Tag: evangelism

Lost People Matter to God

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
Hanging-out with “sinners” has always been a scandalous activity for Christians who do it.  The Pharisees had a big problem with how Jesus was spending his time (Luke 15:1-3).  From their perspective, Christ was guilty by association.  The people Jesus hung-out with were actual real unsavory characters; there was really no doubt about their bad character. 
 
But Jesus did not come to earth to make already righteous people feel good about being around him; he came to rescue sinners and restore them to God. 
 
And Jesus never wavered from this fundamental mission.  With everything he said and did, Jesus communicated that lost people matter to God – and that practice eventually got him killed.
 
            Earlier in my Christian life I adopted a practice that most Friday nights I would go to a certain bar known for its less than virtuous clientele, order a bowl of chili gumbo and sit and talk with people.  I learned a lot about speaking with people about Jesus.  I learned even more about God.  I saw the terrible brokenness of many people’s hearts, and saw that the heart of God was pained and that he longed to restore such persons.
 
            One night, in the middle of winter, as I was walking back to my place with a friend at about midnight, we encountered a guy so drunk that he could not walk straight.  He was not wearing a coat, and he had no pants – he was in twenty degree weather with only a shirt and underwear.  All the people who passed by him laughed and kept walking.  It took several minutes to get some semblance of a story out of him about what happened and where he came from and where he lived.  He could not remember losing his pants which had his wallet and keys.  He had come from a bar that was blocks away, so he had been outside for a while.  He lived far enough away that there was absolutely no way he would have ever made it home.  It is likely that without someone helping him he would have passed out somewhere and died.  We got him home, found a way to get in his place, and tucked him in his bed.
 
            The next day I went and checked on him and had a good conversation about what happened and why we helped.  We ended up meeting several times together and talked a great deal about God, sin, Jesus, and salvation.  But, meanwhile, not everyone was happy about it.  Some of the people in my church were not pleased with me spending time in a bar with sinners.  “Bad company corrupts good character” and “it looks bad” they would tell me.  I just looked at each person who had a problem with it and said with as much D.L. Moody flavor as I could:  “I like the way I am reaching out to lost people better than the way you are not.”
 
We are in danger of becoming encrusted with so much insulation from lost people and their real hurts that we do not know God’s heart for them. 
 
Jesus, better than any of us could ever imagine, knows how awful and horrific sin really is because he suffered by taking on the sinful baggage of every person who has ever lived.  It is a staggering thought.  So, because Jesus understands how incredibly terrible sin is, it is God who becomes completely uncorked with joy and celebration when just one lost sinner is restored to his heart.
 
            Grace lies at the heart of the Father – a scandalous grace that defies all earthly sense.  God’s deepest desire, God’s greatest yearning, and God’s most passionate dream is this: that lost people would return home (Luke 15:11-32).  We were meant to be in harmonious relationship with God.  When that is not true of people, it pains the heart of God and He longs for restoration. 
 
In light of the reality that God’s heart burns for lost people, churches really need to:  put away all their petty concerns and realize there are lost people dying apart from Jesus every day; put their worries about the future in biblical perspective because there are people with no hope and no God in our neighborhoods and workplaces; chuck their pre-occupations with attendance and money, and instead have a holy obsession with people coming to know Jesus Christ as Savior. 
 
We are to make it our aim in this life to pray for, long for, look for, run after, and pursue lost people for Jesus Christ. 
 

 

For what does it profit a person to gain the world but lose his/her life because he/she was too pre-occupied with everything but reaching lost people for Jesus?  And what does it profit a church to have buildings, budgets, and butts in the pew but to never see a lost soul come to Jesus?

Heart and Mouth

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
Confession with the mouth and belief in the heart are both necessary for salvation (Romans 10:8-13).  John Wesley was an Oxford don who became an Anglican priest.  He had all the intellectual tools to rightly handle the intricacies of theology and teach the Bible.  Yet, when he first started out, there was no heart behind it.  On a voyage across the Atlantic to America, Wesley spent much of the time on the ship with a group of German Pietists, that is, men and women who deliberately had a heart behind their practice of Christianity.  The Germans deeply impressed Wesley, and he realized that there was something very important missing from his own religion.  The ship encountered a storm and Wesley was afraid for his life, but the German believers seemed unfazed, having a faith of the heart that John could not explain.  He wanted what they had.  When death stared him in the face, he was fearful and found little comfort in his religion. John Wesley confessed to one of them his growing misery and decision to give up the ministry. “Preach faith till you have it,” one of the Germans advised. “And then because you have it, you will preach faith.  Act as if you have faith and it will be granted to you.”
 
Wesley acted on the advice. He led a prisoner to Christ by preaching faith in Christ alone for forgiveness of sins. The prisoner was immediately converted. Wesley was astonished. He had been struggling for years, and here was a man transformed instantly. He found himself crying out, “Lord, help my unbelief!” However, he felt dull inside and had little motivation even to pray for his own salvation. Back in England, in the year 1738, Wesley was in a church service and someone read from Luther’s Preface to the Epistle to Romans. About 8:45 p.m. Wesley recorded:  “while he was describing the change which God works in the heart through faith in Christ, I felt my heart strangely warmed. I felt I did trust in Christ, Christ alone for salvation; and an assurance was given me that He had taken away my sins, even mine, and saved me from the law of sin and death.”
 
