July 16, 2015 ISI Radio Show with Pastor Keith Foskey on “Methods of Sovereign Grace Evangelism”

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Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister George Norcross in downtown

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Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

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Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

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Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, Iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

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Matthew Henry said that in this passage, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

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It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour, and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

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Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and the rest of humanity living on the planet earth listening via live streaming.

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 16th of July 2015, and we have returning as a guest for the second time,

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Pastor Keith Foskey of Sovereign Grace Family Church in Jacksonville, Florida, and the website for that church,

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I'm getting it right this time, it's sgcfjacks .org,

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S -G for Sovereign Grace, C -F for Christian Family, Jacks, J -A -X, an abbreviation for Jacksonville, Florida, dot org, sgcfjacks .org.

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It's my honor and privilege to welcome you back to Iron Sharpens Iron for the second time, Pastor Keith Foskey.

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Hello, sir, how are you? I'm doing great, and I'm even better now that you're on the air with us, and the theme that we're going to be addressing today is the methods of sovereign grace evangelism.

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Just yesterday, actually, we had Mark Lukens on talking about the love of God and the salvation of sinners, and some of the days previous to that, in fact,

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I believe it was Wednesday, the 8th of July, Mack Tomlinson was discussing the true marks of biblical preaching, and some of all these elements are going to be addressed again today, but specifically on the methodology of evangelism.

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In fact, Tony Miano, the well -known street evangelist and author, he was addressing how

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Calvinism does not hinder evangelistic zeal, and the fact that that is often the caricature or the slander of what we believe.

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Nothing could be farther from the truth when it is rightly applied to one's faith in life.

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Obviously, there are people who distort these teachings who may be guilty of having no evangelistic zeal, but there are

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Arminians and Pelagianists and people of all types of theological backgrounds who are lazy and do not spread the doctrines they believe either, so it doesn't necessarily mean that it is inherent to the teachings of Calvinism, and we know that it is not when it is rightly applied.

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It has historically been embraced, but why did you specifically want to address the methods of sovereign grace evangelism today?

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Well, the particular issue that I see that has arisen is that it's not so much a theological issue, which is keeping people from evangelism, it's the fact that evangelism is the most difficult thing that we do as Christians, because it's the most...

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I think the thing that's the most unnatural for most of us is to go out and talk to people we don't know, share with people we don't know, and it becomes an issue of, you know, you hit something that I was going to mention.

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You said it's not something that's just a Calvinistic issue, but it's something that sort of goes across the board.

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People say Calvinism equals evangelism. That's not true. The reality is, you ask any pastor,

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I don't care whether it's a Calvinist or an Arminian, you ask just about any pastor, what's the issue that you are trying to overcome among your people?

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One of the things that is bound to come out is the issue of, you know, the people are not actively engaging their community with their faith.

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And, you know, we've said it for years, and we say it with sort of a little bit of embarrassment, but you know,

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Jehovah's Witnesses and the Mormons spend so much more time going out into communities seeking to reach people than most

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Baptists or Presbyterians or whatever else, and people say, well, they're, you know, we shouldn't be comparing ourselves to the cult groups, but the reality is, you know, a lot of them are doing it because they have a false view of the gospel, they have a false view of how they're saying.

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So they're thinking, well, they're earning their righteousness through their apostatizing, but the reality is, at the end of the day, they're out there knocking on doors, they're out there seeking to reach people, and a lot of people in, quote -unquote, evangelical

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Christianity, which is, you know, gospel Christianity, are not. And I think that the ones who are, many of the ones who are, are doing so with a bad methodology, and that's sort of what

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I wanted to address, is we need to be doing it, and we need to know what our goal is in evangelism.

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So that, I hope that was kind of a long answer. Well, why don't we even start with what our goal is in evangelism?

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Well, see, this is the part that I think most people get confused about. A lot of people think that the goal in evangelism is to see people get saved, and while that is a potential result, of preaching the gospel, preaching the gospel is the goal in and of itself, because we preach the gospel and God is glorified.

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Whether or not a person is saved through our proclaiming of the truth, so long as we are faithful in proclaiming the truth, then

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God has been glorified in what we have done, and the person who's hearing it is either hearing the truth and it will bring them to a knowledge of salvation, or they're hearing the truth and their heart is hardened against it and they're going to reject it.

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Either way, the truth is the truth, and our proclamation of it doesn't change whether or not they receive it or not.

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So the goal in evangelism is to tell people the truth about their sin, to tell people the truth about salvation through Christ alone, by faith in him alone, and through repentance and faith we come to a saving knowledge of Christ, and that's the goal, and whether or not someone receives it is a result.

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Yeah, that's an excellent point, because you have many Christians, especially

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Arminians, but to be perfectly honest, I'm seeing more and more people in the

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Reformed community, or at least professing Reformed community, professing Reformed denominations, who are adopting the

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Arminian methodology, and basically it is a methodology of pragmatism, and if you believe that your ultimate goal is to convince an unbeliever to believe in the claims of Jesus Christ and his gospel, then you are going to be much more prone to develop unbiblical and even perhaps unconsciously very anti -biblical methods to communicate this message.

