Series: Sword of the Spirit – Unit: Reaching the Lost
Lesson: Evangelism – Topic 4: The audiovisual gospel (Part 2)
Teacher: Colin Dye
Announcer: Welcome to Sword of the Spirit, written and presented by Colin Dye, senior minister of Kensington Temple and leader of London City Church. Sword of the Spirit is a dynamic teaching series equipping the believers of today to build the disciples of tomorrow. We pray that you find these programs inspiring, and a catalyst in deepening your knowledge of God, your relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ, and your intimacy with the Holy Spirit.
Colin Dye: Hello, and welcome to The Sword of the Spirit, a school of ministry in the Word and the Spirit. Our topic is Reaching the Lost—evangelism—spreading the good news of Jesus Christ. And in the last program, we saw, number one, that the gospel message is a message about the kingdom of God. This was Jesus’ central theme in all His preaching and teaching. He proclaimed that in His life, in His mission, the kingdom had come. That means that God’s glorious rule over the hearts of believing Christians all over the world had begun. And when Jesus preached the gospel of the kingdom, He also demonstrated the gospel through His life, through His testimony, and through His miracles. Then we’ve also seen, number two, that this is the gospel of God. It’s God’s gospel. It’s not a human message. People didn’t invent this. Nobody could have possibly invented this message. It has come as a revelation from God. It is the message of God, a heavenly gospel, a word from God from heaven to the hearts of every single person who will open their minds and open their hearts to receive it. And I’m excited about the fact that it is God’s gospel, because if it’s God’s gospel, it means He is going to back up that gospel with all the power of the Holy Spirit to convince people by the Holy Spirit that this message is not from man, it is from God. And so now in today’s message, we’re going to go on to point number three in this series.
Number three; it’s also the gospel of Jesus Christ. The gospel of Jesus is the Good News that He brought into the world. Without Him and His ministry, there could be no forgiveness, no life. There could be no freedom. There could be no hope. Without Him, we would have been left in our sins, alienated from God forever, bound by Satan, wracked by guilt, and spiritually dead forever. Without His gospel bearing activity, there would be no good news. That’s why Paul says in Romans chapter 1 verses 1-3, “Paul, a bondservant of Jesus Christ, called to be an apostle, separated to the gospel of God,” verse 2, “which He promised before through His prophets in the holy scriptures,” verse 3, “concerning His Son, Jesus Christ our Lord, who was born of the seed of David according to the flesh.” So verse 1, Paul says, it’s the gospel of God. Verse 3, he says, it’s concerning His Son. The gospel is Christ. It’s all about Him. So Jesus doesn’t just bring the good news, He is the good news. He embodies the good news. The incarnation is the heart of the gospel. It’s not just the way in which the gospel was proclaimed; not just the way in which the gospel was brought, it’s the heart of the gospel itself—the good news that God is not just the God who is way out there; the transcendent one who lives far away. But He’s the God who’s close by, the God whose presence fills the universe and who came in the person of Jesus, the Son of God, who came incarnate and localized Himself and manifest Himself. The Son of God appeared. He couldn’t have died on the cross unless He came as a man. So the incarnation is the heart of the gospel. He didn’t lean over the balcony in heaven one day with a mega megaphone and say, “Hello, down there. Attention, please. This is the Son of God from heaven. Repent or I’m going to get you!” No, the Word became flesh and dwelt among us and we beheld His glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth. For the law came by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. When Jesus came, He brought grace, He brought truth, He brought mercy, He brought revelation. He is the gospel. He’s the embodiment of the gospel. Hallelujah! I thought that would get a hallelujah. But this is a lecture. You’re not allowed to say hallelujah, are you? And then they said? Hallelujah. Come here. You people here. Come here. You people watching. Come here, come here. Closer, closer. Come here closer. You people watching, I got a tough audience today. Are you going to shout hallelujah? Amen! We heard that, did we not? Okay. You are allowed to get excited at truth. I know I’m addressing you in your understanding, especially by the power of the Holy Spirit, but remember, this will affect you. It will affect how you preach the gospel; it’ll affect how you live the gospel. Okay. Now in one sense, we can say that evangelism, which consists only of spoken proclamation, is almost a denial of the gospel because of this truth of incarnation. Because the incarnation is both the content of the gospel and the embodiment of the gospel. It is the word and the flesh. It’s the message and the means. It is the good news. That’s why Jesus says that we should know the truth and the truth is what we see in Jesus’ life. Jesus said to Philip, John 14 verse 9, “’Have I been with you so long and yet you do not know me, Philip? He who has seen me has seen the Father, so how can you say, Show us the Father?’” No. It’s a gospel of Jesus Christ. John 14 verse 6, “’I am the way, the truth and the life.’” ‘I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life, I am the gospel. Embrace me and you have the Father.’
