Welcome to The Daily Platform. Our program features sermons from chapel services at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina. Today's sermon will be preached by Dr. Bruce McAllister. I have this wonderful privilege this morning to speak on three essential attitudes in evangelism. Years ago, I heard a student at Bob Jones Academy.
I think I was a student teacher at the time. His name is Arnold Algier, and he's beginning to be an older man today, but I heard him bring a devotional from these three verses, and I have never forgotten the way he laid it out. There are three I am's at the start of each of these three verses. I am, I am, I am not. And so let's read these verses together from Romans 1, starting at verse 14.
Would you together? I am deader both to the Greeks and to the barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise. So as much as is in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also. For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. As a 15-year-old boy, I dedicated my life to Jesus Christ and started trying to seriously live for Him and tell other people about Him. Just how Webb came to our church, and I loved his preaching, and he reached out to me, and we had a conversation, and I said, Dr. Webb, how can I lead someone to Christ? He said, I'll preach on that topic tomorrow night, and so the next night he preached on the Romans Road plan of salvation, and I picked that up, began to use the Romans Road plan of salvation in telling other people about Jesus Christ. By the way, Dr. Webb and I became pen pals, and for the next three years, though I did not see him personally until I was in college here as a freshman, we wrote each other back and forth.
I'm talking about handwritten, stamped snail mail, and he really mentored me for those three years through those monthly letters, and I'll always be deeply appreciative to him. He's with the Lord, his son Barry, evangelist Barry Webb carries on the tradition of his father. Dr. Webb wrote a number of young men in the same way, encouraging them toward the ministry, to win souls, to live clean, and to go to Bob Jones, he would throw in there as well. I remember as a teenager, going to public school, by the way, almost my entire generation went to public school, and all those prior, because in essence there were not Christian schools, or the Christian school movement was so young that we were a little ahead of that, and so we were in public schools. And so there was a sense when we came to a Christian college like this, it was a breath of fresh air, and in a sense we had already lived on the mission field, trying to be a testimony for Christ in those public school settings. I remember I would begin to take gospel tracts there in the 10th grade year of my high school career. We were in a new town, a small town, Hartsell, Alabama. I would put my little Bible on top of my books, I was told that was the way to kind of let people know what you believe.
And I tried to navigate that and those relationships. I played ball for our high school, and that gave me a little bit of a platform for ministry as well. In my 10th grade year, I would stand in the living room at my parents' home on Moss Chapel Road in Hartsell, and I would wait for the school bus to come down the road and pick me up. This would be about, you know, 7.20, 7.30, right in that time frame. And back in the day, there really were not very many Christian radio stations. There actually was not very much Christian recording that I was aware of, at least, that I could listen to good Christian music. And so I would try to tune in to DY&FM radio station in Chattanooga, which was about two to two and a half hours northeast of where we lived in North Alabama.
And you could only faintly get the signal of that radio station on our little stereo, our FM station there. And yet at 7.30 in the morning, Dr. Lee Roberson, the famous pastor of Highland Park Baptist Church, would come on the radio each day with his radio program called Gospel Dynamite. And as he opened that program, he would always quote Romans 1.16.
For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believeth, to the Jew first and also to the Greek. And so it was like Dr. Roberson gave me my marching orders for the day to be bold in my testimony for Christ there at the public school. The spirit of compassionate, evangelistic living gripped my soul as a teenager. The next two years, I actually was a school bus driver, if you can believe it. I was a substitute school bus driver at the age of 17, driving a 72-passenger school bus.
If you can believe that, you'd get arrested for doing that today. And at the age of 18, I was a regular school bus driver for that senior year of high school. And then I came off over here to Bob Jones University, Oz, you know, the promised land.
I had visited here several times and then got here. And BJU was actually a flame with evangelistic fervor. The founder of Bob Jones University, my most favorite saying of his, is when he said, it takes evangelistic unction to make orthodoxy function. It takes evangelistic unction, that's power, the anointing of God. The life permeated by the spirit of evangelism, it takes evangelistic unction to make orthodoxy function.
Let me bring it down to where we live. It's not just orthodoxy, that is Bible-believing Christianity, but it takes evangelistic zeal for you and for me to be all that we should be for Jesus Christ, for our very life to function as God intended for it to function. So I'm asking you this morning, has evangelistic zeal, the burden for the lost, the awareness of people dying every day and going to hell, has that spirit gripped your soul? Could you say that I'm praying for the lost and I'm looking for opportunities to tell others about Jesus Christ? The university hymn, Bob Jones University hymn has a stanza in it.
Stanza 7 says, unfailing love, we are so cold in heart. To us thy passion for the lost impart. Give us thy vision of the need of men.
All learning will be used in service then. One of the value statements of Bob Jones University among other fine statements says that we seek to develop individuals who are committed to Jesus Christ as Lord, who are engaged in service and leadership in a biblically faithful church and who have a compelling concern for reaching the unconverted with the Gospel. So high among the priorities of the Bob Jones University educational emphasis is that we would all who know Christ as Savior would develop a compelling concern for reaching the unconverted. I see in Romans chapter 1 in verses 14 and following three key attitudes, essential attitudes in our evangelism. The first is from the phrase, I am, I am debtor.
