you have well that's okay or count secondary understanding is fine the bread and wine shows that's right that's his body and right got it on the nose what shows is that now we'll jump to the last one the most complicated of all what do we need to think about what new uh where was that the new covenant it is the blood of the new covenant. Okay, we can, if we got the first and the last, I assume we can fill in two, three, and four. Okay, so we're doing okay. Isn't that scary? It's really tough. A couple other things under commitment. We won't spend a lot of time on it, but we were looking at theological commitment, ecclesiastical commitment, and we were particularly talking about the concept of the Lord's Supper there. There are other dimensions in passing. the autonomy of the local church, the concept of a plurality of church government, a plurality of male leadership governing the church, a concept of multiplicity of spiritual gifts functioning within the church. These are distinctive that are worth maintaining. There are some others, but these are the primary ones, in addition to the five or the seven, that these are the primary ones that are under some rethinking today. And these distinctions are worth maintaining, to be sure. They're talking about personal commitment. I just want to touch on a couple of those things as well. Relationship to personal commitment. I'm thinking about my individual role in the church. in the functioning of a local church. The question you need to ask here is if everybody in the church function the way I do, what kind of a church would it be? Can you ask that question? Would it be a good one? No, be honest. And I think for most of us, I'd be happy if everybody in the church were like myself. I mean, at least we'd be there all the time. That's a start. You know, and we carry some of the load, do some of the dirty work, and some of the upfront kind of work. The question you want to ask, honestly, is, hey, how would it be if everybody in it functioned the way I do? Some basic things we need to understand there is that while we do not want to get into a structure of legalistic attendance, let me say very quickly, you can't function very well in a local assembly if you're not there. Okay, and that's a biggie. Now, I am sure that all of us can't be there for everything. But there are certain primary things that are spoken of in Scripture, and we have added some secondary things to our church calendar. The church gathered regularly for prayer, for worship, for edification, and for fellowship. Whether there are three or four things there, some debate. I usually break them up into the big four. Fellowship is kind of unscheduled. It's kind of at all of those meetings. But at least all of those I must attend. These are like breathing and eating. If I do not corporately function in all those purposes for the meeting of the church, I am missing something in my spiritual life. And I cannot be contributing properly to the rest of church function. Those big four. I give the kids at a mass a rule of thumb for a successful church life. Just put it on your calendar. You're going to be there. for the breaking of prayer. You're going to be there for the prayer meaning. You're going to be there for ministry. And the fellowship that is associated with all of them, just say that's it. It's an automatic. Don't debate it. Once you start debating, you're dead in the water. Because it's always more convenient to stay home. That's an automatic. Now, on top of those big four, you can add a lot of things. Youth work, children's work, evangelistic outreach, visitation, all the extra things that we have in church scheduling. They can be added. They can't be substituted. The basics you have to have. We all have to have them. We need to pray together. We need to worship together. We need to grow together. We need to have fellowship together. And we need to commit to that up front. Not in a legalistic way. I know a lot of us can go to meetings and it's just a legalistic form. And I'm not talking about that. But because I desire to be with God and with God's people in this special way. It's called church. And we come together for all those purposes that we've mentioned. We must be committed to that if the church is going to succeed. A second area of commitment is commitment to one another. Sort of like the commitment you have in marriage. Every year at a math and orientation, I say to the students, look around. Some of you are looking at your future husband and wife. And they look at one another. Oh, and it can't be. By the end of the year, we know it's true. By the end of two or three years, it's happened. Happens all the time. Look around, kids. Look around one another. You see that? The camp's the second best place to meet your mate, right? We heard that already. I almost had a new husband and wife combination here. Just by a little seating arrangement. That's kind of a fun thing. Yeah. You've got to be careful. But it happens. Happens in a mass. Happens at a camp. How many of you found your husband or wife out of a camp relationship? Anybody? Let's see. Look at this. I'll tell you. It's wonderful. And I know that. How about a Bible college? I know a lot of them ask people here. Let's see. Look at this wonderful. It happens all the time. I like it. That's where it should happen. There's commitment in marriage. If you've ever considered the vows, most