Sharing the Gospel

Our study is taking us through six main purposes we believe God has called us to fulfill as a church.

So far, we have covered our two strongest: worship and prayer.

I hope those have been encouraging you to incorporate both of those into your daily rhythms because we won’t do any of the rest if we aren’t doing those first.

This morning we are shifting from our strengths to our biggest area of weakness: Evangelizing the world through proclamation and missions.

That’s a fancy way of saying “Telling people about Jesus here and around the world.”

This is a critical part of what God has called us to do.

If you remember back to our overview message on September 11, we talked about the fact that Jesus gave us this command:

Matthew 28:19–20 CSB

Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

If we aren’t going and making disciples, we aren’t doing what Jesus told us to do.

A disciple is someone who follows Jesus and grows to live like Jesus and leads others to do the same.

The first step in following Jesus is that someone has to tell you about him. That’s what evangelism is all about: telling people the good news about Jesus’s death, burial, resurrection, and the fact that he invites us into his kingdom.

We are going to talk next week about some of the practical ways to go about telling people about Jesus, especially focusing on how to talk about what he has done for you.

This week, we want to look at one of the early examples of someone who was following Jesus going to someone they didn’t know and telling him about Jesus.

Open up your Bible to Acts 8:26-40 where we are going to see a man named Philip share the gospel with an official from the country of Ethiopia. By the way, Ethiopia back then was farther north than it is today, so it was more like Sudan than Ethiopia as we think of it.

The Philip we are talking about isn’t the one who was one of Jesus’s original twelve disciples, so he isn’t an apostle.

Instead, he is one of the seven men the church set apart to serve as an early version of deacons.

The church has been largely centered in Jerusalem up to this point, but the Jews have started persecuting Christians, so they are beginning to move out of Jerusalem and take the gospel with them as they go.

Philip has been living in Samaria and has been seeing lots of people come to faith in Christ.

He is fulfilling what Jesus command the church to do. In Acts 1:8, Jesus told his followers that they were supposed to take the good news about Jesus and his kingdom to the ends of the earth. They were to start in Jerusalem, then Judea (the area around Jerusalem), then Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth.

Philip had been doing that in Samaria, but now God has a different assignment.

As we see Philip obediently following God in this account, I want to give you this piece of encouragement. If you and I are going to share Jesus the way he tells us to, we need to:

Be okay being weird.

Some of you immediately thought, “Sweet! I have this one locked down. I am as weird as they come.”

That may be fine—you be you—but the weirdness I am talking about is that weirdness that comes from being one of “those people” who talks about Jesus.

As we talked about this summer in 1 Peter, following Jesus causes you to live differently. You may not always fit cleanly into a given political party or some other grouping. You will act differently, have different priorities, treat people differently, and just generally be different, which is something we have all been afraid of doing since about middle school.

As you think about sharing the gospel with your friends, your family, and your neighbors, you may feel self-conscious because you don’t want to be the weird one who talks about God, and you don’t want to make it weird with your friends or at work.

When you look at how God worked through Philip, you will see that he took him to a weird place to have a weird conversation and had a very weird experience as a result.

However, through all the weird, awkward, unusual things that took place, Philip had the privilege of seeing God work in incredible ways. He also had the privilege of leading a man to Christ who could take the gospel into Africa like no one we know of had yet done.

So, let’s read the first part of the story to get some idea of what is going on.

Read 8:26-29...

If we are going to grow more effective at sharing the gospel, we have to:

1) Be willing to go to weird places.

The first unusual thing we see is that God called Philip to go to a weird place at a weird time.

He has been in a city for some time and God had been working mightily. Look back at 8:4-8.

He was preaching, he was doing miracles, people were getting saved and right with God, and it was bringing joy to the city where he was.

Now, go back to what we read a minute ago. Where did God send Philip? (verse 26)

He tells him to leave a city where people are getting saved and God is clearly working and go down to a road that runs through the desert.

Would you have a problem with that? I know I would.

“But God, haven’t you seen what is going on here? People are getting saved, and there’s lots of them. You want me to go where?”

It seemed like a weird place to go, but that was exactly where God called him to go.

You know, if we are going to reach people with the gospel, there may be times we need to go to weird places.

For some of us, that means awkwardly taking a gift to a neighbor we have lived next to for years but always avoided talking to.

For others, it is going to lunch with the weird kid in on my hall or in my class or the weird girl at the office that no one ever invites out for lunch.

Maybe it is volunteering somewhere different or taking a class to learn to do something so I can get around people I don’t know.

It could even be that God calls you to go to Africa or to Asia or to Europe or South America with the gospel. Maybe he calls you, like he did a man we know, to move to North Carolina and work with hispanics in a town in the middle of North Carolina.

You and I have to be willing to go to the weird places—the easy places have been reached!

Did you see the interesting note at the beginning of verse 27? “So he got up and went.”

Wouldn’t it be awesome if that is what could be said of us as individuals and as a church—when God called, we got up and went, even if it was to a place we might consider weird.

Are you willing to go where it’s weird?

When you follow God like that, you also need to:

2) Be willing to have weird conversations.

On the desert road, Philip encounters the Ethiopian eunuch.

Pick up in verse 29-35.

The Spirit directs Philip to go to the man’s chariot, and this is where Philip did a very smart thing: he listened.

I remember flying back through Africa once, and as we were getting ready to land, someone on the plane decided to seize the moment and yell out a quick gospel message loud enough that you could hear him in about a third of the plane.

