Dennis Tuuri

# Sermon Transcript: Motivations for Evangelism (Part 2)

We return to our topic of last week, which is motivations to use while evangelizing. Maybe a better way to say it grammatically: motives for use in evangelism. And of course, these motivations in their direct application encourage us to think about the people that we’re trying to witness to and bring to faith in Christ. But the other side of it is ourselves, of course. And these things are all aspects of the gospel of Jesus Christ—things to give God praise for and also ways to increase our own personal sanctification.

So today we’re going to read from Matthew 10:28-33. And this will be addressing the first in our list of motivations, the next five motivations we’ll be discussing today, which has to do with need for future grace, or we could relate it to fear of hell. Please stand for the reading of God’s word.

Matthew 10:28-33:

“And do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul, but rather fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell. Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? And not one of them falls to the ground apart from your Father’s will. But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear, therefore, you are of more value than many sparrows. Therefore, whoever confesses me before men, him I will also confess before my Father who is in heaven. But whoever denies me before men, him I will also deny before my Father who is in heaven.”

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for the glorious gospel that we come together every Lord’s day to proclaim to one another, to encourage each other with, to hear preached from your word, and to have our lives transformed more and more into the image of our Savior. We pray, Lord God, you’d bless the preaching of the word today. Give us the Holy Spirit in full measure so that he might indeed take this word, write it upon our hearts, and transform us by it. In Jesus’ name we ask it. Amen.

Please be seated.

Jesus sought me when a stranger. We sang that in the first song today. And he does. And he does it in lots of different ways. And so we’re talking about some of those ways. I wanted to start with a reference—another historical reference from one of us old guys that half of you probably won’t even know what I’m talking about—but there used to be a guy named Francis Schaeffer.

And he had tremendous impact in the evangelical world in the ’60s, ’70s, into the ’80s. He actually—and some most people don’t know this—he studied under Cornelius Van Til and so was very much a fellow traveler, I guess, with people like R.J. Rushdoony and others who were pretty influential in our church. So Francis Schaeffer gave a talk at the first International Congress on World Evangelism in Lausanne, Switzerland in the ’70s, and Schaeffer said, you know prophetically, we need to work hard at keeping the truth of the Scriptures in our work in evangelicalism. We have to keep the word of God.

He went on to say, though—and you can see actually this talk was videoed and portions of it are on YouTube—he also said that our job as Christians going into the world to be sent (we’re gathered together to be sent out), and we’re sent out, you know, to do everything we do to the glory of God. And one aspect of that—a very important aspect—is witnessing to others about Jesus and trying to be used by God to help bring others to the faith.

And he said, as we go about doing that work, we have to provide honest answers to honest questions. And so what we’re doing last week and this week is helping think through what are some of the questions that people have these days, and we want to bring the honest answer that’s found only in the Scriptures and ultimately only in the work of Jesus as he reveals the Father and the Holy Spirit to us.

So what are the questions? And this is not just a cultural survey of what people are looking for. Rather, it’s looking at the Scriptures themselves and the motivations that we see God using in the Scriptures to bring people to faith in Christ. And so there’s a variety of means, just like there’s a variety of approaches that we saw in the book of Acts and in Paul’s evangelizing speeches.

So there’s a variety of methods whereby God brings people to himself, and we’re trying to survey a list of eight of those that was originally published as an article by D.A. Carson, who is a research professor of New Testament theology at a leading seminary and also was one of the founding board members of the Gospel Coalition, which is doing great work. So this is really Carson’s list, but it’s a list that he drew from Scripture.

And so we’re going through them and talking about them a little bit. We talked about the first three last week. And you know, some of these motivations—we can think of them as negative motivations: fear, guilt, shame. These are things, you know, that really the fear of God is working in people’s hearts in a way to bring them awareness of the judgment that’s upon them. Other of these motivations that we’ll talk about today are more directly need-oriented—things that people want and they properly want them.

And so it’s more like we bring then the only source of those things to them, which is the Lord Jesus Christ and the Scriptures and relationship with the Father and the Spirit. And we’ll look at John 4, for instance, where he’s the water of which you drink and will never thirst again. And so that kind of thing. So there’s both positive and negatives. And the point of looking at these—the first point—is to be an encouragement to us to really go about doing our evangelistic work that we do with our neighbors, friends, whatever it is, in a biblical way, in a way that properly values the people we’re talking to and what God has done in their life up to this point and how he’s preparing them for the message that you bring.

So part of it is about that, but the other part is us. This is the preaching of the gospel. The good news of Jesus is that he does all these things. He provides all these wonderful benefits to us, alleviating fears and bringing us the things that we most deeply want and desire. And so both of those things are going on at the same time. And this would lead us to praise God for the manifestation of the gospel by looking at these motivations.

And they also might, you know, help you personally to remember how God has worked in your life either in bringing you to conversion or in major elements of sanctification in your life. So it could generate conversations like that in your community groups where people talk about what particular motivations God happened to use in their case at particularly important periods of their lives or just generally how their sanctification works. It’s quite different one from the other.

