Gospel-Centered Witness

Our mission must be to live as witnesses to Christ, which includes building relationships with unbelievers to share the gospel with them and to call them to believe.

We must be willing to be bold with our evangelism.

This is not something that is fulfilled with a program - this is an individual call for all of our lives on a day to day basis.

Working outline:

Introduction

Context of this message within the greater series - we are looking at the call of our church in light of the Great Commission. The call to gospel-centered witness covers the portion of “making disciples of all nations” ()

If we all feel a little uncomfortable at the end of this message, then it has done its job! It should challenge those of us who believe to be better messengers for Jesus, and it should challenge those who do not believe to put their trust in him

Why witness is important

The name of Jesus is the only name by which people will be saved from their sins () - no one comes to the Father except through Jesus

People cannot believe in someone that they have not heard about ()

Who is called to witness

Key concept - “preach” in is best understood as “proclaim” - not as a Sunday morning sermon

We have been commissioned and sent by the Lord himself! How can we assume that this is a job for someone else? ()

What it means to witness

We must proclaim the gospel - simply “living well” is necessary, but is not sufficient ()

We must fully understand and comprehend the gospel () - we cannot be effective witnesses if we do not fully understand it ourselves

We must not water down the gospel - we must be bold with our evangelism and be true to the message of redemption

We must call people to repent and believe

We must start local ()! Begin with your immediate context - some people God will call further afield, but we can all be witnesses within our own Jerusalem!

God calls us to build relationships with those who do not know him (find reference) - if we do not have any non-Christian friends, then we are not living out the Great Commission!

Our relationships enable us to speak specifically into their lives as a friend and as someone who loves and cares about them, not as someone shouting at them from a street corner (although God does, in his grace, use that method sometimes!)

Witness is more than a program - it can be tempting to wait for specific outreach events and then to say “I’ve done my evangelism!” but that is not what God is calling us to do - He is calling us to be His witnesses in our everyday lives

Conclusion

To witness is a gift from God - an opportunity to demonstrate his grace to a rebellious and fallen world () - it is a beautiful thing!

The gospel compels us to share it - we are all like beggars pointing one another to where there is bread.

Key passages:

Introduction

Good morning church! If you are able, please stand with me in honor of the reading of God’s Word. Our passage this morning is from . If you are following along in the bibles under the seat in front of you, the passage is on page 946.

English Standard Version Chapter 10

9 because, if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes and is justified, and with the mouth one confesses and is saved. 11 For the Scripture says, “Everyone who believes in him will not be put to shame.” 12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; for the same Lord is Lord of all, bestowing his riches on all who call on him. 13 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

14 How then will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching? 15 And how are they to preach unless they are sent? As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”

Let’s pray:

Gracious God, we thank you for your Word - your Word that is sharper than a double-edged sword and that cuts us deep to our hearts. We thank you that your Word convicts us - that it calls us to repent of our sins and of our own striving for righteousness and to place our trust in the only one who can truly save our souls - our Lord Jesus. We pray that the light of your Word would shine upon our hearts tonight, showing us where we have strayed from you and bought into the messages of this world, and we pray that we would rightly orient ourselves around living witness for your good news for all people - that you have purposed to save us from our sins through your Son. Amen.

Good morning church! It is my joy to bring you the Word this morning, while the Huttos enjoy their time in South Dakota (hopefully avoiding all of the bears)! Our message this week continues the “Vision” series that we have been progressing through over the past month on the distinctives of King’s Church. We have been working our way through the implications of the Great Commission and what those implications mean for how we function as a church body. We have already spoken about the importance of gospel-centered worship, gospel-centered community, and gospel-centered discipleship, and this morning we will close out our series while speaking about gospel-centered witness. Like our other sermons in this series, since this is topical rather than expositional, we will be jumping around a little bit throughout our Bibles, so be ready to do a little bit of flipping!

If we look back to , which has been the main text of our series so far, we read:

English Standard Version Chapter 28

16 Now the eleven disciples went to Galilee, to the mountain to which Jesus had directed them. 17 And when they saw him they worshiped him, but some doubted. 18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 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, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

Our topic this morning fits neatly into verse 19, where Jesus calls his followers to go out an “make disciples of all nations”. It is clear that Jesus intends for his followers to be witnesses to who he is and what he has done. And we will have much more to say about that over the course of the morning!

