Three Gospel Conversations, Part 2

Today on Summit Life with J.D.

Greer. God overcomes the world by giving you the ability to go through pain and to go through unfair treatment and to have joy in the midst of it that confuses the world. Because you're like, well, I understand why you have joy and things go well, but you have joy in the midst of pain? What if God, His intention was not just to deliver you from adversity, but it was to deliver you in adversity? Welcome to Summit Life, the Bible teaching ministry of Pastor J.D.

Greer. As always, I'm your host, Molly Vidovitch. So let's begin our week with a difficult question. On those around us during difficult times, when we respond from a place of trust in God, I know I want to point people to Jesus.

And what better time than when things are difficult? Now, if you've missed any of the previous messages in our current study in the book of Acts, be sure to catch up and share them with others by visiting jdgreer.com. So grab your Bible and let's get started. Here's the question for today. What does evangelism by normal people look like?

Since we're talking about that, what does it actually look like in practice? And evangelism, in case you're new, just means sharing the good news about Jesus. That's literally what the word means. Acts 16 is going to show you what that looks like. So if you have a Bible, I would invite you to open it to Acts 16.

You're going to see a picture of what ordinary evangelism by ordinary people looks like. We're going to look at three gospel conversations with three persons of interest, shall we call them. Conversation number one, Acts 16, 13, and on the Sabbath day, we went outside to the gate at the Riverside, where we suppose there was a place of prayer. And we sat down and spoke to the women who had come together there. One who heard us was a woman named Lydia.

She was from the city of Thyatira. She was a seller of purple goods, and she was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was being said by Paul. Conversation number two, verse 16, as we were going to the place of prayer, that's where they started their evangelism evidently with spiritually interested people, we were met by a slave girl who had a spirit of divination and brought her owners much gain by fortune telling. Verse 17, she followed Paul and us crying out, these men are servants of the most high God who have come to us to proclaim the way of salvation. Verse 18, this she kept doing for many days, Paul having become greatly annoyed, which by the way, I love that. Shows me the Bible's not made up because it doesn't say, and Paul, full of great compassion, or Paul softly and tenderly looks at her and strokes her hair and says, daughter of Eve.

No, he doesn't say that. Paul ticked off. Paul is peeved is what it says. Paul turns and says to the spirit, I command you in the name of Jesus Christ to come out of her, and it came out that very hour. So how does this girl come to Christ? Not through a Bible study, but through Paul performing an act of deliverance upon her.

She throws out the demon, which also removes her as a circus act that her masters can make money on, which then leads us to conversation number three. But when her owners saw that their hope of gain was gone, they seized Paul and Silas and dragged them into the marketplace before the rulers and the magistrates tore off the garments from them and gave orders to beat them with rods. And when they had inflicted many blows upon them, they threw them into prison, ordering the jailer to keep them safely. Having received this order, he put them into the inner prison and fastened their feet in the stocks.

Verse 25, about midnight, Paul and Silas were praying and singing hymns to God. The prisoners were listening to them and suddenly there was a great earthquake so that the foundations of the prison were shaken and immediately all the doors were open and everyone's bonds were unfastened. When the jailer woke and saw the prison doors were open, he drew his sword and was about to kill himself, supposing that the prisoners had escaped. In those days, if your prisoners escaped, then you pay with your life. It was kind of their way of making sure you didn't let anybody go. Verse 28, while Paul cried out with a loud voice, Paul cried out with a loud voice, eat it, you bigot, serves you right.

No, that's not what it says. Do not harm yourself for we're here. We're all still here. Here's the question you should ask yourself at that point. Why is Paul still there? He's innocent, right?

He knows he shouldn't be in prison. The walls have fallen down. His chains are off. Wasn't that an act of God? Hadn't that just happened to Peter in Acts 12 and Peter just walked out? Why would Paul still be there?