And we’re coming out of a Western culture that is kind of factory-oriented, public school, “grind out things” sort of way of looking at things for a while. And that produced kind of mechanistic views of gospel presentations. The Lord used them. Great. That’s good. But the Four Spiritual Laws is not the only way you talk to people about Jesus. And in fact, if that’s the only way you talk about Jesus—in terms of the motivations that it appeals to—you’re probably missing the mark with most of the people you talk to.

So we’re now in a position in our culture where things are changing fairly radically. We mentioned last week, you know, three of the major motivators are fear, guilt, and shame. People fear—maybe are anxiety-ridden—they don’t know what it’s attached to; it might attach to various things. But fear, guilt, and then shame. And last week I explained—and I won’t do it again today—but if you want to know what kind of that prayer of confession we used was all about, I explained that at the beginning of last week’s sermon. And it’s a reminder to us as we pray at church or in our homes of these major blessings that the Lord God has alleviated our fear of his proper judgment against our sins. He’s brought us relief from guilt, and he’s relieved our shame—all through the work of Jesus. Jesus is the answer.

Each of these things are gospel and methods of evangelism and methods of sanctification because ultimately they reflect aspects or facets of the person of God. So you know, God is the answer to these questions because God has created us, and these motivations we see in the Scriptures are ultimately not about abstract things off in some kind of area, but rather they’re reflections of the very person of God himself.

And so if we understand them, then we get a better glimpse of all the blessings—well, a list of eight—there are many more than this, but at least a list of eight of the great blessings of who God is in his person and has revealed to us and brought us into relationship with. So this helps us to avoid certain things as well.

So we said that Western culture in the past has been more guilt-oriented than shame or fear. And so we like documents like the Westminster Confession that talks about substitutionary atonement, penal substitution, justification—because these are legal categories and legal events that relieve guilt. But our culture is—those are the questions that people were asking in the 16th and 17th centuries, and to some extent have continued to ask in Western cultures. But now that question really isn’t there as much. The question now in this country generally we could say is: How can I express myself? How can I come to full expression as an individual? Okay, now some cultures—Asian cultures—it’s more group-oriented. But with us, how can we individually express ourselves? And this is important to know because if you just walk into a discussion with someone and that’s really what’s driving them—and more often than not it will be in our setting—and you start talking about their lack of conformity to God’s word or that God’s word is truth, that may not be the place to start because truth claims—truth from any source—are associated with repression or oppression of expression.

Now we know that God’s law doesn’t repress or oppress our expression of who we’re meant to be. It frees us to do just that. But they don’t know that. And if you start with that, you’re probably not going to get very far. And so to understand the questions they’re asking and have an answer that’s kind of thought through—an honest answer to an honest question. And the honest answer is that yes, God wants us to come to full expression.

And so you can affirm that desire in the people you talk to. But then you have to let them know they’re going about it without Jesus, and that they’re not ever really going to get to that. Sin is idolatry. It really is. That kind of freedom is repressive and oppressive because it’s idolatrous. So that’s kind of the idea here. And what we’re doing then is really talking about the person of God and facets of him as we do this kind of work.

Colossians 2 says this:

“I want you to know what a great conflict I have for you and those in Laodicea and for as many as have not seen my face in the flesh. So he’s got conflict—to what purpose? That their hearts may be encouraged, being knit together in love, and attaining to all riches of the full assurance of understanding to the knowledge of the mystery of God, both of the Father and of Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.”

And so all of these things ultimately are manifestations or facets of the wonderful jewel that is God’s person himself. And we’re to focus on that.

We’ve got trouble in our country, right? We could talk about that. We have talked about it. Many of you could have long discussions about it. But I was having a conversation with my brother Mike about some of these things this week, and he reminded me that when he was in Oregon, he had an old farmhouse out in Reno, and he had this Golden Delicious apple tree in the backyard. And you’d go out there and you’d want to pick up the apples that fell because they were really great. They really were delicious. But there were yellow jackets all over them. And so, you know, if you just grab, you get stung.

So the idea was you had a rake there, and you’d rake them over to where the bees hadn’t gotten, to where the yellow jackets weren’t at yet, and then you could pick them up quickly. Well, the yellow jackets, of course, want the apples. They want the fruit. And so when that rake comes in there, they go after the end of the rake, the metal rake head. And they attack it and try to kill it, or whatever it is, you know, and try to scare it off. And they have no cognizance that there’s this human being at the other end of this pole that emanates from this rake head, and he’s the guy you’ve got to do something about if you want to keep your apples.

Well, that’s the way it is in our culture right now. We’re greatly concerned about loss of liberty, loss of economic opportunities, the rise of sins that are fairly in-your-face sort of things against God—whether it’s adultery, fornication, homosexual marriage, abortion. We’re concerned about all these things, and properly so. What we want is a wonderful world that represents a nice Golden Delicious apple.

