Dennis Tuuri

# Motivations to Appeal to in Evangelism

Uh, I’m going to be talking about mostly some terms in the first part of the sermon found in Psalm 51, verses 1 and 2, but I thought it’d be good to write it in context. Our message today—I apologize if the title looks inappropriately typed—is about motivations to appeal to in evangelism. So while we’re doing evangelism, what are the motivations of people that we are to appeal to? And what I’ll be saying today is that they’re diverse.

Just like last week, we talked about listening and putting the gospel in a particular context and setting that we’re encountering people in, and how that changes throughout Paul’s addresses in Acts. So we’re saying today that the basic motivation that seems to be kind of front and center—they are very diverse. The end goal isn’t, but the motivations are. And so that’s what I mean by “in evangelism.” While we’re doing evangelism, these are motives to appeal to.

And the first three of those motives on your outline are fear, guilt, and sin. And those relate to three specific Hebrew terms in Psalm 51, verses 1 and 2. But overall, we’ll use Psalm 51. Even though it’s not evangelism in the tightest sense of the term, it really ends with David’s commitment to evangelism and it shows us the motivations that God used to bring David to that point. So while the direct application of the sermon is to how we look for different motivations with people we’re talking to, at the same time these are motivations that move us in terms of our sanctification and our praise of God for what he’s done.

Okay, so long introduction—we’ll read Psalm 51. Please stand for the reading of God’s word. Psalm 51, to the chief musician, a psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet went to him after he had gone in to Bathsheba.

“Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your loving kindness, according to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions. Wash me thoroughly from mine iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. For I acknowledge my transgressions, and my sin is always before me. Against you, you only have I sinned and done this evil in your sight, that you may be found just when you speak and blameless when you judge. Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin my mother conceived me. Behold, you desire truth in the inward parts, and in the hidden part you will make me to know wisdom. Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. Make me hear joy and gladness, that the bones you have broken may rejoice. Hide your face from my sins and blot out all my iniquities. Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a steadfast spirit within me. Do not cast me away from your presence and do not take your Holy Spirit from me. Restore to me the joy of your salvation and uphold me by your generous spirit. Then I will teach transgressors your ways, and sinners shall be converted to you. Deliver me from the guilt of bloodshed, O God, the God of my salvation, and my tongue shall sing aloud of your righteousness. O Lord, open my lips, and my mouth shall show forth your praise. For you do not desire sacrifice, or else I would give it. You do not delight in burnt offering. The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart. These, O God, you will not despise. Do good in your good pleasure to Zion. Build the walls of Jerusalem. Then you shall be pleased with the sacrifices of righteousness, with burnt offering and whole burnt offering. Then they shall offer bulls on your altar.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for your most holy word and the beauty of it. We pray you would bless us, Lord God, with the consideration of these texts and others as we think about how to talk to our neighbors, our co-workers, our friends and relatives about the Lord Jesus Christ, how to talk about the good news of what he has done. Thank you for all the things he’s delivered us from. Help us to consider those today as well, but guide us particularly with an understanding of the appeals that we’re to make to people in different settings. In Jesus’ name we ask it, and for the sake of the manifestation and growth of that visible manifestation of his kingdom, we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

So this Psalm 51, obviously—it’s what we always think of it as a penitential psalm. Of course it is. But it moves in the end to David’s desire to evangelize. We could say to proclaim forth the praises of God. He’ll teach sinners the way and then bring them to God in worship. So we could look at that again and talk about preconditions for evangelism. And one of them is this relationship we have with the Holy Spirit and our own personal holiness.

But David will take the lessons he’s relearned through this experience and will bring those lessons to those he’s going to speak to. And then notice the psalm doesn’t end there—like so much of American evangelicalism does. It doesn’t end with personally sharing the gospel and peacefully becoming Christians apart from their corporate identity with the church of Jesus Christ. It talks about Zion and the walls of Jerusalem. These were—you know, when we read the Psalms, we have to understand what that means. And what that means is the church. And so what David at the end—his great goal is really the wellbeing of the church of Jesus Christ. That’s what he’s prophesying about. That’s what he’s talking about. And so it tells us that evangelism is founded on these various appeals, but it’s not just to relate people to Jesus individually. Somehow that isn’t really the fullness of the gospel. The fullness of the gospel is relating to Christ by becoming part of his body, the church.