 
 
Simply uttering the words with our mouths, “Jesus is Lord,” by itself does not constitute deliverance and salvation for people.  The heart must also be involved.  Yet, having said this we must also consider the reality that only focusing on the heart without having the mouth involved is an insufficient faith.  There must be a ground of solid objective evidence for our faith – a real historical base from which our hearts can tether themselves.  The mouth needs to confess that Jesus has indeed risen from the dead and is Lord of all, having secured salvation for us through his blood shed on the cross (Romans 10:9).
 
If we only focus on the heart, our hearts will condemn us.  We need to say the words of our faith, to confess them with our mouths, over and over and over and over again until we believe them.  We are not just to wait for our hearts to feel like having faith and living for God, because our hearts can be desperately wicked and they will keep deceiving us.  The heart must be informed by God’s Word.  We are to take the words of Holy Scripture by faith and trust what those words say.  “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just to forgive us our sins, and to purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9).
 
We need to have a right confession with our mouths; and, we need to really believe in our hearts.  Both must be present for saving faith.  When mouth and heart work in concert with each other something happens:  “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved” (Romans 10:13).  It does not matter whether that call is melodious, sweet, and in tune, or whether it is a jumbled off-key joyful noise; both will be saved.  Only uttering the right words like some magical incantation does not save us.  Only having a sincere heart does not save us.  One cannot achieve salvation through self-effort, or making oneself worthy to be loved.  No one is saved by finding the right combination of words in prayer, or having some nice feeling that everything is okay.  Deliverance from sin, death, and hell does not result from getting cleaned up so that we are attractive to God and others.  Calling on the name of the Lord with both mouth and heart, trusting in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus Christ, saves us.
 

 

Church ministry, then, is to aim at both head and heart.  It is to provide robust biblical teaching coupled with heartfelt belief and practice.  People are neither only brains on a stick, nor walking headless hearts.  They need intellectual rigor targeted straight toward the heart because we are holistic creatures who must have a salvation that believes in the heart and confesses boldly with the mouth.

Pronoun Trouble

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
One of my favorite Warner Brothers cartoons is the 1952 “Rabbit Seasoning.”  Check out the hilarious dialogue between Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck:
Bugs Bunny [to Elmer]:  Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?
Daffy Duck: Shoot him now! Shoot him now!
Bugs Bunny: You keep outta this! He doesn’t have to shoot you now!
Daffy Duck: He does so have to shoot me now! [to Elmer]: I demand that you shoot me now!
[Elmer shoots him.]
Daffy Duck: Let’s run through that again.
Bugs Bunny:  Okay.  [in a flat tone]: Would you like to shoot me now or wait till you get home?
Daffy Duck: [flat tone] Shoot him now, shoot him now.
Bugs Bunny: [flat tone] You keep outta this. He doesn’t hafta shoot you now.
Daffy Duck: [with sudden passion] Ha! That’s it! Hold it right there! [speaking to the audience]: Pronoun trouble.  [to Bugs]  It’s not: “He doesn’t have to shoot *you* now.” It’s: “He doesn’t have to shoot *me* now.” Well, I say he does have to shoot me now! [to Elmer]  So shoot me now!
[Elmer shoots him.]
 
            Pronouns are important.  I am not trying to be some weird grammar nerd (although I would be okay with that reference).  What I am attempting to get at is that the use of pronouns in the way Christians talk and write belies how we view ourselves, our world, the church, and, even God.  If we are not careful, pronoun trouble will get us sidelined from God’s agenda for the church.
 
            For example, a person comes up to the pastor and says something like “we don’t like _____.”  Go ahead and fill in the blank.  It could be anything.  The gun goes off.  The important thing to note is that an individual is speaking on behalf of a group, or the entire congregation.  That says a lot about the person.  It says that not only is the person taking on a grandiose position of assuming that he/she knows what everyone else is thinking, but, maybe even more significantly, this person does not differentiate him/her self from the group.  The person is so enmeshed in the group or system that speaking as an individual is not practiced.  Many people within the church need the ability to step back and discern what it is they actually need and want, then be able to state “I would like to see ______.” 
 
            Let’s take the opposite kind of example.  A parishioner approaches another congregant and emphatically states something like, “my needs are not getting met here, so I am going elsewhere.”  In this case, the individual is too detached from the larger congregation and can only use the personal pronoun.  The parishioner needs to adopt some plural pronouns in order to better connect with others.  The real problem is one of not having a sense of community and the role that the individual plays within it.  There is too much of a focus on self and not a missional sense of working together to achieve a noble cause.
 
            So, then, there are here two approaches to be avoided.  On the one hand, some congregations can be so entrenched in a particular system and way of doing things that they cannot imagine doing things differently.  “We have always done it this way” are the seven deadly words of the church.  On the other hand, there is the solitary person who can never quite seem to think of others but constantly evaluates everything done in the church through the filter of what she can get out of it for herself. 
 