But our ultimate problem is that these things are not happening apart from God’s sovereignty, right? We’re Calvinists. God’s at the end of the rake. And if all we do—now we’ve got to work the rake. So the analogy breaks down. You have to work the rake. You’ve got to do stuff, and we all know that. But if you think the major problem you’ve got is the rake head, you’re not realizing that God is sovereignly bringing judgments upon our nation because it’s turned against Christ and the word of God. So it’s rebelled against the Holy Spirit, and God is bringing judgments. And until we get that right, ultimately we’re not going to have the apples.

So our job is to understand God better and what we may be doing individually, collectively, that brings his displeasure upon us and his judgments upon our nation. And then to repent of those things individually and try to call our culture to repent as well. And that’s what you’re doing when you talk to your neighbor or coworker or whoever it is about Jesus. That’s what you’re doing. You’re presenting him ultimately with the truth that all of these things that he desires, and on the other hand needs relief from—these things are all to be found in the person of God himself: Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit. All the treasures are hidden there. So these are aspects of that.

Okay. So let’s talk—let’s get to our specific outline. If you don’t have one, there are a few more in the back that were printed up. We were a little short this morning. If you don’t have it, it’s not a big deal. They’re just a series of eight numbered points and a conclusion. And you know, I thought about this: maybe what we should do is not put the outlines out until after the service, and then you could pick them up on your way out as kind of reminders. And then you’d write down things and you’d remember what was said better, maybe. I don’t know. Anyway, you can do that too. You don’t have to get an outline if you don’t want. You can if you want to, but you might just want to write down the numbered points, and that will help remind me as well to say them slowly enough so you can write them down.

So motivations—and this comes directly from D.A. Carson’s list. And the first one we talked about last year was fear, and this is kind of a fear of present judgment upon one’s person. Second was guilt—the burden of guilt. And the third is shame. Guilt has more to do with our offenses against God. Shame more to do with horizontal relationships. And we talked about this last week. But those are the three biggies, I think, that we find over and over again—these three Hebrew words in the Old Testament of the needs of people that bring them to God.

Okay, the fourth is the need for future grace. So this is kind of similar to number one. It has to do with fear—and Tim Keller in his book The Center Church actually bundles this with fear. He talks about fear generally, whether it’s fear in the present or fear of eternal damnation. And that’s what this idea of future grace is.

People all know who God is and that he’s just and he’s righteous. And they know, you know, that they have to be worried about death. Now that’s the greatest thing they try to, you know, sublimate, right? They want to keep that as far away from them as possible. And our culture does a wonderful job of, you know, taking death away from us. Normal death—it likes to bring abnormal death into the news, but normal death, you know, you don’t die at home anymore, and you don’t see it. It’s off someplace. And so people aren’t really thinking about it much because the culture doesn’t want to think about it because the Bible tells us that after death comes judgment.

The death process itself is scary to people, of course. But then the big question is: What happens? Is it non-existence? Well, they sort of know. I think people know the truth of God, and they’re trying to suppress it. So they know, really, that hell’s out there, but they don’t know it very much. It’s way off as some kind of distant memory.

You know, the transition from graveyards—be careful, be grave about your conduct when looking at dead people—to cemeteries, sleeping places. Sema comes from the word for sleep—sleeping places—has kind of reinforced this myth that we die and we just go into some kind of gentle sleep or peaceable state, as opposed to the biblical warning against hell: that after you die comes the judgment.

But it’s there, is my point. Now, it’s not there as much as it should be because we don’t talk about it as much as we should. I mean, to the extent that the church doesn’t communicate the truth of what the world is and what’s happening, the culture more easily holds it down. But, you know, there’s not a thing wrong in our talking about the gospel to people, to bring up the subject of the afterlife. And you know, obviously that takes a lot more time than I have today to talk about how we do that. But the fact that you do it is important because it is in the Scriptures one of the motivators that God uses.

So Hebrews 9:27 reminds us: “It’s appointed for man to die once, but after that the judgment.”

So God’s word reminds us of this as a motivator to us in our present actions, to our sanctification. And it’s a motivator. So it’s one of God’s motivators, and it should be one of the things that we think about as we talk to people.

Now let me say quickly—you know, different people have different primary motivations that you’ll want to appeal to. You know, a couple of sermons back I talked about listening. So the idea is to really care enough about your neighbor, your coworker, whatever, to love them, to try to get to understand them, so that then you can bring the assistance that they need. They may not realize they’re hanging off a cliff on a little piece of rope. They may think something else. So our job is to think through and understand them, right?

And so, you know, Paul does this in Acts 17. Well, I noticed you have this statue to an unknown god. He understands what one of their basic motivators is: this knowledge of a God, but not really any knowledge of him. And he reveals that to them. He takes that. He doesn’t start with hell—what we’re talking about now. So the idea is to listen to people, to understand them, and then to look at this list of motivations here as an example, and think, well, which one should I talk to them about? It seems like they’re really dealing with this one.

The hell one you’re not going to run into that much unless we bring it up. And at some point in the process of talking about the good news of Jesus, clearly, one of the great things about the gospel of Jesus Christ is that when we die, we go to be with him and we’re perpetually with him. And when he returns, we’re here with him and his people. And on the other hand, if we don’t exercise faith, then we go to hell—a place of eternal torment. That’s the truth.

