Matthew 4:18-22 Part 2 - Apr 28, 2024

So it was brought to my attention that we haven't done the Lord's Prayer, and while we may not do it every week, I think it is great to do it because a lot of us grew up doing that in church every week, and now we have children or grandchildren or whoever, and if they're not doing that often enough in church, they won't necessarily learn that prayer the same way we did, and that would be a shame.

So thank you very much for that, I appreciate it. So we're gonna continue on with our study now of Matthew. So if you recall, last week we were in chapter 4 verses 18 through 22, and I told you that we were gonna talk more about the themes of these verses today, so that's exactly what we're gonna do.

Discipleship and Evangelism in Matthew 4:19

And in fact, everything that we talk about today, everything related to discipleship and evangelism, is actually gonna revolve around one single verse from this passage, and that's verse 19, where it says, "...and he said to them, follow me and I will make you fishers of men.".

Because this innocuous statement has so much meat and so much significance and so much importance to it, that we can spend our entire time today talking about it. Now last week I focused really heavily on two words that characterize the disciples' response to the call of Jesus.

We talked about the two words, immediate and complete. So that was important to do as well, but I realized as I thought about what we talked about last Sunday, is that I just very briefly touched on the idea of discipleship and kind of gave a rushed definition and a little bit of an overview of what discipleship is, but I don't think that we gave it enough time, we didn't give it quite enough explanation.

But at the same time we have two massive topics left that we have to cover as they relate to this passage, and obviously one is discipleship, and like we said, the other is evangelism. So we'll start with discipleship, because this is sort of building a foundation here.

Now we already mentioned that what we see in these passages is that Jesus is calling his first disciples, and we talked a lot about how we're supposed to model our lives after Jesus. So what does that mean where the issue of discipleship is concerned?

So once again, we start with the question, what is discipleship? Now Mark Dever, he's the pastor of Capitol Hill Baptist Church up in DC, he gave a good, succinct definition, one that I thought was pretty helpful that I'll share with you today, and he says this, discipleship means growing as followers of Jesus and helping others do the same.

I think that's an excellent definition for us to use. So for Jesus discipling others, or at least calling others to be discipled, it was as simple as him saying follow me, right, because as we're disciples we're trying to be more like Christ.

He could just say follow me. And then of course what Jesus does is proceeds to his earthly ministry, and his disciples get a front-row seat to what it means or what it looks like to bring the message of Christ to the world.

Because no matter how we feel about what's going on today, the world in the times of Jesus and in the times of a lot of the stuff we read in the Bible is every bit as broken and every bit as desperate for Jesus as our world is right now.

So some things about people never change. Now obviously it's not quite as simple for us as it is for Jesus, but I want to make sure that we don't overcomplicate the idea of discipleship. But because we are called to that task, we can't avoid the issue.

So the good news for us as Christians as we start talking about this is that all of our life should be devoted to following Christ. Paul writes in Ephesians 8 5 through 10 to remind us of what this looks like.

He says,. And we can turn to scripture for a description of what the Christian life looks like. And once again I go to Paul. Paul has given us some amazing inspired scripture to help us live our lives.

So in the book of Galatians in chapter 5, he gives us not only a description of what the Christian life is to look like, but he gives us a description of what the Christian life should not look like. He gives us a whole list of things that we shouldn't do.

We're gonna start there. These are things to avoid starting in verse 19. So Galatians chapter 5 verse 19. You, just as I have forewarned you that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.".

So, as we go through that list, check off the ones that are you. I'm just kidding. You don't have to raise your hand or anything, just do it in your head. We all know, and while that's funny, we all have these things, we all have these lists, but we start out with this negative example to give us an idea of what the life of a follower of Christ is not supposed to look like.

And this is why I say that Scripture, while it's not going to give you a very specific answer to a question that you have, it's not going to give you the answer to a decision you're trying to make, it'll give you guidelines that will help you toward those decisions.

Because as you're considering any question that you have, is one of your options going to push you in the direction of any item on that list? And if it is, well, maybe you don't do it. So what should our lives look like as we attempt to model ourselves after Christ?

Well, helpfully, Paul, continuing on in that same chapter in Galatians, gives us a list there as well. I'm sure you're all familiar with this. He says, "...but the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control.