I am debtor. This is our sense of obligation. Paul says in that verse, you follow along in your scriptures with me, he says, I am debtor both to the Greeks and to the barbarians, both to the wise and to the unwise.
Paul was concerned about everyone. That's another way you could just say it. The Gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone that believes. He generally in the book of Romans breaks down mankind into Jews and Greeks or Jews and non-Greeks or Jews and Gentiles. Within those categories, there would be people who would be considered barbarians, perhaps uncouth, not well educated. The very word barbarian is a word that is reflecting the inability of someone to speak clearly.
They just kind of ramble or mutter, not because of a handicap, but because they just don't know how to speak or their language group is unintelligible, at least to the sophisticated Greek speakers. There were people who were, we would say educated, wise, though not certainly all educated people are genuinely wise, people who think they're wise, who are full of human wisdom that falls short of God's wisdom and then those who are, we would say, unwise. Paul himself was of course from Jewish background. He had all the pedigree of the most highly educated Jewish young man.
He had sat at the feet of Gamaliel. He had been through the rabbinical schools. He was well aware of the demands of the Old Testament and he would say in the book of Philippians that he was a Pharisee of a Pharisee and a Hebrew of the Hebrews and as touching the law from an unconverted standpoint, he would have considered himself blameless. And so he was well aware of the trap of self-righteousness that many Jewish people found themselves in and even Gentile people find themselves in as well. He was well aware of the rather despicable attitude that Jewish people had toward the despicable Gentiles. And Paul had a special burden following his Damascus Road experience when the risen Lord Jesus Christ appeared to him and said, you know, Saul, it's hard for you to kick against the pricks. You're out here trying to kill Christians, persecute them and haul them off to jail.
But you've really chosen a hard life. And the very first words out of the now converted Saul of Tarsus are these words, Lord, what will you have me to do? He understood immediately this was the risen Lord Jesus Christ. He submitted his heart to him. He received him, his work on Calvary's cross as the full payment for his own sin and immediately he recognized in his case the lordship of Jesus Christ and the need to do something for Christ. In Acts 9-20, the same chapter in which he, this conversion story is told, it says that Saul preached Christ immediately in the synagogues that he is the Son of God. And thus began a life of service. He immediately testified of Christ.
He immediately told them of the change that had taken place. And of course, he was not readily and immediately received well by those that he had such a terrible reputation for persecuting. But over time and due to the good influence of Barnabas, those matters, those matters were put to rest. You go back to his home area, immediately, actually, he would go to the Damatean Desert east of Damascus and receive revelation from the Lord directly.
What we would call a lot of the books of our New Testament probably. He would go back to his area, his home area, Tarsus of Cilicia for perhaps 7-10 years. And then Barnabas would go get him, bring him to the church at Antioch and they would begin a ministry of teaching and evangelism, evangelism and teaching. The alternating heartbeats of the gospel, evangelism, discipleship, and they would see many people established in the faith and many more people saved. And then in Acts 13, he would begin what we call his first missionary journey when the Holy Ghost says, set apart me, Saul and Barnabas, for the work to which I have called them. Paul lived his life with a sense of holy obligation. God had saved him and it was the passion and burden of his life, the obligation, the heavy concern upon his heart to reach not only his own people, the Jewish people, but Gentile people as well.
And so he had this great sense of obligation. If you know Christ as Savior, if you've been deeply impacted with the gospel of Jesus Christ and your life has been changed and you're walking with Christ and you're filled with the Holy Spirit and you're growing in your understanding of his word, then one of the most important things is to keep also a very important awareness of the people around you who do not yet know the Lord. Do you ever get on a plane or on a bus or attend a large ball game or see a crowd in a football stadium or go to a mall crowded with people or perhaps be in an airport somewhere where very many people are milling around and do you ever ask yourself just how many of these people really know the Lord?
If something tragic were to happen suddenly in this environment where I am, how many of these people would be in heaven and how many would be in hell? Dr. Bob III used to frequently say from this pulpit, the most sobering reality in the world today is that people are dying and going to hell today. May God grab our heart with this sense of obligation.
I am deader. Secondly in verse 15 we see a sense of a search for opportunity. He says in verse 15, I am ready. He says, so as much as is in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also. Paul was very thankful for God's saving grace in Rome, even though he had not been the initial one to preach the gospel there.
He was rejoicing that their faith was known, he says, throughout the world. He served God and them by praying for them. Verse 9 of chapter 1, and he desired to come to them by the will of God, to establish them in the faith further, verse 11. To encourage them, verse 12, to be encouraged by them, verse 13, and to help them to grow and to help bring about by God's grace the conversion of additional people, verse 14. And though now he was hindered from coming, he would eventually get there in Acts 28. We see that he eventually arrived and had a two year ministry there, though even confined there. And so the very occasion of his writing the book of Romans is due to the providential hindrance, but he wanted to get the gospel to them in writing, and so what we have is the most thorough presentation of the gospel as found in the book of Romans that has sustained the doctrinal foundation of the Christian church now for 20 centuries, as Paul gave this truth under inspiration. And that truth would be the basis for people coming to Christ, the theological basis for the gospel, and the establishing of biblical churches over all these many years. Paul had a sense and a search for opportunities.