I stress this because the church is going away. I don’t know if you’ve noticed or not, but in America, the church is disappearing. And I mean, now it’s gotten to the place in Portland—one of the vanguards of this kind of movement—that the church literally disappears on Sunday. They’ll close down. “We don’t want to go to church. We want to be the church in the community.” And there’s a proper instinct of being the church, of course, but to see that in opposition to the corporate worship of the church? The church as an institution is failing dramatically in this country. There’s a Jay-Z song called “No Church in the Wild.” And you know, when there is no church, it is wild. And the devolution of the culture is accompanied by a breakdown of the people of God, the institutional church.

And so evangelism doesn’t stop for David with just getting them in right relationship with God. He wants them rightly related to the people of God. All right. So we want to talk about this and relate it to these motivations.

Now, this list on your outline is not mine. Completely lifted from D.A. Carson. Carson’s a Reformed Baptist, but of excellent exegesis of scriptures. I think he’s written 57 books. Many of them have been translated into Chinese. So he’s got that kind of ministry going on. He is like a research associate at a seminary—yes, I think a seminary in New Testament. Very interesting fellow, and you know, I don’t agree with everything he says obviously, but he’s, you know, and I think he was one of the founding members of the Gospel Coalition. You know, him and Piper are tight and all that stuff, and Keller. So D.A. Carson had this list and this article that I cite for you on your outline.

“Pensées,” by the way, is just thoughts or reflections. So “pastoral thoughts or reflections.” And in this particular article that Carson wrote, he’s talking about preaching. So in his circles in theology, evangelism primarily happens in the worship service. Our view is the worship service is for saints, not primarily for evangelizing. Although we can’t, you know, obviously whenever you proclaim the gospel, it’s the good news. But there—preaching for conversion. And what he’s saying is that for pastors, motivations to appeal to are different that we can deduce from scripture. And he comes up with a list of eight of them. They’re not comprehensive. They’re not listed, he says, in any particular order, although I think the first three are significant. We’ll talk about those more than the last ones.

So this is with the sources of these. And actually, I was pointed to this article again by Timothy Keller’s book, Center Church. In his chapter on biblical contextualization, he talks about this list. He truncates it to six elements, but I thought Carson’s original list of eight was actually better. And so we’re using Carson’s list of eight motives to appeal to in people when we’re sharing the gospel.

So again, the context for this: a year and a half ago, we believe God moved through the leaders of the church who met, came up with some initiatives for our church over the next couple of years. And one of those initiatives had to do with growth. We see kind of an area where we haven’t done as well as we could—evangelism. One of the reasons for the community groups was to set up accountability and training mechanisms to try to encourage people in their one-on-one sharing of the gospel with friends, relatives, neighbors, etc. And so these sermons I’m doing have to do with that and helping to prepare us.

So last week we talked about, you know, how everybody’s different and cultures are different. We’re going to talk about that again today. But when Paul presents the gospel, it’s different. Different authorities are cited. He presents God first in the pagan cultures rather than getting right at Jesus with the biblically literate cultures, etc. So this is along that same line, and it’s preparation then for us as we go about and prepare ourselves to evangelize.

I think I’m thinking about preparing an evaluation form that we would like to know—I would like to know—how many people in how many community groups actually have done this step that we wanted done this year: naming one person that they hope to evangelize this year and want prayer for and help doing so. But if you’ve done that, then these sermons are particularly useful to you, I think, and today’s will be trying to figure out the person you’re talking to and what particular motivations you might want to look at.

Okay, so that’s the idea here. You know, it’s sort of like the Bible says to leaders, “Don’t be like the Gentiles who lord it over people.” So I could preach on not lording it over people—heavy-handed leadership. The Bible also says, “Submit to the authorities.” And so you could preach on submission to authorities, right? And depending on what group you’re talking to, you might want to do one and not the other for a while.

So if you have a group, an Asian group for instance, that’s highly structured in terms of their authority structures, probably if you preach on the need to be submissive to authorities, some of them will start doing that in a somewhat negative way. They’ll be too passive in their relationship to the governing authorities. Not so in America, but in certain other cultures, this is generally the case. And so you would probably want more in those audiences to preach about not lording it over people—because the authority structures are so established from their pre-Christian days that this is part of who they are.

So that’s an example of thinking about what you’re saying to people and where they’re at. These things are complementary in the Bible, but that assumes a particular audience to present them.

