Advancing the Great Commission

As I mentioned two posts back, recently the Lord has been encouraging me in going out of my way to present the Gospel to the lost. This past Saturday, I was blessed to be a part of an outreach effort with others from my church. We have been going through "The Way of the Master" evangelism course and we had decided to invest in a camcorder to record our evangelism efforts for presentation to the church. So we decided to raise the money by having a garage sale and using the opportunity to reach out to the lost.

The effort went very well. We would approach our customers and offer them half-off their purchases if they would take a "quiz". The material is from a pad of tear-off tracts from Living Waters. We'd lead them through each question and give them the correct answers. For the most part we had very positive responses. People enjoyed the trick questions. But many of them also thanked us for giving them the Gospel by the time it was all done. The negatives were few and while there is always a disappointment here and there, at least we made the effort to reach those people as well.

Let me ask you a question. When was the last time you went out of your way to present the life-saving Gospel of repentance and faith to someone who isn't saved? James says that if our neighbor lacks life's necessities and we don't provide when we can, our faith is dead. Isn't the same true for those who need the "spiritual goods" of the Gospel?

Here's a better, and I think more revealing, question. When is the last time someone approached you with the Gospel? I bet it has been years, if ever. I can tell you, as many of my brothers and sisters here can tell you, that it has never happened to us.

So much for the Body of Christ obeying the Great Commission.

Therefore, I would encourage you -- even as the Lord has been encouraging me -- to obey what the Lord commanded us to do 2000 years ago. You may say "I can't win anyone to Christ". You are right. None of us can. Only God can save the lost. But we proclaim the Gospel to glorify God, who will use what we are faithful enough to share by faith.

In a day when professing Christianity is walking away from Biblical Truth, it isn't enough just to have correct doctrine. We must have correct practice as well.

So, you stand for the truth? Great. You say you speak against error in the contemporary church? Wonderful! But what of going out of our way to reach the lost?

James would say it's a matter of saving faith. Do we really believe that people die and go to a real hell if they don't know Christ? If so, do we care at all?

We will demonstrate what we really believe by what we do.