1646. Preach the Gospel

Welcome to The Daily Platform. Our program features sermons 16 this morning. Before Jesus ascended into heaven and after he had resurrected from the dead, he was on this earth for a period of 40 days. During that time, he showed himself alive by appearing on nine different occasions to different people. Three of those occasions he appeared to individuals like Mary and Peter and he appeared to his brother James. He appeared to the disciples one time without Thomas in an upper room and another time with Thomas in the upper room. He appeared to his disciples by the Sea of Galilee. He appeared to over 500 people all at one time up in the region of Galilee and so he appeared and showed himself alive, as the Bible says, by many infallible proofs. And during that period of time, from his resurrection to his ascension, before he went into heaven, during that time, Jesus gave his disciples one great command. Not two, not three, not four, but only one. We could say it this way, he operated by the KISS principle.

Have you ever heard that? Keep it simple what? Not stupid, God doesn't call his people stupid.

Saints, alright? Keep it simple saints. He didn't give us three or four or five commands, he gave us one. And obviously if he's getting ready to go to heaven and he gives us one command, how important is that command?

It's not secondary, it's not third level, it's not what we call tertiary. It is primary, primary for the people of God. And what is that command that he gave us? Well it wasn't something obviously we couldn't do otherwise he wouldn't give it to us. And it was something that everyone was commanded to do.

Everybody can do this. And what is the commandment that he gave us? We find it in all four gospels, and we also find it in the book of Acts. And in Mark 16 and verse 15, he says these words, and he said unto them, go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. Mark says that we are to go into the world and preach the gospel. Matthew says we are to go into the world and make disciples of all nations. Luke says we are to go into the world, into all the world, and preach repentance and remission of sins and being baptized. The book of John says essentially we are to preach this gospel, that's why he wrote it, so that people would become believers in Jesus Christ and we're to go and tell them that.

And in the book of Acts, the book of Acts tells us that they actually obeyed that command, they went into all the world and they preached the gospel. All of us here, if you are a Christian, every one of us have all been given this great singular command, and that is we are to preach the gospel. We are to be sowers of the seed. We are to be tellers of the story. We are to be witnesses of the truth, and we are to be announcers of the good news. We are called the light of the world.

We are called the salt of the earth. Everywhere we go, we are to be telling people the good news. We are to tell it to our roommates, our teammates, our classmates, and our office mates. We are to tell it to our family and to our friend group. We are to share the gospel in our homes and in the homes of others. We are to tell it in restaurants, gas stations, hotels, airplanes, and in grocery stores. We are to announce it on street corners and in the neighborhood.

We are to tell it on the basketball court, and we are to tell it on the soccer field. Everywhere we go, we are to be telling the good news. We are to preach the gospel.

So my goal this morning is really quite simple, and that is how can you fulfill this command while you're a college student? And what I'm going to say is not exhaustive, it's not overly creative, it's just pretty basic and straightforward, but it is intended this morning to do for us what we all need, and that is to be exhorted, and to be stirred up, and to feel the weight of responsibility to do what Jesus told us to do 2,000 years ago, and that is to preach the gospel. And so this morning, let me give you five ways in which we can preach the gospel.

And you know what? You ought to have at least one of these that you can be involved in in your own personal life, if not all of them. Number one, the first way for you as a college student to preach the gospel is to actually preach the gospel on the campus of Bob Jones University, right here. You see, as students, you should be preaching the gospel to one another all the time. First of all, let me say that not every student here knows Jesus. Jesus said, among the wheat there are always going to be tares. Among the sheep there will always be goats. There will always be people who are religious, but they've never been born again. Jesus said, there will be many who will say unto me, Lord, Lord, and I will say unto them, I never knew you, depart from me, you workers of iniquity. There are people who profess that they know the Lord, but in reality and in experience, they've never possessed the new life in Christ.

This was my case in college. I grew up in a nominal Christian home. My father was a deacon and a Sunday school teacher in a Presbyterian church. I was confirmed at the age of 12 years old. If you asked me, did you believe in Jesus, I would have said absolutely. I was religious, but I wasn't saved. The first time I heard the Gospel, I was a 17-year-old public high school teenager sitting outside in front of my school where a friend of mine had been converted, and he asked me a question I'd never been asked before.

He said, Steve, if you died today, would you go to heaven? And at that moment, I'd never been asked that kind of question, and I actually wanted to know. And in my heart, I didn't know. And so the first time in my life, somebody shared the Gospel with me.

It was a 17-year-old friend of mine. We had grown up together. He preached the Gospel to me. I didn't get saved that day. I graduated from high school.

