Just Desserts – Celebrating Salvation – 9/16/07
Date: 9/16/07
Sermon Series: Just Desserts
Sermon Title: Celebrating Salvation
Text: Romans 10:8b-17
“This is the message of faith that we proclaim: if you confess with your mouth, “Jesus is Lord,” and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. With the heart one believes, resulting in righteousness, and with the mouth one confesses, resulting in salvation. Now the Scripture says, No one who believes on Him will be put to shame, for there is no distinction between Jew and Greek, since the same Lord of all is rich to all who call on Him. For everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how can they call on Him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe without hearing about Him? And how can they hear without a preacher? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written: How welcome are the feet of those who announce the gospel of good things! But all did not obey the gospel. For Isaiah says, Lord, who has believed our message? So faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the message about Christ.” (HCSB)
Theme: This passage is the strident call for the Christian to be involved in spreading the message of Christ. If we believe God, then we have to be as passionate about telling others that Christ brings redemption and access to abundant living.
Introduction: I was speaking at an open-air crusade in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Billy Graham was to speak the next night and had arrived a day early. He came incognito and sat on the grass at the rear of the crowd. Because he was wearing a hat and dark glasses, no one recognized him.
Directly in front of him sat an elderly gentleman who seemed to be listening intently to my presentation. When I invited people to come forward as an open sign of commitment, Billy decided to do a little personal evangelism. He tapped the man on the shoulder and asked, “Would you like to accept Christ? I’ll be glad to walk down with you if you want to.” The old man looked him up and down, thought it over for a moment, and then said, “Naw, I think I’ll just wait till the big gun comes tomorrow night.” Billy and I have had several good chuckles over that incident. Unfortunately, it underlines how, in the minds of many people, evangelism is the task of the “Big Guns,” not the “little shots.”
Lieghton Ford, Good News is for Sharing, 1977, David C. Cook Publishing Co., p. 67.
1. The Risk of Celebrating Salvation
a. Some things that appear dangerous are actually much less hazardous than their safer-looking alternative. Commercial airline travel, for instance, is 30 times safer than transportation by car. It may not seem that way to the person who would rather fight rush hour traffic on the ground than ride a solitary Boeing 747 at 35,000 feet. But out of 5 million scheduled commercial flights in 1982, only 5 resulted in fatal accidents. Being carried by tons of metal thrust through the air by huge jet engines is actually safer than being pulled along in an 8-cylinder machine that never leaves the ground.
b. Celebrating Salvation is risky because some might not believe that it is important.
i. You may be seen as a radical: “You mean you really believe that there is a God, that there is a design and consciousness behind all that we see and know?”
c. Celebrating Salvation is risky because others may not believe you.
i. If you really believe what you say that you believe you have to come to terms with the fact that some people, that you may care a great deal about, might never believe you.
2. The Reason for Celebrating Salvation
a. People are the conduits for the message.
i. I have often wondered why it was that God decided that the witness of people would be how He was going to spread His message around the globe.
ii. We know that this was in His mind from the beginning because that is what Jesus was preparing His disciples to do while He as with them here on the earth.
b. Jesus specified this as His main purpose while he was here on the earth. Luke 4:43
c. He spent a lot of time preparing His disciples for this task. – Matthew 10
3. The Realness of Celebrating Salvation
a. More than anything else what is really necessary for someone who is effective in passing on the gospel message is genuineness.
i. A lot of stuff has been said about the current generation.
1. I’ve heard people say that they have lost all sense of the truth. The term that we hear all of the time is that today people see the truth as being completely relative. In other words truth varies depending on the situation and people involved.
