Outreach Through Invitation

So this morning is our third installment on a series called On Mission. Ordinary people with an extraordinary message. So far, two weeks ago, we looked at the question of what is evangelism? It's a very big sounding word. What is evangelism?

And we saw that evangelism really is simply teaching and persuading people of the good news message of Jesus. That evangelism is explaining the facts and then also trying to persuade people to believe that and receive that for themselves. Last week, then we looked at the four sort of central aspects to the good news message. We saw that we had to explain how Jesus was God, sinless God, who became man, that he had to die for sins. So we talked about how we are all fallen and how sin must be punished by a holy God.

We saw that Jesus had to die, and He died in our place receiving the wrath and the judgment that we would bear in our place. And then, fourthly, that He rose to life again, showing that He had done the deed, that it was finished and complete, that He had conquered over that sin, over that punishment, and He had conquered death even, promising us life with God for eternity. So those are the four central aspects in the gospel message when we present that to people. And then today, as we wrap up this little refresher course on evangelism, we're gonna look at the importance of invitation, especially invitation for people to be engaged with church. And throughout the Bible, we see we've looked at even several aspects of evangelism, how it can happen, that process of evangelism.

Most basically and fundamentally, we've touched on this before, is this idea of gospel presentation. Presenting the truth of the gospel and inviting someone to believe that, to receive that in faith. To present the gospel, we've said, is to explain, is to retell and apply the message of Jesus Christ. His mission, his life, his death, his resurrection to people. And that's what we've focused on these past few weeks.

Now this gospel presentation is really the central part of evangelism. It can come after some of those initial philosophical God talks. You know? Does God exist? Is there a creator? How have we come here?

What is the purpose of life? Those philosophical talks, however, sort of get narrowed down to how in Jesus Christ, all of those big questions are answered. But this presentation of the gospel may also come at the end of someone who is really stuck and really broken. And they might feel very, very acutely the hopelessness of their situation. And there is opportunity to explain how Jesus provides hope, endless hope.

So, you know, whatever this sort of circumstance is, there is this gospel presentation. Now, of course, we see an example of that. We already looked at that in Acts 2. We'll just quickly skip there for now. Acts 2, where we see a classic example of this gospel presentation from the apostle Peter at the time of Pentecost.

Now it's one of the greatest sermons that ever happened. And we have a look at that from verse 14. We know that the Holy Spirit descends on the 11 disciples that meet there and they start speaking in tongues. And everyone in Jerusalem at the time was thinking, these guys are crazy. People are saying that they're drunk.

And Peter takes the opportunity to present the gospel. Verse 14 of Acts 2: But Peter, standing with the 11, lifted up his voice and addressed them, the crowd. He's saying, Men of Judea and all those who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you and give ear to my words. For these people are not drunk as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day. Jump down to verse 22.

This is where he sort of comes to the crux. He says, Men of Israel, hear these words. Jesus of Nazareth, a man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through Him in your midst as you yourselves know. This Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and foreknowledge of God, you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men. God raised Him up, loosing the pangs of death because it was not possible for Him to be held by it. There is the gospel presentation.

And then let's just quickly go down to verse 36, which is again a summary and an invitation. An invitation to respond. Verse 36: Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made this Jesus both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. And then verse 37, we see, now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and to the rest of the apostles, Brothers, what shall we do?

There is a classic example of this gospel presentation. But then we also hear of a second sort of aspect or a second approach to evangelism, which we haven't really touched on these past few weeks, and that is known as apologetics. Apologetics. Now that might seem like a very strange word to some of us, but the word apologetics sounds like, doesn't it, apology?

And we might be like, what are we apologising for as Christians? We don't have to apologise for anything. But the word apology comes from the Greek word apologia, which actually means to make a defence. Strictly speaking, in Greek, when you apologise, you are defending your actions. You are explaining them.

It's different, isn't it, to how we use apology in English? And that's fine. We've just given it a different meaning. In English, to apologise is to say sorry, is to be sorry, to be regretful for something that you've done wrong. But Christian apologetics is a very narrow, very strict understanding of giving a defence for the Christian faith. Explaining why this world view works.

Explaining why, for example, Jesus had to come. Explaining how we can believe in that. There are people known as apologists in the Christian world who are the ones that write the blogs and do the YouTube clips and all that sort of stuff, who participate in debates, who do that sort of street preaching as well and handle people's obstacles or questions or whatever. This area of evangelism, defending, in a sense, the gospel is used to sort of debunk a lot of hesitation or obstacles or accusations, false accusations that people may have of the Christian message.

