Tell Someone: Being Used by God

You're listening to A New Beginning with Greg Laurie, a podcast made possible by Harvest Partners, helping people everywhere know God.

Visit our website and learn more about Harvest Partners at harvest.org. We're looking for ability. He's looking for availability. God does not call the qualified.

He qualifies the called. That means you. That means me.

That means us. We can be used by God. Glad you're joining us today here on A New Beginning with Pastor Greg Laurie. Our mission statement is knowing Him and making Him known. Evangelism is in our blood. And really, it's a calling the Lord issued to all believers, not just pastors and evangelists. And that's why Pastor Greg is presenting his series called Tell Someone. It equips us to extend the invitation to come to the Lord to find freedom and peace.

Today, we'll see we're all qualified to extend that invitation. It's been said there are two things that Christians and non-Christians have in common. They're both uptight about evangelism. We're uptight about sharing our faith and non-believers are uptight about us sharing our faith with them.

But there's no getting around it. Jesus has given to us as His followers what is called the Great Commission to go into all the world and preach the gospel. Actually, there's two versions of the Great Commission. One is in the Gospel of Matthew. The other is in the Gospel of Mark. In Matthew's version, Jesus says, Then there's Mark's version of the Great Commission, which is go into all the world and preach the gospel to every person. But yet, many of us are not doing this.

In fact, for many of us, the Great Commission has become the great omission. Consider these statistics. 95% of all Christians have never led another person to Christ. Only 2% of churchgoers have invited an unchurched person to church in the last year.

2%. Think about that. 59% of all Christians say they seldom or never share their faith with others.

What's going on here? God wants to use you to bring other people to Him. Don't ask me why God chooses to use people.

But it's clear that He does. He wants to use you to bring others to Jesus. That's why I've called this series, Tell Someone, subtitle, You Can Bring Others to Jesus. I believe if you will hear, process, and implement the principles that I'll share with you from the Word of God, that you will be leading people to Christ before you know it.

Now Greg, that's a bit presumptuous isn't it? Is not conversion the work of the Holy Spirit? Yes that's true. But honestly sometimes that's said by people that do absolutely nothing. In evangelism there is God's part and there is our part. Our part is to proclaim the gospel. God's part is to convert people.

But we all have a part to play. The Holy Spirit is going to nudge you at times to share your faith but He is not going to take you over and make you do it. You are not going to turn into a little gospel robot. You know you must believe in Jesus or something like that.

No. He is going to nudge you. And you can say yes to Him and He will empower you and give you the right words.

Or you can say no to Him and miss the opportunity. But this is what God wants us to do. Listen. This series is not designed to make you feel bad if you have not been all that effective at sharing your faith.

In fact I hope it is the very opposite of that. I hope it will inspire you. Because I want you to understand that sharing your faith can be an exciting experience. Telling others about Jesus can be an adventure. Leading people to Jesus can be one of the greatest joys you have ever known. And dare I say it? Being used by God can be fun.

That is right. Fun. Not a mere drudgery. Not mere duty. It is a joy. It is a privilege. It is an opportunity.

And listen to this. We are told in Psalm 126 six, those who go out weeping carrying seed to sow will return with songs of joy carrying their sheaves with them. And the idea of that is I go out and I sow my little gospel seeds in the lives of people and periodically the Lord will allow me to see a person come to Christ. And that brings great joy.

Not just on earth but check this out. Every time a lost person believes in Jesus there is applause in heaven. The Bible says that there is joy in the presence of the angels over every sinner that comes to Jesus Christ. And next to knowing Christ myself to me the greatest joy I know is seeing others come to Christ and then growing in their faith. John said I have no greater joy than to know my children are walking in the truth.

Such a joy. And here is the interesting thing about how God does this. He seems to go out of His way to find the least qualified person to do this through. The last person you would ever expect to be a spokesman for Him is the one that God will choose. You know I never wanted to be a public speaker. Can you believe me when I tell you that? My sole aspiration in life as a kid was to be a cartoonist.

A graphic designer. And my backup plan was start a pet shop. I just figured if the graphic thing doesn't work I like animals. You know I was only a kid right? So when God started opening doors for me to speak publicly I was the least likely person to ever do this. But the reason I started doing it because before I didn't have anything to say. But now I do.

And you do too. God couldn't use someone like me. God called Moses. And here is what Moses said.

This just sounds like something one of us would say today. Exodus 4. Moses pleaded with the Lord. Lord I am not very good with words.

I get tongue tied and my words get tangled. God said now go and I will be with you as you speak. I will instruct you in what to say. Moses says please Lord send someone else. You might say I don't have the gift of gab.

I am uncomfortable standing up in front of people. I can't be that person. No God can use you. Jeremiah said Lord I am too young. I mean you know how old Moses was when God called him?

