Do Not Lose Heart

I remind you that we will have a Q&A tomorrow, so question and answer session about particularly evangelism and the topics that are preached about. And so I encourage you, while you're listening to the preaching, to write the questions then, because you'll think of the question and you'll think, I'll remember it, and then an hour later you won't. And then just turn those in to Alan.

Or you can just keep them. Or just hold on to them. Until tomorrow, yeah. Okay, and then that's tomorrow after the second session. So, if you want to turn in your copy of the Word of God with me to 2 Corinthians chapter 4, we will read a little bit in there and a little bit in chapter 5, and then we will try to understand what it's telling us, in particular about the topic of evangelism.

I am reading from the somewhat new translation called the Legacy Standard Bible. And so if you are not familiar with it, it's a lot like the NASB Bible, if you have one of those. So verse 1, Therefore, since we have this ministry, as we received mercy, we do not lose heart. But we have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness or adulterating the word of God, but by the manifestation of truth, commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God.

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the God of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelieving so that they might not see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your slaves for the sake of Jesus. for God who said light shall shine out of darkness is the one who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ now if you'll turn to chapter 5 I'm going to continue verse 14 for the love of Christ controls us having concluded this that one died for all therefore all died. And he died for all so that they who live would no longer live for themselves but for him who died and rose again on their behalf.

Therefore from now on we recognize no one according to the flesh even though we have known Christ according to the flesh. Yet now we know him in this way no longer. Therefore if anyone is in Christ He is a new creation. The old things passed away. Behold, new things have come. Now all these things are from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

Namely, that God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself, not counting their transgressions against them. And he has committed to us the word of reconciliation. So then we are ambassadors for Christ as God is pleading through us. We beg you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. He made him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf so that we might become the righteousness of God in him.

The reading of God's word, when we start to think about having a conference about a topic like evangelism you're faced with the difficulty as a speaker because what we want to do is we want to take the scripture and we want to teach what the scripture says. And at the same time we're also trying to focus it on a particular topic and so particularly I know I think Randall's the same as I am we generally go verse by verse week to week through a scripture and through books of Scripture at church. And so it's a different way of preparing in a sense.

Now, so what I'm going to do is we're going to look at 2 Corinthians 4, parts of 4, parts of 5, and parts of 6 tomorrow. And as is common with me, I have three sermons that I'm going to squish into two for you, since that's all the time I've got. And we're going to try to scratch the surface on what some of these passages are saying. We're not going to be able to get into a lot of depth. there will be a lot of things that would remain unsaid about what Paul has written here.

But the first thing that we want to understand is what is the gospel, I think. And when we say what is the gospel, I think if you're a churchgoer, if you've been baptized and you're a member of a church, even if you're just a catechized child, you may say, well, I know the gospel. And I think a lot of us, we do know the gospel. but one of the important things we have to understand when we are evangelizing is we need to be able to communicate that to people.

We need to be able to communicate it in a way that's more than just how it feels in our heart. And I know that for a lot of people we have a sense of God's presence in our life as Christians and sometimes there's a very subjective feeling about all that But when we talk about the gospel of Jesus Christ, we're talking about objective good news. It is a declaration that Jesus Christ, in fact, has done something on behalf of his bride, the church.

And we proclaim that to people in such a way that people can understand what we are telling them. And so when we talk about the gospel we talk about jesus christ and his person and work so from an evangelism standpoint one of the things that we have to do before we even begin to tell people the good news that god was reconciling the world to himself through christ which is what we saw in verse 19 of chapter 5 that he was not counting their transgressions against them, we have to do what a lot of people think is the hard work and the more difficult part of it all, which is we have to tell people bad news. So if all we did was walk around and tell people Christ is great, he's forgiving, he's merciful, probably people would still be offended by even the implication of the word forgiveness.

But we generally need to explain to people what it means that they're a transgressor of God's law. We need to try to help people understand that when they compare themselves to their neighbor, when they compare themselves to the guy down the street that got arrested for something, when they compare themselves to their cousin that can't get his act together, when they compare themselves, a lot of people, to their dad or their mom who wasn't a real good parent to them, it's very easy for every one of us to proclaim our own goodness. It's very easy for your neighbors, your co-workers, the people you encounter at the store.

