Evidence Of Change Fruit
Tom Shrader teaches that believers have a dual calling: to make the invisible God visible through the fruit of the Spirit (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control) and to speak the truth boldly about what Christ has done. Using 2 Corinthians 5:17 and the Beatitudes, he emphasizes that transformation comes from desire rather than duty, and that our changed lives should prompt others to ask what makes us different.
“God didn't take you out of the world, He left you in the world - the whole idea of salt and light implies this context and contact with the substance.”
— Tom Shrader
Series: CBCC August 2012
Recorded: 2012 at Cannon Beach Conference Center
Duration: 42 min
Themes: transformation, fruit, testimony, witness, character, change, evangelism, holiness, new believer, struggling with change, seeking purpose, wanting to witness, christian worker, mentor, feeling called, young adult
Scripture: 2 Corinthians 5:17-18, Matthew 5:3, Matthew 5:14-16, Galatians 5:16-23, 2 Corinthians 5:14, John 3
Theological Themes: sanctification, fruit of spirit, new creation, reconciliation, ministry calling, spiritual fruit, christian witness, gospel transformation
Full Transcript
My grandmother does the same thing. It's really bad when the music guy can beat you up, that's really bad. I know life is tough. It is not easy being me.
Those things we sang—you just sang—let me just remind you what you were saying: He's mighty to save. I was lost, now I'm found. Blind, now I see. I was under wrath, now I'm reconciled. Here's what takes that for me now to a whole new level. It's a simple sentence: God saves sinners.
The Grammar of Grace
I was never much of a student. Mark Twain said he never let school interfere with his education, and that was kind of my motto. I got through college in four terms. I was proud of that: Johnson, Nixon, Ford, and Carter. No doubt. I thought that was pretty good.
But my early training was at the hands of the most misnamed people on the planet. I was trained by the Sisters of Mercy. They were a wicked group, that Sisters of Mercy, and they made us do a bunch of things that I just thought were really silly. I was just thinking of it sitting here the other night—I was thinking I want to communicate this to my grandkids—because they made us do stuff that at the time I thought was really stupid and I thought, "Am I ever going to use this?" One of them was to diagram sentences.
Remember, I don't know that they diagram sentences in school anymore. My assumption is they do. I hope so. We're proud if we can read sentences right now. But "God saves sinners." So let's diagram that sentence. God is the subject, the noun, the actor. Saves is the predicate, the verb, the action. And sinners—if you can say Jesus is Lord and Savior truly—then you're the direct object. Like that's the great—that's the great position in a sentence—the direct object. You don't have a lot of responsibility. You're kind of a victim, really. It either happens to you or it doesn't.
So the actor, the action: God saved sinners. Your contribution? Your sin. Again, going back to what we looked at the very first day, what I bring is my sin. "God and sinner reconciled" presumes a pre-existing hostile condition.
The Ministry of Reconciliation
We've looked at a couple of passages and I want to go right back to them and then build on them here this morning: 2 Corinthians chapter 5 verse 17, and then Matthew chapter 5 verse 3.
2 Corinthians chapter 5 verse 17: "If anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature. The old things have passed away. Now all these things are from God who reconciled us to Himself through Christ." That's the gospel and the salvation that we've talked about.
Now look at verse 18: "He's reconciled us to Himself through Christ and given us the ministry of reconciliation." Let me read you this from the Amplified: "Now all these things are from God who through Jesus Christ reconciled us to Himself, receiving us into favor, brought us into harmony with Himself, and gave us the ministry of reconciliation." Again from the Amplified: "That by word and deed we might aim to bring others into harmony with Him."
He's given us this ministry of reconciliation. What is it? It's through what we say and what we do that God would proclaim that gospel to the world.
Blessed Emptiness
Matthew chapter 5—and again we were there on the very first night—Matthew chapter 5, the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus says, "Blessed are the poor in spirit." Again from The Message: "Blessed are you when you're at the end of your rope. With less of you, there's more of God and more of His rule."
I was lost, now I'm found. Blind, now I see. I brought my lostness and my blindness. He gave me sight. He's the one who redeemed me.
Jesus begins with these blessings that we identify as the Beatitudes, and then He says, "You're the salt of the earth. Verse 14: You're the light of the world. A city set on a hill can't be hidden, nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house." So here's the command: "Let your light shine in such a way that people see your good works and glorify your Father who's in heaven."
