February 9, 2014 Pastor Jerry Dean Always Be Ready To Give
It’s so good to be here. I’m very thankful for all of you. It’s great to see some familiar faces and renew friendships. I really appreciate all of you dear people. Why don’t you turn in your Bibles to 1 Peter 3. At the beginning of this series “Ready, Set, Go”, Pastor Jeff started talking about sharing your faith with other people. He said that he was not planning on talking about three small words. “Always be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that lies within you.” I want to focus this morning on those three words: always be ready to give. Shall we say those together? [Congregation repeats the phrase three times] Why don’t you turn to a neighbor or somebody close by and tell them, “Always be ready to give.” There you go. You guys are awesome.
As we think about being always ready to give, he [Pastor Jeff] will have further explanations later on in the series, but I want to focus on those three words and three ideas, three concepts, this morning as we talk about sharing your faith. Right up front I want to say that my challenge, my encouragement to you is to share your faith with somebody this week. Share Jesus Christ with someone this week. So often we think, “I’ll share my faith someday.” For many of us, it’s something we’ll do someday or down the road when I get better at it or something else. I would encourage you to make a commitment right now, right where you sit, that you’re going to share your faith and ask God to open doors for you to share your faith or talk to somebody about Jesus Christ this week. We’ll talk a little later about how to do that. That’s my challenge because that takes the message out of the future and puts in right here, right now. Maybe even this afternoon you’ll have an opportunity to do that.
That first phrase says always be ready to give. Some of you sitting here may say, “I’m not so great at that. I’m not so good at that. I’m not sure if that’s particularly my thing.” The first word there says always. It’s the Greek word aei and we get our word eon from that. It’s speaking of time. God’s saying to be ready to give at all times. If you’re here this morning and you’re a child of God then your King and your Lord and your Master and your Boss says that’s part of your mission. It doesn’t matter if you’re bold. It doesn’t matter if you’re shy. It doesn’t matter if you speak well or not. Your God says that’s your mission. That’s what you’re here to do. Always be ready to give. The wonderful thing and the amazing thing is that if you’re his child then God put his Spirit in your heart. He says he lives with you and you have inside of you the Spirit of Jesus Christ which means you have the capacity, you have the ability, to do that. Paul says, “Greater is he who is in you than he who is in the world” (1 Jn 4:4) and “you can do all things [including share your faith] through Christ who strengthens you” (Phil 4:13). God says he has given you the ability far beyond anything that you could ask or think. I don’t know how you think of yourself this morning, but if you’re his child his Spirit is in you and he has given you that ability and those capabilities.
Have you ever noticed that about Jesus or thought that about him? Jesus was at home with everybody. At twelve years old he was at home sitting in the temple talking to the PhDs of his day. He was at home with prostitutes. He was at home with tax collectors. He was at home with commercial fishermen. He was at home with the white collared people and the blue collared people. I don’t know in that age of robes if they had collars on them or not, but you get the point. He was at home with the high and the low and the middle and in between. He was at home with everyone. Early on he was developing those gifts. He was singularly focused. At twelve years old he said, “I am here and I am ready to be about my Father’s business.” He thought about that all the time. Friends, why is that so crucial? Because you and I rub shoulders every day with people who are on their way to eternity. If there was not a hell I would not be standing here today talking to you. It wouldn’t matter. I’ve preached funeral message after funeral message that says, and one of the most intriguing verses from Ecclesiastes 7, says it’s better go to a funeral than it is to a party because that’s what happens to everyone, and wise people think about that. You and I are someday going to be facing the grave. You and I are someday going to be the ones lying in the casket and in the coffin. It’ll be our funeral that people are attending. I am here as a representative of Jesus Christ this morning because either you have the answer for life and death or you don’t.
That’s what makes Christianity so singularly different from every other religion. The founder of every other religion is dead, buried, and gone. Mohammed? Dead and buried. Confucius? Dead and buried. Buddha? Dead and buried. Joseph Smith? Dead and buried. Jesus Christ? His grave’s empty. Historians say that is probably the singular most well documented fact in human history. We even date our history AD and BC although because they want to forget Christ, they’ve changed BC to BCE, “before common era,” which is really fascinating because people who don’t love God, they don’t like to think about that. But Jesus’ resurrection radically changed the world. Either you have an answer for death or we might as well pack it up and go home.
