Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Acts 2 – Pentecost and Evangelism
Pastor Dennis Tuuri

Our sermon text is Acts 2. We’ll be talking on Pentecost and evangelism. The particular handout on page two is actually from last year’s Pentecost sermon that I gave on Pentecost and unity. And so you’ll see the emphasis on unity and the words that are underlined and dealt with. But today we’re going to move on from that unity and speak about it in relationship to evangelism. So please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Acts chapter 2. When the day of Pentecost had fully come, they were all with one accord in one place. And suddenly there came a sound from heaven as of a rushing mighty wind, and it filled the whole house where they were sitting. Then there appeared to them divided tongues as of fire, and one set upon each of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak with other tongues, as the Spirit gave them utterance.

And there were dwelling in Jerusalem, Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And when the sound occurred, the multitude came together and were confused, because everyone heard them speak in his own language. Then they were all amazed and marveled, saying to one another, “Look, are not all these who speak Galileans? And how is it that we hear each in our own language in which we were born? Parthians and Medes and Elamites, those dwelling in Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the parts of Libya joining Cyrene, visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabs.

We hear them speaking in our own language the wonderful works of God. So they were all amazed and perplexed, saying to one another, “Whatever could this mean?” Others mocking said, “They are full of new wine.” But Peter standing up with the eleven raised his voice and said to them, “Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and heed my words. For these are not drunk, as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day, but this is what was spoken by the prophet Joel.

And it shall come to pass in the last days, said God, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh. Your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. Your young men shall see visions. Your old men shall dream dreams. And on my manservants and on my maidservants I will pour out my spirit in those days and they shall prophesy. I will show wonders in heaven above and signs in the earth beneath blood and fire and vapor of smoke.

The sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood before the coming of the great and awesome day of the Lord. And it shall come to pass that whoever calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved. Men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through him in your midst, as you yourselves also know. Him being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified and put to death, whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that he should be held by it.

For David says concerning him, I foresaw the Lord always before my face, for he is at my right hand that I may not be shaken. Therefore, my heart rejoiced and my tongue was glad. Moreover, my flesh also will rest in hope. For you will not leave my soul in Hades, nor will you allow your holy one to see corruption. You have made known to me the ways of life. You will make me full of joy in your presence. Men and brethren, let me speak freely to you of the patriarch David, that he is both dead and buried, and his tomb is with us to this day.

Therefore, being a prophet, and knowing that God had sworn with an oath to him that of the fruit of his body according to the flesh, he would raise up the Christ to sit on his throne. He, foreseeing this, spoke concerning the resurrection of the Christ, that his soul was not left in Hades, nor did his flesh see corruption. This Jesus God has raised up of which we are all witnesses. Therefore, being exalted to the right hand of God, and having received from the Father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he poured out this which you now see and hear.

For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he says himself, “The Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool.” Therefore, let all the house of Israel know assuredly that God has made this Jesus whom you crucified both Lord and Christ. Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, “Men and brethren, what shall we do?” And then Peter said to them, “Repent, and let every one of you be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.

For the promise is to you and to your children and to all who are far off, even as many as the Lord our God will call. And with many other words he testified and exhorted them, saying, “Be saved from this perverse generation.” Then those who gladly received his word were baptized. And that day about 3,000 souls were added to them, and they continued steadfastly in the apostles’ doctrine and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in prayers.

And then fear came upon every soul, and many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. Now all who believed were together and had all things in common and sold their possessions and goods divided them among all as anyone had need. So continuing daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house, they ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people.

And the Lord added to the church daily those who were being saved. Father, we thank you for this account, this beginning of the evangelism of the whole world and the end of it as well in a way in terms of picture and type. We thank you, Lord God, for the commemoration of that this day. And we pray that you would help us to understand this text and what else the scriptures teach about evangelism to the end that we would indeed be those who aggressively pursue the Great Commission in our day and age.

In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen. Please be seated.

I got a call this week from a man who I’d worked with for years in political action in the state and he’s a pretty influential fellow. He said, “Hey, how’s that going? It’s different up here.” So he’s been very influential in the Republican party politics as well as Christian political action here in the state. And, you know, he wanted to talk to me about education because he said it’s quite obvious that we’re a toast for a period of time here in terms of being able to influence public policy in a way that would make the country or the state a better place for us.

And so he wants us to think long term, the Christian political activists, myself and others that we work with about what we can do in the years to come. What we really need of course is more Christians and more Christians who are explicitly Christian in their perspective of public policy and economics and education and all of the things. So we wanted to talk about private schools and homeschools and you know what we could do to try to raise up a new generation.

Our politics in the state of Oregon and nationwide has brought us to a point of despair. We could say a despair that will probably be cemented in the next few years at least for a season. The death of Jerry Falwell is probably going to be a symbol of what will happen in the country at large. The removal of Christian involvement in public policy will not be total of course but it will probably be significant.

And in a way we can say thank God. Because the last thing we want to do is have a Christian moralism without the heart of the gospel at its core. And so I guess what I’m saying here is we have no other choice but to evangelize. So we’re brought to this: evangelize, bring more people into the kingdom of God, equip them with the scriptures, and also to truly evangelize and disciple the children of Christians in this state of which there are a lot.

So you know trying to pull them out of public schools, trying to work with them in private schools, homeschools, cooperative schools, is really a big part of the strategic plan that lies in front of us. And obviously, I had this sermon chose before, but it seems to fit in quite well with what today’s text and the situation that they were in at the time that the text was written and the situation we are in.

What we need is grace from on high and the empowerment of the Holy Spirit to the end that we evangelize and disciple a new host, a new army of God. So we have to think long term and that’s a good thing. We tend to think short term. This text really has this kind of long-term perspective to it. In many ways when we read at the very first verse when Pentecost had fully come. So in a way this is sort of like in the Gospels we read about the end of the Sabbath.

