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God's Grace and Evangelism By John Paterson

A few years back a prominent Australian Christian leader was in the Philippines and he stood
in one of the slum areas in Manila in front of a bulldozer.
And the reason he was standing in front of the bulldozer was to stop it, flattening a
lot of houses in that slum area that belonged to very poor people.
When he was later asked what he'd been doing he said, I was evangelising.
Now if that man had read the book Know and Tell the Gospel by John Chapman which is $15
on the bookstore, he would know that whatever he was doing he was not evangelising.
He might have been doing something good or wise or necessary or compassionate but it
sure wasn't evangelising.
At its heart evangelising is passing on the evangel, Greek word gospel.
To evangelise is to communicate, reason, explain, preach, tell, debate the gospel.
You can do it in all sorts of ways but it means getting a clear and identifiable message
that tells people how they can know God and belong to Him through people's ears in a way
they can understand it.
That's evangelising.
Now what's the grace of God got to do with doing that?
If we read Ephesians 2, 1-10 even half carefully this morning and if we listen even half carefully
to Murray's explanation of it and teaching of it, exposition of it, we know jolly well
that grace has got a heap to do with what happens in me so that I move from being dead
by grace being made alive to walking God's way.
That's how grace works in me through the gospel but what's grace got to do with telling the
gospel?
That's the subject for this session.
How does the grace of God bear upon the work of evangelising?
I want to talk about four main things this morning and the first one is this and I want
to say that revealing grace tells us what the gospel is.
You don't have to work out for yourself what to tell people who aren't Christians.
You don't have to guess.
We don't need to have a committee meeting about it.
We don't need to look to our evangelical tradition which often gives us a bit of a bum steer
on this one I think but we just need to look at the Bible because God's revealed by His
grace what the evangel is with which we evangelise.
It's possible to be 100% certain about what you've got to say and as I say the question
is really what has God said the gospel is?
We know that according to the New Testament God evangelised Abraham.
That's the word that's used.
God told Abraham the gospel.
We know from Isaiah chapter 40 that Isaiah told the people of Israel the gospel.
That's what it says.
That's the word.
We know that Jesus told the gospel.
We know that Paul told the gospel.
I guess if we were to try and work out what is it that we're telling when we tell the
gospel what is it that God has revealed the gospel is all we need to do would be to find
a summary statement.
Paul preached the gospel which was dah dah dah dum or Jesus preached the gospel which
said dah dah dum.
That would be easy enough.
A summary statement would do it.
Look at a couple of them.
Mark chapter 1 verse 14 for starters and just going to quickly whip through.
Just try and get the big picture if you can.
Verse 14 of Mark 1 after John was put in prison Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming
the gospel of God.
I know it's got good news in the NIV but that's a hopeless translation but anyway come back
to that another day.
He went preaching the evangel.
I mean look it can't be good news can it?
What happens if you look this is a sidetrack.
How long have I got?
Here's a sidetrack.
When we know from Luke's gospel that John the Baptist said after me comes one who is
so much more wonderful than I am and he's going to gather up all the chaff and burn
it up and it says Luke says with many other such exhortations he preached the good news.
Now tell me does that sound like good news to you?
You ought to be burned up.
It's only good news if you know you're not going to be burnt up.
If he's telling you you're going to be destroyed by this one coming that's bad news for you.
The gospel is good news only for those who believe it.
It's bad news for those who don't so maybe we ought to take the word good out of it for
me to find just what the message is.
It's a news.
It's an announcement.
Jesus came with an announcement from God with the evangel.
That was a sidetrack.
Sorry.
What does he say verse 15?
The time has come.
The kingdom of God is near.
Repent and believe the gospel.
That's a summary.
What's he saying?
He's preaching the kingdom of God has come.
Repent and believe.
Same sort of thing in Luke's gospel.
Luke chapter 4 verse 43.
Jesus says Luke 4 43 and I'll read them if you don't care.
Look at them.
That's fine.
I must preach the gospel of the kingdom of God.
He doesn't say I must preach the gospel that God loves you.
He doesn't say I must preach the gospel that Jesus died for you.
He doesn't say I must preach the gospel that you must have faith.
He says I must preach the gospel of the kingdom of God.
To the other towns also because that's why I was sent.