Against such things there is no law. Now those who belong to Christ Jesus crucify the flesh with its passions and desires.". And I know that I've breezed past that list a number of times, but when I stop to really look at it, when I stop to really study it, a lot of those words are convicting to me, because I don't always show the fruit of the Spirit.

And people, not everybody will agree with this, but one thing I think is interesting about the way this is translated is it's called the fruit of the Spirit, right? It's not called the fruits of the Spirit, so you can't pick and choose from this list which one of these things you want to live your life with, which one of these traits you want to have, and which one, you know, like, I can be kind but I don't want to be self-controlled, right?

Or I can be gentle but not patient. I like to look at these all as one thing. The fruit of the Spirit evidences all of these behaviors. So to the extent that your life is in line with these attributes, you're following Christ.

And to the extent that you're not in line with these attributes, then we're not following Christ as well as we could. And none of us are following Christ as well as we could, don't get me wrong. But the things in the first list, they're all patterns of sin.

And again, like I said, our nature is that all of us have one or more of those things that we struggle with and that we're tempted to indulge in on a daily basis or however often it is. Now when we consider these things, I also want to look at something else that Paul wrote.

And I like the language that Paul uses in 1st Timothy 6. So the theme is similar here, but Paul is writing to Timothy about negative behaviors. And in chapter 6, verse 11, he writes this, "...but you, O man of God, flee from these things...".

And then he goes on to list a lot of those negative attributes that we're not to live with. He says to Timothy, "...flee from those things...". And this is good advice for us as well, because it's not all the time that these behaviors that we're thinking about, they don't just take us over where we can't control it or catch us by surprise and then all of a sudden we've done something that we know we shouldn't do, right?

We don't all of a sudden, most of the time, yell at another person. We don't all of a sudden get drunk. A lot of these things are a process, even if it's a process over hours as opposed to weeks or days.

It's all a process. There's a time and an opportunity to flee from stuff like this. And later in that same verse, after he tells Timothy to flee from some things, he tells him to pursue things that are good.

Again, this is great advice for us as well. And the fact that Paul is writing to flee some things and pursue others is a clue to us that the Christian life is going to take effort. This process of sanctification is not automatic and it's not total and complete, unfortunately.

And it's not going to come naturally to us, even after we've experienced the gift of salvation. Salvation granted by the Holy Spirit. And despite the fact that we are instructed to flee and pursue certain things, and we're instructed to do that, we have a role in it.

I will tell you that the process of sanctification, the process of becoming more like Christ, is not something that you can do completely under your own power. Because remember what Peter writes. He says that Satan, our adversary, prowls around like a roaring lion seeking someone to devour.

And he's always there tempting us with this list. He's always there tempting us with thoughts, tempting us with deeds, actions, behaviors, tempting us with the things that we're supposed to flee. And he's always trying to push us away from the things that we're supposed to pursue.

Because the goal of Satan is to steer as many souls away from God as he possibly can. And honestly, no matter what any of us think, not a single one of us are good enough on our own to live the Christian life under our own power.

And we certainly can't do and have never done a single thing to earn our own salvation or even to earn merit before God. Again, there's not a checklist. There's not a point system. If there was a point system, Jesus would have all the points.

He would have all the points for all of us. Your score would be zero. But thankfully, Jesus has won everything for you. So we need help. We need help in this. And where does our help come from? Well, our first clue as we look at that passage from Galatians where Paul listed the positive attributes as the fruit of the Spirit, you'll see that in every translation of the Bible, the word Spirit is capitalized in fruit of the Spirit.

And that's because it's referring to the Holy Spirit. Now, Jesus promised the help of the Holy Spirit to the Apostles. In John 14 26, Jesus says this, "...but the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you all things and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.".

Now, these are promises specifically to His disciples at the time, but I think we'll find that they're true to us as well. Because the Holy Spirit is still our help. The Holy Spirit is who Jesus sent after He left to help us with these things.

And despite the fact that a lot of us misunderstand the Holy Spirit, He's no less important than God the Father or Jesus the Son. The entire Trinity is alive and working in our lives. But all that background on living the Christian life is important because this is what we're all striving after with the help of the Holy Spirit.

