Silence is Not Golden

Recap Merit or Mercy

We continue with our series on the early church. We have been working our way through Paul’s letter to the Romans. We just got through a couple of weeks of relatively tough theological teaching, specifically dealing with idea of predestination versus free will. How can we be chosen but still be free? Last week we looked at God’s foreknowledge and how He already knows what is going to happen. God knows our prayers before we even speak them and He knows how He is going to answer before we even ask. All we have to remember is that God is God and we are not. God is much smarter than any of us are. As a result, we just have to trust and obey.

When it comes to matters of the faith, we must trust and obey. That is what we are called to do. Our actions, our works, even the good stuff will not earn our way into heaven. The only One that has done the work is Jesus. We are not brought into heaven based on anything we have done. Instead, it is all based on what God has done. We often like to say that Christianity is not a religion. Technically, it is not because in a religion, it’s a group of people coming together trying to do something. They are trying to do certain things in order to make it to heaven. The idea is we have to “do” something. Whereas in Christianity, it is understood that it is already done. God has done the work. Now it is up to us to take that free gift of salvation. Well, it’s free to us. It cost God dearly.

We talked last week about the tension between the two ideas and how Paul basically does not even address the tension. It’s more of a “God is the One who does the work, but we bear certain responsibilities”. I liken it to the idea that everyone is chosen, but not everyone will come. God has given us free will and won’t make us do anything we don’t want to.

When we were discussing the idea of hyper Calvinism, we identified the obvious shortfall in it. If everyone is chosen by God beforehand, then there is no need to preach the Gospel. Everyone that is going to heaven has already been selected by God, so there is no need to tell people about Jesus. In a completely different vein, there is also the idea of universalism. While it is in a different vein than hypercalvinism, it results in the same problem. Within the universalism, every religion out there, including atheism all leads to the same God. Some compare it to the spokes on a bicycle wheel. All the spokes lead to the same center. The idea is that since all the roads lead to God, everyone will enter heaven. However, that is completely contrary to the Bible. Jesus says in John 14:6 “Jesus told him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

Yet there are those that want to believe that in the end, everyone is going to wind up in heaven which leads to the same problem with hypercalvinism. Why bother telling anyone since it doesn’t matter whether they will listen or not. If everyone is bound for the same destination, why bother telling the Good News?

Paul is going to answer that one here as we move through chapter 10. If you have your Bibles, please turn them to Romans 10:14-21

Romans 10:14–21 CSB

How, then, can they call on him they have not believed in? And how can they believe without hearing about him? And how can they hear without a preacher? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news. But not all obeyed the gospel. For Isaiah says, Lord, who has believed our message? So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the message about Christ. But I ask, “Did they not hear?” Yes, they did: Their voice has gone out to the whole earth, and their words to the ends of the world. But I ask, “Did Israel not understand?” First, Moses said, I will make you jealous of those who are not a nation; I will make you angry by a nation that lacks understanding. And Isaiah says boldly, I was found by those who were not looking for me; I revealed myself to those who were not asking for me. But to Israel he says, All day long I have held out my hands to a disobedient and defiant people.

Paul asks the obvious question. How can anyone know if they have not heard? Newton’s law of inertia, also known as Newton’s first law, states that objects resist changes in their state of motion. This means that a moving object will continue moving at the same speed in a straight line unless an outside force influences its movement. This law also states that an object at rest will tend to stay at rest until acted on by an outside force. If I have a ball resting on a counter, it’s not going to go anywhere. When it comes to matters of the faith, an unbelieving person will remain unbelieving until acted on by some other force. There has to be some kind of influence. Someone has to tell about the good news of Jesus. That someone is us. That’s what we are called to do as believers, everywhere we go, we preach the Gospel and when necessary, we use words.

How in the world will someone know about Jesus if they have not been told about Him. Certainly, creation does attest to God’s existence. For a long time, people have believed in a higher power that put all of the world together. However, those higher powers were not God Almighty. They just saw that there was something higher than them that put these things together.