What's my message?
The message of the kingdom of God.
Luke 8 verse 1.
After Jesus had done some things he travelled about from one town and village to another
proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom of God.
How do you sum up what Jesus said?
You sum it up in that little phrase, the kingdom of God.
And that's exactly the message that the apostles took on board.
Couple of examples we'll do there and we could look at many.
Remember these are summary statements that give us the big picture and tell us how all
the other bits fit together and what they're about.
In Acts chapter 19 verse 8 it says for three months in Ephesus Paul argued persuasively
about the kingdom of God.
That's his message.
Go to the last chapter of Acts and we could go to any number of references in between
these two.
In the last chapter of Acts, verse 23 of chapter 28, Acts 28, 23, Paul's in prison in Rome.
Ephesus before, last one, Rome here.
Paul came to him in large numbers from morning till evening he explained and declared to
them the kingdom of God.
Go to the end of the chapter, last verse of Acts 31, boldly and without hindrance he preached
the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.
Now our evangelical tradition says telling the gospel is telling people God loves them.
Show me the verse.
To preach the gospel is to tell people that God loves them.
There isn't one.
People will say preaching the gospel is telling people that Jesus died for you.
Jesus didn't preach that, otherwise I didn't preach that.
They believed that in different ways according to where they came in history but that was
not their message when they preached the gospel.
The message was not have faith.
The message was not be born again.
They're not the messages we read when we read the gospel is preached.
The message is the kingdom of God.
When we mean the kingdom of God, we simply mean God is the king.
God is the king and Jesus is his appointed ruler and judge.
We could spell that out and that would take time and we'll happily do that later but when
we're preaching the gospel we are not primarily telling a message about the hearers.
We're telling a message about God.
We're not telling people necessarily what they get, we're telling them who God is.
It's about the kingdom of God.
We're not telling people about something they must do.
We're telling them about Jesus, king and judge.
The gospel you see in the end is not about me.
The gospel is not about you.
The gospel is about God.
As John Piper says, the title of one of his books, God is the gospel.
That says it all.
I shouldn't have wasted your last five minutes, I could have just said that.
God is the gospel.
When we tell the gospel, we're telling them about God and about the son of God, the king
and the ruler of the world, Jesus.
If Jesus is not our message, then whatever we're saying is not the gospel.
God has revealed the gospel.
He's raised his grace, he's told us exactly what it's about.
He's revealing grace.
He says that the gospel, I tell you folks, we can't change it, not if you want to tell
the gospel.
You don't work out the gospel by working out what Billy Graham says.
And I might say in brackets, Billy Graham was important to me in 1959.
I went forward and for me becoming a Christian made a lot of sense the first time.
I tell you, you don't judge the gospel by what Billy Graham says, you're judged by what
the Bible says.
Our evangelical history is not very good on this one.
And we've moved away, we've swung it so that it's no longer a message about God, it's a
message about us, our needs, what we do, what we get.
That's not the message in the Bible.
It's about God revealing grace.
God in great grace has told us all we need to know.
He didn't have to tell us, but he has told us and very clearly so.
So that's revealing grace, that's where we start.
Second theme I want to talk about with you is about electing grace.
Yesterday morning, again, when we looked at Ephesians, it was so clear that in love, God
has predestined this great number we call the elect.
I'm talking about electing grace, that grace that means God the Father sets his love upon
this great multitude made up of people from every nation, tribe and language.
Just a great mass of people he's chosen out of humanity.
Electing grace, that choice of God, makes evangelism essential.
If you plan to serve roast lamb for lunch next Sunday, you might make the plan, roast
lunch, roast lamb for lunch, but that plan will have lots of bits to it.
So part of the plan will be, I must make sure I get to the supermarket to buy it before
Sunday comes.
I must make sure I'm home in time to turn the oven on so it's heated and it's all cooking
in time that we can eat it at midday or whatever.
A big plan, we'll have roast lunch, has lots of parts to it.
God's big plan is that he has the elect, whom he will bring to himself.
They'll come, they'll be redeemed, it's part of the plan, we saw that yesterday.
God the Father sends the Son to redeem the elect.
And more than that, God sends the Spirit of God to bring the elect to himself.
And that doesn't happen in a vacuum.