Then we see also, finally, number four, it is a personal gospel. A personal gospel. The New Testament speaks about my gospel and our gospel. It’s a message that we are meant to know and appropriate personally. Do you own the gospel? Can you go to somebody and say, “My gospel is…?” You’ve got the gospel according to Matthew, the gospel according to Mark, Luke and John. What about the gospel of Tom, of Mary, of Colin, of Achmed? Huh? What about the gospel of all those who believe in Jesus Christ, because in a very real sense, you are the gospel to these people—to those who don’t know. Okay. Now by using many different verbs with the noun euangelion, the New Testament makes it clear how we should and should not respond to the gospel. We should believe the gospel. If we believe it, it becomes our gospel. It’s the gospel that I believe. We should lose our lives for the gospel. Are you ready to do that? You’ll do it—you’ve got to do it one way or the other. You’ve only got one death; don’t waste it. Don’t waste it. Make sure you die good. You die as a testimony of Jesus Christ, which means you live your life as a testimony to Jesus Christ. You’re going to lay down your life one way or the other. Going to lay it down in sacrificial service as you live and preach and be good news wherever you go, or you’re going to lay it down when somebody takes it from you because they don’t like what you say. Okay. You better settle it. Jesus said, “Unless you take up your cross and follow me, you cannot be my disciple.” Hello! It’s serious. He says you are to be separated to the gospel. In other words, it’s personalized because you say, “This is my purpose. This is my passion.” You are to serve the gospel. You are not to be ashamed of it; rather, you are to obey it. To obey the gospel—what does that mean? Well, try preaching it and ask yourself, “Am I living what I preach?” Minister the gospel. We are not to hinder the gospel, we are to receive it. We are to enjoy fellowship in the gospel. We are to labor in the gospel and be prepared to suffer hardship in the gospel. What a tragedy today that people going into full time Christian ministry are expecting, alongside that ministry call, a three bedroom semidetached house, a salary commensurate with their opinion of themselves, a car, a telephone, a debt free existence, and also a superannuation that matures at the age of sixty five. Now I am not knocking the way in which some churches, including our own church, works hard to ensure that servants of God are cared for. But I want you to know this—we are called to suffer hardship for the gospel. If it’s your gospel, you will own it.
Now, we’ve also been looking at to see how there are several different ways that we can describe spreading the gospel—preach the gospel, speak the gospel, testify to the gospel, evangelize the gospel, proclaim the gospel. We’ve looked at all of these ways in this session and in the previous session. And so this shows us that if we are to own the gospel as our gospel, we will serve the gospel in all of these different ways. That we will be committed to spreading the gospel in every possible way. It’s not just about giving up your job and saying, “Now I’m a gospel preacher.” Some are called, some are sent, many took a microphone and went. I remember the story of Spurgeon and this woman who had thirteen children. And she was going to leave her husband and she was going to go and become an evangelist and leave these children. She said, “God has called me to preach to the nation.” And he said, “Yes, my dear lady, I believe that, for He’s brought the nation to you.” I want to go and preach the gospel to the tribes. How about the tribes in your own household? How about the tribes in your own community? How about the people that are with you in your place of work? You preach the gospel, not just by standing on a platform behind a Perspex podium. You preach the gospel by your life, you preach the gospel by the way that you treat other people and alongside your normal vocation, you exercise your real vocation, which is to make Christ known in all that you do. Moving on from this, we need to look at what it means to be an evangelist. The noun euangelistes is used only three times in the New Testament. It’s quite surprising. It’s a very common term today—evangelist—but it’s only three times in the New Testament; Acts 21:8 of Philip the evangelist, Ephesians 4:11 of the ministry gift of evangelist, and in 2 Timothy 4 verse 5 of doing the work of an evangelist. Now Philip is the one who’s identified as an evangelist and he spreads the gospel through words and deeds, through proclamation and demonstration. So this shows us that an evangelist