It's very easy for them to see themselves as good people because there are, in fact, a lot of people who are very bad out there. There's people who, if they came near the playground where the children are, we'd say, well, that guy's not allowed within 500 feet of children. You understand what I'm saying? But at the same time, that makes it very difficult for those of us who God, in His mercy, has given us a little self-control over our sins sometimes to realize how sinful we really are.

So when you communicate the gospel to people, one of the first things you have to be clear with people about is that they are, in fact, a descendant of Adam. They are a descendant of Adam, who in the garden failed in the covenant of works that he was given, that if he had kept it, he would have earned eternal life for all his posterity. But the covenant, what does the Baptist catechism say?

The covenant being made with Adam, not only for himself, but for all his posterity. when Adam sinned, we all sinned with him. That's what it says in Romans 5. So when you're talking to your neighbor, your co-worker, the people in your life that you're deciding, I need to reach out, you need to communicate to them that they are in fact sinful from the time of their conception.

Some people say sinful from the time of their birth. You're sinful by the very nature of you being a human being that was created from ordinary generation in Adam. And the reason why Jesus Christ was born of a virgin is he wasn't conceived of ordinary generation. So Jesus Christ comes on the scene and we have these sinful souls who can't help but break God's law.

So there's another dirty word in our society. And even in church today, that's a dirty word. Some of you may have been to churches where even talking about laws or rules would have been inappropriate. And I'm just going to tell you, I don't want to go on a big rabbit trail on this one, but anyone you know who casts aside God's law, they will replace it with their own laws.

Look at our society right now. We have more laws than we can count. I think it would be easier to just have ten, if you know what I'm saying. Not that anybody would obey them, but I think it would be easier to keep track at least. But so, when you go to people and you want to communicate the gospel to them, now I know Randall street preaches, right? And I street preach, and my friend Mike's here, he's a street preacher.

And so we go out on the street. I live in a city of 1.1 million people. Alright, just a city. And we're not talking about a whole state even. So I can go on the street almost anywhere in Columbus, Ohio, and I can just start shouting. It's basically what preaching is.

It's just yelling, but Bible verses. and I can do that and I can have people hear me and I can believe that God will use that and it will have the effect that God intends for it to have because his word being preached is his intended means for people to hear and believe but we're also called to evangelize people in other ways some of you and there are still, I'll just warn you there's two genders so if you don't like that, you came to the wrong conference there's two genders I guarantee all the other speakers and Alan everybody's going to agree with that one there's one gender that you're not supposed to preach and if you don't like that you can take it up with Paul and the book of Timothy and really the rest of the Bible as well but you know what we all communicate with family members some of you ladies have children and you're communicating to them the gospel on a regular basis you discipline your children daily because they sin all the time and that's your opportunity to show them that God has laws and that there's consequences to breaking God's laws. And also you have a lot of opportunities to show them mercy and grace in some areas too. You have co-workers.

There's people that you see at the store. There's people at the homeschool co-op. If your kids go to a school, there's other parents at the school. There's people at the soccer field, at the baseball field. There's all sorts of places you go. and everywhere you go you are encountering other people who are effectively grandchildren or great-grandchildren of Adam.

And every one of them has an eternal destination. And you don't know what that eternal destination is until you go up and talk to them. Or you don't have any hope that you can help them go to heaven instead of hell unless you would even just maybe hand them a gospel tract. And when I say gospel tract, it's just, I've got some up here. It just a little card where we written the gospel in a few hundred words It just a real concise way to tell people who Jesus is especially if you don have time to talk to them It a good way to communicate the truth to them of God Word But so when you run into people, one of the things you try to do is you try to get them to see their need for a Savior.

If you just go up to people and say, yeah, Jesus is great. He's a really good God. You know, there's religions out there that would happily say, yeah, I love Jesus. The polytheistic religions like Hinduism, they don't care. They'll add another God tomorrow. And they'll add a million more if you let them.

So just telling people Jesus is a good God and Jesus is God, that's not enough. Now somebody that already has a Christian background, maybe that'll pique their interest. But we need to communicate God's law. So one of the easiest ways to do that is to go through the Ten Commandments and try to help people see how they've broken God's commandments. And so now there's a lot of details of this that we can train you about and talk to you about.

