Spirit-led Evangelism

Does God ever prevent the gospel from being preached to lost sinners? When the gospel is preached, why do some sinners respond with repentance and faith, and others respond with indifference or even hostility? And what are some practical ways that you and I can be active evangelists… all day, every day?

Chapter 15 is a dividing line in the book of Acts in at least a couple of ways. Most of Acts 15 describes the watershed moment when the early Church[1]definitively dealt with the question of Gentile converts: “Do they have to follow the law of Moses in order to be true followers of Jesus?” “No,” they answered. Salvation is “through the grace of the Lord Jesus” (Acts 15:11) and available to all who simply-and-truly “believe” the gospel (Acts 15:9).

But the last 6 verses of Acts 15 describe the parting of ways between Paul and Barnabas, the addition of Silas to Paul’s missionary team, and the beginning of Paul’s second tour of missionary duty… which included “returning [to] visit the brothers in every city where [he had already] proclaimed the word of the Lord, [to] see how they are” (Acts 15:36). And, as I mentioned last Sunday, Luke now turns his attention to the Apostle Paul for the rest of the book of Acts.

Luke’s overarching focus is on the spread of the gospel and Christ’s kingdom in the world, first “in Jerusalem and in all Judea,” then in “Samaria,” and ultimately “to the end of the earth” (Acts 1:8). And every Spirit-empowered Christian was part of this missionary effort from the beginning – teaching people the gospel, making disciples, forming local churches… and that remains true today. We all have inherited a great history and heritage from those Christians who’ve gone before us, and we must take our place in the long line of Christian witnesses in this fallen world.

But the Apostles played a key and unique role in laying the foundation of the Church – the organic-yet-organized, the regularly-gathering-yet-repeatedly-scattered New Covenant people or kingdom or household or temple of God (Eph. 2:17-22). And Paul was singled out by Jesus Christ as the particular Apostle who would “carry [Christ’s] name” as a missionary extraordinaire to all kinds of people and also “suffer” greatly as he did it (Acts 9:15-16). The rest of Acts, then, is the remaining story of how that divine commission played out.

In our passage today, however, we are to learn that it is actually the “Holy Spirit” / the “Spirit of Jesus” (not Paul or any other Apostle or Christian) who extends Christ’s kingdom in the world. And He – the Holy Spirit – directs and hinders and opens hearts as He pleases.

Let’s stand together and read Acts 16:6-15.

Scripture Reading

Acts 16:6–15 (ESV)

6 And they [at least Paul, Silas, and Timothy… maybe others] went through the region of Phrygia and Galatia, having been forbidden by the Holy Spirit to speak the word in Asia. 7 And when they had come up to Mysia, they attempted to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit of Jesus did not allow them. 8 So, passing by Mysia, they went down to Troas.

9 And a vision appeared to Paul in the night: a man of Macedonia was standing there, urging him and saying, “Come over to Macedonia and help us.” 10 And when Paul had seen the vision, immediately we sought to go on into Macedonia, concluding that God had called us to preach the gospel to them.

11 So, setting sail from Troas, we made a direct voyage to Samothrace, and the following day to Neapolis, 12 and from there to Philippi, which is a leading city of the district of Macedonia and a Roman colony. We remained in this city some days. 13 And on the Sabbath day we went outside the gate to the riverside, where we supposed there was a place of prayer, and we sat down and spoke to the women who had come together.

14 One who heard us was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods, who was a worshiper of God. The Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what was said by Paul. 15 And after she was baptized, and her household as well, she urged us, saying, “If you have judged me to be faithful to the Lord, come to my house and stay.” And she prevailed upon us.

Main Idea:

The gospel message itself is a gift of God’s grace, and we who know it ought to share it promiscuously, trusting God with the results.

Sermon

1. Spiritual Prohibition (v6-8)

God the Holy Spirit is the main character of our passage today. The Holy Spirit was the primary sender of Paul and Barnabas on their first missionary journey from the church in Antioch (Acts 13:2, 4), so it’s not surprising that He plays a major role here too – at the beginning of Paul’s second missionary journey. There are supporting actors to be sure – Paul, his traveling party, and Luke himself seems to join the group in v10. Luke consistently said “they” and “them” before Acts 16:10, but there he begins to say “we” and “us.” We also meet an interesting lady named “Lydia,” (v14) and we see a handful of unidentified “women” (v13) as well as Lydia’s “household” (v15) in the background.