Paul recognizes, you see, listen, that this is part of the plan of God to reach Philippi. So Paul literally stands there with his freedom, his deserved God-given freedom on his right hand and on his left hand, a cruel jailer that had tortured him unjustly the night before. And Paul turns his back on his freedom so he can go back in and proclaim the way of salvation to this jailer. No wonder the jailer was so moved. Y'all, it's not the earthquake that shook the jailer. It was what Paul and Silas did in the earthquake and after the earthquake that shook the jailer. Verse 29, so the jailer called for lights and rushed in and trembling with fear, he fell down before Paul and Silas and he brought them out and said, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they said, do?

There's nothing you can do. Salvation is not something you do, something that has been done for you. And then in the shortest, most concise, most direct answer to the question ever answered, what must I do to be saved? They give this one line. Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved.

You and your household. Salvation is not something you can do. You're asking the wrong question.

It's something that's been done. You just believe it. So you've got to ask why these three stories? What is the author trying to show us with these three stories? All right, I'll tell you why. I'll give you two reasons.

Letter A is the first one. To show us, he records these three stories to show us something important about the gospel. Namely, listen, that the gospel is for everybody. You could not find three more different people than these three. You've got a rich businesswoman, a religious woman. You've got a slave girl who's demon-possessed and you've got a Philippian jailer.

These three people would never even speak to each other on the street. What's he trying to show you? Listen, there is no type for a person who becomes a Christian. Which means I don't know who you are this weekend. I don't know what you've done. I don't know how far you've fallen. But I can tell you that you, if you believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, then you will be saved.

Right? Because you're not more lost than I am. We've got the same problem, sin. So these stories are recorded to show you something about the gospel. Namely, that it's for everybody. Second, they are recorded to give us, letter B, glimpses of different people in our city.

And I believe to kind of give us a pattern for how we're supposed to reach them. We'll start with Lydia, who is the spiritually interested. The best way to reach people like that? Engage them in the study of the Bible. Now, how do you do that?

I'm going to try to make this as practical as I can. This is the part where you should jot some stuff down. You can first just invite them to church. Here's another way, maybe even a better way, is you can just invite them to read the Bible with you. Just say, hey, why don't we read the Bible together? You say, well, what does that look like?

We just start in Genesis and you're going to die somewhere in the middle of the book of Leviticus. You know, it's, I mean, I get that. It's hard. Let me just, this is the best way I've ever seen.

A friend of mine does this. Make a list of verses. Your 15 favorite verses. Just list them out.

Give them to them. If you feel like they're lazy, then write out the verse for them, you know, beside the reference. And just say, take five of these verses, verse five, I want you to write out this week, one a day.

I want you to write out what the verse means and then write out what it's saying to you. And then come back one week later, like Thursday, meet at Starbucks, three in the afternoon, and say, let's discuss what you wrote down for those first five things. It's called the taste and see method. It's a great way for you just to engage somebody in the Bible and allows you to talk about what God has taught you. There's another method that we use around here called the simple Bible study method. And it's basically five questions you can ask on any passage of Scripture. And we do this Summit Bible reading plan and you could just say, hey, let's read this Bible reading plan.

Let's get together and let's discuss these five questions out of this passage. You can start, you can read a good book together with people. I do this sometimes. I use Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. Reason for God by Tim Keller. Occasionally I will use my own book, Gospel, which is kind of weird saying, or it's really weird having somebody read your book along with you. But that's why I wrote the book, Gospel, to help people understand it.

So you can read one of these books together and you can just discuss what you're learning. As you do this, what you're going to look for is God opening the heart the way that he did to Lydia. Let me tell you why I love that phrase. And it's several times in the Bible because it takes the pressure off of me. It means I'm not the one who's got to open the heart. I'm not the one who does the convincing. You're like, well, I don't know all the answers. You don't have to know all the answers. The Lord's the one that opens the heart.

All you've got to do is give the message. See, there's this misconception. Some of you think that the only people who could be effective evangelists are people who are extreme extroverts like me who would sell vacuum cleaners if they got fired from their church.

Right? That's not true. Again, a good friend of mine, Rupert Leary, he's on our staff here, says that an effective evangelist only believes two things.