At the end of the Sabbath, the last Sabbath day we had the new world beginning, the new creation, and the day after. And here when Pentecost has fully come, Pentecost will no longer be what it was. But all that Pentecost was meant to teach us will be fulfilled. I taught my children this morning in the Deuteronomy Sunday school class that, you know, Mosaic laws particularly as it relates to the cult. The cult is the religion, the practice of religion is like a prism that takes the tithe and fractions out aspects of it and we’re brought back to one tithe.

It takes uh it takes the Sabbath which is a creation ordinance fractures out various parts and elements of it so that we can understand what New Testament Lord’s day is all about. And so this text brings all those elements of Pentecost that were the long lines so to speak into play. We have Pentecost fully come. I’ve got comments here on your outline resonances of expulsion from the garden and maturation.

So kicked out of the garden the angels have swords of fire and in a way this divided tongues I think if we looked at the Greek it would appear to us swordlike tongues of fire on each of these people. So there’s a transfer of authority over the world from angels to mankind that Pentecost is certainly playing off of that theme. There’s a transfer of a centralized temple to decentralized through churches and individuals.

I mean you remember the temple or the tabernacle was built and the temple Heavenly fire has to come down and start the fire on the altar. The altar is a representation of the world and individuals. The temple and tabernacle are built in human shape. And we are the new temple of God individually and corporately. And God lights us. He lights the altar fire that is at the core of our being. And Pentecost is surely that as well.

We have the reversal of Babel in an interesting way in both unity and diversity. At Babel, God confused the tongues of the people. But they also had one lip or one confession. one confession, one tongue. Now, Babel is obviously reversed. Everybody hears in their own languages what these men are saying, but God doesn’t eliminate multiple languages. So, it is a stamp of approval in the new creation upon diversity of nations here. So diversity of nations and tongues remains, but they all have a common confession, one lip, one tongue in that sense, a common confession of Christ.

So, in the reversal of Babel, the new world is brought to pass. And this new world is a world of unity and diversity in which nations are not supposed to blend into one world order without national distinctives. There are nations and people groups and cultures. And that’s a good thing. But what they’re moving toward and what history is inevitably about now is having the common confession of Jesus as Lord that’s presented here as well.

Old world and new world. Pentecost was if you count out carefully the time of the Exodus and then the deliverance of the law. The deliverance of the law occurs on Pentecost. And so Pentecost has traditionally by the rabbis been taught as the day when Moses brought down the law of God from the mountain. So Pentecost is always related to the giving of the law of God, which is quite important for us to keep in mind.

And as I said, the chronology of this can be carefully written up from the events of the Exodus. And we’ll see that’s the case where we’re to take the time to do it. So the Pentecost is about the giving of the law on Mount Sinai. And when you remember that when Moses came down, the people were celebrating wildly in sinning and then 3,000 of them died in the resulting judgment from God. Well, here we have you know, Pentecost again, the new giving of the law, we could say, and the effect is that 3,000 people come to life.

And so, we’ve got 3,000 and 3,000. We have this transition from the law that ministers death, we could say. Of course, it was not intended to bring salvation. It was intended as a way of life to save people. But we have that in Now in the new creation life flows in the old creation before the coming of Jesus death flowed rather from person to person new testament life goes out through the church of Jesus Christ.

Many other truths could be taught about but so this is a tremendous longline perspective. The accumulation of all these great truths from the Old Testament should sort of resonate in our being. This the wind coming to the house where they’re at. The wind of God arriving in rushing wind and to meet with Adam and Eve etc. All kinds of themes come to our mind and excite us about the text. We want to focus on one particular theme and that is that this is actually the beginning then of evangelism that the Great Commission will be carried out and we see here that it is carried out all the world is saved.

The unity of the world is sort of there by way of model or type and so we see the promise of what history will unveil. But then we also see some of the means whereby God will bring this to pass. The Great Commission will be brought to pass through evangelism. And this first text in Acts 2 is the beginning of the evangelistic task of the church. And so I’m going to look at it today specifically in terms of informing our view of evangelism.

I want to talk for a while first however and this will be, you know, the outline is not correctly a portion in terms of time segments. The middle point will go fairly quickly as we look at it. But the first point I want to take a little bit of time on this it is common in our day and age to think something very wrong about the Canons of Dort and reformed people and that is that they have no care for missions.

That’s simply not the case. The Canons of Dort themselves stress the importance of this. But before we get to that, I wanted to read a quote from John Calvin from Isaiah 2:3 which is this. Many people will come and say come let us go up to the mountain of the Lord to the house of the God of Jacob. And Calvin commenting on this says this by these words Isaiah the prophet declares that the godly will be filled with such an ardent desire to spread the doctrine of religion that everyone not satisfied in his own calling and his personal knowledge will desire to draw others along with him.

Not he’s not saying discontentment or calling his people, but you’ve been called to God. You understand God. But in in if that’s really true, then you’re going to want to desire to have other people come with you to the house of God. Indeed, Calvin says, Nothing could be more inconsistent with the nature of faith than that deadness which would lead a man to disregard his brethren and keep the light of knowledge choked up within his own breast.

This points out Calvin says to us also the ordinary method of collecting a church which is by the outward voice of men. For though God might bring each person to himself by a secret influence, yet he employs the agency of men that he may awaken in them anxiety about the salvation of each other. By this method, he likewise strengthens their mutual attachment and puts to the test their willingness to receive instruction which everyone permits himself when everyone permits himself to be taught by others.

So wonderful truths you know first if anybody should have a desire to evangelize it should be people who understand the sovereignty of God in evangelism and more specifically those of us who believe that the world will indeed be converted. who are optimistic about our eschatology. It’s not going to happen without human agency. Human agency is the method that God uses to bring men and nations to salvation.

