Share the Love - How to Tell His Story, Part 1

I have a confession to make. I'm not a handy guy, but even I can read directions. You see, knowing the directions makes all the difference in the world, and you know the same thing is true about sharing God's love with others. If you know the directions, you can tell His story with confidence and in such a way that lost people in deep need can experience the saving grace of Christ.

Don't miss today. Welcome to this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. The mission of these daily programs is to intentionally disciple Christians through the Bible teaching of Chip Ingram, and we're nearing the end of his timely series, Share the Love, How to Talk to Anyone About God. Today, Chip will help us condense the Gospel down into an easy-to-remember outline, so the next time you have the opportunity to talk about the basics of the Christian faith, you'll have the clarity and confidence to do it.

Well, with that, here's Chip with his message, How to Tell His Story, from Romans chapter 6. From the moment that you're born and take your first breath to the moment you take your last breath, every person on this planet is in a passionate pursuit to be loved. You took a little breath, and you began to cry when you were born, and you were placed on your mother's chest, and all of a sudden, things got better. As a two-year-old, all of us had that moment when we got afraid in the night, and we ran and climbed in bed, searching for comfort to be belonged, to be cared for, to be affirmed, to know it's safe. Then we got a little bit older, and we went to school, and we were a preteen, and we just longed for that one friend or that one group that would just accept us. Then the magic of teen years happened, and the search intensified. The hormones kicked in, and we wanted a boyfriend or a girlfriend and felt crazy until we found one. Then in the young adult years, what happens? The search even more intensifies, and you're looking for that life partner.

Who are they? By midlife, we have been there and done that for a while, and we're desperately searching for love and finding people that won't look just on the outside, who won't love us for what we've done or what we have, but are willing to just care about us. No strings attached. The flip side of midlife is you're looking for people who love you in spite of what you've done and just will care. Then the day comes. The search continues all the way to the very, very last years, and we get old, and we're longing for people that won't put us down to pasture. We're longing for people that remember we have something to offer even though our bodies don't work so well and our minds aren't as sharp. I want you to know every person in this room is desperately pursuing to be loved every day. You've developed your own story, and you've taken a light like I have, and you take your little light with your background, and you say, this is how I'm going to get loved. Now here's the question.

Do you have enough light in your little torch, in your little view, to solve that issue? And if you look around at most marriages and most families and our journeys, the fact is we don't. Imagine, if you will, instead of me and you with one little light, I came from a certain family, from a certain part of the country, with a certain worldview like everyone here, and everyone here is passionately, who will love me? Who will accept me? Do I have value?

How much education do I need to have? Will I do this? Will I do that? All of us have this one little light, but here's what I want you to get. Until you understand the big picture story of God's love for you, you will search in vain, and you will have one disappointment after the next disappointment when the one person doesn't come through, and the job doesn't come through, and what you thought you would do, or even if you do it and find it's empty. This is the last part of our series on sharing the love, and I want to take you on a journey to explain to you the story of God's love, the big picture. It's contained, many of you, I've watched you on planes, you read a paperback like this, a fiction usually, or a romance novel.

I've watched some of you knock it out in two or three days. Well, this is the greatest romance novel paperback I have in my hands ever written. It's God's love letter to us, but the difference is is that, I don't know about you, there's a lot of hard names in here, and it covers a lot of space, and a lot of years, and at least the first time I opened the Bible, I didn't have a clue of what it really said or what it really meant.

In fact, my experience is, most authentic Christ followers don't know too much about the Bible these days either. And so what I want to do is I want to give you the entire Bible already, the entire Bible, and I want to give you the overview, and I want you to see that God has a story, and there's four acts in his story, like in a great play, act one, act two, act three, act four. Act one opens up, and act one is how it all began. In the Bible it opens in Genesis chapter one, and it talks about creation. God wants you to know in his love story, he made you for himself. Now think of that. If you go out at night, or early in the morning as I do sometimes, and you look up and you see the stars are really bright, and then you realize that this one little planet and this one little solar system is in a galaxy, and our galaxy supposedly has about a hundred billion stars, and some project that there's a hundred to two hundred billion galaxies, and the God that spoke and all that came into existence, the pinnacle of his creation was you.