How about you? Do you just, in a lazy way, let's say, just kind of like in an almost unplanned way, just hope a gospel opportunity comes your way? Or do you actually pray and plan and pursue after making the opportunity, and then taking the opportunity?
If you and I would just be sensitive to the Holy Spirit's moving upon our hearts as we prayerfully move among unsaved people, intentionally move among them, I believe that God will give us opportunities to give the gospel to people. I've lived in a Christian college environment most of my adult life. I love the Christian college environment.
Just nothing like it. It's so dynamic. It's cool. I love it, okay? I love being around wholesome young people. I love being around my colleagues that I work with. I love being around our graduates, our alumni, our friends. I love when they come back, like to this core conference, and you're hugging and shaking hands and refreshing fellowship.
It's just wonderful. But it's easy even for something that good to become something that is kind of self-serving rather than others looking out for other people. And so what I have found in the many years of being in this ministry is I have to schedule time intentionally to reach people for Christ. And I can stand here and tell you very many situations and stories and blessings that come out of that.
But let me encourage you. As a high priority in all the things that you're doing, be sure one way or another you're getting out and telling other people about the great gospel of Jesus Christ and His saving love for them. In verse 16 we see our spirit of optimism. Paul says, I am not ashamed. Paul was not ashamed because he personally knew the power of the gospel to save.
He would say in 2 Timothy chapter 1 in verse 12, for the witch calls also, I have suffered these things, nevertheless I am not ashamed. For I know whom I have believed and am persuaded that He is able to keep that which I have committed unto Him against that day. You know evangelism is not some type of theological treatise that you present to someone. It's good to be theologically clear and have Bible verses memorized and know where to go in a plan of salvation like the good Romans wrote, plan of salvation.
As you grow in your understanding of the Bible and your evangelistic gifts and skills, you'll learn to improvise and you'll get better by God's grace at conversational skill. But actually none of that actually saves people. It's the gospel that does the saving.
Our persuasive techniques, our illustrations do not save. God does the saving. The gospel is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes. The best definition, my most favorite definition at least of personal evangelism is this. It's just one beggar telling another beggar where to get bread. And just a tender heart in the quoting of John 3.16.
Just telling someone that Jesus has saved me and He can save you may be all it takes to bring a sinner to Jesus Christ. It's telling them about a person. I would love to tell you about the girl I married. I would love to tell you about where we met at a table number 34BL here in the BJU Dining Common. I would love to tell you about how we dated, how we got married in War Memorial Chapel on June 1, 1978.
And how we had all four of our babies right in Barge Hospital here on campus. And I'd like to tell you all those good things. And if I told you about Ellen Gamble McAllister, you would sense this tremendous appreciation and love that I have for her.
I would be telling you about a person. When I tell you how Dr. Jack Spratt preached the gospel in our home church back in Decatur, Alabama, and would plead with this little sinner boy to be saved, saying, don't put it off, don't put it off, and how he took me out in his automobile on January 12, 1960 on Church Street in Decatur, Alabama, and tenderly presented the gospel to me one more time and then led me in the sinner's prayer, and how Jesus Christ came into my life and changed my life, I'd be telling you about a friend, not merely Dr. Spratt, but I'd be telling you about Jesus Christ. What a friend we have in Jesus. All our sins and griefs do bear.
It's just one beggar telling another beggar where to get the bread of life. That's why we don't need to be ashamed. That's why we need to be bold.
And we all have that little timidity, I suppose, about getting a conversation started and maybe talking to a stranger or maybe a relative. Yeah, there's a little awkwardness in that, but if you get started and you just start telling about your friend, it just well may be that they too will believe the gospel and be saved and have a purpose for living in a home in heaven. The spirit of optimism. God loves to save sinners. If He saved you, if He saved me, He can save them. Paul said, I'm not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God unto salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jews first, and also to the Greeks. Where are you in your personal evangelism?
Wouldn't you like to be more effective and more fruitful? There may be people right here in this room, and I would say there are people in this room who do not yet know the Savior, and it well could be that you could even have quite a ministry of evangelism right here among your friends on campus. And then go off, and then find others, and pour your life into them, and let the spirit of evangelistic zeal grip your heart and propel you into a life of evangelistic living for Christ. Let's pray together. Lord, we pray to this end that your word and these truths would grip our hearts. We know, dear Lord, that we're not what we should be for you, and this arena is challenging for every one of us. We ask for your forgiveness, and we ask that you would give us an increasing burden for the lost, and that you would give us the privilege to lead many people to you in the days ahead. We pray in Jesus' name, amen. You've been listening to a sermon preached by Dr. Bruce McAllister, Vice President for Ministry at Bob Jones University. Thanks for listening, and join us again tomorrow as we study God's Word together on The Daily Platform.