From the Amplified: "Let your light shine so before men that they may see your moral excellence and your praiseworthy, noble, good deeds so they see something." And their response is they recognize and honor and praise and glorify your Father who is in heaven.
The Pleas for Help
It begins with my emptiness, my wretchedness. Again, let me read this time from Max Lucado—again, different book—*The Applause of Heaven*: "The first step to joy is a plea for help, an acknowledgment of moral destitution, an admission of inward paucity"—which means smallness, quantity, not much there. "Those who taste God's presence have declared spiritual bankruptcy and are aware of their spiritual crisis. Your cupboards are bare, your pockets are empty, your options are gone. They have long since stopped demanding justice and are pleading for mercy."
Now against that backdrop, He is the God who saves and redeems in spite of us, not because of us. We begin to see ourselves as we really are. Lucado continues: "They don't brag, they beg. They ask God to do for them what they can't do for themselves. They can't do without Him. They've seen how holy God is and how sinful they are, and they've agreed with Jesus' statement: salvation is impossible for man."
Heart Transformation
I want to pick up and use the language that Brian used last night. We want to talk about change and what takes place—the heart of stone replaced by the heart of flesh. And now my life is driven—my Christian life now—more by desire than duty.
Now I come to this personal relationship with Christ, and all of a sudden I begin to say, "Okay, what does that look like? What is that normal Christian life? What are those characteristics?" My heart changes, and what Paul's saying in 2 Corinthians—what I think Jesus is saying to us—is that there's a visible difference that people should see something in me. What is it they see?
Now humanly, I want to race to a list. I want to race to a list, and the list that I want to put down has Bible studies and church and all that stuff in it, and that's fine. I think that Paul's kind of going, "But I went that route once before, and I don't know that..."
I want to get religious again. Paul tells us that we have this thing called the fruit of the Spirit in us. He says I want you to be driven again - let's use Brian's language, I love it - by desire, not by duty. So he doesn't just say put off the old. He says put off the old and what? Put on the new.
We talked about it the first night: Thomas Chalmers' "the expulsive power of a new affection." It's not just that I take something away and stop. No, I have to replace it. You said the world ought to see what we do and hear what we say.
Making the Invisible God Visible
So what we're going to talk about today is we need to make the invisible God visible and then speak the truth boldly, and we can't separate those two things. If I merely make the invisible God visible but don't speak the truth boldly, I'm a coward. If I speak the truth boldly but haven't made the invisible God visible... How do I make that invisible God visible?
Well, Galatians chapter 5 we touched on at the first night. Let's turn there. Oftentimes we would go Galatians chapter 5 through the Spirit. I want to do that, talk about it a bit. But I first want to talk about what He gives us, which is really the fruit of the flesh.
As people look at you, what should they see? I want to focus rather than on a specific action than on an attitude. When He gives us the fruit of the Spirit, He gives us characteristics that should be visible in our life: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. He takes those and He says I want to pit those against what's natural, or the desires of the flesh and the desires of the Spirit.
The Battle Between Flesh and Spirit
"I say walk by the Spirit," Galatians 5:16, "and you will not carry out the desires of the flesh. The desires of the flesh are set against the desires of the Spirit, the Spirit against the flesh. They're in opposition to one another. If you're led by the Spirit, you're not under the law."
These are the deeds of the flesh He says, Galatians 5:19, and they're evident: immorality, impurity. He speaks of immorality in the broadest possible sense of impurity. The idea of impurity has with it the idea of illicit sexual activity. Immorality is used - it means literally unclean, is a medical term. That's kind of oozing wound.
You begin to see sensuality - it's an excess and a lack of restraint of these desires - and idolatry, man-made religion, and sorcery. It's the Greek word from which we get the English word pharmaceutical. It's a mind-altering drug. It's sorcery.
What the Flesh Produces in Relationships
Now He says, now it begins in relationships. What does that produce when I'm walking by the flesh? What do immorality, impurity, sensuality, adultery, sorcery... what do they produce? Enmity, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, disputes, and dissensions.
He says I ought to be able to look at your life, and the way I make the invisible God visible is my life is not marked by this list, but by love, joy, and peace.