As I have been writing this sermon for the past week, I suspect that it will make all of us a little bit uncomfortable, perhaps for different reasons. It certainly made me uncomfortable when I was studying and preparing for it! If you belong to Christ and the church, I suspect it may make you uncomfortable as we strive to understand the gravity of the mission of going forth and making disciples (it certainly did for me!), and I hope that it encourages you to step out of your comfort zone in order to do so. And if you do not know Jesus, I suspect that some of the things that we will speak of this morning will seem foreign and strange, but I pray that the Holy Spirit might open your eyes to see the truth of them.

Our message this morning will focus on three main questions about making disciples of all nations:

Why must we witness?

Who is called to be a witness?

What does it mean to truly be a witness of the gospel?

It is my hope any my prayer that these questions challenge all of us to consider our calling to witness, and that it spurs us on to delight in the message of Christ our King even in the face of opposition.

With that in mind, let us turn to our first question this morning: Why is witnessing to what Jesus has done important?

Why Must We Witness?

Well, the first reason is quite simple: God tells us to. Multiple times, in fact!

Let’s look first at the Great Commission passage in :

English Standard Version Chapter 28

19 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, 20 teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

We might be tempted to think that God only commanded the apostles to go out an make disciples (after all, that is who Jesus is speaking to primarily in this passage), but that would not be correct. God has commanded all of us to spread the good news of the gospel to as many people as we can. We see this clearly in a number of different passages. For example, Jesus in commands us:

English Standard Version Chapter 5

14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. 15 Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. 16 In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

Jesus tells us again in :

English Standard Version Chapter 24

Thus it is written, that the Christ should suffer and on the third day rise from the dead, 47 and that repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in his name to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem. 48 You are witnesses of these things.

English Standard Version Chapter 12

8 “And I tell you, everyone who acknowledges me before men, the Son of Man also will acknowledge before the angels of God, 9 but the one who denies me before men will be denied before the angels of God.

Similarly, Peter encourages us in to:

English Standard Version Chapter 3

15 but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect,

And Paul reminds us in :

English Standard Version Chapter 10

The implication for us is clear - we must witness because God has commanded us to do so. We must be prepared to explain the reason for our hope of salvation, we must be willing to speak the name of Jesus to those who have never heard about him, and we must be willing to let our lives shine as lights before all of humanity, that they might glorify God by seeing how we live and what we do.

This alone should be reason enough for us to be witnesses of the gospel. But there is one more reason why we must proclaim the good news of Jesus - eternity hangs in the balance for those who do not repent of their sins and believe in him.

Jesus himself is clear on this point. In he tells Thomas:

English Standard Version Chapter 14

6 Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

This is a vitally important point. Stop and think about what Jesus is claiming here. He is explicitly telling us that there is no other path to salvation. No one else can save - only Jesus, the one true Son of God, can atone for our sins and reconcile us to the Father. If we call ourselves Christians, we must understand the exclusivity of Jesus’ claim; he gives us no other option.

It can be tempting to believe that all religions are worshipping the same God, that they all lead to the same place in the end, that it doesn’t really matter what we believe. This is not true. Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Mormonism, Zoroastrianism, and the many other religions out there offer a fundamentally different view of the state of humanity and our need for salvation. Jesus himself does not leave us the option of looking elsewhere for salvation. He tells us explicitly that no one comes to the Father except through him. We will get deeper into this a little bit later when we talk about knowing and proclaiming the gospel, but the key thing that I want us all to see this morning is that this is a theme that is echoed throughout Scripture. Paul tells us in :

This is a theme that is echoed throughout Scripture. Paul tells us in :

English Standard Version Chapter 2

5 For there is one God, and there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, 6 who gave himself as a ransom for all, which is the testimony given at the proper time.

The apostle John tells us in :

English Standard Version Chapter 5

11 And this is the testimony, that God gave us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. 12 Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.

This message is not confined to the New Testament either. Yahweh himself tells us in :

English Standard Version Chapter 45

21 Declare and present your case;

let them take counsel together!

Who told this long ago?

Who declared it of old?

Was it not I, the LORD?

And there is no other god besides me,

a righteous God and a Savior;

there is none besides me.

22 “Turn to me and be saved,

all the ends of the earth!

For I am God, and there is no other.

