Deadly Evangelism

Thank you John. I haven't changed my mind. I still want to use chapter 23 in the book of Matthew, if you'd find that. Verse 15 is all I want to use today. Verse 15, Matthew chapter 23. Already, huh? It started already. When I get something really good, you'll go have a fit. I think when you read the New Testament, sometimes you get the idea that Jesus and the Pharisees were at odds with each other. Do you realize that they were the closest group of all the Jewish people to believe the same things that Jesus believed? The Sadducees didn't believe that the Old Testament consisted of what we think it does today, but the Pharisees did and Jesus did. The Sadducees didn't believe that there would ever be a resurrection, but the Pharisees did and Jesus did too. Jesus believed that it was his mission to come into the world to lead people into the kingdom of God, and the Pharisees thought that too. Jesus thought it was his responsibility to live a life of holiness and obedience to God, and the Pharisees did too. But of all the groups of people that Jesus talked to, these people were the most adamant against him. The reason that there was such a conflict between them and Jesus was not because of doctrine, but because of lifestyle. They lived in a way different than Jesus did, and he made it clear to them that what they were living was not acceptable to God. It was putting in practice, as Don was talking about, the faith that you believe is the point of conflict with them. It was so vicious and bitter that they felt necessary to try to kill Jesus as a result of this difference in how they lived. And the most harsh words that are found in the Bible about anybody come from the words of Jesus to these Pharisees. In this passage, Jesus is addressing again this difference between them. He's talking here about a difference in their work. He says to them, you go all the way around the world to try to make a disciple, follower of God, but when you're finished, they're twice the child of the devil as they were before. It would be better if you didn't even do any evangelism because your evangelism is deadly to people. What a harsh condemnation. The harshest, I suppose, that he could give. Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees. You're hypocrites. You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are. Jesus uses the word woe to begin this. It's a word of condemnation. You don't have any hope at all. Judgment is coming to you in the most powerful way. It's also a word of compassion. I don't like to tell you this, and I'm sorry that it's going to happen, but here's what's going to happen. God's judgment is going to fall on you. Jesus was not happy with what happened to the Pharisees and what was going to happen to them. He wanted every way he could, and he spent all of his ministry trying to help them understand how they could change all of this, but none of that took hold with them. They were determined that Jesus was wrong, and they were right. And now Jesus focuses on one dimension of why he's announcing this condemnation on them. Now, when you go back to look at the word convert here, we tend to read into the Scriptures the way we see things, and when we think of a convert, you think of someone who's living their life without any thought of God or any interest in the Christian life, and you go up to them and you talk to them about this and say, do you know Jesus came and lived his life and died for you? Would you like to receive him as your Lord and Savior? And this person has never gone to church, doesn't know anything about God, says, yes, I want to receive Christ and become a follower of his. That's not exactly the way this was. The converts that the Pharisees were most interested in were Gentile people, but they were Gentiles who were interested in what was taking place in the Jewish religion. The people that lived in Jesus' day, who were not Jews, lived in a world where they had many different gods, and the gods that they believed were out there worshiping were gods who were unpredictable. They were gods who acted like people who were grumpy. Some day they were grumpy, some day they were nice, some day they were kind, some days they were mean. And so you didn't know when you got up in the morning what the gods were going to be like that day. They might be in a bad mood, and they wanted somebody to take it out on, and you may be miserable because of what the gods did to you. Some days they may look at your wife and find her attractive and holler off and rape her. That's what they believed these gods were capable of doing, and did. Well, here is this Jewish community, and they had a different kind of God. There were not many gods, like 50 or 100, that you had to be careful and pay attention to. There was only one God. And He wasn't the kind of God that got up some days grumpy and some days nice. He was the same all the time, and He loved His people. He was a God who was always doing what was good and right. Well, when they heard about this, they were attracted to that kind of God, and many of the Gentiles became followers of God. They would come to the synagogue, they would listen to the Bible messages, they believed in what was taught to them, and they were interested in following this God. You see, Peter was called a Cornelius, who was one of these gods, and one man came to Jesus, who was one of these kind of men. They called them proselytes of the gate. They called them that because they were interested in the Jewish religion, because of the nature of the God that they had, and also they were very interested in the kind of people that followers of Jesus were, and followers of God. Followers of God were asked to live moral lives, and this was different than most of the other gods that they knew. They didn't have a standard of high morality, but here this Christian community, this Jewish community, had a very high standard of morality, and they wanted to be around people like that. But when they came to talk to the Pharisees about becoming a follower of Jesus, or follower of God, they would say, well, yes, you can believe the law of Moses in these first five books of the Bible, but there's more to it than that. From the very beginning with Moses, we've written down what these laws are about, and how you can follow the instructions Moses has given us. And there are thousands of pages of explanation about how to keep the instructions of Moses. And if you're going to get into this, you've got to be committed to do every bit of these things that God tells you you should do. That's what the Pharisees did. They believed that they had to obey all the spoken or interpretation of Moses' laws, the Talmud. They were a little taken back by that, and then they said, now of course if you're going to be a follower of God, you have to be circumcised. The men weren't too interested in that either. They were interested in finding out about God, coming to the synagogue, listening to the teaching, believing what it had, try to put it in practice. But these human requirements, they were not interested in. The Pharisees took a special interest in the proselytes at the gate. They wanted to be the kind of person that nudged them through the gate and into the kingdom of God as they saw it. To become a proselyte of truth, that's what they would call them once they decided they were ready to become a full-fledged Jew. And Jesus said, you look out for these proselytes at the gate. You go wherever you can find one, and you do whatever it takes to get that person into the kingdom. But the problem is, you make them quite twice the child of the devil that you yourself are. He'd already told them what he saw wrong with them. And you know, proselytes, whenever they become a part of a new group and change, they become more vigorous about it than even their teachers are. And that's what happened to them. The lesson, though, that he teaches us is critical. He teaches us that evangelism can be both life-giving and deadly, depending on how you do it. The mistakes that they made in this were evident because of what Jesus said about them. He said about them in the beginning of this chapter to his own disciples, you listen to the teachings of the Pharisees and the scribes. They know the law of Moses, and they're sitting in the seat of Moses, and now they can interpret what Moses means to you. But you listen to what they tell you, you do every single thing they tell you that Moses said you should do. But don't you look at what they're doing. Do not live the way they live. Now, here's a key ingredient in what Jesus was saying. Whenever the proselytes of the gate were talking to the Pharisees, they said to them, we love God. And the Pharisees and the proselytes of the gate would say, we love your God, too. We try to live in obedience to Him, and the proselytes of the gate would say, we try to live in obedience to Him, too. Then they would say, here are all the teachings that have been passed down to us about how to be able to love God. And you can't really call yourself a follower of God until you do all the things that we teach you that people have said you should do to be able to follow God. What they did was they took the eyes of the proselyte off of God and placed it right on them and their instructions and their teachings. So that the teachings of men became more important to the proselyte entering the kingdom of heaven than the teachings of God Himself. The human requirement is to be circumcised, and it is human event that has to take place before you can really see that you've entered the kingdom of heaven. What happens, you see, sometimes is in the process of our beginning to live for God and live in obedience to Him, we get caught up in the human conduct, the conduit through which God gives us His message. Sometimes it can be the church, the Baptist church. And so we get so hung up on that that we lose sight of God. I remember a man went to us to the convention one time, and he was a new Christian, and I said, what do you think of that? And he said, well, I think the people love God, but some of them thought it was better to be a Southern Baptist than to love God. Wow. The same thing the Pharisees did. As a new theological movement among Southern Baptists, called the Reform Movement or Calvinism, I've always resisted that because I think that whenever you begin to say you're a Calvinist, that you interpret the scripture the way John Calvin did or the Reformed tradition did or even the way Southern Baptists have always done, it's like going outside and putting on glasses, you know. You have pink glasses. Every time you look at something, it has a little shade of pink around it, shade of pink on it. It colors everything that you see, and you can't help it because the glasses are there. And when you leave them on day and night, 24 hours a day, you suddenly begin to see the whole world looks pink, and you believe it does. And whenever you start looking at what Jesus said, and you listen to another person and what they tell you, and then you look at the Bible, and you have your own ideas and mind shaped by that, so that you begin to believe the things of people instead of the things of God. It's a very dangerous thing. I always tell you, you listen carefully to what I have to say, but you don't listen to me. You listen to God. Because in all of this, God is at work speaking. I'm not your teacher. He's your teacher. He's the God. And there's nothing that we do that should draw attention to say what we are as our own denomination or belief is more important than what the words of the Scripture say. And everything that we believe has to be measured against the Bible. Does it fit that? This is what the Pharisees didn't do. They made the teachings of their own more important than the very words of God himself. That's why we promise when anyone comes to become part of our church, that every time they come to church, we will be preaching from the Bible. Every class that we have, we'll be teaching the Bible. That's why we ask you to listen to God and read your Bible. Because the words of God are ultimately all important to us. The first commandment says that we're to have no other God but Him. There's not to be anything in the world that influences our choices, our lifestyle, except God. We heard Don talk about his own life and the conflicts that gave for him when he began to make decisions based on his own plans, his own efforts, and his own goals. God destroys those because he has to make us stop and say, you alone are God. And the great curse that the Pharisees had was they made people disciples of themselves. And the worst thing we can ever do is to make people Southern Baptists. We have to make them followers of Jesus, submitted to the Lordship of Jesus Christ. Jesus said about the Pharisees, everything you do is done for men to see. They make their phylacteries wide and their tassels of their prayer shawls long. They love the places of honor, banquet, and important seats of the synagogue. They love to be greeted in the marketplace and have people call them rabbi. What Jesus saw in the Pharisees is they were prisoners of the approval of other people. It made it very important to them, anywhere they went, for people to say, you're important. This is the best place in the house. You can sit here because you are very important. It was very important to the Pharisees that people looked at them and said, you're holy people. We can tell because the phylacteries were little bands they wore on their wrists with a scripture package on it. Your wristband is really wide and your box is really big and that must mean you really do pray. They wanted everybody to know that. It was important to them. And whenever you make disciples, you see, you begin to have people imitate you. They could see you go in and where you sit down at the head of the table and they would say, boy, I hope the day comes when I'm as important as to sit right up there where the rabbi is and I can be the most important person in the room and I'm going to get me some of those. His are an inch wide. I'm going to make mine an inch and a half. Everybody will know I'm a real praying man. They wanted to draw attention to their own value and importance. You know what happens here is that all of a sudden in the middle of all this, you become prisoners of other people because you begin to seek the approval of people as opposed to the approval of God. And you violate that very first commandment. You're to have no other force controlling your life in this world but God. If they went to the banquet and didn't get set at the key place, they'd be upset, go home mad, grumbling, upset because their value and worth wasn't recognized by the people who were at that meeting. And of course, when they made disciples, they made people that were that way. You know, I think anybody that accepts Christ and begins to live a Christian life wants people to look at them and say, that's a godly man or woman or child. We all really want that, don't we? We want to reflect the very character of God in our lives. But there's just a little step that can be taken that becomes so destructive with this. And it is that you begin to be careful to make sure that you do things that impress the people around you. One of the things I've seen happen in the lives of pastors and church workers and staff people, it's really destructive, is that a pastor comes to work at a church and all the congregation watches him and his family. And I had someone tell me one time they never came to this church years ago because they heard one of my sons was in trouble all the time. Another person in town had the same name he did who had that problem. And so as pastors, you're inclined to say to your kids now, you be careful. Everywhere you go, you do the right thing because you're a pastor and all of it's going to reflect on me and it's going to reflect on my job. And boy, I've met a lot of kids of pastors and staff workers who were mad at the church, angry because they were forced to live all the time thinking that they had to be really careful not to do anything that other people would see that would be wrong. A lot of wives are staff people and pastors, people expect them to play the piano, sing in the choir, come to the women's meetings, teach Sunday school class, teach an evening class, teach Wednesday night class. And they do all this to please the people in the church. One time Carol was getting ready to come to a meeting, women's meeting. We had all kids at home at that time, four of them. She said, I think maybe just had three at that time. She said, I'm so exhausted, I just don't I just don't want to go. I said, why are you going? Well, they expect me to. I said, wait a minute. Who do you serve? People at the church or God? I want you to go sit down and ask yourself, God, what do you want me to do? If He wants you to go to that meeting, you go. If He didn't want you to go to that meeting, you don't go. See, it's so critical not to lose sight of that first commandment, to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength and mind. And that means no one else. We can do a kind of evangelism that causes us to try to live in certain ways so that we're more important about what people think about us than what God thinks of us. And I'll bet you you've had that problem. Haven't you said some things or done some things that you're really embarrassed when people saw you do it or heard you say it? But if they weren't around, you wouldn't even have blinked. I've had a lot of people, you know, and I remember I went to buy a car one time. The guy was came out to see me on the car lot and he was telling me how great these blankety-blank cars were and how much these blankety-blank cars would do and how, he said, what do you do for a living? I said, I'm a pastor. He left and went inside. He may have gone to church. He didn't care what God thought, but he cared what the human being thought who might have given him some money. All of us, you know, we get caught at times in which we're more concerned about what other people think about us than what God thinks about us. That's a violation of this very thing. And if you make disciples and teach them that that's the way they ought to live, that's what they're going to do. If you do that in front of your children, so if they hear you say, well, I shouldn't have said that in front of the preacher, they're going to think, well, a preacher is more important to mom and dad than God. You make twice the child of the devil as if you never started. Why is that? Because you say they're religious, but at the same time, you're teaching them that pleasing people is more important than pleasing God. You violated the very first commandment that God has to give us. And therefore, you make it impossible for them to follow God. They're so caught up in something else. The other thing Jesus condemned about the Pharisees, he said, you like to be called rabbi, but you have only one master and you're all brothers. Do not call anyone on earth father for you have one father. He's in heaven. Nor are you be called teacher for you have one teacher, the Christ. The greatest among you will be the servants. Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted. What Pharisees did to the proselytes of the gate is they taught them the importance of doing what they were doing, following the plans that they had. And they taught them that obeying these instructions that they were given were more important than the commandment that the instructions were about. And so whenever people came, they said, now, it's okay that you believe in God. It's okay. You believe in he's a, everything the Bible says is okay that you want to come here and learn about him, but there's more to it than that. And if you don't do the things we tell you, you ought to do, then you're never going to be able to follow God. It's very important how we evangelize people. Remember now the Pharisees believed in the 10 commandments. They just didn't do them. They made a separation between believing what the Bible said and living it. We don't consciously intend to do that, but sometimes the way we evangelize or ask people to come to Christ creates that very problem, especially true for children, dealing with children who want to enter the kingdom of heaven. They want to come to church and they want to participate in the Lord's supper. They want to be baptized and they want to do all the other things that adults do. And they know how to say the words we want them to say. And they may believe everything that we teach them, but just like Don said, you can learn those words and not learn how to live that life. And so you have 20 years of wandering around or 40 years or 50 years and trying to figure out what it means to let Jesus Christ plan and control your life. And we're not fair to people when we don't explain to them right up front and clear exactly what it means to follow Christ. And we're not fair to children when they come if we don't make it really clear to them that you've given your life as a 10-year-old to Jesus Christ, but when you're 12, you've got to give everything you now have to him then too. And when you're 14 and when you're 15, you have to give him your date time and your vocational life and your money life and your time life and all those things that a child doesn't have. You have to give God all those things in your life or it's not really ever going to work right for you. And the words that we use sometimes don't indicate how serious the surrender to God is. I could ask you to come over to my house, right? You'd come to my house, we'd sit down and talk. You'd be there, leave. When you say to people, I'd like you to ask Jesus into your life, what do you mean by that? Come to my house and sit down with me. There is no evidence of surrender in that phrase. There's no picture of a life of submission and surrender in that phrase. There's nothing of a description of how God requires to control every minute of your day that you submit to him in those phrases. Asking Jesus into your heart, asking forgiveness, being baptized, all these things are wonderful things and they're true and real, but the dimension of what God asks for sometimes is not shown in them. We need to be really careful when we're trying to help people come to know Christ to spell out exactly what it means. We get an example from Jesus. People would come to him and say, oh, I want to follow you. He'd say, do you follow the Ten Commandments? Oh, yes, I've followed those since I was a little boy. I'll tell you what, is your money more important to