Okay. So let’s look at these motivations. Well, actually, we’re going to talk about the first three with an introduction by talking about specific words in Psalm 51 and another psalm from scripture. It’s found in the scriptures.

So the first three motivations on your list of eight are fear, guilt, and shame. Right now, if you have your orders of worship, open them up to the prayer of confession that we just recited together. Please do that. Now, I wrote this prayer and it’s a bit clunky. It’s probably too teachy, but I want you to understand why I wrote it and how it relates to this topic of motivations both for evangelizing people and for our own sanctification.

Now, in Psalm 51, here’s what we read in verse 1. He says, “Have mercy upon me, O God, according to your loving kindness, according to the multitude of your tender mercies, blot out my transgressions.” So transgressions—what are transgressions, sins, and iniquity? These are the three words that David uses here. And what are those words? Are they just synonyms? No, they’re not. A transgression is sometimes translated “trespass.” It means a violation of a law—either, you know, by omission or commission, but you violate God’s law. So it’s the actual violation of the law that transgression is referring to. So David is first saying he did something wrong. He committed adultery—that’s the specific transgression.

Then he says, “Wash me thoroughly from my iniquity.” Is iniquity the same as transgression? No. Iniquity—if you study the Hebrew term—has the context of liability for punishment. So, I also need to be cleansed not just of the disobedience, but I know that when I break God’s word, now that I’m an adulterer, I have iniquity involved in my life. I’m liable to be punished. You have—I have—I have a liability to properly be punished by you for my transgression. You see the difference?

Okay? And then he says, “In addition to transgressions and iniquities, he says cleanse me from my sin.” Now we get this word. This is the biggest word we tend to put everything up into this word “sin.” But that’s not what it means primarily in the Old Testament. The particular Hebrew term here relates back to the sin offering in Leviticus. And the sin offering was to purify the worshipper and the worshipper’s environment from the uncleanness that our sin creates. So the idea is that, you know, somebody sins, they get a blotch on them. They’re liable to get punished by God, but they also walk around, you know, with shame because they got a big—their garments are dirty—and that dirt is referred to as sin in the Old Testament. So that creates this condition of impurity.

So the point here is that there’s true guilt, right? And there’s fear for punishment for that guilt, and there’s shame based upon that transgression and that guilt.

Okay. So the first three motivations that you can appeal to are related together by David here and many places in the scripture. So if you look at this prayer that I just asked you to turn to—you know what do we say here? “We confess that we have broken your law, what we have done and what we have left undone.” That’s the transgression or trespass part of what the Old Testament teaches about these three major aspects of fallenness.

Then we say, “We confess that these trespasses, apart from your grace, result in our impurity and also make us liable to receive your punishments.” So our transgressions also create—they create sins. They create impurity, and it creates iniquity. We’re going to be punished for them. Okay? That’s the purpose of that sentence—to relate what the Bible says about our fallenness and the effects of it.

Then our prayer goes on to say, “We confess our sins.” That’s the impurity part. And “ask that you wash us from our impurities through the cleansing blood of Jesus Christ.” One of the wonderful things that Jesus does—he restores; he washes away our shame, our sense of impurity or uncleanness, right? He takes care of our shame. And then we say, “We acknowledge our iniquities. We acknowledge these things produce a liability for punishment. Ask that you shield us from punishment through the atoning death of our savior.”

And that’s another great thing that Jesus did. He took the punishment for our sins, right? He died instead of us dying, right? So that’s what that word means. In the original, I probably should have done this: when I originally wrote it on a page, it had these sections kind of spaced out from one another. And when we put it in a page, it all runs together, probably in your mind it all runs together. But they’re meant to talk about specific aspects of the human psyche.

Really, when you come here, you know, we come to Jesus us. We know we’ve done some trespasses. We feel ashamed, unclean because of those trespasses. And we know we feel kind of fearful, too. So we have guilt, shame, and fear as we come before God acknowledging our trespasses, our sins, and our iniquities. Get it?

And if you don’t, take this thing home today, think about it. If you got any questions, call me. Get together and talk about it.

And then it says, “From our violations of your just law, forgive us. This is the trespass—through the perfect obedience of Jesus, right? He took the punishment for our sins. He became ashamed so that we didn’t—our shame could be removed. And he was perfectly obedient in terms of washing away our disobedience. And then we, you know—then the rest of the prayer is a prayer that God would be with us in this worship service because we’re seeking the visible manifestation of Christ’s kingdom on earth.