of the guys and girls aren't even hearing that when they're up there. But we say we do it for richer or poorer. We all understand what that means. that married life may find financial success or it may find that there's a lack of financial success. I have a bargain ceremony that only takes the negative side of it for poor and sickness, you know, for worse till death to us, and that's it. Because that's really the way it is, you know. But there are those options that we have in sickness and in health. We understand what that means. Sometimes, a few years into marriage, you find out that I'm married to somebody who has poor health. And the rest of life is nursing a person along. And we promise that whether they're sickness or health, we'll stick together. Rich or poor, we understand. What's better or worse me? That's what it means. That about three years in, you say, oh, man, it was so much better being single. Have any of you ever had that experience? I'm the only person with my hand up. It's not true. Better or worse means better or worse. And the fact of the matter is, some marriages aren't happy. But they're still permanent. And they're supposed to be. You find out you haven't married that person you thought you were dating. Same person, but it's a different person. You know what I mean? And it hasn't turned out quite the way you expect it. And it's really a pleasure to take long, extended business trips. Sometimes that's what makes marriages tick. Time apart. It's worse. But it's still permanent. You know, in the early church, there had to be that kind of commitment. We couldn't get in a little tip and say, yeah, I'm going to Baptist church down the street. You know why? There was no other church down the street. This was it. We're in Paul, right to the city of Corinth. One church. Right to another city. It's only one church. And we're small church. When you read the greetings of the book of Romans, we think of the church at Rome must be a massive church. You know, the church at Rome. Maybe that's maybe fifty or sixty people. Say, man, in Homes. Small church. isolated church. The Apostle John, under the direction of the Lord, is writing to those seven churches, and each of those cities only had one local church and a small church, no doubt. There wasn't an option. Look, if you didn't like the time the elders decided to have the meaning, you couldn't say, oh, I'm going down where it's working means. There was no other place. Had to work it out. The differences, they have to be worked out. We're committed. And I like to think we have that kind of attitude to the local assemblies that we attend. There are going to be problems. I've never met a perfect, because there was one once, but I went, you know. And we destroy the perfection. We are not perfect Christians. And all of us have problems with one another. We have to work those out. That kind of commitment. The kind of commitment that says, look, we've got problems, but I'm not leaving. You can count on that. And I'm going to be throwing all my exercise, spiritual gifts, all my capabilities, all my commitment is going to be this assembly while we work out our struggles. And we're not going to jump and leave. Early church didn't have that luxury. Unfortunately, we do. We get a little tipped over some little thing, and the next thing you know, a person's gone. I wonder where they are. And you find out some minor little thing that overcame their commitment level. was the thing that got in the way. Let's be committed to one another. If we can only trust one another that I'm with you in this one hundred percent and you're with me in this one hundred percent and this thing is going to work. By the grace of God it will. We need that kind of commitment to one another. Let's look at our church at Antioch. I normally don't get off the subject quite that much. That Antioch church was a committed church. Now point two. Acts chapter eleven verse nineteen and we'll just read a few words out of this in verse nineteen they went forth preaching the word the end of verse twenty preaching the Lord Jesus and verse twenty one a great number believes and turned to the Lord. The church at Antioch had at its very beginning an enormously large emphasis on evangelism. Evangelism. A key ingredient in a healthy, ideal church is that the members of that church be evangelistically minded. There's a world to be reached. And the message is entrusted to us. How many of you come from assemblies that are growing in number? Let's see your hands. Okay, that's good. That's not a majority. Most assemblies have plateaus in their size. or they are declining. Now there are some reasons for that. Some of them are demographics. We started in an area where there were new families, unchurched people, lots of children, and the doors were opened. The gospel was preached and people started to come. The assembly we attended for so many years in the Chicagoland area had that experience. When they moved into a new location, put up a gym, had registration for Sunday school, took a whole hour to get the kids registered and they still didn't get them all in. Within a little bit of time, three hundred children in the Sunday school were. That same assembly in the same location doesn't have that success now. It is an older neighborhood. People have gotten into routines of church attendance or non-attendance, whatever. Very hard to make changes in that