And if we don’t tell people the truth, you know, Ezekiel compares us to watchmen on the wall who don’t warn people. Death is approaching. If you don’t turn, if you don’t embrace Christ, you’re going to end up in hell, right? Nothing wrong with bringing that up on a guy’s deathbed, by the way. You know, you have this idea: well, it might offend him, might make his pain and suffering worse. Well, if you don’t say anything, it might make his pain and suffering eternal.

Now, ultimately, we believe in a sovereign God, but God uses means. And Ezekiel says, you know, we have to sound the warning. So part of our gospel message is a message about hell to people, and it’s to understand that’s one of the motivators that’s offered.

Hebrews 9:28 says—after the last verse I read—”Christ was offered once to bear the sins of many. To those who eagerly wait for him, he will appear a second time, apart from sin, for salvation.”

So the Bible uses this idea of judgment to point us then to the wonderful reality that our judgment will be total salvation at the appearing of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Hebrews 10:30-31 says this:

“We know him who said, ‘Vengeance is mine. I will repay,’ says the Lord. And again, ‘The Lord will judge his people. It’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.’”

Now you can experience that fear in the short term, here and now. I used to have panic attacks, and that’s what happened. I fell into the hands of God, and it would always bring me to a great clarity as to my sins and need to repent of them. It always did that for me.

Or, but the verse is also, of course, about the eternal judgment upon us—that it’s a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God after our death, right? So you can kind of see that God gives you this period of time in which you can suppress the truth and unrighteousness, but that ends at death, and now you fall into the hands of the living God. And his judgment and wrath is against you because you rejected his love. You rejected his love—not because you sinned. I mean, in one sense, yes, because you sin. But everybody has sinned. And the reason why people end up in hell is not because they sinned. Well, as I said, you know, from one perspective. But they’ve rejected the love and grace of God.

If you love someone dearly, then it necessitates that you’re going to be angry with people who reject that, right? So God’s wrath is a direct result of his tremendous love. But in any event, it’s real. And so this is one of the motivators as we proclaim the gospel.

Matthew 10:28 says: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather, fear him who is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Now, did you notice when we read that the immediate next verses? Yeah. So the immediate—so this is a truth that Jesus wants us to know: fear. And he’s talking to people that are being persecuted, and he’s saying well, don’t fear those. Ultimately, all they can do is kill you, and after you die, you’re going to be in eternal relationship with me in Christ, and you’ll be perfected, and everything will be great—groovy, okay? But don’t fear those people. But do fear me. If you deny me before men because of your fear of them, you’ve got the fear thing all mixed up. You’ve got a little tiny thing you should fear here—it’s going to hurt to die—but you have this huge hell thing over here, and you’re trading off, you know, that you’re entering into that for the sake of this. It’s a bad bargain.

So he’s telling them: don’t, you know, pervert your witness or your truthtelling of me because of fear of men. But do fear God who will cast you into, who has the ability not just to destroy your body but to also bring eternal punishment upon your soul as well.

Now, what does he say very next thing? “Are not two sparrows sold for a copper coin? Not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father’s will.”

So it’s a dangerous doctrine. And he brings alongside of it immediately, you know, a statement that brings to mind the great love and care and concern that God has for us. He doesn’t want us in evangelism to simply preach a wrathful God, but a God who is wrathful because of his care and concern. So these things are linked together. But while they’re linked together, our human nature is to want to not talk about hell. And so we have to bring that back onto our plate. It has to enter into at some point our discussion with people about the Lord Jesus Christ.

They have to be brought to a knowledge—or they have the knowledge. They have to strip off the lacquer and the varnish and see that underneath. But the reality of it is they know that if they die apart from faith in Christ, rejecting him, they’re going to enter into eternal punishment. And we have to talk about that.

I’ve mentioned this story before, but of course, there was a book out a couple of years ago by one of these emerging church guys, Rob Bell, that basically said there is no hell. And Francis Chan, who I heard speak here at an event a couple of years ago, had a book that came out in response to it. Bell was a friend of his. And Chan’s book is called Erasing Hell. And Chan said he wanted badly to believe what his friend Rob Bell was saying. He really wanted to be able to look at the Scripture and find out that, oh no, this hell thing was really a mistaken interpretation of various verses.

But as he studied—of course, that’s not true. I mean, it’s very obvious the teaching of hell is not an arcane doctrine that’s taught in secret. It’s right there clearly, as we’ve read already. And so he realized, but Chan realized that in his own witnessing—which he does a great deal of—that he had become a bit of what he thought of himself as a PR agent for God. He didn’t want to talk about that God who would send people to hell, who would destroy, you know, the rebellious apostate world, saving only Noah and members of his family. He didn’t want to talk about that God.

“God, I can’t tell him that. They won’t believe in you if I tell them that.” And yet, in the Gospels and in Paul’s epistles, we clearly have this being used as a motivator to bring people to faith in Christ, or at least to get them to continue their sanctification as well. So, you know, like I said, it’s not the only tool in the toolbox, and it’s not to be used without other tools. Jesus goes right on to talk about God’s care for us. But he does want us to know that it’s there.

