Ready, Get Set...Go!

Conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders. There's that word again. We've encountered it. It's a word that refers to the unbeliever, those outside the fellowship.

And here's then the implicit warning behind the action point. The Gospel of Christ is judged by the world, not by what it reads in the Bible, but what it sees in the believer. And Paul is implicitly stating, walk wisely. They're watching you more than you know. As believers and as members of God's family of redeemed people, we've made a promise to demonstrate and communicate the Gospel to our community and our world. This is especially true as our culture rapidly declines morally and increasingly embraces sin as good. People watching you might make you feel uncomfortable and self-conscious, but that's part of being a Christian because the world is watching.

What are they seeing in you? Welcome to wisdom for the heart. In this message, Stephen Davey provides six action steps we can take to effectively share our faith with others. Now, here's Stephen with today's message. Take your New Testament and turn to Colossians chapter four. And let's camp out here in this session today with just a few verses, a few phrases. And what I want to do is just sort of pull out of this six very practical action points that are necessary for the church and the individual Christian to maximize opportunities to authenticate and communicate the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, nothing that I'm going to say if you've been a believer very long are going to strike you as new.

You're not going to write that down and go, wow, I've never heard that before. Really going to just rehearse what we all know, but as we pursue the kind of church that glorifies Christ, it's good to rehearse these simple truths. The first, and I'll give you them as we work our way through, the first action point I'm going to point out is simply this, pray faithfully. Pray faithfully. Look at chapter four and let's dive into verse two, just the first phrase.

Devote yourselves to prayer. Now, Paul is eventually going to get around and talk about seizing the opportunity and going through open doors and delivering the Gospel, but he begins where we must begin. In fact, the reason in my study, I found myself backing up, backing up, backing up to begin at least at verse two, because this is foundational. This is where we must begin. To leap over this step means we stumble at every other step, which is why the Apostle Paul tells the believer here in Colossae that before he tells us to do anything publicly, he stresses what we are to do privately. And I wonder if we fail as much as we do publicly because we fail as much as we do privately. One author now with the Lord put it this way, prayer prepares.

I like that. Prayer prepares. It is the beginning of what we do. It is the ending of all effective Christian service. It isn't, he wrote, an interlude. It is not a luxury for only a few to exercise.

It is not an emergency measure for a crisis. It is every Christian's devotion. The word devoted means to be busy. And I find it interesting because I know it's possible for me to be busy about everything else but this.

How about you? It's so easy to get busy, to be devoted to everything. And when we take stock of our private lives, how many of us would say we are devoted to prayer?

It certainly convicts me. Join Paul who considers this paramount to everything else. So devote yourselves to prayer and he says that activity ought to be taking place privately before you ever consider doing something.

This is first and foundational. Pray faithfully. Secondly, think gratefully. Paul writes in verse 2, keeping alert in it with thanksgiving. While you're at it, remember prayer isn't complaining about the world.

It's easy to do that. It is interceding for the world. We've got to get around to that. How do we take the gospel to our pre-Christian world and we pray that God will allow us to be effective?

And while you're at it, be alert. In other words, it's so easy to slip out of gratitude and develop a bad attitude, right? And if anybody had the right to be angry with the world, if anybody had the right to be upset with God, it was the apostle Paul at this point in his life. With great passion, he wanted to deliver the gospel and he's imprisoned. Colossians is what New Testament authors refer to as one of the prison epistles. To put it in our language today, this is a letter from an inmate. What would an inmate write?

He could have had a list of things he wasn't thankful for. Instead, he exhorts the believer effectively to stay on his toes, to be alert, to think sharp, to move away from this attitude of ingratitude toward the grace and sovereignty of God that assigns you and me, as Paul well understood, to those mountaintop experiences where it is exhilarating and he also assigns us at times to deep valleys. And Paul is grateful even there. Pray faithfully, think gratefully.

Thirdly, cultivate dependency. Verse three, praying at the same time for us as well, that God may open to us a door for the word so that we may speak forth the mystery of Christ for which I have also been imprisoned. Paul is basically saying, while you're praying, don't just pray, you know, the typical prayer, Lord, help him in prison, you know, help the food to be palatable, help him to get a good night's sleep, you know, beyond that.