Man. And he didn't just make you and then go off and let you run your life. He made you for himself. He cares about you.

He loves you. God created originally a perfect relationship, and a perfect world, giving receiving, perfect love. It started in a garden. Our first parents, intimacy, no shame, no guilt, absolute connection, love, affirmation, authenticity, that both went vertical and horizontal. Love gives life that leads to relationship. At the heart of everything the God of the Bible talks about, he loves us, he created us, so he gives life. He breathed into us, and there was life, and it created relationship, and so God would walk in the garden.

What that means and how it looked, I don't know, but he wanted connection. He made us for himself, and the result of that is purpose. Ephesians 2 10 says, we are his workmanship or his work of art.

We're his masterpiece, and it says we're created unto good works, but before the foundations of the earth we should walk in it. God has a plan. There is a purpose. History is linear. It started one place.

It's going somewhere. You're a part of it. You were made for him, and what most people don't know is you really matter, and there's a plan for you. After he said let us make man in our likeness, when the triunity of God created all that there is, the next thing he said, and let them rule over the earth and the fish of the sea. You're made like God. You can think and feel and choose and create, and there's a plan.

A lot of people never, never, never know that. Probably the most dramatic moment I had in experiencing how God must feel about me was in the birth of our first child, and it was a very complicated birth, and it was a 27-hour labor, and there was complications, so they put a fetal monitor on my little boy, and it would go beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep. You know kids heartbeat when they're real small like that. It's real fast, and then Teresa would have a contraction, and then it would go beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, and then the nurse would be there, and the doctor there, and they get ready to beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep, beep.

Well for 27 hours we did that. Believe me it was a lot harder on her than it was on me, but I mean together when we thought we you know his heart would almost stop for more than just a few seconds. I just I gave that boy back to God eight times probably took him back nine, and finally oh God please gave him back the tenth time, and after 27 hours he was born, and they they cleaned him up, and they placed him on Teresa's chest, and she was exhausted, and that little boy just hugged next to her, and then they took him, and put him in my arms, and gave me about a half hour with him, and here's all I can tell you I can't even explain it, because I didn't have a dad that ever said he loved me. My dad was an alcoholic.

I know he did, but he never verbalized, and he didn't know how to get that across, and so I had that big heart father wound too, and now I've got a part of me, and a part of Teresa, and I'm holding it, and all I can tell you emotions came out of me that I didn't know existed, and just tears of joy, and I remember literally getting down on the linoleum floor, and holding my boy, and just thanking God for life, and then just wondering. It was just instinctive. What's the purpose? I wonder what this boy, and I are gonna do. I wonder what your plan is for him. Can I tell you something? I mean I'm just one puny man, and I can't tell you how much I love that little boy, and I have for the last 31 years. That's how God feels about you. Do you believe that? That's how God feels about you, except infinitely more.

He's a good God with a good plan. That's act one. It goes from Genesis chapter one, Genesis chapter two, but act two is a bad part of the story. It's ugly.

It's terrible. Act two is how it all went wrong. The theologians call it the fall. See God's love isn't some sort of plastic superficial love. It's a love that's real, and the love that's real has to give people the opportunity to accept it or reject it. So God allowed us to choose or reject his love. In this perfect environment where we had all that we needed as mankind, God gave the option to turn away to reject him if we so chose, and the choice of Adam and our first parents Eve to reject God's love ushered in sin, and death, and selfishness in every relationship separating us from God, ourselves, and others. See love gives life, but love also gives freedom.

Freedom that leads to consequences. I mean you can put a bird in a cage and say the bird loves you, but you know when you open the cage it's when they have the freedom to go wherever and fly back there's a relationship, and God didn't create little robots, or little machines, or little people that I love you God. I love you God.