But ultimately, once somebody realizes they're a sinner, you can tell them the good news. And the good news is that Jesus Christ came into the world, born of a virgin, without sin, never once committed any transgression of God's law, not even in thought. All of us have sinned in the last five minutes. And we haven't loved God with all our whole heart, mind, and strength.

It's that simple. Jesus Christ never once sinned. He lived a perfectly sinless life. And then when he went to the cross, he went by the predetermined plan of God to die for the people that he came to die for. So that's why Paul says, he died for all. Verse 15 of chapter 5.

We're actually going to work backwards in this passage if you're wondering why I'm in chapter 5 after I read chapter 4. And he says, So that they who live would no longer live for themselves, but for him who died and rose again on their behalf. What Paul's teaching here is that people are dead in their trespasses and sins. It may not be utterly clear that that's exactly what's happening here, but we know that from other scriptures like Ephesians 2.

And the people have no hope of saving themselves, but Jesus Christ came on the scene at the right time, the time appointed by God and did exactly what he was called to do by God. And when he died on the cross, he was actually paying the penalty that sinners deserved. To God. God was executing his justice. And his holy hatred for sin. Upon his only son.

And Jesus drank the cup of God's wrath. Became a propitiation for sin. That means he was a wrath satisfying sacrifice. This is why in Romans 8. Paul can say therefore. There is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus.

Because if you are hidden in Christ Jesus. it's as if God's saying this is my beloved son in whom I'm well pleased about you it's because you're hidden in Christ Jesus it's only by his grace he can say that and you can feel that comfort and you can have that assurance the blessed assurance as we just sang but it's real and it's why if you are not in Christ Jesus or if you know someone who is not in Christ Jesus guess what therefore there is condemnation so if you don't totally understand the gospel it's that when Jesus Christ rose from the grave he defeated sin and death once and for all he fulfilled the plan of God so that God could be both just and justifier of those who have faith in Jesus because wrath was satisfied on the cross justice was done because sin was punished but sinners can be set free because Jesus was able to do it as a substitute that's why he's the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world so when you give the gospel to somebody if you're preaching the gospel, if you're giving it to someone in a gospel tract if you're writing it in an email or a letter to someone one of the easiest ways to give the gospel to people is when you make Christmas cards if you do that, put the gospel in there. If there's ever a time that it's appropriate, you know, it'd be a Christmas card. But when you do that, you want to remember people are sinners and they need to know they're sinners.

This is one of the things we forget to share. Sometimes we're real good at telling people Jesus loves them. I'll give you a hint. Nobody believes. Nobody Let me try to phrase this. There isn't anybody you know that doesn't already think God loves them.

Okay? Telling someone God loves them is the most irrelevant phrase in the whole world. If anything, it will affirm somebody in their sinful behavior. What they need to know is that they've offended God, but that God sent his son to die on behalf of sinners. And if they would believe in Jesus Christ, and if they would turn from dead works, Jesus Christ offers salvation.

And he offers to make people new creations. So we remember to tell people about the fact that they're sinners before God. and you can do that. There's ways you can help people see that without just being maybe so bold as to call people sinners. I know that can be hard to do sometimes. Sometimes people need a little convincing and you are able to talk to them about it and show them God's word that they might understand it better.

I know we're in the Bible belt down here but where I'm from, I'm in the top of the Bible belt actually. Where I'm from, a lot of people have no Christian background whatsoever. They didn't go to church growing up and you have to show them the very first thing about even the Ten Commandments. They don't understand these things. You tell people they're sinners, you tell people Jesus Christ was the perfect man who never once sinned, and that he died on behalf of sinners, and that he rose again, and that all those that come to him he'll never cast out.

And one of the beautiful things about the Gospel is that the Gospel is actually guaranteed to be believed by all those whom God has appointed for eternal life. so we can freely go out to people and we can proclaim to them that Jesus Christ died for sinners and if they come to him they will be forgiven and there will be no condemnation in Christ Jesus for them if they would come And we can believe that God absolutely has the power to save that person And we saw in verse 17 of chapter 5, that if anyone's in Christ, he's a new creation. The old things passed away, behold, new things have come. And the end of that chapter was about the fact that we're ambassadors.