is not just somebody that talks a lot. Interestingly, when Paul says to Timothy, “Do the work of an evangelist,” that command in verse 5 of 2 Timothy 4 follows other verses which talk about preaching the Word. So he says, “Preach the Word and do the work of an evangelist.” So he’s showing here that preaching and evangelism is not the same activity. It’s not exactly the same activity—that there is more to evangelizing than preaching and there’s more to preaching than evangelistic preaching. Remember that. In Ephesians 4:11, it shows that the evangelistic ministry is [stutters] a distinct ministry within the church, but the primary purpose of that ministry is to equip the church. It applies to all of the ministry gifts of Christ. “For it is He who gave some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers.” That’s what it says. But it goes on to say that the purpose of this was to prepare God’s people for works of service. So the evangelistic calling, the call of an evangelist, is a specified function within the body of Christ. There are evangelists—those who are called with a life calling of evangelism. They’re called as evangelists by Jesus Christ, the head of the church. And there may be many of you who are called that way. Your purpose, however, is to take your ministry and multiply it through others so that they would do the work of the ministry. Your ministry is not so much evangelism, but equipping the saints for evangelism. Now in order for that, you’re going to have to demonstrate and show and lead the way by example, of course. But remember, your job as an evangelist is to mobilize the body of Christ. I remember Reinhardt Bonnke saying it would take, I don’t know how many years, a hundred or more years, if he preached the gospel with—if he had maximum crowd capacity to reach all of Africa. And he has some of the largest gatherings anywhere in the world in Africa. So it’s not just about one evangelist preaching to large crowds; it’s about evangelists equipping the members of the body of Christ to do the work of evangelism, for we’ve all been called to evangelize. We looked at that in detail in the section in Glory in the Church. And so our thinking about evangelism, biblically speaking, must be based on this whole group of words—euangelion. And it’s clear from all that we’ve said in this session and the last session, that this first group of words that we’re looking at, the words related to euangelion, euangelistes, euangelidzo, all of these words, show us that the gospel bearing ministry involves proclamation. It does mean preaching, testifying, speaking, proclaiming, debating, announcing, answering questions. It will mean demonstration, healing the sick and the broken hearted, releasing the bound, casting out demons, performing signs and wonders and miracles. It will also involve incarnation—living God’s life among the afflicted people, the hurting people, those who are suffering feeling God’s compassion through you, being ready to suffer hardship, being ready to lose your life. Let me ask you a question right here and now. Does the gospel mean that much to you that you’d lay down your life for it? Others have and if you obey God, you may have to. The great evangelistic challenge of our generation is the 10/40 window—ten degrees north of the equator and forty degrees north of the equator. That band right round the world contains most of the world’s unevangelized. Twenty five percent of the world’s population goes to bed each night without never hearing the name Jesus. And yet in most of those areas, it’s the resistant belt. There’s no such thing as a closed country, because the Holy Spirit can get through iron bars, bamboo bars, He can do anything. If we can get there, He will use us. But it’s dangerous. So I’m not just asking you, listen, wake up a little bit, would you, please? Make sure you witness to the person in the bus stop tomorrow morning. I’m not just telling you to do that. In the name of Jesus Christ, I’m telling you to love the gospel so much that you’re willing to lay down your life for it, whether it is at the bus stop or whether it is right there in the unevangelized areas of the world. So we need to see this is not just some game. This is the very purpose of our existence. We are to go to preach the gospel to the poor. As I said earlier, that literally means somebody who is cowering down or hiding in fear—the hurting, the poor, the brokenhearted. To reach those who are afflicted and hurting—the blind, the imprisoned, the oppressed. Reaching all of those who’ve been hurt by sin, by Satan, and by a sinful, God-rejecting society. That’s the first group of words we’re looking at—euangelion.