That’s our goal. That’s what this church is. We’re going to have a 30th birthday party Friday night. That’s how we got started. And I’m telling you, it’s not the goal of a lot of people today, may not be the goal of some people in this church or most people—I don’t know. But we’re looking not for the visible manifestation of the common good or doing a good witness as the world becomes evil and the rapture happens. That’s not what we are into. We believe Jesus came—just like we—and this morning with the citation from Isaiah repeated in Micah, that God is going to convert the whole earth. That’s what the program is. His kingdom will become manifested visibly. Jesus is already king of the earth, but it will become visible—the manifestation of it.

Okay? That’s the goal. And this prayer wanted that at the end—that the purpose of all these wonderful things that Jesus has done, removing our punishment, our impurity, and our actual transgression or violation of God’s law—the purpose of this is that’s what he’s doing with the world.

Okay. Now, this same thing—look at Psalm 32:5. Turn to Psalm 32:5. Let’s actually look at this just to show you that this is not just in Psalm 51. This is in other Psalms. This is a basic theme that runs throughout the scriptures. And it’s kind of nicely put together in a chiasm in Psalm 32:5.

Okay. “I acknowledge my sin to you. What’s sin? Impurities, uncleanness. That’s the aspect of it. Shame. And my iniquity—liability for punishment, fear that God is going to punish me. My iniquity I have not hidden. And I said, I will confess my transgressions. I broke your law one way or the other. Let’s say I violated your character. You know, I don’t want us to think in legalistic terms. We have not portrayed the image of God that we are by portraying his character. So we’ve done things wrong. We’ve broken his law. We violated his character. And you forgave my iniquity—liability for punishment, the iniquity of my sin, my impurities.”

Okay. That’s a chiasm, you know. So it goes sin, iniquity, transgression, iniquity, sin. The center of the thing, the reason why we become, you know, guilty and shameful—or rather shameful and fearful—is because of our guilt, our true guilt before God for not doing what he wants us to do. That’s the center of the thing. And it produces these other conditions.

Okay? So I hope that’s interesting to you. And I hope more than that, I hope it helps you to understand who you are, what your psyche is like. These are major things going on in our hearts and souls, and when we think about them and understand them, I think it helps us, and we’ll continue to work toward that end with the rest of the sermon.

All right. Now, going to the sermon then—these first three motivations sort of line up with those terms. Okay. So there’s eight things here, but the first three are kind of like can be thought of as a group—grouped together. What’s the first one? Fear. And this relates to iniquity, right?

Hebrews 2:14-18 says this: “Inasmuch then as the children have partaken of flesh and blood, he himself likewise shared in the same, that through death, he might destroy him who had the power of death, that is the devil, and release those who through fear of death were all their lifetime subject to bondage.”

Oh, that is a very important verse. You’ve heard me talk about it a lot over the last ten to fifteen years. Hobby Brooks, who’s here today, shared with me a video series on Eastern Orthodoxy, and I heard this guy talking about—it’s not peculiar to Eastern Orthodoxy, but that was where I first kind of thought about this—and he brought out the meaning of the text. But when I preach through Hebrews, it’s a very important text because it tells you that one of the reasons you sin—a very important reason you sin—is through fear, and specifically fear of death.

It’s iniquity. It’s that your trespasses of God’s law have properly left you properly fearful. But you, in your sinfulness, rather than repent of the trespass, me and you and our fallen condition—that fear results in our subjection to the man who has the power of death, who brought this into our lives, the devil. And it creates a sense of bondage in us, a bondage to sin.

So you know, one of—you have to understand—one of the biggest motivations you have to sin is fear. And when you get fearful in this sense of the term, you sin. So Jesus has come—this text tells us—to release us, to pay the price for our punishment, to suffer death for us. That’s why he takes human flesh. It says so that he can redeem us, and he can take the punishment for God that’s due to us, and he can release us from this fear of death. And the end result of that is we can serve him better. We can serve God better because now we’re not subject to slavery to sin because our fear of death has been definitively removed.

