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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Evangelism by Dee Casper

Dee Casper

01 Fight or Flight

Tonight we're addressing the topic, Fight or Flight.

I know I said I'm not talking about mental health.

You'll see what we're talking about in a moment.

And then tomorrow morning we're gonna address the topic of discipleship.

If you were not planning on coming tomorrow morning, I'm just warning you, it could be a mistake, because I'm really stoked about tomorrow, and I hope that will be a blessing to you.

Then tomorrow afternoon, we're going to talk about the topic of small groups and the powerful and important missional plan God has through small groups.

So that's kind of our trajectory for the weekend.

But yeah, anyway, I'd like to pray And then we'll jump in.

God, thank you for just the blessing to be in Southern California, for the blessing of cooler weather and moisture in the air.

So I pray that you would bless us as we study and reflect upon Scripture tonight.

And I pray that you would put seeds in our hearts and in our minds that would lead us to be more intentional in evangelism through what we've learned this weekend.

And we ask this now in Jesus' name, amen.

Is it okay if we do a Bible study this evening?

Do you guys allow for that at Advent Hope in the last 20 years?

Have you ever had people give a Bible study at any point in time?

Yeah, like that's all you guys do, and I'm so thankful for that.

If you would have said no, I would have done it anyway, just to, it's just kind of important to me.

The fight or flight response is the response of the body to a perceived threat.

When faced with danger, the body releases hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol.

These hormones give us a burst of energy and strength by increasing the heart rate, slowing the digestion, and directing blood to major muscle groups.

Although the response is helpful in the cases of a physical threat, you know, like needing to run away from a bear and stuff, it's inappropriate and maladaptive when it occurs in social or performance situations.

Anyway, it's inappropriate and maladaptive when it occurs in social or performance situations as is the case with social anxiety disorder.

Well, in Ephesians chapter 6, there's a map that God has to prepare his people for those times of perceived threat.

Okay, we're gonna be looking at this study this evening and addressing the topic again of fight or flight, how we respond to certain situations and what God wants to do to set us up for success.

So go to Ephesians chapter 6, and I'm just gonna summarize for time's sake, because yeah, I wanna make sure I do my best so I know we started later.

So in Ephesians chapter 6, in the armor of God, it's fascinating to me when you look at what items are listed and what type of role that they serve.

So you've got the waist of truth, right, or the belt of truth.

You gird your waist with the belt of truth not the waist with truth.

Anyway, that's a defensive item the breastplate of righteousness right something to kind of protect you Defensive item your feet with the gospel of peace defensive item shield of faith help to defend yourself Right in the helmet of salvation It protects you from bad things that can happen to your head and stuff.

But the thing I noticed when I was studying this some years ago was that there's actually only 1 real offensive tool listed in the entire armor of God.

It's fascinating to me that you have all these items, and the reason why it's fascinating is because if we don't learn how to use this 1 offensive item to defend ourselves, we're basically going to spend our entire Christian experience running from the enemy instead of standing as Paul commands us in the text, just trying to survive, right?

It's very interesting what Paul says, and maybe you'll see it now as we kind of read through this.

Put on the whole armor of God, he says, not just some of it, all of it, that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil.

For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places." We live in the midst of a great controversy, right?

Therefore, because of that, take up how much of the armor of God?

So you can maybe able to withstand in the evil day and having done all to Stand, what should you do?

Then he lists the items here of the armor of God.

So it's interesting to me, he keeps kind of giving us this chart to stand, stand, stand, stand, stand, but if you were to find yourself in a situation where you only had defensive items and knew how to use defensive items, you really have no way to...

You're gonna spend your time not standing and defending yourself, but just running and surviving.

Are you understanding where we're going here this evening?

Like, yeah, you may keep from dying and stuff, but you're really not thriving in the Christian experience, and you're really not advancing the great controversy.

And I think it's an important point for us to reflect on.

So hence the title for this evening's message, fight or flight.

Some of us may feel like that's our experience today, that we don't really know how to defend ourselves or properly equip ourselves to succeed in this battle.

We just kind of are surviving our Christian experience.

I don't think that's what God wants for us.

We're told this in the book God's Amazing Grace, that the first Adam fell and the second Adam, Jesus, held fast to God and his word under the most trying circumstances, and his faith in his father's goodness, mercy, and love did not waver for 1 moment.