We want to see that happen. We have a great desire to serve God. And we have a desire to bring other people to worship and praise God and to rejoice in Christ as well. And so if there’s a deadness in our hearts about evangelism, don’t blame the Canons of Dort. Don’t blame reformed theology. Don’t blame John Calvin. these men were men who truly understood the importance of evangelization in the church. We agree that the Great Commission should be a major priority of every individual and the church.

Now having said that we would go about doing it in a distinctive way, a distinctively reformed way. we read in the Canons of Dort the following this is from section chap Section one, but in the love of in this the love of God was made manifest and he sent his only begotten son into the world that whoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life. Now in that statement their point is that the only way to accomplish the salvation of men who have fallen into sin is the proclamation of the gospel with the promise to those who that whoever would believe will come to salvation.

Again later we read the wrath of God remains upon those who do not believe this gospel. But those who receive it and embrace Jesus the savior with a true and living faith are delivered by him from the wrath of God and from destruction and are given eternal life. So then they say that reformed evangelism recognizes that the only way to life is through the agency of the grace of God solely by grace working through faith solely through the merits of Christ.

And so the Canons adore assert this. And then the Canons go also to say this Moreover, the promise of the gospel is that whosoever believes in Christ crucified shall not perish but have eternal life. This promise together with the command to repent and believe ought to be declared and published to all nations and to all persons promiscuously, in other words, without regard any other thing to everyone and without distinctions to whom God out of his good pleasure sends the gospel.

And whereas many who are called by the gospel do not repent or believe in Christ but perish in unbelief. This is not owing to any defect or insufficiency in the sacrifice offered by Christ upon the cross but solely to be imputed to themselves. So they say that this promise and the promise is that to whoever believes we have eternal life. this promise together with the command to repent and believe ought to be declared and published to all nations.

So the Canons of Dort stress the importance of the Great Commission and what they’re saying is that if we really want to evangelize the world we’ll do it in accordance with how God declares himself to be in the scriptures and we’ll use the scriptural method for doing it which is the proclamation and the command to men. Now we’ve already had a little difference in terms of their view of the gospel not an invitation.

The emphasis is not on whosoever will. The emphasis is on the promise that whosoever will believe will receive eternal life. Not an emphasis upon the choice of men, an emphasis on the promise of God. and this promise of God is the is the is the work of God himself. The offer of the gospel is to be made to all men and it is to be understood as a sincere or serious offer. As many as are called by the gospel are unfeignedly called.

The Canons go on to say in section three and four paragraph 8 for God has most earnestly and truly declared in his word what is acceptable to him, namely that those who are called should come unto him. He also seriously promises rest of soul and eternal life to all to come to him and believe. So the Canons of Dort stress in them the importance of the Great Commission, the need for the church to proclaim the gospel that the gospel is a promise to men and it is a command to them to repent.

So the Canons give us sort of a the bare bones of a reformed view of evangelism and I would say a biblical view of evangelism because what they’re saying is consistent with the nature of man given to us in the scriptures that we’ve talked about and consistent with the biblical narrative. When evangelism happens, this is the way it happens in the scriptures. So it’s a conditional promise. The emphasis is on the promise and it is a promise not an offer to people.

It is a promise to people. It is a command. and not an invitation. And it says that we are to be this is to be proclaimed or heralded. And so the emphasis is on proclamation, a conditional promise. That’s the emphasis. The command to repent to men. Now, if you think about that in terms of modern evangelism, it sounds quite different than what modern evangelism typically is today. that’s because modern evangelism, like the modern church, is influenced more by our Arminianism in its view of man.

And we’ve talked about this before, but if man has the ability to pull himself up by his own bootstraps, if his will is contingent upon just getting his emotions and mind straight, then everything is about giving him rational evidences and pulling the right emotional strings to get him to make that decision. But if we look at a from a reformed persp biblical perspective, there’s a command, there’s a conditional promise, it’s a serious you know offer or it is a command though, not an invitation.

And it is done in the in the mechanism by which God says we should do it. I want to read now from a quote from J.I. Packer in his book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. And as we read all this introductory stuff from the Canons, we’ll see that this is just what happens in Acts chapter 2. I mean the right way of doing it as opposed to the wrong way. Packer says this. If we regard our job not simply to present Christ but actually to produce converts to evangelize not only faithfully but also successfully.

Our approach to evangelism would become pragmatic and calculated. Techniques would become ends in themselves. But it not but it is not right when we take it on us to do more than God has given us to do. It is not right when we regard ourselves as responsible for securing converts and look to our own enterprise and techniques to accomplish what only God can accomplish. So he’s critiquing modern evangelism.

He’s critiquing, you know, selling Jesus like soap. I remember 20 years ago, there was a campaign, try Jesus, I think it was big bulletin boards. Try Jesus. You want a little better marriage, try Jesus. Try this product. It was using modern advertising techniques to try to market Jesus. And it was a soft sell, not a hard sell. Well, you know, you might get a little better mileage out of Jesus than that other thing you got going on in your life.

And Packer is critiquing that. He says it’s not right if we don’t understand the sovereignty of God and if we become a perspective, we’re going to go to techniques that produce what looks like good fruit. But if we see that the scriptures require us to herald forth the proclamation of Christ and to evangelize in that sense to command people to repent to promise them eternal life and then leave the rest of the Holy Spirit that’s the biblical way to do it.

So you know it’s not about results. It’s about faithfulness in the use of the method. And that’s what we’re going to look at today is methods from the go from the book of Acts. Packer went on to say this to look at our techniques is to intrude ourselves into the office of the Holy Spirit to exalt ourselves as the agents of the new birth. Thus only by letting our knowledge of God’s sovereignty control the way in which we plan and pray and work in his service can we avoid becoming guilty of this fault.