So that’s another—that’s in this list. That’s the first thing: a desire for future grace, a fear of future punishment, hell.

Okay, next is the attractiveness of truth. So here, you know, N.T. Wright talks about all people being made in the image of God having a desire for beauty. Now you can’t define what it is, and you know, it’s a very interesting discussion, as some of you know, particularly those of you who express yourself in artistic work. But the point is that everybody kind of has this. They’ll look at a beautiful face or a waterfall or sunset, whatever it is, and they’ll be overwhelmed by a sense of beauty. And they’ll—it’s one of the motivators that God gives us, again, to cause us to respond or react to him.

And throughout in the New Testament, a frequent phrase is that we are witnesses of the truth—that I don’t hesitate to speak the truth. Paul says that kind of language, right? So let me try to find a verse here. For instance, 2 Corinthians 4:2:

“We have renounced the hidden things of shame, not walking in craftiness, nor handling the word of God deceitfully, but by manifestation of the truth, commending ourselves to every man’s conscience in the sight of God.”

Now I could read a bunch of texts like that, but the point is—and you might miss this as you read through the Bible—but as you look at those passages where God talks about things like that, he’s using the truth as part of the way to bring men to Jesus Christ. It’s because we can deduce from that that men have a desire for truth. They want to know what the truth is.

Well, if you don’t understand that, then you don’t get it when Pilate says, “What’s truth? What’s the significance of that?” Because it’s just a shocking statement. And it, again, is this attempt to conceal the truth of God and unrighteousness. All people have some kind of desire—a hidden desire—for truth. And that truth is ultimately only satisfied in the person of Christ and the Father and the Spirit as reflected in the truth of the Scriptures.

So the truth of the Scriptures themselves, the Bible itself, is part of what attracts people to God. I mean, again, if you’re in the artistic circles or whatever, you know that the Bible—particularly the King James version, I suppose, but the Bible generally—is this great source of artistic endeavors. I mean, Bob Dylan would be a shadow of his current self without the Scriptures. His songs are just absolutely chock full of allusions to Scripture.

I don’t know how many Grammys he might have won, but the last time I think a song went Grammy was for a song called “Sick of Love.” And that’s an expression that, if you read or listen to the song, you know, is immediately taken out of the Song of Songs. That’s what he did. He took a lot of Old Testament themes and then grafted and wrote those into his. It’s the greatest source. Many artists will say this even though they don’t want to believe in Christ or submit to him or be his disciple. But the Bible is routinely talked about as one of the great artistic things that we have. It’s unlike any other book.

So the Bible itself—the desire for truth—and our answer to that is the truth that’s found in the Scriptures, and ultimately it reflects the person of God, right? So you’ve got God and then his word. And we don’t want to separate those two. You know, the culture does. The culture wants to talk about a God abstracted from his word. It’d be like trying to talk about you without listening to what you say. The Bible is God’s speech. It’s God-breathed. That’s what it is. There it is.

And so God’s word—and in Hebrews, it says the Holy Spirit speaks. And then he quotes the Psalms. It is presently speaking the word of God, truth, to the culture. And so we do ourselves a great disfavor if all we ever do in terms of truth is talk about abstract things and not point people to the source of all true truth—that’s a Schaeffer term as well—true truth in the Scriptures and in the word of God.

So the word of God itself is one of the ways that we meet this basic question: the question is, where can we find truth? Where can we find deliverance? You know, where can we find the answer to the fact that we’re all going to die? None of us will make it out of here. Where can we find truth? We have this yearning to know something that’s substantial and permanent. And the deconstructionist movement is more of a statement—or a recognition, really, in a way—that, apart from the word of God—they wouldn’t say it that way—but everything else, really, you can’t see truth in it anywhere. You can’t really discover it. Ultimately, the world is ephemeral and fleeting, all these things. But in the Scriptures, this is true truth.

And so we need to bring that honest answer: the only place you’re going to find truth is interpreting the world through the lens of God’s word, not what you think about things. Ultimately, what you think has to be brought under captivity to the mind of Christ as revealed in the word.

So that’s an honest answer to an honest question that people you talk to may have—their most important question. Whether they know it or not, it may be at the center of their yearning for trying to find out something else in terms of their life and giving it more meaning.

So truth is another motivation.

The Westminster Confession of Faith—do I have time? Maybe my watch broke, so I’ve got to pull out the phone and look at it. I think I have time.

I thought, you know, again, I don’t suggest you use this in evangelism, but understand it. The Westminster Confession of Faith says this about the word of God:

“We may be moved and induced by the testimony of the Church to a high and reverent esteem of the holy Scriptures and the heavenliness of the matter.”

He’s listing reasons—they’re listing reasons here as to why the Scriptures have this kind of attractiveness to them. So the witness of the Church, there’s the heavenliness of the matter, the efficacy of the doctrine, the majesty of the style, the consent of all the parts. It’s totally consistent, unlike the word of man. The scope of the whole, which is to give all glory to God, the full discovery it makes of the only way of man’s salvation, the many other incomparable excellencies, and the entire perfection thereof—are arguments whereby it doth abundantly evidence itself to be the word of God.