I get a call one night from a gal in our church. Her husband - she and her husband battle, fight. He's locked himself in the bedroom with a gun. And she asked me to come over. Okay, and I'm not... I am NOT a brave man. Okay, and I'm not even... those things make me really nervous. But out I go.
So when I get there, the police are there, and I said, "Well, where's the gun? I don't want to get hurt." And they said, "Well, they've got it taken care of," and they're in there, and the police have settled, and they're sitting, and we begin a discussion. She's here, he's there.
She just begins to talk, and she begins to talk about him, and we begin... all of a sudden she's explaining what happens, and he explodes. I'm thinking, "I drifted off. I missed something in this," because I didn't see that. Here's what I learned: they had learned over the years she had a remote control on just what buttons to push in him, and these outbursts of anger and dissension and disputes, arguments.
The Poison of Envy
He goes on. He said it's not just these things. There's factions, verse 21. There's envy. Sandy and I've been staying at a condo down in Coronado. We have 11 religious channels. That's a lot of false doctrine at one time coming at you. That's a lot coming at you, boy. You can get it in two languages.
But I was watching the Catholic channel, and they were interviewing a man who was a priest, and they said to him, "I'll bet you've heard in confession every sin there is." He said, "I've never heard anyone confess envy." All of a sudden that's selfishness: I want what you have, or I just don't want you to have it.
Drunkenness, carousing - all these things I forewarned you about. When people look at you, what do they see? How do I make the invisible God visible?
The Fruit of the Spirit
I think you make the invisible God visible through the list you find in verse 22. It's the fruit of the Spirit. Again, I want to come back to it: move not by duty, but by desire.
A long time ago I wanted to create a bumper sticker that simply said "Fruit Happens." That fruit is there. You never walk by a tree and hear that tree... Fruit is the byproduct of the right earth, right soil, right nutrition. If God is present in my life, the Holy Spirit is producing, and let's just run down the list. This is what people ought to see in you. It's going to manifest itself in a variety of different ways. They ought to see love - that agape, that choice.
The bumper sticker - I'm sure it's been all over, certainly down our way - "Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty." That sounds so stupid to me. It also sounds like life without Christ: random, senseless, trying to bring some meaning into something when there really isn't there.
So you have a whole group of kids who've been raised to be told that, "Listen, there is no God, that all of this kind of evolved, morphed, that we come from nothing, we're going to nothing," and then we try to add some sort of value when we're here.
How by practicing random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty? Our life as followers of Christ is not random and senseless. Webster defines love as a feeling of strong personal attachment or ardent affection. And it indeed is that.
I had a chance a few years ago to be in New England without any agenda and just driving around and ended up at Jonathan Edwards' church. There's this classic portrait of him there. He does not look like the kind of guy you want to hang with to me. Very stoic fellow, hard for me to read. I'd like to read him so I can say to people, "I've been reading Jonathan Edwards." I don't understand a thing he says, but I've sure been reading a lot of him.
I understand one thing Jonathan Edwards says: he defines nothing as what a rock dreams about when it sleeps. That's the one thing I got from Jonathan Edwards. This Puritan, magnificent mind—the Encyclopedia Britannica says the greatest mind America ever produced—writes this amazing book called "Religious Affections." What he's saying is yes, I get the idea of commitment, but there's no way that I can come to this God and not feel this affection.
Love Compels Action
How can you understand that? I was lost, now found. I was blind, now I see. I was under wrath, now reconciled. And He did all that. How can that not move you to love Him and move you to serve Him? Now the motive becomes desire. Second Corinthians 5:14: "The love of Christ compels us"—drives us, moves us.
When I begin to reflect on that, it changes everything. It's not out of duty. It's not trying to pay God back. It is out of desire.
If you go into town today and you have an amazing cheeseburger and you come back, you're talking to people. You're going to say almost naturally, "You know what I did today? I had an amazing meal. You ought to go try it." You see a movie and something moves you about that movie because nobody has to tell you to go out and tell people about it. You just begin to say, "You ought to see this movie."
If the Creator God of the universe has entered into a personal relationship with you and He loves you and He sent His Son to die for you, what should your desire be? It should be to share that. Shouldn't it? Not out of duty, but when we look at it that way, this Christian life becomes very natural as I live in that supernatural love. It's a feeling, it's an action, it's a commitment.