So if a belief in the sovereignty of God has immediate application to how we evangelize and keeps us away from the foolishness of marketing techniques with Jesus. So, we’re not to be concerned to produce results. We’re to be concerned to be faithful in our approach. Now, we believe that if we faithfully use God’s methods, the result is assured. The Great Commission will be the result, the conversion of men and nations.

What this means is just because a method seems to work does not justify its use. We look at evangelical methods of evangelism. Oh, they’re getting so many converts, you know, it pragmatically looks right and so we like it. But that doesn’t justify its use. You know, there was a time at which the Catholic Church used the method of violence. They made people convert at the point of death and he baptized them and then they dispatch them before they could apostatize.

Very effective, I suppose, if we look at numbers of converts and how many of them don’t apostatize, but I’m sure it’s a method that we would deplore. The first paragraph of the Westminster Confession of Faith on Good Works says this. Good works are only such as God has commanded in his holy word. Not such as without the warrant thereof are devised by men out of blind zeal or upon any pretense of good intentions.

Good intentions don’t cut it. The Westminster Confession says you have to work with the knowledge of the word of God in terms of whatever it is you’re doing. I want to read now a quote from John Owen. The death of death. Actually, it’s not from John Owen. It’s from Packer’s introduction essay. I know several of you have read this. If you haven’t read it, you ought to read it. It’s Packer and it’s published as a little separate pamphlet.

It’s Packer’s introduction to John Owen, The Death of Death in the Death of Christ. And from that uh introduction, I read this. There is no doubt that evangelicalism today is in a state of perplexity and unsettlement. Without realizing it, we have during the past century bartered that gospel, the biblical gospel for a substitute product which though it looks similar enough in points of detail, is as a whole a decidedly different thing.

Hence our troubles for the substitute product does not hence our troubles for the substitute product does not answer the ends for which the authentic gospel has in past days proved itself so mighty. The new gospel conspicuously fails to produce deep reverence, deep repentance, deep humility, a spirit of worship, a concern for the church. So he looks around at Angelism says we got a lot of very nominal Christians.

We’ve got a lot of them in the churches. We’ve done it right. We’ve appealed and you know and he said not saying we’ve done it. The evangelical done it right. We’re getting converts but the converts are you know a mile wide in terms of number but an inch deep. There’s no deep commitment to Christ. There’s no 100-enters out there. Very few 100-enters as I would call them. Why? He says we would suggest that the reason lies in its own character in content.

It fails to make men God-centered in their thoughts and God-fearing in their hearts because that is not primarily what it is trying to do. One way of stating the difference between it and the old gospel is to say that it is too exclusively concerned to be helpful to man to bring peace, comfort, happiness, satisfaction, and too little concerned to glorify God. The old gospel was helpful too, more so indeed than is the new.

But so to speak, incidentally, for its first concern was always to give glory to God. It was always and essentially a proclamation of divine sovereignty and mercy and judgment, a summons to bow down and worship the mighty Lord on whom man depends for all good, both in nature and in grace. Its center of reference was unambiguously God. But in the New Gospel, the center of reference is man. This is just to say that the old gospel was religious in a way that the new gospel is not.

Whereas the chief aim of the old was to teach men to worship God, the concern of the new seems limited to making them feel better. The subject of the old gospel was God and his ways with men. The subject of the new gospel is man and the help God gives him. There is a world of difference in these gospels. The whole perspective and emphasis of gospel preaching has changed. From this change of interest, has sprung a change of content for the new gospel has in effect reformulated the biblical message in supposed interest of helpfulness.

Accordingly, the themes of man’s natural inability to believe, of God’s free election being the ultimate cause of salvation, and of Christ dying specifically for his sheep, he’s going through the points of the five points of Calvinism here. They are not preached. These doctrines, it would be said, are not helpful. They would drive sinners to despair by suggesting ing to men that it’s not in their power to be saved through Christ.

The result of these omissions is that part of the biblical gospel is now preached as if it were the whole of the gospel and a half-truth masquerading as the whole truth becomes a complete untruth. Thus, we appeal to men as if they all had the ability to receive Christ at any time. We speak of his redeeming work as if he had done no more by dying than making it possible. for us to save ourselves by believing.

We speak of God’s love as if it were no more than the general willingness to receive any who will turn and trust. And we depict the father and the son not as sovereignly acting and drawing sinners to themselves, but as waiting in quiet impotence at the door of our hearts for us to let them in. It is undeniable that this is how we preach. Perhaps this is what we really believe. But it needs to be said with emphasis that this set of twisted halftruths is something other than the biblical gospel.

The Bible is against us when we preach in this way. And the fact that such preaching has become almost standard practice among us only shows how urgent it is that we should review this matter. To recover the old authentic biblical gospel and to bring our preaching and practice back into line with it is perhaps our most pressing present need. Our most pressing doesn’t need. We want to look at the scriptures or how we’re to do things.

And the scriptures would begin by saying that in the proclamation of the gospel, the deep things of God supposedly that we’re not supposed to talk about until people are quite mature in Christ, his sovereignty, their inability, the atonement of Christ just for his people. These things are part of the biblical gospel in the preaching of evangelism. And they are effective and they’ve been effective in the past as well.

David Brainerd, who was the great evangelist of American Indians in 1745 spoke of the amazing revival that came to the Indians under his preaching concerning the way in which he preached. He said this, “Those doctrines which had the most direct tendency to humble the fallen creature, to show him the misery of his natural state, to bring him down to the root of sovereign mercy, and to exalt the great redeemer, discover his transcendent excellency were the subject matter of what was delivered.

We trust God for the results. And God says when we do these things in the power of preaching the full gospel of God, he will indeed produce wonderful things in the context of our lives. So I hope you’re seeing a little bit of the difference here. You know, we could just stop with what we’ve taught in the Bible about the nature of man, depravity, election, limited atonement, and say this must be, you know, part of what we preach is the gospel.