80. And Jeremiah was probably 18 or younger. You are never too old to be used by God.

You are never too young to be used by God. And look at the people God used. How flawed they were. Noah got drunk. Abraham.

Man he was just old. Jacob was a liar. Peter denied Christ. The disciples fell asleep while praying and largely abandoned him in his moment of need. Timothy had an ulcer. And Lazarus was dead. So what is your excuse?

See God can use you. I mean we just offer these excuses. They are not reasons. You know what an excuse is?

It is a fancy lie dressed up for dinner. It is what we offer when we don't want to do something. There are no good reasons.

So listen to this. God is not looking for ability. He is looking for availability. God does not call the qualified.

He qualifies the called. That means you. That means me. That means us. We can be used by God.

Let me say something else. We not only should fulfill the Great Commission because Christ has commanded us to and because people need to hear the gospel but we should fulfill the Great Commission so we don't stagnate spiritually. Let me say something else that might surprise you coming from a pastor. There can come a moment when actually you don't need to go to even another Bible study. You don't need to read another Christian book.

You don't need to attend another worship service. I am not suggesting you cut back on those things. I am just saying maybe there will be a point in your life where you don't need to do that more as much as you need an outlet for the truth God has given you. See the problem is if you are always taking in and you are never giving out you are going to reach a state of spiritual stagnation. This would be like a person saying, I eat all the time and I feel listless and lethargic.

It is like dude you need some exercise. And the same can be said of Christians. We are just feeding on the Word of God. Taking in. Taking in. Taking in. Never giving out.

That needs to change or we might find ourselves in trouble spiritually. See God does not give us His truth to hoard. Do we have any hoarders listening right now? I would say I am a micro hoarder. I like to keep stuff. If it is a drawing from my children or my grandchildren I save them and put them up my wall.

I save a lot of things. My wife she is the opposite. She throws everything away. One time she was trying to put me in the trash can.

I resisted. But you know she throws stuff away. But then there are people who are serious hoarders.

I saw a program on TV about a person. They had so much stuff. It was floor to ceiling stuff in their home. Usually these people have a lot of cats too.

I don't know what the connection is. Listen. Ten cats. It is too many. Five cats. Really one cat is too many. Ok but anyway. They hoard all this stuff and in one situation they had to come in with some serious fumigation and other things to clean this home up.

Because food was rotting and stuff was piling up. And that can be a picture of a Christian. A well fed Bible student who loves the Lord. Taking in. Taking in. Taking in. Or putting it another way.

Hoarding and hoarding. God doesn't give you this truth for you to hoard. He gives you this truth to share. Pastor Greg will come back in a moment to explain how sharing our faith is an antidote for spiritual dryness in our own lives. More on that in just a moment. Hey everybody.

Greg Laurie here. Encouraging you to join us this weekend for what we call Harvest at Home. It's worship.

It's a message from the Word of God. You can watch it with your family in your front room. Or you can watch it on the go. On your tablet. On your phone.

Or your computer. Take it with you. Take the Word of God with you. And join us for Harvest at Home at Harvest.org. Well let's continue now with Pastor Greg's message called, Tell Someone.

Available at Harvest.org. Listen to this. You are blessed to be a blessing. You're blessed to be a blessing. Not to keep it to yourself.

But to share it with others. And here's an interesting little passage. Isaiah 58. We find that God's people were sort of dried up spiritually. They didn't know why. They thought they were doing all the right things. But God was pointing out to them that they had no thought of the needs of others.

Just of themselves. So the Lord tells them what steps to take to start thinking of others. To start doing good for others.

And then He says in Isaiah 58.11, The Lord will guide you continually. Giving you water where you are dry. And restoring your strength. You will be like a well-watered garden in an ever-flowing stream. See if you are feeling spiritually dry right now maybe it is because you need to start giving out.

And check this out. The Bible says, Given it shall be given to you. Pressed down. Shaken together.

Running over. As you give out you will find God will give to you. So that brings us to point number one. If you are taking notes you might want to write this down.

Point number one. Effective sharing starts with caring. Sharing starts with caring. Now I know that sounds like something a Care Bear would say. Do you know what a Care Bear is? A little cartoon show. My grandkids used to watch them. I always thought the Care Bears were very strange. You know they all look exactly the same but they have different colors. Then they have a little heart.

An exposed heart. And when they want to do something really good they all get together and they will say, We care a lot. We care a lot. And little rainbows will come out of their hearts.

All right. This does sound like something a Care Bear might say but it is true. Sharing starts with caring. Let's establish a simple fact.

We do not like to share anything much less the gospel. This goes back to our childhood. You know someone gives a nice toy to a child. This is your toy. They are so happy. And then the parent says, Now share it with your friends. They are like, No. No. Why did you give this to me?