A Personal Story of Love
Going back because we've had I don't know how many people ask us in the last few days: How did Sandy and I meet? It was kind of at church, but it was really when she moved to one of our other campuses. I really knew who she was, but I didn't know much about her. I had talked to the guys at the other campus—one of our younger campuses, meaning not a lot of older people there—and I said, "Who are your key people?" Every time I asked, they said Sandy's name.
I also knew that she had job offers from around the country and she was considering moving. I said, "Have you told her she's important to what we're doing?" They said, "Oh, she knows that." I said, "Trust me, she needs to hear it." They said, "Why don't you call her and tell her?" And so that's how we met.
We called, and that first night I think she assumed it was going to be—and I did too—just a kind of normal conversation that you have. She had talked with a lot of pastoral staff, so she assumed this was just another box to check off. We had this incredible conversation about really everything but church.
She left, and she wasn't gone very long before she started texting me. It was apparently irresistible. I don't know that to be true, but immediately began what you know is text harassment, really. I guess I don't know, I've never heard that term, but that's probably what it was. Sandy was on her way—you were going to Vegas then, weren't you, to run? She was going to Vegas to run, and so we texted back and forth. When she got back, in my awkward way I asked her to dinner.
I had these feelings for her, and then I began to act on them. Then on the 25th of May, we stood up before my daughters and their husbands and two grandsons, and one of my son-in-laws said, "Do you take her? Does she take you?" And there was commitment.
The Order of Love: Feeling, Action, Commitment
What sustained it wasn't that big a deal—it was my pleasure, trust me. What sustains me with Sandy is not just feeling, but it's the commitment. I love her and I declare that, and I'm committed to that.
By the way, if you're ever in a relationship where the feeling is gone, here's what you do: you just flip that order. You commit, you act, and the feelings will come back.
We had a couple in our church, and she told me she was a believer but her husband was not. She told me, "I pray every day that he will die. I see myself as the suffering widow getting all of this sympathy." She said, "What should I do?"
I said, "I really believe that you should pray for him and that you should make him dinner and make love to him." That's kind of my answer to everything, really. It solves every problem I've ever had: food and sex. If you could add TV in there, yeah, it's the trifecta.
When Love Changes Everything
She invited him to church. She invited him to church, and he came the Sunday that I did the introduction to the Gospel of John. They're driving home, and this is her telling the story. It's that nervous time—maybe some of you have been there with your spouse or with a friend where you want to ask but you don't know really what to ask or if you should.
Finally she said, "What do you think?" And he goes, "I really like the church. I didn't like the guy who talked—he thought he was funny, he's not. But you know what? I'll do this. I started that Gospel of John, I'm going to go until he finishes the Gospel of John."
It took us three and a half years to do the Gospel of John, and it was in John chapter—
You must be born again. God saved him and He would look back and say it was through her love. Make love. It always works. Make love. I submit to him. I love. I showed him a commitment not driven by feeling or how he responds. I didn't love him because, or if, or when. I should see in you love.
Joy Based on Spiritual Reality
Then I should see joy. This term appears about 70 times in the New Testament. It's always signified of a feeling of happiness that's based on a spiritual reality. So it's not circumstantial as much as it is relational reality that God is mighty to save, that God has saved, that God has redeemed. It's not based on circumstance we would say, but based on relationship.
I made a note, even drew a picture which is odd, that one of most joyful experiences I ever had was doing a funeral. I love to do a few. I don't like to do weddings, but I love to do funerals. I'm at a funeral and there's the man here in the casket. They're getting ready to lower him down. Here's his daughter and there's the three-week-old granddaughter. In a way, one of the most joyful experiences we can have is when one of our own passes—absent from the body, present with the Lord. God and sinner reconciled.
The Fruit of Peace and Patience
Love, joy, peace. We talked about before not pieces as the world gives, but peace—I give peace. Again that is relational. Patience. It has to do with tolerance and long-suffering and endures injuries inflicted by others and accepts situations that are irritating and painful.
Now here's something that I love. Love, joy, peace, patience are not evidence in your life unless you have demanding circumstances. You don't know if you really love someone until they act in a way that's unlovable. You don't know if you have patience if every light is green.
Wedding Vows and Life's Realities
I love the wedding vows. Love. I promise to love, cherish, rich or poor, sickness, health. Those vows imply and assume difficulty. I don't know how many weddings I've done, but I guarantee you every time we do this, we talk about it before. I always have this little talk I do the night before at the rehearsal where I say, "Listen, it is not too late to cancel this."
