In 1962 my father, at the age of 47, became a Christian.
He had been in daily business contact with a man who had persistently shared the gospel with him for over 12 months, and he finally came to Christ.
Come to church with me
When my dad told me this news he asked that I go to church with him each Sunday night, which I did and, through that church, I heard the same gospel as my father had heard and I was converted in July, 1967.
The last time I met the business man through whom my father was converted, the 92-year-old Ernie Crocker, I reminded him: ‘Mr Crocker, you always carried an evangelistic tract in your back pocket’, and he pulled out a tract and said: ‘David, there will be a lot of people in heaven because of this tract.’ I thought, probably also because of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus!
Ernie Crocker knew that in coming to Christ he was joining a people whose conversion was simultaneously their commissioning, like Isaiah and Paul, who came to Christ and were immediately sent to bear God’s name to the world. ( Isaiah 6.5-9; Acts 9.4-6 and 20.)
God’s purpose is to glorify himself by saving a people who hear and believe the gospel of his Son, as it is carried to the ends of the earth by his Spirit-empowered people.
Book of Acts
At Keswick this year I will be speaking from the book of Acts, which is all about how God is fulfilling that same purpose. Luke, the author of Acts, tracks the gospel’s unstoppable progress from Jerusalem, through the suburbs of Judea, then to Samaria and then to the ends of the earth (Rome). Everywhere the gospel goes, God is glorified as people are saved.
Luke, who uses last words well, has the last word of Acts in his Greek text as follows: ‘proclaiming the Kingdom of God and teaching the things concerning the Lord Jesus Christ with all boldness, unhindered-ly’(28.31). Luke finishes the sentence with an adverb, unhinderedly, relating to the verbs proclaiming and teaching. In other words, the gospel has reached Rome, it is unstoppable, it cannot be hindered and under the sovereign oversight of God its progress will be ongoing. God’s purpose must be fulfilled.
And so it is today. We may not all have the same gifts for evangelism, or the same evangelistic opportunities, but all God’s people will have the same heart to see the lost found, the unsaved rescued, those in darkness come to the light of Christ.
You and I as disciples of Christ are sent. We each have our different spheres of influence and we enter those spheres with the gospel, the instrument which God, the great evangelist, will use to convert people.
Sin-hardened city
In Acts 18, Paul is in the sin-hardened city of Corinth. The Lord speaks directly to Paul: ‘Do not be afraid, go on speaking and do not be silent’ (v.9). I take it that God’s Word is always appropriate and that Paul was therefore apt to be both afraid and silent.
The reason Paul is to be bold is that: ‘… I am with you and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people’ (v.10). God knows those who are his; we don’t. Our role is, in prayerful dependence on him, to keep opportunis-tically speaking and sharing the gospel with whoever, because we believe that God yet has ‘many in this place who are my people’.
God sends us
Someone may say: ‘I let my life do the talking’ and yet the Lord Jesus, who lived the perfect life, added word to deed. The abundant life lived without the interpretive word of the gospel as the reason for that life is an enigma to the world.
Others may say: ‘I am a private Christian’, but experience shows that eventually the private will usually cancel out the Christian or, hopefully, the Christian will cancel out the private.
God sent his Son into the world to save the world.
God sent his Spirit into his people to empower them to proclaim the saving work of the Son.
The sending God now sends his Spirit-empowered people to call in the saved and thus glorify him!
