3-5: Evangelism & Missions

Good morning to everyone here in the room and online, and welcome to the gathering of the Eastern Hills Baptist Church family. I wanted to take a moment and give a word of thanks to our Bible study leaders, who give so much time every week in preparation and teaching our Bible study classes.

If this is your first time visiting Eastern Hills, thanks for coming and we want you know know that the goal of this church family is to feel like that: like a family—warm, friendly, and inviting. We love Jesus and we love one another, and that’s really our heartbeat: to connect people to Jesus and to each other. I’d also like to ask a favor of you if this is your first visit: there is an information card in the back of the pew in front of you. Would you mind taking a moment to fill that out, just so we can drop you a note thanking you for being here today? If you’d rather fill out an online card, you can text the word WELCOME to 505-339-2004, and you’ll get a text back with a link to our digital communication card. Either way, I’d like to invite any of you who are guests this morning to come and meet me at the close of service today, as I have a small gift for you just to say thanks for being here.

Announcements

Sundaes On Sunday is today following service! We are going to be both outside on the Courtyard and inside the Family Life Center (gym), sharing some ice cream and fellowship for a while following Family Worship this morning, with an additional purpose: if you have questions regarding our Building Master Plan or the upcoming Endeavor Generosity Campaign, we want to answer those questions! The folks in the shirts like mine will be spread out throughout the gathering, and if you have a question, you can ask one of us. If they don’t have the answer, they’ll be able to point you to someone who does. We have both regular and non-dairy options for treats, as well as a variety of toppings to enjoy, so even if you have ZERO questions, please plan to hang out a little after service today to just get to spend time with each other.

Opening

We’re closing in on the end of the third part of our series on our church Statement of Belief, called “We Believe.” We started this series in January, and we will finish part 3 next Sunday, and then do the last part of the series in January of 2023, Lord willing. I will admit that the last four messages in this series have been particularly weighty for me personally, and I’m blessed to have been able to be challenged by the Lord as I prepared them and then as I preached them. This morning, we will consider the calling of the church to evangelism and missions, and our focal passage will be the Great Commission. Let’s turn to Matthew 28 in our Bibles or Bible apps, and stand as we are able to in honor of God’s holy Word this morning:

Matthew 28:18–20 CSB

18 Jesus came near and said to them, “All authority has been given to me in heaven and on earth. 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 everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

PRAYER (Oliver/Hoffman family: Denise has been given only weeks to live; FBC Cuba, Pastor Dan Cappel - fellow CBA Executive Board member)

Sometimes the greatest difficulty that we have in communication is the fact that we say the same words, but we don’t mean the same things. This is the question of semantics. If I were to say the word “chair,” each of us could picture a chair in our minds. It might be one that’s at your house. It might be one that you’ve seen before, or one that you’d like to have. It might be something huge like a throne, or tiny like a child’s chair in a preschool classroom.

And while we might all have the same base definition of a chair—a piece of furniture that we sit on—what we mean when we refer to a chair in our minds is probably quite different. If I were to speak to you about “my chair,” and you pictured something completely different than the reality of my chair, we might have a hard time communicating clearly about it, unless I gave some further explanation so that your idea of my “chair” and the reality of my chair were more closely aligned. Why we’re having a deep discussion of a chair, I have no idea… but you get what I mean.

This morning, my hope is that we can take a couple of the terms that we might mean differently and bring some unified clarity to them: to make our individual semantics line up more closely together. These two terms are “evangelism” and “missions,” both of which are in the title of Article 13 of our Statement of Belief:

EHBC’s Statement of Belief, Article 13: Evangelism & Missions

It is the duty and privilege of every follower of Christ and every church of the Lord Jesus Christ to endeavor to make disciples of all nations… to seek constantly to win the lost to Christ by verbal witness undergirded by a Christian lifestyle, and by other methods in harmony with the gospel of Christ.

If I’m going to preach effectively this morning about evangelism and missions, we need to do what we can to make sure we’re talking about the same thing, so I need to give some definitions. If you were a part of evening service the first year and a half of my tenure as senior pastor, we defined several terms and worked to remember those definitions. Our definition for evangelism is I believe a good one:

Evangelism: Teaching the Gospel with the aim to persuade.

We didn’t define missions in that study, as far as I know, but I want to give us as solid of a definition that I can come up with this morning, just so we can all understand what I mean when I say, “missions” during this message:

Missions: Evangelism that takes the Gospel across ethnic, linguistic, and geographic boundaries, with the intention of gathering churches and teaching them to obey everything that Jesus commanded. This definition includes connecting people that we reach during missions to an existing church, or the founding of a new church through and with them.