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If your main point is to get sinners to make a profession, then you can come up with all kinds of gimmicks and so on, and just before you answer or comment further, a clear thing comes to mind.

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Many years ago, I believe it was in the early 90s, I was on a bus to a

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Billy Graham crusade, and the only reason I was going is that my

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Roman Catholic sister wanted to attend this event, and I said to her,

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I will go with you, but while I'm on the way there with you, I do want to explain to you why my congregation that I'm a member of does not participate in this, and I basically told my sister that they have people involved in this crusade from religions that do not even believe what

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I hold the gospel to be, nor does my church hold the gospel to be it, nor did the

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Reformers and the Protestant Reformation or Evangelicals for centuries, and they will have these folks lead people to faith in Christ who are coming from positions and beliefs that are sometimes the polar opposite of mine, and I said to my sister, and that would include the

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Roman Catholic Church, who does not believe in salvation by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone, and my sister actually saw the validity of my comment, and there was a pastor, a

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Baptist pastor across the aisle from me on the bus, and I said, just out of curiosity, why do you participate as a church in these meetings knowing that there are

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Roman Catholics and liberal Protestants and others involved in the actual teams that participate in the crusades to lead people to faith?

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And he said, well, I just know people get saved, and I'm willing to put up with everything else that goes on because I know people get saved.

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Now that kind of pragmatism is not even closely or remotely related to anything we see in Scripture, is it?

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No, not at all, and the problem is the definition of pragmatism, as I understand it, is doing what works.

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You're doing whatever it takes because it works. The problem is it doesn't work.

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Pragmatism, and Ray Comfort has a very interesting statistic. I know you're familiar with Ray Comfort's Way of the

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Mass Minister. He introduced in his sermon, Hell's Best Kept Secret, a statistic, and I think that the crusade was in the 90s, but I don't know that it was

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Billy Graham, so I want to make sure I say that up front, but he quoted a statistic from one of these big crusades.

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It was out in Texas. They secured 30 ,000 decisions for Christ, quote -unquote decisions, 30 ,000.

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Within one year, they had gotten the people's information. When they made the decision, they got their information, whatever.

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They were only able to find 30 people out of 30 ,000. They were only able to find 30 who were still actively participating as faithful Christians in their local community.

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That's not even 1%. I'm not a mathematician. I can't tell you what percentage. It's like 0 .001 or whatever, but 30 in 30 ,000.

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I remember I mentioned that in a sermon one time when I had a guy challenge me. He said, well, for those 30 people they got saved, it was worth it.

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I said, no, sir. I'm going to disagree with you because while it was 30 people who got saved through that crusade, what you have is 29 ,970 people who think they got saved, but didn't have anything happen in their lives.

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God did not change their lives. They did not repent. They did not become part of the local church. They did not become participants within the body of Christ.

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You created almost 30 ,000 false believers. That's the problem.

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That's the problem. So, you know, I call it Jesus salesmanship.

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Yeah, and I agree with you, and this seems to be the defense of all the churches that more and more incorporate the suggestions or the success methodology of entertainment and things from the secular world that they employ these things in the church because they know that in some ways they work for certain things.

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They work very often in drawing large crowds. They work in piquing the interest of people.

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They work in perhaps even holding people's interest and remaining in the building wherever this event may be held or in the crowd if it's an outside event.

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So, there are things that work with many of the methods of the world when it comes to entertainment and other things such as that.

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Oh, absolutely. But as you said, the main thing here is to glorify

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God by being faithful to the proclamation of His word, and if you are adopting worldly methods or manufacturing things great against the grain of Scripture, then you're really doing something to the opposite of bringing glory to God, aren't you?

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Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. It's like Dr. White says, what you win them with is what you win them to.

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We've got an elder at our church who always talks about, if you win somebody with a hot dog, you're going to have to keep the hot dogs coming.

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If you want them with a fare, you've got to keep the fare going. If you win them with an entertainment, you're going to have to keep the entertainment going, because that's what they're there for.

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They didn't come with having had their hearts broken over the gospel. They came for whatever the methodology was, whatever this is, and if that's what brought them, that's what's going to keep them.

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Now, how do you respond to those who will say, hey, look, you're a Calvinist.

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You believe that God ordains all things that come to pass. You know that people have been saved at these different types of events that utilize methodology that you disapprove of.

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If God's sovereign over salvation, He's going to use anything that is being used by us, so what difference does it make?

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Well, God, you know, I'm sure that somebody has gotten saved. I don't know that this is true, but I'm sure that someone has gotten saved by going to Barnes and Nobles and looking at Christian literature and reading the gospel.

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I'm sure that that's happened. That doesn't mean I'm going to send somebody to Barnes and Nobles looking for Christian books. I mean,

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I don't know if that makes sense. Yeah, it makes perfect sense. And that's the thing. Just because God can save a person through a methodology which is not most biblical doesn't mean that we should be seeking the unbiblical methodology.

