The Power of God in Outreach

This morning we come to our third instalment on our series on outreach called organic outreach, how to share the gospel naturally. As many of you guys can surely sense and feel, we know on the one hand the urgency and the requirement of the church of God to be involved in the mission of bringing lost people into the kingdom. We sense that urgency, but maybe we don't feel equipped to be able to do that. We don't know how to do that well. We don't know where to start.

This series is meant to give us the tools to be able to do that. And we've already started touching on a few of them. We talked last time about the one degree rule. Remember that? The little dial that we just meant to switch up one degree, rating ourselves between a one and a ten on outreach temperature, asking one another that in our small groups or at around the family dinner table or something like that.

What is our spiritual or our outreach temperature? And then thinking how can I put up that degree by one? What can I put in place to turn the heat up a little bit? Well, this morning we come to our third instalment, and we're starting to look at the role of God in the salvation process, in the outreach or the evangelism process. Three weeks ago we looked at what motivates outreach.

The urgency of that, we saw that it is a love for God. A genuine love for God motivates evangelism. We love God so much that we wanna do His will, and His will is to share the gospel. But we also are motivated by our love for the lost. We're called to love our neighbour as ourselves.

And who of us are not thrilled that we are saved? So we want that for our neighbour as well. Love our neighbour as we love ourself. And then two weeks ago we saw that there is a harvest field that the Lord is sending us into. That the workers are too few, but the harvest is plentiful.

And this morning we look at the role of the work, the power of God in outreach. We're going to turn to First Corinthians chapter two to find our passage this morning. As we investigate the role of God in salvation, does God just sit back and passively wait for us to bring in the harvest? Does He care about these lost souls? And what is God doing about this situation?

Well, we get an insight from the apostle Paul in First Corinthians chapter two starting from verse six all the way through to chapter three verse nine. First Corinthians 2:6. Yet among the mature, we, this is Paul and his fellow workers, do impart wisdom. Although it is not a wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age who are doomed to pass away. But we impart a secret and hidden wisdom of God, which God decreed before the ages for our glory.

None of the rulers of this age understood this. For if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory. But as it is written, what no eye has seen or ear heard, nor the heart of man imagined, what God has prepared for those who love Him. These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit.

For the Spirit searches everything, even the depths of God. For who knows a person's thoughts except the spirit of that person which is in him? So also no one comprehends the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. Now we have received not the spirit of the world, but the Spirit who is from God that we might understand the things freely given us by God. And we impart this in words not taught by human wisdom, but taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual truths to those who are spiritual.

On the other hand, the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God. For they are folly to him and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The spiritual person judges all things but is himself to be judged by no one. For who has understood the mind of the Lord so as to instruct Him? But we have the mind of Christ.

But our brothers could not address you as spiritual people, but as people of the flesh, as infants in Christ. I fed you with milk, not solid food, for you were not ready for it. And even now you are not yet ready, for you are still of the flesh. For while there is jealousy and strife among you, are you not of the flesh and behaving only in a human way? For when one says I follow Paul and another I follow Apollos, are you not being merely human?

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.

He who plants and he who waters are one and each will receive his wages according to his labour. For we are God's fellow workers. You are God's field, God's building. So far our reading. Now I want you to imagine in your mind's eye a chef.

Imagine the white big puffy hats. In fact, we have an ex chef here sitting with us, Michael. You can imagine Michael if you want. This particular chef, unlike Michael, is particularly talented. It's not true.

If you've ever had his curries, you know that he's very talented. This chef is capable of creating absolute masterpieces. Absolute masterpieces. Fantastic soups. Spine tingling desserts.

Mind boggling main courses. He cooks a steak just right. Now, you will know, as I'm sure Michael does, that a chef's most important tool in the kitchen is his knife. More often than not, the knife is instrumental in the preparation of a meal. But after the meal is cooked, when that dish is served, how much focus is given to the knife?

How much praise by the recipient is given to that knife? Who has been to a fancy restaurant, tasted a yummy meal and thought, wow, how good is this guy's knife? No one focuses on the knife. All attention and praise is on the chef behind his creation. The knife, as important as it is, is simply an instrument in the chef's hands, something that is used to create this masterpiece.

