Operation 513 - London Outreach (Tue 22nd Jan - Fri 25th Jan 2008)

Last week I was greatly blessed to partner with other Christians for four days of outreach in London (Tue 22nd Jan - Fri 25th Jan). It was a great time and one in which I will long remember.

David and Anna Gee, who head up Operation 513 in Europe and are based in Sheffield, did a great job in coordinating the outreach. The Lord's favour was also a great blessing to us, one which left us shaking our heads in unbelief on a number of occasions.

The hospitality of my home church, Trinity Road Chapel, truly was a blessing and I am so grateful for all they did to make things easier for us. They provided us with accommodation in one of the church's flats, gave us bedding to use and also gave us the use of the church's kitchen. They really were most kind.

The team that took part was a real mixture of people from different parts of the world. The countries represented were England, Australia, South Africa, Uganda and Nigeria. How wonderful that God brought us all together for this outreach.

The week consisted of open-air preaching, one-to-one witnessing, passing out tracts, and also doing some door-to-door work. Through this many people got to hear the gospel. The highlight of the week would have to be when a young man named Obi surrendered his life to Christ. David Hays, who had come down from St. Albans, got into a one-to-one with him when we were in Paddington doing some phone-fishing for Way Of The Master Radio. Seeing him weeping on that road side was really something. This is why we do what we do.

London was filled with masses and masses of people. It really is a melting pot of culture and diversity. What a harvest field to reach out to. There are people on our streets who will never set foot in a church and will never hear the gospel unless we take it to them.

Each member of the team will be hard pressed to forget the conversations that they had with people. Kevin will remember witnessing to about 10 schoolgirls at Tower Hill who had gathered to watch the "Jack The Ripper" tour. Peter will remember preaching open-air there! Myself and Josh will remember our long conversation that we had with a Catholic man at Trafalgar Square. May the Lord give growth to the seed that was sown.

One of the things that blessed us the most was the favour that we had with the authorities. We live in a time when street evangelism is coming more and more under fire and so it was a very important matter for prayer. At Tooting Broadway we met a police woman who told us to go on preaching as the area needs it. At Leicester Square we were told by the police to keep preaching, since they believed the area needed it. These officers were not Christians yet they told us to go on preaching. How amazing is our God!!

Another highlight for me was when I preached open-air at Leicester Square. After I finished I was approached by a man who was dressed in dark clothing. He had tattoos all up his neck and looked very Gothic in appearance. He congratulated me for preaching and said that I had guts. As he did he placed a 50 Euro note in my hand. I immediately said that I could not receive it but he was insistent. We made small talk for a short while and then I asked him what he did for a living. It turns out that he is the bass guitarist for an American band called Korn. They are in London at the moment and will be performing for their fans. If you know anything about Korn you will know that they are quite dark and demonic. When we got back to the church later that night we had a look at the video that Peter had filmed whilst I had been preaching. It turns out he had been standing in the crowd for at least 10 minutes. You often wonder how you reach the rich and famous of this world. I pray that through all the darkness and the drugs he remembers what he heard and that the Lord grants him repentance and faith.

What a week we had. Please pray for all who heard the gospel and for those who took tracts. We want to see sinners saved. So pray with us. God is mighty to save!!

An Awesome Privilege

It is an extraordinary privilege to partner with our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ in the saving of lost sinners. How often do you think about that? Do you see the task given to us from our Lord to go out into the entire world and preach the gospel as a privilege or do you see it only as a duty and a chore? Certainly it is an obligation that we are to be responsible for. The Lord has commanded us to preach the gospel to every creature and since we are His we ought to always be about the business to which we have been called. Never forget that when you received Christ you willingly surrendered your life to Him. However it is sobering to think that we are called to preach the gospel not because we are needed but rather because we are wanted. Our sovereign God does not need you and me to bring in His elect yet He chooses to use us. We are God’s fellow workers together with Christ! Is not this an awesome privilege?!

I believe understanding that God is sovereign in all things is paramount to having a clear understanding with regards to evangelism. That many within the church today have lost sight of God’s sovereignty in all things is shown to be clear by the pragmatic approach that many have towards evangelism. Success is measured by numbers, as if the efforts of us mere mortals were somehow the determining factor. We are not the ones who do the saving. God is the one who does the saving. Our job is to preach faithfully the message of the gospel, for it is through the preaching of the gospel that God saves sinners.