Friends, that’s why it is so crucial to share your faith. If you are a child of God and you believe that there is an eternal destination of heaven and hell, then it’s of absolute paramount importance. If you went home today after lunch and saw your neighbor’s house on fire, you would probably go home and say, “Well, you know, maybe they decided to sleep late. I know their house is on fire but I don’t really want to wake them up. That could disturb their sleep. They need their rest.” Would any of you think that way? Of course not. Friends, if you genuinely believe this book [holds up a Bible], our God, our Savior, our Lord and master challenged people all the time what does it profit a man if he gains the whole world and loses his own soul (Mk 8:36). If you believe that there is an eternal hell, then you will step out of your comfort zone. You will put your neck, your reputation on the line to share the Good News of Jesus Christ with the people around you.
When I say that, I don’t mean shove it down their throats. I say God uniquely gifts you to touch other people in incredible ways. As we talk about gifts, it’s interesting, he says always be ready to give. Every single one of you has gifts that the rest of us don’t have. You have gifts. You have personality. I was just talking this morning with Mark and his family over here. He’s the baseball coach at Fort Atkinson. We got to coach baseball together for a year. He was just sharing about how they went down to the Dominican Republic to do two things – teach kids baseball and share the Gospel. How awesome!
That’s why I get so into sports. It’s not just sports. It’s because honestly truly, I have gotten to share the Gospel with more lost people through sports than I ever have being a pastor. You know that? That’s where you rub shoulders with people who don’t know Jesus Christ. Those things that take you out into the world. Some of you have incredible gifts. Maybe it’s a smile, maybe it’s a listening ear. All of those things are gifts. I don’t know your gifts, but God has given you talents and opened doors and opportunities to touch people’s lives. You never know. Of course, you may be sitting here this morning saying, “Well, I don’t have gobs of gifts.” Of course you know that God said in his Word that you absolutely, unequivocally, without hesitation cannot ever develop any more gifts than what you already have, right? That was a joke. [laughter] God challenges us to keep developing our gifts. Friends, I’m here to tell you that you never know what gifts you have that God may use.
I’ve lived in two different places in Janesville. Interestingly enough, in both of those houses we have had neighbors who are German. Why does that matter? Well, for whatever reason, I decided in high school to take two years of German. I took another year of German in college. If any of you want to talk German to me I really don’t have a clue. All I remember was the dialog, but it opens doors. I remember the first house we lived in Janesville there was an older woman there in her seventies. I just had her funeral two and a half weeks ago. Her name was Eva and she was a survivor. When World War II came she was a young girl, and the Russians invaded from the east. She was taken to a Russian prison camp where she was raped repeatedly, went through horrific things, and by an act of God she escaped. A doctor had mercy on her and signed her release papers. She left and ended up with a sponsor who brought her to the United States and plopped her next to us in the edge of fourth ward in Janesville. Of course that was all an accident, right?
I still remember meeting her in the sidewalk outside of our house for the first time. I said, “Hi I’m Jerry.”
She says, “Hi, I’m Eva.”
I said, “Germany, right?” She said yes. I said, “Wie gehts?”
She went, “Oooo!”
“Was ist loss?”
She’s like “!!!”
Those were two of the only phrases I remembered in German, except the third one, as we grew in our relationship, I got to say “Ich liebe dich” which is German for I love you. It’s fascinating. This woman, because of the horrific things she had been through, didn’t trust much of anybody. Her brother was a classically trained piano player. She deeply loved her brother. He was killed in World War II. So God plops this dear old woman down in Janesville next to a guy who knows a little bit and a smidgeon of German and, guess what, is a classically trained piano player. I can tell you about the hours she sat in my living room as I sat at the baby grand piano that my grandmother had given me and played for her Bach and Brahms and Beethoven and Chopin and Mozart and her favorite, Franz Liszt.
“Play Liebestraum for me.”
We connected. It took about fifteen years until finally, I sat in her kitchen one morning and led her to Jesus Christ. Those who knew her, at her funeral, her caretakers at the end, said, “You know, those last few years she finally had peace. She finally got it.” There was a presence about her and it was fascinating to me. Her caretaker at the end was also a Christian. Isn’t it amazing how God works?