And then add that. I would have been better if you never gave it to me. Don't want to share. The other day we were out having lunch with my son Jonathan's wife Brittany and their kids. And little Christopher my grandson is three now. So I gave to each of them a bag of chips. Christopher was enjoying his chips immensely. And then his dad said, Christopher can I have one of your chips? What I love about kids is they don't mask their feelings.

And the adult would say sure. But all the while we would be saying, I hate this. I hate this. Here you can have a chip. Christopher is like.

He like furrows his little brow. Christopher Jonathan says, Look at me buddy. Give me a chip. Wow.

It is just like torture for no. He has a whole bag. The bag is half as big as he is. Oh. Finally reaches in and pulls out the most pathetic little chip.

It is all broken. Here dad. Jonathan says, No.

Give me a bigger chip. Oh. And he finally pulls it. You know we are like that.

We just mask it. It is like we go out to eat and my wife says, I am going to just get a salad. I say, Why don't you get something else? No. All I want is a salad. Ok. Well I am getting a hamburger.

So I get a hamburger and I am enjoying it. And my wife says, Can I have a bite? I offered to get you your own. No. I don't want a whole one. Can I have a bite of yours? I will buy you a burger right now.

No. I want a bite of yours. Save me a piece of the end.

Now the whole time I am miserable. I have to give up one. I don't want to give it up.

Mine. So we don't like to share. Now share the gospel. Why would I do that? You mean go up to potentially a complete stranger and talk to them about their need for Jesus. Well I don't want to do that. In fact sometimes we see nonbelievers as the enemy.

We will see some people doing what nonbelievers do. Look at that. So evil. Bad. Sinful. Evil. Yeah.

It is evil. News flash. That was you.

Once. Did you forget? They are not the enemy. They are under the control of the enemy. The enemy is the devil. They are the captive. In fact we are told over in 2 Timothy 2.26, We should pray that they will come to their senses and escape from the devil's trap for they have been held captive by him to do whatever he wants.

Yeah. They are a captive. They are a POW.

They are a hostage. And we are the one that is going to liberate them potentially. But really if we are honest do we really care about nonbelievers? A lot of times we want as little to do with them as possible. Instead of infiltrating we are isolating.

And we are never going to reach anyone if we don't have contact with them are we? Jesus said go into all the world and preach the gospel. But it starts with a burden as the care bearers tell us. Sharing starts with caring. The great British preacher C. H. Spurgeon put it this way and I quote. Follow me if you would.

Speaking of us. Speaking to nonbelievers. The Holy Spirit will move them by first moving you. If you can rest without their being saved they will rest too. But if you are filled with an agony for them, if you cannot bear that they should be lost, you will soon find that they are uneasy too.

I hope you will get into such a state that you will dream about your child. Or you are here perishing for lack of Christ and start up at once and begin to cry, Oh God give me converts or I will die. Then Spurgeon says you will have converts. That is true.

Point number two. Sharing our faith sometimes involves a little bit of anger. And I don't mean that you want to get mad at nonbelievers and scream at them.

What I am saying instead is I get angry at the fact that so many people are being ripped off by the devil and I want to do something about it. The Bible tells a story in Acts 17 of the great apostle Paul who went to the city of Athens which was the capital of Greece. Greece at that time was the intellectual philosophical capital of the world. And it also was a city filled with images erected to false gods.

In fact one ancient writer said it was easier to find a god with a small g in Athens than it was to find a man. So Paul walks around this city. He sees what they are into and it frustrates him. He is getting kind of worked up inside. So he goes to the town square so to speak called the Areopagus and he addresses them.

And my point is simply this. First he was angry. Then he took action. Don't get angry at the sinner. Get angry at the sin.

The Bible tells us in Acts 17 verse 16 he was deeply troubled by all of the idols. Or another translation. He was irritated and aroused to anger.

Or as even another translation puts it, he was hot and he was mad. And I am going to do something. I am not going to just sit by passively and watch this happen.

And in the same way we need to take action. Pastor Greg has developed an online training course that corresponds with this series. It's a six week course that comes to you a lesson per week via email. And it's absolutely free. At the end of six weeks you can be fully equipped and ready to share your faith just as Jesus has commanded us all to do. Learn more about this free Tell Someone training course at Harvest.org.

And our thanks to our Harvest partners for helping us make resources like this available. Well it's a real treat to have Jay Warner Wallace with us today. He's a former atheist and a retired cold case detective. And he's just released a brand new book called Person of Interest. He puts his investigative skills to work examining the deity and uniqueness of Christ without depending on the New Testament as our proof. He points out there are other ways to make a compelling case beyond a shadow of a doubt. Witnesses from that time, the historical record, and so on. And Pastor Greg is speaking with Jim Wallace.