So in the view we’re taking this morning, evangelism is pretty broad, and missions is a specific type of evangelism. We will look at each this morning, and then consider where the power and the motivation for evangelism and missions comes from.

1) Every believer is called to engage in evangelism.

Yes, every. The task of teaching the Gospel with the aim to persuade falls to all of us, individually. If you are a follower of Christ, then you have been given marching orders in the form of the Great Commission. One of the fascinating things about the Great Commission is that it is both individually and corporately meaningful. Notice the individual aspects of it:

Matthew 28:19–20 CSB

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 everything I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

It’s people who go, people who proclaim, people who teach, and people who become disciples, people who are baptized, and people who learn and observe the commands of Jesus. Evangelism can take place everywhere and anywhere, because people are everywhere and anywhere. This is why the imperative, the command, in this passage isn’t “go.” It’s “make disciples.” Everyone “goes” somewhere, sometime. The verb “go” is passive, but the command to “make disciples” declares what we are to be doing as we “go.” We are to teach the Gospel with the aim to persuade others to believe in Jesus.

We’re all called to do this because the work of the Holy Spirit in our lives when we surrender our lives to Jesus should radically alter our perspective. If we are in Christ, we have been given the ability to have an eternal perspective, not merely a human or temporal one.

2 Corinthians 5:16–21 CSB

16 From now on, then, we do not know anyone from a worldly perspective. Even if we have known Christ from a worldly perspective, yet now we no longer know him in this way. 17 Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has passed away, and see, the new has come! 18 Everything is from God, who has reconciled us to himself through Christ and has given us the ministry of reconciliation. 19 That is, in Christ, God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and he has committed the message of reconciliation to us. 20 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us. We plead on Christ’s behalf, “Be reconciled to God.” 21 He made the one who did not know sin to be sin for us, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

This is the work that Christ has done in us who believe. We are no longer to see things in the same way. We have been made new in Christ, and the old way of looking is gone. Now, we can see people the way the Lord sees them: as His beloved creations who bear His image, and for whom Jesus died.

When we created our Statement of Belief, we essentially shortened and reordered the Baptist Faith & Message 2000, to make it a little easier to read. That confession’s Article XI is on Evangelism & Missions, and it has this where we have the ellipsis:

BF&M 2000: Article XI: Evangelism & Missions

“The new birth of man’s spirit by God’s Holy Spirit means the birth of love for others.”

So we are given a new life, made into a new creation, with a new perspective, and a new mandate: to be ambassadors for Christ wherever we go, proclaiming the reconciliation of people to God through the Gospel of Jesus in the power of God’s Holy Spirit, because we have a new love for others: a God-sized love. So Peter could challenge the church:

1 Peter 3:15–16 CSB

15 but in your hearts regard Christ the Lord as holy, ready at any time to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you. 16 Yet do this with gentleness and reverence, keeping a clear conscience, so that when you are accused, those who disparage your good conduct in Christ will be put to shame.

But this is the place that we might run into a difference of definition. For many, evangelism is “winning souls to Christ.” This isn’t a bad goal, because we certainly want souls to come to faith in Christ. But evangelism happens before someone makes a decision to follow Jesus. It happens when the follower of Christ faithfully presents the truth and hope of the Gospel to the lost. For us to “win” anyone is above our pay grade. We can’t save people, because we didn’t die for them. The Holy Spirit is the One who convicts them of their sin and righteousness and judgment. Our task is to be faithful to teaching the Gospel with the aim to persuade. We fulfill our call as evangelists when we tell, not when people surrender. Isaac Adams, in his little book on evangelism, wrote:

“…Our job is to proclaim salvation, not produce it. We’re called to deliver a message to people; God’s the one who delivers people from sin.”

—Isaac Adams, What If I’m Discouraged In My Evangelism?, Crossway

While there are certainly those who have a special giftedness from God for the purpose of evangelism (see Ephesians 4), that doesn’t mean that the rest of us have a pass. Probably one of the two biggest reasons that we don’t share the Gospel is discouragement due to what we perceive to be a lack of success. We share the Gospel, and the person we share it with doesn’t believe.... so we feel like maybe we did a bad job or let God down or whatever, so we kind of give up. Can I be completely honest and transparent this morning? I often feel discouraged in my evangelism. I have a particular advantage in that I get to share the Gospel every week from here, but the vast majority of weeks, no one comes to faith in Christ that I know of. When I share the Gospel individually, rarely does someone surrender. So sometimes it feels like my sharing the message is not landing on fertile soil.