Now, if you don’t think about that, you know, it’s you still are going to do it. But if you appropriate that in your life—if you think about that—I don’t have to fear death right now. Death comes in many forms, and in a way shame is just another form of death. Death of relationships—we fear death of our reputation, you know—so this death works itself out in various ways, right? But the Bible says that is a big deal, and it’s a big motivating factor for us.

And when we talk to our friends about Jesus—the Bible says, whether they’re aware of it or not, you know, we suppress the truth in unrighteousness—but some of them will be aware of it. They’ll be aware of their fear. They may not understand what the fear is connected to. But their fear is what they need you to come alongside of them and say, “Hey, the good news is Jesus has died. So you don’t got to be fearful anymore.”

So the removal of fear is a primary motivating factor in the presentation of the gospel to people. Make sense?

Now, there’s a lot of other things going on, but this is one of them. This is a big one. And it’s a big one for you and me, brothers and sisters. You know, if we see things difficult around us and we become fearful that death is going to reign in relationships, family structures, work, whatever it is, we become fearful. But Jesus has died once for all and taken away the fear of death. Now, we’re going to go through death still. He’s not saying you never die. You do encounter death. Each of us will die literally, but he’s transformed that by removing the fear of it. To us, death is just a precursor to resurrection.

And if we take that into our lives, everything changes, right? You know, we go through death-like experiences. I go through nine months of weirdness with my legs. But if I keep to heart—and I didn’t a lot of the times—but when I did, I don’t have to be fearful of that. And if I become fearful that death is going to control me, then I’m going to sin.

Okay? I hope that makes sense. Fear, iniquity, liability for punishment. Jesus specifically has come so that he would release us from bondage to sin and fear of death.

So one of the big things when you talk to people about Jesus—that some of them, one of the things that’s talked about—Paul does this. We’ll look at as we go through those sermons in Acts or not sermons but presentations of the gospel—he uses fear sometimes. Okay? That’s part of what he does.

Okay, the next one: the burden of guilt. So you may not be really focusing on being fearful. You know, there’s a lot of fear in our culture, and there’s a lot. You know, you have this whole anxiety thing going on where you’ve got unspecified fear. It kind of localizes in panic attacks, which I’ve had. There’s this generalized fear that fills our culture. Why wouldn’t it? As the culture moves away from Jesus, the one who took care of death, which is related to fear and sin, of course, the culture is going to become more fearful, angst-ridden.

Look at the Middle East culture, and all you see is fear and conspiracy thinking in every direction. So you know, it’s a big deal, and you don’t want to miss looking for it, at least in the person you want to share Jesus with. You know, how fearful are they? Are they aware of their fear? If they’re not, maybe it’s something else you want to talk and focus on.

Okay. Another thing you can focus on is guilt. So this is like—they’re not fearful so much. It’s kind of related, but this is guilt, right? And guilt here is separated from shame. Guilt and shame are somewhat connected. In fact, Tim Keller, in his recitation of these Carson motivations in his book, goes from eight to six. One of the reasons for that is he takes guilt and shame and puts them together. They’re quite different concepts though. I don’t think that’s as helpful as Keller could have been.

But if you look at Carson’s original list where guilt and shame are separated—and they’re, you know, they’re related, of course—but guilt, I think, has more of a connotation of something we’ve done wrong, and there’s kind of more of a vertical aspect to it. And shame is related horizontally. It seems we’re ashamed toward other people. We feel guilty toward God or somebody else, an authority.

So there is a difference. Both of them, you can have false guilt and false shame. You can feel shame because somebody has done something to you, right? Jesus suffers shame for us just like he suffered death for us and was properly apprehensive of that death in the garden. You know, Jesus was spat upon, for instance. It’s a very shameful event. I know people that have had that happen to them. It produces shame. Now, you’ve done nothing wrong, but you still feel shame.

Guilt—you know, this is usually more for something, you know, you did wrong—but there can be false guilt. But anyway, guilt and shame are a little bit different. And David seems to express both. He knows he’s guilty in his sin with Bathsheba, right? And he feels that guilt. He has fear. He knows he’s liable to punishment. He knows that he has iniquities, but he also knows that he’s trespass, that he’s transgressed.

And I think that transgression and trespass relate to this motivation of guilt. And we’re the same way. We feel guilty. Now, when we feel guilty, there’s things we can do with that. And one thing David does, of course, is to hide from God, which doesn’t help. But that’s what people do. The guilt won’t bring them to Jesus apart from the work of the Holy Spirit. It actually will drive them further away. But in the providence of God, he brings guilt to bring them to Jesus Christ.