setting presently. Some of the questions that we have to resolve are demographics. What kind of a setting are we in? But those things being equal, we have a bigger problem. And I think if we are honest with one another, the problem in evangelism is that we don't evangelize. We don't talk to people about the Lord. A bigger question would be, how many people have you led to the Lord in your lifetime in the last year, in the last month? And all of a sudden that's a question we don't want to answer very much. How many people have even given a hint that I am a Christian? Next week, you'll go back to your routine of life. Some of you will go to work, and on the Monday, you always talk about what the weekend was about, don't you? And we'll say, well, I was up at a... Look at I'm out. What were you doing? Oh, you know, there's this historic battlefield. I had such a good time visiting there. It was beautiful, you know. And I learned a whole lot about the Civil War, and that's really... Oh, that's good. You went on a Civil War expedition. Well, sorry. And Simon's Bible conference finally got out a whole week. So what did you do there? Well, we could go to three church services a week. What? Well, how many of you are going to go back and just say, I had such a great week. I was at the Bible conference for a whole week. The person sitting next to you are going to hear about that. What do you think? Just that kind of a little hint of what we've done. Basically, you may find this hard to believe, but basically I'm a shy person. That's true. Always have been my whole life. And if I go take an airplane from one place to another, the last thing I want to do is even talk to the person sitting next to them. Then alone get into a theological discussion. Any of you have that kind of feeling? Dick is shocked. Oh, man, I tell you. Have we overcome obstacles, haven't we? Oh, yeah. I don't want to talk to it, but they probe sometimes. Somebody say, hey, where have you been? I'm telling where I've been. What have you done? I was a... What do you do for a living? I teach at a small private school in Northeast Iowa. What do you teach? Maldecai is getting more and more specific, you know. Oh, some ancient religions. You know, and you keep giving these vague answers. And finally, you have to get the gospel out. And it's kind of tough for me to do. I don't like to do that much. Well, I am convinced that it's not my responsibility to get the whole gospel on the guy in the two-hour flight. That's not my responsibility. I have a different area of responsibility, particularly. It is the real world in which I live. I do not assume any guilt for the fifty million, eighty million Chinese that are born every day. I have nothing to do with that. I will never see those people. I do assume some responsibility for another world. And that's the world I think we all have to face. Our real world. The world that we rub shoulders with every day. I want to run a little experiment now, and we're going to take a sampling of our audience, just this center group. I want you all to do a favor. I need a mathematician. Who's a good mathematician amongst us? Anybody? Volunteers for Jesus. Where's the good mathematician? Is there none? Okay. Larry's going to do it for us. Here we go. I want all of you in this middle section, all the way to the back. This will just take a few minutes. to answer this question. In multiples of five, that's zero, five, ten, fifteen, got it? In multiples of five, I want you to estimate how many unsaved people, as unsaved people, you will meet in a normal one-week period in your life that know you by name. Okay, did you get all the limits on that? One week period, normal, not up here in the Bible conference, but a normal one week period, unsaved people who know you by name. One week, unsaved, know you by name, multiples of five. Can you handle that, Larry? Okay, here we go. We'll start right in the front row and go right back and forth. You ladies make out you're singing a song and just give a number, okay? Can we do that? I think that's okay. Just for a number. Here we go. A hundred. Oh, that's a good start. Seventy-five. Let's do it fast now. Good. Are you hearing all that? Let's do it real loud. Okay. Start again. One hundred, seventy-five, fifty, eighty-five, ninety, a hundred, eighty-five, fifty, seventy-five, Ten. That's okay. There are no wrong answers. Fifty. Fifty. Fifty. Fifty. Fifty. Fifty. Fifty. Fifty. Twenty. Twenty-five. Twenty-five. Twenty-five. Twenty-five. Let's stop there for time's sake. Okay. That was two rows we got. One, three, four, five, six, seven, eight rows. Eight times that total. Oh, that's eight hundred of that group. So it's eight times that. Eight times eight hundred tells me that's six thousand, four hundred. And we need to double that for the wing. So that's twelve thousand eight hundred. people. Does that shock you? Do you know if you superimpose that on your city? And it's always like this. I do this a lot of times. It's always an enormous number. If you superimpose that on your city and figure there are a lot more Christians in that area than just represented, count all the evangelical churches. Do you know what you find now generally? Most of the cities have people coming in contact with Christians four or five times in a day. The pagans are rubbing shoulders with us all the time, and they know us. They know who we are. We know them, and