Now we haven't focused on this, but it's a reality probably that some of us, with our brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers, friends, colleagues, we will in some way have to do some apologetics work. We will have to explain to them even very basically some of the concerns that they may have about Christianity or some of the myths that they might believe about the Christian message. And debunking some of those things is doing the work of an apologist, giving a defence, giving an explanation to some of these things. Now again, we have a wonderful example in the book of Acts on how this was done even in the early church. In Acts 17, have a quick look at that.

And we already actually referred to this a few weeks ago, where Paul is in Thessalonica with Silas. And Paul is an excellent apologist. Paul does it so well in this event here. And let's go from verse 2 in Acts 17. They arrive in Thessalonica, and Paul went in as was his custom.

And on three Sabbath days, he reasoned with them, the Jews from the synagogue, from the scriptures. He reasoned with them from the scriptures explaining and proving that it was necessary for the Christ to suffer and to rise from the dead and saying, This Jesus whom I proclaim to you is the Christ. We see Paul reasoning. We see Paul proving to these Jews that this happened. It's in Isaiah 53.

Have a look at that. Have a look at Zechariah. Have a look at all these prophecies. This Jesus has fulfilled them all. And for three weeks in a row, Paul is answering questions and he's giving explanations so that people may believe, that their resistance to the gospel may be demystified, debunked.

And so in our evangelism or our outreach, we might be challenged about why we believe what we believe. And that is okay. And that is normal. But be aware that it is a normal part of our outreach. And in a way, we should be comfortable to deal with that.

We should be equipped to deal with some of those things. And we're sometimes a little passive. We sort of don't do this preemptively until someone says, why do you believe? And then we have to go back and run to a YouTube clip or something like that and quickly study up and say, okay, that's what I'm supposed to say. But it is just a normal part of evangelism, of our outreach.

And so those are two main areas. But then I wanna focus on a third area this morning that's really sort of the focus of our talk this morning, and that is invitation into the church community. Invitation as a part of our outreach. A couple of weeks ago, I made the point and I made it fairly strongly that you can't say you've done genuine evangelism if you simply say to yourself, I've lived a really good life, and somehow through that, they will know that Jesus died for their sins.

That's not the biblical understanding of proclaiming the gospel. No one will fall to their knees and say, Wow, Tony is such a great man. I will put my trust in Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins and life eternal. They won't. It needs the explanation.

It needs the word of God. But that doesn't mean that our life and how we live it doesn't impact the proclamation of the gospel. They are somehow connected. I mean, people smell hypocrisy a mile away. But if we haven't gotten someone to hear the gospel message, then they haven't been evangelised.

But having said that, we should be careful, and this is my point, we should be careful not to go down too far down the track of saying that evangelism is then only this individual effort between me and my friend Billy. Like, I have to, you know, it's me and Billy in this ring and we're sort of just like ducking and weaving and stuff like that. And it's just us in this little skirmish together. No.

No. There's an underappreciated aspect, I think, of outreach today, which is the simple idea of inviting people into the conglomerate of other believers who have had such a wealth of experience of God in such a wide array of ways that there's something powerful to that. And again, I think we see a biblical example of that in the early church in the book of Acts. Let's flip back again to Acts 2. This is just after Peter's amazing sermon where 3,000 people became believers.

And we see just after this, a little church starts in Jerusalem. Just a group of believers are there. And we read from verse 42 what this church looked like. Acts 2:42: And they, these new Christians, this group of Christians, devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching. They devoted themselves to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread, and to prayer.

And awe came upon every soul and many wonders and signs were being done through the apostles. And all who believed were together and all had things in common. And they were selling their possessions and belongings and distributing the proceeds to all as any had need. And day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they received their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favour with all the people. And listen to this: and the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.

So we see a wonderful summary of these early Christians doing church together, meeting together, living out communally the life of a Christian. And what we see here is that God uses this community of believers to draw more people into the kingdom. Like, Peter had just done his great presentation of the gospel. We don't see him doing that again and again and again. Now it's the work of the church bringing people in, engaging them in the daily temple worship that they were doing at the time, the sharing of fellowship together, the attention to the teaching of the apostles, to prayer.

