WHY ARE WE HERE?                                                                   9-21-03

To Become Witnesses

1 Corin. 9:19-23; 2 Corin. 5:11-20; (Acts 1:8)

People can go to hell admiring your consistent Christian living, but lost because they never heard about Jesus, the only One Who could have saved them.

But people can also go to hell having heard you tell them about Jesus, but they didn’t believe what you said because you never lived a life that demonstrated the reality of Jesus.

What the world needs now is not love, sweet love.  What the world needs now is Christians who will both walk the walk and talk the talk, who will speak of their faith in Jesus both by their words and by the life they live.

This is the third in a series of six messages dealing with our God-given mission to produce growing, healthy followers of Jesus Christ, who are worshippers, witnesses, workers, and warriors. 

Two weeks ago we looked at what it means to be a growing follower of Jesus.  Last Sunday we looked at what it meant to be a worshipper.  Today we are looking at being witnesses.

I want us to look at 2 passages from the Bible today.  The first is in       1 Corinthians 9.  This is the Apostle Paul’s first letter to the Christians  in the city of Corinth.  This was not a Jewish city, but rather a city in Greece.  It was one of the greatest commercial centers of the world.  But it was also a very wicked city.  There is even a Greek word that means “to live like a Corinthian”, and it meant to live in drunkenness and immorality.

One source of that immorality was the Temple of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love.  It stood on a hill overlooking Corinth.  The temple had 1000 priestesses who were sacred prostitutes.  Every evening they descended from the temple into the city to find willing “worshippers” who could be both religious and sinful at the same time.

It is to Christians living in this setting that Paul writes two letters.  True Christians have always been a society within a society.  As our society becomes more and more sinful, we need to remember that Christianity began in conditions similar to ours, and under those conditions it flourished.

Let’s read 1 Corin. 9:19-23.

When those first 120 followers of Jesus had been filled with the Holy Spirit on the day on Pentecost, they had all become witnesses of Jesus.  Jesus had said in Acts 1:8 But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you; and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, and in all Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.”

You will be My witnesses!  What does it mean to be a witness?

Back when we lived in Vancouver, once when I was out jogging I encountered a young woman, crying and bleeding from a wound on her head.  She said she had been raped in a nearby field.  I took her to a home that was close by and we called the police.  They came and talked with her, and I left.

Several weeks later I received a subpoena to appear as a witness at the trial of the man accused of raping her.  In the courtroom I was asked if I swore to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, to which I agreed.

The attorney asked me what I had seen that night.  If I had told him I actually had not been there that night but only had read about it in the paper the next day, he would have immediately asked me to step down.  He wanted to know what first-hand knowledge I had of this case – what had I seen, what had I observed with my own eyes and heard with my own ears.  When I told them what the lady had said to me, they said that was not relevant.  It was only hearsay.  She would tell her own story.  I could only tell of what I had seen, what I had experienced.

Without experience there can be no witness.  Acts 22:14-15 Then (Annanias) said (to Paul): ‘The God of our fathers has chosen you to know his will and to see the Righteous One and to hear words from his mouth. You will be his witness to all men of what you have seen and heard.

It is possible to witness something, however, and yet not give testimony of what we have witnessed.  We may not want to be bothered.  We may fear the consequences of taking the witness stand.  We may rationalize our refusal to give testimony.  And all of these things apply to our Christian witness as well.

But God calls us to be witnesses.  God did not place you on this earth just to consume resources – to breathe the air, drink the water, eat the food, take up space.  God place you here for a purpose, and that is so you could experience Him and then give testimony of your experience.

Let’s take a look at this passage we have just read.  Two phrases are used here that I want us to take a look at.  In v.19 I make myself a slave to everyone.   And in v.22 I have become all things to all men.  What is meant by those phrases.

Let’s look first at what is not meant:

It does not mean that we conform to the world.

Romans 12:2 says Do not conform any longer to the pattern of this world.  Paul is not saying in 1 Corin. 9 that he violated the Scriptures and is urging us to do the same.  Whatever it is that he is saying, it’s not that we should conform to the pattern of world.