Love is blind. Only after you say I do. You ought to look at her right now, and boy, if there's something you don't like, it's probably not going to get better. You need to think this thing through. Because once you say I do, let me tell you something—you aren't the exception. There will be rich and poor and sickness and health.
Defining the Remaining Fruits
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness. It just means common courtesy. Gentleness—it's kindness in action. The idea of goodness, meekness.
Here's one: faithfulness. It means loyal or trustworthy. We had an event and we scheduled at church. I don't know how long ago, and we had a hundred RSVPs. "We will attend. We'll be there. Yes, yes, yes." Sixty-five people showed up. That really hacks me off. It's loyalty and faithfulness in the little things.
A Lesson in Faithfulness
I had a guy who came to me one time and he said, "I want to do what you do." What he meant was speak. He said, "I'd love to do that." I had started this thing called the leadership forum. It was a Saturday morning thing, and I knew the only way I'd get guys out on Saturday was to call it leadership.
He said, "Is there something I can do?" I said, "Yeah, we need somebody to make coffee next Saturday. We start at seven. You need to be there about six-fifteen, get the coffee on." I got there about a quarter to seven. Chairs are out, pipes are on, podium set. Noticeably absent was the fragrant aroma of freshly brewed coffee.
A little before seven this guy comes bouncing in and he said, "Hey, how you doing?" I said, "I'm doing great except I don't have any coffee. We don't have any coffee. No one here has coffee." He said, "Yeah, I know. I just didn't get here."
He said, "Can we talk afterwards because I want to do what you're doing?" I moved periodically in the flesh. This was one of those moments. I said, "How, if I can't trust you with coffee, how is God ever going to trust you with someone's soul?" Stuck it right to him.
Teaching Young Men Faithfulness
Faithfulness. We don't think much about that. When Brian's talking about dealing with young men, one of the things that I've learned is that you can't trust people with coffee. When Brian's talking about dealing with young men, one of the things we have to teach him is to be on time. They don't even understand that.
Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. How do I make the invisible God visible? People begin to see that in your life. They see you in circumstances where they put themselves, they interject, and they say, "If I was there, I could never do that. How do you love that person? How do you find joy in the midst of that? We were both in the same meeting. We were both just released from our positions, and you seem to have a calmness about that."
Making the Invisible God Visible
It's to make the invisible God visible. But that's phase one.
Phase two is to speak the truth boldly. Paul says, "I'm not ashamed of the gospel." Been beaten for it, in prison for it. "I'm not ashamed of it because it's the power of salvation." It takes death and brings life and darkness and brings light and danger and brings protection. I was alienated from God. Now I'm reconciled to Him. I'm intimate with Him, and I want to just show you this transformed life. But I want to speak that truth boldly.
"Let them see your good works and glorify your Father's in heaven." How are they going to glorify your Father's in heaven? They won't do it unless you point them there. Because what they're going to say is, "Boy, that's an incredible personality you have. I don't know how you endure that. You are really something." "No, no, no. It's not me. It's Christ in me." You've got to speak the truth.
Three Examples Coming
Boy, I want to give you three examples of this. Two are from my own life. One where I made the invisible God visible but failed to speak the truth boldly. The other where I spoke the truth very boldly but had not yet made the invisible God visible. Not a friend who was thinking about moving down from Iowa. We've gone to school together.
The Third Denial
Let me share a story with you. I had a friend from grade school and high school who came to visit. He stayed with us for about a week, and on the last night he said, "Let's go out to dinner."
So we're at dinner, and when the salad comes, here's what he said: "There's something different about you." I said to him, "I've lost a little weight." Which makes you wonder how fat was I?
Then the main course comes and he says, "There's something different about you." I said, "I'm a little older, a little grayer, and a little more wrinkled."
The third opportunity came with dessert. He said, "There's something different about you." I looked him right in the eye and I said, "Jim, living in Arizona really agrees with me." I could hear over my shoulder as I denied what Christ had done for the third time.
I had made the invisible God visible. He was there. He was right. He said something's different. What is it? Is it a geographical difference, a hair difference, a weight difference? What's different about you? He had seen as he watched me with Susan, watched me with the girls, watched our family. He's saying, "I've known you. I have a lot of history with this guy." As I said, we did kindergarten together. The first beer I ever drank in my life was with this guy. We knew each other well. We did a lot of stuff. "You're something that's not you. What is it?"