He isn't even asking for that. He's asking for the opening of a door related to the mystery of Christ so he can deliver things, speak forth the mystery of Christ. I would agree with New Testament scholars who believe the phrase there is simply a categorical euphemism, as it were, for the gospel.

It is the gospel which in its mysterious work brings Jew and Gentile together in a united body called the church. And Paul wants to be prepared for whatever God has planned. He's thinking beyond what the food's going to be like and whether or not he's going to be able to sleep. He's waiting for God to open some kind of door. He wants to be prepared for whatever God has planned. And isn't it true that we need prayer more than ever? Isn't it true that we must cultivate dependency on God through prayer more than ever for him to provide for us when we've just discovered what he has prepared for us? And a lot of times you don't get to pray at the moment you discover what God has prepared. The prayers that you've been praying prepare you for what God has planned. And so there is this cultivation in this man's life and heart which speaks so well to us that here he is in prison and he's asking for an opportunity to deliver to somebody the mystery of Christ. Godly dependency for whatever God has prepared.

Fourth, behave wisely. He writes in verse 5 the first phrase, conduct yourselves with wisdom toward outsiders. There's that word again.

We've encountered it. It's a word that refers to the unbeliever. Those outside the fellowship. Those in the community without saving faith in Christ alone.

Those who are your mission field and mine. And here's then the implicit warning behind the action point. The gospel of Christ is judged by the world not by what it reads in the Bible, but what it sees in the believer. And Paul is implicitly stating walk wisely as if to say they're watching those outsiders.

They're watching you more than you know. So walk with wisdom. Conduct yourself wisely. What does that mean? It means exactly what you think it means.

It means to walk with tact and common sense and discernment and self-control and insight, respectability, prudence, whatever. You walk in such a way that the world who will never read the Bible, they don't really care you have a Bible. They don't care how worn out your Bible is. They don't care how often you open it. And they don't really care about your devotion to prayer either. They're not interested in that. They'll never read it. But they'll read you. So conduct yourself wisely to the outsiders.

That's our responsibility to them. And our promise to each other in the Christ. A woman in our congregation today is a believer. Now a part of the fellowship because she watched her co-worker's life and finally went over to her and said, listen, I got to know what is your source of joy?

What's your source of joy? One of the men in our fellowship told me that he had a co-worker call him at home some time ago and say, look, let's just cut to the chase. I know you're one of those Christians.

I want to know what that means because you have something I don't have. Tell me about it. Listen, our conduct in the midst of outsiders is the most compelling advertising campaign for Christianity there is on the planet. Think about these believers in Colossae here. They're in the minority. In fact, as I thought about that, their numbers are so small compared to their city, I don't think you could even call them a minority.

Only more like a focus group that met weekly, often daily. They have no church building. They have no printed New Testament to give anybody to read or to read themselves. They have no gospel tracts to hand people to think about and read after hours. They have no schools. They have no missions organization. They have no steeples. They have no staff.

They have no budget. Go reach your world. The next action point is going to come into play. Number five, we'll call it this, maximize opportunity. Verse five again, the latter part, making the most of every opportunity.

Making the most of every opportunity. Now, in your cross-reference or maybe your study Bible, you'll probably see a reference to that phrase. You might have a little number by that word or that phrase, and you'll look over and it'll say redeeming the time. That's because the original participle here means rather woodenly to buy at the marketplace.

And the preposition alongside has this sense of urgency. Eagerly buy at the marketplace. That's the attitude at Walmart on Black Friday.

Eagerly buying at the marketplace. This is why I avoid it on that day especially because I'm probably going to pick up something 200 other people want, and they're bigger than I am. So I'm just going to leave that day alone.

I think that's a good illustration of the attitude here. Buy up the time. Buy up the opportunity. Don't miss it. Don't let it slip through your hands. Here's the sense of urgency.

Now is the time. Let's not miss it. I remember being in the car years ago with a very fruitful man who lived for Christ, was the president of a missions organization, and his own personal life was always a challenge to me personally, and I picked him up in the car several years ago. I was driving him here to preach, and he'd just flown in from somewhere else in the country and actually the world, and he just, as we're talking, he just said to me, Stephen, I just don't want to miss anything.