People are being invited into that community, and people being saved day by day, the Bible says. And so I think it is important for us not to neglect the invitation of our friends into this, a Sunday morning service, a small group community on a Tuesday or a Thursday night. And I wanna just share three reasons. Three reasons why I think this is a really powerful part of our evangelism and should be a powerful part of our evangelism. Firstly, that our witness together is greater than our witness separately.

One of the big things that Jesus Himself taught about the church was that non-Christians will know that we are His disciples by our love for one another. John 13:35. By this will all people know that you are my disciples if you have love one for another. Now this teaches us that not only are we supposed to be together frequently, like Jesus is assuming that we will actually want to be with other Christians. It's a bit of a just a reminder that, you know, no matter how hard you click that like button on Facebook for someone in your church, it's not quite the same as spending time with them.

Even if you give them the little love heart instead of the thumbs up. Jesus says, not only as Christians are we supposed to want to be around each other, but what Jesus also assumes is that it will be in view of other people. It means that we are living it in such a way that we are public about it. And that means we're engaging with people outside. We're inviting them in.

It means that we invite people into our space, into our life. Our witness together as the body of believers loving each other deeply, even though we are very different, some of us, encouraging each other, that's a significant witness to the gospel power. It shows that it has effect. It shows that it can actually overhaul lives. It can bring a whole bunch of randoms like us together.

I mean, think about what sort of place, what sort of club would these different people be sitting together for any other reason than the Christian gospel. Our witness together as the body of believers is a testament to the gospel's power to overhaul lives. So outreach through invitation, inviting people to the church, into the church community, inviting people to our small groups allows people to witness our togetherness, which is far more influential, Jesus Himself says, than our individual witness to them. That's an amazing statement. Secondly, it allows a person to experience the full range of God's people.

Although you are part of the church, you are not the whole church. Does that make sense? You are part of the church, you are not the whole church. It's like me saying, I'm a volleyball player for a club. If you meet me, you've experienced volleyball.

As I'm talking to you now, even though I'm a volleyball player, you haven't experienced volleyball as you hear me speaking to you. I could even explain the rules and the concepts of volleyball, but until you've come with me to watch us play volleyball, you haven't experienced volleyball. When we invite someone to church, you are inviting them to experience Jesus working through His people. The church, Paul describes us, is the body of Christ. It's like the physical representation of Christ working in the world.

And these members, the members of this body can offer to individuals something that you might not be able to offer to that friend, to that family member. You may be really good at apologetics. You may be really brainy. You can remember all these arguments. But someone walks through that door and there's an Erica that welcomes them.

There's a Steph chases after them with a coffee at morning tea. And that is just so amazing to them. They feel so much love in that moment. That your apologetics, well, that's nice, but this is amazing. We can't give that to them, just me as KJ.

We need the body of Christ involved in that to experience Jesus Christ fully. And so when we invite people into our church or our small group, you're asking other Christians, and this is a trusting as well, you're asking other Christians to participate in reaching out to your friend or your family member instead of trying to do it yourself, being the superman. But they may just be the right person. They may just have the right personality. They may just have that gift that you don't have.

And then lastly, coming to a church service especially gives them uninterrupted time with Jesus and His word. We get it, don't we? Everyone is busy. Everyone is tired. You probably will hear it again once we say, how are you doing?

You know, around the coffee here. How are you doing? Oh, man. So busy. So busy.

Our friends are busy. Our family members are busy. We get it. They are bombarded with information. They are overwhelmed with new ideas, with thoughts, with marketing, with noise.

This is what we're battling against with our friends and our family. But when God's people meet together on Sundays, when we meet together at small groups even, we collectively decide to put the noise away. We take our phones, I did this morning, and I put it on do not disturb. Our ladies tuck it right down into their handbag down at the bottom. We turn off the iPads.

We don't have iPads here. We don't play it while we're listening. I hope I have never seen anyone do it yet. We don't even check our Facebook status to see who's liked our stuff from last night. You can hear that.

It's quiet. And this phenomenon allows us to listen. It allows God uninterrupted time with us. And so when we're inviting our friends, we're inviting them into this space, this sacred moment where we hear God's word to us and we can respond. We are reflective enough.

We're introspective enough to think about the big questions. Why am I here? Who is God? What is my purpose in life? I've said this before, but I wanna stress it to us again this morning.

You can trust what happens at this church on Sunday. Sometimes we get nervous because we're control freaks and we don't know what is gonna happen at church. We get nervous. We don't know how the pastor is gonna preach that Sunday and what he's gonna preach on. We don't know if they're gonna play our favourite songs in the music team.