Romans 5:18 says, “Therefore, as through one man’s offense, judgment came to all men, resulting in condemnation—condemnation. That’s like guilt. Even so, through one man’s righteous act, the free gift comes to all.”

And so Paul, one of the things he does—and we’ll look at this again as we go through the presentations in Acts—is he tells them that they have true guilt. So sometimes people we talk to are fearful, and sometimes people we talk to feel guilty. And so if you see that, then bring the cure of Jesus as they appear to you. Say, as they close to Jesus, as they begin to move toward Jesus—maybe the thing you want to stress with them is that Jesus relieves us from guilt, from the condemnation. To—Roman—the point of Romans is that Jesus takes upon himself imputation of our disobedience, pays the price for it.

So Jesus removes our guilt.

A third aspect is shame, which I’ve been talking about, related to impurity or uncleanness. The term is sin in Psalm 51 and 32. And so shame is something different. Read in Romans 6:20 and 21: “For when you were slaves of sin—why are we slaves to sin? Death. Fear of death. So fearful. You are free in regard to righteous. You are free in regard to righteousness. What fruit did you have then in the things of which you are now ashamed?”

So he’s saying now that you’ve come to righteousness, you’re ashamed. You knew you were ashamed of the things you did wrong. So shame, you know, keeps us kind of locked up. Shame results from our true guilt, but it’s not the same as guilt. It’s shame. So shame is another motivating factor.

Doug Wilson had a recent blog post—what was it called?—”Three Kinds of Accusations,” where he talks about these first three motivations. I didn’t find it till last night, but it’s interesting. He talks about these first three on Carson’s list. And he says that, you know, there’s three different kinds of accusations to throw at people: ones that produce fear, that produce guilt, and one that produces shame.

You really, if you’re working with people today in any significant way, you really need to think these things through, because fear, guilt, and shame are now commonly referred to in conferences on abuse by women particularly. And they’ll tell these women that if you ever have people using fear, guilt, or shame upon you, that’s abusive, whether it’s your husband, your church, whatever it is.

Okay, so these things are now completely looked upon as abusive—and they usually are. They frequently are. But in the providence of God, of course, he wants us to feel guilty like David did. He wants us to be ashamed of our sin, and he wants us to fear his just pleasure because that brings us to the true relief from those things.

We can just, you know, all these conferences, one thing they tend to do is give power to people to suppress the truth of God in unrighteousness—that they do have, you know, true transgressions of God’s word, and that they really do feel guilty, that they really should be ashamed for what they’ve done. And so what happens? Well, you know, if you watch TV, nobody’s ashamed of anything anymore, right?

Well, people really are. And when you talk to somebody about Jesus, some people won’t be fearful, and they won’t feel guiltridden, but they’ll be shameful. They’ll feel a sense of shame. They don’t understand. And you can appeal to that motivation. The Bible says that’s a primary motivation that you can use to bring people to Jesus Christ.

Wilson helpfully talks about these three things in relationship to parenting. He says this: “You can see this working in how parents try to keep their kids in line. Denunciation works the guilt. Scorn works the shame. And threats work the fear.”

Okay? If you’re a parent here, you know you’ve entered into some of this stuff. You know? And there’s proper ways to do it, but then there’s sinful ways to do it. And I have true guilt, which I feel ashamed for, and I know apart from the blood of Jesus, God would punish me for treating my kids in the same way in a sinful way, right?

And this is what Wilson is really stressing: that, you know, as Christians bringing kids up, in the culture Jesus came to create, a culture in which those things are kind of pushed to the side—because in the fallen culture, fear, guilt, and shame are control elements. They are manipulators that people use to control other people, okay? And they’re used sinfully. Now, God uses them wonderfully, but you know what we do is always twist what God has.

And so we want to be careful in our parenting, you know, and these things.

Now, these three things also—we want to understand—this is not just motivations to look for in people we’re spreading the gospel with, talking about the gospel. These are things that Jesus has delivered us from. And you may not really have entered into a consideration about that. You may still be suffering under fear, guilt, or shame in reference to things that Jesus has already taken the place of. Jesus has taken care of all these things.

