Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Eric Alexander: We are this morning coming to the third of a series of three sermons on the general theme, life in the Spirit, or as Paul describes it in Romans chapter 8, verse 5, walking according to the Spirit or living in accordance with the Spirit. We began three weeks ago with the theme worshipping in the Spirit. Our second study was on the theme of walking in the Spirit. And this morning, we turn to the theme of witnessing in the Spirit.

I suggested on the first Sunday that what we are really doing on these three occasions is trying to understand together the way the Spirit-filled life is lived in relation to three areas. First, in relation to God in worship. Secondly, in relation to ourselves in our daily walk as Christians. And thirdly, in relation to the world around us in witness.

The need for this third theme is probably self-evident in our own generation, partly because of the enormous need of the world around us in its multiplied sickness and confusion, and partly because of the appalling ineffectiveness of the Christian church in our day and in the contemporary world. You just need to read some of the reports of the General Assembly which has recently finished to discover that even there, there is a measure of concern being sounded at the lack of impact that the Christian church is making upon the modern world and upon modern society.

There is a statistic that has been floating around, the validity of which I am unable to confirm, but saying that the day is soon going to come in this country when there will be as many committed Muslims as committed evangelical Christians. Certainly, there can be no question that the way the vast majority of people in the modern world view the Christian church in Scotland this morning is as a gross irrelevance to everything that really matters in life.

It is very easy for us to delude ourselves in a large congregation like this into thinking that something else is the truth, but that is the fact. We are seeing a generation growing up in our own country who, by and large, are untouched by Holy Scripture, unreached by Christian people who have biblical convictions, and for whom the future must inevitably be filled with foreboding so far as we are concerned from the vantage point of our conviction.

So the need for this theme is self-evident to anyone whose eyes are open in the world in which we live: witnessing in the power of the Holy Spirit. But, of course, the main reason that we need to come to consider this theme is that our Lord Jesus Christ himself, before he ascended, when he was promising and describing the gift of the Holy Spirit to his church, said, "You shall receive the Holy Spirit and you shall be witnesses unto me."

The coming of the Holy Spirit upon them, therefore, was with a view to equipping and enabling the church to bear witness to Christ in the world. The Holy Spirit will come upon you and you shall be witnesses unto me. That is, the power of the Holy Spirit is promised by Jesus in order to enable his people to witness for him in the world in expanding circles, beginning where you are in Jerusalem, in Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth. The Holy Spirit is given in power in order that we might be empowered to witness to him.

The relevance of that is particular for us as a congregation in these days as we are beginning to go out into our newly extended parish and to the repopulated area of our own parish where we are soon going to be faced with something like 1,200 to 1,500 homes on our doorstep here in the center of Glasgow. So I want to try to learn with you in these moments this morning from Paul's example, as he describes it to us here, as to what Spirit-inspired and Spirit-empowered witness and evangelism really is.

"When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony of God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and in fear and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power so that your faith should not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power."

Now, there are three areas that we need to focus upon, with which Paul deals in that passage. They are, first of all, the theme of Paul's witness. Secondly, the motive of Paul's witness. And thirdly, the dynamic of Paul's witness. The theme of Paul's witness is the Gospel of God. The motive of Paul's witness is the glory of God. And the dynamic of Paul's witness is the Spirit of God. It is in these three areas that I want us to seek to focus our thinking and seek God's grace that we may learn from him.

First, the theme of Paul's witness, which is the Gospel of God. Now, you can apply all of this to our personal witnessing, which, of course, is where all Christian witness begins. It is really quite pointless for us to be thinking about witness and evangelism in terms of organizing other people to do that if we are not ourselves living witnesses day by day where God has set us down. So the primary area where we need to apply this truth is to our own personal witness to other people.

Now, the most obvious thing about Paul's theme is that there was nothing vague about it. As he bore testimony and witnessed to the grace of God, there was nothing vague about his message. One of the basic problems from which the contemporary church most acutely suffers is this problem of vagueness about precisely what the message God has committed to us really is.

So many of us find it possible to talk to other people about the church, or about religion, or about the state of things socially and so on in the world today and the way the Christian church relates to that and the Christian gospel too. But as to the essence of the proclamation of what the gospel is, it is precisely here that we are vague. And it was precisely here that the apostle is crystal clear.