Friends, I hope we understand how serious our call to witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ is. Without Jesus, we are all dead in our sins. If we are without Jesus, we will spend eternity separated from God, suffering the full punishment of what we deserve for our rebellion against him. If we do not witness to what Christ has done, we are condemning those who have not heard of him to eternal damnation. After all, as Paul said, “How are they to believe in Him of whom they have never heard?”

Penn Jillette, avowed atheist and the more “talkative” half of the comic illusion act Penn & Teller had this to say after he was evangelized to by a polite and impressive man:

“I’ve always said, you know, that I don’t respect people who don’t proselytize. I don’t respect that at all. If you believe that there’s a heaven and a hell, and people could be going to hell…and you think that, well, it’s really not worth telling them about this because it would make it socially awkward…how much do you have to hate somebody to not proselytize? How much do you have to hate somebody to believe that everlasting life is possible and not tell them that? I mean, if I believed beyond a shadow of a doubt that a truck was coming at you, and you didn’t believe it, and that truck was bearing down on you, there is a certain point where I tackle you. And this is more important than that!”

Jillette understands something that many Christians don’t like to think about. If we refuse to tell others about the work of Christ on the cross, we are removing all hope from them. If we truly love our family, if we truly love our neighbors, if we truly love our coworkers, if we truly love the stranger that we pass on the street, we cannot allow them to persist in rebellion against God! We ought to earnestly desire to tell them of the redemption that has been accomplished by the blood of Christ! All this is to say that if we truly love other people, we must witness - we have no other choice.

If we refuse to tell others about the work of Christ on the cross, we are removing all hope from them. If we truly love our family, if we truly love our neighbors, if we truly love our coworkers, if we truly love the stranger that we pass on the street, we cannot allow them to persist in rebellion against God! We ought to earnestly desire to tell them of the redemption that has been accomplished by the blood of Christ! We must witness - we have no other choice.

Who is Called to Witness?

This brings us to our second point - who is called to be a witness? This will be a short point. I hope that from our previous exploration of why witnessing is important that the answer is clear - we are all called to witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ!

Let’s turn our attention back to our main passage for today. says:

English Standard Version Chapter 10

13 For “everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”

Looking at this passage, we might initially breathe a sigh of relief. We might think something along the lines of “Oh, it says that people are to hear because of preaching. We all know that it is the responsibility of the elders to preach. So I can leave the whole evangelism thing up to them. After all, you need to preach to be able to do it.”

I’m sure you can immediately tell that this is not the right interpretation of this passage. The word translated “preach” in this passage is not strictly referring to what we understand as preaching on Sunday morning. The word means “to tell” or “to proclaim”. Paul is telling us that there is a need for people to go and to tell other people about Jesus and what he has done.

And what about the sending? Is that perhaps another out? Maybe if we need to be sent, it means that we can leave witnessing to the missionaries and those who are headed out for church sanctioned evangelism events and mission trips. Alas, no, that option is not available to us either. Let’s look back to the Great Commission in :

English Standard Version Chapter 28

18 And Jesus came and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. 19 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,

Our Lord calls us to “Go!” This command is not optional. We must see how it flows from the reality of who Jesus is. The disciples and the others who are present for this moment have seen the very face of the risen Lord. They know that he has conquered death because he stands before them. They know that he has all authority on heaven and on earth because the Father has raised him from the dead. And Jesus tells them, because of who I am and what I have done - “Go!”

Friends, we are all sent. If we have understood that Jesus is who he has claimed to be and we have believed in his atoning death and victorious resurrection and we understand what this means, we can have no other response but to “Go!” If you belong to Christ, you are called to “Go!” You have been commissioned and sent by the Lord himself!

What Does it Mean to Witness?

Who is called to witness

This brings us to our final topic this morning - what it means to witness (see, I told you point 2 was a quick one!).

Key concept - “preach” in is best understood as “proclaim” - not as a Sunday morning sermon

There is a quote from Francis of Assisi that I have commented on in the past, and I’m going to comment on it again here because it raises a pertinent point about what it means to witness. St. Francis is purported to have said:

“Preach the gospel. If necessary, use words.”

This is not a helpful quote when it comes to witnessing. To St. Francis’ credit, there is a good point that he is trying to make - that the way that our lives are lived and our interactions with others should point people to the gospel. This is all true and valid. Our lives must be lived in such a way that they empower gospel witness. Paul tells Titus in :

English Standard Version Chapter 2

7 Show yourself in all respects to be a model of good works, and in your teaching show integrity, dignity, 8 and sound speech that cannot be condemned, so that an opponent may be put to shame, having nothing evil to say about us.