And another thing that I wanted to point out is that the process of sanctification is not one that ever ends. There's no end state, there's no final goal that you can achieve. And the reason that I tell you this is so that you understand that there's no retirement from being a Christian.

Just because you have been following Christ and you've been following Christ in a way that is exemplary for 40, 50, 60, 70 years, more, that doesn't mean that you have the opportunity to pass off that responsibility to the next generation now and just kick back and relax and enjoy your assigned pew seat.

See, especially when you're somebody that knows the ins and the outs and the ups and the downs of the Christian life, this is when we need you to come alongside of other people in the church to help them do the same.

Because I promise you, for every one person who has been doing this for, you know, longer than a lot of other people have been alive, there's probably a handful of people that are struggling and don't know what to do next and need help on this process, this journey.

And that's what discipleship is. It's when you come alongside those people that need help, you show them what it's like to live the Christian life. And this is one of the most significant tasks of the church, and this is the most significant form of church growth.

Because when we talk about church growth, most of the time, when we use that term, we think of the number of people that are showing up to our service on a Sunday. But far more important than the number of people in a church is the growth in the spiritual maturity and the Christ-likeness that happens in the members of the church who are sitting in the pews.

And the process by which we help one another is discipleship. Again, it's not worth having a huge group of people who don't know each other and don't care for each other. A church is a group of people, no matter how big, that are living the Christian life together and that are helping one another.

But we like to overcomplicate things, and you can come up with programs and classes and all kinds of stuff like that to formalize this. And I think the reason that we do that is because we like processes, and we like steps, and we like to know exactly what we have to do next.

But unfortunately, life doesn't always work like that. So when you think about discipleship, a lot of times discipleship takes place one-on-one, just when you're living your life, just when you're being involved with other people.

It takes place in conversations that you have. It takes place in helping people in the church. And it also takes place with the way you live your life. It takes place with your example, so you also have to be careful there because chances are somebody's probably watching.

So you have to do your best to make sure that you have a life that's worth emulating, especially if you talk a good game about the Christian life. One of the things they said to us at the place where I was for the last few months was, you better make sure that your video matches your audio.

Got to make sure that what people see you doing matches what you say that you are doing, or that you should do. Or, in some cases, that what you say other people should do, you better make sure you're doing it yourself.

That way you can say this with Paul. Going back to Paul, a lot of Paul today. 1st Corinthians 11 .1, he says this, And this is important because Jesus gave us an example that we're to model, but we're not like Jesus.

Jesus was holy. Jesus was perfect. We are none of those things. But Paul was a man, and Paul lived a life worth emulating. So, just one final word on discipleship. And even though I said that formal, structured programs aren't required, there still should be some intentionality there.

You should be you should be looking for the opportunity to be discipled, even if it's only by the example of someone else. If there's no one in your life that you can look to to be discipled, look to look to other great Christians of the past.

Look to Paul. Look to people in Scripture. And you should also be looking for opportunities to disciple other people who aren't as far along as you are. Because chances are someone has helped you grow.

Someone has helped you along in your Christian life at some point along the way, and this is your opportunity to do the same thing. So that's our talk about discipleship. So now we want to get into the other significant piece in this verse, and that's the theme of evangelism.

The Great Commission and the Meaning of Evangelism

And it's surprisingly easy to get all wrapped up in discipleship and just turn all your efforts in, and turn all your efforts inside the walls of the church. But at that point you just become a social club.

Now we might be helping one another grow in our walk with Christ, but remember that Jesus has called us to take His message to the entire world. There's a couple places that we see this. Matthew chapter 28 verses 19 and 20, and Mark chapter 16 verses 15 and 16.

And we're gonna look at Mark today. But these show Jesus giving His disciples what we call the Great Commission. So Mark 16, 15 through 16, says this. He said to them, So while I said that discipleship is one of the most important tasks of the church, I don't think it's a stretch to say that evangelism is probably the most important task that the church has.

In fact, everything else is an accessory to evangelism. We disciple people so that they can go out and share the gospel of Jesus with other people, so they can disciple as well. We read Scripture and teach from the pulpit to help equip you and grow you, so you can take that message to other people.