It was met by a few people responding in Arabic, and I didn’t see anyone who seemed overly convinced to follow Christ.

While I admire this man’s boldness, I am afraid he didn’t give off the impression he was wanting to.

Philip didn’t walk up to the man’s chariot and just start yelling at him; instead, he listened.

Once he listened, he asked him a question— “Do you understand what you are reading?”

I gave out a few copies of Randy Newman’s book Questioning Evangelism a few months ago. In that book, he highlights that Jesus often started with a question when he was explaining something to someone.

One clear example is the woman at the well. Instead of walking up and saying, “Hey. I’m the Messiah,” Jesus asked her for a drink and then had a conversation with her that he slowly turned to spiritual things.

For Philip, the man was already thinking about spiritual topics. He was even reading the Bible, and God had him in the perfect passage for Philip to start with.

He was reading Isaiah 53:7-8, which was fulfilled in Jesus’ death on the cross.

It was the perfect starting point for Philip to explain all God had done through Jesus and share the gospel with him.

You have to admit, though, that this was a bit of an odd conversation. Here is this official, traveling along the road and reading aloud, when some random stranger comes alongside and says, “Hey. Do you know what you’re reading?”

He listened, but then he went ahead and asked the question.

That’s where it gets real, doesn’t it? Once you bring Jesus into the conversation, it changes things, and you can’t go back.

Are you willing to step out and introduce Jesus into a conversation, even if it gets weird?

If you are willing to go weird places and have weird conversations, then you may also need to:

3) Be prepared to see God do weird things.

Look at what happens next. Read verses 36-38.

In God’s sovereignty, they ended up near a pool of water deep enough for Philip to baptize this official.

Through Philip’s testimony, the man came to faith in Christ and was able to immediately show that through baptism.

It’s easy for us to miss the uniqueness of this moment, though.

You see, this man was a eunuch. Likely, he was born a slave and made a eunuch so he would be a loyal servant in the treasury.

Because of that, he could never become a full proselyte to Judaism. In other words, he could never be really a Jew. He had traveled hundreds of miles to Jerusalem only to be able to look at the Temple and not go in.

And then he hears the message of the gospel. The message that Jesus came and took our sin and our shame away so we could have full access to God through him.

Regardless of our background, what we had suffered, or what our bodies were like, Christ invites us into his kingdom and we can be full citizens no matter what.

Philip’s message told the eunuch that he could know God more intimately than he ever believed he could, and with joy, he wanted to show his desire to follow Christ by getting baptized.

Can you imagine what it would have been like to be Philip here? This wealthy, powerful man from what the Romans considered to be the end of the civilized world, allows you to come alongside his life. You have the privilege of pointing him to the truth that can give him lasting hope and that pulls away years of shame. You have the joy of explaining Christ’s love to him, and then the joy of seeing him publicly profess his love for Christ through baptism.

What a weird day, right? You have seen God call you to a weird place where you have a weird conversation, and now you get to see God do the incredible act of saving this man’s soul.

Here’s where it gets even weirder.

Pick up in verse 39-40.

How cool would this be? You baptize this man, you come up out of the water, and next thing you know, you are about 20 miles away in a city along the coast.

The Ethiopian, a new man in Christ, goes on his way rejoicing, and Philip goes on his way preaching.

Now, I am not going to say that if you baptize someone, you might find yourself in Salem suddenly.

However, I am going to say that when you share the gospel, you have the privilege of seeing God work in unimaginable ways.

You see people surrender burdens they have carried for years when they realize that Jesus can forgive any sin.

You see others wrestle with the truth, reject Christ, and walk away.

However, in those moments, you never know what God may do.

We need to be willing to be weird like Phillip, and we cannot get away from that.

However, part of that also means we are going to support others who are sharing the gospel in places or ways that we can’t always do.

Supporting means praying for, giving, and serving alongside those doing the work.

We want to put this into practice over the next two weeks by giving you an opportunity to give to support The Hill Church in Roanoke.

I wish Pastor Charles could have come down personally to tell you about all God is doing, but he had other obligations this week.

Here’s a video, though, that gives you a little bit more information about how God is working through them.

The video is a little over 5 minutes long. As you watch it, would you pray in two ways? Pray first for the work God is doing through Pastor Charles and his team. Second, would you pray about how God is leading you specifically to give to support what God is doing there?

Turn your attention to the screen now… <<Show Video - fullscreen on feed if possible>>

God is doing even more through The Hill Church than what the video can share.

I sat down with Pastor Charles recently and heard about the opportunities God is opening for them to bring the hope of the gospel to a community that needs it, and I was blown away.

In addition to the ministry needs they have, they are working on some massive renovations to their church building that will allow them to have an even greater impact where they are.

If you would like to support what God is doing through them, here are the various ways to give:

<<Show giving slide—fullscreen on stream if possible>>

Use the Hill Church giving page on Church Center (has a dollar bill with a heart)

Use the special giving link for the Hill Church in the mobile bulletin

Text your donation amount and “hill” to 84321 (Ex: “$25 hill”)

Place cash/check in a Love Offering envelope and place in the Tithes & Offerings box in the Foyer

If you didn’t come prepared to give today, that is totally fine. You can give through any of the online options at any point throughout the week, and you can bring your offering next Sunday as well.

So, are you willing to be weird so your friends can know Jesus?

If you aren’t yet a follower of Jesus, are you willing to surrender to him?

Let’s take some time to respond...