This is the good news. And we could say that we preach the sovereignty of God of the inability of man and this is what evangelism is that would be enough but we want to look specifically at Acts chapter 2 and see how this works now first of all in your outline then I have preparation for evangelism so there’s a message that’s preached at the center but there’s preparation before evangelism and then there’s the results after evangelism is preached there’s the product of evangelism we could say preparation for evangelism involves prayer.

We read that, you know, the disciples were in the upper room. They were praying continually. Jesus had said to wait for a particular moment, a time would come when the spirit would be given. They were to pray that might happen. And we blow by this, but we shouldn’t. Evangelism is preceded by active prayer of the people. I heard last week D. Duke from Jefferson, Oregon. excellent talk by him both to a group of pastors and later at the worship service here in Oregon City.

The orderly one and their church does I think 10 days of prayer leading up to Pentecost and they do pretty much around the clock praying and things seem strange to us but I think we could learn from this that if evangelism is to be central to what we do as a church it has to it then will force us to become systematic in how many hours of prayer we end up praying I mean there’s no set amount that’s right or wrong but what I’m saying is that evangelism is preceded by prayer Why?

Because evangelism is the task of God and the Holy Spirit. It’s that we can’t do it in our own ability. And as we’ll see, there’s things we need before the word goes forth. So there’s the essence, there’s the importance of prayer. Secondly, it’s preceded by the unity. they’re all together in one place. Pray and then evangelism happens as a result there. So the evangelism of the church results from prayer and unity.

Now at the end of the text, we read about the unity of the church as well. And it’s says that they were all together, they were having a great time, they were a really living body, caring for one another on the particular exigencies of the time, selling their property, etc. And we read at the end of this chapter, well, let’s just look at it. I’m going to focus on proclamation in the middle, but I want to show that there are other types of evangelism going on in this very text.

And at the end of it, the last verses we read, verse 45, 46, continuing daily with one accord in the temple and breaking bread from house to house. So worship and then moving out into the into their homes. They ate their food with gladness and simplicity of heart, praising God and having favor with all the people. And the Lord added to the church daily those who are being saved. Now this is presence evangelism.

Some have named it. This is what you might call lifestyle evangelism. This unity of the church precedes the proclamation. But then after the proclamation, the unity of the church itself is evangelistic. But notice this unity here is what’s stressed. Lifestyle evangelism according to Acts chapter 2 is the lifestyle of the community, not the individual. You know how lifestyle, you know, I said that Arminianism keeps fragmenting everything up into pieces, right?

It breaks apart the idea of the covenantal fall of mankind and Adam. It breaks men into certain areas that are fallen and not fallen. He becomes against himself eventually. Well, the biblical message is that God has brought community. We tend to think of presence evangelism or lifestyle evangelism. As I go out and I show my neighbor what a great guy I am and I got a great wife and kids and he wants a great wife and kids and if I just live a little better than my neighbor, he’s going to ask me what’s going on.

I’m going to say Jesus. Now, that may happen. I hope it does. But that’s not what happens in Acts. The presence or lifestyle evangelism in Acts is the result of the community obviously and visibly living together in the midst of the culture. It’s the lifestyle of the church is a corporate unity, not just the worship of the church. The community of the church in the context of the world on our strategy map which is based on the Great Commission.

That’s how important we think it is. All right. the last of those four things is community to have joyful community and have an impact upon our community. That’s evangelism. That’s the lifestyle evangelism that Acts chapter 2 talks about. It’s not individualistic. It’s corporate. And it means that you know what we do now is we either go into the world individually and we just do our thing in the midst of everybody else and we feel guilty because our lifestyle our presence evangelism didn’t have much effect.

Well, it’s not supposed to. It’s supposed to be the church as a community. Or when we get apart from the church, the community stuff we do is all cloistered up. We don’t we’re not in the world and we don’t want to be of the world. But the Bible says we’re supposed to be in that world. And specifically, I think what’s going on in Acts two is that promise of Jesus that the world will know that you’re a Christian.

by your love. This will be the great event, one of the great evangelistic methods is the love, the care of the church for her members, their fellowship. They’re helping each other out. They don’t ever see it. So, we’ve cut off one of the major sources of presence evangelism, lifestyle evangelism by failing to have Christian community lived in the context of our culture. Let me just give a practical example here.

And I don’t want I’m not, you know, I praise God for what we’ve done so far. I give examples and, you know, I don’t even want you to feel bad, but for instance, you got a sports team, right? One way of presence evangelism I think would be incorrect is to say, “I’m going to go play on the city league team. I’ll be a Christian. I’ll be a great guy. They’ll see my little light and they’ll ask me about Jesus.” May work, but that’s not what you talked about in Acts.

You want to have a Christian softball team. But the other error you could fall into is we’re going to have an RCC team, but we’re only going to play in church leagues. You see, an RCC team has the capability of showing community, care, love, fellowship, what this world sees less and less of all the time, okay? To live our lives of hope, even in the context of our recreation in the context of the world.

So maybe we should think about having a, you know, churches have softball teams in city leagues. Do you see what the see that? So you can think about that in lots of different areas in your lives. How can you move your relationships with Christians instead of being cloistered in the context of the week into more obvious places where the world can see what’s going on. It’s hard because we have fragmented communities.

Now, we’ve tried to think of a parish model and families are moving into Oregon City. We’ve joined the Chamber of Commerce. There’s stuff we’re thinking about doing, but what I’m saying is that in Acts, presence, evangelism on the part of the group is quite important, okay? In the world, but not of the world. You know, we look at movies and we go to movies and that’s a good thing. I think we’re supposed to be in the world analyzing the culture, thinking about it.