So you can share the gospel with other people. And we see Jesus in this passage, specifically in verse 19, like I said, calling Peter and Andrew to be His disciples. But He's calling them to be disciples specifically for the purpose of being made into fishers of men, and at the risk of going over the same thing too many times.

Discipleship is the training that makes people into fishers of men, but evangelism is the purpose. Evangelism is the main reason for discipleship to even happen at all. So back to this idea that evangelism is the most important thing the church does.

John MacArthur said this, he said that rescuing men from sin is God's greatest concern. Luke 19 .10 says, "...for the Son of Man has come to seek and save the lost.". And we all know what John 3 .16 says, "...for God so loved the world that He sent His only Son, that whoever believes in Him would not perish but have eternal life.".

Everything that God did, sending Jesus to earth for His ministry, turning Jesus from God to man, was to save people. And in addition to this, we'll see this as we continue through Matthew, that the main focus of Jesus the whole time He was on earth was sharing the gospel.

And now we get into some territory that's kind of uncomfortable, because there's a lot of misconceptions with people about what evangelism is, or how you have to do it. I know that some of us grew up, and some of you grew up, thinking evangelism is basically like the Christian equivalent of door-to-door salesmanship, right?

Cold-calling people to sell them Jesus. And I know that that scarred a lot of people. And other people think that you have to be Billy Graham. We think that evangelism is a gift, and you have to be this great speaker, and you go out every night, and you have revivals, and thousands of people walk down the aisle and give their life to Christ.

They make a decision for Christ, right? We already know that, no, we don't do that. But that's what people think of evangelism. Other people think that evangelism is just living a quiet life of serving people, or a life of keeping to yourself, but living out those principles of godliness, living out the fruit of the Spirit.

There's a quote. What's that quote? Preach the gospel at all times, but use words if necessary. That's a bad quote, because you can't preach the gospel without using words. You can't preach the gospel only living your life, without telling people why they need Jesus, who He is, and what He did, and how to follow Him.

So all those things, they have a mixture of truth and error. Again, yeah, you have to live a godly life. So, you know, part of that quote is right. You have to live that way. But evangelism is a super deep subject, and honestly, I struggled trying to figure out exactly what it was that I wanted to share with you today, because there's so much to talk about.

But the great part of this is that I don't have to tell you all of it today, and I know some of you are glad that we don't have to hear all about evangelism today. You know, I pack a lunch and we're just gonna talk about this for the rest of the afternoon.

But what I do want to share with you today regarding evangelism is a few things. So this is gonna fall kind of under three headings. The first one is, I want to share with you the one element that must be present for something to be evangelism.

And then I want to share two great misconceptions about evangelism. And then finally, I want to share one concept that should be of great encouragement to you as you practice evangelism. So let's start with the one element that must be present.

What Must Be Present for Evangelism

So the first thing that we have to get clear about is what evangelism actually is. And definitions are often helpful, but in this case, the definition has kind of been stated over and over in a variety of ways.

So I wanted to find at least a little bit more information so that I could say this to you one more time without completely repeating the same thing over and over. So the word evangelism is based on a Greek word, euangelion.

Hopefully I said that right. But that translates literally into the word gospelling, which is basically taking the gospel and making it a verb, as in something that you do. So evangelism by definition means to share the gospel, literally to share the gospel.

And we can expand on that just a little bit. One way that I saw it put was this, evangelism is teaching the gospel with the aim to persuade. And that last part is important, because the only reason that we would ever practice evangelism, the only reason that we would ever share the gospel with somebody else, is because we want them to be saved.

And the goal of people being saved should be what we want out of every evangelistic encounter that we have. And we'll talk about the outcome of evangelism in just a little bit, but for now I want to highlight the fact that this definition deals entirely with things that are under your control.

Because you control whether or not you're faithful to share the gospel with other people when you have the opportunity. And you control whether or not your hope or your aim is to persuade them to believe in Jesus Christ.

But I said that I wanted to share with you the one element that must be present to be considered evangelism. So here it is. For something to be considered evangelism in any encounter, you must present the gospel.

And that means very specifically that you have to talk about the life and the death and the resurrection of Jesus Christ, and call that person to faith in that message. Sometimes what people do, and this is good, is that they share their own stories about what Jesus has done in their life.

