308 Sermon Illustrations on Witnessing

First preach the Law...

Psalm 19:7 - “The law of the LORD is perfect, converting the soul...”

“The first duty of the Gospel preacher is to declare God’s Law and show the nature of sin, because it will act as a schoolmaster and bring him to everlasting life which is in Jesus Christ.” [Martin Luther]

“Before I preach love, mercy and grace, I must preach sin, Law and judgment.” [John Wesley]

“Preach 90 percent Law and 10 percent grace.” [John Wesley]

“They will never accept grace until they tremble before a just and holy Law.” [Charles Spurgeon]

“Evermore the Law must prepare the way for the Gospel; to overlook this in instructing souls is almost certain to result in false hope, the introduction of a false standard of Christian experience, and to fill the church with false converts.” [Charles Finney]

“The highest service to which a man may attain on earth is to preach the Law of God.” [John Wycliffe]

“God being a perfect God, had to give a perfect Law, and the Law was given not to save men, but to measure them.” [D.L. Moody]

“Satan, the god of all dissension, stirreth up daily newsects and last of all, which of all other I should never have forseen or once suspected, he hath raised up a sect such as teach...that men should not be terrified by the Law, but gently exhorted by the preaching of the grace of Christ.” [Martin Luther]

“The true function of the Law is to accuse and kill; but the function of the Gospel is to make alive.” [Martin Luther]

“People will never set their faces decidedly towards Heaven and live like pilgrims, until they really feel that they are in danger of Hell... Let us expound and beat out the 10 commandments, and show the length, and breadth, and depth, and height of their requirements. this is the way of our Lord in the sermon on the mount. We can not do better than to follow His plan.” [J.C. Ryle]

“We cannot come to Christ to be justified until we have first been to Moses to be condemned. But once we have gone to Moses and acknowledged our sin, guilt and condemnation, we must not stay there. We must let Moses send us to Christ.” [John. R.W. Stott]

“I never knew but one person in the whole course of my ministry who acknowledged that the first motions of religion in his own heart arose from a sense of the goodness of God, ‘What shall I render to the Lord who has dealt so bountifully with me?’ But I think all besides who have come within my notice have rather been awakened to fly from the wrath to come by passion of fear.” [Isaac Watts]

“If I had my way, I would declare a moratorium on the public preaching of “the plan of salvation” in America for one or two years. Then I would call on everyone who has use of the airwaves and the pulpits to preach the holiness of God, the righteousness of God and the Law of God until sinners would cry out, “What must we do to be saved?” Then i would take them off into a corner and whisper the gospel to them. Such drastic action is needed because we have gospel-hardened a generation of sinners by telling them how to be saved. Don’t use John 3:16. Why? Because you tell a sinner how to be saved before he realized that he needs to be saved. You have gospel-hardened him.” [Paris Reidhead]

“It is a great mistake to give a man who has no been convicted of sin certain passages that were never meant for him. The Law is what he needs...Do not offer the consolation of the Gospel until he sees and knows he is guilty before God. We must give enough of the Law to take away all self-righteousness. I pity the man who preaches only one side of truth - always the gospel and never the Law.” [D.L. Moody]

“Few, very few, are ever awakened or convinced by the encouragements and promises of the Gospel, but almost all by the denunciations of the Law.” [Dr. Timothy Dwight]

“So it is with the work-righteous and the proud unbelievers. Because they do not know the Law of God, which is directed against them, it is impossible for them to know their sin. Therefore also they are not amenable to instruction. If they would know the Law, they would also know their sin; and sin to which they are now dead would become alive in them.” [Martin Luther]

“The only way we can know we are sinning is by knowing His moral Law.” [Jonathan Edwards]

“First then, before you speak peace to your hearts, you must be made to see, made to feel, made to weep over, made to bewail, your actual transgressions against the Law of God.” [George Whitefield]

“Ignorance of the nature and design of the Law is at the bottom of most religious mistakes.” [John Newton]

“I do not believe that any man can preach the gospel who does not preach the Law.” [Charles Spurgeon]

“The Law cuts into the core of the evil, it reveals the seat of the malady, and informs us that the leprosy lies deep within.” [Charles Spurgeon]

“Unless we see our shortcomings in the light of the Law and holiness of God, we do not see them at all.” [J.I. Packer]

“The first duty of the Gospel preacher is to declare God’s Law and show the nature of sin...we would not see or realise it (what a distressing and horrible fall in which we lie), if it were not for the Law, and we would have to remain forever lost, if we were not again helped out of it through Christ. Therefore the Law and the Gospel are given to the end that we may learn to know both how guilty we are and to what we should again return.” [Martin Luther]

...and then the grace of God

This morning (July 27, 2015) I will preach my father-in-law’s funeral at Camp Nelson National Cemetery in Nicholasville, Kentucky.

