Dr. M. Taylor Bach I Timothy 6:11-16 Matthew 9:35-38

The Good News reading this morning, even though it's only a paragraph long is loaded with good information. It's the comment of Jesus about bringing in the harvest. In it, He says the harvest is plentiful but the laborers are few. I want you to think a moment about the harvest being plentiful. As you know, frequently I will quote to you statistics from the Barna Group which is a research group that figures out what's going on in the religious world by interviewing hundreds and thousands of people. One of the things they published recently, which absolutely floored me, is that 27% of our population in the United States doesn't believe they will have a religious funeral. What does that mean? That means these people have no religion. I mentioned this to one of the funeral directors that I was with this past week. The director said, “We are now urged to take classes on how to conduct funerals ourselves where there won't be a minister. All we do is talk about what a wonderful life the person had and that is the funeral service.” So these people don't believe in heaven and they don't believe in hell. It reminds me of the joke about the atheist being all dressed up with no place to go at their death. It is sad and terrifying to me.

If we look at this paragraph in the Bible, Matthew 9:35-38, you will see that there are what I call the four “P's” of evangelism or the four “P's” of bringing in the harvest. The first one is compassion. The “P” would be that the Lord had PITY on people who are outside the church, having pity on those who will never get to heaven. So it says, “He was moved with compassion when He saw these people.” The second one is great POTENTIAL. Barna research says that really about 75% of the population is no longer Christian or of that number, 20% are marginally Christian. The harvest field is enormous. We should be able to go out and discover that three out of every four people we talk to would only be marginally Christian or not Christian at all. So the field is huge. Then as we read further, we find that there is a PROBLEM, the third “P”. The problem is that there are not enough laborers. There are not enough committed Christians who obey Jesus when He said, “Go to all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey all that I have commanded of you.” There aren't enough Christians who have the confidence in their faith to go out and share their faith with other people. So the laborers are few. But then there is a solution. The solution is, “Therefore PRAY that God will send laborers to the harvest.” So we have the four “P's”. Pity, potential, problem and prayer. That in essence is what can give us the ability to solve the problem of all these people never ever knowing the Lord and never ever having the opportunity to get into heaven.

Our society would have us believe that everybody is going to go to heaven. That it is just a given. That God, because He is all loving, is going to simply say, “OK. You come on up here.” Every time I conduct a funeral, I know that I have to say something like that. Whether that person was a good person or a bad person, I have to say, “OK. We think this person got into heaven.” But I am not always sure that is the case. Sometimes I have concerns about that after the family has told me stories about the person and they seem less that sterling Christians. All of us should really have some concern about the people who aren't going to make it. We should have within us a hope, definitely a prayer and a drive that all people get to heaven, because it is Jesus' will that all people are saved. How do we help? What can we do to help other people?

The first thing we do is we need to associate with those we think may not make it to heaven and at the same time not allow them to contaminate us and pull us down, too. One of the other things in Barna's research that is terribly frightening is that in the year 2020, about eleven years from now, only 4% of the population of the current group of children now growing up will be Christian. 65% of their grandparents in that same age category were Christian. But in the year 2020, only 4% will be Christian. That is scary. I don't know if it scares you, but that scares me. It says to me that there is a tremendous urgency for us to share the good news. We need to share it in a way that we are not offending people, where we are not badgering them, we are not arrogant about our faith, but where we are sincerely concerned about these people's problems and about the fact that they grow up with no faith or marginal faith. So we feel a drive to do something about that.

We need to listen to people. We need to hear their stories. Every life has a story. There was a book written that said in a fact that every life is worth a book. Have you written yours yet? I haven't written mine yet either. But our lives are worth a book. So we need to listen to people's stories, hear their cares, their concerns, their trials and tribulations. Everybody has crises. Nobody is spared from them. The purpose of problems is to make us humble and make us want to reach out to God in prayer. It is so often that it is only in prayer and in a sense of desperation that we'll turn to God. It seems the only reason problems are allowed in this life is so that people with free will will begin to cry out, “Lord, help me. Be there for me.” When that happens, it opens the door for Jesus to come in and dwell in their hearts. As Romans says, none of us are free of sin. If we know our own hearts and we are honest with ourselves, we would say that is absolutely true and reach out to God for forgiveness and help.

