Rescuing the Perishing

How can they believe in Him whom they've never heard about? And how will they hear about Him if somebody doesn't deliver the news?

And how can they go if the church won't train them, and send them, and subsidize them, and pray for them? And we all gather together on the Lord's Day, and we sing glory to our King. Have we come from the trenches? Do we come bursting with news from the front? The gospel is living.

It is fresh water. You may know some people who picked up a Bible or a gospel track, and God used the power of His Word to save them. The Bible contains everything necessary for having a relationship with God. However, most of the time, people come to understanding of the gospel through conversations. A Christian friend or family member talks to them, takes them to God's Word and explains the gospel. God has given us the responsibility of proclaiming the truth of the gospel, but Christians often neglect that responsibility. Today, Stephen Davey is going to challenge us regarding evangelism here on Wisdom for the Heart. I invite your attention to Romans chapter 10, verses 14 and 15. And as I have studied this, this week, I would tell you that I believe that this is perhaps the most compelling portion of Paul's letter, where we hear his heart.

It's as if he just opens it up and bears it all. Let's back up to verse 13, for whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved. How then shall they call upon him in whom they have not believed? And how shall they believe in him whom they have not heard? And how shall they hear without a preacher? And how shall they preach unless they are sent? Just as it is written, how beautiful are the feet of those who bring glad tidings of good things? While I normally begin my sermon with some story or illustration to point to the need of the text, what I want to do this morning is begin by giving you my outline.

I know that sounds exciting. Hold your applause. Here it is, okay? You probably already noticed, in fact, you ought to have your pencils out, that you have here four questions and one commendation. Each of the questions and the commendation begin with the word, how. That's not my outline.

I just wanted to point that out. Here's one approach for you students of the word. The first two questions reveal the unbeliever's response. The second two questions challenge the believer's responsibility.

Or you could outline it this way. The first question relates to an unbeliever acting in faith. Paul asks, how shall they call upon him in whom they have not believed? The second question relates to an unbeliever hearing the facts, how shall they believe in him whom they have not heard? The third question relates to the believer speaking, how shall they hear without a preacher?

The fourth question relates to the believer's sending, how shall they preach unless they are sent? Or you could arrange these four questions along these lines. The first two questions have to do with the message. The second two questions have to do with the method.

Or you could approach it this way. The first question has to do with the miracle of the gospel. The second question has to do with the message of the gospel. The third question has to do with the messenger of the gospel. The fourth question has to do with the ministry of the gospel. So we have calling upon Christ, hearing about Christ, preaching Christ and sending in the name of Christ. Or you could dissect these verses by simply studying the verbs, calling, believing, hearing, preaching, sending.

Or you could turn the text around and outline it this way. The believer sends the messenger. The messenger delivers the message. The unbeliever understands the meaning and the unbeliever accepts the Messiah. This text, ladies and gentlemen, is easy to outline, but it's difficult to live out. It's hard to live out.

It's so easy to be satisfied with a few alliterated words. You leave chapter nine, if you were studying with me, and you probably left a little overwhelmed with the fact that salvation is all up to God and maybe for you was a little unsettling. But then this chapter, chapter 10, arrests the scholars and the linguists and the students and all in one fell swoop. You get halfway through chapter 10 and you are overwhelmed and a little upset with the fact that salvation seems to be all up to us. In chapter nine, your salvation is predestined by the intentional foreknowledge of God acting upon the counsel of his electing decree. In chapter 10, it's just go tell the world the gospel so they can believe the gospel because if you don't tell them, they can't believe. How do you resolve the paradox of these two chapters? I will tell you, you don't because you can't.

You can't. Both the will of man and the will of God and redemption are part of the picture. Charles Spurgeon himself once said, to deny election and free will is to lose your soul.

To try and understand them is to lose your mind. One covenant theologian whom I enjoy reading from time to time, even though he's so wrong on so many things, admitted that it was clear from this text and he wrote from the thrust of Paul's message that the church is responsible to take the gospel to the whole world. Not just because it is responsible, but evidently because without it, whoever will believe will not be able to believe for they will not know what to believe and in whom they must believe.

Well said. You see, in chapter nine, we have read the startling truth that salvation is entirely up to God. In chapter 10, you read the startling thrust of his passage, this message, and you discover salvation seems to be all to us. God depends upon us. This is what Paul talks about when he says we are laborers together with God. In First Corinthians three, verse nine, salvation is the work of God. Yes, yes, but God has chosen to deliver it through people like you and me. And we can leave today saying with Jesus Christ, we must be about our Father's business.