Are there telltale signs when someone is not telling the truth? Oh yeah. So what we do a lot of times when we're looking at it, this is how I first investigated scripture. I was somebody who was the interviewer on our team. I was working on an investigative team. I was working undercover. I had super long hair.

I had this longer goatee than I'm wearing today. And so I thought, well, you know, I love doing interviews. And I loved looking for deception indicators when people will say things. And there's a process called forensic statement analysis. What you're doing is you would have somebody, let's say that crime occurred yesterday, a murder. You would say, okay, you know what, why don't you do me a favor.

On this piece of paper, which happens to have 24 lines, I just want you to write down everything you did yesterday from the moment you got up to the moment you went to bed. And I give them a pen. So any changes they make, they have to cross out. And then I've got, you can't use the backside.

You can only use the frontside. So what that allows me to do is to see what their pace is, right? How many lines do they use to describe each hour?

Because people will compress time or expand time, and they're either trying to hide something or minimize something, or maybe they're just impressed by what happened in that moment, but it'll tell me something about that day in terms of how they expand and compress. I'm looking for things like pronoun use. This is my good friend, Greg. I used a first name. This is my good friend, the pastor. Now I'm calling him the pastor?

So I'm looking for the context of how the pronouns change over the course of the description, right? I love my wife, Susie, and I. We went on a vacation.

It was beautiful. My lovely wife, Susie. That's one way to describe her. Oh, I took Susie on a vacation. Well, I didn't even describe her as my wife. I took the wife on a vacation. Now it's not even a possessive pronoun.

Now it's like the wife. Okay, what's going on with that? Now it may be that's what you do all the time.

Or it might be that you've changed here because at that point in the day, you were upset about something. So I'm looking at all those deception indicators, and when I read through the Gospel of Mark for the first time, I didn't think much of it, but then someone told me that an early bishop in the church named Papias said that Mark's Gospel was written at the feet of Peter. And I thought, hmm, can I test that? Because who's Mark? Mark's not—we don't know if Mark was at the scene. Peter was. Is there any evidence in Mark's Gospel that points to Peter specifically? And I'm looking at deception indicators, places where, you know, how the story is different, comparing the other Gospels.

I think there's actually a lot of forensic evidence in Mark that demonstrates that Peter is his source. Wow, that's interesting. And so this is how I approached it, right?

Because this is the discipline I had in my pocket. I knew there were a certain number of skills that if you—let's put it this way. If there's a murder from 20 years ago, the witnesses sometimes are dead by the time I get to the case. And not only that, the guys who did the interviews, or the gals, the detectives who wrote the supplemental reports, sometimes they're dead too. So now I've got an account, a supplemental report, I've got no access to the witness, and I've got no access to the report writer.

That's the Gospels. I've got no access to the witness, no access to the report writers. How do I determine what happened 30 years ago? I used the same process to determine what happened.

It doesn't make any difference how long that time has gone by. In the end, there are linguistic—there are little things that people say or don't say that tell you a lot about what— and this is why my daughters would hate growing up with me because one would come in and I would say, hey, before you say anything, just know that every word that comes out of your mouth, I'm going to analyze, I'm going to test. Wow. And then she would go, oh my gosh. Oh, and before you say anything, also know that everything you could have said but chose not to say, I'm also going to hold against you. Wow. Well, then she's like, well, what's the point? She just confessed to it.

So that made it easier, right, for me. But the point is, that process you could actually apply to the Gospels. Wow. All this explosive information is contained in this book that we are offering to you. It's called Person of Interest by J. Warner Wallace, Why Jesus Still Matters in a World That Rejects the Bible. And we'll send you this book for your gift of any size because we want to put quality resources into your hands, and we also want to give you an opportunity to support us as we teach the Word of God and proclaim the Gospel all around this planet. So if you'd like your own copy, Dave's going to give you the contact information, and we'll send you Person of Interest.

Yeah, that's right. It's brand new, and we so much appreciate your investment so this daily study can continue. And when you send a donation today, let us thank you with a copy of Person of Interest. You can write A New Beginning, Box 4000, Riverside, CA 92514. Or call us at 1-800-821-3300. We can take your call anytime 24-7.

Again, dial 1-800-821-3300. Well, next time, Pastor Greg continues his series called Tell Someone and shows us how evangelism isn't an optional accessory to the Christian life. It's a responsibility the Lord has given to each one of us. Learn more next time on A New Beginning. This is the day, the day when life begins Hey everybody, thanks for listening to this podcast. To learn more about Harvest Ministries, follow this show and consider supporting it. Just go to harvest.org. And to find out how to know God personally, go to harvest.org and click on Know God.