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Newington Three Angels Church

Eric Walsh

Evangelism in a Disconnected World

I'm going to go to Romans chapter 10 to start off.

How then shall they call on him in whom they have not believed?

And how shall they believe in him of whom they have not heard?

And how shall they hear without a preacher?

And how shall they preach except they be sent?

As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of them that preach the gospel of peace and bring tidings of good things.

So our message for this last session, Evangelism in a Disconnected World.

Father God, we thank you for this opportunity to study your Word and to look at evangelism even further.

Lord, you have blessed us with great presentations so far.

And we just ask now as we come towards the end, that Father God, the Holy Spirit will continue to linger in this place.

And help us, Lord, through the power of the Holy Ghost to be enlightened as to how we might better reach everyone on earth.

All right, so I'm gonna go to Matthew 8 and use a story to begin the process of discussing evangelism in a world that's disconnected.

Matthew 8, 1 says, when he was come down from the mountain, great multitudes followed him.

And behold, there came a leper and worst of him saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make me clean.

So Jesus comes down on a mountain, there's multitudes following him, A leper steps up.

So what would have automatically happened when the leper came around the crowd?

1 of the reasons there's no argument, the blind man, they were like, oh, you be quiet, you be quiet.

So he was able to get to Jesus and speak.

So he says, listen, and he worshiped Jesus.

So here was a man who was in a situation of certain death, of certain disgrace, and yet he worshiped Jesus.

The irony is that many would go on later on who followed him in the crowd now who would cry crucify him, crucify him.

And so it is most frequently seen in Leviticus where it referred primarily to uncleanness or imperfections according to the biblical standards.

A person with any scaly skin blemish was seraph.

Interesting, as we come out of the pandemic, if you want to study how God dealt with diseases like these that are contagious, studied the Bible, and we actually did, ironically, force people to do stuff.

Some people actually did have to leave the camp by force because they would have infected everybody else.

And the symbolism extended to rot or blemish on leather, the walls of a house, and woven cloth.

So even if your walls in Leviticus were messed up, it was like you had leprosy.

Other Old Testament references to leprosy are associated with punishment or the consequences of sin.

So to be leprous after a while in the Jewish economy meant, this means you sinned.

Remember the man born blind, and the disciples said, who has sinned, this man or his parents?

In the Jewish economy, these things meant, by default, you deserved your condition.

And that was 1 of the challenges that they had.

So in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, Sarath, was translated as aphelepros.

These words in Greek implied a skin condition that spread over the body.

And so it was a lonely condition, because when people saw it, it was trouble.

It was bigger than what we think of as leprosy today in medicine.

And verse 3 says, and Jesus put forth his hand, he touched him saying, I will be thou clean.

And immediately his leprosy was cleansed.

What is strange about that statement with everything Leviticus would have said about leprosy?

Were you even supposed to get close to a leper?

What Jesus shows us there is that those we often deem unclean in this society are worthy of our touch.

Now, you could say, well, this man believed first, he worshiped Jesus, but the truth of the matter is, as we read in the initial scripture, there are a lot of people who don't know, to the point of Brother Fitzroy's point in the previous presentation, a lot of people don't know what or how to worship.

And I want to submit to you that the changes that we were discussing in a previous lecture about how decreased Christianity is in society is almost not the average person's fault.

We removed, and as Adventists, we're in a catch-22.

They removed religious instruction from public schools.

They basically withdrew the ability for religious organizations to function inside a school.

On the 1 hand, we think that's, you might think it's terrible as a Christian, but on the other hand, you might think it's great because it more guarantees a separation of church and state.

Either way, when they pulled God out of school, pulled God out of our university, even the Christian established universities, all of the Ivy League schools pretty much were started as Christian schools.

And now they are antithetical to Christianity.

And that correlation between the number of people that now claim to be in the LGBTQ community and this descent away from God, I believe that correlation, if you were to graph it, there'd be a direct correlation.

As God has been removed from society, societies, watch this, the consequences of not having God have surfaced more.

In other words, as God is removed from society, more and more people are spiritual lepers.

As God is removed, more people have issues and problems that must be addressed.

The nexus for us is Will we be like Christ and find a way to touch the person who has gone that far from God?

I mean, it was said very well in a previous presentation.

That's the end goal, and that's very, very difficult.

In fact, so difficult that you'd be foolish to think you could strategize and do it.

It must be the work of the function of the Holy Spirit.

So before you can even actually begin to do true outreach, the church has to be praying for the Holy Spirit, which is 1 of the reasons you have this whole movement now against the Holy Spirit inside the church.

Because if you can disempower who the Holy Ghost is, if you can disempower how he works, you can disempower the entire work of the church in the last days.

Our prayer meetings on Wednesday night in most of our churches?

Yet, if we are going to actually have power as a church to do the work of the last, when Pentecost came, it didn't happen because Peter was some great orator.

If you read the rest of the thing, it's not like Peter became a great orator.

He definitely didn't speak all of those languages.

And we are waiting for the latter rain, but there are things we must do for the latter rain to happen.

No matter how much strategy I put in here, it is all in the context that without the working of the Holy Ghost, we will be unsuccessful.

The irony is, I've worked, I've been in a lot of churches, we have more visitors randomly show up at our church in Newington, at 3 Angels, than I've had at any other church and ironically we don't even do nothing.

We like literally have no program to reach the people.

We took 3 young people over to our church yesterday, over to our house after church yesterday for lunch.

Not 1 of them was an Adventist and they were sitting in our church.

So the Holy Spirit has got to be working.

So evangelism really is that Jesus touched the untouchable and It's not easy because as was given in the previous presentation, we have been deceived into picking sides on issues that have no eternal merit.

Race, When I look at the vaccine, I go back 1 summer earlier.

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Evangelism in a Disconnected World

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