I do whatever you want. He gave you. He gave our first parents.

He gave all of us the freedom to accept or reject because he wanted legitimate from our heart moral beings the opportunity to love him, and our first parents rejected his love, and as a result we get to inherit some good things, and some bad things. Romans 5 12 says therefore just as sin entered the world through one man Adam, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men because all sinned, and the result is separation. Now the way the story goes is there was deception, and there's evil, and there's an enemy called Satan, and he fooled, and tricked our parents, and yet they made a willful choice, and as the separation occurred God said in the day that you sin or eat from that tree you'll surely die, but if you read the story and you read the paperback version what you're gonna find is the moment they sinned they didn't fall over dead physically, but they were separated then spiritually. They were taken out of the perfect environment.

The perfect relationship was broken, and they were separated. I remember as a young pastor getting a call from a guy that had become a good buddy, and just was a great guy, and from all outward circumstances think the beautiful wife that he had, and the couple little kids that he had, and things were going great, and he gave me a call on the phone, and by the way some of you who think us pastors know a lot we're learning, but I'll tell you the first time things happen there's times where when you get off the phone, and someone says so-and-so committed suicide, or they lost a baby, or you get a call like this you just pray like crazy. Oh God I don't know what to do, and this was one of those calls, and I was a very young pastor.

He said man I got to talk to you, and we found ourselves sitting across from one another, and they pulled out a sheet of paper. I said what's that? He says that's what was stuck on the refrigerator when I got home today. I don't love you anymore. I'm gone.

I'm never coming back. He said I got home, and that was on the refrigerator. I didn't even know we had a problem. We didn't have any big arguments.

She's gone, and all of her stuff is gone, and most of mine, and I don't know where. They're separated. Can I tell you something else? Just as the God who created you made you for himself, and loves you, and feels infinitely more about you like I felt with my son, when you sin, when you walk away from God, when you do your own thing, when you do things that hurt other people, you know how God feels? God feels. He's a being.

He's a person. He feels like that man when his wife walked out on him. There's separation. God's heart gets broken. The Bible says that he grieves, and so act one is creation, and love brings life, and life leads to relationship. Act two is a sad one. Act two is that love gives freedom, but it leads to consequences, and death, and separation, and then act three is really, it's the big act. If you get the novel, and by the way, if you've never read it, you really should.

I was 18 before I ever opened a Bible, but act three starts from Genesis, end of Genesis chapter three, and goes all the way to almost the end, to Revelation chapter 20, and act three is the exciting part. This is how God's love rescued us. You've heard it before. You've seen it, but greater love has no one than this, that one lay down his life for his friend. That's the test of love.

You're willing to give your all. God the Son took on human flesh. He came to earth fully man, fully God. He lived a perfect life to reveal God's heart.

It's Jesus, and then he offered his life as a sacrifice and a payment for the sins of all people of all time, that whoever would choose to receive new life may have it. See, love gives forgiveness that leads to peace. The whole point, God knew he would give us freedom.

God knew that with that freedom, all-knowing, all-powerful, even outside of time, gives us that freedom, but from the foundations of the earth said the high price tag of our freedom would mean evil and suffering and a fallen world of course, but it would mean for him that God the Son would come and lay down his life to rescue us, to redeem us. That word redeem is something's bad and broken and torn. It gets bought back.

It gets repaired. You want to know what God's really like? He's not some invisible force. It's not some invisible list of rules or morality. That's not at all what Jesus taught. It's not about religion. It's not about trying to be good.

It's about re-establishing the connection and the heart and the relationship between your creator and you. That was always God's purpose, but when sin entered the world, every one of us in this room, right, we lie. We pretend we love people more than we do. When people don't come through for us, we try and act better than we are.

We sin. I mean, how many people were here from parents who divorced and you thought things would never be that way? How many of you have had someone walk out on you? How many of you had a business partner who lied to you?