I don't want to miss anything that could glorify God. This man in his 60s was so passionate. He just kind of lived with that attitude. That's the attitude of Paul.

I'm here, but I can hear as it were, I think he was the kind of man that lived with this sense of hearing tuned for the creaking of a door opening. 1 Corinthians 16, 9, he uses that image again. A wide door for effective ministry is open to me. He used it again to the Corinthian church in 2 Corinthians chapter 2. He writes, for when I came to Troas for the gospel of Christ, when a door was opened to me in the Lord, I went on to Macedonia.

He's always on the lookout. He's always watching, alert, devoted in prayer, dependent on the Spirit of God, grateful for what God is doing, asking for more opportunity to maximize. Look, if he is urgent, 1,900 years ago in Colossae, can you imagine how urgent it is today in Kerry and the surrounding region for the gospel? We need to be willing with an eagerness like this to capitalize on every opportunity for the gospel.

One of the men in our church told me some time ago that he had literally begun asking God for opportunity. He was isolated in his role. He was an IT guy and he worked on computers and typically whenever he arrived at somebody's desk to work on it, they would leave while he fixed it. So he wasn't around a lot of people in conversation and he wasn't happy with that. And he told me he was praying that God would give him an opportunity to tell somebody about Jesus Christ, which I applauded.

I thought that was wonderful. He came to me a couple of days after that and he said, you won't believe it. He said, one of the sales people near where I was working on a computer, again, that person who left their desk, but I just happened to be near this salesman as he was working with a customer and he was trying to get him to buy this product and he was even throwing in something rather substantive for free to try to give him the incentive to go ahead and sign. You just can't pass this up. And that customer just wouldn't buy in. He just wouldn't lock down on it and eventually he left and the salesman was really put off by it and he looked over at this guy from IT working on this computer and he just said to him, can you believe that someone would turn down a free gift? That's what you call a softball from God. You ready?

You at the plate? He said, I gulped. And he said, well, people actually do that every day.

They do. What do you mean? And he walked through that door and began a conversation with this man about the gospel of Jesus Christ. Maybe, beloved, we don't have the opportunity we want to have because we're not asking God for it. He knows our ears are closed to the sound of creaking hinges. But if God would give us a longing to declare the gospel to our world and begin to pray for that to happen, have we begun to reach our city? A hundred thousand people in this little town alone are going nowhere today who do not know the Savior you know.

We are just beginning. We pray that God will give us opportunity and then look for it and listen out for it. Number six, while you are communicating, here's another action point. We'll call it this, communicate graciously. Communicate graciously. Verse six, let your speech always be with grace, seasoned, as it were, with salt so that you may know how you should respond to each person.

Again, he's talking about the people outside. He isn't telling them what to say. Did you notice he's telling them how to say it? How to speak. How do you talk to people outside the church? How do you talk?

Let me back it up. How do you talk outside the church? I know in here we've got to polish everything up, don't we? We might sand off a few rough edges. We might clean up a few things. We're in church.

What about when you're not in church? I found it interesting. The Middle English word for sanctuary was feyn. F-A-N-E. You would talk about a beautiful feyn in the Middle Ages. Taken from the Latin phantom or feynum. In the Middle Ages, they eventually added a prefix pro which created the word profain which they literally understood to mean out in front of the cathedral.

Out there. And then over time, somewhat tongue-in-cheek, the word profain came to represent language that belonged outside the church. You'd never bring it in here. We call it profanity. Profain speech. You never talk that way in church.

But you can talk that way when you're outside in front. The truth is, beloved, our speech is not only an identification of our nationality and our locality and you can hear the accenting. It is a revelation of our spirituality. Probably one of the best gauges of whether or not we're growing in Christ has to do with our speech. Because it comes from our heart.

Out of the heart proceeds those things we say and think. There's no excuse. There's no excuse if we ever hope to take the opportunity and maximize it for the gospel. There's no excuse for coarse speaking, for sexual innuendo in our conversation, for dirty mouths, dirty jokes. And you could expand that to an angry mouth or a slanderous mouth or a deceitful mouth or an unkind mouth.