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Just because God can do that doesn't mean that that's what we're supposed to be doing. We're supposed to not be like Nadab and Abihu and creating this strange fire and hoping

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God blesses it, you know, and just looking out to see that the fire is not going to come back on us. Our goal is to do what

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God tells us to do. God tells us to be faithful in the proclamation of the gospel, to tell people the truth about sin and salvation through Jesus Christ alone.

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We are not supposed to be entertainers. We're not supposed to be clowns. We're not supposed to be comedians. We're not supposed to be, you know, having—we've turned the church into everything but what it was intended to be.

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Right. And it's now become a house of entertainment rather than a house of prayer. Yes, in fact,

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I know that some of my Catholic friends or listeners will be upset at me for this, but I remember seeing in a

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Catholic church the area where they have candles for people to light that will somehow enhance their prayer communication to the saints.

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I was an altar boy and I could not even figure that out back then, especially when they went from us lighting matches and actually lighting candles to pressing a button for a flame -shaped bulb to be turned on.

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But I remember having the overwhelming urge to hang a sign on one of these displays of candles that said,

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In loving memory of Nadab and Ambaihu. But I obviously refrained because I don't believe in vandalism.

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Well, that also is another warning to us, that whole story about the serious dangers of innovation.

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I mean, we do have the freedom, especially in the New Covenant, to be creative and innovative, but we have to be very careful about that, don't we?

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Yes, I think it comes down—you know, in reform circles we talk about the regulative principle. The regulative principle is that we are not to do anything in worship that is not regulated or prescribed to us in Scripture.

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And the opposite of that, the other view is that we can do anything we want as long as it's not forbidden.

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And I think Nadab and Ambaihu speak to that, because in that particular text, God's statement to them was that they did not do what they had been commanded to do.

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It wasn't that they did something that they weren't commanded to do, they did not do what they had been commanded to do. And that's what we've lost in our

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Sunday morning worship, we've lost in our evangelism. We're not doing what we're supposed to do, we're doing what we have not been commanded to do.

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This has happened with all kinds of different methodologies. You have the friendship evangelism, which has really taken evangelicalism ever since,

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I guess, for the last 20 years, it's really become the normative thing. You ask somebody, do you share your faith with someone, what do they always say?

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Well, I have to make friends with them first. And what happens is, they make friends with them, and then you say, well, have you shared your faith with them?

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They say, well, no, we're too good of friends, I don't want to hurt their feelings. You had to make friends before you could share your faith.

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And Tony Miano makes it great. Actually, you mentioned him earlier. He has a great little analogy that he gives.

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A person moves in next door, and we want to share our faith with them, but we become good friends with them.

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We go over there, we start having barbecues together, and finally, after a year, we build up the confidence, okay,

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I've made friends with them, I'm going to go share my faith with them. And finally, I walk over there, and I'm very solemn, and my face is kind of solemn and very serious, and they're like, well, what's wrong?

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Well, I want to share with you what's most important in my life is my faith. And they look at you like you're crazy and say, this is the most important thing in your life?

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You've known me for a year, and you haven't told me. And on top of that, is this the whole reason you became my friend in the first place?

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And Tony goes on to say, wouldn't it be better if somebody moves into your neighborhood to walk over to their house, bring them a basket of cookies, bring them something and a gospel tract and say, hey, you know what?

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I want you to know I want to be your friend. I'm glad you moved into the neighborhood. I'm glad to meet you. My name's Keith. This is my wife,

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Jennifer. We are Christians, and we go to Sovereign Grace Church, and we just wanted to let you guys know who we are.

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Here's a gospel tract. If you have any questions about this, we'd love to talk to you. I mean, that would be one way to read some of the gospel.

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I love gospel tracts, by the way. I'm a big proponent. I think Jeff Pollard's message on paper missionaries is the best

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I've ever heard on the value of gospel in the written form. But you let them know up front who you are and what you're about.

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And you're not, you know, it's not that I don't want to be your friend. I do want to be your friend. But I want you to know that my mission in life is to make sure that you know the same

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Christ that I know, at least that you heard his message. Because, you know, from the time I meet somebody to the time

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I die, I'm only going to have a certain amount of interactions with that individual. And it could only be one interaction.

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And I've got to ask myself a question in the interaction that I've had with this person. Have I had, have I taken the opportunity to share

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Jesus Christ with this person, whether it's with a gospel tract, whether it's with my words? And people say, well, I share Jesus by how

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I live. No, you don't. No, you don't. And I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings. We don't share

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Jesus with actions. We share Jesus with words. Because if somebody looks at you, atheists hold doors.

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Atheists give money to the poor. Atheists feed the hungry. Don't tell me that your deeds preach the gospel because they don't.

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Now, your deeds can ruin your witness, but they can't be your witness. And I want to give our email address out.

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If you have a question for Pastor Keith Foskey on methods of sovereign grace evangelism, which we'll actually get to some of his specific ideas in a minute, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com.