An ambassador is someone who goes somewhere for a king or some kind of regent or governor, and he goes and speaks on behalf of that person. So now, into your evangelism. Turn back to chapter 4. We're going to work backwards in the verses that I read. So my first goal was to just reiterate for you the gospel that hopefully you've already believed. that you might be reminded of the grace you've been given that if you have not yet believed it that maybe today would be the day that you'd say I need to take this step that maybe you say you've believed it that you haven't come forward and become baptized and joined a church I want you to be compelled to these things but Paul says the love of Christ controls us and we're ambassadors for Christ So therefore we go and we try to, as he said there, he even begs, he said, for people to be reconciled.

And I don't think Paul was a beggar. I think Paul proclaimed the truth to people that Christ is King of kings and Lord of lords. I think Paul desperately wished that people would be like he was and saved. well verse 6 of chapter 4 gives us a little hint of the power that is actually behind you when you go as an ambassador for God so if you imagine an ambassador for a country going to another country and telling the people of that country this is what my king says and now imagine that the person that you're going on behalf of I should say persons there's three persons father son holy spirit but that the one that you're going on behalf of has all power to affect whatever his will is at any time.

So you go to someone and you tell someone, hey, did you know that you're a sinner? And they say, no, no, no, no. I heard all that growing up. I don't need any of that. I've heard people say, I done did that. That's what people say sometimes.

And you start showing them God's law and they say, yeah, well, I don't believe that. That's just an antiquated book. and they clearly don't believe the things you're telling them. If it was up to you to convince them that they're a sinner and that Christ actually came and died, then everyone could be damned. Because none of us has the power to do that for them.

And some of you actually work like you are the one with the power. But Paul says in verse 5 and 6 of chapter 4 of 2 Corinthians, he says we don't preach ourselves but Jesus Christ is Lord and ourselves as your slaves for the sake of Jesus but then he says for God who said light shall shine out of darkness is the one who has shown in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ Paul is making a reference here and he's and again he piggybacks it in the next chapter when he says we're all new creations if we're in Christ. Paul's making the comparison that the same God who called all the universe out of nothing, the God that made light out of darkness on day one, the God who created ex nihilo, it says, I think in the book of Hebrews, which is Latin for out of nothing.

That God is the God that also has the power to change a sinner's heart and to grant faith to anyone that he wants to grant faith to. And since you don't know who that is, you need to try to give the gospel to everybody that you find. The love of Christ should control you, not only to proclaim Him as Lord. I mean, if Christ told you, let me just make a side note here.

If Christ said, I'm not going to save anybody else, but I want you to go preach the rest of your life because I'm worth preaching, you should do it. Okay? There should be more amens to that one. That wasn't really a good point I made. That's just straight up logic there. I mean, he's worth it.

All right? He's worthy to be worshipped the rest of your life if he gave you nothing else that he's already given you. Of the amazing blessings that we have, especially just in this country. But Jesus Christ has told us that there still are people out there that may be saved. And you don't know who they are. but you do know that he has sent you as an ambassador.

And you might look online and you might see guys that go preach and there's guys that make videos and there's whole video things on YouTube of guys that are evangelists and they do all these things, but you know what? They're not reaching the person who's at the grocery store when you are. I think that's the thing we all forget. Somebody came to you with the gospel at some point. and praise God for that that that person wasn't looking for a bigger crowd that day but so God who made light out of darkness is able to save any sinner it's all his sovereign choice but the way God does that is by his word the seed of the gospel being planted in them okay you know the parable of the soils where the guy tosses the seed and some of the seed falls on the rocky soil and some falls on the soil that has the weeds and some of it falls on the ground that it won't even take any root whatsoever and then some of it produces fruit.

What, 30, 60, and 100 fold? The point is, is that it's our job to thrive. the seed. We don't have control over the tilling of the soil, which is what God does in the sinner's heart. And you don't even know who's the person. There's no clue on somebody, right? It was Spurgeon that said if he could lift someone's shirt and see an E on them, and that meant they were elect, then he'd know who to give the gospel to.

But because he can't do that, he just gives the gospel to everybody he can. And he trusts that God will do the work in each and every heart. and we can do the same thing. Some of the people that we have seen in Christianity who have been saved were people who at any given point in time, we would have considered the most unlikely convert. I can think of one for sure, Paul.