The Bible tells us not to think more highly of ourselves that we ought to think. When we preach the gospel, whether it is to a stranger on the street or to a family member, we are simply one link in a long chain. Very often those who come to Christ are those who have heard the gospel on more than one occasion from a number of different people. Paul writes in his first epistle to the Corinthians, “Neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth” (1 Cor. 3:7).

God is an active God who calls sinners to Himself. The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked. It is a hard heart that must be broken. Charles Spurgeon made it clear with these words, “You and I must continue to drive at men’s hearts till they are broken. Then we must keep on preaching Christ crucified until their hearts are bound up.” This is why it is so important that we begin by preaching sin, righteousness and judgment. Alas, we see little of this in the church today. Pragmatism has given birth to a watered down, sugar-coated gospel made palatable so that it does not offend. Yet the gospel preached in the New Testament is a gospel that tells men they are wicked and depraved sinners, sinners who need to repent. How do you package that? How do you market that? As John MacArthur has so rightly put it, the gospel message is hard to believe. It is hard because you have to be willing to give up everything. The gospel does promise a wonderful Saviour, but in order to receive that Saviour a man must surrender all. He must surrender his entire life. Jesus said, “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross daily, and follow me” (Luke 9:23). Elsewhere He said these words, “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matthew 16:25). The gospel has always been, and always will be, an offensive message. If you take away the offence you have taken away the gospel.

Consider the following. When we preach the gospel we partner with God in the ministry of reconciliation. The Bible tells us that God was in Christ reconciling the world to Himself. Now Christ is in us doing the same. When speaking of the promised Holy Spirit who was to come Jesus said, “And when He [the Holy Spirit] is come, he will reprove the world of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment” (John 16:8). We know that just because it is the Holy Spirit who convicts man of his sin it does not mean that we sit back and do nothing. We are called to preach the gospel. John MacArthur writes, “Only the true message of Jesus, connected with the work of the Spirit, will produce true salvation.” If the work of the Holy Spirit is to convict of sin, righteousness and judgment, then ask yourself, what is it that we are to preach? Surely sin, righteousness and judgment.

We have been entrusted with a great privilege. The question we ought to always ask ourselves is, “How seriously do I take that privilege?” Is evangelism the foremost thought on your mind? I believe it ought to be. Jesus’ primary purpose in life was to seek and save those who are lost. If we are truly the followers of Jesus that we hold to be then our primary purpose in life will be the same. Consider what Spurgeon had to say on the subject, “I would sooner bring one sinner to Jesus than unravel all the mysteries of the Word, for salvation is the thing we are to live for.” Elsewhere he wrote, “Your one business in life is to lead men to believe in Jesus Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit. Every other thing should be made subservient to this one objective.”

The command given us from Jesus to go and make disciples of all nations is one which is entrusted to every Christian. In his book “The Gospel & Personal Evangelism,” Mark Dever writes, “Part of our failure to evangelise comes from a lack of understanding. God uses not so much gifts for evangelism (although there is a biblical gift of evangelism) but the faithfulness of thousands and millions of Christians who would never say that evangelism is their gift. Your conclusion that you are not gifted for a particular task does not absolve you of responsibility to obey. You may conclude that evangelism is not your gift, but it is still your duty. Not having the gift of mercy in no way excuses us from being merciful. All Christians are to exercise mercy; some will be particularly gifted to do this in special ways at certain times, but all are to be merciful. So with evangelism. God may unusually bless and own a Peter and a Philip, a Whitefield and a Spurgeon, a Hudson Taylor and an Adoniram Judson, but He calls all of us to share the good news.”

I count it a privilege to partner with my Lord in the saving of the lost. That God would use me, a fallen and wretched sinner, to lead others to Him is quite beyond me. What a privilege! What a God!

The Antinomy Of All Antinomies

I am quite certain that most of you will agree with me when I say that there are some things in Scripture that we will never quite understand. Well, at least this side of heaven that is.

Here's a real tough one: divine sovereignty and the responsibility of man.

Trying to get God all figured out the way we often try to do will just drive us bonkers. God says in His word...

"My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways," says the Lord. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9).