But regardless what you share, these elements must be present. And this can be hard, and this is the part that gets intimidating. Because the starting point for the good news of the gospel, the starting point, the place we all begin with the gospel, is the fact that we're sinners.

Otherwise, the good news doesn't matter. But at the most basic level, we have all sinned and fallen short of God. And you know what? Everybody knows this. Even people that don't believe the Bible, even people that don't believe in God or what Jesus has done, they know that they've done things in their life that aren't right.

And a lot of people are living with anxiety, they're living with depression, they're living with fear or grief or all kinds of other emotions as a result of the things that they've done, no matter how mild or how horrible.

But they, a lot of times, don't have a framework for processing it. And the reason that this is significant in this case is because, as all of us are sinners, all of us are headed for an eternity in hell, barring something else happening.

All of us. And of course, some people have the mistaken idea that they're somehow good enough or that they've done enough to get to heaven on their own, but Scripture tells us that that's not the case.

That Scripture tells us that we've all fallen short, Scripture tells us that no one is righteous. And that's all, that's all bad news, right? It all sounds like bad news. But the good news is that God sent His only Son, Jesus.

God sent Jesus to earth, fully God and fully man, to live a perfect and sinless life, to show us how we should live. But also, that God sent Him to save the people of the world from their sins. Now, the way Jesus saved the world from their sins was living that perfect life and then serving as a sacrifice on the cross.

But not only that, three days later, after He served as a sacrifice on the cross, He rose from the dead. And by rising from the dead, by His resurrection, He showed that His sacrifice was acceptable to God and that His sacrifice redeemed us from our sins before God.

And that's the good news, but the best news of all is that all we have to do to escape hell and spend eternity with God in heaven is to repent of our sins and believe in the work of Jesus. And this is great news because the only thing, the only thing that's required of Christians is faith.

And this is essentially the only religion where that's the case. In every other religion, you have to act a certain way in order to earn the favor of whoever the deity is or whoever the God is. There are things you have to do to earn their favor.

But for us, all we have to do is have faith. We have to believe in the finished work of Jesus. And this is core to what we do as a church because everything comes back to Jesus. Now the reason evangelism gets so scary and becomes such a challenge is because it does, it does require confronting people with the fact that they're sinners.

And it does also require that those people repent of those sins. And that's a challenge because most of the sin that we're stuck with, we're stuck with because it's so enjoyable to our fleshly nature, at least for the moment.

So there's that one absolute requirement for evangelism, and that's that you share the gospel, the whole gospel, with the person you're talking to. And you don't have to be mean. You don't have to be rude.

You don't have to be accusatory. And actually, you should never be that way because you're benefiting from the same thing, you know, you're only a couple steps removed from that awful sinner that you're talking to.

But what happens is we get so worried about what people will think. We want people to like us. We don't want anybody to be mad at us. Most of us don't like rejection. So we focus only on the positive aspects of the Christian faith.

And we try to take the hard edges off the gospel. We sort of sand them off. But the problem with that is when we try to convince people without giving them all the information, we've essentially lied to them.

If you try to share the gospel without sharing all aspects of the gospel with somebody, what happens is that you wind up with a false convert, basically. You wind up with people who think they're saved when they're not.

And just a few more words on this before we move on, because I'm going to kind of touch on this in just a second, but the fact that the gospel must be presented, it also means that some of the things that we think are evangelism are not evangelism.

So don't misunderstand me when I say this, but just inviting someone to church is not evangelism. That doesn't mean I don't want you to invite people to church. I absolutely want you to invite people to church, because I saw a statistic somewhere that some enormous percentage of people who came to church and came to know Jesus came because they were invited.

So please invite people to church. However, the simple invitation is not evangelism. Don't miss the opportunity to share the gospel with somebody. If you're willing to invite them to church, tell them why.

Give them the whole story. Because remember this, our church service is for Christians. And while an unbeliever should come to church and hear the gospel if I'm doing what I'm supposed to do, then the purpose of this is still for me to teach and grow you.

You don't need the basics every single Sunday. We have to go beyond that in order to continue in our walk with Christ. And we'll get the basics sometime. We're getting some of the basics today. But, you know, we don't invite somebody to church for them to take step one and learn every little thing they need to know.