they know us. Now, that's a big number of twelve thousand people. This group will see every week. That's our mission field. Now how do we go about reaching that mission field? The Apostle Peter gives us some enormous help in this. He gives us advice that I would never expect Peter to tell us. In First Peter chapter three, and verse fifteen. The Apostle Peter gives us his verse for evangelism. He says, sanctify the Lord God in your heart and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you with meekness and fear. Would you expect Peter to say, now, look, this is the evangelism tact I want you to take. This is bold Peter, who speaks when others would not. This is Pentecostal Peter, who gives a wonderful message. This is Peter who stands before the Sanhedrin. But to us, as he writes, he doesn't say, look, you're all evangelists. He says, this is what the truth of it is in evangelism. Be ready to give a reason for the hope that is in you if anybody asks you about it. Now that makes me feel better already. Doesn't it you? Who starts this witness contact? Who does? Who does? The other person starts. He asks you, hey, How can you have everything put together in your life? What's this hope that you have? Why do you have this kind of a personality? Now see, this all presupposes something. It presupposes they know us by name. It presupposes they can observe us. That's why I asked the question I did. The people that know you. The real world. Now, that's not a small world. That's a twelve thousand people world just in this small group. They observe us. And the context of First Peter is that. What kind of people ought we to be? We are to be kind and courteous and loving and forgiving, not pursuing evil, but pursuing peace. And there are ten, twelve characteristics of normal Christians, what should be normal Christians that just perceive this. And Peter said, now you're in that world, you're that kind of a person in the real world, and they're observing you. And they ask you for reason, for the hope. So they initiate the conversation. And it's our job to give an answer. Be ready for a defense, an apology, of what you believe. That's not saying, hey, I'm really sorry, I believe this. It's a reasoned defense, out of which we get a course in Bible college and seminary called apologetics, a reasoned defense of Scripture. Be ready to give that answer. if anyone has. And then he talks about how we go about doing that. With meekness and fear. People will say, look, religion is very personal. It is. And if anyone wants to talk about it, Peter says, don't make them. With meekness and fear. Don't force them. If they want to change the subject, let them change the subject. The Lord Jesus did that. Woman at the well, he said, let's go call your husband. That's a gigantic loophole. If she did not want to pursue spiritual truth, she could have said, very good idea. I'm going to go call my husband. She didn't do that. She stayed. And when she stayed, the Lord took it one step deeper. So you don't have a... Do that five. I wonder what now is it? And he started to probe into her knees at that point. Meetness and fear. Give the people opportunity not to talk about it. If they change the subject, fine. It's not our job to manipulate the conversation, to make them talk about what we want to talk about. If it's the work of the Holy Spirit, we'll take that up later today in our discussion. If it's the work of the Holy Spirit, we don't need to manipulate and play the games with them. When there's interest that they respond to, we know God, the Holy Spirit, has done a work beforehand. But it's that kind of a world that we live in. Now, how does it work out? Again, I'd like to suggest that it's not the whole gospel in one shot. It's the simple things. Like on the Wednesday, if we are committed to... active church life, we'll naturally say as we're taking the elevator down the business building, leaving work that day. It's Wednesday night, can't wait to get the prayer meeting. See you tomorrow morning. That's a witness. When push comes to shove in that person's life and they have a spiritual need, and guess who they're going to go to? The person who about three weeks before said, Can't wait to go to prayer meeting tonight. Have a great time. Pray. Now that's not a hard witness, is it? I'm going to prayer meeting tonight. Is that hard to say? Let's try that one. I'm going to prayer meeting tonight. That's not tough. You know. That's not, you don't have to memorize verses for that. It's just your normal life that you're communicating with them. Go to lunch, what do you do when you take your friends to lunch, business associates? Number one, you buy lunch. And then you can say, since I bought, I have a custom. I give thanks to God for provision. They'll let you do that forever, I guarantee it. Now, when push comes to shove, when the marriage starts falling apart, When the kid has rebelled so much that mom and dad don't know what to do, they're going to gun for that spiritual person to talk to. Here's somebody that seems to have life put together. Those people that we rub shoulders with are the people we're to be friends with like Jesus was. He was a friend of sinners. He was accused of eating with drunkards. One of the most effective ways of evangelism is to have the unsafe people over to the house for dinner with your kids sitting around the table. Does that scare you? Something's