And yet, the Holy Spirit is most certainly the main character. This second trip is really an extension of the first, and, as I said, the Holy Spirit initiated the whole thing (Acts 13:2, 4). During this second journey, the Holy Spirit “forbade” (ESV, KJV) or “prevented” (NET) or “kept” (NIV) Paul and his companions from “speaking the word in Asia” (v6). The Holy Spirit also “did not allow [or “permit” (NASB) or “suffer” (KJV)] them” to “go into Bithynia” (v7). Instead, the Holy Spirit revealed to Paul in a vision that the Macedonians were the people to whom He wanted Paul and his friends “to preach the gospel” (v10). And when they did speak to some Macedonians in the city of Philippi, the Holy Spirit “opened [the] heart” of at least one of the hearers, such that she believed the gospel (v14).

Lord willing, we will consider all of these actions of the Holy Spirit today, but under this first point, I’d like us to focus on the Spirit’s prohibitions. Two times, in this brief passage, the Holy Spirit prohibited or stopped or prevented the missionary party from preaching the gospel in one place in order to direct their efforts elsewhere. And there is so much we might delve into as we consider these prohibitions. I’m going to keep the focus narrow, particularly on (1) the continued reign and work of Jesus Christ in the world through the Holy Spirit and (2) on the Holy Spirit’s prerogative or right to send the gospel there and not here.

First, the “Holy Spirit” (v6) is the “Spirit of God” (Rom. 8:9-10) and is the “Spirit of Jesus” (v7). The Scripture presents us with several assertions about God that we must collect and keep in mind if we are to understand rightly who and what God is. I think people can get all twisted into knots when they try to press the doctrine of the Trinity too deeply into a philosophical container, but at least a couple of philosophical categories are helpful. God is one what and three whos; God is one being or thing or essence, and God is three persons or subsistences.[2]

There is one God who has revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Spirit. The Holy Spirit is the third person of the Trinity, and He possesses all the same attributes as the Father and the Son. He is specifically called “the Spirit,” but all three persons of the Trinity are “spirit” in the sense that the triune God does not have a body like we do; He (Father, Son, and Spirit) is essentially non-corporeal. Of course, God the Son did gain a body like ours when He “took on… human form” (Phil. 2:7-8), when God the Son became Jesus of Nazareth in the womb of a virgin (Lk. 1:26-35), but the essence of the triune God didn’t change in the least.

As I said, philosophers may tie themselves in knots over the Trinity, but we don’t have to. We simply need to keep in mind that God is one what and three whos. These three are distinct (the Father is not the Son or the Spirit, and the Spirit is not the Father or the Son), and yet these three are never separate (we cannot speak of one without relationship to the others). We don’t have to understand the mechanics; we just need to trust the word or testimony of the God who knows Himself better than we ever will.

That said, the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the triune God. He is the Spirit of both the Father and the Son. In fact, the Bible interchangeably refers to the Holy Spirit as the “Spirit of God” and the “Spirit of Jesus” or the “Spirit of Christ” (Rom. 8:9-17; cf. Acts 6:6-7). So, the “Holy Spirit” in v6 is the same as the “Spirit of Jesus” in v7, and when Luke used this designation (the “Spirit of Jesus”) he was intending to make the reader know that Jesus Christ Himself was the one who was working and directing and building up His Church – just as He said He would (Matt. 16:15-19, 28:18-20) – by the power and presence of His Spirit!

Second, the Holy Spirit – because He is God’s Spirit, the Spirit of Jesus – has the right or the prerogative to send the gospel to one place and not to another. Now, it is clear that Christ intended His disciples (i.e., His followers) to bear witness to the gospel as far out into the world as possible (Acts 1:8; cf. Matt. 28:18-20). However, that does not mean that every nation or state or town or person would immediately or always have a gospel witness. As a matter of fact, many nations in history have come and gone with no gospel witness at all, and many people even today live their whole lives without ever hearing the gospel.

Did you know that nearly half of the world’s population today is categorized as Unreached?[3] This means that the number of professing Christians among their people group is less than 5%. And just over a quarter of the world’s population falls into a far worse category, which the Joshua Project calls Frontier Peoples.[4] These are people groups with less than 0.1% calling themselves Christian. And these statistics are what they are after 200+ years of the modern evangelical missionary movement.

