Evangelistic Preaching

Winston Churchill said, “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.” That may be a common response to truth, but it places those who respond thusly on the road to tragedy and destruction. There is no way to love and follow God without loving and following truth. The two cannot be separated.

Evangelistic Preaching

Preaching Truth!

2 Timothy 4:2 ESV

preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, and exhort, with complete patience and teaching.

Truth:

In 1975, several years before his death, Chaplin entered a look-alike contest of himself in France. He probably thought he was a shoo-in for the prize and everyone would have a hearty laugh at the end. But then he came in third.

Present Truth

2 Peter 1:12 NKJV

For this reason I will not be negligent to remind you always of these things, though you know and are established in the present truth.

I would like to share with you a true story that took place during the Revolutionary War. During that time there was a pastor named Peter Miller, and all through his ministry in a small town in Lancaster County, he had a neighbor who took great pleasure in mocking and ridiculing Miller and his followers. And as it happens, during the war, that neighbor fell on hard times and was both accused and convicted of treason. And while of course, he was an unpleasant person, Miller was convinced that he was not in fact, a traitor. And so Peter Miller decided to travel 70 miles on foot to see George Washington, who he believed could commute the sentence, and free him of the charges against him.

When Miller approached the great general, Washington told him he was sorry but there was nothing he could do to save his friend. “My Friend?” Miller gasped, he isn’t my friend! In fact he is the greatest enemy I’ve ever had” Washington needless to say, was surprised:

“What?” cried Washington. “You’ve walked seventy miles to save the life of an enemy? That in my judgment puts the matter in different light. I’ll grant your pardon.” And so, the story goes, Miller returned home just as his neighbor was being led to the scaffold. The Neighbor cried out to the crowd… “Old Peter Miller has coming to get his revenge and watch me hang from the scaffold”. Miller said “not at all” and he handed him the paper with his pardon.

Just in Time!

Truth that is current

Essential for that time.

Noah -

Present Truth

Get in the boat.

Joshua

Present Truth

Choose You This Day Who You Will Serve

Elijah

Choose between God and Baal

Lot

This city will burn!

Present Truth

Truth Essential Now!

What is that?

Jesus is coming soon.

Judgement Hour

Don’t Receive Mark

Come Into Shelter of Truth

Personal

Joshua 24:15 (ESV)

“… Choose this day whom you will serve...”

The prince of Grenada, an heir to the Spanish crown, was sentenced to life in solitary confinement in Madrid’s ancient prison. The dreadful, dirty, and dreary nature of the place earned it the name, “The Place of the Skull.” Everyone knew that once you were in, you would never come out alive. The prince was given one book to read the entire time: the Bible.

With only one book to read, he read it hundreds and hundreds of times. The book became his constant companion. After 33 years of imprisonment, he died. When they came to clean out his cell, they found some notes he had written using nails to mark the soft stone of the prison walls.

The notations were of this sort: Psalm 118:8 is the middle verse of the Bible; Ezra 7:21 contains all the letters of the alphabet except the letter J; the ninth verse of the eighth chapter of Esther is the longest verse in the Bible; no word or name more than six syllables can be found in the Bible.

This individual spent 33 years of his life studying what some have described as the greatest book of all time. Yet he could only glean trivia. From all we know, he never made any religious or spiritual commitment to Christ. He simply became an expert at Bible trivia.

Making a personal appeal.

Not Personal?

Good ideas

Meaningful topics

Entertaining Message

Personal =

Just like Lot’s Sons

You must make a choice!

Prayerful

Colossians 4:3 (ESV)

At the same time, pray also for us, that God may open to us a door for the word, to declare the mystery of Christ...

Pray that the word

will be received.

Door open

in the heart.

Because people are

making decisions.

so important.

One day George Muller began praying for five of his friends. After many months, one of them came to the Lord. Ten years later, two others were converted. It took 25 years before the fourth man was saved. Muller persevered in prayer until his death for the fifth friend, and throughout those 52 years he never gave up hoping that he would accept Christ! His faith was rewarded, for soon after Muller's funeral the last one was saved.

Time of committed prayer.

We get out of it.

What we put into it.

Half-hearted Prayer

Half-hearted preaching

Half-hearted results

Persuasive

2 Corinthians 5:11 (ESV)

Therefore, knowing the fear of the Lord, we persuade others...