The other thing that we need to do as we are reaching out to people is we have to be in touch with the promptings of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit will speak to us in what is referred to in the Bible as that still small voice. He doesn't come in claps of thunder. He doesn't come in roaring fire. He comes in a quiet voice that will play inside our minds and He will whisper to us what is our purpose in life. He will whisper to us what our talents and abilities are and how we are to use them. He will urge us and tell us who we are to talk to and how we are to talk to them and how we can lead them to the faith in Christ. So we are to be in touch with the promptings of the Holy Spirit.

There is a man locally that I've heard about who owns a gas station. His first name is Bob. This man has led dozens of people to Christ. He does this by getting them into his church, then getting them to turn their lives over to Christ and offer themselves up in commitment to Christ. We don't just want to get people to church and have attenders. We want people to come into church and create a personal relationship with God because they need Him. So Bob has no signs on his service station advertizing that he is a Christian. He doesn't have fish on the back on his car or tow truck saying he is a Christian. But what does he have? He has integrity and honesty. This is a rare commodity in our world. As I have watched television just in this past week, I was floored with the dishonesty that was revealed in the financial markets. Yet here is a private business owner who gets spiritual results because of his integrity, his honesty and his willingness to reach out to people and listen to their problems when they came to get their cars repaired. He is able to say to them, “You don't go to church?” or “You dropped out of church?” “You know what? You ought to come try mine. I've got a good one. And I'd like to invite you. I'll meet you at the door Sunday if you are willing to come and make you feel at home and make you feel comfortable.” As I heard about this man's story, I also learned the fact that dozens of people came in and found Christ because of him. That's the kind of person all of us are to be. We are to see a person across the room and walk over to them and hear their story. Then show them how Christ can enter into their story and help them solve their problems and relieve their pain. Christ can do that. First we need to allow Him to walk into our story and relieve our pain and help us through the crises of our life. We do this through prayer. The Bible says that we need to pray unceasingly, which means we make our whole life a prayer. Prayer is simply conversation with God so we go through our daily life and offer a little prayer here and a little prayer there. “Hey God, help me to meet this person,” or “Help me to listen to this person's issues and help me to introduce this person to you some way.” “Help me to invite this person to join our community of faith where they can be supported and loved.” That is how we are to go through life. Jesus did this with every person He met. As this passage says, He always began with compassion. He had pity on people in their situations. Then He was able to get into their problems and go from their problems to His Father being the solution. That is how we are to approach life and that is what makes witnesses out of all of us. We don't have to walk up to people and say, “Are you saved?” We don't need to be obnoxious about it but we need to be loving and concerned about the individual God puts into our lives.

There is something going on right now. As you know, I love basketball and I get into March madness. I watch many of the games. Most of my favorite teams are out. Now I am rooting for Louisville. If Louisville gets knocked out, I'll probably root for Villanova because my niece went there. But as I watched the games this past week, I became aware of something. The teams that won were the teams that didn't sit on a lead. If they had a lead, they didn't try to stall and run out the clock. They kept pushing on and kept trying to score. The ones that had a lead with three minutes to go and started to try to run out the clock and hold on to the lead would lose because the other team would kick out the basketball to the three point lane and would shoot three pointers and catch up very quickly. The church is like that. We get way too comfortable with our Christianity. We get comfortable with our lead and we want to just sit in our pews. God didn't say, “Stay.” He said, “Go.” That is what we need to do. We need to be like the teams that are winning and that is never give up. They are persistent. They drive. They continue to score. That is the way we have to live our Christianity. OK. Maybe that is a weak example for some of you who don't care for sports. But it just struck me that it is a metaphor that fits. When we think we are ahead, we tend to coast. We can't coast in Christianity. There are too many people who are not going to get to heaven. We love them. Have you ever said to a family member, “I won't go to heaven without you. I'm going to drag you in, too”? And see that they come with you. What a loving thing to say. So here we are in our church this morning praying to God, offering ourselves to Him. Let us also offer ourselves to work for Him - to live our faith and to bring others to Him.