The idea that people will come to faith if God’s people are silent simply does not work. Okay, I am going to use this example with extreme caution. There was this mythical toy that came out in 1985. That thing was advertised all over the TV. It was in magazines, I saw pictures of it. That was the only way we were ever going to know it existed, especially since the item was so big, that they could not even put it on display at the toy store, not even Toys R Us. I am talking about none other than the USS Flagg, also known as the GI Joe aircraft carrier. That thing was supposedly massive. It was a whopping 7.5 feet long. A kid would need a whole separate room just to have their toy ship set up for the naval battles that could ensue. The only way we even knew about this thing was because of the commercials, that was it. The fact is that the thing went on my Christmas list every single year. Every year I asked for the USS Flagg and every year I was denied. I know I’m not the only one. A lot of Christmases, people will post on Facebook, we are now in year 40 of not receiving the GI Joe aircraft carrier. The disappointment was so widespread that within the last few years, when a captain took command of an aircraft carrier, his first remark was that his parents never got him a GI Joe aircraft carrier, so he decided to go get the real thing. That takes some serious dedication if you ask me.

Here’s the deal with that toy, though. My friends and I we heard about it. We heard rumors of other friends receiving said toy, but they were always far away and we were unable to see it. We have never held it in our hands. We have never put any of our GI Joes on it along with all the aircraft, yet to this day I believe that the USS Flagg exists today. In fact, I belong to certain groups on facebook that collect vintage GI Joes and many of the collectors are trying to piece their own together. All that to say, my friend group only saw the commercials and heard about other people outside of our area having it. We never looked at it on a shelf, we never held it in our hands. Yet, we still believe that it existed. Why? Because people talked about it. Had it not been for other people talking about it, I never would have known it existed.

It’s the same way with faith. How can we expect people to know about Jesus if no one ever tells them about Him? Again, Paul is just glossing over the tension and carrying on. God does the work in conversion, we have the choice to confess Him as LORD and come to Him. He already knows who is coming to Him and who is not, but WE still are called to go and tell people about Jesus. We cannot expect people to hear without a preacher.

I think that the evangelical church ran into a big problem in the 80s and 90s. Back in those days, we were doing what we could to get people into the baptismal pool. We would get them baptized and they would just kind of disappear. As far as they were concerned, now that they were baptized they were in and that’s that. When I came to faith, I was on fire for the LORD and I had no problem telling people about my faith and how much Jesus means to me. You know who did? My mother did. She did not like me preaching and teaching outside of church. Unless I was in church, I should really just be quiet because no one wants to hear about it. As a new Christian I was told to keep my mouth shut about the faith. I am sure I am not the only one.

That goes against what we are supposed to do because if we are silent, who is going to speak up? As Jesus is making His triumphal entry into Jerusalem, the chief priests tell Him to silence the people that are praising Him. Jesus tells them that if the crowd goes quiet then the stones would cry out. And what a sight that would have been. Jesus didn’t call us to hide our faith. Now, I am not saying that we should be ostentatious about it. We can’t go out there and alienate people in our approach. Jesus always had a welcoming spirit, but He would also call out sin when it was present. As His people, we cannot be silent. Matthew 10:32–33 ““Therefore, everyone who will acknowledge me before others, I will also acknowledge him before my Father in heaven. But whoever denies me before others, I will also deny him before my Father in heaven.” That would be pretty awkward, right, get to heaven and as we are standing before the Father, Jesus denies knowing us because we have denied Him before people. It doesn’t just take an outright denial. Sometimes the silence will speak volumes. If we aren’t going to speak up for Christ and defend the faith because we are scared of men, we might not outright deny Jesus through voice, but we sure are through action.

Why would we want to keep quiet? We have received the best possible news ever. 1 Peter 3:18 “For Christ also suffered for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring you to God. He was put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit,” We were stuck in our sin and shame. God, the righteous and mighty One, sent His Son to take on our sin and die for us, a sacrifice once and for all, putting our sin and shame as far as the east is from the west. That’s great news! It’s great news that the righteous came and died for the unrighteous. God knew how badly we were going to fail. He knew how much we would mess up. He knew how sinful we would be. He knew we could not do it on our own. Even still, God loved us enough to make us. Better yet His love for us caused Him to send His son to take our place. God loves us so much that He did the work to reconcile us to Himself. We have that good news, so why would we want to hide it? Matthew 5:14–16 ““You are the light of the world. A city situated on a hill cannot be hidden. No one lights a lamp and puts it under a basket, but rather on a lampstand, and it gives light for all who are in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father in heaven.”

I get it, though, it’s hard. It is a lot easier to talk to people about Jesus in the confines of the Christian environment. When Dania and I were back at Liberty doing one of the many tours, Dania was talking with one of the education majors. She grew up around the Roanoke area and graduated from a Christian school there. Dania was telling her about all the wonderful opportunities to minister to people in the public education realm. Our motto at Liberty is that we are training champions for Christ. This girl, bless her heart, looked at Dania and said, “Oh no, I’m going to go back and teach at the school I graduated from. It’s going to be like a full circle moment for me.” That’s all fine and dandy, but what’s the point in going to a Christian university where evangelism is part of the curriculum regardless of your major? In my opinion, that time of instruction would be better used in the secular realm. If we are just going to tell people about Jesus that already believe in Jesus, we aren’t really moving the mission forward.