This is what Paul is actually getting at in our passage this morning. Earlier in chapter one, Paul has acknowledged as he writes to this really troubled church in Corinth that not everybody will understand the good news of Jesus. In verse 18 of chapter one, Paul says there is a fundamental divide in humanity between those who believe and those who don't. No race. No gender.

No identity politics. The dividing line is between those who believe and those who don't. This is what he says in verse 18: for the word of the cross, the message of the cross, is folly to those who are perishing, but to those who are being saved, the gospel is the power of God. And the verses we read this morning, Paul shows that the deciding factor between those who believe and those who don't is not in wisdom.

The deciding factor is not in intelligence or scientific knowledge as much as people will try and argue, or on moral standing, how good a person you are so that you may simply just hop across into the kingdom because you're that good. It is not about the skill of the person who has shared the gospel with that person that matters. It comes down to the revealing power of the Holy Spirit. In verse nine, chapter two, Paul describes the altogether supernatural event of salvation. Paul says, no eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor the heart of man has imagined what God has prepared for those who love Him.

These things God has revealed to us through the Spirit. This is the fundamental beginning that you and I must understand, must hold on to at all times. When we think of evangelism, but just in life in general, we believe, friends, we believe because of revelation. We believe because it has been revealed to us. It hasn't been because we've somehow adopted it through intergenerational Christians, that you know, a family sort of thing.

No imagination has tricked us into believing this. No intelligent philosophy has made us understand this. No thirst for a spiritual experience has brought us to this place. No rational or logical reasoning has made us understand and put our trust in Christ. God, through the Holy Spirit, has opened blinded eyes and hardened hearts to receive the good news.

And Paul doubles down on this when he goes on further in verse 14 to say, the natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, foolishness to him. They are not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned. The natural person, meaning the person without the Holy Spirit, cannot accept the things of God. It's not that they miss it. They cannot understand the things of God.

They are altogether different to the nature that they have. And so when they hear it, it is foolishness. It doesn't make sense. And so we have to understand we believe. We believe because of revelation.

We believe because something supernaturally has taken shape in our lives. Paul then moves on to chapter three where he starts applying what this means. He applies these truths to the controversy that was being experienced in the Corinthian church. It seems that if you read that, there was some division, some debate about who the real leader of this church was. Some were saying, well, it's Paul because most of us became believers through the ministry of Paul when he shared the gospel. Others were saying, it's Apollos because Apollos stayed here after Paul.

He came after Paul and he was teaching us what the gospel means, how we are to live. And they're saying, we follow Paul and we follow Apollos. Now it's true, and Paul admits this, these two men were instrumental in the conversion and the discipleship of the Corinthian Christians. Paul describes it. He says, he was there first and Apollos came later.

But from what he has explained in chapter two about God's absolute power in giving revelation through the Holy Spirit, Paul says, you guys, you need to understand that whoever shares the gospel is only an instrument in the hand of God. It is God who has rescued you. We are part of the process, but no one, none of us, is the one that you should depend on for your faith. Chapter three verse five, this is what he says. This is how he puts it.

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants, simply servants through whom you believed as the Lord assigned to each. Sure enough, I planted, Apollos watered, but God is the one who gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth.

And so as we think of our unsaved friends, as we think of those colleagues we rub shoulders with day in, day out, the clients that we meet on a weekly basis, this is the critical thing we must understand. We must remember and keep reminding ourselves, we believe because of revelation. And therefore our work of outreach to others who are like us, who are no different to us, means their salvation can only come through the work of God. God will use our words and God will use our actions just like He used Paul to sow those seeds and Apollos to water those seeds, but the power, the effectual call, the theologians call it.

The thing that brings about a reaction, the power of life for salvation doesn't lay in the actions of sowing and watering. A written or a spoken word cannot bring a dead life back from the dead. Our words cannot open the eyes of the spiritually blind. It doesn't matter what you say.

