Yesterday our church was blessed to have Dr. Rick Lance as our guest.  He is the Executive Director of the Alabama State Board of Missions and does a great job.  The one thing I appreciate about Rick is that he communicates his vision for the Alabama Baptist simply and yet effectively.  You can ask almost anyone who has attended the Alabama Baptist Convention or spent any time with Rick what his mission statement is and they will say—We have one mission—the Great Commission and one program—the Cooperative Program.

Here at FBC Pell City we seek to live for the glory of God in everything we do.  That’s our statement—“Living for the Glory of God.”  (1 Corinthians 10:31) How do we live for God’s glory?  We ask our members to do three things—we want you to Connect with God, we want you to Connect with Each Other, and we want you to Connect with the World.  In other words, we want you to find a place to worship, find a small group, and use your gifts to reach people.

How are you doing?  Are you involved in worship?  Are you in a small group?  Are you using your gifts to reach out to those who are lost and to build up those who are saved?  If not—why not?

I’ll be real honest—I expected Alabama to beat Auburn and I felt like it would be by a at least 17 points.  I knew Auburn would play well, but I didn’t think they had the depth to hold up for four quarters and based on their other eleven games, I didn’t think they could stop Ingram.

Needless to say I was thrilled with the start of the game.  I couldn’t believe Auburn went up 14—0 and I couldn’t believe they led for most of the game, but I was not comfortable with a one point lead going into the fourth.

Auburn led for the entire game, but with one minute and 24 seconds left in the game Alabama had the audacity to score.  I held my breath as Auburn completed the pass with ten seconds to go and ran up to spike the ball with three seconds left…I turned as blue as the Boise State field waiting for the Hail Mary pass and breathed a sigh of disgust as the pass was batted to the ground.

Alabama is an excellent team and I am thrilled Auburn played a great game, but I was once again reminded that it is not how you start the game—it is how you finish.  That’s true in football, but it is also especially true in our spiritual walk.  I want to encourage you to read the following verses and to know that if you truly start in Christ you will also finish in Christ.  Starting well, but ending in the flesh isn’t how the Bible pictures being Born Again.

l Corinthians 15:1-2, Colossians 1:21-23, 2 Timothy 2:11-12,
Mark 13:13, Revelation 2:7, l0, ll, l7, 25, 26; Revelation 3:5, ll, l2, 2l.

My brother-in-law showed me a web page of a pastor with whom he went to High School.  The pastor was a Health & Wealth preacher and as I read his mission statement I asked two things—first, is this the Message for which Jesus died? And second, what happens to his hearers when they go through the tribulations the Bible promises we will go through when we live for Christ?

 It reminded me of a scene in Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress.  At the very beginning Christian leaves his city and heads toward the Narrow Gate.  He is met by Obstinate and Pliable who do what they can to persuade Christian to come back home. 

 Obstinate leaves Christian and Pliable and Christian began to describe the City to which he was going.  Pliable loved everything he had to say about the City and said, “I’m glad to hear of these things.  Come on! Let’s walk faster!”  Right after that the two of them fell into the Swamp of Despondence and Pliable said, “Is this the happiness you’ve been telling me about all this time?  If we make such poor progress at the beginning of our travel, what can we expect between here and our journey’s end? If I get out alive, you will enter the fine country without me!”

Christian finally gets out of the Swamp and enters through the Narrow Gate.  Goodwill meets with him and upon hearing about Pliable he said, “Alas, poor man! Is the Celestial Glory of so little value to him that he doesn’t count it worth running the hazard of a few difficulties to obtain?” 

Is the Celestial Glory of our God worth sacrifice and tribulation?  The Bible teaches us that the only ones who will ever enter that City are the ones who persevere unto the end.  Fight the good fight and know that the real blessings are eternal.

I love Thanksgiving.  You get to spend time with family, you get to eat (a lot), and you don’t have to buy presents!  It’s one of my favorite holidays, but the Bible speaks of the Ultimate Thanksgiving in which we, who are born again, will participate. 

Rev 7:9-17,

9 After this I looked, and behold, a great multitude that no one could number, from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages, standing before the throne and before the Lamb, clothed in white robes, with palm branches in their hands,

10 and crying out with a loud voice, “Salvation belongs to our God who sits on the throne, and to the Lamb!”

11 And all the angels were standing around the throne and around the elders and the four living creatures, and they fell on their faces before the throne and worshiped God,

12  saying, “Amen! Blessing and glory and wisdom and thanksgiving and honor and power and might be to our God forever and ever! Amen.”

13 Then one of the elders addressed me, saying, “Who are these, clothed in white robes, and from where have they come?”

14 I said to him, “Sir, you know.” And he said to me, “These are the ones coming out of the great tribulation. They have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

15 “Therefore they are before the throne of God, and serve him day and night in his temple; and he who sits on the throne will shelter them with his presence.

