Rob Morgan: E = Evangelism

E = Evangelism

A Pocket Paper
from
The Donelson Fellowship
______________

Robert J. Morgan
July 22, 2007

Today we’re coming to the end of our SIMPLE 2 series of messages in which we’ve looked at the basics—the A, B, C, D, and E of successful Christian living: Assurance of Salvation, Baptism, Church Involvement, Daily Devotions, and, today, the subject of Evangelism.

Evangelism has been damaged in the United States in recent years by moral failures among high-profile ministers, going all the way back to the Jim and Tammy Baker scandal, and more recently the pastor in Colorado Springs who fell into sin. And whenever these things happen, it demoralizes all of us. It’s discouraging when the headlines in the newspaper are devoted to moral failure among Christian leaders.

But I find some solace in turning to the Bible and realizing that the same thing happened in biblical times. Perhaps the most prominent Old Testament example is King David. In 2 Samuel 11, we read about how one evening David got up from his bed and walked around on the roof of his palace, and from the roof he saw a woman bathing. She was evidently in a private area, perhaps a courtyard, of her home; and in the darkness she had no idea anyone was watching her from above.

Interestingly and incidentally, we have a pretty good idea where this took place. In just the last year or two, an Israeli archaeologist has announced that she has identified the location and foundation of the ancient palace of King David, dating from the 10th century B.C. It’s located on a hillside on the southeast slopes of Jerusalem where it would have looked out over the surrounding houses, just as 2 Samuel indicates.

Well, up to this point, King David had been one of the most revered and respected men in the Bible—a young man who kept sheep and killed giants and trusted God and composed Scripture and wrote worship songs and provided godly leadership for his nation. Now, he was drawn away by his own desires, and his desires became lust, and his lust became sin, and sin became death—and by the time it was all over, he was engulfed in a conspiracy that involved adultery, murder, deception, and cover-up.

But David still had a tender heart, and when his pastor—the prophet Nathan—came to rebuke him for his sin, David collapsed into tears, full of genuine and earnest repentance. Out of that experience he wrote Psalm 51, and in this psalm he said something very important on the subject of evangelism. So our Scripture reading today is the 51st Psalm, and I’d like to read through it verse by verse with comments, and then share a great secret from this passage about winning others to Christ.

Notice the superscription over the psalm. It says: Psalm 51: For the director of music. A psalm of David. When the prophet Nathan came to him after David had committed adultery with Bathsheba.

Verse 1 says: Have mercy on me, O God, according to Your unfailing love; according to Your great compassion blot out my transgression. Wash away all my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin.

There are three verbs here—to blot out, to wash away, and to cleanse. And these three verbs give us a three-fold picture of what God does with our sins. Blot out is the picture of something being erased. When I was in elementary school, in some of my classes all the students would have a little job to do every day. Sometimes my job was to erase the blackboard and to clean it. For some reason, I always like that job. I began with a simple eraser that wiped out all the words and numbers on the board. And then the teacher had a rag with some kind of damp substance that cleaned it even better, until it looked as good as new.

That’s what David needed, and it’s what you and I need ever so constantly. Lord, erase all the record of my sins and mistakes and regrets.

The second verb is wash away, and the Hebrew word here was the word used for washing clothes. Your shirt is dirty and smelly, so you put it in the washing machine with detergent and maybe bleach, and by the end of the day it’s fresh and clean again. That’s what happens to us when God forgives our sin.

The third verb is cleanse: Cleanse me from all sin. This was the ceremonial word used in the book of Leviticus, when priests and worshippers were ceremonially cleansed and purified to stand before God in temple worship.

The only answer in all the universe for our mistakes and regrets is our Lord’s three-fold forgiveness. He erases it. He washes it away. He cleanses us from it. That’s why we don’t have to keep flogging ourselves because of it. When He forgives us, our sin and guilt is gone for good.

In the next verse, verse 3, David openly confesses his sin, saying: For I know my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against You, You only, have I sinned and done what is evil in Your sight, so that You are proved right when You speak and justified when You judge.

The interesting thing about this is the timing of it. It took David a year to repent of his sins. It was a year after his sin that Nathan approached him and rebuked him and brought about the sentiments expressed in this psalm. David had been living with his guilt for a solid year, and his sin had been ever before him.

Now he was acknowledging that it was against God that he had sinned. Now, in one sense, of course, he had sinned against himself, and against his wife, against Bathsheba and her husband whose death he had arranged, and against his entire nation. But in another sense, it was against God alone that he had sinned.

Why is that? Because it was the Lord who issued commands against sexual immorality, murder, lying, and deception. It was God’s rules that David had broken—rules that issued forth from the very character of God’s holy nature. Whenever we sin against someone else, we are primarily sinning against God because we are breaking His laws and violating His holiness.

I shared something about this with Jeff Nichols this week, and he encouraged me to share it with you. We can think of God’s laws as a great triangle. First, everything issues forth from the nature of God’s transcendent holiness. He is utterly and eternally and intrinsically good, pure, perfect, holy, ethical, honest, faithful, and righteous.