It isn't as though somehow you went to sleep one night and you're a pagan and you wake
up the next morning and you're a Christian and it sort of happened while you were asleep.
Like catching the measles, they just come.
It's not like that.
In Ephesians, Paul made it very clear, speaking about God's big plan of election, he sent
the Son to redeem and then he says to these Christians in verse 13 of Ephesians 1,
And you were included in Christ when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation.
He chose you before time.
He redeemed you in time and now he's brought you to himself by the preaching of the gospel.
It's part of the plan.
The plan wasn't just election, full stop.
I tell you, nobody goes to heaven because of election, full stop.
You go to heaven because you're redeemed and brought and sanctified and taken to heaven.
It's all part of the plan.
It begins with God's election in love, but there are many parts to it.
And that's why I say, as my theme this morning, that electing grace makes evangelism essential.
See, you only come to Jesus if you're elect.
Turn it round, if you've come to Jesus, it's because you're elect.
Somebody brought the gospel to you and as Murray said this morning, it might have been
when you were five or 15 or 95.
It doesn't matter when it happened.
Someone brought the gospel to you or you heard it on the radio or you picked up a book or
something happened and you saw it and you said yes.
That's part of the plan, election, redemption, calling by the gospel.
There are some people who say that, you know, if you believe in election, you won't bother
evangelizing.
Well, that proves that people don't believe in election, I reckon, because this is part
of the deal.
Election makes these things essential, not irrelevant.
We don't sit around on our bottoms just saying, well, God will do it.
This is part of the way God's plan to do it.
It's always his plan.
Elect, redeemed by Christ, brought by the Spirit through the gospel, kept and so on
and so on.
That's the way Paul puts it, I think, to the Thessalonians.
People say, well, I'm not sure that I'm really one of these elect, one of these chosen people.
How do you really know?
Well, actually, it's a breeze.
I mean, it really is.
In 1 Thessalonians chapter 1 verse 4, Paul can speak to his Christian friends at Thessalonica
and say to them, we know, brothers, that you're loved by God.
We know that he's chosen you.
How does Paul know that?
Because he says, verse 5, our gospel came to you not simply with words but also with
power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction.
And you grabbed it.
Of course we know you're elect because God brought the gospel to you and the gospel brought
you to Jesus.
It's part of the plan.
It's the way it works.
And that's why I say, folks, that electing grace makes evangelism essential, not irrelevant,
not redundant.
It's part of the deal.
I guess when you turned to Jesus, maybe all you saw, you had a conversation, let's imagine
somebody, a friend, you had a good friend who loved you so much that he told you the
gospel.
And what love was that?
And that's about all you saw at the time.
In this sort of half hour, in that year of your life, this guy talking to you and you
asking questions back and that seemed to be about it.
And at the end of that conversation, you said, yes.
You went home and you said, yes, Jesus, yes, I'm yours, I'm yours, and that's about all
you saw.
Or maybe you've been telling the gospel to some friends of yours and all you've seen
is that conversation.
All you've seen is that that time you handed over that book or gave that tape or you've
been telling it to your kids and all you've seen is that conversation in the bedroom when
the child was upset before he went to sleep or this Bible reading and you just see these
little bits.
These little bits fit into this most magnificent plan.
They're not just out there on their own.
God's got his elect and he's going for them and he means to bring them, he's chosen them,
he's saved them at the cross.
He means to bring them into a knowledge of their salvation and nothing's going to stop
him.
They'll come.
There's nothing more certain in this world that every elect child of God will come to
Jesus.
Nothing's more sure than that and it might be through you.
Think of that.
You might be the one God uses as part of his magnificent plan to bring the gospel to this
guy, this woman, this child.
All you see is this conversation but God's doing great things, eternal things through
you.
Miserable, inconsistent, unbelieving, vanilla, ordinary you and I tell you, if that doesn't
sound like your gobsmacked, I don't know what will.
Can you believe that, that these plans which overarch all eternity and overarch time and
belong in eternity, somehow working it through you, through me, it's just astounding.
Some people I think see the doctrine of evangelism as a bit of an embarrassment, that somehow
God's stuck himself with this plan where he's choosing people.