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That's C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com.

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Now, having said what you said, Keith, we are to be salt and light in the world by the way we live in addition to what we say, correct?

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Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. And like I said, I hope I didn't come across as brash, and I may have, and I want to make sure

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I'm clear. I'm not saying that how we live doesn't matter. What I am saying, though, is a person is not going to hear about justification by grace through faith.

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They're not going to hear about sin, repentance, and Jesus Christ simply by us holding the door for them or being nice to them.

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A person is only going to hear that when we tell it to them or give it to them in a gospel tract. We cannot assume that they're going to look at us and say, man, you're a nice person, and I want to be like you.

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I have a lady who told me that. She said, you know, I just wait for people to ask me. I said, how often in the last year has someone asked you what's different about you?

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And she said, well, I don't know. I said, last five years. How often has that happened? Well, you know, a couple times.

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I said, so in five years, you've only shared your faith with two people? You know,

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I mean, if we're waiting on somebody to ask us, hey, what's different about you?

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We're both things are vital. You have

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Paul who may emphasize what we believe and preach and teach, and you have James who was focusing on, in many respects, what we do.

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Just saying to people in need be warm and filled isn't enough. And of course, when

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I say isn't enough, I'm not talking about to inherit eternal life. I'm speaking of to be a faithful Christian.

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But therefore, we must remember that just being a friend and being nice is not sufficient.

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In fact, Jesus wasn't always nice. If you hear him interact with the

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Pharisees, you realize very quickly he wasn't nice to them. Yes, and I had an interesting interaction recently.

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I don't know how far we are from a break. I have a story I wanted to tell. In fact, why don't you, this might be if you have a story you want to tell.

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Well, actually, you can begin it now because we have about five minutes left, so you can continue. Okay. One of the things that we have, we have a gentleman in our church who does preach on the street.

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He does street preaching similar to Tony Miata. He goes out when there are events downtown. We live in Jacksonville, so we have a big sports town, and there's a lot of things that go on here, and he goes down and preaches.

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And I've been down there. I've preached once, so it's not something that I do regularly, but I go down and try to support him.

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And recently, the Jehovah Witnesses had a conference here in Jacksonville.

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It was two weekends in a row where they gathered thousands. I've never seen so many Jehovah Witnesses in one place.

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I've never known to see that many in one place. It's just thousands of people flocked to this one, the

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Jacksonville Arena. And so we went down there, and my friend was preaching outside.

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Well, a woman approached me as I was standing there with him. She approached me, and she started berating us for preaching the gospel.

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And I didn't know this woman. I just walked up. She goes, why are you doing this? And I said, we're trying to reach these people with the gospel, and we're preaching.

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And I got to tell you, the guy who was preaching, very loving, was not hard.

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I mean, his words were firm, but he wasn't calling names or mocking or anything like that.

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And I walked up to her, and I said, we're proclaiming the gospel. And she said, well, my mother is here, and I'm here to pick her up.

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I said, okay. You know, we want to share the gospel with your mom. I said, are you a Christian?

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And she goes, I am a Baptist. She said it with great pride. I am a Baptist. And I said, man, we are really wanting to share

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Jesus with your mom. She goes, well, I respect her faith. And I said, have you tried to reach your mom with the gospel of Jesus Christ?

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You say you're a Baptist. Have you tried to reach out to her? I respect her faith, and you could learn a thing or two from her is what she told me.

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And then she walked away. And I thought to myself as she was leaving, here's a woman whose mother is believing a false gospel.

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She's believing in something that is ultimately, if she doesn't repent, is going to be something that leads her to hell.

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And yet, she respects her. And I understand respecting other people of other religions in the sense that we don't go around and be ugly to them or be mean to them.

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But the idea that she wouldn't share the gospel with her mom simply because she respects her mom, that's so unloving, but that's modern evangelicalism.

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Right. What you said clearly brings to my memory, the very first year that I began orchestrating debates with Dr.

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James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries and Roman Catholic theologians who were his opponents in public moderated debates,

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I was going to different churches where the pastors had given me permission to bring posters, 11 by 17 posters, to publicize these debates.

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And I went to this one church, and I'm waiting in the lobby for the pastor, and the stack of posters is on the coffee table that they had in their lobby.

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And this was early in a Sunday morning before their services started. And this woman from the church walks over to the coffee table and she says, what are these doing here?

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I said, I brought them here because your pastor said that I could hang them up. I'm just waiting for him to come out of his office.

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And she says, you can't put these up now. And I said, why? My mother's Catholic and she's here today visiting.

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And I said, don't you think it's time you break the news to mom that you're not

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Catholic? And there's a reason. And the thing that was amazing is that these posters, you couldn't even really tell who made the poster.

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A Roman Catholic could have made the poster because it just gave the facts about the debate and who the participants were in the subject matter.

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But even the fact that there was any kind of mention of disagreement, there was horror running through the bones of this woman.