I went off to college in Charleston, South Carolina, and I played on the varsity soccer team, and there were only two freshmen on the team that year. Myself and a fellow from Beaufort, South Carolina named Maxie Birch, and Maxie had become a Christian his senior year in high school. And so as we would walk to the soccer field and back for practice every day, he would preach the Gospel to me.

He would tell me, Pettit, you need to get saved. And I knew in my heart I wasn't saved, and I was under conviction. He would invite me to Fellowship of Christian Athlete meetings, and I didn't really want to go because I wasn't a part of a Christian community.

I felt awkward. I felt more comfortable in a bar taking alcohol than sitting in a Bible study. But by the way that he lived and by his faithful testimony, he preached the Gospel to me. And on Easter Sunday, 1975, coming back from Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, I woke up that morning, and I was driving down the highway. I turned on the radio, and I would have listened to the local rock station.

I would have listened to the beach jam tunes. But instead I decided to listen to a church service, and a preacher preached over the radio, and I don't know who he was. I don't know what kind of church it was. All I know is I was driving down the highway, and I thought he knew I was driving down the highway because he was preaching to me. That's the unique thing about preaching. The preacher is God's voice box, but the Holy Spirit is the one that delivers the message to your heart, and you sit there and you feel like he's preaching to you.

That's the work of God. And the preacher was preaching, and he said these words, there's somebody driving down the highway right now, and you're not saved. Man, I looked at that radio. My heart was pounding like a bass drum. He said, why don't you pull over to the side of the road right now and get saved? And driving down that highway, I prayed and asked Jesus to come into my life, and God saved me as a 19-year-old freshman.

Why? Because somebody preached the Gospel. As a student here at Bob Jones University, you should be preaching the Gospel. You should preach it in your dorm rooms. You should preach it in your D-groups. You should preach it in your societies. You should preach it in the dining common. You should preach it on your sports teams. One of the best videos that we have put out this year is the video of a volleyball player who preached the Gospel to another volleyball player, and she got saved and got baptized here in a church locally in the Greenville area. We should be preaching the Gospel all the time. Ask the question, when were you saved?

Where do you stand in your faith? Have you experienced a new birth? We should be telling the story all the time. A number of years ago, our basketball team went to play down at the Citadel during right around the November Thanksgiving break. And I went down there to watch them play, and there were not many people there because it was Thanksgiving break. And during halftime, I was standing in the gym where they have their games, and a tap comes to my shoulder, and I turned around. And there was a former soccer player that we had played together back when we were on our team, and he was actually an all-conference player and was one of the highest scorers in the history of the school. His name was Chris Glaze. And as soon as I saw him, we gave each other a big hug, and he said, Steve, I just wanted to come over here, and I wanted to tell you, and I wanted to thank you, because you and Maxie Birch led me to Christ on the back of the bus as we were going from one game to another game when I was a, he was either a freshman or sophomore in college.

I don't remember which one. And here we are now, years later, years later, and he's sharing with me how God had changed his life. Folks, let me tell you something. We should be preaching the Gospel. You say, well, this is Bob Jones University.

I know where I am. But we should be preaching the message to each other all the time. Number one, preach the Gospel on the campus.

Number two, preach the Gospel through your local church. Everybody here attends a local church in the greater Greenville area. The church is God's work in the world.

He's establishing his church. When I was a student, I attended a church faithfully here in town. I got involved in the youth group.

I drove a car for visitation. I went out and visited with the youth pastor on Saturday mornings. I would speak in a Sunday school class as a substitute.

I served in youth activities. I actually taught a fifth grade Sunday school class. By the way, I learned how to preach by preaching to fifth graders. If you can't preach to fifth grade boys and get them excited about Jesus, you can't preach to anybody.

I'm serious about that. And I had this group of fifth grade boys. They were my audience. And I taught in the stairwell of the church in my Sunday school class. One day I preached about the coming of the Lord and the setting up of his kingdom. I preached about the millennium to fifth graders.

Go figure. You say, what'd you preach about? I said, the Bible says one day you will lay down with a lion. I said, how many of you would like a lion as a house pet?

All the fifth graders would. Cool! He says you'll play upon the whole of the cobra.

How many of you would like to have a cobra for a house pet? Cool! By the end of Sunday school class, boys were standing on their seats and they were cheering about the millennium, about the coming of Christ, about his setting up of his kingdom. Man, if you can't preach to fifth grade boys, you can't preach to anybody. And you should be involved in your local church. What is your church doing to spread the gospel? Then be involved. Look for opportunities.

Take those opportunities. Every open door that I've ever had in the ministry always came by serving in local churches. I served in the local church here in Greenville and got recommended to another church in the state of Michigan where I served for five years after grad school. The open door for service comes as you're serving. And be involved in your local church.