People are convinced

of their own worldview.

The experience a system

of beliefs and values.

This worldview

bring them

comfort and

safety.

Like a security blanket.

Evangelistic Preaching

Flips that worldview

upside down.

It attacks false worldviews

Therefore people are

inherently skeptical.

Persuasion

means of explaining

truth that is controversial

to different worldview.

Apologetics

can be very argumentative

Arguments don’t win

saints to Christ.

In the early 1960s, the publishers of Time Magazine were concerned about their declining circulation, so they designed a campaign to send out thousands of letters making an emotional appeal to potential subscribers. In the past, such mailings had been done manually, at a great cost in human resources. IBM was developing something called a computer, so they made a proposal to install a fully automated system that would write the letters, seal the envelopes, address them according to a selected database, stamp them and send them into the postal system without the letters ever being touched by a human hand. The huge computer was installed with much fanfare and anticipation.

However, as is still the case with computers, there was a glitch, and as a result a poor rancher in Wyoming received 12,634 letters appealing to him to subscribe to Time Magazine. The surprised rancher, who didn't ordinarily get much mail, opened the mail-bags and started reading the letters. After reading a few dozen, he sent in a $6 check for a subscription with a note that said, "I give up!"

Passionate

Romans 13:11 ESV

Besides this you know the time, that the hour has come for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we first believed.

Wake up!

Why?

Salvation is Close!

Ephesians 5:14 (ESV)

… “Awake, O sleeper,

and arise from the dead,

and Christ will shine on you.”

When Dwight L. Moody was in London during one of his famous evangelistic tours, several British clergymen visited him. They wanted to know how and why this poorly educated American was so effective in winning throngs of people to Christ. Moody took the three men to the window of his hotel room and asked each in turn what he saw. One by one, the men described the people in the park below. Then Moody looked out the window with tears rolling down his cheeks. “What do you see, Mr. Moody?” asked one of the men.

“I see countless thousands of souls that will one day spend eternity in hell if they do not find the Savior.”

Programmed Non-response

Wake them up

Plain Truth

1 Timothy 2:7 (NKJV)

I was appointed a preacher and an apostle—I am speaking the truth in Christ and not lying...

God commanded

Preach simple truth.

Ephesians 4:15 HCSB

But speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into Him who is the head —Christ.

Truth must be

taught in love.

Yet, still,

plain truth.

Recently there was a children’s television show on YouTube, and the host asked, “What is the meaning of Life?” His response was typical: “I don’t know,” but what he said next made me laugh: “I don’t know, but I could really go for a smoothie right now!” It’s funny to think about, but isn’t that how many of us respond to the big questions of life?

I don’t have the answer but a smoothie sure sounds good right about now! We end up numbing ourselves with immediate pleasures when we really need to do is search for the truth.

We mask our deep longings for meaning in different ways, sometimes with the classic drugs of our society, alcohol, opiates, food, prescription pain killers, or we do it with “good things” that become ends in themselves: our careers, our families, our busyness. As Socrates once said, “The unexamined life is not worth living”…So when the deep, foundational questions of our existence bubble up to the surface, may we look first to Christ, not a smoothie.

Powerful

Acts 1:8 ESV

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.”

What make it powerful.

infilling of the the HS

Thomas Aquinas, the famous medieval theologian, created one of the greatest intellectual achievements of Western civilization in his Summa Theologica. It’s a massive work: thirty-eight treatises, three thousand articles, ten thousand objections.

Thomas tried to gather into once coherent whole all of truth. What an undertaking: anthropology, science, ethics, psychology, political theory, and theology, all under God.

On December 6, 1273, Thomas abruptly stopped his work.

While celebrating Mass in the Chapel of St. Thomas, he caught a glimpse of eternity, and suddenly he knew that all his efforts to describe God fell so far short that he decided never to write again.When his secretary, Reginald tried to encourage him to do more writing, he said, “Reginald, I can do no more. Such things have been revealed to me that all I have written seems as so much straw.”

Persevering

Galatians 6:9 HCSB

So we must not get tired of doing good, for we will reap at the proper time if we don’t give up.

Don’t give up.

Results?

narrow path.

Huge results?

may not be good indication.

Appeal

Evangelistic Preaching

Always has an appeal

Following that

My appeal today is simple.

“Speak the Truth in Love”