So we sort of better help him out by getting the gospel out so that somehow we get some
people to believe or God the Father has sent Jesus to die on the cross and Jesus hung there
on the cross.
He said, oh Father, I'm giving my life to the world, every single person.
We say, oh, there aren't too many people believing, it'll all be wasted, quickly we better get
some people to believe.
We sort of want to help God out of an embarrassing situation he got himself into.
I tell you folks, God's not in any kind of embarrassing situation.
He's chosen those he'll bring, he saved them at the cross and he will bring them and nothing
will stop him.
And we're going to evangelise and get them.
The part you play is not the decisive part, it's not an equal part, it's not as if God
has said, look, I've done my bit, now you do your bit and together we'll sort of make
it work.
It's not as if God says, I've made the big plan but really, if you don't get it right,
it's all going to fall in the heap.
No, it's not an equal part, it's not a decisive part, but he does it through you and me and
people like us.
That's amazing.
It doesn't depend on us, it's not going to fall in the heap if we get it wrong, but what
a miracle that he uses people just like us.
Don't you think that's astounding, this great plan and we've got a part in it somehow, by
his grace.
I knew a man who worked on the building of the Harbour Bridge, which was completed, what,
75 years ago, the anniversary was this year.
And sometimes he would look at, I knew him a long time ago, and he'd look at the bridge
and he'd say to me, you know, he said, I put in some of those six million rivets that holds
it all together and he'd stand back and go, well, I tell you, I haven't contributed anything
to the plan of God, but I've got a part to play.
God does it through me and people like me, it's just amazing.
That guy was pretty chuffed that he had a role in the Sydney Harbour Bridge, but I tell
you, I'm involved in the building of the kingdom, that's probably stacks better.
Okay, electing grace makes evangelism essential, not redundant, folks, we go for it, and we
can't bail, we can't bail.
Third one, changing grace means people will believe the gospel.
You know, I think in terms of numbers, Jesus had got to be the biggest fizzer ever.
He, three years of public ministry, how many people do you think he preached to?
Certainly now it's tens of thousands, tens and tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands,
who knows?
Lots of people, what did he end up with?
Some disciples, a few women, some others, but boy, he's pretty pathetic numerically.
And we'd have to say Jesus really mucked it up.
Let me give you two incidents in his lifetime, two case, looking at two situations which
will help us understand things much, much better than that.
In John chapter 6, big crowd, it's the feeding of the 5,000 men, so presumably there were
some women and children there as well, we know at least one child because he's got some
fish and bread rolls in his basket.
So 5,000, 8,000, 10,000, 12,000, it's a big crowd, 5,000 males, others beside.
So you reckon you'd get something pretty good out of that if you're a good preacher, wouldn't
you?
Wouldn't you?
What happens?
He feeds them and then, as it were, Ross told me to say this, he has them eating out of
his hands.
And that's about as good as Ross gets, but there you go.
When Jesus began evangelising, when he begins to talk, it all goes wrong, it seems.
He tells them all they've got the wrong motives for being there.
He tells them all they're looking for the wrong things.
He says, you've come for food in your stomachs, but you should be looking for me.
You should come to me.
But then he says, but you can't come to me.
You don't have the ability to come to me.
And they start getting really fast.
And bit by bit, they dribble away.
In fact, in droves, they dribble away.
So that by the end of chapter 6 of John, all you've got left is 12 people.
And one of them's a deceiver.
And Jesus says, aren't you going to go home too?
I mean, he's really mucked it up.
Ten, eight, ten, twelve, fifteen thousand people to start with
that end up with the guys he had at the beginning before that.
That really is a fizzer.
Now what'll he do, do you think?
Do you think he'll now have sleepless nights tossing and turning over what might have been?
Do you think he'll say, look, this is just not worth the effort?
It's just not worth the energy.
We've tried in our church to do this and this and this, and it seems that there are just no results.
Nobody seems to have believed.
Conclude it's all a waste of time.
But I tell you, Jesus doesn't do that because he knows that there's more to be seen than what you can see.
There's something going on other than what you can just see with your eyes.
And so he says in John chapter 6, in verse 36,
I've told you all these things.
You've seen me and still you don't believe.
How am I going to explain that, he says.
Verse 37, all that the Father gives me will come to me.