Then also, in exploring our understanding of what evangelism means, we need to come to a second group of words. It’s the word ‘herald,’ based on the Greek noun kerux. So there’s a whole word group based on this word kerux, and it means ‘a herald.’ It’s only used three times in the New Testament. It’s usually translated as ‘preacher.’ Today, however, the common idea of a preacher is quite different from a herald. The essence of being a herald is that they traveled from place to place announcing a message which was given to them by their king and announcing it publicly wherever they went and to whoever they met. When we think of a preacher, we think of somebody who’s giving a doctrinal address which they have carefully constructed to a closed group of convinced believers in a church building. And that’s the exact opposite of a herald. Heralds do not have to be learned or clever, they just have to be faithful to the message. They have to be reliable and trustworthy. They’re not there to express their own ideas. They’re there to pass on the king’s message. They’re not there to offer their own personal opinions. They only proclaim what the king has told them to say. On their own, heralds are nothing. Their significance lies only in the fact that they’re representing the one who sent them. Here we have the apostle Paul as a herald. It says, 1 Timothy 2 and verse 7, “For which, I was appointed a preacher and an apostle—I’m speaking the truth and not lying—a teacher of the faith in [stutters] a teacher of the Gentiles in faith and truth.” Here, Paul describes himself as a preacher and the word ‘preacher’ there is ‘herald.’ “I’m a herald; I’m an apostle, and a teacher.” And he is showing that though these three things are linked, they are distinct. The herald preacher is distinct from the teacher and heralding preaching is distinct from teaching. The herald preacher delivers a message indiscriminately. It’s a broadcaster. You preach like the sower sows—everywhere. And some falls on stony ground, some falls on hard ground, some falls on the pathway. So this is how we are. We’re to preach. We’re to preach the gospel, proclaim everywhere. We are to broadcast the good news. Now a teacher delivers an instructional message to those who are sitting, ready to listen, and who are choosing to listen. But heralds are related to apostles in that they are sent. And teachers are to be sent as well. A herald is sent by the king with the king’s message. And the Greek word apostolos, which means ‘apostle,’ literally means ‘one who is sent.’ And Paul makes it clear that he’s been sent as a teacher to a specific group of people. So in these passages, Paul uses these three words, I think, in a sequential way. First of all, he says, “I am sent to the Gentiles as a herald. I announce the king’s message that whoever will listen to this message, well, they’re going to hear it. I’m going to speak this out and it’s there for anyone to listen to if they want to listen to it.” He announced the good news. He bears the king’s message. And then he says, “I’m also an apostle. So those who believe this message, I then apostle them. I take them and form them into a church.” And you need to understand that the word kerux is the word for a herald, and the job of a herald was to announce. And one of the major jobs that the herald would announce was the announcement of the council meeting. And in Glory in the Church, we looked at that in detail. That’s one of the functions of a herald. And it’s a good—it fits very well because the council meeting is the word for ecclesia, the word ‘church.’ So we find that when the herald—New Testament herald—when the herald proclaims the gospel, those who hear that message and respond that message become the church. The herald would announce the council meetings, say, “Everybody, it’s time. The council meeting’s there. Everybody gather together.” So when the gospel is preached, people gather together into the church. So we must understand, gospel preaching is all about gathering people to Jesus in a church community. It’s not just about scattering seed; it’s about gathering. Gathering the harvest in the granary. It’s not just about sowing seed; it’s about bringing that harvest in. And so then he says also, “I’ve been sent to those as a church now to begin to teach them and to disciple them into the way of Jesus Christ.” And so we see here, there is a very great ministry of being an evangelist, of being a herald, of proclaiming the message of Jesus Christ, and of demonstrating that message as you continue to evangelize and then bringing those people into some apostolic shape. Every church should be an apostolic church. The apostolic ministry is a vital part of this, to bring people into an apostolic relationship with Jesus Christ and with one another into the body of Christ and then to be taught the great apostle’s doctrine and then seeing that church emerge and grow into maturity into the image of Jesus Christ. That’s His body. When Jesus returns, He’s coming back for a church that is mature, to the full manhood of maturity. That’s where we are heading. That’s why this ministry is to be connected with the other ministries. And so we see the apostle Paul say, “I’m a herald, but I’m also an apostle and I’m also a teacher.” These ministries work together. When we come back in the next section, we’re going to pick up from exactly this point and we’re going to see how we can conduct that ministry of being a herald for the sake of Jesus Christ. God bless you. Until the next session.
And that brings to an end today’s teaching on Reaching the Lost. I pray that you’ve been inspired to reach out to people who don’t yet know Jesus Christ with the wonderful message of the gospel. We’ll be back next time with more teaching on Reaching the Lost. Till then, God bless you.
Recommended reading
Additional reading