Worship evangelism

Romans 12: 1 – 13
Rev. Peter R Green, Sunday morning, 10 Jun, 2007

IN THE 1970s, revival broke out among students at a Catholic University in the US. Interestingly, many who were touched by the revival confessed that this was when they were converted.

There was not a lot of evangelistic preaching. Catholics are generally not particularly good at that
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The conversions came out of worship, as people joined with their friends, heard Jesus glorified and saw their genuineness.

I believe that we do need evangelistic preaching. We need the truth of salvation through faith in Jesus very clearly declared. But when that is combined with genuine, devoted worship, the Spirit moves in power among the people.

Jesus came into Galilee proclaiming,

God’s kingdom is near: repent and believe the good news!

He backed this up with signs and wonders which made it clear that God was with him.

But just now we will focus on how we can make God’s love, God’s power, God’s kingdom rule, clear to a needy world.

We begin with worship. True worship and effective evangelism go together.

Worship evangelism is responsive

Worship is for God. It is not a 'me’ thing. It is response to who God is and what he has done.

The famous command to Israel, the Shema, says.

Hear, O Israel! The Lord your God, the Lord is one! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul and with all your strength.

It doesn’t mention worship, but it is about worship. Worship is a word which sums up this command.

We also read from Romans 12:

I plead with you, brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as living sacrifices, holy and acceptable to God, which is your rational worship.

Real worship is responsive to God.

For the Israelites, it was a response to God’s majestic Oneness. There was no running around appeasing hundreds of gods and demigods and spirits. They had one true God, who commanded them to love him with their entire being.

For us Christians, there is even more: we love God because of his great mercies to us.

Did you know that the most effective evangelists are new Christians? Their response to God is fresh. They know with great clarity what he has done for them. As they respond to him, they also want to share him with others.

The next best group of evangelists are people who have had some recent and refreshing experience of God.

I worked with a woman who was pretty glum. She got on with life, she plodded from one thing to another. She was a Christian, but that had little impact on people,

Then she discovered the Holy Spirit. The touch of the Spirit had such an impact on her life that one person asked me, “What kind of happy pills is she taking?” People wanted to hear what Fay had to say, because they saw something had changed.

She responded to God’s love and goodness, and it just bubbled out.

Similarly, our youth group went to Beth Shan in 1971, and the Spirit touched many of us. They were frighteningly fundamentalist. But the Spirit did his work, and the young people who had been aloof all weekend ran and cried out to meet God through Jesus Christ.

When God’s people respond to God, other people want to respond, too.

I sometimes go to the Petersham Assemblies of God church when I am on holidays. One thing I absolutely love is how people respond to Christ when the call is made. All through the service they expect response, and it touches people‘s hearts.

Response to God doesn’t mean being upbeat all the time. Sometimes it is very joyful; sometimes it is with tears of repentance. All the time it is engagement with the God who has come to rule.

Worship evangelism is relational.

That means that it is more to do with entering a relationship with God and with other people than it is about agreeing to propositions about God.

The ancient Hebrew Shema declares that God is One, therefore we are to love him with all we have. Romans 12 says that God has acted with great mercy towards us, therefore we must give ourselves to him unconditionally.

Love is about giving our self, isn’t it?

Here’s an example. Soon after my father died, I had a day which reminded me very much of him, and I was feeling miserable. Of course, that is the kind of day when someone will certainly come and ask you, “How are you really getting on?” And that happened.

I nearly burst into tears on the spot — as near as I manage to get, anyway.

The girl who asked me is not particularly demonstrative. She’s kind and friendly, but shies away from public displays of affection. She grabbed me and hugged me tightly until I was OK, and said some wise things about grief.

That was a loving act, because she gave herself to me in order to meet my need. It sticks strongly in my memories.

We all resist self–giving.

But the essence of a right relationship with God, the essence of loving God, is giving ourselves to him. After all, didn’t God give himself to us in Jesus?

There are many possible reasons for entering a relationship with God.

The ancient Jews heard that God is one. They knew that it meant he is in full charge. It was a declaration of God’s sovereignty.

Christians always respond to God for different reasons. The Calvinists focus on his sovereignty. The Pentecostalists focus on his awsome presence. The Catholics worship with a sense of his beauty, while the more liberal Christians look mainly at his love. We Baptists enjoy God’s communication with us, and focus strongly on the Word.

We even get wary of what others focus on.

But what we really need is all of those things brought together. What we need is to see God in his sovereignty and in his love, in his beauty and in his awesomeness, in his communication with us and in his oneness.

And our appropriate response is love.

John says,

^{1 John 4:19} We love, because he first loved us.

You might notice that John doesn’t merely say, “We love God.” He says that we love. In fact he goes on to declare that you can’t love God on the one hand and not love your fellow humans on the other.

Paul says,

14 For Christ’s love compels us, because we are convinced that one died for all, and therefore all died. ¹⁵ And he died for all, that those who live should no longer live for themselves but for him who died for them and was raised again.

Our evangelism arises from the very same relational basis — love from God and love for God, mediated through Jesus our Lord.

When I did my evangelism course at College, there was an emphasis on the duty of evangelism, on setting a stark choice before people: Jesus or the devil, heaven or hell.

That is true, but I thought it was one–sided.