I had made the invisible God visible, but I hadn't spoken the truth boldly.
Declaring Truth Without Living It
Let me put it the other way. God saved me in March of 1980. In July of 1980, I always liked horse racing. There's something about it. I love the excitement of it, and I'm a $2 bettor or whatever. But I just loved it, and I loved all that went with it.
So we're in Phoenix, and about an hour and a half north there's a little town called Prescott. In the summer the horses ran in Prescott, and I'm looking in the paper. It's Thursday and Friday, quarter hot dogs and nickel beer. I'm kind of a health food nut, so that's going to attract me up there.
I said to one of the guys I work with, "Let's go up to Prescott Downs, and we'll get our administrative assistant. We got some work to do. She can drive us up." So I spent the entire day at the track with quarter hot dogs and nickel beer. We stopped to get some more beer. We come right to town. I could take you to the place. It's the freeway at Dunlap. He was sitting in the front, administrative assistant driving, and I said to him, "Jesus Christ has changed my life." He looked back, and he said, "You look like the same old drunk to me."
I had not made the invisible God visible, but boy, had I declared the truth boldly.
By the way, that was an amazing moment for me. I'd been a believer for about three or four months, and I called my mentor. I said to him, "I'm devastated here. I got back to the office and I just cried in the car." When I called him the next day, I said, "I'm a mess here." He said, "Tell me what it is," and I told him. He said, "This is really an important point for you, because you got to figure out if you're a hypocrite or if you're a sinner saved by grace."
The Witness of Suffering
I'll give you a third example. There's a guy I worked with, and he went through a whole lot of stuff in his life: financial, relational. Now cancer. Now dying. A friend of ours came back from visiting him, and I said to him, "I don't know how you do this." He said, "It's Jesus."
It's to make the invisible God visible and to speak the truth boldly. We would use words like witness, evangelize. You need to understand that God didn't take you out of the world. He left you in the world. The whole idea of salt and light implies this contact with the substance.
Christian As Noun, Not Adjective
Here's one of the things that I've observed. As I said, I came from Catholic grade school, high school, college. All this stuff was brand new to me. I'm kind of figuring it out as I'm going. I hadn't been a Christian very long when I realized that we had turned that word "Christian" into an adjective instead of a noun.
So we had Christian music, Christian comics, Christian TV, Christian radio. A Christian is one who's a follower of Christ, a little Christ, Christ-like. You need to understand, I assume you do, that when you say to people, "I'm going to Cannon Beach," they say, "Where are you going?" "To Cannon Beach." "Down to the Stephanie Inn?" "No, going to the Christian Conference Center." "What are you going to do there?" "Well, family's there. It's cool time. We've got this great teacher and then breakfast at night."
Now don't start backing and forth because I'm not up for him. I'm too tired. We've got this great teaching. "What's it teach you about?" "What? We teach you how to live. What the Bible..." The minute you say that, they're looking at you. I had a friend, and these are all so corny, but he said, "You need to understand, you may be the only Bible some people ever read."
Now that doesn't alleviate them from the responsibility to respond, but when they look at you... When you walk... We were walking down to Bill's to get a burger yesterday, and there were a couple of you walking back with your name tags on. That's like a target walking through town because now they're looking at you and they're going, "Okay, I want to see something different about them."
Witnessing Is Inevitable
This whole idea of witnessing is big. It's not optional. It's not mandatory. It's inevitable. You are—you may stink at it, well, you're a witness. You may be a very good one.
Edward Gibbon in his work "The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire" speaks about the spread of Christianity. He offers this insight: "It became the most sacred duty of a new convert to diffuse among his friends and neighbors the blessing he had received." In other words, they began to live this, and their desire, duty, responsibility inevitably was to say, "Hey, there's something different about you. What is it?"
So there's that old saying: "Preach the gospel, and if you must, use words." And if you must use words, well, you have to use words.
You go. People are going to say there's something different about you here. There's something different about you—what is it? Jesus. You have to say it. You have to make the invisible God visible and speak the truth boldly. Here's who I was, here's who I am, here's what He did.