It is written was his weapon of resistance and it is the sword of the Spirit which every human being is to use." So it's kind of important then, isn't it, for us to understand how to use the sword of the Spirit.

They continue, let the youth or the young adults, right, y'all in this age demographic, let them try to appreciate the privilege that may be theirs to be directed by the unerring wisdom of God.

Did you know that it is your privilege to be guided and directed by the unerring wisdom of God?

Let them take the word of truth as the man of their counsel and become skillful in the use of the sword of the Spirit.

Satan is a wise general, but the humble devoted soldier of Jesus Christ may overcome him." Amen?

But the way that we're going to defend ourselves is by becoming wise in the use of the sword of the Spirit.

Martin Luther said it this way, that 1 little word from this word shall fell him the devil.

Hebrews chapter 4 and verse 12 tells us that the Word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and spirit and joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart." Man, you can do some wicked damage with that thing, huh?

And typically here in the West and in America, when there's something that's capable of causing a lot of damage, a lot of times they'll require you to go through some form of training beforehand, right?

You can't just get behind a vehicle without learning how to actually do it properly, or driving a forklift, or certain types of firearms, and so forth, right?

They want you to go through some form of training to ensure that you know how to use this thing properly because it's capable of harming people if not used the right way, right?

Or capable of causing, you know, difficulties, if you will.

Not that the Bible can really cause difficulties, but have you ever seen somebody improperly handle the Word of God and weaponize it in their conversations with someone else?

And it can lead people to not want to have anything to do with God because of how they do that.

But I find this idea of needing training, right, before using something of this magnitude, something of this, that's this powerful.

As we read our next text, go to 1 Samuel 17.

02 The Greatest Commission

What I wanna share with you this morning is the topic of the greatest commission.

What I want to cover this morning is the greatest commission.

So I'm gonna start with the word of prayer and then we'll dive in.

Sweet Jesus, thank you for this privilege to know you, to serve you, and to find opportunities to grow in our understanding of how to share you with others.

And so as we're focusing on evangelism this week, I just pray that you would speak to our hearts, that you would put a fire in our bones for laboring for others, and that you would use us as your instrumentality to bless and comfort this world and we ask it in Jesus name amen what is the goal of a disciple of Jesus I don't know if you can read it from where you are that's all my fault I changed my slides and it anyway I'll read them to you if you can't see it.

But in John chapter 17, verse 3, we're told that this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, in Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

So this is our goal as a disciple of Jesus, right, is to find eternal life in Jesus.

And so that's our goal, it's what we're longing for, and for the people that we disciple is to receive eternal life.

And that's found in a genuine, heartfelt surrender to Jesus, right, when we encounter His love, right?

We love Him because He first loved us, as 1 John tells us.

So the amazing thing to me though is, John 17 verse 3 says that this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom He has sent.

Do we have to wait until heaven to have that type of an experience?

That tells me that we can actually begin to experience the amazing beauty of eternal life right now.

You don't have to wait until some distant, far off time until Jesus comes, you can actually begin to enjoy that relationship now, and the relationship you're building now, you're carrying with you into an eternal existence.

It's actually available to you to know the God of heaven intimately and personally, to know Jesus intimately and personally, right?

And so what makes heaven heaven is secure, eternal fellowship with Jesus, not the scenery, right?

What the roads look like, whether my dog will be there, though he is on my socks, cause I totally love him and stuff.

At the end of the day, what makes heaven heaven to me is that Jesus is there.

I never have to wonder if I'm ever going to be good enough.

I can rest in His presence and never have to leave Him.

When we come into God's undying love for us and we receive that eternal life, something happens inside where that natural desire to just do me and get mine starts to change and our priorities change to be more outward than just inward, right?

That there's a greater need to those around us.

This is something that's meant to happen in the life of believers.

We find a love awakening inside of us for the people around us in our sphere of influence that wasn't there before.

And our care and our concern for their eternal wellbeing grows, right?

When we see how much God loves us, we come to realize, man, God must love the people around me in the same way, right?

John 15 says this, that greater love has no 1 than this, than to lay down one's life for his friends.

And then Jesus says something that absolutely warms my heart.

He says, and you are my friends if you do whatever I command you.