But do we go to movies as Christians and wanting to think about them in a Christian way or we just taking in whatever the world thinks is funny? We need 100-enters and 100-enters everything they do. Now, I’m not saying you can’t have fun, laugh at the jokes, sure, but there’s a sense in which you’re evaluating things from a Christian perspective. And then your discussion of those movies, church has a group discussion time of movies.

Let’s say do it with the world. Invite them in the context of what we do. Try to think of ways to bring the corporate culture of RCC into the visible presence of the extended community in Oregon City. That’s presence lifestyle evangelism in the book of Acts. You know, we’re having this marriage seminar where this peacemaker stuff is going to be taught again in September. And you know, we’re going to have hopefully 200 people at this church.

Hopefully a lot of them from outside of this church. Hopefully some of you attend. but seminar will be on conflict resolution and marriage. It’ll be put on by a man from Peacemakers will be speaking should be quite good a top quality production. and what we want to do now if anything is when we want to invite the neighbors in the immediate vicinity of this church to this event. People have difficult marriages.

They might want to come in here. How can I stop fighting with my wife? You see, they may not want to come, you know, to some of our celebrations that are so obviously, you know, church oriented. That’s a good thing too to live our celebrations in the context of the community. But things like this seminar may be an immediate application of this as well. So there’s presence evangelism. Prayer and unity are behind much of what’s going on here.

Okay. Providence. There’s another type of evangelism that people see in the book of Acts known as power evangelism. What that means is something big happens and then you come along and proclaim the gospel and persuade men. So you got presence evangel. We’ll talk about that. Proclamation evangelism is what’s going on in the text before us. Persuasion evangelism tries to reason with people and it usually is it always is connected up to proclamation.

But then there’s this idea of power evangelism. A great powerful event happens and that’s what happens here. Miracle happens and then in the basis of that miracle they speak about the gospel. So a power event happens the spirit does something fantastic and then interpret the events for those who are in the subjects the recipients of the powerful thing going on. So proclamation is set up by power and we can see this throughout Acts actually you know Philippian jailer there’s a powerful unusual earthquake that releases God’s prisoners and on the basis of that power now they’ve got the attention of the jailer and they witness to him in the context of that power event Lystra they go there and they’re trying to evangelize but what really spurs things on is they heal a guy a miraculous healing and then the people try to worship them as gods and they say don’t do that you know God will kill you if you do that.

You got to believe in Jesus. So, their proclamation evangelism is set up by specific events of healing. And this happens a number of times in the book of Acts. Now, we’re probably not going to get that. we’re probably not going to have these kind of miraculous events, but if we think of them as the providence of God for that particular time, God had created events to set up their evangelism. Okay? He had provided a context for their proclamation.

And that context in part was what they were waiting for and praying for. They’re praying. They’re building their unity. You know, this is another thing. We look at Peter’s sermon and we think of evangelists, individual evangelists out evangelizing. No, there are a bunch of people that the spirit came upon. A bunch of them. And there were at least 11 that were actually involved in this proclamation. And if you look through the book of Acts carefully, you’ll see corporate evangelizing going on.

In other words, Paul doesn’t go up by himself. So, you need a group of people presenting the gospel. Some will take precedence in terms of the explanation of scripture, whatever it is, but a group. So, the prayer is waiting for the pro praying for the providential event that God will bring along to them. And while they’re praying, they’re building their unity together through that prayer. And on the basis of that, they then use that opportunity that they’ve been praying for.

The providence of God happens and they proclaim this command. and reformed Dort Calvinistic gospel. That’s what it says. They command men to repent. So proclamation is set up by providence. Now the same thing’s true in our day and age. We’re not going to get miracles, but we can certainly pray for providential opportunities to share the gospel in the context of what’s difficult. And all you got to do is pick up the Oregonian every day.

years ago, a charismatic man we had here in the pulpit said, “You know what God does is he’s plowing things up. And what you see in the papers usually is where God is plowing. And when God plows, it’s to create something to grow up there. You know, a lot of people wear red poppies tomorrow, right? They don’t anymore. When I was a kid, everybody wear a poppy. You know, the poppy, the corn poppy,, grew in the trenches that were dug up by the bombs.

The bombs would, you know,, Flanders Field is where the great poem about the red poppies involved. But wherever the bombs would go in Europe, see, the, It would dig up the soil. The seeds of the corn poppy would receive light and they would grow up. Death gives way to life. So there was plowing and then the seed was allowed to grow in the context of the plowing. Well, the same thing’s true with us., one of the areas that’s being plowed right now is global warming.

How do you take care of the planet? And we, you see, we see this stuff and we get ticked off because it’s always liberals promoting these agendas. But think about the providence of God behind the liberals giving us an opportunity to address a specific issue from a distinctively biblical perspective. The stewardship ordinance is the answer to the problem of environmentalism and stewardship over the culture.

Now there’s two ditches. There’s the liberal ditch which is the stewardship. We don’t have anything to change. We just take care of the earth as it was. In fact, we get rid of every all people and civilization. But the other ditch is the conservative unchristian ditch. We just rip every resource we can out of the thing and when it’s all pitmin well know that’ll be the problem of our grandkids and this is the way a lot of business worked for a while now probably mostly ignorance and maybe some of that’s anecdotal stories that aren’t really true but it is certainly true that we could take that approach to our environment and not extra concise care right over it and the biblical answer is somewhere in between the stewardship ordinance you know that we’re improving ing what we have.

We don’t take raw grain. We improve it. We bring it into the worship of God. yada yada. Genesis, you know, Dominion, all that stuff. It’s obvious once you start the thoughts flowing which way we’re going to go with this thing. And we have our own Mars Hill discussion group set up on internet cafes and email sites and blogs and now Twitters and everything else you can think of. We got this mechanism to enter into this dialogue from a Christian perspective.