Paul deserves hell. You realize that, right? He's like the greatest Christian ever, right? We see it that way now. Paul was killing Christians. But God calls people by his sovereign choice at the time he appoints.

And he converts them into new people. And so there's a lot of hope you can give people. That Christ not only offers forgiveness for the penalty of their sin. but he also offers people power over the grasp that that sin has on their life. And we can tell people that when we give them the gospel. So you should have great confidence in evangelism. So if you're here and the reason you're here is you're interested in learning about evangelism I want you to be compelled that everyone that you encounter has a date with death and that they one day will stand before God and they may or may not already know the gospel but when they stand before God they'll either be seen as a forgiven sinner because of the blood of Christ having washed them clean or they'll be seen as a condemned sinner and they'll go to hell.

And your role in their life may be to be the one that brings them the message that God uses to convert them. And I think that the love of Christ controls us not only means that we just love Christ so much he's worth proclaiming, but that we want to see more people come to him. We want to see more worshipers of Christ. We want to hear more people singing the praises of Christ in this world so we tell more people about him.

Again, trusting Christ to be the one with the power to actually make people into new creations. So if we go back to verse 5, we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ is Lord and ourselves as slaves for the sake of Jesus. This is the substance of what we tell people. If you want to hear men preach themselves, you can turn on the television. You can go into most churches right now in the United States.

I'm not going to try to categorize them, but a lot of mega churches seem to have this thing where the guy up front, you know more about him than you do about the Lord Jesus Christ by the time he's finished. We preach Jesus Christ as Lord, and we do that unashamedly. When you're talking to somebody and they want to argue about things, this goes into some detail here.

Preaching Jesus Christ as Lord is more than, hey, did you know Jesus Christ is Lord? And then the person saying, yeah, yeah, I went to church, I heard that too. preaching Jesus Christ as Lord communicating to people Jesus Christ as Lord has to do a lot with the way that you live your life and the things that you believe and say so for example I'm just going to use a contemporary example and if it gets me in trouble we'll deal with it but if somebody comes to you who's obviously a female and says that you need to call her he you say no Jesus Christ is Lord and Jesus Christ made you a female so therefore you're a she it's not disrespectful what would be more hateful would be entertaining them in their delusion what would be more hateful would be going along with their sin that's taking them to hell that would be more hateful than offending them by saying no God made you a she God made them male and female right? when somebody comes to you and says all sorts of things, I'm gay all the different things people want to say and oh that's just my identity that's just who I am people say what's the one saying I know we sometimes use the quip when somebody says I was born that way we say yeah that's why you have to be born again right? we're all born already with a predisposition to sin, it doesn't mean we're excused from it, and it certainly doesn't mean that God's going to ignore it on the day of judgment. And so proclaiming Jesus Christ as Lord, preaching Jesus Christ as Lord, is first and foremost the opposite of preaching ourselves.

I can't save anyone, you can't save anyone, so we don't pretend we can save anyone. If anything, we communicate to people that we're just like they are. We're in need of mercy as they are, and that's why we're telling them about the gospel. Another saying I've heard used about evangelism is, it's just a poor beggar found a piece of bread, and he's telling the other guys, just sharing what he found.

We're not better than other people. We're just telling them that we've received mercy, and we want them also. And then secondly, Jesus Christ as Lord has to do with the disposition of your life. If you are... Let's just say you're a heterosexual. Am I allowed to say those kinds of words in here That probably a good one Okay I never know what the key words trigger words are for people You a guy and you like girls or vice versa and you fornicating and you doing something you shouldn but then you want to stand up and talk about how bad homosexuality is.

Well, you're letting everybody know you don't think Christ's law matters anyway, so why are they going to listen to you talk about it? This is one of the big arguments of the gay marriage thing, the homosexual marriage is, well, heterosexuals don't do it so well either. Most of you all get divorced, they say. Right? And even in the church, most church people get divorced.

You know that? I think it's over 50% now. Well, you know what? Collectively, we've lost the right to tell anyone, hey, they don't know what marriage is because we know. Because we've gone ahead and showed them that we don't care what it is. Now hopefully in this room, I'm speaking to people that do care.