I don’t know what skills you have, but never stop learning. Never stop developing gifts. You have no idea how God can use you. Some talent or some gift or something you know that may seem really insignificant to you, friends, God can use that. Amen? God can use you.
I remembered a few years ago that God can even use stuff that you don’t particularly like. I chuckle because the winter games are going on. I know that the U.S. just won two snowboarding gold medals and I really don’t care. I’m not trying to be mean. I just don’t care about the X Games and I don’t care about it. It never fascinated me. I still remember five or six years ago that I had a day off and I decided, “I think I’m going to go watch a movie today.” So I checked out movie times and all that stuff and I really couldn’t find anything I wanted to go see. I saw a movie called Lords of Dogtown and it was about skateboarding and how California surfers spawned the skateboarding culture during a draught in California. They built their own skateboards and skated in swimming pools that were concave and launched the skateboarding revolution. I have no idea why, well I do know why, but I decided to go see that movie. I have a very good memory, years of memorizing Bible verses I think, and I remembered all these names and all these situations from all these people. Likewise, that week I got two magazines in the mail that I subscribe to ESPN Magazine and Sports Illustrated, both of them, I think because of the X Games, had articles about skateboarding from cover to cover. Normally, I wouldn’t even look at them. It just doesn’t interest me. I don’t know why, I should say, I do know why I decided to read all those articles so I’m filled with skateboarding information.
Standing right back there after a service one weekend, about where Jim is standing, a guy came up to me and said, “Hey, will you visit my son in Dane County Jail?”
I’m like, “Sure. I’d be happy to.” I like to connect on a level other than just the Gospel because sometimes that opens doors. You make friends and you make connections. I said, “So tell me what your son is into.”
He said, “My son is really into skateboarding.”
The lights go on! Hmmm, fancy that. I’m walking in; we sit down and start talking. I say, “I hear you’re into skateboarding.”
He goes, “Yeah.”
I start rattling off all this stuff and he looks at me like, you’ve got to be kidding me. How does this old guy know all this stuff? That’s how God works isn’t it? When you have a desire and you’re asking him for open doors, you have no idea what he can use.
Friends, I’ll say this as well, even tragedy and heartache in your life or the things that hurt very much, God can use those. I always think of Vic and Linda Smith who lost children. Vic lost a twenty-year-old who was eight and a half months pregnant in a car accident. Twenty years of age. Gone is the promise of life and hope and a grandchild, and yet through that they have a heart for people going through grief. God’s used them to touch people’s lives and bring people to salvation. Even our heartache and our tragedy and pain can be things that God uses to save us from eternity.
I know for myself when I was a teenager and going through a bunch of hormonal things. My body was producing too much testosterone and doing weird things. We went to the doctor and they proceeded to prescribe me, stuck me on steroids for two years. I look back and I’m like, “Are you kidding me?” I basically went from being this mellow happy-go-lucky guy to going half nuts. I was thinking about people I wanted to kill and assault and all that kind of stuff. I was thinking about killing myself every single day. It was probably the most painful time in my life. I literally thought about killing myself every single day. It’s the knowledge that hell exists is the reason I didn’t. I’m very thankful for that.
You know, fast forward. Does God know what he’s doing? I’m in Evansville, Wisconsin and have a passion and a heart for Evansville. You know why? It has the highest suicide rate of any community in the state of Wisconsin. God has opened doors already. The first funeral I ever had in Evansville was a suicide. I sat on the phone on Christmas Eve talking with a guy in Missouri for an hour and a half and God allows me to say things that spare his life and change his course and give him hope. That time seemed like that [snaps]. Why? Because I can empathize with him so much. I can relate to him so much. I’ve been where he’s been, wanting to end it all. In fact, he got done and said, “How in the world are you spending all this time talking to me on Christmas Eve?” The answer is because even the horrible and awful things that we go through in our lives, God allows and uses to develop us to reach out and minister and bless other people. Amen?
Time and time again, when I have situations like that, I pinch myself and say, “God, if I had to go through all that heartache and all that pain to save one soul, it was all worth it. It was all worth it.” Amen? So God challenges us to always be ready.