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But anyway, we're going to be going to a break right now. And just a reminder, if you want to email us at chrisarnson at gmail .com,

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chrisarnson at gmail .com. And when we come back from the break, we're going to have Pastor Keith Foskey give specific examples on how his church is involved in evangelism with the doctrines of grace as their motivation and methodology and their theology.

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And obviously, we were speaking a lot about worship within the walls of the church.

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And when we come back, we're going to specifically going to be speaking on evangelism. So we'd love to hear from you and your questions for Keith Foskey right after these messages don't go away.

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That's wrbc .us. Welcome back.

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This is Chris Zarnes, and if you've just tuned us in on Iron Sharpens Iron, our guest today is

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Keith Foskey, who is pastor of Sovereign Grace Family Church in Jacksonville, Florida.

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Their website is sgcfjacks .org.

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S -G -C, which stands for Sovereign Grace.

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Yeah, right, I wrote it. I swore I wasn't going to mess this up, and I messed it up.

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S -G -F -C -Jacks .org. That's S -G for Sovereign Grace, F -C for Family Church, Jacks, J -A -X, which is an abbreviation for Jacksonville, Florida, dot

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O -R -G. And once again, I apologize for messing up your website, which

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I was determined not to do. If I ever do anything like that again, please right away correct me,

32:46

Keith, if you happen to pick it up. Yes, sir. But, and before I forget, since I heard

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Dr. James R. White in the ad for the New American Standard Bible, I just want to let you know that today, immediately following Iron Sharpens Iron, James White's program,

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The Dividing Line, will begin at 5 p .m. So that's 5 p .m. Eastern time. So his website is

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A -O -M -I -N .org, A -O -M -I -N .org,

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which stands for Alpha and Omega Ministries, A -O -M -I -N .org. And he is bound to be telling us something that we need to know, as he is very well known for doing.

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And so if we could take this up where we left off and now begin to specifically talk about how

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Sovereign Grace Family Church participates in evangelism, and how in doing so they do not violate the scriptures or the doctrines of Sovereign Grace through your ingenuity and your creativity and so on.

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Well, the first thing that we try to encourage everyone to do in our church is to understand what the goal is in proclaiming the gospel and how to proclaim the gospel using law and grace.

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One of the things that we have used is The Way of the

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Master, which is their Kirk Cameron and Ray Comfort's DVD series.

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But we talk a little bit about some of the differences between our theology and Ray Comfort's theology.

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Ray Comfort, I'm not certain. I think that he's a Lutheran, but I'm not certain of that.

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But we do, of course, hold to the doctrine of limited atonement. So one of the things that we don't do is we don't go around using the methodology to tell people, well,

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Jesus died for you, Jesus died for you. Which is interesting because when I first was introduced to Reformed theology, one of the things that I was just told to say and was thought that that was just a normal thing, that we just go around telling everyone, well,

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Jesus died for your sin, Jesus died to pay for your sin. And obviously, if you hold to the doctrine of grace and you understand the doctrine of perfect atonement, we know that Christ died for the elect,

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Christ died to save those who would believe, and that there is not going to be, and there has not been atonement made for those who do not believe.

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And so that's something that we try to help people understand in how we use language when we're sharing the gospel.

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Because I think what happens when you go around using the language of Jesus died for you, I think you're trying to appeal to to a felt need and an emotion.

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Whereas when we tell people that they are sinners, and that they are in need of a

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Savior, and that Jesus Christ is their only Savior, and if they would repent and trust in Him, that His atonement would be sufficient for them, would make a sufficient payment for their sin,

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I think that's a much better way and a much more clear way of explaining what Christ has done. That there is a perfection in the atonement, it wasn't just to put atonement, but it was perfectly made on behalf of all those who would believe.

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You know, even John 3 .16, which is often used to bash Calvin, John 3 .16 has a limiting statement.

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It's all the believing ones will not perish. It's not everyone in the world, but the vast majority of the world will perish.

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Jesus said that there are two ways, the narrow way and the broad way, and the broad way is broad because many take it, and many will go therein.

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So I think the first thing that we do, and I know it is, the first thing that we do is we try to help people understand the gospel, understand law, that it is sin is any want of conformity to or transgression of the law of God, we use that catechism question as something we train people to understand what is sin.

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Sin is any want of conformity to, meaning that we have not lived up to, or transgression of, we've broken

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God's law. So when we're out talking to people about our faith, one of the things we do, and again this is not ours, this is, you know, great comfort, we ask people do you think that you're a good person?

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And sometimes I'll even ask people, I'll even use the old D. James Kennedy diagnostic question, if you were to die and face

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God, and he says why should I let you into heaven, what would you say? And the goal in that question is trying to get people to open up about what they really think about themselves.

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Do they think themselves to be good? Do they think themselves to be personally righteous? Most people do.