And what is our business? Well, Paul will remind us in this text that it has something to do with beautiful feet. Now I want to go back to that first outline I gave you, primarily because it's the one many of you tried to write down and gave up. I will tell you, we've already spent many Sundays discussing the doctrinal points of these verses, such as calling and faith and belief and the gospel and the applied truths of heaven and hell.

What I want to do today is speak in general terms simply about the passion of Paul and the mission of the church. And it wasn't long into my study that I realized we'd have to take two shots at this text before we could get through it. And so this will be part one. The first two questions reveal the unbelievers' response. And you'll notice that their response is twofold. They understand the facts and then they call out in faith. Look at verse 14 again. How then shall they call upon him in whom they've not believed? That is, how can they call in faith? How shall they believe in him whom they've not heard without hearing the facts? They must hear the gospel of Jesus Christ.

In other words, if they never hear about him, they will never be able to call upon him. They've got to hear the facts. You say, well, we live in America, Stephen. I mean, we live here in this country. Everybody knows the facts.

Do they? I think you're probably somewhat convinced before I even give you what I'm going to give you in setting that up that really Americans don't in general know the facts. According to data gathered from the Barna Research Group conducted a year ago, people were asked these following questions. Americans were asked these questions.

Do you believe that praying to deceased saints can positively affect your life? And half the people said yes. Do you believe the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon are all different expressions of the same spiritual truth? Four out of six said yes.

Do you believe truth can only be discovered through human personal experience? And 54% said yes. Do you believe that Jesus Christ sinned like other people when he was on earth? And 42% said yes. Do you believe that when people are born, they are neither good nor evil? They make a choice between the two as they grow older.

And 74% said yes. In other words, the facts have been lost of original sin that corrupted human nature so that we're all born sinners. Forget about the truth of Jesus Christ being a sinless substitute for mankind and forget about truth being propositional. Forget about the Koran or the Book of Mormon or the Bible being authoritative or individually unique. They're all just saying the same thing and you just discover, if you did read any of them as I have, that they say very different things about how to go to heaven.

Listen, according to this, your best bet is to pray to some deceased person who can somehow bring positive impact into your life here and maybe your life to come. This is America. The average American no longer then knows the facts of sinful humanity and a sinless Savior and the unique inspiration of Scripture and the absolute nature of eternal truth. I'll give you the results of another pollster, this one, Secular, reported by NBC.

They probably didn't know the implications of their results. 90% of adult Americans they talked with believe in God. Now we know that's somewhat elastic, somewhat very elastic, but you talk to the average person on the street, do you believe in God? And they will say, of course, nine out of ten times. 82% believe in heaven and 75% believe in hell, just a little slightly less.

We understand. 25% of the same adults, now follow this, said they also believed in reincarnation. So now if 90% said they believed in God, and yet one out of four of the same people said they believed in reincarnation, which God do they believe in?

Yahweh or Krishna? Or do they even know? 50% of these same adults also said they believed in ghosts, meaning that there were departed spirits that didn't go to heaven or hell. We don't know where. They're just running around planet earth spooking people.

We don't know. To say don't be concerned with America, we need to get the gospel out there to the mission field. Ladies and gentlemen, America happens to be our mission field. Where you work, where you play, where you go to school, where you live, that's the mission field. And Paul says the unbeliever needs to get an understanding of the basic facts of the gospel before he can ever exercise faith in God. And he happens to be talking about our world.

How are they going to believe in faith when they've never heard the facts of the faith? And I want you to know, even though this passage is usually used in missions conferences, Paul is not making an appeal here to foreign missions. He isn't even making an appeal to local missions. Paul is making an appeal for the church to become part of the mission, period.

Wherever we are, be involved in the mission. Talked to a guy who came to me after the first service. He said, how were construction? I was on a roof and a guy up there with me noticed that I had a hangover. I looked miserable and he said to me, you don't look too good.

And we stopped hammering for a while. And I said, I don't feel too good. And he said, tell me about it. And I told him about it.

And he said, I think I got what you need. I'm going to tell you about Jesus Christ. And on the roof, you ever wonder what they're doing up there on the roof?

They're working on their tans, whatever. Somebody's up there maybe delivering the gospel. That is his mission field. That's somebody who has embraced the passion of Paul. Now Paul goes a little deeper with his penetrating questions until we realize he's pointing his finger at all of us. The first two questions reveal the unbeliever's response.