How many of you have had a boyfriend or girlfriend that cheated on you? I mean, it's a fallen world. Jesus came and lived a perfect life to say, this is the Father's heart. He wants to repair. If you want to know what God is really like, it's Jesus talking with a prostitute.

How does he respond to her? It's Jesus helping a poor person. It's Jesus here with religious people who try and put burdens on people, and he cuts them off at the knees.

He says, I'm looking for what's happening in people's heart in their life. And so, he gives forgiveness. It's a gift, and it leads to peace. But notice, the result is reconciliation. That just simply means that you become friends again with God. When you're reconciled, some of you have been through a very difficult time in your marriage. You were separated for a season, and what's it called when, you know, you probably go to some counseling. You probably realize, like most of us, you have a lot of baggage, and you begin to learn to communicate, and then you forgive one another, and then you're reconciled. And if you've ever been separated, the wounds were really pretty deep, and there was some anger, and there was some hurt, and there was times where you were just enemies.

And when the love gets restored, you're friends again. And that's what act three is. Notice what the scripture says, 2 Corinthians 5, 17 and 18 says, therefore, if anyone is in Christ, if anyone would understand that act two doesn't have to be your life story, but you can turn from your sin and ask him to forgive you based on what he did on the cross, if you're in Christ, here's what he promises. He's a new creation. The old is gone, the new has come. And all this is from God who reconciled us to himself through Christ. And then I love this, and then he gave us the ministry of reconciliation.

That there is this amazing thing I never heard of. I grew up in a church that was out to lunch, that didn't believe or teach God God's Word, and people said one thing and lived another way. So I rejected Christianity, I rejected God, but then I met a group of people that understood about the love of God, and they lived it out with their life and with their lips, and they introduced me to his word, and they were the conduit of that love into my heart that changed my life. That's the ministry of reconciliation, that your neighbors and your co-workers and your kids and your friends and your schoolmates would understand they would have a living Jesus inside of you, living it out imperfectly, but with progress to let them know that they're loved.

I mean everyone's looking for love, right? There's not a lot of competition when you start loving people, and there's something amazing that happens when you become a conduit of the love of God, and you see people's lives transformed. Because when you are forgiven and you have peace, then you actually can give away something that you never could before, and it's powerful. You've been listening to part one of Chip's message, How to Tell His Story, which is from our series, Share the Love.

Chip will be back with us in studio shortly to share some helpful application for us to think about. For one reason or another, Christians today are hesitant to share their faith. We know we should be doing it more, but sometimes just the thought of talking to someone about God can be nerve-wracking.

So why is that, and how can we change it? In this eight part series, Chip's going to boost our confidence and teach us to have personal and spontaneous conversations about Jesus. Learn how to develop the heart, skills, and perspective to share your faith in a winsome, natural way. Don't miss how you can move from being a secret Christian to an unashamed witness for Christ. For more information about Share the Love or our resources, visit livingontheedge.org.

That's livingontheedge.org. Thanks, Dave. I'll be right back in just a minute with some final thoughts from today's message. But I just want to take a moment and share with you something very exciting that's happening in my life. I go to a church where the people are super young, and most of them have very little experience to the gospel, the Bible. And Teresa and I opened our home and said, would you just want to explore the faith? And some are believers, and some are seekers, and we're just having a fabulous time. And the one thing that I keep hearing, I mean, these are 22, 23, 24-year-olds, and they just are asking, is there any real purpose in life, and how do you discover God's purpose for your life? And I'm reminding them that God has a mission, that they are His workmanship, they're His tapestry, they're His work of art, that God has a good work from the foundations of the earth, according to Ephesians chapter 2 verse 10, that He's prepared for them.

And what I want you to know is that He's got that for you as well. I want you to think about maybe a young person or maybe even yourself, and do you know your purpose? Do you know your mission? Do you know how you're wired? Do you know your gifts? Do you know how you fit on a team?