What would the church have looked like if the disciples had just kept their information hidden and talked about it amongst themselves? I think one of the big problems these days is that we can get stuck in echo chambers. The media we consume through technology is all based on algorithms. There are a bunch of computers that are using math to decide what we should be looking at based on who we are and what stage of life we are in. I know this because any time my chronic sinusitis acts up and I complain about it, when I get on Facebook, between every other post is some advertisement for the latest and greatest sinus rinse technology. Amazon does it as well. Now that I’m middle aged, half the advertisements sent to me are for products to make me feel like I am 20 again. It does it with advertisements, but it also does it with who else we interact with. That’s a problem, because if we are only spending time with like minded individuals that will not challenge our way of thinking, then we can’t expect any growth. Another problem is that by removing ourselves from people that have different ways of thinking than we do, it does not create any productive dialog. Instead, we just keep feeding each other what we want to hear. This leads to people being unable to change their mindset or even look at a different point of view. The phenomenon has become so prevalent in the information age, they had to develop a term for it. It’s called the backfire effect. When someone is given facts that go contrary to their firmly held beliefs and truths, the person refutes the proposed idea and denies any facts that counter said beliefs. No wonder we have so many people out there these days that believe the world is flat! That has become such a prevalent thing that on the last launch to the moon just a few weeks ago, one of the pilots wore a patch that said “Not flat, we checked.”

So how do we counter this echo chamber? We have to be willing to engage in conversations with people outside of our comfort zone. We have to create respectful and loving dialog with everyone, not just a few people that we hand select. It was funny, I was talking with another pastor earlier this week about a new initiative I am proposing to the BGAV. We have been doing things with tiny homes to help people that are displaced due to a natural disaster. So I had the idea that we could probably use them for people that have been displaced for medical reasons. He thought the idea is great and I am working the proposal. However, he did say to me, “Well, we can’t just contain it to BGAV folks that can use them.” My response was, “Well, of course, our point is to love and help everyone regardless of whether they are part of the Virginia baptists or not.” He responded, “Oh yeah, no, I was not talking about you, I was talking about others in the BGAV.” Here’s the trick, my brothers and sisters, the moment any church or association begins worrying more about serving the people on the inside and keeping them happy, than going and serving people on the outside, that is the moment the church is dead. The church does not exist so that we can come together on Sunday and just have our social time. The church exists to move God’s kingdom forward. It’s not going to move forward when we stay stuck in an echo chamber. We cannot be silent.

Mary and Mary went to the tomb to finish anointing Jesus’s corpse. To their surprise, He isn’t there anymore. He reveals Himself to them and tells the women to go and tell the disciples what had happened. What would have happened if they chose not to go? What if they had thought, “Well, they aren’t going to believe me, so I wont even waste my time.” I humbly submit that we wouldn’t be here right now.

The fact is, not everyone is going to believe. We teach the truth, but some cannot see that truth, they cannot comprehend that truth. That’s why we have titled this sermon “do you hear what I hear.” The Jews that failed to see Christ as Lord heard the exact same things that Paul did. The difference is that Paul had ears to hear. We can go and preach and teach and everyone will hear the same thing, but not everyone will understand it. Some people will hear the gospel and they won’t comprehend it. 1 Corinthians 3:7 “So, then, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.” Our job is to sow the seed, God will do the work of converting. Our job is to go and tell people about Jesus. One thing we should do to help the process out is to stop using all the Christianese. We speak a different language than others do. Your average non church attender does not use words like fellowship, or atonement, or righteousness or whatever. If we want anyone to have a chance at hearing and comprehending, the first thing we should do is pray and then use language they are familiar with. Otherwise, the words will have no meaning.

In my time at sea, I spent many a port visit in Middle Eastern countries. They have some great food over there and some really neat architecture. Since they are primarily Muslim, during the various times of prescribed prayer, the call to prayer would play over the loudspeakers throughout the town. When this happened, all the residents nearby would head inside to get their mats and pray. Meanwhile, we would just keep going. Why? Because we had no idea what they were saying. It was all done in Arabic, so we didn’t understand what was going on. So it is possible to hear things and not understand what is being said.