Secondly as we focus on that term “ready”, be prepared. Friends, I want to leave you a couple of thoughts about “prepared”. That means you prepare ahead of time. You just got done with the Super Bowl. Those guys playing in the Super Bowl, I tell you, they watched hours upon hours upon hours of game film. You have the quarterbacks playing in that game that you watch a defense line up across from you and you watch people shifting all over creation and in a second and a half you have to decide are they in man are they doing a combo coverage are they going zone? Which defensive players are rushing? Which are falling back? You have to read all that in a second and a half. How do they do that? They are able to do that from hours upon hours and repetition upon repetition of watching film over and over and over. That’s preparation. God challenges us to do the same in regard to our faith. He says prepare.
There’s three ways you do that. First of all, prayer and God’s Word. The single prayer that I pray more often than any other prayer is, “God, open doors for me.” That was Paul's prayer. He wrote to one of the churches in the New Testament, “Pray for us, that God would open the door for our message” (Col 4:3). When God opens a door it becomes really obvious, right? You don’t have to kick it down.
I grew up in an era where people shoved the Gospel down other people’s throats. That just appalled me. Neil was talking about singing “Just As I Am” in the 8 a.m. service. I once sat through a service and an alter call at the end where they sang 120 verses of “Just As I Am”. That just makes me sick to my stomach to try to shove the Gospel down someone’s throat or emotionally manipulate somebody.
Friends, God calls us to prepare. He calls us to plan ahead. When God opens doors he puts you in the right situation at the right time in a way that fits you and your personality and your gifts. On this side of things, I look and find myself talking to people about Christ so often, not in a church setting, and I almost shake my head walking away from things saying, “How did that happen? How did we get there?” Time and again I can’t really remember how we particularly got onto talking about God. It just seems to happen, which is what happens when God opens doors. When God opens doors I don’t have to be the spiritual swat team that kicks it down, right? God does that in ways that are absolutely incredible.
Speaking of combining those, I want to share a quick story. I want to give you an example. When I first got to Janesville, the block we lived on was almost all people in their seventies and eighties except for one family. They lived right next to us: Lee and Sue. We became good friends. They had a couple of children. As the years went by, we got to share our faith with them and they started coming to church. They were not Christians, but they were seeking. We would talk and our friendship grew. I got up one morning and I sat down in my living room on my couch to read my Bible. You have to understand, at a very young age I had written out 120 goals for my life. One of those goals was to read the Bible through fifty times. Me, I’m pretty, I don’t know, focused or singular. Knowing that, I had it all planned out and charted out. I read 10 chapters of my Bible every single day. I would start in Genesis. I read from Genesis to Revelation and turn around and start again. I never varied from that ever for anything or anyone. I say that as a background.
So I sat there, flipped my Bible open, and I know I was somewhere in Exodus. I started to read in Exodus and I just got this really weird uncomfortable feeling like I wasn’t supposed to be there. I thought that was really odd, so I tried to force my way through it, and it wasn’t happening. I just felt so uncomfortable. So I started flipping through my Bible. Okay, if not Exodus then maybe Judges – heroes, deliverers, stories about war and conflict and God and great victories – nope it wasn’t there. Joshua? Nope. Samuel, Kings, and Chronicles? More stories of kings and judges and victories and heroes. Nope. How about Psalms and Proverbs? I love Psalms and Proverbs. Nope, not there either. The prophets? It was really weird and uncomfortable in the prophets. I got to the New Testament, stories of the life of Christ. What’s better than the life of Christ? Surely it must be here. No, it was very uncomfortable. Acts? Lots of history. I love history. Nope. I got to Romans and it was almost like I was on a roller coaster and things started slowing down, but I was still feeling really weird and uncomfortable almost like I wasn’t supposed to be there. I finally got to Corinthians and it was like I felt the brakes being applied. I started thumbing through chapter 1,2,3,4 and I finally got to 1 Corinthians chapter twelve. It was finally like [sigh]. There was just this sense of peace like - you’ve arrived, you’re where you’re supposed to be. I thought, that’s really kind of odd and strange, but I read 1 Corinthians 12, 13, and 14 - three chapters. Since it wasn’t ten chapters, I had lots more time to sit there and think about it. I read those and got up to go off and pray and didn’t think much more of it until that night. My wife and myself and my kids were sitting at our supper table, and in the middle of supper there was a knock at the door. I opened the door and there were my neighbors, Lee and Sue.
Lee said, “Jerry, can we talk to you?”