But you need to be careful. The Bible tells you to walk circumspectly, and part of it is so that your love for Christ will show, and your obedience to his law will be evident to people, that they might not see you as a hypocrite. Non-believers are illogical as all get out, but they're great at spotting hypocrites in the church. So don't be one. proclaim Jesus Christ as Lord by your very life in such a way that if somebody came to you and was evaluating whether you appear to be obeying the Ten Commandments that they would be able to say, wow, the guy actually seems to believe what he says I'm supposed to do.

And then when you don't, you repent. There's no perfect Christian, just repenting ones. The unrepentant Christian is, there's another word for that, it's called pagan. So moving backwards in the chapter, Paul says in verse 3, And even if our gospel is veiled, it's veiled to those who are perishing, in whose case the God of this age has blinded the minds of the unbelieving, so that they might not see the light of the gospel, the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.

Most people agree this is a reference to Satan, called the God of this world, the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work, and the sons of disobedience. he has blinded non-believers to being able to believe the gospel now we don't want to give Satan too much credit though to have a lot of power Satan can't do anything whatsoever other than what God has decreed he'll do and allows him to do when some people say he's on some kind of like a leash he'll go as far as God will let him go and then God pulls him back when he wants but the point is this have you ever talked to somebody about church about Jesus, about the gospel and you feel like they just can't understand it and the fact of the matter is they can't this is why they need to be born again they can't understand it but we still tell people the truth if somebody refused to believe that your spouse was a good person, we'll just use a weird example here it wouldn't mean you would never defend your spouse you still defend your spouse if you needed to even if people wouldn't believe Jesus Christ is worth being proclaimed even when people don't believe but you'll hit some brick walls and this is where evangelism, the rubber hits the road because it's fun to watch a video where Ray Comfort talks to some guy on Huntington Beach and he gets the guy to cry and maybe pray a prayer at the end and say yeah I want to follow Jesus and then you never really find out what happened after and you kind of hope the person really got saved and found a church and things of that sort. And I'm not against great comfort, so I like great comfort, okay. He seems to be out there trying to give the gospel to people regularly.

But when you have a few encounters of your own where people start to be totally oppositional to what you're saying, or maybe worse they start to insult you they can't get at the king so they attack the ambassador and sometimes the stuff people say is downright cruel and I would actually argue that if your skin is so thick that it doesn't bother you at all maybe you're in the wrong arena I think we should have some sensitivity to our fellow man where some of those things still hurt once in a while. We may learn how to get over it. We may learn how to quickly give it to God and get comfort from Him.

But it hurts. You told somebody that Jesus Christ came to save sinners, that it's His love that caused Him to want to do the things He did so that He could redeem a bride for Himself and that while people were yet sinners, Christ died for them. And then he rose again because he has the power to lift his own life from the grave as he had the power to lay it down because no man could take it from him.

And you tell him all this and you say, God is a God of mercy and he's a God of grace and he's a forgiving God. And their response is, you're an idiot. You believe in a sky fairy. And then you start getting a little deeper and you start standing up against things like evolutionary teaching teaching and you start proclaiming Christ as creator who created the way he said he created in the Bible.

And you start saying there's only two genders and the only right way to be married is one man, one woman and actually you're not supposed to do any of the other stuff until that point also. And you start proclaiming all these truths. And people will call you all sorts of names. And the main one is they call you stupid. In one way or another. They say you must be stupid. and then they'll find something you do or something you did.

Maybe just one time. Maybe one time you got angry at work and you lost your temper and you said something you shouldn have Maybe you still need to clean up your mouth a little bit And you drop blasphemies, or even just, we'll call them the replacement word, blasphemies, once in a while. And people have heard that from you. Or your cousin remembers when you were just the one showing up all the time at Christmas drunk.

And they bring those things up. and that's hard to deal with and it's hurtful but if we remember that for some people there's a veil and you can read about the veil in chapter 3 of the book if you want to go back and understand the context again if we were going verse by verse through 2nd Corinthians it would be like a year before we got here at some people's pace at least I don't know probably three months, six months at least I'm looking at, but it can be hard. And so you remember that you're there because Christ is worth it. You're there to tell people who Jesus is because he's watching you.