Notice the two main features of it. One, it came from God. Now, if you look carefully at verse 1 with me, and this is the importance of having your Bible before you, when I came to you, brothers, Chapter 2 verse 1 of 1 Corinthians. "When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony of God."

Now, if you have an NIV, you will notice it says, "I proclaimed to you the testimony about God." I think that the NIV is not the most helpful translation to us here, although I love it and use it as you will realize. But I think that is an interpretation rather than a translation. Because what Paul is simply saying is this: "I proclaimed to you the testimony of God."

Now, I think that the basic meaning and the most obvious meaning of that is this: that the message that Paul proclaimed, for which he eschewed eloquence and superior wisdom, was the testimony that came from the lips of God about Jesus. That is, God testified to the truth of this message as he revealed it to the apostles.

So the gospel is the Gospel of God primarily because God revealed it and declared it, and it bears his own testimony as to its truth. Now, the importance of that for Paul is paramount. It is that the Christian message is not just a piece of human wisdom or philosophy. He has dealt with that already and exposed it in all its futility in chapter 1 in the passage where we began to read, verse 17.

"Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power." Because, he says, the message of the cross is not human wisdom. It is divine wisdom. It is not human in its origin. He has not thought it up. It is not simply the apostle's view of things or his opinion or his line. It is God's revelation given to him that he might proclaim it. That's the sense in which Paul is a herald, you see. He is a herald of what God has given to him.

And the gospel is, in that sense, the Gospel of God. It is contrasted with human wisdom in 1 Corinthians 1, verse 19. "It is written," says Paul, "I will destroy the wisdom of the wise; the intelligence of the intelligent I will frustrate." "Where is the wise man?" Paul challenges them about the futility of human wisdom. Where has it got you? "Where is the scholar?" he says. "Where is the philosopher of this age?"

Now, let's apply that to our own time. There are so many people, multitudes of people in our generation this morning, and their religion is that they have confidence in human wisdom, in human discovery, in man's scientific ability and technological capacity. And that's where their confidence lies today. So we open our papers concerned to know what the latest news is about what man is doing.

And the apostle says, "Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age?" He might well have asked it in contemporary Greece. In that desperately sick, ailing society, the philosophers and the scholars and the wise men had left that generation in utter despair.

And the philosophers and the scholars and the technicians and the scientists in our generation for whom we thank God, because God has given them skill and wisdom, but my dear friends, when we trust and rely in them, we are left in precisely the same ancient despair of the declining world into which the apostle preached.

Because if you think of it, we have done so much in our modern generation, and we are so proud of ourselves having been able to achieve so much technologically. We have controlled all kinds of things. We have controlled man's journey to the moon and brought him back again to Earth. We have probed into areas of outer space that nobody has ever begun to imagine possible until our generation. But I tell you the one thing that we cannot control and it exercises the minds and consciences of people all over the world today: we cannot control human behavior here on Earth.

And the wise men of our own generation find themselves demented and distracted because that is the ultimate uncontrollable factor. And so the apostle makes it very clear: the gospel is devised and planned by God. It is a gospel which is achieved and accomplished by God. It is a gospel which is revealed and disclosed by God. And the apostle counts it the greatest privilege that he has ever known in all of his life to proclaim and bear testimony to it.

Because it comes from God. Notice the second thing. The apostle says it is not only a message about God, it is a message concerning Christ. And that is the heart and soul of the apostle's message that he has come to bring to them. Notice how he focuses down upon it. "I resolved," Chapter 2, verse 2, "to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified."

So the content of the message, what he bears witness to, is not a theory or a philosophy or a theology even. What he bears witness to is Jesus. And when he came into Corinth, this was what was burning in his heart. It was that he wanted to speak to them of Jesus. Now, I don't think you can divorce that from what made the apostle an evangelist primarily, and that is that on the Damascus Road, what happened to that man was not that he suddenly became persuaded of a philosophy.

Nor that he joined himself to the Christian church, nor anything else of that order. What happened to him was that the living reality of the Lord Jesus Christ broke in upon his life. And it was that that sent him out into the ancient world, his heart aflame with Jesus. My dear friends, that is the theme of the gospel. It is a person, not a philosophy. It is Christ, not the church, which is the basic theme of the gospel.

And it is more accurately still, says Paul, Christ and him crucified. So that the emphasis that he lays when he bears testimony to the gospel is not upon Jesus' peerless teaching, not upon his perfect life and example, not upon his mighty signs and wonders, but upon his dying the death of a condemned criminal on the cross, bearing the judgment of God and dying in your place.