Our lives ought to point people to the gospel. But our lives cannot preach the whole gospel in and of themselves. There is a good reason for this. If we rely on our lives to preach the gospel, it tends to show people what we do. What we do is all well and good, but what we do is not the gospel. On the contrary, the gospel is the good news about what God has done for us. The gospel is the good news about how our very condition before God has been instantaneously transformed through the atoning death of his Son.

This is the distinctive between Christianity and all of the other religions in the world today. Islam, Mormonism, Hinduism, Buddhism, they are all about the journey and the process of redemption. They are all about what we do in order to be worth of salvation. In Islam, Hinduism and Mormonism, it means (in the most simplest terms) doing more good works than bad works to earn our way into Paradise. In Buddhism, it means emptying ourselves of the corruption of the world so that we escape the cycle of rebirth and become one with the eternal consciousness. While they have different means of achieving “salvation”, they all focus on what we as individuals must do to achieve it.

This is where Christianity is completely different. The gospel tells us that there is nothing that we can do to achieve salvation. We are in active rebellion against God. We are dead in our sins and cannot do enough good works to get back into his good graces, because even a single solitary sin is an eternal offense against a Holy God. Although this is part of the gospel, it does not sound like good news. We cannot do anything about our state. But God can. And he did, through the life and death of Jesus.

Friends, a life well lived in light of God’s commandments is a wonderful testimony to our changed hearts through Jesus. For our witness to be at its most effective, it is a necessary thing to have. But it is not sufficient in and of itself, because our actions are not sufficient in and of themselves. There is a reason that the road to salvation in Christianity is called the “good news”. It is a message about what someone else has done for us, and therefore it cannot be accomplished by us. It must be proclaimed for us to receive. If we focus only on showing the outward manifestation of the gospel, we will confuse the message. In the same way that our works cannot save us, our lives cannot fully communicate the doctrines of grace without us speaking and proclaiming them.

And this brings us to a vitally important point in - it is essential that we are able to both fully understand and articulate the gospel:

English Standard Version Chapter 10

is a beautiful summary of the good news that we proclaim. As theologian John Stott says:

The Message of Romans 2. Alternative Ways of Righteousness (5–13)

Implicit in the good news are the truths that Jesus Christ died, was raised, was exalted, and now reigns as Lord and bestows salvation on those who believe. This is not salvation by slogan but by faith, that is, by an intelligent faith which lays hold of Christ as the crucified and resurrected Lord and Saviour.

We must know the gospel intimately because we must proclaim the gospel intimately. We must witness to the full measure and glory of what Christ has accomplished. We must present the good news of Jesus’ death and resurrection on our behalf clearly to the world.

Why is it so essential that we do this? It is essential because we cannot assume that people, even people who call themselves and think of themselves as Christian truly understand the gospel. Friends, I guarantee you that there are a great number of people in this city who have grown up going to a church, who think that they are Christians, but would be completely unable to articulate the gospel if they were asked about it and who would in fact hold to a great many things that are not true!

I’ll give you a quick example of this. I have a 25-30 minute drive to and from work each day, so I listen to podcasts in the car during the commute. One of the ones that I listen to regularly is about cults (I find it fascinating and distressing to see how many people will manipulate the words of Jesus for their own personal agenda or personal gain). This past week I was listening to an episode about a doomsday cult from the early 2000s, when the narrator said “Their group believed like most mainstream Christians believe - that God has provided a set of rules by which to live our lives, and if we keep those rules, we can gain entrance into heaven.”

I about swerved the car off the road at that line. That understanding of Christianity is the very antithesis of the gospel. You could not be more wrong about what Christians believe! And yet this is the understanding that many people have. We cannot assume that people know what we mean when we speak about the gospel. So we must be clear. We must not water it down. We must be gracious in the way that we deliver it, but we must be prepared to accept the fact that the gospel will often offend people.