Don't just slide in and slide out. Walk in and say, what can I do? You may not be able to do it every single week, but you should be able to serve consistently, especially in giving out the gospel. Preach the gospel through your local church.

And then number three, let me encourage you to preach the gospel through outreach opportunities here through the university. There are so many opportunities that we have in the greater Greenville area. Greenville needs the gospel. It's a growing city. I just read the other day that it's still on a list of one of the top destination cities in America.

Go figure. People are wanting to come to Greenville. People are moving here. The need for us to spread the gospel is as great now as it's ever been in the history of our school, and we should be spreading the gospel. Bob Jones students should be known for spreading the gospel.

How do we do that? Number one, we can do it through nursing homes. I remember when my mother was placed into an assisted living home in Denver, Colorado, and one of the things that really stirred me was that there was no church in the city of Denver that was coming to that home to try to minister to those that were there by preaching the gospel, by singing, by serving, and by loving them. My daughter, when she was in Bible college, my oldest daughter spent three of her four years while she was a student there going to a nursing home weekly.

And she learned to love those people, and she became very close friends with them. Every one of us should spend some time in a nursing home. I try to go to a nursing home or some kind of assisted living at least once a semester to do music and to go and minister to those people. We have opportunities of spreading the gospel in downtown Greenville and in parks and on streets. We have here in Greenville, the greater Greenville area, Child Evangelism Fellowship that has multiple meetings throughout Greenville through local churches. And many of you, your local churches are involved in CEF, and you can be involved in backyard Bible clubs. We have outreaches to public high schools.

We have the Piedmont Women's Center here in the greater Greenville area where you can serve Miracle Hill Ministry, which is reaching out to people with addictions. And so as you work through these opportunities, these are opportunities to learn to serve. You don't really learn ministry by sitting in a class. You've got to get your feet out and move.

You've got to get your hands dirty. When I was a student here in grad school, we created a teenage Bible study. And we did it through our local church, and it was for a local public high school here in the area.

We held meetings on Monday night. It was really sort of a youth activity, you could call it that. And during that time we would have activities, we had games, we had competition, we had food.

And then there was always a message. And there were so many young people that we were able to reach with the gospel not far from the campus here that lived in the community. I'm not saying you have to do that, but you should be creative. You guys are creative.

You can think of ways far beyond what we could think of in getting the gospel out. When I was a student here, we used to have a prayer meeting on Saturday mornings. It was a small group of guys. And we would go off campus to a gentleman who had a home, and in his backyard he had a barn. And the barn on the second floor was originally his office. And so it was a nice, heated, carpeted room.

But there was no furniture there. And I knew the gentleman well, and I said, listen, we have a group of guys that would like to have a prayer meeting. And would you mind us using your barn on Saturday mornings?

He said, sure, I would love for you to do that. And so for one year, a group of guys met, and it was anywhere from four or five, and sometimes it would be up to 15 or more. We were spiritual, so we called it the upper room. So we would go to the upper room.

And we would meet for three hours. The first hour, we would read our Bibles. The second hour, we would preach to each other.

And the third hour, we would pray from five to eight. And then after that, we all had things to do, and many of us were involved in ministries. And we would go out and serve in those ministries on that Saturday morning. And out of that group came pastors, out of that group came evangelists, out of that group came all kinds of young men who went out in the ministry and had a major impact for the Gospel.

We should be creative. We developed an evangelistic team while we were here as students. And we would go out in some of the smaller towns and smaller churches and hold services and do music and do preaching.

In other words, there are opportunities if you look for them. So preach the Gospel through outreaches. There should be many of you establishing all kinds of creative outreaches in the community. And then number four, how do we preach the Gospel? We preach the Gospel through visual or printed tools. And my emphasis here is really on various ways we can be getting the Gospel out.

First of all, we can get the Gospel out through printed form. You were given the opportunity at the end of last semester to get Bibles from the Gideons. I'm thankful that many of you took four or five of them, so hold on to those and be ready to give those out. My freshman year of college, I broke my left ankle playing indoor soccer. I had surgery at the Baptist Hospital in Columbia, South Carolina. And I remember waking up after surgery and sitting next to my bed was a gift that had been given to me by the hospital. It was a copy of the Bible. And I remember getting that and I remember starting to read the Bible. It was a copy of the New Testament. And I read that New Testament they gave me until I wore it out. And literally they gave me a copy of God's Word and I wanted to read it.

We should be giving out printed material. We should be handing out Gospel tracts. Gospel tracts are these little things that people give out, printed material, and the Gospel is presented on them. I carry with me in my bag everywhere I go various copies of Gospel tracts. My wife and I will go out to eat at a restaurant and she'll ask me, do you have a tract?