That's gonna come through discipleship. So I'm sort of getting ahead of myself now, because now we're talking about the two great misconceptions. And the first one is confusing witnessing with evangelism.

Inviting somebody to church is witnessing. Sharing the gospel with them is evangelism. When you hand out a blessing bag to somebody, if you just roll down the window, hand it to them and take off, that's witnessing.

You're doing a great thing. You're helping people. But if you don't share the gospel with them, it's not evangelism, right? Again, the goal that Jesus did not send his disciples out in the world to help people.

Like, this whole social thing comes along with the gospel, but it's not the gospel. So you have to share that. So all of these things are good. Again, witnessing is a great thing. And please don't think I'm you to stop, because I'm not.

I'm just telling you that it's not evangelism, and share the gospel. Share the good news of Jesus when you have the opportunity. Now, the second great misconception relates to the message of the gospel itself.

And I'm gonna split this up into a couple different ways. And the first one is looking at the the misguided idea that somehow the messenger is more important than the message. So the gospel message is everything.

But we get the idea that if we want to reach a certain type of people, we want to reach young people. We want to reach professional people. Or we want to reach people of different ethnicities. That we have to somehow emulate the culture.

We have to take our church service, if we want to take it to the world, we have to make it look like the world. And that is a mistake. To think that we have to change the style of our music, the way the pastor dresses, the way our building looks, just to meet the preferences of the people that we want to hear the gospel, that's a mistake.

Because it's the power of God's Word, and it's the power of the work of Jesus Christ that converts people. It's not the experience that they have. Because when we start playing with people's emotions, that's another way that we get false converts.

And there's no reason that we would leave out anybody of any group of any race, culture, age, clothing preference who is required to preach the gospel from preaching the gospel. But we don't ever want to get the idea that the messenger is more important than the message that they're delivering.

So always remember that. Always remember that it's the message, it's the gospel, and it's the power of God that works through that message with the hearer. And speaking of the message, the second issue we have with that, and this is one that I mentioned a little bit already, is that sometimes we want to soften the message of the gospel, because we want to make it a little bit easier for people to hear.

We want to make it easier to draw people into church. So we take away that sin part. We tell you that Jesus died for you, but we don't necessarily tell you why Jesus had to die for you. And then we wind up with what I think we see largely in the evangelical church today, being more concerned with being liked than telling people the truth.

And this is something I said already, but you wind up with these kind of pseudo-Christian gatherings of people that ultimately are sinning in some way. Again, we're all sinning in some way, but they're being told that Jesus died for them, so it's okay.

So they continue in that sin because they haven't ever been told different, and they're headed down a path straight to hell, and the pastors that are teaching them that way are condemning them to hell, and they're condemning themselves, because they have to answer for God, to God for that.

And it happens because we want to be popular. But if you want to be popular, leading a church is a terrible way to go about it. Because you can tell people all that good stuff in some other forum where you're, well, where you're not condemning yourself.

But because remember this message, this is more from Paul, 1st Corinthians 118. For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing. Because some people, and this is why evangelism is hard too, I get it.

Some people are going to reject your message, and they're not going to want to talk to you, and they're going to see you coming, and they're going to say, oh gosh, that person wants to talk to me about Jesus again, and they're going to go the other way, right?

And that hurts. None of us like that. But the Bible has predicted that that's going to happen. And even if people aren't going to like it, and they aren't going to come into the doors of this church, that's no excuse for changing what the truth of the gospel is in an attempt to repeal to unrepentant sinners.

So those are our two misconceptions, and there's a lot more. But those are the two that I wanted to address. The first one is confusing witnessing and evangelism, and the second is trying to adapt or change the message of the gospel to achieve a wider appeal.

The Encouragement That We Have No Control Over the Outcome

The last thing I want to address, to close on a high note, is to give you what I hope is the most encouraging thing I can about evangelism, and that is that you have no responsibility for the outcome of evangelism.

You have no control over it. You have no responsibility of it. Remember, we don't save anyone. Only the work of the Holy Spirit in men's and women's hearts can grant salvation. And that's why we don't ask for a decision.

That's why if I was talking to somebody, I wouldn't say, will you decide to follow Jesus today right now? I wouldn't say that, because that's not what we're going for. We can tell people that we hope they will put their faith in Christ.