Now again in Acts the entering into it is corporate entering in and it is backed by prayer and unity. But the point is we can pray for providential events to happen that this church might evangelize as a group and we can look at the providential events where God is plowing up the ground and we can come along and plant the seeds of the gospel in environmentalism, the war in Iraq, whatever it might be that comes up on the papers.

So prayer, unity, and waiting on the providence of God. And now let’s talk a little bit about the actual proclamation now that it’s time to end the sermon. But we can do this real quick. Maybe I can come back to it. That’s okay. Okay. The message of evangelism. So we have the preparation. Now what’s the process itself mean? We could say now this method is to people of the book. It’s different, right? You have to know who you’re talking to.

Here Peter is talking to people who had an old had commitment to Old Testament. He uses the Old Testament in his reasoning with them. When Paul talks to the men at Lystra who are pure pagans, he doesn’t bring in the scriptures as a tempter butress his claim. When he’s at Mars Hill, he knows the poets of their age, the philosophers of their age, and brings in them. So, this particular sermon is not the end all and be all of evangelism, but it is evangelism to people of the book.

And so, it shows us immediately a sensitiz have a sensitivity to the cultural context of our evangelism. And notice that what Peter first of all does is he gets a hold he grabs the attention of the hearers. He says to him, “Listen to me.” See, he gets their attention before he starts to speak. And while we can, you know, just kind of go by that quickly, the point is that’s what he does. remember that according to God and the Canons of Dort and follow God’s word.

This is going to happen through the human voice articulating speech to others. But in order to communicate, it has to resonate on their earbones and you have to have their mind thinking. So he gets the attention of the men. Secondly, he applies the word to the times. So again, we’re not going to have you know this kind of miracle happen, but we’re going to have things going on in the context of our lives that we can take the word of God and apply it to it.

Now, if we’re talking to Christians, if we’re talking to the 1% instead of the 100 percenters, right? The vast unwashed evangelicals who maybe have never really been brought to saving faith in Christ at all, quite frankly. It’s another gospel. It’s their choice. They just have a house. The house is great, but they need a chapel on the top of the house of their lives. Biblical evangelism tears it right down to the floorboards and takes out the floorboards and lays the foundation of Jesus.

So, we’re going to have a lot of Christians in our day and age sort of like these guys that were being spoken to. And when we see that and we see what the issues of the day are that’s when we press home the claims of the sovereign God to those sort of people as well. The word of God is applied to the situation, applied to the times. That means we need to know the Bible. We need to know the times. We got to have both those things in there.

third, he speaks historical facts about Jesus. At the very center of the whole chapter, at the at the core center of the chapter, he says, “Now listen to these words. It this is repeated several times throughout it. God wants us to see that emphasis. We’re supposed to be speaking. We’re getting their attention. We’re telling the importance of the words we’re saying. We want them to listen. Then we be good to talk to a child who’s not looking at you.

Then we get good to talk to a child whose ears are closed. Okay? Get their attention. Shama, big ears. And at the center of this, what they’re to give heed to, what he seizes them for the opportunity of speaking about is the historical realities of Jesus Christ. That he was crucified. That he was raised up. the historical facts of Jesus. And so evangelism has as its core speaking to people the historical realities of the Christian faith.

We recite the apostles creed, the nine creed, the historical facts. Christianity is not an ideology. If we don’t keep to the historical facts, that’s what it becomes, a philosophy. We don’t want to have a man add a second story philosophy to his house. We want to rip it down to the bottom. And the bottom, the new foundation is the historical actions of the Lord Jesus Christ. So he does that. He and then finally he or not finally the next thing he does is present the arrest warrant for a death penalty crime.

You know we sell Jesus like soap. Many people do. He doesn’t sell Jesus. what he does instead is he indictes the people. He tells them and notice he doesn’t hold back from the truth of revealing who God is. God sovereignty sovereignly his determined for has brought this to pass. God is sovereign. and you kill Jesus. Ultimately, God was working through that to affect salvation for his people. So, he doesn’t hold back from declaring the sovereignty of God.

But he also doesn’t hold back from declaring their responsibilities before this sovereign God. You killed him. That’s part of the message of evangelism. Your sins, you know, is what led him to go to the cross. So, the culpability of the people, you are in rebellion against God. God, the road you’re headed is to hell. I am here not to try to tease you into accepting Jesus and trying him out to get a better marriage.

I am here to deliver. Now, it can be delivered in different ways. I’m here to give you a warrant for your arrest. And this warrant for your arrest tells you that you have dishonored God. You spit on his son. You’ve walked in disobedience and unthankfulness. You’re headed to death, eternal death, forever. I’m going to give you an indictment here, a warrant for your arrest. It’s a death penalty crime. And then he goes on to assure them that Jesus Christ is judge and king.

He’s going to bring it to pass. He’s at the right hand of the father. He’s there until all his enemies. He made his footstool. So he brings home judgment to people in the proclamation of his gospel. He says, “Look, before it was different. Now he’s telling you people that if you don’t repent, he’s going to bring judgment upon your head. The New Testament is not nicer times than the Old Testament.” Paul says, It’s worse times.

He says the same thing in Lystra to non-Jews. He says, “Look, God used to ignore some of this stuff that the nations did, your idolatry and stuff, but no more. He’s appointed a day in which he’s going to judge the earth now. Since Jesus comes, this the message of evangelism doesn’t get easier. It gets harder for people. They’re brought to a death penalty and then they get the assurance that Jesus Christ is going to send them to hell unless they repent.

There is an absolute promise of the judgment of God. upon them except they repent and are baptized. So he calls them to their responsibility for their sins. Even a even as he’s asserting the sovereignty of God, he’s preparing the elect among them for 100 enter life with deep reverence, deep seeking for the glory of God, deep repentance from sins, deep commitment to following Jesus in every area of his life to preparing people to be in the world but not of the world.