No longer do I call you servants, for a servant does not know what his master is doing, but I again have called you friends.

For all things I heard from my father I've made known to you." So part of our call is being a disciple of Jesus is to be a friend of Jesus and a friend for Jesus.

So when we become a child of God and even a friend of God, he again places love on our hearts for those around us and it grows to the point that we would be willing to lay down our lives for another.

You can't create that type of love, but you can receive it.

And you receive it by first going to the source.

Jesus died to show us our own need of dying.

To realize what the fruit of our selfishness really is.

He's wanting us to realize that we exist for a far greater purpose than just fulfilling our own wants and desires.

We exist to be used by God in active service to others.

A great example of this is a man named George Mueller.

Wikipedia is not research college students, just so you know, but it was a quick easy resource They gave a condensed version of his his background I didn't go to college so I can research wherever I want and not get in trouble.

But anyway, George Mueller says was well known for providing an education to the children under his care to the point where he was accused of raising the poor above their natural station in life.

Would to God someone would accuse me of something like that, amen?

Accusing me of being dumb and not using my words wisely, that's warranted.

Someone who's accused of raising the poor above their natural station in life.

He also established a hundred and 17 schools which offered Christian education to over a hundred and 20000 children, many of them being orphans.

Someone asked him, so how did you get this form of success in the work that God's called you to do?

He says there was a day when I died Utterly died died to George Mueller his opinions preferences tastes and will died to the world It's approval or censure died to the approval or blame even of my brethren and friends.

And since then I have only to show myself approved to God." Isn't that amazing?

He continues, if there is room for some of the waters of God's bounty to pass through.

And if we cheerfully yield ourselves as channels for this purpose, then the channel becomes wider and deeper and the waters of the bounty of God can pass through more abundantly.

Don't you love this picture language here?

That the more that we allow ourselves to be filled with God's love and we share that with others, it's like this good form of erosion, right?

He can use us more and more because We're dying as we're giving and living for others.

And the less of you there is, there's more room for him to bless and grow others around us.

Love that, it's a good secret to success, isn't it?

All right, we're called to be ambassadors of reconciliation.

This is 2 Corinthians 5, 1 of my favorite Pauline chapters.

2 Corinthians 5, it says, for the love of Christ compels us.

Not the hope of reward or the fear of punishment.

It's the love of Christ that compels us because we judged us that if 1 died for all then all died and he died for all why that those who live should no longer live for themselves did you know that Jesus died so that we would stop being selfish.

He died so that we would no longer live for ourselves, but for him who died and for them and rose again.

Therefore, from now on, We regard no 1 according to the flesh, and I love this, we no longer look at people for what we can get out of them, like commodities.

I'll be nice to that guy, because I may get a job if I'm nice to him.

Oh, yeah, I'll do this, because then I'll feel good about myself.

We don't view them according to the flesh for what we can get out of them.

We view them based upon what Christ did for them to secure their eternal destiny.

03 What We Do is Not Good

All right, so we're gonna start with a word of prayer and then we'll go into our last topic for the weekend on the topic of evangelism.

That's borrowed language, by the way, so you can't kick me out of here, it's biblical.

We'll see it here in just a moment, but let's start and pray.

God, thank you that you do have a plan for evangelism to bless our churches and to bless our faith community.

Pray that you would open our eyes to the biblical premise behind it and that you would show us how to succeed in implementing it here.

Typically for the Evangelistic series scenario that we have, we hire a guy to preach or the pastor himself plans to preach.

I just finished 1 of these not that long ago.

We mail out flyers hoping somebody else will show up.

About 1% of people showing up is an acceptable return in your investment, between 1% and 5% or 8%.

Some members invite friends and some other form of advertisement takes place, maybe something in the newspaper or whatever, and all the attendees or members watch 1 man do a majority of the work and have a little participation apart from the appeals or bridge events, if they have bridge events, right?

So we bring in the hired guns, send out some flyers, and then the preacher preaches all the meetings, and if members show up, they just kind of sit and watch, right, many times.

A series happens, and a small number of those people are baptized, and we praise God for that, right?

That a small ratio, so you send out all these flyers, a small percentage show up to a meeting, a smaller percentage of that actually say yes and receive this message and choose to join the church.

If your church is fortunate enough to have conference funds or if they can afford to pay for it themselves, a Bible worker furthers those connections that we've made outside of the meetings, if you have that.