Our words need to have the spiritual power of God behind them in order to do that. But in His grace and mercy, God has chosen us to do it through. And so this belief in the sovereignty of God for the salvation of souls has some clear implications for us. Well, the first thing we see is that understanding God's work in salvation, if we understand this correctly, actually humbles us. First and foremost, we are humbled by that realisation because it means there's no place for us to boast in that process at all.

There's no place for us to boast about how many people came to our crusades, Pastor James, when we were preaching in Africa. Not that Pastor James does that, of course. There's no place for us to boast about our evangelistic expertise of having ten people in our lifetime that have come through to faith on our couches at home. Paul says, neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything. Only God who gives the growth is anything.

If God uses us to open the eyes of the spiritually blind, then He gets all the glory for it. So often in my experience, and I'm sure in yours if you've been around for a while, is seeing someone coming to the Lord at the end of a long spiritual journey. A long spiritual journey more often than not, where the Lord has been doing work in their hearts for years. The planting of the gospel was done ages ago. The seed has been watered a myriad of different ways through a myriad of different persons.

And then at one point in this process, this one genuine conversion happens where the enormity of their guilt, the sin that they have, is realised. And at the same time, the enormity of God's sheer grace is also realised in Christ Jesus, and it is felt for the first time perhaps. And that leads to genuine repentance. And that leads to genuine faith. The mark of true faith.

But this conversion has been just the tip of an iceberg. The Bible says that the person God uses to bring someone to faith is no more important than the process of someone who initially planted the seed, maybe even years ago. Unfortunately, that person may never even know what has happened years later, but in God's eternal perspective, they are equally important. They are equally significant. The one couldn't have happened without the other.

But ultimately, we are instruments in the hand of a saving God who is at work in that process. It is God and God alone who gives life to that process. And so firstly, this humbles us out of any notion that we have done an especially good job of being the be all and the end all in this process because God has been working in that person's life long before we got there. God is the only one that breathes life into the gospel proclamation that happens here on every Sunday morning. God gives conviction and sorrow for sin to the heart in order to believe, and that keeps us truly humble.

That keeps us with our heads down when we're working in the harvest field. Secondly, the understanding of God's work in salvation should encourage us. While we are gospel instruments in God's hands and while we all have responsibility to be sharp knives as those instruments, ultimately the success of the gospel doesn't rest with us. And thank God for that. We should have the confidence to back ourselves in outreach.

We should have the confidence to back ourselves in outreach. Every one of you sitting here this morning, I wanna tell you that God can and will use you in evangelism. This is what it means if God is the one that is working. If God is really at work in bringing people to salvation, it means that we can take He can use and take our frail words and by the power of His Spirit, He can use those words to bring the dead back to life. Now we don't know what God is doing with a particular person at any given moment.

Right? We don't know if we are being the planter here. We don't know if we are being the waterer here. Or that we might be the one that witnesses that final decision that is made for Christ. We don't know.

We don't have to know. But we can have the confidence that God can use us because God is the one who has the power. Now coming back to our analogy, just like a chef will prefer to use a sharp knife over a blunt one, so I think God will bless a ministry that is prepared and intentionally involved in outreach. Does that make sense? There's no excuse for laziness or fear when we have been called into the harvest field.

It is not for the special few. We are to smell like sweat and wheat to get to work, to get amongst it. But the reassuring implication of God's word this morning is this: if we step out in faith, if we will intentionally build relationships with our neighbours, if we will willingly speak up about God, then the Holy Spirit will work. The Holy Spirit will work. If salvation is ultimately a work of God, we should be humbled out of any pride, but we should also be encouraged out of any fear.

And so we move to our third and final point. How understanding God's sovereignty in evangelism will drive us into outreach. If God is the only one who saves, then He's the only one who changes hearts. Right? Then we should be far less concerned with developing really neat and tidy Sunday worship services with just the right amount of music, with just the right length of prayer so that people won't be bored, making sure that we have just the right amount of smiling faces at the door so that people won't feel isolated or lonely, and making sure that we pick a Sunday to invite someone when KJ is going to preach a ripper sermon.