So this is a pastoral sermon to you as well—that the gospel says that Jesus, like we have in our confession prayer, has removed guilt, fear, and shame from you. And in addition to that, what we should do in worship is to express our eternal thanksgiving, great joy, delight. We should bless God for these things.

The gospel is that instead of guilt, he gives us innocence now. He gives us justification with God through what Jesus did, right? And the Bible says that instead of fear, we call out “Abba Father”—to a father that we don’t have to be fearful of. In fact, we’re in Jesus, who is always moving closer to the Father. That’s who we are now. That’s what God has accomplished in your life by bringing you to faith in God, in Jesus, in relationship with the Father.

And God says you don’t need to feel ashamed anymore. He says he’s taking care of that shame. Jesus received that shame as he went to the cross so that we don’t have to feel shameful anymore. Okay? As we walk with him.

So these are wonderful blessings. These are great gifts by God. And David, no wonder David, after he processes those three things as he gets toward the end of Psalm 51, says, “Oh, I’m going to tell sinners this is great stuff. Praise God.” You know? When those burdens are lifted, why wouldn’t you want to tell people? And why wouldn’t you want to come and praise God in the corporate assembly?

You see? So that’s what these things are.

Now, it’s interesting because people have noticed—talking about looking at the context of who we’re talking to, right, in terms of these motivations—people have noticed that cultures generally function in terms of these areas predominantly. Okay. Doug Wilson commenting on this says, “The west is a culture of guilt, the east a culture of shame, and the south is a culture of fear. The north doesn’t—generally okay—because it’s cold and hardly anybody wants to go up there.”

So now, he’s not talking about the east and west and south of America. He’s talking about the world globally. This is true. There was a book published—I don’t remember, ten years ago maybe—called “Honor and Shame: Unlocking the Door.” This is written by a guy named Roland Mueller. I didn’t know about this till last night. Saw a review online about it. And he gets into this in a lot more detail.

And he says that in Western cultures, America, Europe, etc.—in Western cultures we tend to emphasize more the guilt-innocence thing. Okay. And so to us, we stress guilt rather than fear or shame. Let me see what he says here. So he puts these things in pairs. So guilt-innocence is a pair. Honor-shame, okay. And fear-power. So fear is related—if you want to get rid of fear in fallen perspective, you go to power. And if you want to get rid of shame, you go to glory. You seek glory. If you part from Jesus, it’s not going to do good, but that’s what you do. And if you want to seek a relief to your guilt, you try to prove your innocence. Okay?

And so these are the kind of pairs that he’s talking to. And Mueller goes on to say that each culture sort of reflects this. So let me read from review—Mueller, rather, classifies western cultures like Europe and the United States as predominantly innocence-guilt-based cultures. This means that we westerners operate primarily in legal categories because that’s the legal setting, right? David said, “It’s trespass-guilt,” with a special focus then on the individual because guilt is individual primarily.

In theological terms, guilt-based cultures tend to emphasize concepts like justification and penal substitution, since we are most concerned with the question, “How can I stand righteous before a just God?”

Okay. Now he says that in Eastern and Asian cultures, these are predominantly—now these things are not hard and fast. Everybody, you know, there’s blends and blurs and all that stuff, but predominantly Asian and Middle Eastern cultures are predominantly honor-shame-based. In these cultures, one’s standing within the family and local tribe or community plays a primary role. Theological concepts like cleansing purification or purification and adoption tend to become the things that could be or should be emphasized in these cultures.

So face cultures—sometimes refer to them as—I haven’t read the book—but Brian Shear tells me, and my son Elijah tells me, that this book, “Outliers,” has a chapter on the ethnic origins of plane crashes, and these cultures are highly—the—I’m sorry. The Asian cultures that he talks about, some of them—any culture that has a high predominance of shame-based [attitudes], and you don’t want to be shamed in front of the family or structure or tribe. So you have a heavy submission to authority. Co-pilots tend not to react in time because they don’t want to tell the pilot he’s doing something wrong. That would bring shame upon the inferior, whereas in America, we want to tell each other we’re doing something wrong all the time in Western cultures.

So you know, there’s a difference. And what’s the point of this? The point of this is not to produce stereotypes in your head, but it is to think about contextualization of the message of the gospel. We think in our culture that what the world needs to hear is justification and atonement. But in cultures that stress this idea of tribe and community and family, the suggestion is we should stress more the idea that Christ has purified us from shame and that he’s adopted us into his family. We have honor within the family of God.

