We make Jesus Known
I imagine many of you will know that Billy Graham died on Wednesday last week at 99 years of age.
Whether you agree with everything that Billy Graham stood for or not is not what I want to speak about this morning … but I think we would all agree that he was one of the most influential Christians of the 20th century.
As an evangelist, he told the gospel of Christ to more people than anyone else in history, I am told to nearly 215 million people in 185 countries.
There must be thousands and thousands and thousands of people who became followers of Christ because they heard the gospel of grace from Billy Graham. There are people here this morning who became Christians because they heard Billy Graham speak about Christ.
Billy Graham as an individual, had such influence and such powerful contacts, including American Presidents. Do you think he wasted his time, making Jesus known when he could have done so much good in the world?
This is what the Guardian said about Billy Graham this week:
“When Billy Graham stands before the judgement Seat of God, he may finally realise how badly he failed his country, and perhaps his God. On civil rights and the environmental crisis, the most important issues of his lifetime, he championed the wrong policies.
Graham was on the wrong side of history.”
“Graham had the opportunity to lead fundamentalists into a new era. He could have pushed them to take social reform seriously as a God-given mandate to save the world from environmental destruction. He could have tackled racism, America’s original sin, by championing the federal government’s aggressive civil rights policies, but he squandered it. He could not overcome the speculative end-times schemes of his cohort of evangelicals, with their anti-government hostilities.”
Is making Jesus known a waste of time when there are big things happening in our world? What about us?
I do not think for a moment that we as a church will have the same influence or impact as Billy Graham has had, but given that we are a group of 300 people what should we do with our time?
What should we be focused on?
Over the last few week we have been talking about what is at the heart of Trinity church. We have said we belong to a Big God. We listen to his voice. We are saved by sovereign grace.
What should we do?
Should we stand together against racism and discrimination in the world? Should we make a stand against global warming, and do all we can to fix it? Should we feed the hungry and the poor? Should we protect the innocent?
What should be our focus, and consume our lives, our time and energy?
Does the answer: ‘Take every opportunity to make Christ known in all the world’, sound ordinary or extraordinary? Let me be clear about what making the Jesus known, or evangelism is.
A few years back an Australian Christian leader stood in front of a bulldozer which was about to flatten houses in a slum area of Manila, in the Philippines. He wanted to protect the interests of the very poor people who lived in those houses. When he was later asked what he had done, he said he had been evangelising.
Now he might have been doing something good, or wise or necessary or compassionate, but he was not evangelising.
Evangelising, at its heart, is passing on a message the Bible calls the evangel. You can preach it, talk it, reason it, dialogue it, explain it, but however you convey it, means getting a clear and identifiable message to people in such a way that they can reasonably understand it.
The nice thing is that we do not have to work out for ourselves what this message is that we are to talk, speak, reason, explain, tell and preach because God has clearly told us what it is. It is possible to be 100% sure that what we say is not our invention, but God’s.
We know that Jesus preached the gospel, we know that Paul preached the gospel, and so we can look at what they said.
Here are a few of those summaries:
· Mark 1:14, 15. Jesus went into Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God. “The time has come”, he said. “The kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe the gospel.”
· Luke 4:43 “I must preach the gospel of the kingdom of God to the other towns also, because that is why I was sent.”
You can sum up Paul’s evangelistic preaching in the same way:
· Acts 28:31 “Boldly and without hindrance he preached the kingdom of God and taught about the Lord Jesus Christ.”
Our evangelical tradition says that the message of the gospel is “God loves you”, or “Jesus died for you”, or “have faith”, but that is not what we find in the gospels or the book of Acts. What we find is an evangel that proclaims “the kingdom of God” … or, Jesus is the King.
When we tell the gospel we are not primarily saying something about the people to whom we speak. We are not telling them how much they are loved, or what they get in the gospel, or what they must do, or even that they must be born again (though it is true that they must). The gospel is about God, not me. The gospel is about Jesus as King and Judge.