That's where the gospel focuses. It focuses upon a Christ who goes to the very roots of the human problem. Now, this is why the philosophers and the wise men of every generation are in this realm—and you will notice what I am saying—in this realm, irrelevant. Because they cannot touch the deepest need of the human heart. And the only message, the only reality that can touch it is Christ and him crucified.

It is Jesus by his death, where he dealt with sin, who is the hope of lost mankind in every generation. Now, it was that message which gave birth to the church in Corinth and invaded the sick society of ancient Greece with healing and transforming power. So much so that Paul is able to say a chapter or two ahead in 1 Corinthians, in chapter 6, when he is describing what happened to some of them. Do you realize what happened there in ancient Greece?

He says, "Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom of God?" 1 Corinthians 6:9. "Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God." And then this: "And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God."

He is saying Christ and him crucified is the key to what you, my brothers and sisters at Corinth, are this morning. And my dear friends, the only message, the only gospel which has power to change a sick, sick world and society is Christ and him crucified. And that's what God, by his Holy Spirit, empowers us to take out and bear witness to in the modern world. The theme of Paul's witness is the Gospel of God.

Secondly, the motive of Paul's witness is the glory of God. There is a sense in which this whole section of 1 Corinthians is really a sermon on the text Paul quotes at the end of chapter 1 in verse 31 from Jeremiah 9:24. "Let him who boasts," or "Let him who glories," as the Authorized Version puts it, "glory in the Lord."

Now, there is a profound sense in which you can trace throughout this section of 1 Corinthians, Paul is absorbed by this theme: "Let him who glories, glory in the Lord." And he has a jealous zeal that nothing may rob God of his glory in his message, in his ministry, in his manner, in any area of his life. And that, of course, affects the method and manner of Paul's witness.

And that's why he disclaims in 1 Corinthians 2, at the beginning, any pretense at great oratory or clever argument or conscious display of human wisdom. Look at chapter 1, verse 17. "For Christ did not send me to baptize, but to preach the gospel—not with words of human wisdom, lest the cross of Christ be emptied of its power." Chapter 1, verse 27: "But God chose the foolish things of the world to shame the wise; God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong. He chose the lowly things of this world and the despised things—and the things that are not—to nullify the things that are."

Why? Verse 29: "So that no one may boast before him." Or the AV again: "So that no flesh should glory before God." Listen to these words of John Stott. "Perhaps there is no passage of scripture that deals more painful or more powerful blows at man's pride than this. For self-glorification, the desire to glorify ourselves, our wisdom and our power, is deeply ingrained in fallen human nature. Self-glorification dogs our footsteps, yes, as we seek our own salvation, and then as we go out to seek the salvation of others." Paul says, "Let no flesh glory in his presence."

Now, the reason that the glory of God is the ultimate motive of all evangelism, of all true witness, is that it was for the glory of God that Jesus died on the cross. His ultimate motive in his death was what he expressed on the last night of his life. "Father, glorify your name. The hour has come, glorify your name."

And it was because our Lord Jesus Christ had a burning zeal for the glory of God that he bore the sin of men and sent his church out to bear witness to the gospel. How does this work out in our motivation to evangelism? Now, there are many motives for evangelism, you know. There is the motive of the need of people, and God means us to see that in the modern world in our day. You need to be blind not to see it.

There is the motive of Christ's commission: "Go into all the world and preach the gospel." Now, these are adequate motives in their place, but they are not, in another sense, adequate to understand the real motivation of evangelism. Because the real motivation of evangelism lies in a heart that has a zeal and jealousy for the glory of God.

And whenever God is robbed of his glory in the life of any man, that will be my ultimate motive to seek his salvation. And where there are whole areas of the world that God is robbed of his glory, that's the church's ultimate motive for evangelism. And in a sense, nothing else will do than that.

I was reading the other day part of Henry Martyn's life. You know that great and amazing man who was such a scholar in Cambridge, a man of astonishing ability, who went out to Persia as a missionary, died as a young man. There are some amazing passages in Henry Martyn's life story of how he went out and saw people bowing before images, something that many of us may have seen in other parts of the world this morning.

And then he saw some drawings that had been made in a Muslim town of Jesus bowing before Muhammad. And Martyn went away, and someone found him with his head bowed to the ground and his eyes weeping copious tears. And when they said to him, "What is wrong?" he said, "I could not go on living if my savior were thus to be dishonored."