Listen to this. An effective evangelist only believes two things. Number one, that salvation belongs to God, which means God's the one who does the convincing. And he believes, number two, he or she believes that faith comes by hearing and hearing only by the word of God. So what number one does is it takes the pressure off of me, showing me that I don't have to have all the answers, and I don't have to do all the convincing, and I don't have to give a perfect explanation. But part two, faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God shows me that I do have a responsibility because the word of God cannot begin to convince where it has not been placed, and my responsibility is to put that person in the presence of the word of God.

Everybody can do this, y'all. That's how we reach person number one. But here is the problem.

Summit. For most people and most churches, that's where evangelism stops. That's the only kind of evangelism we know how to do. But there are two other kinds of people, and they're not going to be reached by inviting them to church. The slave girl is never going to show up at the place of prayer. She's not going to do a Bible study with you. Neither will the Roman soldier.

Physically, she can't, and the Roman soldier just won't. I think I first realized this when I was 16 years old and had just become a Christian. When I became a Christian, I was an invite people to my church fool. I invited everybody to my church. I remember driving to church one weekend, stopping in the gas station. There was a homeless man there wanting to invite him to church, but realizing he's not going to come. And if he does come, he's not going to understand anything, and it's going to feel like a completely different world to him. Our church was not set up to reach people like that.

If we're going to reach them, we've got to do something different than how we reach Lydia's. Every year, more and more people in our community become the kind of people who just aren't going to come to church. You see, every year, the number of people who check none for religious affiliation on censuses in our country increases at an astounding rate.

Nones, as they're now called, not like Catholic, but N-O-N-E-S, nuns are not casually making their way into our churches for really any reason. It's like you're dealing with people of a completely different religion. You and I are living in a society that is becoming increasingly like that, and if we're going to reach the other two-thirds of our city, we've got to get good at reaching people other than Lydia, because we're not going to reach them by having greater music and me telling better stories at our Christmas Eve service, because they're just not coming. So, how do we reach these other two people? Here's the second one, the physical and spiritual captive. How's this guy reached? How's this girl reached? Well, Paul delivers her. If we're going to reach these people, that means we have to get involved in their lives.

Why is it that we have a strategy for the homeless, orphaned, prisoner, one-way mother in high school dropped out? Because they're not coming any other way. That's why some of you need to get involved, because God loves this part of our city too. He doesn't just love the Lydia's. He loves these people that are physical and spiritual captives, and He wants us to be involved in their lives, and some of you need to get involved. Which leads me to number three, the Philippian jailer.

He's the skeptic, the Philippian jailer. This guy gets saved because of two things. One, he observes Paul and Silas' joy in the midst of pain, and two, he was the recipient of their extravagant grace. Instead of running and letting him kill himself when that's what he deserved, Paul came back for it. Paul did that, listen, because Paul recognized, this is so important, listen to this, Paul recognized that God had appointed this suffering to reach this jailer, which is why Paul did not run from it when the earthquake occurred.

Instead, Paul chose to remain and do two things in the midst of it. To keep giving praise to God, and to show extraordinary grace to those who had mistreated him. What if, what if in the midst of your pain, your first thought was not, God, what have I done wrong? What if your first thought was, God, whose life are you trying to use me to spare?

Here's a wild thought. Maybe sometimes we should quit asking God to take away this week what we asked him in prayer to give us last week. We're like, oh, God, use me. So God does something like this, and we're like, God, you hate me. And God's like, I don't hate you, I just was doing what you asked me.

You asked me to use you, and this is how I'm going to use you. Some of you guys, you're like, when you suffer, you're like, oh, God, what have I done wrong? And then you get out your Bible desperately to try to find some way to explain it, and you flip open your Bible doing that Bible lottery thing, and you just point to a verse, and you land somewhere in Leviticus, and you're like, I knew it, you hated me, I knew that.

Why do that? Why not tope into John 16, 33, where Jesus said, in the world you're going to have tribulation, be of good cheer, I've overcome the world. Because how God overcomes the world is by giving you the ability to go through pain, and to go through this unfair treatment, and to have joy in the midst of it that confuses the world. Because they're like, well, I understand why you have joy, and everything's going well, but you have joy in the midst of pain? What if God, His intention was not just to deliver you from adversity, but it was to deliver you in adversity?