And whoever comes to me, I'll never drive away.
Now if the Father gives you, you'll come.
You guys haven't come.
Presumably the Father hasn't given them.
And if you're in any doubt about that, you go down to verse 44.
No one can come to me.
You know what the word can means, don't you?
Can is a word of ability.
If Peter Fenner here were to put his hand up right now and say, can I go to the toilet?
I'd say sure.
If you get something, I'd say hang on, I didn't say you may.
Can, you have the ability.
May, you have permission.
Sorry, not the time for grammar is it, but it's a good distinction.
Jesus said, he doesn't say nobody may come.
Everybody's got permission to come.
Jesus said, whoever comes to me, I'm not cast away, that's permission.
But he says you don't have the ability.
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.
The word draw, it's the word that's used, only used eight times in the New Testament.
Peter drew his sword.
The disciples are fishing after that Jesus has risen from the dead.
And their nets are full of fish at Jesus' command.
And they drag their nets.
That's the word.
It's not just God saying, hey, hey, would you like to think about the gospel?
That's not God's drawing.
God sweetly, wonderfully takes hold of you and brings you.
Nobody can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him.
And I'll raise him up at the last day.
It's written in the prophet, they'll be taught by God.
God will teach them.
God doesn't, as it were, bruise your will.
As Spurgeon said, you can tell the way God works.
It's not like a treasure chest which has had the rip, sorry, the lock ripped off.
But someone has gently opened the lock.
God doesn't, as it were, work apart from your will, against your will.
He changes your will.
So you sweetly, George, you sweetly say you want to come.
That's what God does.
And he does it by the preaching of the gospel.
The disciples saw things that day that the crowd didn't see because God had taught them.
Because the Father was bringing them.
Because changing grace meant that they could believe.
It wasn't down to them, it was down to the grace of God.
One other incident.
If you go back to Matthew chapter 11.
In Matthew chapter 11, Jesus has been showing himself and teaching and doing wonderful miracles around many of the towns in Galilee.
And people have really heard and seen the most astounding things.
But the response is almost zero.
I mean, it really is awful that they can have seen and heard wonderful things and still they reject him and write him off.
How do you explain that?
Well, I'll tell you how Jesus explains it.
There are a few ways you could explain that.
You could just say people had hard hearts.
People chose not to believe.
That's true.
It's dead true.
But if you go to base, how do you explain it?
Verse 25, Matthew 11, 25.
At that time, Jesus said, I praise you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth.
Remember what we said yesterday?
There are no no-go areas with God.
He's Lord of heaven and earth.
He's the one who calls the tune from start to finish, from east to west.
I thank you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and learned and revealed them to little children.
Yes, Father, this was your good pleasure.
You see, it isn't the case that some are more intelligent than others or some are more depraved than others.
I mean, I tell you, folks, if it's down to that, if it's down to people's ability to understand,
all you've got to do in your life is locate the convertible types.
The people who find it easy to believe anything, just locate them and then just tell them they'll come.
But Jesus doesn't explain it that way.
It's not down to anything in them.
It's not down to anything in the preacher, in the writer, in the teller, in the talker.
Now, we don't have the ability to make anybody believe.
And you might as well make a house brick believer trying to make a pagan who's dead believe.
You can't do it.
You don't have the ability and they don't have the ability to believe any more than a house brick has the ability to believe.
It's not like that.
What Jesus says is the reason is that the results are governed by God.
He reveals the truth.
I thank you, Lord, that you've revealed the truth to these and you've concealed the truth from those.
Now, you might say, well, hang on, I don't quite understand that because I would have thought it would be better if God had a sort of revealed it to lots more.
Or maybe these rather than these.
I mean, look at these frums over here.
They're just awful, gross people.
At least these people are earnest and sincere.
Why don't you do it this way?
Jesus says, because, Father, this was your gracious will.
You showed grace.
And your will is always good and always right.
So shut your mouth before you start saying to God, you should have done it this way.
You shouldn't have given me this illness.
You should have done this with my kids.
Shut your mouth.
Because this is God's gracious will.
And his will is always perfect and always good and always holy and will always result in his glory.
And we'll get to heaven and we'll say, Lord, it was so wonderful you did it the way you did it.
Shut your mouth.