Yet notwithstanding, our full persuasion and assurance of the infallible truth and divine authority thereof is from the inward work of the Holy Spirit. But it lists those various ways in which the word of God is beautiful and attractive to people and testifies to itself. But very importantly, for our work—you know, either our own personal sanctification or in bringing the gospel to our neighbors—at the end of the day, they say, you know, you can’t rely on all of that. The only thing that works with men (and he works by using those things) is the person of the Holy Spirit who has to accompany our actions, whether it’s our own personal sanctification. In fact, it’s got to be the primary motivation and power for doing those things.

And so even the beauty of the word or some of these other things we’ve talked about, we have to remember to ask for the Holy Spirit to be in the context of our proclamation of the gospel to our friends.

So that’s another motivation—the witness to the truth.

Sixth: a general despairing sense of need. And here Carson uses the story of the woman at the well in John 4. And you get this sense as you read the account of this woman at the well that she has this, you know, undefined sense of need. She’s gone through all these husbands looking for something, and she’s there by herself. And Jesus seems to be responding to that when he tells her that, you know, you drink this water, it goes away. But if you drink this other water, it will—you’ll never thirst again. I have the answer to your question. I have the answer to your felt need of some deep sense of needfulness for something other than what you’ve found satisfaction in.

This is a frequent motivator as you talk to people. I would say this is one of the most significant motivators that the Lord used to bring me to full discipleship of Christ as an adult.

Let me say that also: if you’re a covenant child here, you don’t know that any of these things had anything to do with your conversion because all you’ve known is Christ from your birth. But with a lot of you—not all of you—with a lot of you, you’ll go through a quickening, one could say. You’ll go through kind of a thing where you really click into your own understanding of who God is and relationship to him.

Now, not all of you will go through that, and if you don’t, that’s fine. But think about it. Talk about it in your community groups if you’re an older covenant kid here. What did God use to motivate you to get serious and really get locked in as a mature disciple of the Lord Jesus Christ?

And one of them is this idea of felt needs. Throughout the Gospels, right? People have, you know, this or that health problem. They have a withered hand, or they’re blind, or whatever it is, and they’ll be brought to Jesus by their friends, or they’ll get there somehow. The woman with the hemorrhage, etc. People have these needs. And you know, sometimes we make the huge mistake of saying, “Well, we don’t want rice Christians, I guess”—and you know, where people would become Christians on the mission field just to get their hunger met. But, you know, it’s easy to say, “Well, that’s not really becoming a Christian, and those things aren’t really the big deal. The big deal is becoming a disciple of Christ.” But you can’t read the Gospels and think about this stuff without recognizing that Jesus absolutely uses those felt needs—physical, emotional, whatever they are, the general sense of need on the part of the woman at the well—that God uses those needs and his meeting of those needs before they become believers even, right?

I mean, we know—was it lepers that got converted or fixed or healed? I don’t know my Bible well enough, but one comes back and gives thanks, and the others don’t. He healed people that didn’t come to faith in him. He met needs, right? In the book of Daniel, the angel leans down and helps and touches Daniel and brings them up.

We have a need to touch people in their lives to try to fulfill these needs that they have—the immediate pressing needs or longings for something more. That’s why we’re doing Love in Action, right? Love in the name of Christ. We’re doing that. We’re trying to help people meet needs, not contingent upon them becoming a Christian, but it will, in some cases, be the very mechanism that God uses to bring them to Christ. Christ would move on from healing people to try to press them for discipleship and faith in him, right?

But you know, there are two ditches here. One is, you know, to say all we want to do is feed people, and that’s great. And then the other ditch is, well, we’re not going to feed people till they become Christians. You know, those are the ditches in your working with people. Frequently, they will have some kind of felt need going on—perhaps vague and undefined, or perhaps very real. This was more along the lines of my experience: this idea of a deep felt need, which I’ll talk about in a few minutes at the end of the sermon.

So there’s that—there’s that as another motivation that God uses. Jesus certainly uses it in the Gospels to bring people to faith in him.

So hopefully, you know, we’re going through these quickly, but they’re quite important.

The Lord Jehovah Jireh is one of the names for God in the Old Testament, and it means the Lord our provider. So one of the basic aspects—remember, these are facets of God’s character—and God is the provider for people, right? It’s one of his very names. And so frequently in our lives, we can testify to that: God has met our needs. And we might want to, you know, bring that forward as maybe the primary thing we talk to our neighbors, our friends that we’re witnessing to about—that Jesus is Jehovah Jireh.

Jesus also goes by the name of Jehovah Rapha, which means the Lord your physician. And again, it’s a picture of the very character of God. It is his character to help people. And it should be the character of Christians to help people. And this is used by God frequently to be a primary motivator for bringing people to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Okay, seven: responding to grace and love. And this is somewhat connected with the last one. But you know, we have this interesting verse in the Scriptures in Romans 2:4:

“Do you despise the riches of his goodness, forbearance, and longsuffering, not knowing that the goodness of God leads you to repentance?”