During the Age of Exploration (1400s to 1600s), developed nations brought their religions along with them as they explored and conquered the unknown world. But around the turn of the 19th century, western Christians (both in Europe and America) began to organize their efforts, not as nation-builders, but as genuine Christian missionaries. William Carey went to India, Adoniram Judson to Burma, and (later) David Livingston went to Africa. These are only a few of the more famous names, but thousands of Christian men and women were pioneers of the modern evangelical missionary movement. And missionary money and personnel have both grown exponentially over the last 200 years… and yet, there remains today, in our world, a great number of sinners who have no gospel witness.

Brothers and sisters, this reality may well be a wake-up call for some of us here today. What are you doing for the sake of the Great Commission? Are you making disciples among the people you know? Are you praying for the conversion of sinners in Diana, or in Longview, or in Ore City, or in Gilmer? Are you contributing, out of the surplus of your finances, to the preservation and extension of the teaching ministry of this local church? Are you giving to support our missions partnerships? Or maybe God would have one or two of us consider leaving everything behind and engaging in cross-cultural gospel ministry somewhere else in the world. If you’d like to consider it, then come talk with me. I’d be happy to help you think through your qualifications and options.

But, friends, there’s another side to this coin. Yes, Jesus Christ has commissioned every Christian to be a disciple-making disciple, and some Christians will cross geographic and even language barriers to make disciples… But God the Holy Spirit has the right to make the gospel witness more or less accessible at any given place or time. It is a fact that the gospel has been both visible and veiled at various places and times in history, and God is sovereign over such ebbs and flows. Right here in our passage is evidence of that reality.

The Holy Spirit “forbade” (ESV, KJV) or “prevented” (NET) or “kept” (NIV) Paul and his companions from “speaking the word in Asia” (v6). The Holy Spirit also “did not allow [or “permit” (NASB) or “suffer” (KJV)] them” to “go into Bithynia” (v7). Luke is flat out telling us that this missionary team was not able (because of some revelation or physical hindrance from the Spirit of God) to travel North or East in their efforts to preach “the word” to lost sinners. And there was no other missionary team going in either of those directions; Barnabas and John Mark had gone to Cyprus, which was an island in the southwest (Acts 15:39).

There are many good applications here, but I think we would all do well to hear and see this as a warning not to presume upon the grace of God. He does not owe the message of His grace and mercy to any sinner. If we are hearers of this fantastic news today, then we ought to praise and thank Him… for His grace in sending Jesus and also for His grace in sending us Christian witnesses.

2. Spiritual Directive & Practical Method (v9-13)

In this middle section of our passage today, there is the coming together of God’s sovereignty and human efforts in evangelism. In v9-13 we read that the Holy Spirit did direct Paul’s missionary efforts (not just telling him where he couldn’t go, but directing Paul where he should go), and we also read that Paul and his crew applied practical methods. Let’s think about the Spiritual directive and the practical methods we see here, and let’s try to apply these ideas to our own lives.

First, the Spiritual directive. God’s Spirit – the “Holy Spirit” or the “Spirit of Jesus” – gave the Apostle Paul a “vision” of a Macedonian “man” who was pleading for “help” (v9). And Luke tells us that Paul and the rest “concluded” or “gathered” that “God” Himself (i.e., not a pleading Macedonian) had “called” or “summoned” them “to preach the gospel” to the Macedonians (v10). The phrasing of v10 indicates that Paul and his companions thought of this vision as the sort of positive answer to the roadblocks they’d been getting from God’s Spirit so far. The Holy Spirit had said “no” to Asia and to Bithynia, so the inevitable question was: “Alright, where then?” This supernatural vision was God’s own directive about where He wanted Paul to go and preach.

Friends, sometimes I hear Christians today talk about evangelism just like this. They wait for “spiritual appointments” or “divine encounters” with random strangers who will somehow invite them to share the gospel. There certainly are examples of supernatural intervention throughout the book of Acts, but this isn’t the norm, and it’s definitely not the way the Bible instructs Christians to think about evangelism. The Bible teaches us – everyday Christians – to think about evangelism as a necessary combination of righteous living and gospel proclaiming.

Righteous living is the necessary backdrop of gospel proclamation; if we don’t practice what we preach, then we are not credible witnesses for Christ. Repeatedly, the New Testament commands Christians to be “self-controlled” to “renounce ungodliness and worldly passions” and to be “zealous for good works” (Titus 2:1-15; cf. 1 Pet. 3:8-17). Brothers and sisters, we must war against sin, pursue holiness, and work hard to align our understanding of such things (i.e., “sin” and “holiness”) with the Bible’s definitions of them. We must do this for the sake of our own joy, out of love and gratitude for our Savior, and for the sake of the credibility of our Christian witness… And then, brothers and sisters, we must open our mouths and tell others about the good and bad news of the gospel.