This is your gracious will, he says to his Father.
And it wouldn't have been better some other way.
I remember a few years ago.
Look, I've had so many asides.
I'll just check the time.
I remember a few years ago when James Montgomery Boyce, American preacher, wonderful man, just the loveliest guy.
And he, a writer, we've got some of his books on the bookstore.
He'd been diagnosed with cancer, very serious cancer.
And he knew for some time.
And then he announced in church about, when the doctor said, I think you've got about eight weeks to live, give or take.
He announced in church that he was dying of cancer.
Big church on the eastern seaboard of the United States.
And you know what he said to people in the church?
He said, don't pray that it will be anything other than what God's decided to do because it wouldn't be as good.
Such is your gracious will.
God's will to his children is always gracious.
Why would you say, God, do it some other way?
He's committed to you.
Why would you not say, if the Lord's for us, who could be against us?
But we tend to sort of work out these schemes.
Lord, if it was this way and this way and this way.
No, friends, shut your mouth.
See, gracious will.
I tell you, when people believe the gospel, your kids believe the gospel,
and somehow in the most amazingly gracious way, God used you as part of that.
And your kids believe, or your friend believes, or somebody you evangelise at work believes.
Don't say, what a good boy am I.
As Murray was saying this morning, don't praise them or get them to praise themselves, lest they boast.
Say, Lord, this was your gracious will.
And when people believe and when they turn to Christ and take hold of the gospel,
as one man says when he writes on these verses about God concealing and revealing,
he says, when poor, broken, half-witted men and women respond in faith, don't despise them.
They are the trophies of the Father's good pleasure.
Friends, that the work of evangelism can never fail.
Because God the Father works out everything in conformity with the purpose of his gracious pleasure.
Does it always look gracious to me? No, it doesn't.
It honestly doesn't.
Does it always look clear to me? No, it doesn't. Often it looks very confusing.
But am I going to walk by sight or am I going to walk by faith?
Am I going to ask questions I've got no right to ask and make demands I've got no right to make?
Am I going to say, no, Jesus, you said your Father's will is always gracious, always good, always right.
That's enough. That's all I need to know.
Changing grace means people will believe the gospel.
People will believe it in every nation, every language, every tribe.
They're the people in heaven. They'll believe the gospel.
That's why, friends, we ought to be the most passionate.
People who believe in election and redemption and sovereign calling through the gospel,
we ought to be the most passionate in the world about taking the gospel to the four corners of the world.
Because God's got his elect all over. Let's go and get them.
Let's go and get them by the preaching of the gospel.
There's no other way they'll come than by the preaching of the gospel.
Let's go.
Last point.
God works his grace through the gospel for his glory.
You know, if we were to do a bit of a sort of a track down and through history,
we'd find that things have really changed in the last hundred or so years.
If you went back to, in this matter, on this subject,
if we went back to the early reformers, to use B.B. Warfield's phrase,
they were blazing predestinarians.
People lived heartily in the predestinating grace of God.
Do you know what they also did?
They divided up the world, got a map, divided it up,
and they started training people to take the gospel to every part of the world.
They were evangelistically passionate in their towns and across the known world.
Of course, they believed that God has his elect everywhere.
It wasn't something that sort of cramped their style when it came to evangelism.
It enlarged their vision.
They're the guys of the 1500s.
Go to the 1600s, the Puritans, the same.
Go to the leaders, the main leaders of the evangelical awakening in the 1700s, the same.
Go to the early 1800s and the leaders of the modern missionary movement,
William Carey, Henry Martin, David Brainerd, the same.
They believed all these things.
They believed Ephesians from chapter 1, verse 1 right through and understood it biblically.
They were blazing predestinarians, all of them, and they were passionate.
They crossed continents. They lost their lives for the sake of the gospel.
And yet we come to the 1850s, 1900s, 1950s, 2000s, and what are we on about?
These guys back there offered for centuries,
let's get the gospel out to bring in the elect to the praise of God.
It was a vision of God that drove them.
What drives us now?
When you speak at a meeting like this and if we wanted to get 20 people here to stand at the end of this session
and say, yes, I'm willing to become a cross-cultural missionary, you know what we'd do it?
You know how we'd do it today?