And he does this through the proclamation handing them a death warrant and then assuring them that Jesus is going to bring this warrant to pass. He brings them to the and as I said we don’t have time to look at it but you go out throughout the book of Acts here you’re talking to Jews in Lystra you’re talking to other people but the message is always the same you’re dying the judgment of God is upon you proclamation evangelism can be buttressed by persuasion but persuasion but without proclamation is no evangelism proclamation of the historical facts of Christ, the responsibility of men, the sovereignty of God, and their obligation.

They are commanded to repent. They’re commanded to repent. And that’s consistent throughout the book of Acts. And on the basis of that,, men come to faith. So, the assertion of the present reign of King Jesus, this one, you know, who you’ve offended, is reigning. And then a call to repentance. So, he doesn’t call them to accept Jesus into their life. He calls them to repent at the very bottom of who they are.

He calls them to rip down their house and say the whole thing’s been built in rebellion to the Lord Jesus Christ. He calls them to repentance, a complete change of mind and actions about their lives. And then finally, he calls them to baptism, forgiveness of sins, and spirit empowerment. We think about Pentecost as kind of an ecstatic day and people, you know, wildly, you know, saying things and irresponsibility and the spirit comes and makes us do all kinds of weird things like he did with Saul and stuff.

But no, the spirit comes on the day of the giving of God’s law. The spirit comes to call men to responsible living in the present as new converts to the faith of the Lord Jesus Christ. And there is no Christian on the day of Pentecost that doesn’t get baptized. Baptism is part of the deal. Baptism is union with Christ. Union with Christ is everything in the proclamation of the gospel. So, You don’t call people just to repent.

You call them to repentance and then baptism. And then you’ll find out whether they’re willing to submit to the waters of baptism where they’ve really repented or not. And the other thing baptism does, it joins them to the corporate body of Christ. And that’s the result. That’s the product. 3,000 were added to the rolls of the church. The product of evangelism is not a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.

Okay? The product of evangelism is not a personal relation relationship with Jesus Christ. Now, it is that there is a personal relationship, but that’s not all it is, and that’s not primarily what it is. The personal relationship with Jesus Christ is mediated in the context of the corporate relationship with Jesus Christ. Our relationship to Jesus is by way of the church. You’re brought into that community.

You’re enrolled. You’re not just left to go out on your own. We have good reason to doubt the salvation of men, no matter how earnest or zealous they may appear to be, but who are not good church members. Now, we have good reason to doubt the salvation of good church members who live, you know, not committed to Christ as well. So, I’m not falling into one ditch or the other, but I’m saying that the result of Arminianism has been an individualized you choose Jesus kind of gospel and evangelism.

And it’s resulted in an individual relationship with Jesus. And that’s the only thing that really counts. The heart is deceitful above all things. And the Bible makes clear we have that old Adamic heart still with us. We’re to put it off, but it remains there. We continue to think of ourselves as the center. We continue to want to be by ourselves. We continue to want to determine for ourselves what’s right and wrong.

We’re going to be like that in Christ unless we do what this text says. We’re enrolled to the church. And in the context of that, we’re brought into the host, the army of God. And that army marches forth and gets more converts because the text goes on to say that they then live in community together and the result of that living in community is people will see the love they have for one another and God adds to their number daily.

Proclamation evangelism is not you know it’s a it’s a stinging indictment against marketing sort of selling Jesus like soap and having a truncated gospel produces truncated Christians and it produces the kind of culture that we have today. The preaching of the full gospel fully proclaiming the sovereignty of God, the responsibility of men, Christ’s death for his people on the cross, calling men not just to invite Jesus into their hearts and have a personal relationship, but calling on men to repent and to be baptized as part of the body of Jesus Christ.

This produces the kind of evangelism downstream that the rest of the chapter talks about. You see, one source of evangelism produces a culture in decline. godly evangelism. Evangelism done in the context of the teaching of God’s word. We’re people of the book. Yeah. We want to fulfill the Great Commission, but we don’t want to study modern marketing techniques in terms of how to bring it out. We want to study the scriptures.

And the scriptures are replete with evidences of evangelism. And this evidence of Acts chapter 2, the beginning of the evangelization of the church, the beginning of the fulfillment of the Great Commission begins with preparation through prayer and the unity of the church, looking for the pro providence of God to address particular times of trouble and distress for a people. And into that trouble and distress, the sure word of God is proclaimed.

His sovereignty is proclaimed. Man’s responsibility is proclaimed. Man has not sold a bill to help him get better. He’s sold instead a death warrant. He’s given a death warrant from God and says the only way he can escape that death warrant is through belief in the Lord Jesus Christ. And Jesus is reigning now and he’s going to destroy everybody that doesn’t repent. Repent. You’re commanded to repent. And that repentance is evidenced in a complete change of life, a destruction of his old house, not building upon his logic, a personal relationship with Jesus in his own private little chapel of the of the house of his life, but rather being united to the body of Christ, which then through its presence evangelism completes and continues the Great Commission.

May the Lord God grant us today a renewed commitment to prayer, to unity, and to corporate presence in the context of this culture and to making good use of the opportunities that God and his providence provides to bring proclamation evangelism in the context of our day and age. This is what Pentecost says about evangelism. Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for this day. We thank you, Father, for the clarity of your word.

forgive us, Lord God, that we just don’t slow down and look at this stuff very often and learn from your word and by your spirit. We thank you that your spirit brings the word to us again. and creates a law-abiding host, an army. Doesn’t remove men from the difficulties of their lives, but he makes them more than conquerors through the power of Jesus Christ in his church. Thank you, Lord God, for this text.

May we as we come forward commit ourselves afresh to prayer, to unity, to looking for your providence, and thinking of ways to live our lives corporately in the midst of this culture. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.