going to come across there. There's going to be a Christian love that these people have never sensed in their whole life. Just subtly communicate. The way we address one another. The customs that are different for every family, but the customs that we have at the dinner table. The fun that we can have. We used to have a little plaque up on the wall. Versus scripture. Last year do it good like a medicine. That's not Ben Franklin. That's Proverbs. Okay? I used to hang there until one day and such I'd roar as laughter I threw my hands back and it crashed to the ground broke, you know. But you have fun as Christians, don't you? Isn't that true? I'd love to be around Tom's table. I bet that'd be a scream. Isn't that fun all the time? I even hear the funerals in Tom's family are fun. You ever get him going on those stories, okay? We have more fun. Christians have better fun than the unsaved ever had. That's the truth. We don't have a headache and we're not sick in the morning after even. It's a lot better. And those things communicate in a natural Christian family. That kind of thing. It's just simple, everyday life. Now, it's a modern day thing nowadays to identify this kind of evangelism. Do you know the title they give to it now? Lifestyle evangelism. That's actually biblical evangelism. Peter said it long before anybody else did. Live your life in front of... Be this kind of a Christian. Live your life in front of the people those twelve thousand we know. And allow them to initiate the conversation. Now, when they initiate it, we can't blow it. I like to go grocery shopping when I can. My wife and I go together. We shop for ourselves. We shop for our parents. Seems like we're always in the grocery store. It's amazing what two eighty-five year old people can eat. So we go out week by week for them. And you get to know people in the store consequently. And one occasion I said to the lady, you made a mistake charging us there. This is before the scanners, you know. Made a mistake. And she looked at it and said, oh man, I didn't charge you enough. Why did you tell me that? Is that an opportunity? Okay, here's what I said. I have to sleep tonight. Is that a good witness? That stinks. You know, all along I've been building up. We're friendly. I win their friendship. You're nice to them. It's been a busy day. You're busy on a one-armed paper hanger today. You're doing okay. You know, you get friendly with them, and they know you by name, and they see you off. Now push comes to shove. My morality has leaked over. My Christian convictions has leaked over so that she understands there's a difference between me and the next guy who's going to try to rip her off. And she asked me a reason for the hope that's in me. That's really what she was doing. And I blew it. Because there's still a little bit of embarrassment of being identified with Jesus Christ. Do you ever sense that? We've identified with a despised person. They might think we're religious nuts or something like that. And in a moment of time, I backed off. Well, that was some time ago. By now, I don't really much care what people think about me, whether I'm a religious nut or not. So I dump it all out on them when they give me an opportunity to. reason. Now there's a bigger problem. I think this is really the rub in all of this. Gallup has recently taken a poll measuring the value system of evangelical Christians against the value system of the secular world. Guess what? I was afraid of it. There's no difference. There's no difference. On a large scale, evangelical Christianity lives for the same thing the secularists, the materialists, lives for. Now when you link that with lifestyle evangelism, what do you have? What do you have? You have zero. If I live for the same things as my pagan neighbor, he's not going to observe a difference in me. If my value system is his value system, he's not going to come to me and say, hey, why do you have it together? Because it looks like I don't have it together any more than he does. I'm confused, he's confused. That's the way they read it. If my value system is the same as his. And most of evangelicalism is that way. Most of evangelicalism is like the Missouri River. It's a mile wide an inch deep. It's not much to it. And that's got a lot of evangelicals up front. That's why MacArthur's written a book like he has with so many people around calling themselves Christians that don't look like it. He wonders if they really are. He's tried to tighten up on the grace of God, unfortunately. But understand his problem. It doesn't look like we're a lot different. And you know, it's really hammered us. We really don't understand it. We talk about humanism and materialism as out there. It's not out there, is it? It's knocked the church door down. It's us. We do have the same kind of values. We do live for things. We do live for status. We do live for pleasure and enjoyment. That is, again, one of the reasons, things like this, conferences are in decline. There was a day when there were three focuses of life. Your family, your work, and church. Those three. We put some more on that whole thing now. We have put leisure, entertainment. And we have to have this. Big part of life. Some of you folks grew up not even ever having vacations. Having you? Yeah. Vacation was when you fixed the house. Right? I know that. That's when you did all the big jobs. Who could afford going away? I