We don't even know what sort of cake we'll be on for morning tea. But I wanna reassure you that you can trust us. In fact, you have to trust us. God has said you must trust us. But I wanna make this promise to you that I will preach the gospel every time.

I will preach it every time. And I can guarantee you because I know this church that they will experience in some way real genuine community. People say it of this church all the time. They will see changed lives. In two weeks' time, a man will be baptised here, Brian.

They will give a testimony that is just incredible. God's word will be heard. But we have this very powerful promise as well and we must also remember this. That God's Spirit is hovering amongst His people at this time. The sermon may not be a 10 out of 10 knock them dead sermon.

The worship songs may not be your favourite. The church pews you're sitting on might be a little bit hard this morning. But none of that matters as much as the fact that you have brought someone with you to enter into the special presence of God Himself in this moment. And there is power in that. And we see some of these three things, these, you know, three aspects that we've just looked at happening here in Acts 2, don't we?

We see that Christians devoting themselves to the teaching of the apostles. God's word is there constantly. They meet together regularly to pray. Who are they praying for? Well, they're praying for the church, obviously, but they're praying for people to get saved, to understand what Jesus has done.

They eat together. There is community. There is fellowship. They go to the temple to sing and praise God every single day. And then amazingly, verse 47 says, somehow despite all this wackiness, they find favour with all people.

The non-Christians included. How is that possible? They have done all these things in such a way that it was pleasant and intriguing and winsome by everyone who watched it, who saw it. And how does the snapshot of the early church end here? What is the result of all of this?

And the Lord added to their numbers daily those who were being saved. It's important for us to hear this aspect as well. It was the Lord who added. It's the Lord's work to save our friends. We believe that.

We believe that. And it's the Lord's will to add them to the kingdom. But this doesn't deter us from doing our part even as we rest in the knowledge of God's sovereign call and drawing of His people. The wonderful thing for us, however, is that at one time, we were the ones who were called. At one point, whether that was through personal invitation, whether that was through a really good argument by a great apologist, or whether that was just witnessing the humble love of a parent for Jesus.

Somehow, we heard that Jesus loves us. And this incredible love would seek us out. This love would hunt us down and rescue us despite ourselves. The good news message of Jesus is that He has come to seek and to save the lost. But as you and I know, the worst problem about being lost, the worst problem about being lost is not knowing that you are lost.

Jesus said of Himself that He came to Earth to help us find a way back home, and He taught us who God is, and so our friends can come and hear that. And He told us about His mission, and our friends can come and hear that. We need to have this message go to those guys and girls. But we are also comforted this morning as we now participate in the Lord's Supper that this is for us as well. We receive this first.

And because this is such great news, we cannot keep it to ourselves. We cannot. It is a message that must be heard. It is a message that must be responded to in some way. And that is what God calls us to again this morning.

Let's invite those people. Let's be praying for those people these next two weeks. If they don't come Easter, that's okay. The gospel will be here the next week. Let's keep working on them.

Let's pray. Father, we thank you for Your word. We receive it again. We do pray as Brendan has already prayed for those friends of ours, those colleagues of ours that need to hear this. And we pray, Lord, for the courage.

We pray for the opportunity. We pray for the passion, the courage for the vision, the excitement, the joy of seeing these people come to know You. Lord, give us a burden for them. Help us to not forget them and to keep them in our prayers and in our thought lives forever. Holy Spirit, we thank you that we can come into this place, this special time every week, and know that Your Spirit is here with us.

Father, that You are dwelling with Your people. And we just ask, Lord, that we may have the confidence to know that You are so real, that You are an objective reality that we enter into. And that because You are an objective reality, someone that doesn't even know You may experience You as well. You are not some hidden mysterious secret thing that we enter into. You are the God who speaks and can be heard. Lord, we look towards Easter.

We pray not only for our church, but for all those churches who will declare and pronounce Your gospel everywhere. We pray, Lord, that You will send and draw those who need to hear it. And, oh, God, that You will bring conviction of sin, the awareness of a future without You, and, Father, the assurance of Your pardon and forgiveness in Jesus Christ. We pray for Your church in Australia. Lord, we pray that we may declare that faithfully, succinctly, and clearly.

Raise the leaders that need to preach that, Lord, and help us in our way, whether just simply through love or through wise and intelligent words, help us to communicate Your gospel of peace. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen.