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Welcome to Faith of Our Fathers. Today we feature John stott. Born in 1921, he was well known throughout the world for his writings and godly influence in the global church. He founded Langham Partnership in response to the growing needs he heard from churches and pastors in the majority world. Stott passed away July 27th in 2011. He leaves behind a legacy that continues to expand through the power of God's Word. Today, John Stott presents a study on the daily witness.
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We conclude today a series of sermons in August entitled Day by Day. As we come to the sixth and the final installment, we've been trying to see together how God intends us to live the Christian life a day at a time, not in fits and starts, not always looking back to yesterday or on to tomorrow, but living today while it is called today, in the light of both yesterday and tomorrow. Before I turn or ask you to turn to my text, I want to introduce our theme today. Briefly. One of the most profitable exercises for the church in any generation is to compare itself with the church of the first generation. Mind you, we have to be realistic as we do this. We have to take off our rose tinted spectacles. We have to keep our critical faculties alert. There is a great danger of idealizing and even romanticizing the early church. There are some people who speak of the early church with bated breath, as if it had no blemishes. And when you do that, well, you can only do it when you're blindfolded. Because if you open your eyes and read the documents of the New Testament, it becomes abundantly plain that the early church was troubled, just like the church of today, with inconsistencies, immoralities, divisions, factions, heresies, hypocrisies and all the rest. The early church was very far from being perfect. Nevertheless, one thing is certain, it had been profoundly moved and stirred by the Holy Spirit. And the daily witness of which we're going to think today is one of the marks of a spirit filled and spirit controlled church. So would you kindly open the Bible and turn with me in the New Testament section to page 114. This is the book of Acts, chapter two. And although this is not my text, I want us to look first at verse 42, an extremely well known text on which hundreds and thousands of sermons have been preached. Dangerously so, as we shall see in a moment, Acts 2. 42. This is the first description we're given of the early church. 3000 had been converted and baptized and this is what they were like this first community, verse 42. They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching and fellowship, and to the breaking of bread and the prayers. Look at it again. Luke describes, portrays this first Christian community as a learning church. They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching as a caring church. They were united in fellowship. And he goes on to tell how they sold their goods and distributed to the people in need. And thirdly, they were a worshipping church. They continued in the breaking of bread, that is The Lord's supper and the prayers. So Luke describes this early church as a learning and a caring and a worshipping church. They were related to the apostles from whom they were learning, they were related to one another for whom they cared, and they were related to God whom they worshipped. And my question is, is that all? Was the early church just a self regarding little coterie, preoccupied with their own interior life, preoccupied with their worship and with their fellowship and with their learning? How nice, how congenial, how comfortable. And what about the world outside? In its pain and in its tragedy and in its agony, did those early Christians have no compassion for the world outside? The alienated, the lost, the unevangelized, the oppressed? Were they so preoccupied with God and with each other and with the apostles that they turned their back on the world? You see, we learn another lesson of the great danger of proof texting. I would venture to say to any preachers here, Never Preach on Acts 2:42 unless you see it in its wider context. We cannot learn the truth about any doctrine or any practice if we restrict ourselves to one text or even one paragraph. We have to see each in the light of all and the part in the light of the whole. And we must see Acts 2:42 in the light of Acts 2:47b, the second part of the verse. The Lord added to their number day by day, those who were being saved. Now that's our text. Very few verses, very few words. But from it I think we may learn from the early church's daily witness and evangelism three very important lessons about the evangelistic task of the church, all of which are much neglected today. A lot is written and spoken about evangelism. These three things are very often overlooked. And the first is the Lord. Jesus himself did it. The Lord. That's Jesus. When Hercurios is used in the New Testament without any further epithet or descriptive adjective, it always refers to Jesus. He is the Lord. The Lord Jesus added to their number. Of course, I have no doubt he did it through their daily witness, which is our topic. The Apostle Paul, for example, in 2nd Corinthians 5, says, we are ambassadors for Christ. But then he goes on God making His appeal through us. We beseech you, be reconciled to God. We have to beg people to be reconciled to God. But as we do the begging, God does the begging through us. God is beseeching people through us. He does the work. It's his work supremely. Again, he not only did it through the preaching of the apostles, he did it through the everyday witness of ordinary Christians who gossiped the Gospel with their neighbors and their relatives and their friends. Jesus did it, I have no doubt, through the love of their common life. They loved one another. People could see they were Christians by their love. They sold their possessions, they gave to people in need. See how these Christians love one another. The people in Jerusalem will have said, as they watched as careful observers of what was going on in the Christian community. So Jesus was at work bringing people into the Christian community through the preaching of the apostles, through the everyday witness of ordinary Christians, through the love of the community. And I've no doubt also through their intercessory prayers. But although he did it through them, he did it. The Lord added to their number day by day. No, they were not inactive. A belief in the sovereignty of God will never spare the Church evangelistic labors because God has ordained in his sovereignty that the means by which he will add people to the Church is the preaching and the evangelism of his people. So the sovereignty of God, far from making evangelism unnecessary, makes it indispensable because evangelism is the medium that God has ordained by which people will be added to the church. So we can't be inactive even in the conversion of Saul of Tarsus. Probably the most dramatic example of a divine intervention in somebody's life that you'll find anywhere in the New Testament. Even there. Stephen the martyr, Ananias of Damascus, Barnabas the Son of Consolation. Each of those three men had an indispensable part to play in bringing Saul of Tarsus into the Church. So we mustn't be inactive, but through our activity. We must be looking to the head of the Church, the Lord Jesus, to add people to the Church. Nobody else can do it. If he doesn't do it, all our activity is futile. Boy, we need that emphasis in the Church today. Our contemporary culture is extremely man centered and extremely self confident. Scientific technology tempts us to burst. We've got the know how, just leave it to us. We've got the tools. We'll finish the job. Why nothing is impossible to us in this scientific technocracy Some books on evangelism that I read give a similar impression. Just leave it to us. They seem to say, we'll reduce the population of the world to manageable proportions. We'll identify all the unreached peoples of the world. We'll do the recruiting, we'll recruit all the missionaries we need. And it's usually either Europeans or Americans who talk like this. And they think that the great missionary force is going to come from the west, which is extremely unlikely in the future. And not only will we recruit the missionaries needed, we'll deploy them, we'll scatter them strategically throughout the world and we'll computerize the campaign like a military operation. And hey presto. The evangelization of the world will be the ultimate triumph of human technology. Well, brothers and sisters, don't believe it. It's not true. Again, I beg you, don't misunderstand me. I'm not denigrating those things. That is, it's perfectly legitimate to think of the human race as comprising hundreds of thousands of distinctive culture or distinctive people groups, each with its own culture or that is an observable fact. It's perfectly legitimate to take that into consideration in evangelism. It's perfectly right that we should call for missionaries of the right kind and it's right that we should deploy them strategically. I wish our church leaders would think strategically about this country, about secularized Britain, and would map out the country and locate the areas in which Christian witness is particularly weak and the Church a nonentity, and would deliberately deploy our Christian population and call people to go and relocate themselves and live in the inner city and the industrial areas of the country. I wish there was more strategic planning. And we've got to use computers and every sophisticated electronic gadget there is. But it is still only the Lord Jesus who adds people to the church. He can use them. But if he doesn't use them, then all our media will be of no effect. He has the keys that can open close gifts doors. And if he doesn't use the key and open the door, the door will remain closed. There are the legal doors, hostile governments who refuse to admit any missionary into their territory. There is a growing number of them in the world today. Cultural doors, that is to say, the power of alien ideas that hold people in intellectual bondage and make it impossible for them to open their mind to the Gospel and spiritual doors, human stubbornness and human opposition to the gospel. How are you going to open those doors? Legal, cultural, spiritual, intellectual, ideological? We have no keys. Those doors are closed. The key is in the hand of Jesus, who says that when he opens, nobody can close, and when he closes, nobody can open. So we need to humble ourselves. The gospel can never penetrate through these closed doors unless Jesus Christ opens them. And the church, maybe more than anything else, needs to humble itself before the Lord of the church. It's not necessarily that there is a need of less organization, but it is necessarily that there is a need of more prayer. Organization can be an expression only of human ingenuity and human self confidence. But prayer is always an expression of humble dependence. God. Now that's the first lesson. It's vitally important. The Lord Jesus did it. The Lord Jesus still does it. He's the only person who can add people to the church. And the second is what he did was two things together. He added to their number those who were being saved. He did the two things together. Salvation and church membership belong together. First, he added to their number. Early church growth was a marvelous continuous addition process. Twice later in his narrative, Luke says that many people were added to the Lord. Twice in this chapter, he says they were added to the church. You have your text open. You could glance back to verse 41. So those who received his word were baptized. And they were added that day, about 3,000 souls. But the addition did not stop that day. It went on every day. Verse 47, the Lord added and added and added and added, and went on adding to their numbers every day, those who are being saved. In fact, so much addition was going on that Luke soon abandoned the addition model and chose the multiplication model instead. So that we read, in chapter six, verse one, the number of the disciples was multiplying. And chapter six, verse seven, the number was multiplying greatly. Or look on, please, to chapter 9 and verse 31. After the conversion of Saul, the church throughout all Judea, Galilee and Samaria had peace and was built up and walking in the fear of the Lord. In the comfort of the Holy Spirit. It was multiplied. The great multiplication process was going on. I believe it's a deliberate echo of Genesis 22:17, when God says to Abraham, I will multiply your descendants, because we are the children of Abraham. No, not by blood, but by faith. Every Christian believer throughout the world is a child of Abraham. Abraham is the father of believers, he believes. And every believer becomes a spiritual child of Abraham. God said he would multiply the descendants of Abraham. And as he's multiplying the church, he's multiplying Abraham's posterity until that day before the throne in heaven, when the great Company of the redeemed will be so enormous that nobody is able to count. Will be like the stars in the night sky, like the grains of sand on all the beaches of the world. I will multiply your descendants like the stars in the sky and the sand on the seashore. And he's doing it, adding to the church. But Jesus wasn't only adding to the church. He was saving the people. He was adding to the church. The Lord Jesus added to their number those who were being saved. And that continuous tense reminds us that salvation has three tenses. Salvation is a big word. It has past, present, and future tenses. When we first come to Jesus in penitence and faith as sinners, we are immediately and completely justified. That is, brought into acceptance before God immediately. There's no process in justification, and there are no degrees in justification. You can be no more justified on the day of your death than you were on the day of your conversion. Justification is complete the moment God accepts us in Jesus Christ. But although the first stage of salvation is complete, the. The second tense then begins, and we call it sanctification. And it is a process. And we pray to God that we may be a great deal more sanctified on the day of our death than we were on the day of our conversion. We shall not be any more justified, but we shall more sanctified. It's a process going on all the time, becoming like Jesus in character and conduct. Then when Christ comes again, the third tense of salvation will happen. And we shall be glorified in our character and in our bodies and every part of us. We shall be glorified. We shall share in the glory of God, and our salvation will be complete. So if you care to ask me, as you go out this morning, are you saved? And I don't mind a bit if you care to ask me that question. You know, don't you, the old story told of Bishop Westcott, that a Salvation army lassie came up to him in a bus and said, bishop, excuse me, are you saved? And he looked at her over his spectacles because he was a great Greek scholar. And he said, well, do you mean so theseis or sominos or so thesomenos, giving the three Greek tenses of salvation? Well, if you ask me afterwards, am I saved? You know what I reply? I reply yes and no. Because if you mean, am I justified the first tense of salvation, then yes, praise the Lord by his infinite grace, I am. If you mean sanctified, well, I can only say to you, well, I'm sort of Half and half. A rather mixed up kid, but becoming a bit more sanctified as the days go by. But if you mean glorified, the third stage of salvation, the answer is no, not yet. But I'm waiting for that glorious day. So we need to understand these tenses of salvation. And Jesus was adding to the church those who were being saved, and they were on the road to glory. So then let's come back to our text. Jesus was doing these two things together. He was saving people, which is an inward and invisible process beginning with new birth. And he was adding to their number, which is an outward and visible process beginning with baptism. So he wasn't saving them without adding them to the church. There was no solitary Christianity in those days. And he wasn't adding them to the church without saving them. There was no nominal Christianity in those days. He was both saving them inwardly and adding them to the church outwardly. And the two processes were going on simultaneously. And there still are. Listen. Unsaved church members and unchurched Christian people are both grotesque anomalies that the New Testament doesn't recognize and in which the New Testament will not acquiesce. We need to be being saved and added to the church simultaneously. Both are parts of evangelism. So first, the Lord Jesus did it, and second, he did two things together. And thirdly, he did both things daily. And we come to our theme of day by day. The Lord added to their number day by day by day, those who were being saved. You notice, don't you, that the adverbial expression translated in the Revised Standard Version, day by day, or in the New International version, daily or every day occurs two verses running. In verse 46, we read, day by day, they were attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes and praising God. Verse 47 at the end says the Lord added to their number day by day. So the early church was a worshipping and a witnessing church. They were praising God and witnessing day by day. Worship and witness were continuous activities of the early Christian community. And neither worship nor evangelism was an occasional or sporadic enterprise. Both were going on day by day. And yet, I think you'll agree with me, the daily witness. The concept of continuous evangelism is quite foreign to many churches today. There are many people in some churches I know who regard it as the acme of Christian enthusiasm and zeal to organize a mission every five years. And then when the quinquennial mission is over, they sink back into their customary bourgeois complacency until the next quinquennial mission comes round, then they wake up again out of their lethargy. Other churches are worse than that. They never have a mission. Even every five years. They don't engage in evangelism at all. They don't expect any converts. So you won't be surprised. They don't give get any converts. There are some churches that haven't had a convert for decades, and if they got one, they wouldn't know what to do with him or her. So extraordinary the phenomenon would appear. There's no expectation of the church growing. Well, contrast the early church. The Lord added to their number daily. It was due partly to the evangelistic zeal of the apostles. We're told in chapter 5, verse 42 that every day in the temple and at home, the apostles did not cease to preach and teach that Jesus is the Christ. Every day they were preaching. And the apostle Paul later was equally diligent. For example, Luke tells us that in Athens, Acts 1717, he argued diligently daily with the passers by in the forum. And I have no doubt that ordinary church members did what the apostles were doing. Maybe not preaching like the apostles, but gossiping the gospel, speaking with their neighbors and their friends. Not in an artificial or rude way, barging unceremoniously into other people's privacy. No, no. But quite naturally, lovingly, simply, spontaneously sharing with their relatives and friends and neighbors and workmates the good news of Jesus. And as a result, the Lord added to their number, day by day, by day by day, those who are being saved. Where is our expectation that that will happen again daily? Well, I thank God that we do have that expectation in our own church. I thank God that For more than 30 years there have been beginners groups that used to be called nursery classes. A very simple structure so that the new convert immediately can find a welcome in a beginner's group. Because we are expecting converts. You might just as well be a church and evangelize without beginners groups as pray for rain and go out without an umbrella. We're expecting converts. We better make allowance for them. We better have a structure that can welcome them and build them up and lead them on into maturity in Christ. So let me recapitulate and conclude. Here are three lessons about local church evangelism, which the contemporary church urgently needs to learn. One, in an age of technological self confidence, we need to remember it was the Lord Jesus who added to the church, and who still does. Second, in an age of theological confusion in which salvation and church membership, or new birth and baptism are so often confused and often separated and divorced from one another, then we better notice the Lord Jesus married them. He added to the church, day by day, those who were being saved. He didn't keep them apart. He brought them together. And thirdly, in an age of spiritual declension in which evangelism is sporadic, faith is weak, and expectation is low, we need to note that the Lord Jesus added to their number, day by day by day, those who are being saved. So what's the conclusion? I want to ask, as I conclude in the last couple of minutes or so, how could it happen again? How could this our church, whether it's the Church of England or the church in this country generally, or in secularized Europe or wherever you come from, a church so secularized itself so worldly, if you can generalize, so doubting, even contradicting the elements of the gospel, so stagnant, how can it expect converts again every day and expect to grow? Well, in one sense, only if the Lord Jesus, the head of the church, will himself intervene, visit the church with his power, anoint it, revive it, renew it. In one sense, only if that happens. But in another sense, it can happen only if the church recovers its vision of evangelism, such as the early church had, namely, that every Christian is called to be a witness. Evangelism was not restricted to the apostles, and it isn't restricted to professionals like clergy. Today, every Christian is called to be a witness to open our mouth to Jesus. I don't suppose many people here have ever read the books of homilies, which, in days when preaching was pretty poor, the reformers wrote sermons for clergy to preach so that they would preach biblically. This is in the 16th century, and in the second book of homilies published in 1571, I want to quote this to. If anybody be a dumb Christian, a dumb Christian not professing his faith openly, but cloaking and coloring himself for fear of danger. In time to come, he giveth men occasion justly and with good conscience to doubt, lest he have not the grace of the Holy Ghost within him, because he is tongue tied and doth not speak. That's 412, 11 years ago, and still many of us are done. I remember reading Frank Gabeline of America saying, it's easy to sing oh for a thousand tongues, to sing my dear Redeemer's praise, But it's a futile wish. He goes on, we shall never have a thousand tongues. And we had them, we wouldn't know what to do with them, not when the one tongue we have is so strangely silent, respecting the Lord who loves us and gave Himself for us. So why are we dumb Christians? Why don't we open our mouth and speak for Jesus naturally, boldly? Well, I'm afraid the reason is because we don't have the experience of the power of the gospel that the early Christians had. They were not ashamed of the gospel because they knew it was the power of God unto salvation in their own experience. Paul said, I'm eager to preach the gospel. Woe to me if I don't preach the gospel. Why? Why that eagerness? Because he knew the saving power of Jesus in his own life. These early Christians had an inner compulsion because of their experience. They had something to say, something to declare. You know the name of David Read, who is minister of Fifth Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York. Sorry, it's Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church in New York City. One of his recent books is called Go and Make Disciples. And in it he says, those of us who enjoy visiting other countries are familiar with that solemn moment when at the frontier we encounter a customs official who fixes us with steely eyes and says, have you anything to declare? I've not yet had the nerve. He goes on to answer, why, yes, as a minister of Jesus Christ, it is my duty to declare to you that he is your Savior and Lord. So he entitles his last chapter the crux, have you anything to declare? And he says, it's lack of conviction about the Gospel which makes most of us such reluctant evangelists. So we conclude our daily, our Day by Day series. All these dailies stick together. I don't know if you have a daily at home who comes in sometimes, but she might remind you of these six biblical dailies. It's only if we receive the grace of God every day, new every morning See his steadfast love never ceases we receive his grace every day we're being renewed every day. Our outward man is perishing Our inward man is being renewed from day to day and as a result, we are listening to God every day. Oh, that today you would hear his voice. We're repenting every day Taking up the cross every day we're praising every day Every day I will give thanks to your name. It's only if those other five dailies are in place that I think our text for this morning will come true. We shall be engaged in daily witness and the Lord will be adding to our number Day by day by day those who are being saved may their dream come true. As we sit, let us ask Jesus Christ to open our lips. To give us such an experience of him and of his power unto salvation. That we shall not be ashamed to speak of him. But be eager to do so spontaneously. Not in a contrived and artificial way, but humbly, naturally, simply. Let's pray to Jesus. Lord Jesus, open our eyes to see your glory. Our ears to hear your word. Our hearts to receive your grace. And then open our lips that we may speak and sing your praise for your namesake.
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You've been listening to John Stott. Listen to Faith of Our Fathers each Saturday and Sunday to hear more great 20th century preachers.