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I remember there was a man who came to our church looking for food. While he was there,

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I was getting him some food from our pantry, and I had him in the church kitchen, and I began to share the gospel with him, and I said that I was a sinner, that I needed

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Christ as my savior, that he was a sinner, that he needed Christ as his savior, and I was going through the doctrine of substitution,

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I was talking to him about the fact that I cannot bear my sins, Christ must bear my sins, if I bear my sins

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I'm going to go to hell, but Christ hates my sins, and the guy looked at me very perplexed, and he said pastor you can't live like that.

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I said what do you mean? He said you've got to be able to pull yourself up by your own bootstraps, you can't go relying on someone else your whole life.

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I said now first of all you came to our church looking for food. There's a touch of irony, but on top of that, this is one thing that I can't pull myself up by my own bootstraps, and I had to tell him

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I said this is the one thing that you have to have a substitute for. I have to have a substitute take my sin, if not

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I'm going to bear the weight of my sins, and if I bear the weight of my sins it's going to be an eternity in hell. And so you know right theology, right understanding of law and gospel is how we begin, and we train our people that when they're talking to people to try to point them towards their sin, so that they understand their need for a savior.

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If a person doesn't understand their need for a savior, the message of the cross is foolishness, it's not going to make any sense.

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It's like telling someone you paid a fine for them, and they didn't know they didn't have the fine. They're not going to appreciate it, they're not going to understand it, it's going to be foolishness to them, and so we need to help them understand why their sin is so repugnant to God, and why they need a savior.

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So we begin with that, next thing we do is we really make heavy use of the gospel tracts, and we get gospel tracts from several different places.

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We write a lot of ourselves, and we have them printed ourselves. We have a couple men in the church who are good writers,

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I write some myself. One of the ones we have looks like a appointment card, has

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Hebrews 9 .27 on it, but it looks like it's kind of like if you're going to the doctor's office to give you an appointment card. It looks like that, and it just says you know everyone has an appointment, and on the back it's got

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Hebrews 9 .27 and a little tract that talks about the fact that we're all going to be appointed and a man wants to die, and then comes judgment.

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So we use gospel tracts for the times when we're not going to have time with people to really talk, because sometimes you step onto an elevator, you've got 15 seconds with a person.

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You're passing by someone in a library, you see somebody you haven't seen in a while, they're walking in a place, you're walking out of a place.

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That's what a gospel tract is for, it's for those quick interactions where you say, hey you know what I have something

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I want to give you, this is very important to me, and I would like for you to read it. And having good tracts with you is something

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I encourage all Christians to do. I encourage our whole church, the church invests in them. We buy them, we put them out on the narthex table, we put them in people's hands, and we've even now, and this is the next thing

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I was going to say, we've even created a booth that we are setting up at local events.

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Like our first one, there's a home educators national conference that's coming to Jacksonville.

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And so we invested money in renting a spot at this convention so that we could set up our booth.

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And the booth is not really to advertise the church, I mean it's got the church's name on it, but the booth is an opportunity for us to have a thousand people come by and us to put gospel tracts in everyone's hands.

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And the booth, the big letters on the side of the booth, I got this from Tony Miano, and big letters that says let's talk about God.

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Because that's what we want people to do. We want to give you a tract, but we want to talk to you. We want to have an opportunity to speak into your life, and we train our people to do that.

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We have a couple guys who are really good at it, so they sort of take as team leads, and then some people who haven't had as much experience work with them.

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And so we go together, and we help people reach out to these people, and people say, well you're going to a home educators event, all those, you know, all homeschoolers are

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Christian. Well no, they're not. And most of the people at this event are

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Roman Catholics, because a lot of the people in this area who do homeschooling are

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Catholic. And so it's very interesting that we're going to have an opportunity to share the gospel with people who don't have it.

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They have Rome's gospel, which is not a gospel at all. Amen. We do have a listener from a fellow

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Floridian. I don't know how close Fort Myers is to Jacksonville, but Mike wants to know if you attended

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Jacksonville Baptist Seminary, and if you did, were you introduced to the history and tenets of biblical

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Calvinism within the Southern Baptist Convention? If so, how was the general posture of the professors in presenting and teaching on the subject?

43:12

It's sort of off of our topic, but it is related, since you are a believer in the doctrines of grace or Calvinism.

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So if you could... I appreciate that question, and I did attend Jacksonville Baptist Theological Seminary.

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I attended, Dr. Vernon Johns was the president when I started, and he was a very dear man, and he passed away while I was there.

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And Dr. Jerry Powers took his position as the president, and he recently passed.

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And also there was Dr. Stanford Cruz was one of my professors.

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All of these men were great men, and I want to make something from the very get -go.

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I want to say that I love these men. They were godly men. They taught me a lot, and I cannot thank

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God enough for how much wisdom they spoke in my life. Having said all that, they were not

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Calvinists. They were not positive regarding the doctrines of grace.

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I did not enter seminary as a Calvinist. I entered seminary quite ignorant of the

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Calvinism in discussion. As I told you last time I was taught, I came from a liberal background church, so I went to seminary really as a blank slate because I didn't have a lot of theology.