For 32 years of our marriage, I dreaded this terrible task because he was not a believer. He wanted no part of Christ or His Gospel. We prayed for him, witnessed to him, sent others to talk to him, and five years ago even took him to Manaus, Brazil, to go fishing for tucunaré (peacock bass), but with the real intention of sharing Christ on the entire trip. We colluded, cooperated and conspired for his soul.

While in Manaus we attended the Nova Igreja Batista, where our close friends David and Pennie Hatcher serve and we stayed in their home. They and all the members of Nova became co-conspirators in our redemptive plot.

I will never forget sitting on the front row of their massive sanctuary surrounded by thousands of bouncing Brazilians worshipping and praising their Savior, smiles beaming from their brown faces. Gene could only recognize one word that they sang over and over -- Jesus. He looked at Tanya and said, “These people really believe what they are singing.” She took the opportunity to drive home the point that He had changed their lives and that is why they sang so fervently.

When we got back to Kentucky, our niece met us at the airport and drove her grandfather home. She later told us that he did not stop talking -- about the church and about David and Pennie. The three days of fishing the Rio Uatumã or seeing freshwater dolphins, caiman, howler monkeys or any of the things that he went to Brazil to see did not even merit a mention. Instead he was fixated on the obvious deep, meaningful belief in the Gospel now so evident to him in so many people.

A few months later his body failed him. One night his legs refused to work for him anymore and he never walked again. Too big and with too many medical needs for any of us to care for at home, the man whose life was as big as the great outdoors suddenly found himself limited to the four walls of a single room and flat on his back in a nursing home.

For the first four or five days we had to go through red tape to get him a television and, coupled with his near deafness, he had nothing to watch or hear when we weren’t there. The strange providence of God had twisted and brought him into the last place on earth he wanted to be but precisely where he needed to be. There, in the silence of that room, God brought to his mind all the times someone had shared the Gospel with him, the simple message that Jesus saves by grace through faith. The effect in the lives of his children and grandchildren and his deceased wife and so many others, he realized, was undeniable.

The next day Tanya and I came to see him and were amazed by his attitude. Frankly, we had anticipated that he would hate the nursing home and might be terribly uncooperative. Instead he was positive, focused, and met this challenge with the same spirit that helped him survive World War II. We were, to be candid, stunned.

As we got up to leave, Gene put out his hand and said something strange to me. “Preach to me, Hershey.”

He had never said that before. I thought he was confused or that asking me to pray for him was so unusual that he just didn’t know how to do it. In 32 years, until this moment, he had never asked me to pray for him or with him about anything. A few days earlier he had held out his hand and said, “Say some good words for me,” and I had taken that to mean pray for him and I had. Now I was trying to interpret, “Preach to me” and thought surely he meant for me to pray.

So Tanya took one hand and I the other, and I prayed. I asked God to strengthen and heal him according to His will, but then I prayed for God to save him. I begged God to help him see that Jesus is the only way. I told God that Gene had had his way for far too long, and I pleaded with Him to overwhelm him with His love and to overrule his stubborn heart and grant him repentance and faith in Christ alone.

When I said, “Amen,” Gene patted my hand and looked me in the eye and said, “I’ve done that.”

Tanya and I shot each other a skeptical and confused glance, both of us worried that he might say such a thing too lightly -- though he certainly never had before.

“What?” I asked. “I’ve done that!” “You’re telling me that you have repented of your sins and you are trusting in Christ alone for eternal life?” “Yes,” he answered. “I have.” “Now, Gene,” I pleaded, “I really need to be sure about this because more than anything I want to spend eternity with you.” “Well you will,” he said, “because I have done that.”