grew up that way. And if you do go away, who's going to take care of the local church? Yeah. We got some commitment to that. And when you do have the two weeks off, that's vacation Bible school time. You plan your vacation around those kind of things so you can give your whole time to it, right? Used to be that way. Not now. You have leisure, inalienable right of every human being in North America, and entertainment. We've got to have the Third World War to keep the kids attracted, okay? And you have all this kind of stuff piled on top of the necessities of life. And when the pressure comes, what do we bump? We bump church. Because we really value these other things as guarantees of life. And as that filters into our whole attitude of life, that we live for the weekends, we live for pleasure, we live for entertainment, Let's get out of this work as fast as we can. There's nobility and fulfillment in work. That entertainment will never give you. And we are reversing the things that are important. When we live like that and have the same mentality as the world has, lifestyle evangelism is going to be a flop. And we better start doing what my relatives did, getting out on the street and giving out tracks where we never let them see what we're like because here's a track run. Now we make fun of that kind of thing nowadays. Nowadays, probably when we should be doing that. Because we don't want to get in our lives. Because they find us talking about the same movies they're talking about. Going to the same kind of entertainment they're going to, living for the same values they live for. Rather than having a different world. Sometimes, somewhere in the pendulum swing from being isolated away from the world to being like the world, we've missed the balance that Peter's calling for here. And push, guns, and shove. I think we were better off back then than we are now. I can't reverse history. But I can say that in this matter of evangelism, the rub is that very frequently our lifestyle is just like the lifestyle of the world. And they do read us. And consequently, they don't come and task us. In high school, it looks like I don't have it together any more than the kids at this lecture. As the neighbor, it looks like I don't have it together anymore than he does. Because I live on the same rat race life that he does. I want things. I want pleasure. And we have to readjust our thinking. That there is a world out there. And one of the primary reasons that I am left in this world after salvation is to be an ambassador for Jesus Christ in this known world in which I live. I am there linked with God. And I need to live a lifestyle and when opportunity comes, be quick to give a reasoned defense so that I can hear the gospel. I have to be involved with those kind of people in a very natural way. Allowing them to see the inner workings of my Christian life. And bring them to the Lord when opportunity presents itself. That challenged all of us. Look, we got twelve thousand people. View those twelve thousand. And it's not twelve thousand. This is eighty-five. It's a hundred. View those as the people that God holds you responsible for. Doesn't mean you've got to get them saved. That's his business. That does mean we have to live a life before them and give the answer when opportunity presents it. That will say, Jesus Christ is the means of eternal life. When you have a church that's oriented in that kind of work, you'll have one of the key ingredients to an ideal, successful church. You know, when you start seeing people getting saved, there's nothing more to say. Isn't that right? Paul Little calls it the fizz of Christianity. It is. All of a sudden we're not fighting with one another with little details of Christian living. Because we're so concerned to see a babe going to maturity now. And our focus is not on ourselves. So in this new one in Christ that we can help along. It's the excitement in the Christian world of seeing someone right in front of your eyes pass from death to life. But see God's plans being worked out and all the provision that God has made being fulfilled right in front of you. And you're an instrument of doing that. That can't get you excited. Nothing can. It's exciting to be a witness for Jesus Christ. And it's not something we need to be afraid of. The church at Antioch preached the word. They preached Christ. And many people were added to the church. Wouldn't that do something for every one of our Sundays? Just think what it would be within the next month or two. Through the witnessing that we carry on, many people be added to the church. Would make for a different path, different level of excitement, different dimension of commitment. Let's pray to that end. Father, we think of these twelve thousand people represented by this group. that each person here is a particular witness, has a specific responsibility to these people that know them. We pray that they may be able to observe knowledge of Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior in each person's life. And when you work, we pray that we may have the boldness to give a reasoned defense for the hope that is within us. We thank you for this part that we all have in reaching out to the unsaved. And pray we may fulfill our responsibility to our real world in our day-by-day experience. We pray this for the growth of the church, for the encouragement of the saints in your son's name.