So friends, we must ask ourselves, can we articulate the gospel? Can we speak clearly and intelligently about how God created the world perfect and good? About how he made man and woman in his image and without blemish, that he might share his creation with them and that they might glorify him? Can we tell of how, starting with Adam and Eve, each and every one of us has rebelled against God, and how we insist upon worshiping ourselves rather than worshiping him, that we are dead in our sins and therefore deserve death? Can we speak of how our sins have separated us from God and kept us from his presence, and how he in his great mercy has made a way for us to return to him through his one and only Son, who came and lived the life that we could not live, who died the death that we deserved, who defeated sin and death and was raised to life? Can we tell of how he calls us repent of our sins and believe in his atoning death, and that because of what he has done for us our sins are forgiven and his righteousness is given to us? Can we articulate how we await his glorious return, when he will wipe away every tear from our eyes and turn all of the bad things of the world untrue? How he will judge the living and the dead and reign over his beloved for all eternity in a renewed earth?

Friends, if we cannot easily speak of these things, we must study them and learn them so that we can. We must bask in their glorious truths. The gospel is not just the entry point of Christianity. It continue to impact us day after day after day. We ought to love to proclaim it rightly and to call people to believe. Our proclamation doesn’t need to be perfect, after all, it is not our words that convict of sin, but the Holy Spirit. But we ought to seek to desire to speak these truths as clearly and as lovingly as possible.

So where do we begin?

gives us a good starting point. Here, Jesus speaks to the disciples before his ascension and tells them:

English Standard Version Chapter 1

8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit has come upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the end of the earth.”

Witness begins in our Jerusalem. Witness begins at home (Jerusalem), it begins in our neighborhood (Judea). It begins with our family and friends, the ones that we have forged relationships with.

Relationships are essential to witnessing. We believe in a God who is sovereign over salvation, to be sure, and there are great stories of those who have come to understand their need for Christ via a preacher on a street corner, but far more common are those who have been patiently taught over days, weeks, months, and years by dear friends who know them, who love them, and who care for them. The relationships that we build enable us to speak specifically into the lives of others as a friend and as someone who cares for them. It allows people to see that we speak the offensive parts of the gospel not because we want to attack or condemn them but because they are true. And it offers the opportunity for others to see our lives lived out in light of what we believe - to see how our hearts are changed and how our lives change with them.

I want us to focus on the third and fourth places that Jesus mentions above - Samaria and the ends of the earth. First, a (real quick) history lesson - the Samaritans were viewed as enemies of the Jews. They accepted some of the teachings of the Torah but otherwise had their own understanding of the Scriptures and worshipped in a different place. It’s part of why Jesus’ parable of the good Samaritan would have been so scandalous - it would have been ludicrous to expect a Samaritan to behave charitably towards a Jew due to their history of animosity. And yet Jesus tells his disciples to broaden their circle to Samaria, and then even to the Gentiles, those whom had been specifically excluded from the covenant with God! Jesus tells them to go to those who actively oppose them. He tells them - go to your enemies, and tell them about me.

Think of the implication for us here, friends! True gospel centered witness knows no artificial boundary lines. We believe in a sovereign God who is over all things. Are we honestly to believe that there are those who are too far gone to be brought to life even by God? But we so often live this way! We confine our gospel witness to those that we believe are most likely to hear and respond well. We confine it to those who we believe that we can convince. But if we do that, then we betray an insufficient understanding of how the gospel works.

The beauty of the gospel is that it does not depend on the messenger. It isn’t about how convincing or articulate I am when I tell you about Jesus (though we should certainly strive to be earnest and articulate about it!). This should be of great comfort to us; after all, it is not our words that stir people to repentance, it is God himself who does that. The pressure is off! It is our responsibility to proclaim, not to awaken from death to life. And if we are saved, we are equipped to proclaim.

And so we go out and we build relationships with those who are not like us. Those who disagree with us, who call us bigoted and narrow-minded and backwards. Those who worship different gods. Those whose cultures are so foreign and strange to our sensibilities that it seems like we have nothing in common. We go to build relationships with them because we are called to love them. We build relationships with them because we want to walk along side them, to care for them, to support them, to show them the love of Jesus. We build relationships with them because, at the end of the day, we are like beggars who have found bread, and we delight to tell about how we have been blessed.

Friends, I hope that it has become clear that gospel centered witness is not a program. It’s not us going out and hanging door hangers on doors and speaking to a few people and thinking “Well there, I’ve done my witness for the year!” Gospel centered witness is a daily activity. It plays itself out in our everyday interactions, our family dinners, our late night phone calls. There may be some of us that God one day calls to set aside our lives here and go further afield to proclaim him, but even if that never happens, we each have a mission field here in our everyday lives.