2. This semester in school I have been taking a class that highlights the different types of mindsets that are out there with a concentration on what is called the post-modern mindset. While some of the generalities are about the way that this generation thinks may be true, I want to defend the current generation a little bit.
a. They have had all kinds of signals from the time that they were little that are designed to confuse the basis for what they consider truth to be.
i. Creationism vs. Evolution
ii. The way that things are reported in the media. (proliferation of news outlets)
iii. A media that delights in “exposing” people to scrutiny that destroys any belief that there are heroes out there. Think of the superheroes that have fallen in the post modern age. Even super man fell victim to putting his own interests above those of the world.
iv. A culture that sees more divorced couples then married ones shows the current generation that, not even the love of a family is stable anymore.
b. In my conversations with people who are self-proclaimed post-moderns I have come to the conclusion that it is not absolute truth they don’t believe in but instead it is the ability to know who is qualified to give them absolute truth.
c. This is why it is more important then ever for Christians to be people who live out what they say they believe. To be real and genuine.
d. This does not mean that you are perfect. There are two problems with this. 1) It is not true. If it was then you wouldn’t need the redemptive relationship that you have with Jesus. 2) You just come across as phony. Be a real person with all of the foibles that a real person has. This kind of genuineness is what today’s culture is crying out for.
The following article is based on a sermon by missionary Del Tarr who served fourteen years in West Africa with another mission agency. His story points out the price some people pay to sow the seed of the gospel in hard soil.
I was always perplexed by Psalm 126 until I went to the Sahel, that vast stretch of savanna more than four thousand miles wide just under the Sahara Desert. In the Sahel, all the moisture comes in a four month period: May, June, July, and August. After that, not a drop of rain falls for eight months. The ground cracks from dryness, and so do your hands and feet. The winds of the Sahara pick up the dust and throw it thousands of feet into the air. It then comes slowly drifting across West Africa as a fine grit. It gets inside your mouth. It gets inside your watch and stops it. The year’s food, of course, must all be grown in those four months. People grow sorghum or milo in small fields.
October and November…these are beautiful months. The granaries are full — the harvest has come. People sing and dance. They eat two meals a day. The sorghum is ground between two stones to make flour and then a mush with the consistency of yesterday’s Cream of Wheat. The sticky mush is eaten hot; they roll it into little balls between their fingers, drop it into a bit of sauce and then pop it into their mouths. The meal lies heavy on their stomachs so they can sleep.
December comes, and the granaries start to recede. Many families omit the morning meal.
Certainly by January not one family in fifty is still eating two meals a day.
By February, the evening meal diminishes.
The meal shrinks even more during March and children succumb to sickness. You don’t stay well on half a meal a day.
April is the month that haunts my memory. In it you hear the babies crying in the twilight. Most of the days are passed with only an evening cup of gruel.
Then, inevitably, it happens. A six-or seven-year-old boy comes running to his father one day with sudden excitement. “Daddy! Daddy! We’ve got grain!” he shouts. “Son, you know we haven’t had grain for weeks.” “Yes, we have!” the boy insists. “Out in the hut where we keep the goats — there’s a leather sack hanging up on the wall — I reached up and put my hand down in there — Daddy, there’s grain in there! Give it to Mommy so she can make flour, and tonight our tummies can sleep!”
The father stands motionless. “Son, we can’t do that,” he softly explains. “That’s next year’s seed grain. It’s the only thing between us and starvation. We’re waiting for the rains, and then we must use it.” The rains finally arrive in May, and when they do the young boy watches as his father takes the sack from the wall and does the most unreasonable thing imaginable. Instead of feeding his desperately weakened family, he goes to the field and with tears streaming down his face, he takes the precious seed and throws it away. He scatters it in the dirt! Why? Because he believes in the harvest (Italics added).
The seed is his; he owns it. He can do anything with it he wants. The act of sowing it hurts so much that he cries. But as the African pastors say when they preach on Psalm 126, “Brother and sisters, this is God’s law of the harvest. Don’t expect to rejoice later on unless you have been willing to sow in tears.” And I want to ask you: How much would it cost you to sow in tears? I don’t mean just giving God something from your abundance, but finding a way to say, “I believe in the harvest, and therefore I will give what makes no sense. The world would call me unreasonable to do this — but I must sow regardless, in order that I may someday celebrate with songs of joy.”