One of the early historians of the church writes, "The feat of Christianity was accomplished"—meaning the expansion—"by means of informal missionaries." It was men and women like you, like us, who just lived their life in such a way that people saw the difference. We declare the truth.
One of the things I'll talk about either Thursday or Friday is that my faith can't be segregated from the rest of my life, but has to be integrated all through my life. I make the invisible God visible and then I speak the truth boldly.
Time for Self-Reflection
So it's time to ask you as you reflect in your own life—I'm not going to judge you, you look at your own life—do people see that in you? When people look at you, if we were to start to use words to describe what they see in you, would they use words like love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control?
I try to think about why would I not want to share this faith. There was a movie years ago—remember the movie called The Sixth Sense with the little boy—and what did he say? "I see dead people." If you love Jesus, as you look at the world around you, you should say, "I see dead people."
Here's a great exercise to do. It sounds judgmental; I don't mean it this way. Walk through the office and there's cubes in offices there, and as you go through, in your own mind with the best of your ability, try to determine if that person in that cube, in that office, is saved. So you're just walking through: no, no, yes, no, no. This is me at work, at church: no, no, no, no, no, no, yeah, no, no, yes.
Now you've got to ask yourself, because I'm going to guess at the end of this stroll you're going to have a whole bunch of no's. You've got to ask yourself: so here's this person who doesn't know Christ, separated from Him. Why would you not be moved to share that reality with them? Don't care? Afraid?
Out of Desire, Not Duty
Again, not out of duty. I want to stay away from that. I don't like duty—out of desire. John the Baptist: "Jesus must increase, I must decrease. Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world"—sin of the world.
Your life, and I mean this in a normal way, just you living life, should be the process of making the invisible God visible all day, every day. As the fruit of the Spirit emerges through you, there should be a steady stream of people in your life who are saying, "There's something different about you. What is it?" Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control.
Understanding that the problem in the world is spiritual, so the answer is spiritual. Problem's not economic. Problem is in brilliance. We look at the shooter in Denver—apparently this kid was a really bright kid. I need to know Christ. I need to know Christ. I need to know Him in a deep, personal way.
Two Simple Points
I made just a couple of notes and they're really simple. Number one: man can't change himself. You can try—it's religion—but you must be born again. See, the theme was lost, now found; was blind, now see; under wrath, reconciled. He is mighty to save. He's mighty to save, and He's the only one who can save. He's the only one who can redeem. He's the only one who can put me back together again.
The second point I made is that salvation is through Christ and Christ alone. "I am the way, the truth, the life. No one comes to the Father but through Me." And when God saves, He's decided to save through people.
One of the things that I have—I have a whole bunch of cards. I'm an old Rockford Files guy; I love Rockford Files. And one of the things I love about Jimmy is that he had that little thing in his car where he could make his calling cards. I have a lot of those, so I have Tom Schrader pastor, Tom Schrader sellable real estate cards, Tom Schrader does Bible studies, Tom Schrader does different things. It gets me into the pastor's club, which I enjoy—it's an interesting group of people.
No Distinction Between Clergy and Laity
One of the things that I fear, and I see it in our church, is that we create this artificial distinction between the clergy and the laity, rather than to say no, God's got us all in His kingdom at different places, and this is not more important than others. I run into guys all the time—God will save them, they're in business—and they'll say, "I want to get out of this and into full-time ministry." And what's the answer to that? You are in full-time ministry.
And your full-time ministry, among other things, is to make the invisible God visible and then to speak the truth boldly.
A Natural Flow from Desire
Let me come back to one other thing. This flows from desire, hopefully not from duty, and it becomes the natural, just a natural part of my life. I don't even realize it. As people begin to look at you living life, they see something distinct and different in you. You've made the invisible God visible. Now I speak the truth boldly. It's not me, but it's Christ in me.
Let me pray, and then Mila, you can come and close us.
Pray Father, thank You. Father, thank You for the amazing truths that we are new creatures, that You didn't just desire to get us to heaven, but You use us here, giving us a ministry of reconciliation. And that is through what we say and what we do that people would see You, be drawn to You. God, we give You all the glory. We say it again: we were lost, now found; we were blind, now see; we were under wrath, but now reconciled, because You saved us. You, God, save sinners. Father, thank You for that amazing truth. We love You, we worship You, we praise You. We do that in Christ's name and in His alone. Amen.