So the things they want are right—innocence, honor, and power—but the way they go about getting them without Jesus is wrong. But it’s a way to contextualize our message to people that resonates with them more.

And then he says the third culture, of course—in the south—what he’s talking about is Africa, South America, and these cultures, you know, animistic in origins and background and stuff. And so they tend to be more fear-based. And to get rid of fear, they want power. So they use shamanism, who do these sorts of things to attain power over the forces in nature that they’re fearful of. And so you know, what do you do with that?

Well, you try to talk to them about victorious life in Jesus, right? When you preach the gospel to them, you demonstrate that Jesus really does have power, right? And so the power of the Christian life is emphasized. And these cultures tend to be more individualistic in this power association. And so you would talk to them about the idea of the use of spiritual gifts, for instance.

So now—so those are the three kind of cultures and how these first three things—iniquity, trespasses, and sins—play out in the lives of fallen men and the cultures that they build. And these are the ways to contextualize the message of Jesus. These are also—now one last thing. The review that I read said, “Well, it seems like in America or in Europe, it’s breaking down—that whole guilt thing. Postmodernism says there is no guilt, right? We don’t even know what that is. There’s no fixed standards. So,” the author of the review tried to come up with a system for the people that we’re going to encounter in Portland—that’s not what he says, but that’s what I’m saying. And in Portland, the big deal to them is expression or repression.

So the idea is “express yourself,” right? “I was born this way.” All that stuff. So expression—and anything that wants to oppress you is bad and evil, fixed standards, authorities, all that stuff. You see? So people want to find expression. And again, there it’s a perfectly proper thing. God wants you to express yourself. I mentioned spiritual gifts. Spiritual gifts, as we looked at those last year, they’re individual things that God has given to you as an individual to use in the context of the church as an expression of who God has made you in Christ.

So with those cultures—with Portland—we would want to talk in terms of: the Bible lets you find true expression. And in actuality, repression is the only thing that your sinful lifestyle is going to bring you. You’re being repressed. And as you see liberalism work into political correctness, that’s what you see. You see repression. And so we can use that to show them there’s really no answer to your proper desire for expression and fear of repression apart from the gospel of Jesus Christ.

We’ll come back to this list next week with the other five elements.

One last thing here, though: this is not just stuff that makes you more effective in talking about Jesus to your neighbor, trying to figure out fear, shame, guilt—what’s going on. This is also particular. When you see these broad categories, this corrects us. We’re in the west, and we’re going to speak primarily in legal categories, individualistic categories. We’re going to stress justification and atonement. But all of these things on your list of eight—and many more—are facets to a diamond. And we tend to focus on one part of that diamond to our detriment, because the diamond is a reflection of the character of God. And how God relieves all of these concerns of mankind are to be found in him and in Jesus, right?

And so when we focus on the thing that our culture is predominantly fixated on, we don’t stress adoption. We don’t stress expressionism in terms of spiritual gifts. We don’t stress victorious Christian living the way the power cultures would when they come to faith. And so what we need—this is what, you know, the one of the mottos of transformational movements—is “we need the city as much as the city needs us.” You need your neighbors’ perspective. We need other people’s perspective to help fill out what our knowledge and appreciation of who God is.

Okay? We do. If our primary thing is innocence and guilt, we need to remember and understand that God has relieved our shame and our guilt and not just our guilt—our punishment as well. So it fleshes out who we are.

Evangelism, gospel proclamation, is really indirectly preaching the gospel to ourselves. And that gospel is fuller as we understand all the different motives and appeals that can be made, demonstrated by a deduction of scriptural texts. It fleshes out our knowledge of God and the wonderful salvation that he’s brought to us.

Let’s pray. Father, we bless your holy name. We do thank you, Father, for the wonderful way the world is communicating, coming together. And as a result, we see you reflected in so many facets of this wonderful jewel of your character and who you are. We thank you, Lord God, and bless your holy name for releasing us from guilt and from fear and from shame.

We pray, Father, that we would be wise as we present the gospel of Jesus, understanding the people we talk to, really caring about them, knowing what their problems are, knowing what’s underneath what they present many times, so that we can bring the cure of Jesus Christ and show them that they seek something good, but that good only can be found through Jesus.

Bless us, Father, in our endeavor to do these things. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.