If that is our message, if that is at the heart of what we do,
There are lots of people who would say we are wrong or wasting our lives. Sceptics may say, “Isn’t it really just an ego trip, to be so filled with self-importance that you try to cause someone else to accept your Jesus? It really isn’t kosher in these pluralistic times, to try to get other people to change their belief and accept yours?
Others may say it is just too hard, and we make people angry at us, after all, there is a new level of hostility towards Christians in Australia.
I read this week: It has always been Babylon (meaning we live in an a world that rejects Jesus), and a certain level of hostility is to be expected, but the current context, in which the gospel person has moved from being a do-gooder to being a do-‘badder’ has caught people by surprise. No one likes Christians anymore so should we be silent?
Is it just a waste of time? Is the world just too apathetic?
I did hear of one concerned student a couple of years ago tried to organise a rally against apathy, but he had to cancel it because no one came. (Joke)
Is it nonsense? Once it was okay to draw lines - this is good and that is bad. This is right and that is wrong, and so there were issues for which to fight, but somewhere along the line we thought it was bad to draw the lines. Indeed it has become the ultimate sin to draw lines and say something is right and something else is wrong.
We have lost any notion of the truth, except the ones of self-interest.
To make Jesus known … do we really want that as one of the six things that we are saying is at the heart of Trinity Church?
We will actually be liked more if we fight for other things.
Well this morning let me give you two great reasons that making Jesus known will be the main focus for us.
1. WE MAKE JESUS KNOWN BECAUSE GOD DOES
Jesus did many things during his earthly ministry, but right up there near the top is the fact that he was an evangelist. He comes into this world preaching the gospel. He tells it to tax collectors, blind men, and women by wells, people with power, poor people, religious people, children and adults. He speaks so plainly that even the least educated can understand him. His miracles so powerfully point to the truth of what he says, that even the casual are forced to take him very, very seriously. He keeps acting as if he is the most important person there ever was, and he calls people to himself
John 6:35
35 Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst.
Matthew 11
28 Come to me, all who labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.
Jesus is absolutely committed to evangelism. He is the outgoing, preaching, evangelising God. In so many ways we can never be like Jesus. We cannot atone for sins by dying, as he does. We cannot know what goes on inside people like he does. We cannot do the gospel-confirming miracles he does. We cannot have the relationship with His Father that he does.
In some ways, we are exactly like him. He told his disciples “(In exactly the same way) As the Father has sent me, I am sending you” (Jn 20:21). Just as he came preaching the gospel (Mk 1:13), he expects that people like us will do the same, making disciples, “to the very end of the age.” (Mt 28:20)
We cannot imitate his power, or his knowledge, or his death, but as we evangelise, telling people about him, we are doing precisely what he loves and what he does.
Many people visit Israel, and then tell us how they stood where Jesus stood, or sat where Jesus sat. You never get closer to standing where Jesus stood than when you tell people about him. You are never more like the Holy Son of God than when you evangelise.
When we as a church run Summerfest, when we organise ginger bread evenings. When we encourage each other individually to invite out friends to turn to Jesus in repentance and faith, we are standing in a direct line with Jesus.
Maybe no-one else will know about what we do, maybe people will mock it as a waste of time, but I tell you it really matters, because we are never more like Jesus than when we proclaim his gospel.
Privileges do not come much better than that. We make Jesus known, because God does.
But secondly.
2. WE MAKE JESUS KNOWN BECAUSE OF WHO HE IS
The first creed of the first early church was … Jesus is Lord, it was that simple.
We see that confession here the end of Peter’s sermon at Pentecost. He had been speaking about prophecies from the past, but here he brings us to a well know Old Testament text from
Ps 110.
Vs 34 …
34 For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says,
“‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at my right hand,
35 until I make your enemies your footstool.”’
It is a strange passage, because King David says that strange line “the Lord said to my Lord.”
An astounding thing given the monotheism of Judaism that David is saying God is speaking to someone, other than himself, who is David’s Lord.
The sacred name given to God is the name Yahweh, that is the name that was protected by the Jews lest they defile it, and so they heaped up other titles so as not to say Yahweh, and the most holy, the most sacred title given to God was the title Lord, Adonai.