Because there's a difference in those two. I love both kinds of deliverance, by the way. I love being delivered from adversity, and God does that sometimes, but sometimes God chooses to deliver me in adversity, which means that He gives me the ability to be joyful, He gives me the ability to never lose my hope, and the glory of God in the midst of pain, so that I can show others that I got a hope that goes beyond the world, and a hope that is better and sweeter than any earthly blessing that God could give me. There are two things about your pain I want you to write down, and I want you to think about, as the greatest evangelistic strategy that you'll have. Regarding your pain, A, you need to see it coming, and B, you need to see it through. See it coming and see it through. See it coming means don't be surprised by it.

Don't be surprised by it. I mean, God had told Paul, I'm going to use you to reach Gentiles, and part of that, I'm choosing you to suffer. That's not just true about Paul, it's true about you. What if God said to you, I'm choosing you to make my name famous, and part of that is going to be how well that you suffer. Psalm 112, 7, I love this verse. The righteous have no fear of bad news. Why? Because it's never coming?

Nope. Righteous get bad news all the time. They have no fear of bad news because their hearts are steadfast, trust in the Lord.

Does that describe you? What bad news are you afraid of getting? A health scare? News that your retirement didn't work out the way that you were hoping? Does that verse describe you that the righteous have no fear of bad news? It will if you know that God has appointed you to overcome the world, and part of the way that God overcomes the world is not always by delivering you from adversity, but by delivering you in adversity, and then you'll be able to do what Jesus said. You'll be of good cheer because you'll know that in all things, both your joy and your pain, God is working to deliver not only you, but people around you from the world, and that He has sovereignly appointed these things so that you can give testimony to Him in the midst of those things so you see it coming, and then secondly, you see it through, which means that you make a choice to never cease praising God.

You're not going to choose, because I'm telling you, you ain't going to feel like it. Paul and Silas, with their feet up in the stocks, having their backs open raw with whips, and their feet beaten to a pulp, didn't feel like praising God. You're not going to feel like praising God. You're going to have to say with Habakkuk, though there be no crop in the field, though there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will, I choose to rejoice in God my Savior. You're going to have to say with King David, Bless the Lord, O my soul, and all that is within me. Forget not His holy name, forget not all His benefits that He has given to me. You know why David had to say that to himself?

Because he didn't feel like blessing the Lord, and he had forgotten the benefits that God had given to him, which is why he is choosing to bless God and worship God in the midst of pain. You've got to choose, and you've got to do it exuberantly. You've got to talk about the goodness of God. You've got to declare it to yourself.

You've got to declare it to other people. You've got to sing about it. You've got to put a smile on your face when you do. Why? Because the other prisoners are listening.

That's why. You want to know why I encourage you sometimes, and the veins pop out my neck, and I yell at you, and I sound angry when I'm telling you why you should worship exuberantly in here? It's not because I want you all to be my personality, or I want you all to worship like one culture. It's because I know, listen, that how we worship puts on display what we believe about the promises of God. And we've got other prisoners that are in here, and they're watching you, and they're learning how much you value you put on the promises of God based on the way that you sing in the midst of pain. I know we're not all the same personality. You say, well, I feel weird worshiping exuberantly. I just feel awkward.

Listen, full disclosure, I did too. I did not grow up in a church where we did this. I grew up in a church where you showed your devotion to God while quiet and still you could stay in the midst of church. Quiet as a church mouse, right? We were trying to be rodents for Jesus. That was kind of our church's strategy. So I'm not expecting you to go from 0 to 60 in one Sunday, but you can start somewhere, right? You can start, I hear, sing.

That'd be a big step for some of y'all. Listen, I sit back here, and I watch. Just sing the words. Put a smile on your face. Then after a while, you can start moving just a little bit. Just move.