This is our Spirit-inspired directive every day, all day. Second Corinthians 5 says that God has “reconciled” sinners to Himself “through Christ,” and God has “entrusted” the “message of reconciliation” to the very ones who have been reconciled. “Therefore,” the Scripture says, “we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us” (2 Cor. 5:18-20). We don’t need a supernatural vision, nor should we wait for some emotional sense that “God wants me to talk to this person about Jesus.” In His providence, God has put you right next to sinners every day who need to see what it looks like to be an actual Christian, a believing Christian, a spiritually alive Christian, the kind of Christian who doesn’t go to hell in the end. And God has put you there, not merely to live faithfully, but also to speak truthfully and lovingly… to speak about sin and judgment, about guilt and repentance, about salvation and about the only Savior who offers it.

Second, the practical method. Paul and his crew give us another great example of practical evangelistic methodology right here. It has already been Paul’s method of operation to start in any town by first heading to the synagogue on the Sabbath to talk with fellow Jews who are already interested in the Old Testament Scriptures. Philippi was a “leading city of the district of Macedonia,” and it may not have had much of a Jewish population (v12). I think this is probably why Paul and his fellow Christian missionaries “went outside the gate” and even as far as the “river” to find a group of women who had “come together” for “prayer” on the “Sabbath” (v13). This implies to me that there was no synagogue, which would mean that there were no Jewish men to construct and maintain one.

Whatever the demographic makeup of Macedonia, we know that it was mostly Gentile, and that’s why Paul was traveling across the known world anyway. He wanted to preach the gospel to Gentiles so that he might fulfill the commission Jesus gave him (Acts 9:15-16). And, in this passage, we can observe Paul’s consistent and practical methods for evangelism. Paul went to “a leading city” in the area he wanted to evangelize (v12). He set up shop there for a while; Luke says, “we remained in this city some days” (v12). Paul targeted those people with whom he had the most common ground. In other towns, these were the men in the synagogues; in Philippi, these were the “women who had come together” in a “place of prayer” on the “Sabbath day” (v13). And, finally, Paul and his Christian brothers “preached” or “spoke” “the gospel to them” (v10; cf. v13-14).

Let’s take each one of these in turn and apply them in our own context. How might we follow Paul’s evangelistic example?

One, Paul went where the people were and where other people would be. In your situation, unless you’re planning a new mission strategy or aiming to plant a church somewhere, your target population is already selected for you. Where are the people God has put around you? Where do you often run into new people? For many of us, the main place we interact with others is on our job. How are you thinking about your time at work as an opportunity for evangelism?

For some of us, the main places we run into non-Christians is in the context of community activities. How are you living as a Christian witness, looking for ways to point others to Jesus Christ? All of us interact with non-Christians somewhere. We visit the mechanic, we talk briefly with the checker at the grocery store or gas station, we do cardio or lift weights around people at the gym, we connect with others over hobbies, and some of us live with non-Christians in our home (and parents with young children, this is an especially urgent reality for us!). God help us to go where the people are, especially those already right beside us.

Two, Paul hung around long enough to know where he could find the people with whom he had the most common ground. For Paul and other first-century Jewish Christians, they had the most in common with other Jews and those Gentiles who were familiar with the Old Testament (i.e., “God-fearer” [Acts 10:22, 13:16, 26] or “worshiper of God” as Lydia was called [v14]). For most of us, we have a great deal in common with the nominal Christians around us.

A lot of people in East Texas know enough about the Bible to know that they should obey God, love Jesus, and think well of the local church. But if you and I will just ask a few questions, we will often find that they have no real intentions of obeying God when His ethics don’t agree with theirs, they don’t actually love the Jesus of the Bible but one of their own imaginations, and they haven’t been to a Sunday church gathering in years (wherever they say they “keep their membership,” whatever that means). Brothers and sisters, focus your evangelistic efforts right there!

What a model of this was Kathy Ford. She wasn’t the most articulate person, and she hated talking in front of people. But she loved her sisters and her mom, and she knew that Scripture could do spiritual work in them that she never could. So, she organized a weekly Bible study, where she’d sit down with her sisters and mother (off and on, and sometimes some of them joined by speaker phone on the table), and they’d read a portion of the Bible, they’d talk about it, and they’d pray together. And, over the course of time, the word and the Spirit did the work! Praise God for the fine example Kathy has been to so many of us.