So we’re actually told here didactically, or by teaching, that it’s the goodness of God that will, at times, be the primary motivating factor for people’s repentance. Whether it’s our sanctification or our witnessing to people, you know, some people get very religious. They get very committed to being a better Christian when bad things happen. But other people become more obedient when good things happen to them. I kind of am the latter, for whatever reason. There are reasons, but the point is that this is frequently a motivator—that’s a proper one—that God says is supposed to be used. The goodness of God leads to repentance.

His very love and character—at the center of that diamond, really, is the love of God and his grace to sinners. And that loveliness of the person of God—and the Lord Jesus Christ is a representation of that—is frequently the thing that we’re to bring to the honest question. You know, the honest question is: Where can I find love? Where can I find grace? All my friends betray me. People are no darn good—as Lex Luthor’s father taught him. And there’s a lot of truth to that, ’cause everybody’s fallen.

And so people have this desire for love. Joni Mitchell had this—what I thought was an excellent song: “Come in from the Cold.” “All we ever wanted was to come in from the cold. Come in. Come in. Come in.”

And you know, it’s about romantic relationships, but ultimately that’s the longing in the human heart. All these things are true questions that anyone can bring forward. But to some, it’s the number one question. And to many people, particularly today in our world, right? In our world, families are broken, churches are broken, groups are broken. And in fact, it’s deliberate because everybody’s trying to express themselves individually.

Well, men weren’t made to be individuals only. In the image of God, he created them male and female. We’re created in community, right? And we long for community—whether we want to admit it or not. And so, particularly in our world where the community is broken and where everybody’s even self-consciously attempting radical individualism, there—they have this yearning in their hearts for wanting to go home, for wanting to be with a family that loves them, to want to have relationship, right?

That’s how I thought of it when I got serious about following Christ. You know, when I went back to church, it was: I wanted to go home. You know, we have this sense. A lot of our twenty-somethings actually do go home after being away from home for a while. But you know, ultimately the home is a representation of something greater, right? All these things—the felt needs that we have, these desires—the home is a representation given to us by God of this relationship to him and his people. That’s home.

And by the way, today that brings to us as a church a real need to think about how good we are at being a home. How welcoming are we even to one another, you know, let alone people coming in from radically different perspectives or ways of life or contexts? I think we’re pretty good at it, but I think we could improve quite a bit too.

So home. People have this felt need of home. They have the question: Where can I be a recipient of the love that I really ache for? And all my self-expression doesn’t really bring me love from someone else. You know, it’s a triune God who created us, who lives in community, and we’re made in his image. And we have a yearning for love. And that love ultimately is found in the person of God and our relationship to him and then also in his body, the Church. So this is another motivation that may be the central one that you’d want to talk about when you witness to a particular person.

Number eight—okay, good.

Number eight. And this is Carson’s wording. It’s not my wording. “A rather vague desire to be on the right side of what is right, of what is from God, of what is biblical, of what is clean or what endures.”

So that’s a lot more wordy than most of the things Carson says. But the word that I have bolded in your outline (mind if you don’t have one)—the word I’ve bolded is the right: a desire to be on the right.

All men—we talked about this a little bit last week. N.T. Wright talks about this in his books. People want justice. We’re created in the image of God. Jesus came to bring justice. You know, we’re reminded of this by Martin Luther King Jr.—not the other Martin Luther—the 50th anniversary of his “I Have a Dream” speech. And he wanted justice to roll down—text from Isaiah—and that’s proper. And the injustice that was suffered by Black people in this country at that time was something to be addressed. And too bad that the church didn’t do a little better job. But the church was pretty involved in that.

But everybody wants that. Everybody wants justice. There’s a deep sense of that, you know: it’s not fair. We always want to say. And so one of the motivations for people—the question they’re asking is: Where can I find justice? Particularly today in our day and age, it seems like the manifestations of justice are going away. And people want to know: they have a sense that, you know, this just isn’t right somehow. Where can we find justice?

And as I said, the Scriptures are replete with citations that Jesus has come to bring justice, to victory, to bring justice to the earth. And so if that’s not part of our message, somehow we’re missing things. And that’s the point of these eight—this list of eight. The point is to get you to think about: what would you typically talk about to your neighbor? And there’s probably one or two here that rise to the top of your list. And in fact, one or two here may be the only things on your list.

And if what we’re saying is true—that these are all aspects, facets, on the diamond that is the person of God, the Triune God—then what you’re doing is presenting a truncated God. If that’s all you ever talk about, and that’s probably because you haven’t necessarily come to a recognition of all these wonderful blessings that God provides you. Maybe the only thing you’ve really focused on in your Christian life is this legal relationship to God through Christ. You know, that’s not normally the case, but I’m just saying as an example. The point of this list is to get you to see:

Number one: your list should be broad. You should have a number of tools that you can talk to particular people about. And number two: you should praise God for a variety of facets of who he is and not just for a couple of pet doctrines. And number three: as a church, we don’t want to be characterized as a church that only talks about one, two, and three—guilt, fear, and shame. Something’s wrong if that’s happening. Somehow we’ve missed the person of God and his multiple beauty and the fullness of the good news of the ascension of Christ to the right hand of the Father.