And because he is important enough that your lips need to have his name on them. And some people, the gospel will be veiled to them. I want you to be hopeful I want you to leave here and I want you to have a list of people that you think I'm going to go make sure that they hear about Jesus and I want you to actually believe that God's going to save them I don't want you to have this bad attitude like oh well maybe the veil's over all their faces I don't know I want you to be hopeful I want you to pray about people's salvation as if you really believe God's going to save them I want you to have a good positive attitude about those things.

But I don't want you to have the rose-colored glasses that think, well, it's just going to somehow be automatic. Or that if you do something well enough, they'll get saved. I want you to understand that there is a veil that God has put over some faces. And they don't see the gospel the way you do. They don't see Christ as beautiful the way that at some point in your life you were awakened to.

At some point you were born again. Those of you who are born again. And all of a sudden Christ became beautiful. And the things that Christ said were good started to seem good to you. And the things Christ said were bad started to seem bad to you. And it was by no power or doing of your own that this happened.

And you need to recognize it for other people, that may take a while before God chooses to do it. And it may be very difficult. And if you lose friends or family members, don't want to talk to you, people call you names, people want to go to a different church from you all of a sudden. Maybe there's marital conflict all of a sudden. that is a difficult path to be on but all those who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus are going to be persecuted if there's one thing other than the fact that you will be sanctified that's promised in the gospel it's that you'll suffer and if you don't suffer with Christ in order to be glorified with him you don't have any real hope of one day being glorified there are many who will say to God Lord, Lord, didn't I do all this stuff in your name?

Matthew 7 and there's many who will actually perish in hell because they didn't actually have faith in their heart towards Christ so take heart though back to verse 1 or no, verse 2, sorry go to verse 2 we've renounced the hidden things of shame not walking in craftiness or adulterating the word of God but by the manifestation of truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God. There's a lot in that verse. But ultimately consider this, that we are not crafty.

The temptation when you start going to people and saying Oh hey, did you know about Jesus? Did you know that we're sinners? Oh hey, I'm a sinner too. and you soften the blow, like, I'm the worst sinner there is, but you are too. And you think that that will somehow get this person to listen and think, oh, well, this guy's really humble, right, because he thinks he's a sinner too.

The temptation becomes to change the message around a little bit. That's the temptation. And if you don't believe me, just go to any major bookstore chain, go to the religion section. if you want to have fun take the sign off and switch it with the fiction section because most of religious literature you find at a bookstore now is fiction but that's what craftiness is in this verse craftiness is the word used in chapter 11 of this same book to describe Satan's deceitfulness it's not about being clever and having a good idea like how to organize the church so you can eat a meal or something.

This is about deceptively changing things around that God has asked you to openly state, commending people by the manifestation of truth. So rather than openly stating the truth to people, disguising it in some way because you think, well, maybe that'll trick them into believing it. Maybe it'll get them in the door. I don't know how many people are here, but we could have filled this room if we had some kind of raffle if we had bouncy houses for kids could have got a lot of families in here there's churches all over doing that I think was Spurgeon who said the day is gonna come when instead of feeding the sheep they just be entertaining the goats So when you talk to people you follow what Paul said, you renounce hidden things of shame.

You don't have to do things that are borderline sinful to try to attract the world to you. You know, there's Christians who use vulgar or even profane or blasphemous language because they think it'll get the world to listen to them. And now they've got their ear and they think they're like me a little bit. And so now I can preach to them. And all they do is, they're basically, all they're doing is proclaiming to people, yeah, I'm actually like you.

So the promise of a new creation is not being exhibited by this person now. You don't have to do worldly things to attract worldly people. You do godly things and you openly state the truth that God has provided and you trust God to bring godly people. We don't want a church filled with people that hate God just so they're in the building. What we want is you want churches filled with people that love God who were attracted by the preaching of Jesus Christ and Him crucified.

Those are the kind of people you want to stand next to and sing songs with. so now the reason I work backwards is so I can get to verse 1 in chapter 4 so after telling you how hard the whole deal is after telling you that there are people who literally will not believe it and actually will persecute you persecution comes in many forms some of you aren't worried about being hung from a cross or thrown in a river or some of these things. But it's happened. It's happened in this country.