In order to show us how His character should be reflected in our lives, He has given us in the Law and throughout the Bible hundreds of commandments and instructions.

These hundreds of commandments and instructions are all boiled down into ten areas and summarized in the Ten Commandments.

If we study the Ten Commandments very closely, we find that they are grouped into two categories—commandments having to do with our relationship with God (Commandments 1, 2, 3, and 4), and commandments having to do with our relationship with other people on this planet (Commandments 5-10).

Jesus, picking up on that, summarized the Ten into Two—Love God with all your heart, and love your neighbor as yourself.

And the writers of the epistles noted that we could take all the laws and regulations of the Bible and boil them down to one word—Love, but love as God knows it to be and defines it in His word.

So you see the triangle:

The Transcendent Character of An Infinitely and Perfectly Holy God

Hundreds of Commands and Instructions in Scripture

Ten Great Summarizing Commandments

Two Great Commands

Love

And whenever we sin against someone else, we are violating something somewhere in this triangle, and it is always and ultimately a violation of God’s character. So it is against God that we sin and do this evil in His sight.

Verse 5 goes on to explain why we act this way. He said that he had sinned because he was a sinner; that is, he was born with a sinful nature: Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Surely you desire truth in the inner parts….

This is one of the passages in the Bible that explains how we have inherited a sinful nature from our parents and grandparents and great-grandparents, going all the way back to Adam and Eve. We are born with a sinful nature, and it’s a problem we can never fix on our own. It’s like an inherited blood disease for which there is no cure. Our only hope is a blood transfusion, as it were. We need the blood of Christ. But left to ourselves, we are inherently sinful.

No one questioned that very much until the so-called Enlightenment, because it seems so obvious and intuitive. But when the Enlightenment spread through Europe in the 1700s, it created a fundamental shift in the way people viewed themselves, and in the way they viewed both God and sin.

The thinkers of the Enlightenment rejected the idea of a personal God who was transcendent and holy, and they rejected the idea that humanity is ultimately evil. They taught that humanity was essentially good, and that political and social movements could advance humanity to new zeniths. And that’s what spawned all the –isms: Nationalism, Marxism, Leninism, Stalinism, Communism, Fascism, Nazism, and so forth. I recently heard one historian opine that the age of the Enlightenment began with the French Revolution and ended with the Fall of the Berlin Wall, when the last of the great –isms—Communism—collapsed in Western society, ending the bloodiest century the world has ever known.

What are we left with now? We’re left with extreme atheism and hardcore secularism, still clinging to the notion that human beings are just fine without the Lord Jesus Christ.

But David said, “I need the Lord!” Surely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me. Surely you desire truth in the inner parts…. You teach me wisdom in the inmost place.

Then in verse 7, David says: Cleanse me with hyssop, and I will be clean. What does this mean? There are several references to hyssop in the ceremonial law of Israel, but perhaps the most familiar reference is that incredible story of the Passover Lamb in Exodus 12. Moses and Pharaoh were face to face in their historic dual, fighting for the liberation of the Israelites from bondage. The Lord sent a series of plagues on Egypt, the last of which was the death of the firstborn in every home. On that terrible night, Moses told every Israelite family to kill a lamb, emblematic of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to dip into its blood a branch of a hyssop tree and to paint the doorposts of the house with the blood. “And when I see the blood, I will pass over you,” said the Lord.

David was saying, “Lord, do that to me! Cleanse me with hyssop and I will be clean; wash me, and I will be whiter than snow.”

Verse 8 continues: Let me hear joy and gladness; let the bones you have crushed rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquity.

And now, David’s requests turn in a positive direction. It’s not just, “Lord, forgive me for the past,” but “Lord, help me now and in the future.” Verse 10 says: Create in me a pure heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me.

In my prayer notebook I have several petitions from the Bible that I request of the Lord every morning, and this is one of them: Create in me a clean heart, O God. I can’t build a clean heart within myself. I need for the Lord to construct a clean heart and a clean mind within me. It’s His work in our lives. The Bible says that He perfects that which concerns us, that He who has begun a good work in us will carry it on to completion. This is a biblical prayer that represents God’s perfect will for our lives, and we can pray each day, “Lord, create in me a clean heart.”

In verse 11, I think David is begging God not to let him end up like his predecessor, King Saul. He said: Do not cast me from Your presence or take Your Holy Spirit from me. This was the Old Testament dispensation, when the Holy Spirit didn’t indwell every believer in the sense that He has since the Day of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit in the Old Testament came upon certain people at certain times in certain ways for certain tasks. And when we read the story of King Saul in 1 Samuel, we see how the Holy Spirit came upon him to equip him for his kingship, but because of his repeated sin and failure, he was cast away from God’s presence and the Holy Spirit was taken from him. David was anguished at the possibility of the same thing happening to him. So he prayed: Do not cast me from Your presence or take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of Your salvation, and grant me a willing spirit to sustain me.