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And so I received from them very typical Southern Baptist, I guess you would say modern

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Southern Baptist theology. It wasn't that, but certainly

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Arminian in its perspective. And there were some things that I would now disagree with looking back.

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Things that I was taught that I would say no, I think I would go a different direction now. But they were definitely godly.

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I love what they did for me in my life. I wasn't

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Calvinism through it, but in a negative way they did a class. This is actually funny, and again, irony of irony.

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They taught a class opposing Calvinism using the book, Debating Calvinism by James White and Dave Hunt.

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That book introduced me to James White, and here I am 10 years later, one of the probably,

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I don't want to say I'm the biggest James White fan, but I really appreciate his ministry. And I kind of credit the seminary for introducing me to him, and I'm sure they were much to their chagrin at this point because they were doing so thinking that they would be discouraging people from going to Calvinism.

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But Dave Hunt's arguments in the book were just, they were not on par.

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Yeah, that reminds me of a brother who is a retired pastor who was once on the faculty at a

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Calvary Chapel school, and Chuck Smith who was known for being, was known for being anti -Calvinistic, when this man converted to Calvinism and he had to leave the faculty there,

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Chuck Smith said, how on earth did you become a Calvinist? And he said, well you know those books that you had me stock the library with that were written by Calvinists?

46:42

And he said, yes. He goes, well I read them. But we have to go right now, and I'm sorry, we have to go to a break right now, and we're going to be right back after these messages, so don't go away if you have a question, now is your time to email it to us for keithfoskey at chrisarnson at gmail .com,

47:02

chrisarnson at gmail .com, we'll be right back. Lynbrook Baptist Church on 225

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It's about God and His glory, and the gospel is about... Welcome back. This is Chris Arnzen. If you've just tuned into Iron Sharpens Iron, our guest today is

48:30

Pastor Keith Foskey of Sovereign Grace Family Church in Jacksonville, Florida, and this time

48:35

I'm getting the website right. It is S -G -F -C -JAX .org,

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S -G for Sovereign Grace, F -C for Family Church, JAX, J -A -X, standing for Jacksonville, Florida, .org,

48:51

and we are discussing methods of Sovereign Grace evangelism. We do have an anonymous listener who says,

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I am uncomfortable by the fact that my church practices Super Bowl Sunday gatherings as an outreach to the lost, and I do not even see much evangelism taking place because after all, how can you interrupt a football game the magnitude of the

49:20

Super Bowl by talking about the Bible? Is this an appropriate method, in your opinion, of evangelism?

49:27

So that's a very good question because you hear about that all the time. Wow. This is a very difficult question, only because I would be very tempted just to say, yeah,

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I think something like that is is inappropriate. We have to remember, what is the goal in evangelism is reaching people with the gospel, reaching people with the truth.

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I think, honestly, if I were going to have, if I were going to show the Super Bowl to church,

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I don't think we would, but if I were going to do it, I would just show the Super Bowl to church. I wouldn't say this is an evangelism activity.

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I would just say we're doing this activity. I think what happens is we do all kinds of things that we want to do, and then we slap evangelism on it and say that that's what it is, when that's really not what the, because I imagine the people who are doing the event spent a lot, and I'm not,

50:29

I don't know them, so I'm assuming, I'm assuming they spent a lot more time thinking about what food they were going to serve, how big the screen was going to be, how loud the music was going to be, how, you know, all these things, and I imagine that the actual evangelism part of it was very, very low on the priority list as to what was happening.

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So really what they did was they had a football game sponsored by Jesus. I think that what we've got to do is we've got to just start being honest.

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You know, we have in our church, we have a program called

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American Heritage Girls. American Heritage Girls is a Christian scouting program, and it's for girls.

51:17

It's not the Girl Scout. It's a national program. It's one of the best programs I've seen.

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Our leaders are fantastic. They're great women, and they are doing a great thing.

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They're training young girls in godliness, and they are sharing the gospel with us sometimes, you know, as part of their program.

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But we don't call that an evangelism thing. We say this is American Heritage Girls, and it has a very specific role in the church, just like we have a sport program.

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I teach a little karate class for kids. I've been in karate for a long time, so I teach a little karate class for kids.

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I don't call it an evangelism thing. I say we have a little karate class. Now, do I share the gospel with those kids? Absolutely.

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But if it was an evangelism thing, then that would be the primary thing we focus on, and that's what happens.

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Like, you know, they have these PBS's, and they say, well, this PBS is about sharing theses with these kids, and really what it becomes is a baptism ministry.

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They try to get these kids in and get them baptized so that they're baptized, but now I'm getting into stuff.

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I better not go that way. The point is, there's nothing wrong with having events at the church.

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As long as those events aren't glorifying evil or glorifying, you know, something that's bad. If we're having fellowship events at the church, if the church wants to sponsor an upward program, that's fine.

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If the church wants to have something go on, you know, that's fine. It's about it. It's really about evangelism, because we want to do it.

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And I think if we're honest, then a lot of times we say, you know what? It really isn't about evangelism. It really isn't about that, because if it was, we'd spend more time focused on evangelism than what we are actually focused on.