You want to make a difference in your world as you maximize the opportunity. Paul writes, let your speech always be with grace. Now, it might be tempting, as one New Testament author pointed out, to just sort of hide behind the belief that, well, he's talking theologically here about the subject of grace. And so, you know, we can tell people, well, God bless you or God will provide for you or God's grace is sufficient and then never mind.

He's not. He's speaking in this context, I believe, not so much theologically as he is practically. In fact, one New Testament author wrote, more than likely the idea here in Paul's mind is the idea of beauty, the idea of winsomeness. Speak with grace. Winsome speech. You might think that, well, people in the church aren't going to have a problem with that.

Well, they did in the first century and I think it's possible it could happen in the 21st century. Listen to the great fearless apostle. I find this text interesting. He's writing ahead of a visit he's going to make to Corinth and he says to them in a letter that precedes his visit these words. I'm afraid, striking to hear him say that, but I'm afraid that when I come and when I visit you, there will be strife, angry tempers, disputes, slanders, and disturbances. You wonder if he's writing to hockey players or who is he addressing here?

Tempers, disputes, disturbances. No, he's writing to the church. Second Corinthians chapter 12 verse 20.

Paul writes to this church in Colossae, speak to your world as you do with winsomeness, the winsomeness of grace. Then he adds this wonderful phrase, let your speech be seasoned as it were with salt. Well, what did he mean? What did it mean to him? Make sure you start there, not what do you think it means to you. An article that I had tucked away 17 years ago, that I found recently, a few weeks ago, and it detailed the history of salt, which got me researching.

I could do a message on this, it's a few minutes after 12, so let me just kind of whittle it down. Marco Polo in his travels during the 13th century, if we want to start there, discovered that Tibetans had compressed salt cakes, and then stamped them with the imperial seal of the great Kublai Khan and used those cakes as money. Civilizations, going back to the formation of the Roman Empire, began around salt marshes, where they could harvest it. In fact, the first Roman road of an incredible system of roads that connected the empire was called the Via Solaria, the salt road. It came from the very first Roman colony built at that salt marsh in Ostia. The Roman Empire would also import salt from France and North Africa and other parts of Europe.

Officials would be appointed to tax it to monitor this precious cargo, this precious commodity. I've mentioned to you before that Roman soldiers were often paid in salt. They would buy and barter with salt salt as it was weighed out for centuries was worth more than the weight of gold against which it was compared. If someone or something wasn't worth its salt that came out of that ancient practice of bartering and buying with this commodity, you go back into the Old Testament.

In fact, this was a fascinating study. You discover that God ordered salt to accompany the sacrifices. It represented Leviticus chapter two. It was a symbol of purity and preservation. It also represented fidelity and faithfulness. There was a salt covenant you could make in the Old Testament days. It was binding. In fact, even Arabs through the centuries who made peace treaties and declared their loyal fidelity to the one they made the treaty with would use the expression, there is now salt between us.

For Paul, the metaphor is simple enough. Salt is valuable. Salt symbolized purity. It came out of those offerings dedicated to God. Of course, on a very practical way or manner, it seasoned food.

It also created thirst, right? So Paul, we're not sure exactly what he's thinking of, but maybe he's thinking of it all. Season your words. Don't waste your words. They're valuable. Don't throw them around.

They're worth more than gold. Don't solely them. Keep it clean for it represents purity. And in the context of this challenge to reach our world for Christ, use your words to create thirst. Talk to people outside in such a way that God might use your words to create thirst for Jesus Christ who is the water of life. May we speak in such a way that people become thirsty for Christ, John chapter 4. Let's communicate graciously with our world. God wants to work through you and use you to influence the people in your life.

I hope that's what you want as well. Now, the work begins as we go out and live the truth we've learned. This is wisdom for the heart. If you'd like to send Stephen a card, letter, or note of encouragement, please address your correspondence to Wisdom for the Heart, PO Box 37297, Raleigh, North Carolina, 27627. If you prefer to correspond by email, our address is info at wisdomonline.org. That's info at wisdomonline.org. You'll also find our ministry on various social media platforms. However it is that you prefer to interact with us, we'd enjoy hearing from you. Stephen Davey has one more lesson to go in this series called Going Public. That's tomorrow here on Wisdom for the Heart. you