Paul writes to these Christians in Corinth, that extremely wealthy yet wicked city: “Therefore come out from them and be separate, says the Lord. Touch no unclean thing, and I will receive you. I will be a Father to you, and you will be my sons and daughters, says the Lord Almighty.”

2 Corin. 6:17-18.

It does not mean that we participate in people’s sin.

That verse we just read applies here as well.  Touch no unclean thing.  In saying To those not having the Law I became like one not having the Law, he is not saying that he went ahead and visited the Temple of Aphrodite every time he visited Corinth.  He did not hook up with a  prostitute to try to win her to Jesus.

You can be a witness to people without doing what they are doing.  When we were in Vancouver there was a neighborhood party, and on the bottom of the invitation were 4 letters: BYOB.  And I said to Mary Ann “Look at this; we are to bring our own Bible.”  We went, without our Bibles, but without any booze either.

With our own neighborhood watch gatherings, the people who have hosted our last two potlucks have had a cooler of beer.  And last time Wirt Pirello said “There’s some beer in the cooler there if you want, Al.”  So how does a A/G pastor respond to an invitation to have a beer? 

I just told him: “You know, I’m goofy enough without drinking that stuff; I think I’ll just have a root beer.”  And we sat down and had a great time talking together.  You don’t have to do what they are doing.

It does not mean that we take on the world’s values.

In order to win people, I have seen some people become more like the world than they are like Jesus.  They begin to value what the world values rather than valuing what God values.  That is not what this passage is talking about.

What then, is it talking about?  What this passage is saying is that reaching the lost is of such great importance that:

1. We are sensitive to the people we are trying to reach.

Paul is saying that he did not see everyone the same.  He recognized that there were differences between Jew and Gentile.  Jews had knowledge that Gentiles did not have.  He was sensitive to that.  Those under the Law needed one approach and those without the Law needed another approach; he was sensitive to that.  He was sensitive to those who were weak.

How does that happen?  It involves listening before we start just indiscriminately quoting Bible verses to them.  Where is their need? Where are they hurting?  What open door has the Lord prepared for His Word to enter?  We discover those things through listening, through asking questions, through being the loving hand of Jesus reaching down to them rather than being just a mouth spouting information.

2. We adapt our approach, but not our message.

I listened to a tape this week while out working in my garden.  And one of the segments on the tape was an old black preacher, a pastor down in Dallas, Texas.  And he talked about dying black churches who had not come into the 21^st century, but rather were doing business like it was still the 1950s.

Some of you have traveled extensively, and you know that churches in Africa and Asia are different than churches in Spokane.  The churches we have visited throughout Latin America – in Brazil and Argentina and Mexico and Costa Rica, the way they do church is different than the way we do church. 

And our culture even here is America has changed drastically during the last 50 years.  The younger generations growing up around us do not have the spiritual roots that people of my generation had.  We are not, in fact, a Christian nation.  We have moved away from those Judeo-Christian moorings that we once had.  Many people do not even know who Jesus Christ is; they do not know what Easter is all about; they know nothing of the cross.

In our witnessing we are dealing with many pagan people in our society as well as many Muslims and Buddhists and New-Agers.  The message is still the same: Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins so that through faith in Him we can be saved from an eternity of suffering the penalty of our sins.  The message is not adapted.  It is still the same and will always be the same.  But becoming all things to all men means that how that message is presented to one may be different than how it is presented to someone else, in a language they understand.

3. We are willing to be uncomfortable.

I make myself a slave to everyone Paul says.  “The Gospel, the winning of people to faith in Jesus is so important, so vital, that I am willing to suffer whatever inconvenience, whatever trouble, whatever sacrifice I must in order to see people saved.”

God did not place us here on this earth so that we could be comfortable.  I would like every one of you to write that on one of those blank front pages of your Bible.  Satan has warped the thinking of millions of Christians into thinking that “It’s all about me.”  It’s not all about me. 