It's happened in other countries. And it's happening now. There's Christians suffering all over the world right now in places where there's less Christian memory than the United States. But persecution comes in other forms. Losing a job, losing hours, family members shunning you, family members trying to indoctrinate your kids with weird stuff when they're around because they know that you're teaching them Christian stuff trying to sow seeds of doubt in your children's minds people just mocking you that's a form of persecution and I realize there's a difference between someone that's right now being tortured and you being called a name but read Matthew 5 Jesus considers it a form of persecution but Paul says therefore since we have this ministry he says as we receive mercy we do not lose heart so my final exhortation to you tonight I hope everyone runs out of here and does more evangelism than they did before that somehow you just try to do one more thing or two more things or whatever it is some of you will be leading teams one day maybe doing conferences like this, who knows but as you start to face those difficulties as the prince of the power of the air himself opposes you with his demonic powers as difficulty happens in your family maybe in a marriage maybe with children maybe within a church I want you not to lose heart and Paul says don't lose heart he says as we have received mercy don't lose heart you have the power of God on your side the same power that created all the worlds the same power that made light appear out of nothing the same power you realize in the book of Genesis that all the vegetables grew before there was the sun God created the sun on the fourth day and he grew the vegetables on the third day take that to your evolutionary try to fit that in with your evolutionary science if you think you're someone that meshes those things together it doesn't work but that same God has the power not only to save the people that you're giving the gospel to even when you're not there he has the power to comfort you in that difficulty because if there's anybody that knows personally how painful it is to give your life for people and to sacrifice for people and to love people and to proclaim the truth to people, the only life-saving truth that they can possibly ever hear and knows the pain of that being rejected, it's Jesus Christ himself.

One of the reasons why we have a great high priest who's able to sympathize with our weaknesses is because we actually have a God who became man. And he knows what it's like to tell people the truth and have them reject him. he knows what it's like to have a close friend betray him stab him in the back so you run to Jesus Christ and so the way that you don't lose heart isn't by pulling up your bootstraps and reminding yourself that the guy from Ohio said don't lose heart you don't lose heart by continuing to feed yourself with the means of grace even while maybe you're out doing some of this evangelism that hopefully I think you're going to start doing. You go to church and you make sure you're a member of a church where you're accountable.

You take communion. You be baptized if you haven't done that. You listen to the preaching of God's word week after week. And sometimes, if you're blessed, twice a week on Sunday sometimes, sometimes Thursday. And in your daily life, you pray. You read God's word.

I think we neglect prayer sometimes. And if you really believe that it's God who has the power to change sinners' hearts, you'll pray that He'll do so. And you'll pray specifically. people's names by name. You'll pray for opportunities to evangelize. You'll pray for courage to do so when the opportunities present themselves to you. You'll repent of the times that you've avoided it.

You'll realize that you only avoided it out of fear. And it wasn't fear of the Lord, though. And so I want you not to lose heart because it's not easy. one of the reasons we're having an evangelism conference is generally people don't do it if you go to every church in America and you see the things people are doing this is one of the things that is most clearly commanded in the scripture to all Christians to be some part of that is neglected and one of the reasons I think it's neglected is I think it's hard and I think there's some people who had some real good hearts and they really did want to see people saved and they went out and they tried and they said the right things and they were bold about it and they held Christ as Lord in their heart and they gave answers for the hope that's in them and they got rejected and they got hurt enough times and then they beat down and so I want Christians to know that Christ is always with you And when you suffer it a reminder that He suffered for you And that those people that you trying to get saved by your efforts as co-laborers with Christ, just look at the first two verses of chapter 6.

We're all working with Him in a sense. He's with you though. And He knows your pain. And He knows your labor of love. And He will not forget it on the last day. pray with me. Father, we thank you that your word is so perfect and that we have absolute certainty that you always know what you're doing and you always know what you've said.

And so, Lord, help us to simply believe the things that have been written. Help us to live out the lives that you have promised we can live as new creations that we might glorify you and in fact in that process be edified and given joy in our own souls. Please help us this weekend to focus on worshiping Christ as we learn things, as we're reminded of things.

Help us to edify one another with our speech. Let the words of our mouth be acceptable in your sight. because of Jesus and His death and resurrection. Amen.