And then we come to the point of today’s message and our primary text on the subject of evangelism. Look at verse 13: Then will I teach transgressors your ways, and sinners will turn back to you. David is saying, “Lord, if you will forgive me, cleanse me, renew me, restore me, and give me once again a clean heart, no one will be better equipped to help other sinners than me. I will go to other people whose lives are messed up and mired down, and I’ll tell them what you’ve done for me. I will teach transgressors your ways and sinners will be converted to you. Look at what David says in verse 15: Lord, open my lips and my mouth will declare Your praise.

Now here’s the principle I want to highlight in today’s message:

Great sinners can become great soul-winners—and we’re all great sinners.

If you think you can’t win someone else to the Lord Jesus Christ because you’re too great a sinner, or too immature a Christian, or too unworthy to do anything for the Lord, think again. God uses forgiven sinners to reach those whom Christ died to forgive and to save.

This reminds me of what Paul said to Timothy: Here is a trustworthy saying that deserves full acceptance: Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners—of whom I am the worst. But for that very reason I was shown mercy so that in me, the worst of sinners, Christ Jesus might display his unlimited patience as an example for those who would believe in Him and receive eternal life.

In other words, at the very beginning of Christian history, the Lord saved and called His most sinful, vile, violent opponent so that throughout the entire subsequent history of evangelism, everyone would know that God saves great sinners, and that great sinners become great soul-winners.

Recently I came across the story of Andrew Wyzenbeek. I had never heard of him before, but as I did some research, I realized he was a great Christian worker and soul-winner in American 20th-century life. Andrew emigrated from Holland to the United States and became a successful engineer, manufacturer, and inventor. After his conversion, which I’m going to tell you about, he worked with evangelists like Billy Sunday, Mel Trotter, Paul Rader, Torrey Johnson, and Billy Graham. He served on the board of the Slavic Gospel Association, worked in the Gideons, and was active in Chicago church life as long as he was able.

Here’s how he was saved. Andrew Wyzenbeek arrived in America as a militant atheist, one of those who had been educated in the philosophies of the Enlightenment. There is no God, and people are basically good. All that’s needed is the right political environment for humanity to flourish.

Well, Andrew was hired as superintendent in a factory, and that was the environment he saw every day. Working for him were the six filthiest men he had ever seen. They were so unkempt and dirty that most people avoided them. Their clothes were always filthy, as though they never did any laundry. Their bodies were filthy, as though they never bathed. They lived like dirty animals.

But one Monday, these men arrived at work on time, sober, clean, and neatly dressed. They were clean and groomed. Andrew, watching them, was confused. He thought they were dressed for a funeral and would ask for time off. The next day was the same story. Finally, his curiosity got the best of him, and Andrew approached the six.

“Ollie,” he said, “what happened to you fellows? You’re different.”

The man replied, “We are different. We are new men. We are born again. We accepted the Lord Jesus Christ as our Savior, and He has put a new spirit and a new heart in us. All six of us.”

That night, Andrew couldn’t sleep, and the next day he interviewed the men again. He couldn’t get over the change he saw in these men. They kept telling him how Jesus had changed their hearts and literally cleaned up their lives.

Finally Andrews went with them to an evangelistic service and was eventually converted because of the change in their lives, and he went on to devote his life to winning others to the Lord. It was the change, the repentance of filthy sinners that led him to consider the claims of Christ.

The Lord wants to clean up our lives so that we can be His witnesses to others—and the world is always changed by those who have been forgiven.

I want to end today by telling you a story that Norman Richards shared with me recently. Norman is our Director of Pastoral Ministries at TDF and he also oversees our Senior Adult ministries and our program of teaching English as a second language.

Well, Norman told me that when he was a senior in high school, he had a good friend who lived nearby named Bill Smith. Norman had never shared his faith with anyone, but he knew the Lord and he began to have a real burden to tell Bill about the Lord Jesus. Norman said, “It’s the first time I had ever tried to witness to anyone and to lead them to the Lord, and so I sat down with Bill and gave him some Scriptures and asked him about giving his heart to the Lord Jesus. He deferred, and when I left him, he had not received Christ. But I felt a great weight lift from my heart because I felt I had done what God wanted me to do.”

“Well, I graduated and got married and went off to college and then to the mission field. And fifty years passed in the blink of an eye. Bill and I hadn’t seen each other in fifty years. But I went back home for our 50th high school reunion, and there was Bill. He came up to me and said, “Norman, I’m so glad to see you. For some reason, we lost touch with each other and I never told you this, but I want you to know that shortly after you talked with me, I took your words to heart and accepted Christ as my personal Savior. And I married, and my wife and I have been church workers all these years. I’m glad I’ve been able to tell you this after all these years.”

The Bible says, “He who goes forth with weeping, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him…. For as the rain and snow come down from heaven, and do not return to it without watering the earth and making it bud and flourish so that it yields seed for the sower and bread for the eater, so is my word that goes out from my mouth. It will not return void.”

The Lord wants to use us in ever increasing ways to win others to him—children, teens, and adults. He turns great sinners into great soul-winners, and we are all great-sinners so we all qualify. Let’s all pray:

Lord, create in me a clean heart and renew a right spirit within me… then will I teach transgressors Thy ways, and sinners shall be converted unto Thee.