God has placed us here to serve Him, not so that He could serve us. Being an effective witness for Jesus will involve discomfort.  It will move us out of our comfort zones; it will involve the risk of being misunderstood, of being ridiculed, of being rejected.  And God says: “So what?  Why are you more interested in those people’s approval than you are in My approval?

Let’s look for a bit now at our second passage for this morning; it is found in Paul’s second letter to these same people.  2 Corin. 5.  the verses we will read are part of an extended passage about ministry and witnessing of our faith to others.  And I want to pick up three thoughts from these verses.  

Read v.11 Effective witnessing comes out of our relationship with God.

Because we fear God, Paul says, we try to persuade men.  We talked last week a bit about fearing God, worshipping Him in reverence and awe since He is a consuming fire.  There is more to the Christian life than just asking Jesus to forgive your sins and come into your life.

The Christian life is a relationship with God through His Son, Jesus.  It is relating to God, seeing Him as He is, and seeing ourselves as He sees us.  It is living in contact, in communion with Him, allowing Him to reveal Himself to us and to mold and shape our lives so that our character would be more like the character of His Son, Jesus.

If your relationship with God is shallow, if you are not experiencing Him daily, your witness will not be very effective.  And likely you will not be giving testimony to what you have witnessed either, because you have not witnessed anything.  The stronger, the deeper, the more profound your relationship with God is, the more effective your witness can be.

Read v. 14-16 Effective witnessing comes out of our understanding and experiencing Jesus’ love.

Christ’s love compels us.  The motivation for our witnessing is not that we feel sorry for people who are heading for eternity without God.  If that’s all the deeper our motivation is, we will not be consistent witnesses.  The motivation is our understanding of and our experience of Jesus’ love.

The evidence of Jesus’ love is the cross, and the horrible death He died there.  Understanding that expression of His love for me will help me to know that I am not here to live for myself, but for Him.  And His love for my neighbor is just as great as His love for me.

Viewing my neighbors from a worldly point of view would see them with their Saab and their SUV and their wave runners and their snow mobiles and think that all is well.  But when I understand Jesus’ love for them and His desire to spend eternity with them, then none of those material things really matter.  The only thing that matters is whether or not their hearts are right with God.

Read v.18-20 Effective witnessing comes out of our understanding of man’s condition.

When I was a young associate pastor, Dan Johnson was the pastor at Spanaway Assembly, and it was a growing church.  So Pastor Johnson was somehow commissioned to tell the rest of us how to have a growing church.  And on several occasions I heard him speak.

One thing he said has stuck with me for these past 30 years: “A church will grow in proportion to the conviction in the heart of its workers that people are lost without Jesus.”

I have thought about that a bit this past week, and I think it’s only partly true.  A church can grow through its programs, its friendly people, its music program, its youth and children’s programs.  It can grow through things that have nothing to do with reaching lost people.  But while the church may grow, the kingdom of God may not be growing.

But if we want to talk about growing the kingdom of God, then Dan Johnson’s statement is true: people are lost without Jesus, and once that gets lodged deep in our soul, we will be more effective witnesses.

Jesus said: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”  John 14:6.  The early Christians understood that, so they taught: “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to men by which we must be saved.”  The message of the Bible is that Jesus is the only way to heaven.

People without Jesus are alienated from God.  It’s that simple.  And programs that are not designed to address that alienation in some way do not really fit in with our God-given mission.  We are not here to help people go to hell as non-smokers.  We are not here to help people go to hell weighing less than they used to.  We are not here to help people go to hell with a better marriage or as a more well adjusted single person.

We are here to rescue people from hell through being reconciled to God through Jesus Christ, and we can only do that when we recognize the condition of every man, woman, young person, boy and girl apart from Jesus.

Have you been reconciled to God?  Have you opened your life to Jesus and invited Him to be Lord of your life?  Have you put your trust in Him as your only Savior, and committed yourself to follow Him?  If you have not done that, I urge you to do that today, right now as we pray.

PRAY