And you might have to wait a while for that one. But these things, to some extent, are important. We have to think about these things, and thankfully we had wonderfully smiling faces this morning with Michael and Coretta at the front. And I think we had a good time of worship this morning with excellently skilled and well practised musicians. But if God is the power behind someone's salvation, then our priority must be prayer. If prayer moves the heart of God and God moves the heart of man, then that is where we have to start.

In fact, if you were to go and investigate all the times of incredible revival across the history of the church, the two thousand years of the church, the times of Jonathan Edwards, the times of John Wesley, of George Whitfield, Martin Luther, William Tyndale. If you were to look at all these moments of mass conversions and people coming to faith, do you know what you'll find? They were all marked in a church that was praying. We hear and we see these men, these giants of the faith preaching and moving, but they were upheld and supported by thousands of people who prayed for them. Prayer is the cornerstone of any effective outreach.

We unleash heavenly power when we pray for lost people. And Jesus Himself commanded for us to pray for ourselves and for other believers to be thrust, expelled into the harvest field. Remember that? We must pray and we must pray and we must pray, not simply for our lost brother or our lost husband or our granddaughter who's far from God. We must be praying for the whole of the Gold Coast.

I wanna ask you this morning, when last have you prayed for your workplace? When last have you prayed for your colleague, for your client, for them to know Jesus Christ as Lord? I wanna share a little bit of a testimony this morning because it was such a God thing, I think. Two weeks ago, after I preached the sermon on the harvest being plentiful and the workers being few, I was really challenged with that question and I sort of I think I vented that out loud to you guys that morning as well. Do I really believe that the harvest field is plentiful?

I asked. Do I really believe when Jesus said the harvest field is so plentiful we don't have enough workers? It feels sometimes we have too many workers and not enough people to bring in. And I realised something that morning that I simply need to take it on faith that, yes, the harvest field is plentiful. And so I prayed that God would give me spiritual eyes to see that harvest field.

Well, the next week, the following week, very early the next morning in fact, I flew to Melbourne for a bunch of meetings. And we met in the Melbourne Airport at a meeting room there. During these two days of meeting, we had a lady come in and provide us lunch. And midway through a report that I was giving back, Jack DeFries, who some of you will know, interrupted me. And he asked the lady serving us lunch if there is anything that we could be praying for her.

She was quite surprised that we would ask her this sort of thing, and she asked us, are you Catholics? We explained to her we're on the other side. We're the Protestants, and she said, well, that's good enough. You can pray for me. She told us that we should pray for her two children and that we should pray for God's blessing on her family.

And so dutifully, like all good pastors do, we sat there, or we scribbled in our notepads, these things that we should pray for. A few minutes later and she left. She left our lunch there and she left. A few minutes later, still in my report, she burst through the door and again interrupted me. And she said, well, she just remembered that there's also a family member in her homeland of Sri Lanka who is very, very ill, and a number of her family members are flying back to see them.

Can we please pray for her? He said, absolutely. And I saw that the pastors again dutifully writing, but I just felt I'm gonna pray for her now. So I asked, can we pray for you now? And one of the pastors pulled out a chair and she sat down and we prayed for her.

And I prayed that God would reveal Himself to her in this time, that God would reveal Himself to her two children. We prayed for God's blessing on those kids. And then we prayed for God to heal this gravely ill family member. And I shared that we trust and we believe that God, You are powerful. You can do this.

And as we opened our eyes, there was just tears streaming down her face. Absolute uncontrollable tears. She was so moved. And, you know, not wanting to embarrass herself, she quickly got up and took a few plates and cups and left. Later that week we received an email from her manager thanking us for the way that we had treated her staff member and how moved the entire group of staff were at hearing the testimony of this lady for what we had done for her in that time.

The manager asked that the next time we're there, we need to invite her to come and pray as well. Can you believe that? The point is, I started that week feeling challenged by the thought, do I really believe the harvest is plentiful? And this is one event in three that I experienced that week. And I prayed about it.