My dear friends, I am bound to confess to you that I don't know that zeal for the glory of God as Henry Martyn knew it, but I long to. And I think you need to long to as well if you don't know it this morning. You remember how Paul, when he went to Athens, saw something of the same kind, and we read a very significant phrase that he was, in the translations have it an anguish, but the word is a paroxysm. I understand it's the original word that was used for a heart attack.

And what it means is that Paul found like a searing iron something going through his soul because they bowed down to images and did not know God. Do you know that cry of Jesus in John 17 where, out of the depths, he cries to his Father, "Oh, righteous Father, the world has not known you"? My dear friends, most of us can walk up and down Buchanan Street and Sauchiehall Street and through the town, and we live in a world that does not know God, but it doesn't do that to us, does it?

The theme of Paul's witness is the Gospel of God. The motive of Paul's witness is the glory of God. The dynamic of Paul's witness is the Spirit of God. Let me say a little to you about this in verse 4: "My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power."

Now, since that is what is absent from so much of our modern Christian life and witness, we need to look at it before we close this morning. It was clearly Paul's experience again and again, particularly perhaps here in Greece. Do you remember how he came to the Thessalonians in Northern Greece? Corinth is in Southern Greece. And he was at Thessalonica first of all, and he says, writing to them in 1 Thessalonians 1, "Brothers loved by God, we know that he has chosen you because our gospel came to you not simply with words, but also with power, with the Holy Spirit and with deep conviction."

Now, it is this that we need to face in these days, my dear friends. We have a great deal of the gospel coming in word to people. But the thing that really matters is, is the gospel coming to men and women through me personally and through us communally with power? See, there are many things that man left to himself can do. Christian man, I mean, Christian witnesses, people who are seeking to persuade others. There are many things we can do.

We can persuade people intellectually. Quite possible to do that if you're clever enough. You can win a Christian argument with somebody and make an intellectual conquest. We can move people emotionally. It's not really too difficult to do that if you are that kind of person and these are your gifts. There are many people who may be deeply moved emotionally.

But what I want to say to you this morning—and oh, may God burn it into our hearts—only the Holy Spirit of God can regenerate men and women spiritually. Only God himself, by his Spirit, can raise us up from spiritual death into spiritual life. Only God can create a life-transforming, permanent work of grace in the lives of men and women like ourselves.

And that is why we need to be sent to him, to say to him, "Lord, we have been so foolish and misled. We have believed that power belongs in some sense to men, but now we have discovered: power belongs unto the Lord." And that may be why Paul says that God is pleased to use the weak things of this world. Many people have said to me, going out on this parish visitation and evangelism, "We feel so weak, ill-equipped, inadequate," and so on.

That's probably why God is pleased to use the weak things of the world and the things that are not and the things that men despise, in order that the power may be of God and not of man. Now, you notice the effectiveness of that evangelism in Corinth is that their faith rested, verse 5, not on men's wisdom, but on God's power.

I am bound to say to you that we know so little of the power of God in our generation, in the church of God. And that's why we need to ask: what conclusion do we draw? If power belongs unto the Lord, if the church of Jesus Christ is weak and inadequate and in so many cases to the eyes of people of our time irrelevant, what do we need?

Well, my dear brothers and sisters, it seems to me just a piece of pure logic that if power belongs to God, if this work is God's work and not ours, the primary evangelistic method—what do you think the primary evangelistic method is? I tell you: it's prayer. And the real sickness of the church in the modern world, the evangelical church, I mean, is that prayer is supplemental when it needs to be fundamental. That's where our witness will be changed. Let's pray together.

Father, there is probably not one of us here this morning who didn't know that in our heads. But oh, we long that you would persuade us of it in our hearts and make us men and women who have begun to wait on the Lord. We ask it for your name's sake and for the world's sake. Amen.

Mark Daniels: You're listening to Hear the Word of God with the Reverend Eric Alexander, a minister in the Church of Scotland for over 50 years. To access more Bible teaching from Reverend Alexander, visit hearthewordofgod.org where your generous contribution will help us sustain and grow this ministry. That's hearthewordofgod.org. You could choose instead to mail a check to this address: 600 Eden Road, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, 17601. Or call 1-800-488-1888. This program is a presentation of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. I'm Mark Daniels. Thank you for listening. Please join us again next time for Eric Alexander and Hear the Word of God.