I wish I could tell you how sweet these last three years of his life have been, even in difficult circumstances none of us would ever choose. We saw God’s grace at work in his life even as it had a profound effect on us as well. So today, I am not preaching the funeral I dreaded. I am preaching the funeral that I could preach for a Rahab, or a Ruth, or the thief on the cross. It’s the story of redemption, of God’s love extended to one whom many thought beyond His reach. It’s the story of the 5 o’clock worker who gets the same reward as the one who’s labored since dawn. It’s the story of grace. It’s the story of

We all know that our purpose in church work is defined by the Great Commission. We know that making disciples is what Jesus has called us to do, which starts with the evangelization of those who do not know Him.

In one of my “sermon in a sack” times with the younger kids, my goal was to help them appreciate how much God loves and seeks those who are lost. I asked the group on the steps of the stage if they understood what it meant when the Bible referred to a person as lost or when we sang songs that referred to being lost.

A 7-year-old girl spoke up and said, “Those are people who are running from God.” My heart leaped. Perfect.

We know the right answer but we also know that, if we are honest, we have a tendency to make church about everything but seeking the lost, to become preoccupied with either matters of corporate institutionalization or individual consumerism.

It seems that as a church progresses over a longer period of time, it can turn inward toward maintaining the status quo and preserving the institution. Programs that have existed for a long time can become ends unto themselves, with the goal simply to keep the organization afloat and financially solvent. And as long as this is achieved it seems that the church is healthy, even if none of it truly involves any real effectiveness in reaching the lost. This is when the deacons or elders along with the pastors fall into seeing their role as managing the institution instead of leading people to be on mission.

On the individual level, lots of people have come to see a church as something that serves them. They want their church to be a good, comfortable fit for them and their family. They size up its amenities (the preaching, the music, the children and youth programs, the facilities, the small group experiences, the kind of people who go there, etc.), deciding if the church serves them well. We often become preoccupied with making people happy. Not that we shouldn’t strive for excellent worship and great discipleship opportunities. But we shouldn’t be doing what we do to sell people on our church. But let’s be honest, that’s how we are thinking about it much of the time.

The biblical truth is that God wants us to go and seek the lost as our primary passion.

Our joy should be to put lost people at the top of our priorities. This was the passion Jesus expressed to His disciples after conversing with the Samaritan woman at the well. The soul satisfaction of doing the Father’s will in seeking the lost and revealing Himself was His spiritual food. He told His disciples to lift up their eyes and look at the harvest already ripe. He pushed them out of their comfort zone and instilled in them a sense of urgency in regard to the lost.

We must stop exhausting ourselves running after disgruntled or absentee church members, and use that energy to go after the lost and unchurched no matter who they are in our community.

Jesus told a parable of one who invited certain people to a big dinner. All those he originally invited gave excuses of why they couldn’t come when the time approached. The man (representing God) grew angry at their response and instructed his servant to go out and invite the unexpected ones -- “the poor, crippled, blind and lame.” He would waste no more time on those who had been invited and refused. There were always others who would respond.

We need to get over people who are chronically unfaithful and uninvolved. We need to stop strategizing how to get them back. We need to care for these folks as well, but at some point we need to cut them loose and go invite others. The lost are all around us. They need to always be our first and greatest passion.

If the lost are running from God -- and they are -- then we have to be running in the same direction after them. We have to overtake them and confront them with the grace of the Gospel. We know that they will not all come when invited but we are promised that some will. God calls the church to go after the lost. Jesus did this and taught us that this should be our passion too.

If the church is truly going to be the church, then we are going to have to get a whole lot more comfortable with being uncomfortable. We must allow God to break our hearts for the lost, and trust God to use us to bring the same Good News that came to us to others who don’t know yet that they even need it.

________

Daryl C. Cornett is pastor of First Baptist Church in Hazard, Kentucky

Judy Seiwert had been visiting her grandchildren and was flying home to Montana, eager to pass the time with a book on her new Kindle. Seated next to Hector Esquivel, however, she was stirred to begin a conversation.

Esquivel was returning from his mother’s funeral that week in 2011, and he had been annoyed by a group of Christians praying over him at her wake, he told Baptist Press. In obligatory small talk with Seiwert on the plane, he mentioned his mother’s death and said she was in a better place.

“She goes, ‘Oh, she’s Christian, then?’” Esquivel remembers Seiwert asking. “I said, ‘Yeah.’ She asked me if I was Christian, and I told her I wasn’t.”

The truth was Esquivel was suicidal at that point in his life.