I did my placement at the Assemblies of God Church in Petersham, and their youth pastor at that time, Barry Saar, told me about their philosophy. He agreed that heaven, hell, Jesus and devil are all part of the gospel message, but he said, “If you convert someone through fear, conversion will relieve his fear. Once he is no longer afraid, he will see no further use for the gospel, and will drift away. But if you love him into the Kingdom, he will stay forever, because we all need love.”

Wise words!

Worship evangelism is rational

It is vital for us to understand this fact.

Paul says that we should present our bodies as living sacrifices, because this is our rational worship, The Greek word is logiki, and we get our term, logical from the same root.

In Deuteronomy, we hear we are to love God with all our heart, soul and strength. Jesus adds that we are to do it with all our mind as well.

His restatement isn’t a contradiction, because the Hebrew understanding of heart and soul included our idea of mind. Moses says to Israel, in effect, “You shall love the Lord your God with your entire will, you shall love the Lord your God with everything your life is about, and you shall love him with as much energy and conviction as you can muster.”

But Greeks thought of “soul” in a very different way. It was your psyche, your emotional and spiritual aspect. So Jesus is pulling the idea back to the Hebrew idea, which includes your mind, your intellect, your rational capacity.

Jesus makes sure that the people around him would understand. Incidentally, that suggests that Jesus probably sometimes spoke Greek.

God wants our rational worship. He wants our minds engaged.

I have been reading a lot of criticism of Christianity lately, and one consistent strand is that Christianity is irrational, that you are expected to believe things that are illogical and unprovable, and that you have to leave your brain outside if you want to be in the church.

Some Christians certainly don’t help much!

The world needs sound arguments for the gospel, not mere emotional appeals. This is where propositions find a place: let’s state clearly and concisely what it means to be a Christian believer. Let’s also do the hard work to discard worthless Christian fads and to boldly stand for truth.

Have you read about Ken Ham's new Creation Museum? It depicts dinosaurs and humans together. One article about it said that this is what the Old Testament teaches.

Where does Genesis even hint at dinosaurs? If anyone tells you you have to believe that the world was created in 404BC and that dinosaurs played with the first humans, that person is a heretic. Heretics add something to the gospel that isn’t there, and try to make people depend on it for their salvation. Jesus — Jesus alone — is the Saviour. Anything added to that message takes away from it!

There are many valid Christian opinions about Genesis. There are many valid Christian opinions about the return of Jesus. We might think that one or other is more Biblical, but we can’t make it an article of faith that they must.

Some of us will always be more theoretical and ideas–focused than others are. But our aim has to be to worship rationally and to evangelise rationally, to speak where God has spoken and to remain silent where his word is silent.

Worship evangelism is rational.

Conclusions and actions

Responsive, relational, rational. Those are key factors in worship and in evangelism.

As we, God’s people, worship, we model to others what a relationship with God through Jesus our Lord is really like.

They will respond more readily when they see that we respond to the goodness, the greatness, the sovereignty, the beauty of God.

They will respond more readily when they see that our responsiveness to God impacts on our lives, that it is not something we compartmentalise.

We should look at our buildings, what they say to our world, because here is the house where God’s people come together to worship, evangelise, do good.

Where we are should reflect the people we are.

They should see in us that we have discovered mercy and that we live mercifully; that we have discovered God’s beauty and respond to him with beauty; that we know he is sovereign and we do the things he says; that we know his word and put consciously into practice in our lives.

We must display responsiveness to God in the lives we lead.

Then we have to reveal that our faith is relational.

Many religions are atheistic at their core. It’s not that they don’t believe in the existence of God, it is that they would work without the concept of God. As long as you obey their commands and keep their rituals, the rest is immaterial, because there is no relationship with God at their heart.

Christianity is different from them because it is based on trust in God, not belief in propostions, and it has a relationship with God through a man — Jesus — at its basis.

When our relationship with God is healthy, our relationship with each other is more loving, and our love will spill out to a needy world. That is when effective evangelism will take place.

We need to make our love strong, real and apparent. We need to show our willingness to go outside our own comfort in order to minister to others. Some churches provide meals for kids who would otherwise go to school without breakfast; they run barbecues for people in welfare housing, so as to provide a social gathering for them. They run Drop In Centres — as we have done when we were able to — so as to provide safe environments for people with nowhere else to go.

But we also have to grow a focus on love for God and for each other, if we are to grow love for those outside our group.

Finally, we need a rational faith and rational evangelism. By all means engage people’s hearts and emotions. But we need places, situations, where people can truly discover the intellectual bases of Christianity. We need to rediscover teaching. Everything from Alpha to Theological courses — people have to find out that being a Christian is not nonsense.

In the early second century, as Christianity began to expand rapidly, it met exactly the challenges we meet today. It had to communicate with its world about God’s goodness and the need to respond to him. It had to show that Christianity is relational. And it had to explain itself to a disbelieving world.

And it won the battle.

Are we defeated?

Can a hostile world possibly prevail against the church which was built to break down hell’s gates?

When we live it out, the world will see and hear and experience and respond.

Then, great glory will come to the triune God, and his Kingdom will expand, and we will find the place he has called us to occupy in our own town,

Let’s press forward towards the goal, because Jesus himself calls us.

AMEN

© Peter R. Green 2007. Permission is granted for quotation in full for non-commercial purposes provided that authorship is acknowledged and this copyright notice is displayed with the text. Portions also copyright The Bible, NIV (Zondervan Ltd.)