Brothers and sisters, you might one day be a Christian apologist who debates with atheists or Muslims or Jehovah’s Witnesses, but don’t wait until you’re loaded for bear before you go hunting squirrel. Just talk with the people you already know about the Jesus you love and serve. Ask them questions about what they really believe and talk with them about what the Bible calls spiritual fruit. Do they have any? If so, how might you encourage and help them to see more? If not, how might you lovingly help them to see that Christianity is about way more than saying the sinner’s prayer and shaking a preacher’s hand.

The third practical method we see on display here is that Paul and his friends “preached” or “spoke” “the gospel” (v10; cf. v13-14). They didn’t just live righteous lives and talk about the weather or baseball or politics; no, they (at some point or another) laid out the gospel and called for repentance and faith. This leads us into my third and final point, but let me just say here that I think this is where many of us fall short. We try to live faithfully, we talk about Jesus, but we don’t want to lay the either-or decision in the laps of our friends. Ah, but we must!

3. Spiritual Illumination (v14-15)

As always happens on Sundays, we are not able to squeeze every drop of goodness from the passage. Today, like a couple of Sundays ago, I’m probably going to disappoint those of us who want to get into the polity issues that arise from the events of the Jerusalem council and the baptism of Lydia and “her household” (v15). I assure you, no one in the room would be more delighted than me to discuss church polity and the sacraments or ordinances. And if you’re particularly interested, let’s get together over coffee or lunch sometime. But I think most of us will benefit more from considering how Lydia was converted, and I also think Luke intends for the work of the Spirit to be the emphasis of this passage.

Look with me at v14. Luke says, “One who heard us [preach or speak the gospel] was a woman named Lydia, from the city of Thyatira, a seller of purple goods [which probably means she was wealthy], who was a worshiper of God [i.e., she was a Gentile who lived as much as Gentiles were allowed under the Mosaic covenant].” The next phrase in v14 is similar in all the main translations: “The Lord opened her heart to pay attention” (ESV); “the Lord opened her heart to respond” (NASB, NIV, NET); her “heart the Lord opened, that she attended unto the things which were spoken” (KJV).

So, let’s consider what this phrase means by grabbing hold of two Greek words: one, dianoigō (διανοίγω), and the other, prosechō (προσέχω).

dianoigō is what “the Lord” did to Lydia’s heart while Paul “spoke” (v14). Luke used this same word 3 times in the last chapter of his Gospel, and there he said that the disciples “eyes were opened” to be able to recognize Jesus (Lk. 24:31), the Scriptures were “opened” to the disciples when Jesus explained them (Lk. 24:32), and the disciples minds were “opened” to be able to “understand the Scriptures” (Lk. 24:45). In each case, it was the Lord Jesus who was doing the “opening” …their eyes, the Scriptures, and their minds.

So, when Luke says here that “The Lord opened her heart,” he means that the Lord Jesus, by His Spirit, made Lydia receptive to the message or the words Paul was saying. For those of us who are parents, this is like when we yell at our kids… I mean speak to them compellingly, saying, “Open your ears!” We don’t think their ears are clogged by anything; we think they are not listening. We want them to really listen to our instructions and put them into action. While hearing the gospel message, Lydia really started to listen… she became capable of understanding and interested in the substance of the words spoken… and this happened because “The Lord opened her heart” (v14).

The second word we’re focusing on this morning is what Lydia did, prosechō. Luke says that “The Lord opened her heart to pay attention” or to “respond” or to “attend unto” the words which Paul was speaking (v14). The Lord made it happen, He “opened” her heart and ears and mind, and Lydia “paid attention,” she “responded,” she “attended to” what she was hearing. The word is used in the New Testament for the ideas of caution (ex: “watch out!” [Lk. 21:34] and “Beware!” [Matt. 7:15]), and devotion (ex: “devote yourself” [1 Tim. 4:13]), and even care (ex: “Pay careful attention” [Acts 20:28]).

The idea is that Lydia began to hear what Paul was saying with a heart that believed the words were true. And it was this sort of response that resulted in Lydia being “baptized” and “judged” (ESV, KJV) or “considered” (NET, NIV) by Paul and his band of Christian missionaries as “faithful to the Lord” (ESV, KJV) or “a believer in the Lord” (NET, NIV). The clear meaning of the text is that Lydia was converted! She became a Christian, and not merely a “God-fearer” or “worshiper of God” (v14). With her ears, she’d heard the words of the gospel; but now, by the powerful work of the Holy Spirit, she believed.