I prayed about it. I didn't whinge about it simply and think, oh, this is too. I prayed about it and that week I saw this bit of faith, this bit of belief that, yes, I take it at God's word, it is plentiful, and experience these incredible events that showed how God is at work even in the midst of what I think is a tough mission in Australia. I was rebuked in my lack of faith. I've been challenged to pray for more eyes, more spiritual eyes to see the harvest field. And so this leads me at the end of the message to our next little tool for the toolkit.

Okay. So last time we had the tool of the one degree moving up. Well, this next tool is the toolkit of prayer. Now that doesn't seem very revolutionary, but I wanna start having you see it this way. It's not simply a thing that we do.

Prayer is a tool for evangelism. We must use prayer before we do evangelism. This is the unseen praying that we do for the people around us. This is the prayer for our colleagues and our family members preparing our hearts and what we do in our quiet times. But I wanna suggest to you this, that you use prayer for evangelistic conversations.

Like I did with this Sri Lankan lady, Shani, I used prayer to share with her who God is. I pray that God may reveal Himself, that He is a God who is able to be sensed and seen and experienced in life. That's what I shared with her when I was simply praying. I pray that her children may know God, that God loves her children. I pray that God may care for her sick relatives, that He is powerful enough to heal and save.

All these things I was able to share with her without preaching, without her defences being up. I could simply say these things about God to God in the presence of her listening. Kevin Harney, in his book on organic outreach, he suggests setting up a mental trigger in your mind. That anytime you talk with someone that is not a Christian and they share something really happy with you, really joyful with you, or something really, really hard, really sad with you, that something in you triggers so that you can say something along the lines of, hey, that sounds really hard what you're going through. Could I pray for you?

Hey, I'm so glad that this makes you so happy. Can I pray God's blessing on that? And Harney says, you'll be surprised by how many people are genuinely touched by that gesture. They may not believe in that moment that this prayer can do anything, but the fact that you're willing to pray for them is so affirming. And I think spiritually I believe spiritually, there is something inside all of us that wants to reach to something higher than us, something transcendent when we experience deep pain or deep joy.

I think our souls are pushing at the ceiling at that moment. And so facilitating that is so liberating for some of these people. So why not try it out this week? Why not set up that trigger in your mind, that evangelistic prayer? Through that, you can witness and share with those people who God is.

As we wrap up, I'm reminded of what J. I. Packer wrote in his really influential book on evangelism called Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God. A really great little book to help us understand exactly what we've been talking about this morning. In it, he reflects on Paul's theology on salvation. What we've just spent some time on this morning. But Packer reflected on how Paul's theology influenced Paul's life and his lifestyle and his outlook on ministry.

Packer writes that the knowledge of God's power in salvation, I'll put up the quote here, made Paul confident. So the knowledge of God's power in salvation made Paul confident, tireless, and expectant in his evangelism. And if there were on occasions hard spells with much opposition and little visible fruit, he did not panic or lose heart. For he knew that if Christ had opened the door for him to make known the gospel in a place, that meant that if it was Christ's purpose to draw sinners to Himself in that place, the word would not return void. So his business therefore was to be patient and be faithful in spreading the good news till the time of harvest should come.

May we be confident and tireless and expectant in the work of evangelism in this church. May the Lord use us this week as we patiently pray and seek His power to change the hearts of those we love. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we thank You this morning for Your word again given to us. We thank You for the encouraging word that You are the God of salvation.

You are the power of life. Thank You for the revelation that we have received at one point to understand and sense and know that You are God, and in You there is hope. We pray, Lord, that this will keep us humble. And, Lord, we pray that this will keep us and encourage us rather to be courageous as well. Father, I wanna pray for those people that You will send across our path this week.

I pray for wonderful testimonies in the coming days and the coming weeks of how You have used us to share, to pray, and to invite. Father, help us to work on these practical things to set up these necessary triggers and thoughts in our minds and just understand how we can be used by You, how we can be used as this sharp knife in the hands of a talented chef. And Father, we pray just like we read this morning in the Psalms that we will see and experience the joy of seeing the peoples, the nations worship our God. Create in us the urgency and the desire to see You glorified by even more souls. Oh, Lord, because You are worthy of it. In Jesus' name. Amen.