But this doesn’t mean that I should give up sharing the Gospel! I can take heart because I know that my place is to plant, not to grow. Growth is God’s job. Mine is to faithfully share the message of Jesus:

1 Corinthians 3:5–9 CSB

5 What then is Apollos? What is Paul? They are servants through whom you believed, and each has the role the Lord has given. 6 I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. 7 So, then, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. 8 Now he who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his own reward according to his own labor. 9 For we are God’s coworkers. You are God’s field, God’s building.

Has your life been changed by Jesus? Have you been saved from your sin? Have you been made new, passed from death to life, gone from blind to seeing? Then tell people about what He has done for you, and teach them the Gospel with the aim to persuade th‘em of their need for Christ. Be faithful in evangelism! God can use your faithful witness, even if you never get to see the fruit!

One last word on evangelism generally for parents: keep sharing the Gospel with your kids. You know that the world is trying to “evangelize” them every waking minute. Don’t buy the lie that you just want them to “make up their own minds,” so somehow that means that you shouldn’t share the Gospel with them. Sharing the truth about something isn’t indoctrination: it’s teaching. I mean, would you ever look at your child’s math teacher and say, “You know, I really think that you should let my child make up their own mind about what five plus five is. Don’t tell them it’s 10. I don’t want them indoctrinated into the maths.” Of course not! If you think that you are somehow doing them a disservice by sharing the Gospel with them, then I would submit to you that you either don’t understand the Gospel, or that you don’t believe the Gospel. That’s a problem with your faith and your obedience, not theirs. Remember what we saw last week, parents:

Ephesians 6:4 CSB

4 Fathers, don’t stir up anger in your children, but bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.

Share the Gospel with your kids, and never stop. It is your calling as parents.

Now, on to the corporate view of the Great Commission.

2) Every believing church is called to engage in missions.

While every individual believer is called to engage in evangelism, there’s definitely something about the Great Commission that must be larger than just the individual person. When we come to faith in Christ, we are not merely saved for ourselves. We are saved into a community of faith, and as a result, we are a part of the family of God, joint citizens of another kingdom, a part of a massive army based on a shared testimony, an army that is to be engaged in a spiritual battle of eternal proportions:

Matthew 16:15–18 CSB

15 “But you,” he asked them, “who do you say that I am?” 16 Simon Peter answered, “You are the Messiah, the Son of the living God.” 17 Jesus responded, “Blessed are you, Simon son of Jonah, because flesh and blood did not reveal this to you, but my Father in heaven. 18 And I also say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.

The church is all believers in Jesus through all of time, and the rock upon which Jesus builds His church is the testimony of Christ as Savior and Lord, a foundation that cannot be shaken. All the powers of hell cannot overcome the church, because our hope is in Jesus, who is Lord over all. And God in His sovereignty has seen fit to establish that the church universal be pictured in the church local: groups of believers who have covenanted with one another in a particular location for the ministry of the Gospel.

Therefore, we as the local church then have a collective responsibility as well as an individual one. Consider again the Great Commission:

Matthew 28:19–20 CSB

The Great Commission has a congregational aspect, in that it’s the church that sends, the church that baptizes, the church that provides much of the context for discipleship (even if it’s done outside the walls, it’s still the purpose of the church). And those who come to faith are baptized into the church collective, and then replicate the church mandate by then doing missions, because that is necessarily included in observing everything that Jesus has commanded us!

Only the church could do the work of reaching “all nations.” “Nations” in Matthew 28 is ἔθνη (ethne), where we get our English words ethnic or ethnicity. One person couldn’t go and reach every people group on the planet, especially in the first century when Jesus said it. No, we are collectively called to this form of evangelism. Notice what Jesus said to His disciples just before He ascended into heaven:

Acts 1:8 CSB

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

We are called to be witnesses in our personal locales (Jerusalem), in our geographic vicinities and nearby vicinities (Judea and Samaria), and outward to the ends of the earth: where “all nations” are found.

Just as every person who makes up a local church is called to evangelism so that the kingdom of God might grow locally, so every local congregation is called to the task of missions so that the kingdom of God might grow globally. It’s a whole church thing, so it doesn’t require that every single person in the church (or in fact ANY person in a particular local church) actually go, though this would be ideal (that the church would raise up, commission, and send out). This is why I’ve separated this point in this way. Not all of us are called to go, but all of us can be a part of sending out those who are called.