You don't have to have rhythm. You don't. You just kind of move back and forth a little bit. And then after a while, when nobody's looking, you can do the worship Frisbees down here, right? And then I've showed you this.

You can do the carry the TV. Nobody's seen this yet. And I promise you, after a while, you'll be doing varsity level worship. Varsity is washing heaven's windows and giving high fives to Jesus. You'll get there, okay?

Just start somewhere. Pain and unfortunate circumstances are your chance to put your hope and joy in God on display. In fact, those are your best chances to be a witness. I, for one, am tired of seeing the worst of Christians come out in the midst of pain. Some of you are in the prison of a bad marriage. Some of you are in the prison of a tough job situation. I'm talking to somebody out there, right? Some of you are in the prison of chronic health problems.

You're a victim of injustice. I'm not telling you to not do what you can do to remedy it. I mean, Paul, in the next five verses, you keep reading in verse 35 and beyond, he's gonna do what he can to fix the situation so that it never happens to somebody else. But I'm just saying that as you do that, never lose the joy of your possession in Christ because other people are watching. And show extravagant grace. See, that's the cousin to extravagant praise is extravagant grace.

You start giving kindness to those who have mistreated you. Many of you are familiar with the story Les Mis, book, movie, stage production, however you saw it. But you know, the whole thing centers around this one act of grace where Jean Valjean steals from a priest. The priest has a chance to just report it and to get this guy thrown in jail for the rest of his life and that God deserves that. But this priest in this kind of like moment that opens the whole story, instead of giving Jean Valjean what he deserves, he says to the police, oh, no, no, I donated these things to him. I wanted him to have them and he forgot to take the candlesticks and he goes in and rather than giving them what he deserves, he pours out more riches on him and Jean Valjean says, why? And the priest says, I'm doing this to purchase your soul. And that fundamentally changes the rest of Valjean's life. You don't have that kind of situation at that level happen every day, do you? No, you don't. But you have dozens of smaller situations where you get to do that to give to the person who doesn't deserve, you give them something different.

And then so do when you raise this question, why would you do this? Nothing puts the gospel on display like showing and extending grace. And that's what we're all about here at Summit Life, putting the gospel message on a pedestal for the world to see.

If you tuned in a little late today, no worries. You can always find the complete message online at jdgrier.com. So J.D., we've been talking for a couple of weeks about our newest Bible study that will help our listeners dig deeper into the book of Acts. We have volume two of our sent Bible study available today. And remember, we offered volume one back in March.

So now it's time for the second half. Can you tell us a little bit about this resource and what to expect? Yeah, you know, like all of our Bible studies, these can be used privately, one on one, or it can be used with a group. The second volume covers chapters nine through 28 of Acts. It's a great supplement to your personal devotion times. Somebody you're discipling, you could use this to go through the book of Acts, maybe in conjunction with these messages. Or if you're part of a small group, it might be something that will provide a good discussion guide as you as you press deeper into Acts. Acts tells the story of the early church, and it follows apostles like Peter and Paul, who are probably not quite who you think they are.

I mean, we see them as these superhuman spiritual giants and saints, but they were ordinary men, plain men in some ways, that just said yes to God and got used in incredible ways. And as you study, as you press deep into the promises of the book of Acts, our prayers that you won't just be learning a lot of new information, our prayers that your heart is going to be stirred to get on board with the same mission that the early church had, and that is the spread of the gospel. You can get just volume two right now, or you can get volumes one and two at jdgrier.com.

You have a role, and it's our pleasure to help you understand your role in spreading the gospel message. Ask for your copy when you give a suggested donation of $25 or more. Call 866-335-5220. That's 866-335-5220. Or go online and request your copy when you visit us at jdgrier.com.

And if you missed volume one back in March, be sure to request that as well so you have the full study. I'm Molly Bidevich, inviting you to join us again Tuesday. Pastor J.D.

will explain that in order for others to understand the gospel, we've first got to understand where they're coming from. Learn more about the importance of context tomorrow on Summit Life with J.D. Greer. Today's program was produced and sponsored by J.D. Greer Ministries.