16 They shall hunger no more, neither thirst anymore;  the sun shall not strike them, nor any scorching heat.

17 For the Lamb in the midst of the throne will be their shepherd, and he will guide them to springs of living water, and God will wipe away every tear from their eyes.” (ESV)

I think every serious student of the Bible has wrestled with God’s sovereignty and man’s responsibility.  I found the following quote by Iain Murray and loved it.

“There is no inconsistency between believing that God has a special sovereign love before the foundation of the world that is efficacious and brings in all the Body of Christ and that there is too love for all men, and that no man knows to which of those loves he has been brought until he is converted.  In other words, it is the love of God in Christ that is proclaimed.  And theoretical problems about how is this consistent with that, and so on, are not really our concern.  And ultimately, we don’t even know the answer to that.  So, Robert Candlish (1806-1873), another Free Church divine, says, ‘We don’t preach a limited atonement or a universal atonement.  We preach a saving Christ.  And when people come to Christ, then they find they have been redeemed and his blood has been shed for them.’”

I read the following blog by John Piper.  It is a great thing to see the truth of Romans 8:28 fleshed out.

On Thursday a team of four of us stopped in at Angola Prison in Angola, Louisiana. Warden Burl Cain was very gracious to take us into his world, even the most painful part of it.

Here is what he said three years  ago in Decision Magazine about this prison:

This prison is the largest maximum-security prison in America. It is one of the most famous prisons in the whole world. It has only murderers, rapists, armed robbers and habitual felons. The average sentence is 88 years, with 3,200 people in one place serving life sentences. Ninety percent of the inmates will die here. This is a place of hopelessness, so if Angola can change, the rest of the country’s prisons can’t say, “We can’t do this.”

For those who know prison culture from the inside, this place is astonishing. On a campus of 18,000 acres, which is mainly farm land, the prisoners raise virtually all their food and eat three meals for a total cost of $1.45 each. The fish and crawdads that we ate were from “the Farm.”

There is a local extension of New Orleans Baptist Theological Seminary in the prison and about 140 prisoners are enrolled. There are six churches in the prison and they train their own pastors. They send trained “missionaries” to other prisons to plant churches. They do this without using any tax money. But O the money—and lives—it saves!

Violence in the prison is rare. Courtesy and respect is pronounced. The ministry team of women who were visiting at the same time we were said they were treated with more respect from prisoners here, than in many places on the “outside.” Public profanity is not allowed.

The 42-inch church bell hangs high over the chapel in a prisoner-built tower. They rescued the bell from storage where it had been put after falling and killing a man. Some of the prisoners say: The bell killed a man and we killed a man, but now the bell and we serve the Lord Jesus.

Warden Cain says: I am as nice as they let me be and as mean as they make me be. Given the job he is given to do, it is a good motto.

I saw the Warden’s “nice” as we sat for half an hour with G.B., a prisoner on Death Row whose death by lethal injection the Warden will oversee in January. There are over 80 on death row, some now for over 14 years as appeals go on. The Warden asked me to share the gospel with G.B. Never have I felt a greater urgency to say the good news plainly and plead from my heart. The thief on the cross is a hero on Death Row.

The Warden answered all G.B.’s questions about what the last day would be like and who from his family and the press could be there. He gave G.B. unusual privileges for these last seven weeks. He was manifestly compassionate while stating the facts with precision. I took G.B.’s picture with my phone and said I would pray for him. (Perhaps you would too.)

I preached with all my heart to those who could fit in the chapel, and to the rest by closed circuit television. G.B. (and three others on Death Row) told me they’d be watching. I pulled no punches:

For 90% of you the next stop is not home and family, but heaven or hell. O what glorious news we have in that situation. And believe me it is not the prosperity of Gospel. Jesus came and died and rose again not mainly to be useful, but to be precious. And that he can be in Angola as well as Atlanta. Perhaps even more.

There is no way to heaven, whatever your hopes may be, but through Christ.

There is no way to the gates of pearl but through the bleeding side of Jesus.

These are the gates of paradise – these bleeding wounds.

If you would find your way to God’s bright throne, find first your way to Jesus’ cross.

If you would know the way to happiness, tread in that path of misery which Jesus trod.

What! Attempt another way?

Are you mad enough to think that you can rend the posts, and bars, and gates of heaven, from their perpetual places, and force your way in by your imagined strength?

Or do you think to purchase with your riches and your gold a foothold in paradise? Fool! What is your gold where streets are made of it, and where the gates are solid pearl? — where the foundations are of jasper, and the walls whereof are precious gems?

And do you think to get there by your merits? Ah! by pride fell the angels, and by your pride you have fallen. Heaven is not for such as you!” – C. H. Spurgeon

One of the best books I have read this year is Tell the Truth by Will Metzger.  In the book Metzger gives five foundational principles for evangelism by Martyn Lloyd-Jones.  I’ll give you the points and make a few comments.

     1. The supreme object of the work of evangelism is to glorify God, not to save souls.

 Everything we do is for the glory of God.  I heard a well known missionary/preacher indicate this week that the motivation for evangelism and missions should be a love for lost people.  I understand his point, but the true motivation for obedience in any area is God’s glory.