Conclusion

I want to leave us this morning with a word of encouragement from the end of . Paul quotes , saying:

We have been commissioned and sent by the Lord himself! How can we assume that this is a job for someone else? ()

English Standard Version Chapter 10

As it is written, “How beautiful are the feet of those who preach the good news!”

We must proclaim the gospel - simply “living well” is necessary, but is not sufficient ()

What it means to witness

I want us to end by thinking about what this verse has to say about the call to witness. In the ancient world, even more so than today, feet were dirty. Open (or no!) shoes, dusty roads, animal dung, sweat, mud - all of these things would have been caked to a messengers feet when they finally arrived at a village to deliver their message. And yet the prophet calls them beautiful.

We must fully understand and comprehend the gospel () - we cannot be effective witnesses if we do not fully understand it ourselves

For those of us who know Christ, think back to your own awakening to life. Think of the faithful men and women who preached the gospel to you, those who sowed the seed that flowered into a redeemed life through the grace of God. How beautiful and precious are those people! How wonderful that they were faithful to the calling that they were given, that they shared the good news of Jesus faithfully and openly.

We must not water down the gospel - we must be bold with our evangelism and be true to the message of redemption

It is my prayer for each and every one of us, that when we enter into glory, our Lord looks at us and tells us with a smile: “What beautiful feet!”

We must call people to repent and believe

Let’s pray.

We must start local ()! Begin with your immediate context - some people God will call further afield, but we can all be witnesses within our own Jerusalem!

Gracious God, we thank you for what you have done for us. We thank you that you have redeemed for yourself a people through the blood of Jesus, we thank you that by believing in what Christ has done and in his resurrection from the dead we are given his righteousness, and that we have life in his name. Heavenly Father, help us to see in our daily lives the beauty of your gospel. Help stir our hearts to compassion for all of those around us who are lost in the ways of the world, who are like sheep without a shepherd. Give us your boldness and compassion for them, that we might love them, serve them, and proclaim your truth to them. We pray that in so doing, you would bring them into our midst and brothers, sisters, and fellow heirs to the promises of Christ, and that through all your name might be glorified. Amen.

God calls us to build relationships with those who do not know him (find reference) - if we do not have any non-Christian friends, then we are not living out the Great Commission!

The Lord’s Supper

It is appropriate that we respond to this message on gospel-centered witness by sharing the Lord’s Supper together. After all, the Lord’s Supper is itself a witness, a proclamation that we believe what the gospel declares – that Jesus died an atoning death on the cross for our sins, that his body was broken on our behalf, that his blood was shed so that ours need not be. To take the Supper is to proclaim these truths and to align ourselves with the gospel. It’s also the reason why we ask that if you do not know Jesus and trust him as your Savior, that we ask you to allow the bread and the wine to pass you by. We pray that you ponder what you have heard today in your heart, that you consider the good news of the gospel that God saves sinners through the blood of Jesus, and that you put your trust in him and speak with myself, Dan, or Richard so that you might join us in this meal in the future.

As the elements come around, now is an excellent time to examine our own lives and see where we have allowed opportunities to witness to slide by the wayside. As we think about the gospel and what it has meant for our lives, let’s take some time to pray that the gospel will continue to soften our hearts, that we would love our neighbors and those who are different and distant from us enough to go out of our way to share the good news of Jesus Christ with them.

On the night he was betrayed, our Lord took bread. After giving thanks he broke it, saying “This is my body, broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”

In the same way after supper he took the cup, saying “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.”

Let’s pray.

Gracious God, thank you for the gift of your Son. Thank you that you have called us into relationship with you despite our persistent rebellion. Thank you that you have forgiven our sins and reconciled us to yourself through the death of Jesus on the cross. We pray that as we seek to gain a deeper and more complete understanding of your gospel that your Spirit would be at work in our hearts, that he would be teaching us, guiding us, and leading us to opportunities to share your good news with those who have not yet heard of what Christ has done. Father, we pray for boldness, that we would be willing to speak your truths even in the face of opposition, and that we would not water down the gospel message for the sake of it being more palatable to people’s sensitivities. Let us speak the truth in love, and let us proclaim your good news to our families, our friends, and our neighbors, in our neighborhood, in our city, in our nation, and to the ends of the earth. Amen.

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