I said, “Sure.” I stepped outside, and Sue looked like she was really upset about something.
I should have prefaced things. 1 Corinthians 12-14, does anybody know what that’s about? It’s about all the spiritual gifts: gifts of prophecy, gifts of teaching, gifts of tongues, the superiority of love over all of those gifts, and order in the church, and let everything be done decently and in order, and all those details.
So, Lee said, “Can we talk to you?”
I said, “Sure.”
Sue looked really upset, and Lee said to me, “Jerry, I’ve got a question for you.”
I said, “What’s that, Lee?”
He said, “There’s somebody at my wife’s workplace who keeps telling Sue that unless she speaks in tongues, she can’t be saved. I just wondered if the Bible says anything about that.”
I’m like, “Funny you should say that. Guess where I was reading this week.”
Friends, what I’m saying is when you’re open to the promptings and leadings of the Spirit of God and you’re in his Word, he directs your steps. There’s a verse in Isaiah that says, “Whether you turn to the right or turn to the left you will hear a voice behind you, saying, ‘This is the way; walk in it’” (Isa 30:21). God calls us to be prepared.
In terms of “practice” or “preparation” or “being ready,” friends, how do you get ready for anything? Practice. Did you know that’s biblical? Look up Hebrews chapter five. Maturity comes to “those who by reason of practice have their senses exercised to discern good and evil (v 14). In 1 Timothy 4:7 Paul says to Timothy, “Exercise yourself to godliness.” You get good at anything through practice. Talking about music and sports, I had no idea that when my grandmother made me play all those scales and all those chords and all those arpeggios she was setting me up for a wonderful coaching career. What I got was that you don’t get good at anything without lots and lots and lots and lots of really focused practice.
How do you become good at sharing your faith? Practice. Some of you are in different places. It doesn’t matter. Some of you have better sharing skills than others. It doesn’t matter. Start where you are. When I was in eighth grade our youth group was encouraged to go out and share our faith. My brother and I ended up in our apartment complex and knocked on a door. There was a woman who opened the door, and we invited her to church.
She said, “Well, I’m Baha’i.”
I didn’t know what Baha’i was. I thought maybe she was on ba’drugs or something [laughter]. So, we invited her to church and she was like, “Can you help me?” I didn’t know how to help her. My brother didn’t know how to help her. He was older than I was. But you know what? We knew somebody who could. We went home and got our mom. My mom came back and led her to Christ. She got baptized and she started to walk with God and was faithful in church and faithful in her walk with the Lord. Were we biblical scholars? No. We didn’t even know what to say, but we knew somebody to get. Maybe you’re in that position. Share your faith.
Maybe you’re like me early on. I remember working at a church here in town when I was in college. It came Sunday night after I was done with the weekend stuff, and I was headed back to school. I was really burdened like, “God, I want to share my faith with somebody. Please open a door.” On the way back to school, I stopped at Country Kitchen. I sat at the counter and ordered a piece of pie. There was a guy sitting next to me looking kind of bedraggled. Isn’t that a great word, by the way? Bedraggled. I didn’t know what other word fit there, sorry. You know, disheveled, there’s a good word. Bedraggled, disheveled, there’s a lesson there somewhere, I suppose.
Anyway, I heard him talking and he was like, “Man, I really need a ride to Edgerton.”
I was like, ding ding ding! “I’ll give you a ride to Edgerton!”
He was like, “Really?”
I was like, “Sure.”
We get in the car and get about a mile out of town. I was like, Wow! God, this is a great opportunity. I turned to him in the front seat and I looked at him and I said, [creepy voice] “You know why I picked you up don’t you?” [laughter]. His eyes got really big around. That’s a horrible way to share your faith. I don’t know, maybe God had a hand in that. Maybe he was too scared to say anything and he sat there and listened. I don’t know. My point is if you’re willing to try, you get better as you share your faith.
I wonder how many of you have ever had a situation where you wanted to talk to somebody about Christ. You wanted to share your faith. God opened the door and you started to say something and you just couldn’t quite get it out. You were tongue tied and you hesitated. You didn’t say anything and the moment passed. You walked away kicking yourself, right? Anybody been there? It’s all bad, right? No, it’s all good! If you think about it and you pray about it and you’re thinking, “Well, God, I should have done this. I should have said that. I shouldn’t have hesitated.” What does that make you the next time the door opens even so slightly? You will jump at the chance to talk to somebody about Jesus Christ, right? You’re better prepared. It’s practice that prepares you. Even those failures are only experiences that help you to develop that ability.