Well, I want you to know if those are questions that you're asking, Living on the Edge right now has some answers. We've created a brand new resource called The Real You. It's an online questionnaire designed to provide insight into how God wired you. This is more than spiritual gift test. You'll identify the patterns in what you think, what motivates you, and why teams need someone just like you.

It'll take about 20 minutes to complete, and it won't cost you a thing. Then based on your responses, The Real You will offer suggestions about how you can practically live out God's purpose for your life, whether that's at home, in the office, at church, or in your community. As a Living on the Edge partner, we want you to be the first to access this resource. Head over to therealyou.org to learn more. That's therealyou.org.

Most Christians don't know how to leverage their God-given wiring and experiences for the kingdom. We want to change that. Thanks, Chip. As you can tell, we are really excited about this resource. We hope The Real You will help you discover who God made you to be and how He created you to think, act, and live.

Sign up for this free assessment by going to therealyou.org. Or if it's easier, text REAL to 74141. That's the word REAL, R-E-A-L, to 74141. App listeners, tap The Real You. Well, with that, here again is Chip to share a really challenging application for us to think about. As we wrap up today's message, the major point was pretty simple today in the teaching.

The importance of getting clear on exactly what the gospel is so that you can articulate it clearly and even in a brief amount of time. And I have to tell you a story that is so vivid in my mind. It's one of those things that is just like a movie and I can push a button and relive it in my mind almost at a moment's notice.

Many, many, many years ago, my kids were fairly small. We went down to visit my parents in Florida, and we were driving up from Florida back to Texas, and we were on the freeway. And as we were going in one direction on the freeway, cars were coming the opposite direction. And literally, it was like in slow motion. But I saw a car hit another car, hit the embankment, and then the car went up in the air and rotated in the air and then landed in the median. And I'm, you know, like about, I don't know, maybe eight, nine hundred yards away, and I'm coming 65 miles an hour, but no one's there. I see the car land and crash, and then I see a body literally thrown from the car.

And I mean, what am I supposed to do? I pulled off to the left side. I was the very first person there. Within a minute or two, someone from the other lane pulled, and someone called 911, and there was a man laying on the grass.

And it was obvious he was deeply injured. And I put my hand under his head, and I began to talk with him a little bit. And I've never been in the presence of someone that I thought was maybe minutes away from dying. And I remember clearly prompted by God saying, is it okay?

Can I pray for you? And his eyes, he nodded, and yes, and was coherent. And I prayed for him. And then some two other people came, and I was a little self-conscious. And I thought, this is not a time to be self-conscious. I said, excuse me, sir, I have no idea where you're coming from.

But things do not look good right now. I want to share with you that God loves you. And I literally, in about two and a half minutes, clearly shared the gospel. And I said, do you understand? And his eyes were kind of nodding that he understood. By that time, police and fire trucks, I mean, I don't know where they came from.

And people rushed in and told us to clear away. And I remember, literally, my hands were shaking, getting back in my car with my family and my kids, and thanking God that I had taken the time to learn the story and could articulate it clearly and briefly. It's the power of God to salvation. It's the gospel. Let me encourage you.

In fact, let me challenge you. Make sure you understand and can communicate the gospel clearly. Someone's eternity may depend on it. Well, Chip, that is an amazing story of why we need to be ready to share our faith at a moment's notice. You know, a person's soul could literally be hanging in the balance. Thanks for sharing that with us, Chip.

That had to be a tough memory to relive. Well, before we go, I want to direct you to a great resource that'll prepare you to talk about your faith in a relatable and helpful way. It's our friend John Dickerson's book, Jesus Loves Me. And this resource will not only give you the tools to encourage others to follow Jesus, but deepen your understanding of the Christian faith, too. To get your hands on John's book, go to Special Offers on the Chip Ingram Map or LivingOnTheEdge.org. We pray this resource will minister to you. We'll listen in next time as Chip wraps up our series, Share the Love. Until then, I'm Dave Druey, saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.