The second two questions reveal or challenge the believer's responsibility. Verse 14 ends with Paul asking this pointed question. How shall they hear without a preacher? How are they going to hear without a preacher? In other words, who among you in Rome and who among us in Cary will become preachers? Now, don't worry. It isn't your message.

You don't have to be clever. You just simply get up and repeat what God has already said. But who among us will accept this calling? Are there any here who will accept the calling to be preachers?

This is the calling that Spurgeon described as that intense, all-absorbing desire for the work. The apostle Paul revealed it in his own life when he wrote, necessity is laid upon me. Yea, woe is me if I preach, not the gospel.

And I have to deliver the question to you. Where are the preachers? Where are those who are saying we will enter this ministry of preaching and we will give our lives to it?

Necessity is laid upon us. Where will Colonial find its preachers? Where will the preachers come from next who will feel and embrace this necessity? Do you sense it when you read this text?

Do you dare to think it? That God might call you into the ministry of preaching the gospel? Is your heart even now yearning for this thing called preaching? I commend it to you.

Give your life to it. Now lest we all think we're off the hook because we're just talking to, you know, those who will enter this ministry. Queruso can be a word that refers to not only those who preach with their livelihood and with their giving of time, it can mean to proclaim or herald the message. This would include men and women in all types of venues where the truth of the gospel is delivered to all ages and all races. Communicating the truth of the gospel in a myriad of ways.

Spoken, print, broadcast, televised, signed, interpreted, translated, webcast, projected, dramatized, sung, you name it. Just some way of getting out the facts of the gospel. Will we do it? See, Paul is looking the believer in the eye and he is saying this rather unsettling truth. He is saying no one will come to faith in Christ and call upon him because of your life. While your lifestyle may demonstrate your faith, it will not deliver the facts of your faith. Eventually we have to speak.

We have to say something. You don't have to be a preacher in the pulpit to join Paul in his passion. I think of Edward Kimball. He was this kind of passionate person. He was a shoemaker. He sold shoes in Chicago in the early 1800s.

You probably heard a little bit about this, man. If not him, you heard about one of the young boys he led to faith in Christ. He loved to go find the urchins who ran the alleys in inner city Chicago and he would bring them to a Sunday school class that he would teach.

One of those young boys came and Edward Kimball in his own shoe shop actually led him to faith in Christ. His name was D.L. Moody.

D.L. Moody grew up to become a preacher, a faithful preacher that was known in this part of the world and in 1879 Moody won a young man to the Lord by the name of F.B. Meyer.

I have nearly all the books he has written. F.B. Meyer was used in Great Britain and in America in wonderful ways.

F.B. Meyer won a young man to faith in Christ and his name was J.W. Chapman.

J.W. Chapman grew up to be a preacher and he would preach in open air crusades and one semi-professional baseball player who came to one of Chapman's meetings accepted Christ. He became a preacher and his name was Billy Sunday. Billy Sunday would preach to more than a million people. In fact, he held these open air crusades in the middle of the last century and he came to Charlotte, North Carolina, held a crusade.

And it was so effective that they called for extended meetings and Billy Sunday invited his friend Mordecai Ham to come and preach and Mordecai Ham preached and a teenage boy named Billy Graham got saved. Can you imagine six men trace their gospel lineage to a man who wasn't even a minister by trade? He made shoes. He sold shoes.

But to him life was more than shoes. He had embraced this passion of declaring the gospel to those who would listen. The final question is in verse 15. How can they preach unless they are sent? You see, now Paul finally points his finger at all of us. Isn't that great? Aren't you glad you came this morning to have fingers pointed at you? How can they preach unless they are sent?

We deserve to be pointed at a little bit, don't we? I think the church and our generation, more than any preceding generation, since the organization of our own country, has lost the mission. The mission of the church, as we have said in the past, is not made up by how many we can seat but by how many we can what?

Send. And that isn't just across the ocean. It's across the street. We have this passion and this mentality that when we do leave this place, we are entering the mission field. But the church has forgotten that. Did you know that in our country today 80 percent of church growth is by transfer of letter? Eighty percent is one person leaving one church and going to another. So the church in our generation today is in no way keeping pace, not even close to it.

It's simply shifting from one location to another. You don't have to duck your head, by the way. That's what I did. I came here a believer. My wife came here a believer. This church didn't win us to faith in Christ. Did it win you?