In the early church, we have a great image of this in the church at Syrian Antioch. That church was gathered together, and God called out Saul (Paul) and Barnabas for a special missions work:

Acts 13:1–3 CSB

1 Now in the church at Antioch there were prophets and teachers: Barnabas, Simeon who was called Niger, Lucius of Cyrene, Manaen, a close friend of Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. 2 As they were worshiping the Lord and fasting, the Holy Spirit said, “Set apart for me Barnabas and Saul for the work to which I have called them.” 3 Then after they had fasted, prayed, and laid hands on them, they sent them off.

They commissioned them and sent them out to proclaim the Gospel, which is exactly what they did. And throughout the rest of Paul’s life, he was a missionary. He constantly strove to reach the nations with the message of the Gospel. And there were many churches that he planted that came alongside him in sending him to proclaim Christ, through prayer, through giving, and through going as well.

While not referring to Paul, something that John wrote in the tiny little book of 3 John to his friend Gaius should encourage us in our support of missionaries:

3 John 5–8 CSB

5 Dear friend, you are acting faithfully in whatever you do for the brothers and sisters, especially when they are strangers. 6 They have testified to your love before the church. You will do well to send them on their journey in a manner worthy of God, 7 since they set out for the sake of the Name, accepting nothing from pagans. 8 Therefore, we ought to support such people so that we can be coworkers with the truth.

But again, this is where we run into the problem with semantics. We do a lot of things that we call “missions.” But for missions to be “missions,” it must have evangelism as its central purpose and focus. Granted, missionaries often do a lot of things in order to love the people they minister to well, and to afford them the opportunity of sharing the Gospel message, but they understand that those other things are more the means, not the ends. Underlying all of the good that we do is the desire to preach the love of Jesus for a lost world, so that they might be saved. Consider what long time missionary Mark Collins wrote:

“Throughout history, Christians have built schools, established hospitals, fed the poor, and cultivated community structures that have helped people flourish. But those larger social goods are not the aim of Christian missions, as if knowing Jesus is merely the means to more important social goods. Christ commissioned us to preach the Gospel, calling sinners to repentance. We must ‘make disciples.’ In fact, sometimes, faithful preaching may mean communicating the Gospel with no immediate discernible effect at all.”

—Mark Collins, How Can I Support International Missions?, Crossway

In Mark’s book, he went on to share a list of ways that we can be engaged in missions.

Share. Share the Gospel yourself by being an evangelist where you are. This helps us develop a heart for people and a passion for missions.

Learn. Read about faithful Christian missionaries and ask the Lord to inspire your support for missions through their stories. Engage in our missions weeks of prayer each Winter and Spring.

Pray. Pray for missionaries. We have several missionaries on our Prayer Line, and there are many ways to get information on missionaries to pray for. One great way is the get the WMU prayer calendar email. Pray about whether God is sending you to serve.

Give. Give to support missionaries through offerings like the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering or Annie Armstrong Easter Offering (both of those ladies were missionaries). Want to support a missionary family more directly? Let me know, because Eastern Hills already partners with several missionaries.

Go. If God is clearly leading you to go, then respond to the call! You might be called to go serve in a short-term capacity or for a longer term. Eastern Hills is a sending church.

Inform. As you learn about missions, tell others, so that they can learn and pray and give and go.

Mobilize. If you’re going to serve, invite a brother or sister in Christ to go serve with you. If you’re going to learn about missions, invite someone to learn with you. God can use your passion as a catalyst for leading others to engage in missions.

3) The power and motivation for both evangelism and missions is the Gospel.

The most important aspect of both evangelism and missions is the fact that both the motivation and the power behind evangelism and missions is the Gospel. Specifically, while you might sit down and have a cup of coffee while evangelizing, you can sit down and have a cup of coffee without ever talking about Jesus. That’s not evangelism. It’s building a relationship that hopefully will lead to evangelism, but it’s not evangelism itself yet. While you might travel to another city and do lots of good things, there are many who do not believe in Christ who do that. So that’s not missions yet. Evangelism—teaching the Gospel with the aim to persuade—needs to be a part of both if we’re going to be doing evangelism and missions.

What moves us from NOT participating in evangelism and missions to DOING evangelism and missions is what Jesus bookended the Great Commission with: His authority and His presence.

Matthew 28:18 CSB

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

Matthew 28:20b (CSB)

20b And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age.”