We'd crank a response out of people by showing slides, showing things up here of millions of lost people.
Or we'd talk about, we'd give graphic pictures of hell
and all these thousands of millions and billions of people sliding into a Christless eternity.
That's true. Hell's real.
And it's true there are millions and billions of people who are lost. That's true.
That's not the motive.
It's not the best motive.
If you love the Lord Jesus, you'll love people.
You'll love people.
But it's not the dominant motive.
The dominant motive is we take the gospel to bring in the elect that it will be to the praise of God's glory.
It's God's glory that drives us, not man's need.
But you see, today it's all about man's need.
And so evangelistic sermons start.
I want to tell you how needy you are.
I mean, you are.
But that's the burden, rather than showing who Jesus is
and showing that our response is to the King and the Judge of the world.
Not that we'll get something, because of who He is that we come.
More than this, what we'll get when we come.
And these guys for hundreds of years have been driven by a vision of the glory of God.
It's been their dominant motive.
You turn to Acts 17 and you find Paul in Athens, a city very much like our own culture, I think,
where people have got every kind of philosophy and every sort of idea and every religion.
It all gets a go.
I mean, the people of Athens prided themselves on being in part of the city where, in a sense, everything gets tolerated.
You know, you walk around the main square and you walk down all the streets and there's this idol, this idol, this idol, this idol.
Nobody thought that one somehow excluded the others.
We're tolerant people.
Every idea, if you believe it, that's fine.
Put up your idol.
Now, what's Paul going to say when he gets to a city like that?
He's going to sort of cave in and say, well, guys, I've got another one you might like to consider on the smorgasbord.
No way.
You know what happens? You read Acts 17, verse 16, and it says,
When Paul was in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols.
The word?
He was burning hot inside.
Why is he burning hot?
Because the people are lost.
Look, if he loved Jesus, he loved those people.
He wanted good things for them.
There's no doubt about that, but it wasn't it just there.
His dominant motive was when he saw the city was full of idols.
Here are people giving their love and allegiance and devotion and time and hearts to things that are not the true God when the true God's being despised.
And our jealous love, he preached the gospel for the glory of Jesus, not primarily to answer their needs.
You see the difference?
It was this passion that drove him.
Jesus is Lord and King.
How can people despise such a one?
You know that true love is always jealous, don't you?
People today sort of look down their nose at you and treat you as a bit of an idiot
if you sort of get a bit fussed when somebody looks at your wife the wrong way.
Well, you ought to look fussed because true love is jealous love.
Nobody should give to another what belongs to someone else.
People in this world, people you know, people in your family, people you work with, your neighbours, they owe Jesus.
They owe him glory and honour.
They owe him their lives.
And folks, that's the motive.
That's the primary motive.
That's what it's been for hundreds of years except the last hundred.
When we've turned it around, we've talked about man's need.
It's the glory of Jesus.
Will Jesus be glorified when the gospel is preached?
You bet he will because all those whom the Father has given him will come to him.
He will not cast them out and they'll all be in heaven.
Every chair in heaven will be full.
You know, you have a party and you put all the place names around it,
every chair will be full.
Nobody will be missing.
Not one. Not one.
Look, that's only the beginning.
I could talk about this for hours.
You'd be glad to know I'm not going to but it's so important and it's just so wonderful.
I just want to finish by just asking you where it leaves you I suppose
because I hope that you're not going to spend your life committed to pathetic little plans
that are all bound up with your security and your safety.
I hope you've got bigger plans than that,
bigger plans than your safety and your success
when you could take wonderful risks for Jesus that in the end won't be risks
because God's plan is certain and good.
I hope you have a wonderfully expansive vision that goes way past
I'm going to tell the gospel to that guy because he's nice.
He's like me.
What about the people who aren't like you?
The other end of the social spectrum, the other end of the world?
God's not got his elect there?
You bet he has.
And if we are narrow, so just people like me, we haven't got the mind of God.
I hope you see the greatness of the plan of God and the majestic glory of God
so that you know nothing else comes as even close for a good motive
for telling your friends the gospel.
They're in need. I know they're in need.
They face a Christless eternity and that's serious.
But folks, Jesus is the King and Judge of the world.
How can they ignore him?
Call them to him for his glory and to fulfil his plan.