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And of course, there are going to be a lot of people in our theological camp that would never, on a

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Lord's Day, have such an event that would be distracting from the proclamation of the

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Word, and especially not during a worship service time or hour.

53:23

Sure, yeah, and I didn't even think about Super Bowl being on Sunday. How silly of me. I don't watch football, so I don't know much about it.

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But yeah, you're right. I didn't even think about that in the context of the question of whether or not that would be replacing a worship service, or if that would be, you know, something in lieu of worship, which

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I think would not be wise. And if your goal is the friendship evangelism to get your neighbors and so on to become friends with you during these

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Super Bowl gatherings, watch how upset they are when you keep interrupting them during the game by talking about Christ and the

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Bible. They're not there for that if they're there at a Super Bowl gathering. Well, if you could, in the four minutes that we have left, could you give us some other ways that your church is actually conducting evangelism outside the walls of your church that do not, in your opinion, violate the scriptures or the doctrines of grace?

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Well, I think I mentioned it earlier, but I want to go back to it. I think the idea of preaching out in the open air really has a very divided feeling within the church, and we support preaching in the open air, but I know a lot of people who are very uncomfortable with it.

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So I guess I would, in these last few minutes, simply make an appeal. I recommend

54:55

Tony Miano's sermon he did at the Herald Society. You were with me. Yes, we were there. And he taught on a defense of the public proclamation of the gospel.

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And, you know, he came up and the very first thing he said was, I don't have to defend this. This is not why give a biblical defense for something that's so obviously biblical.

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This is not necessary. But because every Christian that I talk to, at least recently, when

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I say, you know, we go out and preach in public, we have men that do that, and we have one man in particular who we support who goes out and does that.

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A lot of times people cringe. Sometimes they kind of look at us funny, almost like we're the Westboro Baptist group.

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And I do think that you have to, anytime you go out, you have to make sure that you are not approaching the gospel in the way that the

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Westboro people do. The Westboro Baptist, they are using shock language.

55:54

They are the Howard Stern of,

55:59

I don't want to call them Christians, they're the Howard Stern of this movement.

56:07

Because all they're doing is they're trying to use shock language to get attention. If you have, in your church, if you have men that want to go out and preach, number one, they need to be vetted by the elders.

56:18

They need to be examined by the elders. The elders need to be looking at them to see if they're not qualified to preach in the church, they're not qualified to preach in the street.

56:29

Very simply. And if they are qualified, then support them, encourage them, go with them, stand with them, hand out tracts with them, and you will be surprised.

56:41

You know where you're going to get the most problem when you do this? Is at Christian events. My friend went and preached at Joel Osteen here in Jacksonville.

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Now, Joel Osteen came to Jacksonville. My friend went and preached at Joel Osteen. You know what people were coming out saying?

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You're preaching to the wrong people. We're all Christians here. I got news for you. People go on to listen to Joel Osteen.

57:02

That's Georgia Partners. In fact, Joel Osteen has said publicly that there are many

57:08

Muslims and homosexuals and people who are clearly not Christians who go to his worship services.

57:14

Exactly. So we're there, you know, my friend's there, he's preaching, and people are saying, why are you doing this?

57:20

You don't need to be doing this. You're insulting Christ by doing this. No, you're not. You're preaching the truth, and you're preaching it to people who don't know the truth, because if they knew the truth, they wouldn't be following Joel Osteen.

57:29

And don't many people in the world really catch on that these things are gimmicks?

57:35

I mean, I've heard people that are not Christian or even anti -Christian who mock these events that the church participates in that are sometimes really silly.

57:45

Oh, absolutely, and that's the thing. We are never going to be a better entertainment venue for the world than what the world can produce.

57:55

A lot of pastors are trying to be Jimmy Fallon or Will Ferrell or some other comedian because they think that the world wants entertainment, and they think that they're going to out -entertain these guys.

58:07

We're never going to out -entertain them. That's all they do. They give up on trying to be the entertainment capital of the world.

58:16

And, you know, I wrote an article a few years ago called The Church is Not an Amusement Park. And the idea behind that, amusement means to turn off your mind.

58:25

Amuse means to think, and amuse means the opposite, means to stop thinking. And an amusement park is what the church has become.

58:34

It's become a place where people want to go in and shut their minds off. And they want to slip Jesus into ground beef like a pill, secretly, like they'll have these events, the festivities and all kinds of entertainment, and then slip

58:48

Jesus in secretly as if that's somehow going to benefit the person by being tricked somehow into the kingdom.

58:55

But I just want to thank you for being an excellent guest once again, Pastor Keith. I want to have you back on. Maybe we can even speak about a

59:02

Christian and martial arts. I know that you're a black belt in several of the martial arts and how a Christian can be involved without violating the scriptures.

59:11

But I know that your website, again, this time correctly is sgfcjax .org.

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S -G for Sovereign Grace, F -C Family Church, Jax, J -A -X .org.