you than God? Well, I don't know. Yeah, okay then, why don't you go sell everything you have and give it to the poor and then you come and live with me. All of a sudden the man realized, you know, I don't love God like he's talking about. I don't want to get rid of my money. I don't want to get rid of these things in my life. I don't want to change the way I do things. I don't want to change vocations. I don't want to change the way I get up in the morning or go to bed at night or the way I live. Whatever it is that God requires of you, to read the Bible, pray, attend church. I want to keep on living exactly the way I'm living, but saying the words, Jesus Christ is my Lord, without even knowing that that doesn't mean anything without surrender and submission to him. The Christian life is a place in which you come to say, God, I believe that you are everything I've heard about you. You rule the world. That you've made a plan that you want me to live by, and I haven't paid any attention to it in my life. You have a way of life that you want me to live where you control my mind, my will, and my emotions, but I've been living kind of the way I want to, and I enjoy it, but I've come to realize that that's not right, and the only way I'm ever going to find life as it ought to be is to say to you, here is my life. You take my present, my past, and my future, and from now on, you direct and control me and my life. That's what I want. That's the greatest desire of my heart, and when you've done that, you've made a promise to God, and you've lived in obedience to that promise you've made to God, then you experience the fullness of the life God wants for you. When we have an evangelism that does not do that, we end up making children of the devil twice as bad as they were before. Do you know why? Because once someone does this initial thing, okay, God, I give you my life, and I give you my Lord Jesus Christ, and then I'm going to go on and live my life the way I want to. You can't convince them that they need to sit down and surrender their life to Christ. You know what they tell you? Oh, I did that when I was 12. But you look at their life, and they're not making any choices in obedience to God. They're not living any way in obedience to what He asks of them. If you look at their life, you see there's something there that's not like God-controlled. But you can't convince them because they went forward at camp, or they went forward at church, they were baptized, and the pastor told them, now you're going to be saved, and no one can ever take that away from you. A false assurance. Jesus said, people will come at the last days, and they'll say, well, you know, we're ready to get that big mansion in heaven. And you'll say, who are you? I don't know you. Well, but we did miracles in your name. And we preached in your name. And you'll say, I don't know who you are. What he means by that is, you may have done all these things, but you didn't do them because I told you to. You did them because you wanted to. You thought that it would earn you something. I am looking for the people who say, God, you can direct my life. And those are the only ones I have a home for. The great tragedy that the Pharisees faced was that many of their disciples would come at the last days and face God and hear him say, I don't know who you are. Yeah, you kept all those laws that people told you about. Yes, you did all those things they said, but you didn't listen to me. I was never really in control of your life. And that's why it'd be better for you Pharisees not even try to make disciples and to make them the way you are. I have a feeling sometimes he says that about us. When you look at all the people that we baptized and all the people that have professed their faith and yet don't seem to know what it means to live in obedience to God. It's not a game that we play. It is a life and death issue for now and for eternity. And the message we have to give is God is the ruler of this world. He's made a plan for all the people to live here. And if you will surrender yourself to his plan for your life, you will find life as you've never found it before. And there's no other way. Let's pray. What is the assurance of your salvation? Is it the word of someone else that you have done everything you need to do? Or can you say to God, God is my life like you want it? And then after you said that, do you have the quiet confidence from God that affirms that? Or do you know now that there is something more to your life than what you have? I urge you with all the urgency I can give you today to say to God, I understand who you are. I understand how I've lived in the past. But today, right now, in this moment, I want to say to you, I pledge my life to live in submission and obedience to you as best I can. Just that simple promise will change your entire future and your present. That's evangelism that brings life. In a moment, we're going to sing an invitation hymn. This is an invitation hymn that if God has spoken to you today, and you know what he wants, an opportunity for you to respond, to join the church, or profess your trust in Christ, whatever it is that God's told you, you can come kneel and pray, come talk to me, to Roz. Father, I hope that I've explained today who you are and what you expect. If I've made any mistakes, clarify it, block it out. But if your word has been spoken, then it means that there are people here who you wanted to hear it. I pray that Satan's power to deceive and stop people from hearing and following the truth would be removed. And today, your voice would be heard and obeyed. In the name of Jesus Christ, I ask this. Amen.