The last thing in that line, [Paul] says, “Always be ready to give” (1 Pet 3:15). Friends, the thing that opens doors more than anything else, that allows you to share your faith, is the willingness to give. When you give it opens doors. It may be a smile; it may be a listening ear. Did you know that listening to someone is an incredible gift? I’ll never forget reading a counseling book that was this thick [shows with hands] and the best thing in the whole book was in the first chapter. It says, you know what God does more than any other single thing? He listens. He spends all day, all the time, listening to people the world over. He listens and listens and listens and listens and don’t ever forget how healing it is to listen. My wife tells me, she can’t believe it, “People walk up to you and they just start telling their whole life story and they don’t even know you!” Well, if people get the sense that you’re willing to listen to them it’s amazing what they’ll tell you. It’s also amazing how reciprocal people are that if you’re willing to listen to them time and again they’re willing to listen to you when you share your faith.
If you have that attitude of giving and serving, you never know, time and again God opens doors in amazing ways. I think of Jesus Christ and why we are proclaiming him. He is the greatest giver of all time. John 3:16, that classic verse, says, “God so loved the world that he gave…” When you do things for people and help people and reach out to people that’s not the be all and end all. What you’re hoping is that your gifts, your service, your acts of kindness open the door to share your faith.
Talking about where I moved first in Janesville, the edge of the old fourth ward and everybody on our block was all older people except for one family. Nobody on our block had snow blowers. I had developed the spiritual gift of shoveling. That is a spiritual gift. You know how I developed that? Growing up on a small farm with sheep and cattle and horses where I learned to shovel manure. It’s amazing how sometimes the stinky dirty jobs that you’re willing to do to honor those over you develop spiritual gifts. I’m not kidding! Right there in the Greek in the book of Romans – shoveling, I think, is inherently right in there in the list of spiritual gifts. When it snowed, time and again, I would shovel the entire block. I would shovel not only the sidewalks, but the driveways too. You know what that got me? That got me the chance to lead two of my neighbors to Christ. It got me to share the Gospel with all of my neighbors. It got me to have funerals for two of my neighbors. In fact, one of the funerals, the people ended up coming to church later on.
One of the funerals, I’ll never forget walking into the funeral after the husband died. I’d been shoveling their sidewalks for years, so when he died and they didn’t go to church guess who they asked to do the funeral? Low and behold. I had a little fear and trepidation about the funeral because I knew there was nobody there who was a Christian. I walked into the funeral home and, low and behold, I see a really really good friend of mine who had gone to the same church.
I said, “Terry, what are you doing here?”
He was like, “I’m the special music; I’m singing. What are you doing here?”
I was like, “I’m giving the message. I’m doing the funeral.”
He was like, “Really, no kidding?”
I was like, “No kidding.”
He said, “What an answer to prayer. We’re the only people in our family who are Christians. Everybody else in our family is unsaved. We were praying and praying and praying that God would open a door and bring some pastor who would share Jesus Christ and share eternity and share the resurrection with my family. Not only does God send somebody, he sends you! How awesome is that?”
Isn’t God good? If you’re ready and willing to give. Friends, I close by saying that I never get tired of talking about Jesus Christ. He is the greatest hero of all time; he is the greatest hero who ever lived. We write books, we have movies about hero champions who do incredible things to save the princess, find the treasure, save the children or whatever else it is. There is nobody like Jesus Christ. Nobody ever went through what he did, who literally went through hell, went through damnation to rescue you and me. Amen? If you get that, if you get his heroism, it makes you want to step out of your comfort zone and save the lives of friends and neighbors and relatives and people around you who are lost without Jesus Christ and on a road to eternal hell. God is challenging you today and this week to step out of your comfort zone to do something different, to share your faith. I’ll tell you, if you want adventure, if you want satisfaction there is nothing like that.
