Sermon Tone Analysis
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The title of the sermon this morning is, God calls us to share our faith.
Three ways He will help us.
Let’s take a quick poll this morning.
The poll is about your attitudes and mine toward the topic of evangelism - sharing your faith.
I’m going to share with you a series of statements that sum up our attitudes toward sharing our faith, and you raise your hand if it’s true of you.
Sharing your faith means giving 1) your personal testimony of how God saved you, and 2) a presentation of the gospel.
How many of you would agree with these statements.
And here’s the rule: If you’re be honest with me about where you’re, I’ll also share with you honestly about where I’m at.
“I want to share my faith with others, and I regularly do share my faith with others.”
“I want to share my faith with others, and I regularly do share my faith others.”
“I want to share my faith with others, and I know I should, but I don’t do so nearly as often as I should.”
“I want to share my faith with others, and one day I will, but just not today.”
“I want to share my faith with others, but I have no intention to do so.”
“I don’t want to share my faith with others, and I have no intention to do so.”
Now, for those of you who answered with any hesitation at all about sharing your faith, here’s the question...
How many of you would say that the reason you answered with hesitation is that evangelism can be scary?
Now, fear is a natural human response to a real or perceived threat.
And the thing that makes evangelism seem to be a threat is all the uncertainty associated with it, right?
“Will they be receptive to me?
Or will they reject my attempt?
Will we mess things up or get it right?
What if I can’t answer their questions?
What if they get upset with me?
If it’s someone I know and love, how will this change my relationship with them?
Another way, actually, of asking those questions is to ask this question: “Can I trust God?
Will He show up, or leave me hanging?’
God calls us to share our faith.
Acts 8:25-40 answers this question by giving us three ways He will help us.
#1: God will draw lost men and women from all nations
There’s just been a massive spiritual awakening in Samaria.
Philip went and preached the gospel of forgiveness of sins through faith in Christ.
The Spirit is moving and men and women are being saved in large numbers.
So from Samaria, they begin to return to home base for the early church, Jerusalem.
And we’ll read down through verse 27, which is our focus for this point:
Now, look with me at verse 27: “And there was an Ethiopian, a eunuch, a court official of Candace, queen of the Ethiopians, who was in charge of all her worship.”
The Ethiopian eunuch:
He was different ethnically
He was different racially
He was different physically
He was the first Gentile convert!
God will draw men and women from all nations to Himself.
This Ethiopian guy here is a case study in God’s desire to draw men and women from not just Israel, but from every nation to Himself.
How so?
Notice on your screen four things about this Ethiopian.
First, he was different ethnically.
Ethiopia in the NT is not modern-day Ethiopia.
This is modern-day Sudan, south Africa.
He’s different ethnically.
But he’s also different racially.
The word “Ethiopian” here in Acts literally means “to have burned skin”, “to have a burned face”.
Ethiopians were dark skinned; they were African, which means they were black.
So he was also different racially.
Now, the Israelites for centuries had believed themselves to belong to God simply because they could trace their genealogy back to the patriarchs like Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
Gentiles, non-Jews, they were dismissed without even a thought.
And yet, we serve a God who is so very, very different in His love for people from all nations.
And that’s why there’s a surprising detail in verse 27.
Look with me at the end of the verse: “He had come to Jerusalem to worship.”
Why is that surprising?
It’s surprising because of Deut.
23:1.
That passage is talking about a eunuch.
Well, what’s a eunuch?
A eunuch is a man whose reproductive organs are intentionally mutilated.
And eunuchs - well, they were barred from worship in the OT because they were physically mutilated.
There’s even question whether he was even able to go into the temple in Jerusalem.
He definitely wouldn’t have been allowed to worship with the Jews.
He would have had to enter the separate, second-class space since he was a Gentile.
And this Ethiopian — different ethnically, different racially, different physically because he was a eunuch — this eunuch God is drawing to Himself.
God is saying to this eunuch, “No more of this second class worship…you are important to me; you have worth and value; I want you for myself.”
This was promised in the OT, by the way - that God would one day draw those types of people who had been rejected as ceremonially impure.
God is concerned not just about the masses of people, but also each individual person as they were the only one!
We talk about the lost often, as a category; the unsaved, etc.
And anyone who is out fellowship with God through Christ is indeed lost and unsaved.
But the danger is we think of the lost as a category of people who are nameless and faceless.
The Ethiopian eunuch is a reminder to us: God sees each and every person, and He cares.
God sees you, and He cares about you.
He knows your name, He knows your heart, He knows your desires and your fears — all of that, and He still loves you.
God is concerned not just about the masses of people; He is concerned also about each individual person as if they were the only one.
When we share our faith with others, we can trust that the person we are sharing Christ with is being drawn by the Father.
We are dead in sins and unable to lift a finger, unable to believe, unable to repent, until God in grace draws us.
Jesus says in John 6:44, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.”
God draws men and women from every nation to Himself.
#2: God will cause our paths to intersect with theirs
But here’s the next promise: not only will God draw the lost from every nation to Himself; He will also cause our paths to intersect with theirs.
And sometimes we have experiences of just this very thing.
There was a pastor and Bible scholar named Ian Thomas.
He had been traveling and was about to catch his final connecting flight home.
He was so tired that he planned to try to curl up and sleep through the duration of his flight.
But a few minutes into it, he says that the guy across the aisle started trying to get his attention.
And just like the Ethiopian eunuch, he said, “I am reading in the Bible about Nicodemus in John 3, and I do not understand it.
Do you know anything about the Bible?”
Literally the guy is a Bible scholar who teaches and studies the Bible for a living.
And here’s someone across the aisle reading John 3 about being born again.
“”Truly, truly, I say to you, unless one is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God” (John 3:3 ESV), Jesus says in that passage.
And seated across from a Bible scholar, he says, “Hey, I want to understand this.
Do you perhaps happen to know anything about the Bible?
[Hughes PTW loc.
cit.]
How many of you have actually experienced something like that?
If you have, I would love to hear the story and even write it down and file it away for the future.
But I wonder if the reason we don’t have more of these experiences, church, is that we’re inconvenienced by them?
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