            How Christians talk of others outside the church is also of much importance.  “They” and “them” are pronouns that can easily be used to refer to some nameless people that we do not want within the fellowship.  It is prescient to keep in mind that a pronoun refers to a proper name.  Who are “they?”  Are “they” really a threat?  It would be much better to define who we are talking about and why. Sometimes pronouns are not the best way to talk to each other.  “The missions team would like to reach young urban professionals with the gospel of Jesus” is better than an amorphous “we do not want them in our church services.”
 

 

            I hope you get the picture here.  Pronouns are important.  Their proper use can either further the mission of the church, or they can get us into trouble.  Pay attention to language, because it has been given to the church as a sacred trust.

Thinking About Outreach

On By Tim EhrhardtIn Exploring Church Ministry BlogLeave a comment
 
 
Lost people matter to God.  They matter so much to him that one lost soul whom is found is the grounds for a big celestial party (Luke 15:7, 10, 32).  Jesus told three stories in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 15, that all teach the same thing, so that we would be absolutely sure to get it:  a loving God has unbounded joy over lost people being found.  These parables of Jesus are meant primarily to give us a glimpse of God’s own heart.  He would do anything to find a lost person, to restore and reconcile a person back to himself.  God would go dumpster diving and wade through the stinky nasty garbage of this world to find one lost valuable person.
 
            Why should every church make reaching others for Jesus Christ a high priority?  Because restoring lost people is a high priority to God.  Lost people matter so much to him that he sent his Son, the Lord Jesus, to this earth.  Jesus paid the ultimate price of a cruel death on a cross in order to reconcile a broken lost relationship between people and God.
 
            I still remember what it felt like to be separated from God, and estranged from the church – it was lonely and awful.  My life before Christ felt like I was walking through a cemetery at night and fell into an open grave, with no way out and no one to hear my screams.  But God, in his great mercy, sent people into my life to share the message of salvation from my prodigal way of life of sin and misery.  When I turned from the path of destruction I was on and embraced Jesus Christ there was a big party in heaven!
 
            In the story of the prodigal lost son, that son hit rock bottom and rehearsed a speech he would give to his father when he came back.  He never got to finish that speech, because the father interrupted his confession of sin and got the celebration going!  (Luke 15:17-24).  We celebrate the things that are important to us.  Lost people matter so much to God that it is a cause for a great celebration.  God’s grace steps in and takes over, erasing past sin and bringing radical forgiveness and reconciliation.
 
            It needs to be asked:  Where do we find ourselves in these parables?  These three stories were offensive to Christ’s original hearers.  Those listening to Jesus were so inwardly focused that they believed ministry ought to revolve around them and their needs.  What is more, the Pharisees and teachers of the law were offended because they thought all this fuss about sinners would just highlight their sin!  There should be no party for them because of how they lived.
 
            We must understand that preaching grace is always offensive to people who work for their salvation.  The elder son in the story of the prodigal was inwardly obsessed instead of outwardly compassionate like his father.  It is scandalous to such persons to hear that Jesus did not come to call the righteous, but sinners to repentance (Matthew 9:13).  If we hear such verses and listen to all this talk about outreach and being concerned for sinners who don’t know Jesus and say:  “Well, all this talk about outreach is well and good, but what about us?  What about me?”  Then, we must locate ourselves as the person who is lost and in need of being found by God’s grace.
 
            We need the father’s heart when it comes to others.  We need a heart of grace.  Think of the worst sinner you can think of – a person for whom you would label as being like the devil.  Now picture if that person were to be found by God and become a Christian.  Would you attend the party to celebrate that person’s repentance, reconciliation, and recovery?  If any one of us feels justified in our hate, then we are the lost ones in need of turning from sin.
 
            In the first story of Luke 15, a shepherd left the ninety-nine sheep and went after the one lost sheep. The shepherd, who represents God, gave preferential attention to the lost one.  Can you live with that?  What do these parables mean for our church programs, budgets, and committees?  Today in America only one-in-five lost people even knows one Christian.  Statistics like that are what keep me up at night; it bothers me and makes me sad.  It drives me to prayer, and causes me to follow my compassionate wife’s example of going after lost people.  My wife, Mary, has never met a person that she didn’t think needed to hear the good news of God’s love in Jesus Christ.  If we have no relationships with lost people, then we need to ask ourselves if we are willing to follow Jesus in his mission to find sinners and call them home.  We need to ask ourselves if we have the father’s heart.
 
            God’s unconditional amazing grace makes a difference.  If we lose that sense of awe and appreciation for what God has done for us in Christ, then there will be no outreach.  Reaching out and finding a lost person is not dependent on completing a class on evangelism or getting training in how to answer every question.  Outreach is fueled by passion and desire.  Healthy Christians reproduce themselves.  I am guessing that, if you have children, you probably did not take a class on how to procreate – you just had the desire and the willingness; and, you celebrated when there was a birth of new life.
 

 

            God’s heart is one that longs for the lost people of this world to be reconciled and brought back into relationship with him.  Thus, reaching out to the lost people of this world is to be of the utmost importance to the church.  That will only happen if we share the same heart of the Father.