Friends, not every passage in the New Testament is as clear as this one on the details of what happens that moment when a sinner is transferred from spiritual darkness to spiritual light. But any good Bible student knows that we are supposed to let the clearer passages help us to understand the less clear passages. We don’t grab our speculations from elsewhere and jam them down on top of the clear teaching of Scripture here. Rather, we see the perfect harmony of all of Scripture when we begin to draw various passages together for even greater clarity.

There’s no doubt that the message of the gospel is essential for anyone to be converted. Romans 10, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. [But] how… will they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how are they to believe in him of whom they have never heard? And how are they to hear without someone preaching?” (Rom. 10:13-14). But why do some people “call on the name of the Lord” (or repent and believe [Lk. 24:27; Acts 2:38])? While other people hear the gospel and either neglect or reject it?

Well, back in the first few verses of our passage, we were reminded that God does not owe the message of His grace and mercy to any sinner. The Holy Spirit was and is fully within His right to steer Paul’s missionary team away from Asia and Bithynia, and toward Macedonia. The gospel is a message about God’s grace, and the very act of hearing the gospel preached is also a gracious gift of God.

And here, in the last couple of verses, we are reminded that God is the only one who can change a sinner’s heart. We can preach, and teach, and plead, and pray (and we should certainly do all of those things), but only God can bring spiritual life to a spiritually dead heart (Eph. 2:1-5). The Bible is crystal clear on this point.

The Scripture tells us, “The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly [or “foolishness”] to him” (1 Cor. 2:14). And again, “the word of the cross [or “the word about the cross” (i.e., the gospel)] is folly [or “foolishness”] to those who are perishing [or “those who are lost”]” (1 Cor. 1:18). And again, “the god [or “ruler” (see Jn. 12:31)] of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ” (2 Cor. 4:4).

“But, if this is true,” you might be asking, “then how in the world does any sinner believe the gospel?” Yes! That’s the right question! It’s not surprising in the least that a sinner would reject the gospel or simply ignore it. What’s surprising is that any sinner would hear the gospel and all of a sudden believe and cling to the message he/she once thought of as foolishness. But that’s the power of the Spirit of God at work in the gospel of Jesus Christ!

Yes, indeed, “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel… [but the same] God who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ [at creation] shines in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:4-6). That’s what happened to Lydia, and that’s what happens every time a sinner comes to faith in Jesus Christ. This is not something we can do, only God can, and we simply play the part God has given to us… We preach, we tell, we implore those we know and love to hear – to really hear – the good news that God has sent His own Son the live and to die for sinners.

We describe and explain the contents of the gospel – God is creator, man is guilty sinner, and Christ is gracious Savior – and then we call for a response… You must repent – turn from your sin – and believe– sincerely embrace Jesus Christ for who He is! …And then we wait… We trust God to make dead sinners spiritually alive sinners… and we watch for fruit or evidence or signs of life.

Conclusion

Friends, we’ve studied a passage today that highlights God’s gracious grace. We’ve been reminded that the Christ or Messiah God sent to save guilty sinners was not sent to do a work that was owed to any of us. Rather, the work of Christ on the cross and the Spirit’s application of that work are both acts of God’s sovereign grace. So too, the message about Christ’s work is carried by Christian witnesses, but the arrival of that message to any sinner’s ear is an act of God’s sovereign grace. Therefore, we who know the gospel ought to share it promiscuously, even as we trust God with the results.

Endnotes

[1]I’m capitalizing “Church” here because I’m using the term to refer to the universaland invisible Church. Local churches are visiblemanifestations of the universal Church, and one cannot separate these two concepts – the universal Church and the local church. However, one must distinguish between the two in order to avoid disastrous confusion and a nebulization of the meaning attached to either phrase. One way I mark the distinctions I see between the universal Church and the local church is by capitalizing the term when I refer to the universal Church and using the lowercase “c” when I refer to a local church or churches. [2] I highly recommend this 6-part video teaching series on the Trinity by Dr. R.C. Sproul. Learners at every level will benefit tremendously. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL30acyfm60fUn9Yl_IUO9PLddhIjCtMgv [3]See statistics and a definition for this term at https://joshuaproject.net/progress/1 [4]See statistics and a definition for this term at https://joshuaproject.net/frontier/1

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