David says, The Lord says to My Lord. And the title Adonai always speaks about God, but here Yahweh says to my Adonai, sit at my right hand. So the meaning of this verse is God is speaking to the one that he is appointing to be King David’s sovereign, to be David’s Lord to be David’s Adonai, and Peter now applies this to Jesus.
Vs 34
“‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at my right hand,
35 until I make your enemies your footstool.”’
To be placed at the right hand of God is to be placed in the seat of all cosmic authority. When God elevates Christ to his right hand and gives him all authority in heaven and earth, it means he has cosmic authority.
If you have all authority in heaven and earth then there is nothing left. That authority is above every emperor, above every king, above every prime minster and president and is the one who God has placed at his right hand, calling him not just King, but king of all the kings and not just Lord but Lord of all the Lords.
What was prophesied by David 1000 years before is that God himself was going to take his messiah, his Christ and elevate him to his right hand, to the seat of cosmic authority.
You see, how do you speak about Jesus? So often we have reduced the significance of that affirmation. The theology that is around today that has Jesus as a saviour but he does not reign at the right hand of God. That is why some people can say, I have Jesus as saviour but not as my Lord.
How many times have you heard it said or said yourself, I asked Jesus into my heart and invited him to be the Lord of my life? What was he before that invitation?
The message Peter preaches is far more radical than that. He is saying that God who created heaven and Earth has made Jesus the Lord of universe, and that includes you and me. He rules, he does not wait for you or me, or anyone else to invite him to be Lord of our life. He rules you whether you want him to rule over you or not. You can be hostile to his reign and fight against his just place as the King of Kings but all of that does not reduce him at all.
God has decreed that Jesus is Lord, it does not change a thing if you or I declare otherwise.
“‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at my right hand,
35 until I make your enemies your footstool.”’
The imagery of bowing the knee before the Messiah is used again and again in the Old Testament, and what the scriptures tell us is that there will be a day in which every person on the face of the earth will bow the knee to Christ as Lord.
You might ask,” how can that be?”, as most of the people in the world do not embrace the Christian faith. In the final analyses, that will not matter, what matters is who God declares Jesus to be, and God says I will make your enemies your footstool.
God says in Psalm 2 that he will break them with a rod of iron.
“I will break their knees with a rod of iron.”
Many people come willing and throw themselves on the wonderful mercy of the King of Kings, others flee from him, but God says, “You will bow down before the Lord Jesus Christ whether you want to or not, I will break your knee….”
Now how different is Peter’s Evangelistic message from what is often proclaimed in evangelism. How can we not proclaim Christ once we know who he is? When you know who he is, you will proclaim his kinship.
People who fail to look upwards, think that churches should not be proclaiming Jesus.
When I lived in Sydney as a university student and had nothing better to do we would climb out on the roof and drop water bombs on the cars as they stopped at the traffic lights. We were so close to the road that all we had to do was let them fall on the widescreen from directly above.
A strange thing occurred in my time of doing that. I notice that the people in the cars never looked up, they would look out to see where it had come from, but not up. (All the kids in the back seat however, would look up. Is this a strange behaviour in adults I wonder?)
If you never look up, if you only look horizontally then it is not surprising that the biggest problem we see is racism, or global warming, or people being bad to each other.
If there is a big God, who made us for himself, who owns and to whom we owe everything, well, that means there is actually something bigger than social action or political involvement as good as that might be. What a wonderful thing it would be if, as a result of seeing him in his supremacy, it seemed like peanuts to us to give up a career, or marriage, or comfort, to spread the knowledge of the supremacy of Christ.
I know that people show Christ as supreme, in their work as builders and teachers and farmers and doctors? Of course I do. But I also know that God has planned to make him known in every people-group across this world, and I know he will do it through people like us, some who will walk away from a promising career in our 20’s,some who will surrender the usual 40’s and 50’s comforts to do it, and some who will trade in their retirement plans to do it.
For these people it will not be a big deal, because it will be for Jesus’ sake.
Let us all proclaim him Jesus, our Lord and Christ.