“I had a lot of problems. I was super heavy into drugs. I was drinking a lot,” Esquivel said. “I was on a very, very bad path.”

It’s particularly interesting, Esquivel said, that Seiwert spoke to him on the plane that day. “People tend to back off from me,” he said. “They take a look at me and go, ‘Oh, man, this guy looks like trouble. He looks like problems.’ But not Judy. She wasn’t scared at all.”

Seiwert knew a conversation about eternal matters with Esquivel was more important than her Kindle, so she asked him if he wanted to know how he could see his mother again.

“I just shared the ABCs of being saved. I shared with him that if he admitted he was a sinner and believed in Christ -- that Christ died and went to the grave and rose again -- and would commit his life to the Lord, then he could be saved,” Seiwert told Baptist Press.

“I said, ‘But you have to ask Jesus into your heart. I can’t do it for you. I will share with you. I will start the prayer, but you have to finish and you have to ask.’ And he did. I started off praying, and then I stopped and he picked it up. He was very emotional, and I knew that he was changed.”

After Esquivel prayed to accept Christ as his Savior, he and Seiwert talked all the way to Billings. She learned his truck needed a repair, and she told him not to worry about it because her husband Art was a mechanic and would fix it for him. Sure enough, when they landed around 1 a.m., the Seiwerts had Esquivel follow them home.

Art fixed the fan belt on the truck, and the couple invited Esquivel to spend the night. He declined and left around 6 a.m., he recalls, to return to work in a North Dakota oil field.

During the past eight years, Esquivel and the Seiwerts have kept in touch. When he left North Dakota to return to California, he drove through Montana and stopped to visit them, and he went to a service with them at Valley Baptist Church in Huntley.

“He has called my husband when he’s down or struggling,” Seiwert said.

“One day I was out in my husband’s parking lot waiting to go to lunch with him and Hector called. He said, ‘Sister Judy, I just have one question for you.’ He said, ‘I met this woman,’ and he started to share some things, and I just said, ‘Run, Hector, run.’ He said, ‘What?’ I said, ‘She’s not leading you down the right path. That’s not biblical.’ He said, ‘OK, sister.’

“Another time, he called and said, ‘Sister Judy, I just had to tell you I’m standing here in my backyard, looking up at the sky, and I said a prayer that someone would be led to the Lord like you led me.’ That touched my heart so much,” Seiwert said.

Esquivel told Baptist Press he believes God put Seiwert beside him on that plane for a reason.

“I’m no longer a drug addict. I no longer drink. I think of the stuff once in a while, but I don’t do it,” he said. “I’m still not married, but I don’t go out with all these girls like I used to before. So it’s been a huge change. I found a church.”

In an attempt to not appear mean, Esquivel said he cuts his hair differently and shaves differently now.

“I’ve been going to church ever since I met Judy. Judy got me going. I don’t know what she did. It was the Holy Spirit, of course, but she planted that seed in me, and she planted it deep,” he said.

“All my old friends aren’t my friends anymore. Everybody turned their backs on me because of this change. They don’t like the new Hector. They like the old Hector,” Esquivel said.

The Seiwerts send Esquivel cards occasionally, and the three of them text or talk by phone sometimes. “Bro. Art still prays over me,” Esquivel said.

Seiwert told Baptist Press, “I’m just so thankful we have Hector in our lives. It was a highlight of my life because here I am thinking I’m just going to enjoy this last moment of my trip, and yet God used it in a different way, and that was pretty awesome.”

Barrett Duke, executive director of the Montana Southern Baptist Convention, met the Seiwerts when he preached at Valley Baptist Church this spring. The couple took Duke and his wife to lunch after church, and when they were talking about evangelism, Esquivel’s story came up.

“The depth of spiritual maturity and commitment to the Lord flowed out of her and her husband once we started talking about the things of God,” Duke told Baptist Press. “Just to look at them, you wouldn’t say there was anything unusual about them. They present themselves in typical Montana style -- quiet, reserved and stoic. But that’s just the learned response to life in rural Montana.

“This couple turned out to be far from any of those characteristics. They are deeply passionate about life and the world, fully engaged in spiritual life, and loving,” Duke said. “They reminded me that rural America is still very much alive with faith and passion for Christ. Christians in rural America have a lot to offer the church and the world. Denominations ignore them to their own loss.”