You know, and part of it is how you think about these things. His enemies will be made his footstool. Is that a bad thing or a good thing? Well, if you have a certain mindset, it’s a bad thing: “Oh yeah, God’s going to just have his foot on people.” But the rest—that’s what it looks like. But you know, the footstool—if you look at what it was that terminology in the Old Testament—that was close to God.

Now, I haven’t studied the verse out, but I’m just saying our perspectives as we come to this stuff points us in particular directions. And the purpose of this list is to broaden your perspective on things—not that I think would work, but things that the Bible says God uses—these various motivations. And so yes, they would work as well.

Notice that these motivations kind of have a different—you could lump them into particular areas, right? Some appeal to logic or intellectual thought more. Paul on Mars Hill—truth is really what’s going on there: “What is truth?” Other things appeal to emotional or, you know, felt need stuff. That seems to be a little bit more in the case of the woman at the well, for instance. People there are more emotive kind of motivations that God uses. And in other cases, they’re very practical things, right? I need help. Where can I get help?

And so different kinds of people are kind of—they have different things going on. And we can tend to deride some of these things. And what we want to see today is that these are all wonderful aspects of the person of God in his multifaceted beauty. And we want to both apply them to our own personal sanctification, to the upbringing of our children, and to the way we end up talking with people about the Lord Jesus Christ as well.

Now, in closing: Howard mentioned we had our 30th—uh, celebration of 30 years of RCC. We signed our church covenant in September of 1983. And Howard gave a little talk, and he started by talking about how he became a Christian. And I wish more of you had been there to hear it. It’s really good. Maybe he’ll do it again in some setting. But you know, he had things weren’t going right. He had some needs, some felt needs, right?

And so it wasn’t really a feeling of guilt or shame or fear, as I understood his story. It was more other stuff. Life was, you know, he’d been—well, I won’t go into the details. Maybe not shared with everybody. But he just wasn’t doing well, and he was looking for answers from somewhere, right? Show me a sign. And the sign was a girl invited him to church. And that led to his conversion and, you know, tremendous effectiveness for the kingdom of God. So it wasn’t the top three. It was something else.

Same with me. When I got serious about being a disciple, I think I was a Christian much earlier, but long time away. But when I got serious about following Christ was up here in Oregon. I was looking for a place to rent, and I had, you know, I was hitchhiking, and everybody was witnessing to me about Jesus Christ. So he kind of pre-packed this little narrative I’m going to tell you with a lot of, you know, the Hound of Heaven sort of stuff. And then what happened to me was I was out there, and I was talking to this guy about renting the top room in his house. And he asked if I was a Christian.

And I remember I looked up, and you know, part of it was I was needing a place to live. And so maybe that was part of how God set it up. But I remember looking up at the guy and seeing these stars and thinking: why do I continue, you know, to swim the wrong direction? Why do I fight like this? I’ve been fighting for years. And like Howard, I had all these problems that were happening, and I realized I was just like a fish, you know, going the wrong way in the stream. And God wanted me to turn around and go with the flow, go with him.

And I did that by looking at his magnificence as displayed in the evening sky. And so I just turned to the guy and said, “Yeah, I am. I am a Christian.” And then started reading my Bible like crazy. And like Howard then, he got very productive for the kingdom, etc.

But those are motivations. Talk about these in your own groups—motivations.

Now, the common thing between Howard and me wasn’t necessarily a particular motivation. The common thing was somebody talked to us, right? The girl said, “Do you want to go to church?” The guy said, “Are you a Christian?” So, you know, as much as all these things are very useful and good for our own sanctification, for our development as a church, for our appreciation of the beauty of God and all his multi-splendored glory, and for our effectiveness in witnessing—it doesn’t happen that last one unless you speak.

So at the end of the day, you know, the common factor in most conversions (sometimes it’s an isolation, but even there somebody’s talked to them beforehand)—the common element, the one thing that is common, not the particular motivation or method, but the commonality is you. That you’re going to go talk to somebody. And people that come to Christ have personal interaction with another image-bearer who is helping them to find honest answers to these honest questions that they, in their fallen state, find themselves in.

May the Lord God empower us to be those who speak.

Let’s pray. Father, we thank you for today. We thank you for the proclamation of the good news of Christ throughout our worship service, that you have met all of our needs in him. Thank you, Father. We bless your holy name. And we pray that each of us would pray for opportunities this week to speak the truth about Jesus. We thank you, Father, for the warnings in your Scriptures when it talks about hell—that those who deny you and deny Christ before men, he will deny to the Father. Help us, Lord God, to be shaken by that. And help us to gladly open our mouths this week, trusting not in our effectiveness as communicators, nor in methodology, but trust in the power of the Holy Spirit to use our speech to bring people back to life in Christ.

In Christ’s name we pray. Amen.