I’ll close with this one story. One of the coolest things that ever happened to me in my life was that a friend of mine and I started this sports outreach program a few years ago. We shared the Gospel with hundreds of guys through basketball. We’d rent gyms, guys would come and play free, and we’d share the Gospel with them. One day we got done and I was taking my friend, Tom, home. I was driving him home past Papa John’s Pizza, down there on the main drag in Janesville. There’s a house across the street in the parkway or the driveway, the parking lot behind that house there are four guys who are just beating a guy to death. I’ve been in enough fights and boxed for a long time, judo and that kind of stuff, to know the seriousness. My immediate thought was, they’re going to kill him. My second immediate thought was the story of Jonathan and his armor-bearer who decide to attack a Philistine fortress by themselves and Jonathan says the immortal words, “Eh, it’s no big deal to God. He can save by a lot of people or just a handful of people” (1 Sam 14). That was my next thought.
I said, “Okay, Lord, Tom’s my armor bearer. I know that he’s the least likely person on the face of God’s green earth to ever get involved in a fight, so I’m going to ask him and if Tom says yes, then I know this is you.” So I turned to Tom and I said, “Do you see that?”
He says, “Yeah. We’d better do something! They’re going to kill him.”
I was like, well that’s affirmation. So I whipped the car around, parked in the parking lot, jumped out, and started heading toward these guys. I was not afraid; I realized that God had prepared me for this moment through boxing, judo, football, and weightlifting. He’d developed those gifts, but I’m really trying to avoid disaster. I walked up to them and they turned around and looked at me like, you’ve got to be kidding me. There are four of us, there’s one of you, you’re fifteen years older than all of us and what in the world are you doing? I looked at them and the first thing that popped in my head was, “Hey guys, did you know that Jesus loves you?”
It was probably the perfect thing because if they thought I was weird before or scary or whatever else, now they’re like, dude, what planet is this guy on? They hesitated and they stopped and they stood there. I just started talking to them about the Lord. If it wasn’t for one of the guys, I think we could have gotten out without any further things because they were all drunk. But this one guy, I found out later, was high on crack. I was talking and the longer I talked, the itchier and twitchier he got. I was trying to rescue this guy from the situation and avoid the fight. He finally got himself up off the ground and shook himself off. You could tell he was absolutely petrified, and he was still worried about his situation. He still knew that we were vastly outnumbered and so he reached down and picked up a beer bottle to defend himself. When he picked up that beer bottle all purgatory broke loose. See, I didn’t use the word hell in church. All purgatory. Beer bottles and fists and all that stuff started flying, and God was really good. I got him out of there. I got him in my car and started hauling him out of the danger zone even as beer bottles bounced off my car and off of me. We got a couple of blocks away and he leaned over the front seat and handed me a hundred dollar bill.
“I want you to have this because you saved my life. They would have killed me.”
“I pretty much figured that, but I don’t want your money, that’s not why I did it.”
He said, “But they’d have killed me. If you hadn’t come, I’d be dead. I got to do something for you let me buy you a case a bear.”
I said, “You know what, I don’t drink.”
He was almost frantic. He said, “I’ve got to do something for you. You saved my life! They would have killed me.”
Friends, here’s the thing. God had prepared me for all those years and I got to say to him, “You know, it is one thing to stick your physical body and your neck on the line to save somebody else’s life. It is quite another thing to give your soul to save someone from an eternity in hell. If you really want to do something for me then you sit there while I tell you about the greatest hero of all time who took on the greatest odds of all time who was the greatest champion of all time who went through hell and died to pay for your sins and for mine because he loves you and cares about you and he wants a relationship with you.”
Do you think it’s worth it? I would take all those beer bottles and fists bouncing off of me to get the chance to tell one more person about Jesus Christ. He is the Hero, isn’t he? He is the Champion [applause]. Friends, if you really get who he is and you really get what he’s done, it’s not hard to talk about him. Amen? My challenge stands. I encourage you, challenge you, this week share your faith. Pray. Ask God to open doors and God will use you this week. Because of you there may be one or two or five people in eternity with Jesus Christ who wouldn’t have been before because you had the courage to share Jesus Christ with somebody else. Amen? Shall we pray?
Father, I thank you so much for these dear friends. I pray that you would speak to their hearts. I pray that you would encourage them and challenge them and help them to practice and develop their gifts to touch other people’s lives. Thank you for the example of Jesus Christ, and I thank you that we can pray in his name. Amen.