We now hope that the church nurtures them and that they're able to make friends as new members of the church.

Statistics show that if people connect with 6 people within a local church, so if a visitor who comes to an evangelistic series, if they connect or a visitor to church in general, if they're able to connect with 6 different people, the likelihood of them staying goes up quite significantly.

But so you're hoping that that level of interaction and connection takes place.

We also hope that somehow they're gonna want to reach out to their friends and community, but we rarely equip them to do so.

We talked about this last night, right, that people don't know how to share, so they don't share, right?

Like, I would do something, but I don't know how.

I don't know where to start, and so many times new members are not equipped to share their faith because our own members many times are not equipped to share their faith.

And for many, fear and lack of training keeps them from reaching out.

So this is what you're going to see in many churches in North America today.

What we would brand as doing evangelism as a local church is we hold public meetings with very little investment in the community throughout the year.

Then we hold a reaping meeting, but the problem is an evangelistic series is indeed a reaping meeting to reap the investments in the community that you've been making over the course of the year.

You can't really reap what you don't sow, right?

Now, God in his great mercy is still bringing people into this movement through our less than ideal means that happen at times in local congregations.

Now this isn't absolutely across the board.

There are churches who are active in their local communities, who are doing health events and community events and finance classes and so forth, making good solid connections.

And from that, they're inviting people to reaping meetings and it's much more effective.

Our students, for instance, are going out and doing Bible work in the community, giving personal Bible studies, investing in people.

Then they invited people to our public meetings, and the beautiful story is many of those people who actually came to our meetings that were connected to our students made decisions for baptism.

Nearly all of them, actually, which was amazing.

So that's just part of how this generally goes down.

So what we're posing today is using a biblical method to improve our public evangelism, not to replace public evangelism, but the synopsis that I just gave you is quite common in North America.

I think there's a way that we can make this much more effective that's a biblical model, right?

How many people have ever attended a small group, right?

There's a small Bible study, a group of people in someone's home or somewhere else.

It's just a comfortable place to grow together, to commune together, talk and study and so forth.

So that's what we're going to talk about today and how this can really improve our local church settings and just improve our faith community at large.

For 1, it's located in a home and not a church, which is already less intimidating.

For some people, the friction involved of having to walk into a church is kind of scary for them.

It's a little harder for them than going to somebody's home.

It's a little more disarming in that sense.

Number 2, there's a substantially smaller group present than at a church service, right?

I don't know how many people were here this morning, but the place was nearly full.

In a small group setting, it's a warm, intimate, smaller gathering, and you don't feel so intimidated.

It's casual and there's some activity or meal or both that makes them more comfortable.

And then group participation is welcomed and encouraged and everyone contributes.

So people aren't coming to a small group to hear somebody preach at them.

We're talking together and learning together.

This is 1 of the beautiful things about Sabbath school, when it's done correctly.

Sometimes Sabbath school is just sermonizing yet again with a few interrupting comments.

But the main purpose for Sabbath school was to facilitate discussion, right?

Not to be a monologue, but to facilitate a dialogue and to keep things moving.

And that's just so exciting because like I get to be involved.

Like There's things I've been studying and thinking about, and I get to share my point of view, and I get to learn from somebody else's point of view, and it's not just somebody preaching at me, which really, really is helpful.

And now lay people are doing the boots-on-the-ground investment in instruction instead of just a Bible worker or a pastor, right?

So you're spreading the load of who's doing the actual investment in the community, which makes things better as well, right?

Because pastors are getting crushed out and weighed down with administrative responsibilities, counseling, and so forth.

That's a lot of things that you have to do, and it's difficult to go out there and pound the ground and win souls as you would like because you have all these other things you're tending to, plus you've got a family and so forth, but when you're engaging in small group evangelism, it actually allows for lay people to take the reins and take responsibility for the growth and health of the local congregation.

It's a beautiful thing, right, that everybody can be involved.

Now a community is being formed inside of the community of the church.

So the church is kind of like the town and the small group is like the neighborhood.

So you're growing a deeper, smaller community, which in turn is growing the overall atmosphere and environment of the church at large.

Series

Evangelism by Dee Casper

03 What We Do is Not Good

Transcript

Parent Series

Sponsor

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