I'll meet somebody along the road and maybe I don't have the opportunity to have much of a conversation with them, but a warm up conversation and I leave them a gift. It's a gift of a Gospel tract. People read them. I remember as a teenager, a public high school teenager being handed a Gospel tract on a street corner in Jacksonville, Florida by two old ladies who were passing out tracts. And I remember getting it and at first I was a little embarrassed but I stuck it in my pocket and I read it. I used to read tracts before I ever became a Christian.

God uses them. The legal drinking age in the state of South Carolina when I was a student was 18 years old. Today it's 21 years old. The age of 18 years old when I was unsaved, I didn't know the Lord. And I would go to local bars at 18 years old. One night I was walking into a bar called the Twilight Lounge.

What an original name. And a guy was standing there handing out Gospel tracts and I took it. And I walked in and I sat down at a table. And it was a Chick tract. You ever heard of a Chick tract?

It's called This Was Your Life. It was a cartoon, but it was powerful. And I came under the deepest conviction as an 18 year old senior in high school. And God used that. God uses them. This coming March, at the end of March, in the first week of April, we're going to participate in a Gospel tract campaign to give out the Gospel through tract form. Now we should do it with discretion. We should do it winsomely. We should be courageous about it. We just don't want to throw it at people. But we have so many open opportunities and so many opportunities to give the Gospel out.

And then let me say this, we ought to use as many different ways we can in video form. Whether it's through YouTube or movies or different kinds of opportunities to spread the Gospel. My son Michael graduated from here in 2019. He was a history major. He went to get his master's degree at Hebrew University in the city of Jerusalem. He met his wife there and they live there now.

She works for a university in Jerusalem. He worked in that university and he has gotten involved in a very special, unique outreach. And that is he uses social media. He does TikTok Live, Michael Pettit. He has almost 50,000 followers. And every single day, Monday through Friday, from 10 to 11 o'clock Jerusalem time, he does a live tour of the old city of Jerusalem. And he is averaging between 40 and 50,000 people a day watching him on that tour.

And he's preaching the Gospel as he goes throughout the city. And he has people from literally all over the world. Now, I don't think TikTok is the greatest social media in the world, okay?

And the Chinese own it. So, you know, I mean, let's be honest. But you know what? God takes things and uses them for his own glory.

And then finally, let me say this. Preach the Gospel through prayer. The most powerful weapon that God has given us on earth is his word and prayer.

And prayer can transform people's hearts. Who are you praying for that is without Christ? When I was growing up, I had a friend of mine, particularly in high school, who every time I got around him, we got in trouble.

Have you ever had a friend like that? His name was Bubba Hammond. Bubba. And every time I got with Bubba, we got in trouble.

Well, I got saved my freshman year of college. And when I went back home, Bubba was going his way and I was going in a completely different direction. But I began to pray for him.

And one day I was out jogging, trying to get in shape. And I was running near his house and the Spirit of God prompted me to stop by and see Bubba. And I stopped by his house. And he came out. We hadn't seen each other for a while.

And we talked for a little bit. And then I shared the Gospel with him. I told him about the Lord. He wasn't ready to get saved. He told me he wasn't ready to get saved.

And I said, well, I'll be praying for you. Years later, I was preaching in a revival meeting in Columbia, South Carolina. And about halfway through the sermon, a fellow walks in and sits down in the back. And as soon as I see him, I think, who in the world is that? Man, I recognize that.

And you know this, you can do two things at once. You can be preaching and thinking about something else. And it dawned on me, that's Bubba Hammond. And Bubba had come and heard I was preaching there. And he came after the service and he said, Steve, do you remember when you stopped by my house to talk to me? He said, I never forgot that. And he said, since then I have been saved. And I'm telling you what, if God can save Bubba Hammond, he can save anybody. Believe me.

Trust me. And I learned years ago that one of the ways we preach the gospel is through prayer. So as we finish, let me ask you a question. How many of you would acknowledge, I need to be preaching the gospel? Raise your hand. Would you acknowledge that? Okay. How many of you would say, pray for me?

Because I don't feel like I'm doing that great of a job at it, but I need to be doing it. Pray for me. Would you raise your hand? Hold on.

I got both my hands up. It's really easy to live in the BJU bubble. You understand what I'm saying? Do your Christian thing here and forget that the world is going to hell.

And do you know what? We need to be preaching the gospel. Lord, thank you for your word. Help us to be faithful to preach the gospel and all the venues and opportunities. Help us to look for them and take those opportunities and testify of you in Jesus name. Amen. Have a great day. We hope you'll join us again tomorrow at this same time as we study God's Word together on The Daily Platform.