What I mean here is that if we want to be empowered to evangelize effectively (again, “effective” meaning that we faithfully share the Gospel), if we want to be motivated to support missions, then the most important thing is to be in love with Jesus and in awe of His authority. Horatius Bonar, in his book Words to Winners of Souls, wrote:

“Our power in drawing men to Christ springs chiefly from the fullness of our personal joy in Him, and the nearness of our personal communion with Him.”

—Horatius Bonar, Words to Winners of Souls, P&R

In Christ, we are empowered by His Spirit at work in our lives. Through the Gospel we are motivated, because we believe what the Bible says: that God loves us and created us for a relationship with Him, but that we sinned and rebelled against Him, going our own way. As a result, humanity was separated from God, deserving of everlasting punishment in hell. But because of His great love, God sent His one and only Son, Jesus, to provide the way of salvation for sinful humanity. Jesus lived a perfect life, never sinning, and died as the payment for our sins instead. He took the judgment and punishment that we deserve. But He rose from the grave, proving that the Gospel is true, and those who surrender to Him, turning from our sins and trusting in His death for our forgiveness, will receive eternal life with God.

We should want to share this message because we know that it is the power of God for salvation, as Paul said in Romans 1:

Romans 1:16–17 CSB

16 For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, first to the Jew, and also to the Greek. 17 For in it the righteousness of God is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written: The righteous will live by faith.

One last note before we wrap up: earlier I mentioned the second biggest reason that I believe we don’t evangelize: discouragement. The biggest reason? Fear. But if we will keep in mind the authority and presence of Jesus, we will discover that we have nothing to fear. We’ll just talk about Jesus because we love Jesus. Think about it: grandparents have no problem telling people about their grandkids. Why? Because they love them and want others to love them as well.

2 Timothy 1:8 CSB

8 So don’t be ashamed of the testimony about our Lord, or of me his prisoner. Instead, share in suffering for the gospel, relying on the power of God.

We don’t evangelize or do missions alone. We do so under the authority of Christ and with His presence, because He is with us. We can trust in His power to sustain us, because He has all authority. We can lean on His presence in the midst of suffering for the sake of the Gospel, because even if we are rejected for His name, we are blessed:

Luke 6:22–23 CSB

22 Blessed are you when people hate you, when they exclude you, insult you, and slander your name as evil because of the Son of Man. 23 “Rejoice in that day and leap for joy. Take note—your reward is great in heaven, for this is the way their ancestors used to treat the prophets.

And not only that, but we are surrounded by our brothers and sisters in Christ, those who are also empowered and motivated by the Gospel. We’re in this together! And we can lift each other up, asking God to give us opportunity to share the Gospel, and to give us a boldness to share it as those opportunities arise:

Colossians 4:3–4 CSB

3 At the same time, pray also for us that God may open a door to us for the word, to speak the mystery of Christ, for which I am in chains, 4 so that I may make it known as I should.

Ephesians 6:19–20 CSB

19 Pray also for me, that the message may be given to me when I open my mouth to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel. 20 For this I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I might be bold enough to speak about it as I should.

We are God’s chosen vessels for sharing the message of hope of the Gospel of Jesus. May we be available, observant, empowered, an emboldened to share as we should.

Closing

Ultimately, the Great Commission is called that because we are on mission together with Christ: a “co-mission,” if you will. His mission, simply put, is to “seek and save the lost,” according to Luke 19:10. If we are in Christ, we are called to be a part of that mission here, there, and wherever we may find ourselves. This is the mission of the church. And this mission is both an endeavor as a noun, and we are to endeavor as a verb to make disciples of all nations. This is why we’ve called our upcoming generosity campaign Endeavor—because it’s not just about the building. It’s about the building being able to continue supporting the work that God is doing in and through this church family, while we strive to make His name known here and around the world.

Today’s message has been primarily to the church, but today, you have heard the Gospel. Those in the room right now who believe in Jesus have been made new through faith in Him, and Jesus wants to make you new today as well. He died so you could be made right with God, and He rose so that you could live forever with Him, if you belong to Him through repentance and faith. Would you give up going your own way today, and trust in Christ? Right now, right where you are, whether you’re in the room or online, confess your need for salvation to Jesus, and surrender your life for Him to save and lead. And if that’s you, we would love to celebrate that with you this morning.

Church membership

Responding to call to missions or ministry.

Prayer

Offering

PRAYER

Closing Remarks

Bible reading (Joshua 3)

Pastor’s Study tonight

Prayer meeting on Wednesdays

Instructions for guests

Benediction

Romans 10:14–15 CSB

14 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? 15 And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news.