Did it win you? In America, one church every day will close its doors. One church every day. Go out of business.

Why? Because there's no business left. Or because we have forgotten what our business is. How are they going to preach unless there are prayers and senders and givers? Would it make a difference to us today if we knew that at the offering when we gave that the Apostle Paul was in the boardroom counting with the other men? Would that make a difference in the figure beside our name?

Would that make a difference in the fact that we would like to be included? Would it matter if Paul took note that he would evaluate the capability and passion and the way we exercise that gift and sending those? The crisis of the church remains because I fear we have become so wrapped up in our shoes we have forgotten about our feet. How beautiful are the feet of them who bring glad tidings of good things.

Paul wants to develop in us a deeper pity for the world and a deeper passion for the work. How can they believe in him whom they've never heard about? And how will they hear about him if somebody doesn't deliver the news?

And how can they go if the church won't train them and send them and subsidize them and pray for them and we all gather together on the Lord's day and we sing glory to our King? Have we come from the trenches? Do we come bursting with news from the front? The gospel is living.

It is fresh water. Or do we only sing and write our outlines down and then go have lunch? Ben Patterson in Leadership Magazine a few months ago and I'm reading from his article the story of the Jesus film being shown to a tribe in the jungles of East Asia. A tribe who had never heard the name Jesus Christ before.

Can you imagine that? They come in with their gear, their generator, their movie projector. The missionaries gone ahead of them to prepare the groundwork to introduce himself and to say as much about the gospel and Jesus Christ as he can and within a few days here comes the team. They set the generator up and plug in the projector.

It's dark. They got the sheet hanging from a limb and they show the movie called the Jesus film. He writes, not only had these people never heard of Jesus Christ, they had never seen a motion picture before.

And then all at once on one unforgettable evening they saw it all. The gospel in their own language translated into their dialect, visible and real. They watched and listened as Jesus preached the gospel, told the crowds who he was and why he had come. You can only imagine how it felt for this tribe to see the movie portrayal of Christ, to see him healing the sick, to hear him preaching, to watch him loving children yet then they watched him being held without a trial and being beaten by jeering soldiers and as they watched this, this tribe of people came unglued. They stood up and began to shout at the cruel men on the screen assuming they could hear them. Demanding that this outrage stopped. When nothing happened, they ran to attack the missionary assuming he was responsible.

The missionary quickly turned off the projector. I'll bet he did. Explain the story. It wasn't over yet. There's more to come. They settled back down onto the ground, not quite sure, holding their emotions in tenuous check. Then events unfolded and here came the crucifixion. Again, the people could not be held back. They began to weep and to wail with such loud grief that once again the film had to be stopped.

The missionary again calmed them, answering their questions, explaining the story wasn't over yet. There was more to come and once again they composed themselves and they sat down wiping their tears to see what happened next. And what happened next was the resurrection. The stone rolled away.

Jesus portrayed as alive. Pandemonium broke out this time, but for a different reason. The gathering had spontaneously erupted into a celebration. The noise now was of jubilation and it was deafening.

The people were jumping and dancing and hugging and weeping. Christ was risen, they shouted. Christ was risen. Again the missionary shut off the projector, but this time he did not tell them to calm down and wait for what was to happen next. For all that was supposed to happen next was happening.

They were in effect calling upon this resurrected Lord in faith, having seen and heard the facts and they believed. You know when I read that I thought behind the scenes there were people who were so impassioned about this project. They wrote the script. They produced the movie.

They played the instruments. They acted the part. They made the costumes.

They brought the movie projector. They supplied the generator. They raised the missionaries in their homes. They trained the missionaries in their churches. They flew the team to the field. They supported the team from home.

They gave their money for it all and a million things more occurred and what happened? These unbelievers heard. They even saw the gospel and they understood the facts and God provided the faith and the two intersected in human minds and hearts and this miracle of regeneration occurred.

They believed on this risen Savior and they were saved. I hope today's lesson increased your burden for the lost and that you'll take steps to share your faith as God gives you opportunity. Here on Wisdom for the Heart, Stephen Davey is working through a series entitled How to Get to Heaven from Earth. The title of today's message is Rescue the Perishing. If it would encourage you to be able to listen to this message again, we have it posted on our website right now. Visit wisdomonline.org. We also have this series available as a set of CDs if you would prefer that. Call us for information. Our number is 866-48-BIBLE. Join us next time as we continue to bring you Wisdom for the Heart.