      2. The only power that can do this work is the Holy Spirit, not our own strength.

 God is the evangelizer—He is the only One who can speak life into a dead soul.  God certainly uses us—it’s His Sovereign decree that we take the Gospel to the world, but read Acts 1:8.  The disciples were told to wait for the Spirit to come upon them before they were sent out to be witnesses.  That is a powerful statement.  The most liberating thing for you and I to understand is that we are not responsible for saving anyone—we are responsible to be faithful to plant and water seed, but God alone can cause it to grow.

     3. The one and only medium though which the Spirit works is the Scriptures; therefore we reason out of the Scriptures like Paul did.

 It’s amazing how many times we will sink a total evangelistic presentation into three or four verses.  The Word of God is powerful and we need to learn to show a person the awfulness of their sin and the wonder of God’s grace from the pages of His Word.

      4. These preceding principles give us the true motivation for evangelism—a zeal for God and a love for others.

      5. There is a constant danger of heresy through a false zeal and employment of unscriptural methods.

 I discussed unscriptural methods yesterday.  They are often preceded by words like, “Just try God for a while…”  Unscriptural methods jump to the cure without sharing the reason you need to be cured.  We start by saying, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life…”  That’s true, but before you can see the power of God’s love you have to see the sin from which you must be saved. 

 You and I cannot expect a person to trust in Christ until they see the holiness of God and the sinfulness of man.  How can we know what Jesus did for us until we see our sin and God’s provision for that sin? 

 I hope you’ll go out and live for God’s glory today by loving Him with all that you have and by loving others as you love yourself.  You cannot do either of those commands without sharing His grace with others.  As you go—remember He has gone before you, He is going with you, and He will work long after you have gone.  Trust Him and walk in Him.

On Monday night I joined three pastor friends for a meal at Outback.  When the food was brought out the waitress really messed up our order–so much so that the proprietor came out apologized and said he would take care of two of our meals.

When the waitress came back we began to talk to her and to try to encourage her.  As we continued to talk my friend Ryan began to talk to her about her faith in Christ.  He asked her three great questions:

1. Who was Jesus?
2. What did Jesus do?
3. Why does that matter?

She was ready for the first two answers, but she couldn’t answer the third.  As Ryan shared with her she began to cry and you could tell that God was working in her life.  We asked if she had a Bible and she said she didn’t.  We promised to bring her one and told her that we would continue to pray for her.

The next night we stopped by with a brand new Bible.  Ryan brought it to her and he said that when she saw him she said, “I didn’t think you were going to come back.” 

There was a time when I would have used a time like that to press the person to “Pray the Prayer.”  I would have felt like a failure if I shared the message and didn’t get her to pray, but I have come to understand this truth—we plant seeds, we water the seeds, but God causes the growth.

Will Metzger said, “Francis Shaeffer was once asked the question, ‘What would you do if you met a really modern man on a train and you had just an hour to talk to him about the gospel?’  He replied, ‘I’ve said over and over again, I would spend 45-50 minutes on the negative, to really show him his dilemma—that is he is morally dead—then I’d take 10-15 minutes to preach the Gospel.  I believe that much of our evangelistic and personal work today is not clear simply because we are too anxious to get to the answer without having a man realize the real cause of his sickness, which is true moral guilt in the presence of God.’”

Are you confident in God’s ability to save?  One of the great problems in many of the modern methods of evangelism and decision based preaching is we simply usurp the work of the Spirit.  We jump right over the sickness to the cure, offer the pill that cures (the sinners prayer), and then offer immediate assurance that you are eternally secure in heaven.  Is that how Jesus did evangelism?

It’s interesting to see in John’s Gospel the number of times John said, “Many believed in him.”  In John 2:23-24 we find that many believed in Jesus when they saw the signs he was doing, but John literally says, “But Jesus on his part did not believe them because he knew all people…”  In John 8:31 Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you abide in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” 

I think there are times to lead people to profess their faith in Christ, but there are also times when you and I must simply trust the Holy Spirit to do the work of regeneration.  I am confident that the waitress will come to Christ.  She promised to read the Gospel of John and I know the Holy Spirit will work in her life.  We could have talked her into something that someone else could have come along and talked her out of, but the moment the Spirit turns on the light in her life—no one will be able to turn it off!

Last year while we were in Peru I found out that my translator had not been born again.  The first day I asked her to read John 1.  We talked about it the next day and then I asked her to read John 2.  We talked about that chapter that day and then she agreed to read John 3.  The next day I asked her what she thought and she said, “I think I am ready to be born again.”  That wasn’t something I did—that was something the Spirit did.

We must witness, we must evangelize, but we must do it in the power of the Spirit and not with clever human sales tricks.  God is the evangelizer—we share, but He saves!  We plant, we water, but God grows to maturity and to reap before the fruit is ripe is to usurp the work of the Holy Spirit.

Tomorrow I want to share 5 foundational principles for evangelism.

The Gettys were at the Alabama State Convention this week…Wow!  What a powerful time of worship.  Let me share a song with you and let me encourage you to get their music.