Let me Let me ask you a question. Do you know what an antinomy is? I had never heard of an antinomy before, that is, not until I started reading J.I. Packer’s book “Evangelism And The Sovereignty of God.” I’ll let Mr. Packer take it from here…

“What is an antinomy? According to The Shorter Oxford Dictionary an antinomy is defined as "a contradiction between conclusions which seem equally logical, reasonable or necessary." For our purposes, however, this definition is not quite accurate; the opening words should read ‘an appearance of contradiction,’ for the whole point of an antinomy - in theology, at any rate - is that it is not a real contradiction, though it looks like one. It is an apparent incompatibility between two apparent truths. An antinomy exists when a pair of principles stand side by side, seemingly irreconcilable, yet both undeniable. There are cogent reasons for believing each of them; each rests on clear and solid evidence; but it is a mystery to you how they can be squared with each other. You see that each must be true on its own, but you do not see how they can both be true together. Let me give an example. Modern physics faces an antinomy, in this sense, in its study of light. There is cogent evidence to show that light consists of waves, and equally cogent evidence to show that it consists of particles. It is not clear how light can be both waves and particles, but the evidence is there, and so neither view can be ruled out in favour of the other. Neither, however, can be reduced to the other or explained in terms of the other; the two seemingly incompatible positions must be held together, and both must be treated as true. Such a necessity scandalises our tidy minds, no doubt, but there is no help for it if we are to be loyal to the facts.

It appears, therefore, that an antinomy is not the same thing as a paradox. A paradox is a figure of speech, a play on words. It is a form of statement that seems to unite two opposite ideas, or to deny something by the very terms in which it is asserted. Examples of paradoxes in Scripture would be things like, ‘Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing... having nothing, and yet possessing all things;’ ‘when I am weak, then I am strong’ (2 Cor. 6:10, 12:10).

What should we do, then, with an antinomy? Accept it for what it is, and learn to live with it. The particular antinomy which concerns us here is the apparent opposition between divine sovereignty and human responsibility, or (putting it more biblically) between what God does as King and what He does as Judge. Scripture teaches that as King, He orders and controls all things, human actions among them, in accordance with His own eternal purpose (Genesis 45:8, 50:20; Proverbs 16:9, 21:1; Matthew 10:29; Acts 4:27; Romans 9:20; Ephesians 1:11).

Scripture also teaches that, as Judge, He holds every man responsible for the choices he makes and the courses of actions he pursues (Matthew 25; Romans 2:1-16; Revelation 20:11-13). Thus, hearers of the gospel are responsible for their reaction; if they reject the good news, they are guilty of unbelief. ‘He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God’ (John 3:18 ). Again, Paul, entrusted with the gospel, is responsible for preaching it; if he neglects his commission, he is penalized for unfaithfulness. ‘For if I preach the gospel, I have nothing to boast of, for necessity is laid upon me; yes, woe is me if I do not preach the gospel!’ (1 Corinthians 9:16).

God's sovereignty and man's responsibility are taught us side by side in the same Bible; indeed sometimes even in the same text (Luke 22:22). Both are thus guaranteed to us by the same divine authority; both, therefore, are true. It follows that they must be held together, and not played off against each other. Man is a responsible moral agent, though he is also divinely controlled; man is divinely controlled, though he is also a responsible moral agent. God's sovereignty is a reality, and man's responsibility is a reality too. And so this is the revealed antimony presented to us from Scripture in terms of which we are to do our thinking with regards to evangelism.”

Evangelism And The Sovereignty Of God, Pg. 18, 19, 21, 22, 23

Mark

Back in December I wrote of how myself and Phil (a good friend of mine) had gone to Tooting Broadway tube station in London to do some open-air preaching. The weather had been against us that day so we headed over to Tooting market to do some one-to-one's instead. Inside the market I had the opportunity to have four really good conversations. As I mentioned before a young guy called Mark was one of them.

The conversation went well and Mark showed himself to be someone genuinely interested in what I had to say. We talked for well over twenty minutes in depth about the gospel. I was getting quite excited as I could see that he was understanding what I was saying. It came to the point where I said to him, "So how about it?" This was a direct question to ask, but I wanted Mark to understand that today is the day of salvation. I stressed to him that we cannot afford to allow receiving Christ to be one of those things that we simply "put off till next year." He still wanted to go away and think about it, so I gave him my contact details and said goodbye. As he was leaving, he said these words, "Remember Mark."

It's been over a month now and I haven't heard back from Mark. Evangelism can be frustrating. We want so much for the people we share with to respond to the gospel in repentance and faith. For all our desire the only thing we can do is pray. We cannot manipulate or coerce people into the kingdom of God. God must save them.

We preach. We pray. But ultimately it is God who saves.