We're gonna continue our look at evangelism or our series on mission, which is just thinking through how we share our faith with people who don't know. Friends, family members that may be interested or just we feel really need to hear this message. Last week, we dealt with the question, what is evangelism? And we'll sort of just recap that a little bit later today. But today, we're gonna look at the essential elements of this message that we share, the essential elements in evangelism.
This morning, we're going to reflect, and it's actually providential that Gary led us in the Apostle's Creed as well because we're going to be looking at the basic elements that make up the Christian gospel. What are the essential things that we must communicate when we evangelise, when we share the gospel message with people? In order to do that, we're gonna turn to 1 Corinthians 15:1-11. And if you ever wanted to highlight a passage in the Bible, this is one. Because it just gives you absolutely everything in a nutshell about what the Christian message at its most core is.
So we're gonna look at 1 Corinthians 15 and starting to read from verse 1. Now, this is the apostle Paul writing. Now, I would remind you brothers, and that brothers means brothers and sisters of the gospel. I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved. If you hold fast to the word I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.
Four, because I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures. That He was buried. That He was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. And that He appeared to Cephas, then to the 12, then He appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then He appeared to James, then to all the apostles.
Last of all, as to one untimely born, He appeared also to me, for I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God, I am what I am, and His grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed. So far our reading.
We're gonna look at four points this morning on what evangelism is and how to do it and how to do it effectively knowing that we have communicated the essential elements of it. Last week, we already said that evangelism is a verbal thing. It is communicating and persuading truth. We can't say, in other words, that we have evangelised if we haven't used words. You've probably heard this popular quote often attributed to Francis of Assisi from the medieval period about a thousand years ago.
Someone has said that this is what he said, preach the gospel at all times and use words if necessary. The thing is, Saint Francis never said that. We don't know actually who said that. But the fact is people haven't stopped attributing him to that quote. Regardless of the origin, however, this statement or this way of thinking, people still hold to today.
But we never see the apostles using those sort of words. We don't ever see the apostles saying these sort of statements. We don't hear Paul go saying, simply go out into the world and be very friendly and hope that somehow people will understand the Christian message through osmosis. We don't see the apostle Paul saying that at all. So we have to unlearn that theology if we believe it because it's not true.
Evangelism is ultimately telling someone the truth about Jesus. And so the first thing we have to realise is true evangelism is always involving verbal proclamation. If we don't use words, we have not evangelised. The second thing is evangelism will always include the gospel. We mentioned last week, and I wanna explain again the word evangelism or evangelise comes from the Greek word euangelion, which literally means good news.
To evangelise then is to announce good news. We might think in a broad conversation, we might think that a conversation that talks about the concept of God being real, the philosophy that something out there, someone exists is evangelism. That is a helpful conversation, but that is not specifically evangelism. Evangelism, strictly speaking, is a presentation of the central message of Christianity. Evangelism is sharing the good news about who Jesus is and what He has done.
And that is where we come to our passage here in 1 Corinthians 15 because that is exactly what Paul is reminding these people of. Let's have a look at it again. We find Paul towards the end of this epic letter, the first letter to the Corinthian church, towards the end of this letter saying, guys, I just wanna remind you what you said you believe. I just wanna remind you how you came to be called Christians. This is what you put your faith into, and he gives us a summary statement of it.
He tells them in verse one, remember what I originally taught you guys about the central Christian message, the good news. Verse one, the gospel I preached to you, he says. This message, he goes on verse two to say, is the message by which you will be saved. That is why it's good news. You will be saved through this message if you hold on to it.
And then in verse 3, he begins with the objective statement of what it contains. The factual account of this news that has massive, huge, universal implications. Verse 3 says, for I delivered this to you as of first importance. Listen to what Paul is saying. Listen to what he is saying.
The central message of Christianity. This objective statement of truth. Paul has received that. He has heard it from others. He has checked it out.
He has investigated it, and he has found it to be true. And because it is an objective factual account, it is relevant for all people. It is objective, not subjective. It's not true just for me and not true for Gary. It is an objective reality that has been checked out.
He, therefore, can receive it and pass it on because it matters for me, as it matters for Audrey, as it matters for Marais. But notice this, he stresses that the gospel is not just an afterthought. This declaration is not something that we should be timid about or ashamed about or is perhaps relevant for some but not for others based on their culture or their demographic or their age. This is an objective reality, and Paul says, it is of first importance to receive it and believe it. It is the most important thing you can believe in your life.
Why is it of the first importance? Well, Paul says, and he's already hinted to it in verse 2, it's going to be regarding being saved. Someone is in terrible danger, and they need saving. The gospel is of first importance because it is through the reality of what has happened through Jesus Christ, through His life-saving actions that we are going to be saved, and therefore, it is good news. So what has God done in Jesus?
Well, Paul tells us in a few sentences, but before we jump ahead, we must see that when Paul shared the gospel with these Christians, when he evangelised them, he did it by centring his proclamation, his preaching on the news of Jesus. And so firstly, we should understand that evangelism must always include the gospel. We can talk about the reality of God as a philosophical idea, a creator that might exist. We can speculate and we can debate all those things, but at the end of the day, the gospel, evangelism centres on Jesus Christ and what He did and why He did it. So the first thing we should understand or the second thing we should understand is that evangelism must always include the gospel.
And then the next question is, well, what is it, this message, what does it contain? What essential elements in this message do we need to know? Well, Paul goes on in this passage, and it's just brilliant. In two verses, he sums it up, and we'll just digest that a little bit this morning.
Evangelism must include central truths about, firstly, Jesus' authority. Secondly, about our sin and our punishment. Thirdly, His sacrificial death on our behalf. And fourthly, His resurrection that proves our forgiveness and that gives eternal life. We may talk to our friends or our fellow students at university about the Bible.
We may talk to them about religion. We can talk to them about social issues, but until we've told them about Jesus' death and resurrection and our sin, we have not evangelised them. Evangelism includes some very specific truth about Jesus, about what he came to do for humanity. So the first thing we see Paul saying in verse three is that he calls Jesus the Christ. Have a look at that in verse three.
For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received that Christ died for our sins. Christ. Now if you are to ask most Aussies, who is Jesus Christ? Some of them will say it's a curse word. Some of them will be able to tell you that, well, he's someone that the Christians think is very important.
Some will say that he's a really good person. Some will say that he's perhaps even a prophet. There are some people that might even say, isn't he the one that is said to be the son of God? They don't know exactly what that means, but that's what they've heard. The son of God.
But when Paul calls Jesus the Christ, he is using it for a very specific purpose. Paul is claiming that Jesus is the long awaited messiah who is God in flesh. Christ in the Greek, which is Christos, which is a transliteration of the Hebrew term messiah, which means anointed one. So Christ means messiah. But this is the one who in the Old Testament this is what Paul is saying.
This is the one who in the Old Testament, the Hebrew scriptures was said to be the one who would come to rescue us, to rescue God's people, to rescue mankind even. In a prophecy seven hundred years before Jesus arrived on the scene, Isaiah 7:14, this is what it said the Christ, the Messiah would be. Therefore, Isaiah 7:14, the Lord Himself will give you a sign. Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and you shall call His name Emmanuel. Emmanuel in Hebrew means God with us.
Then when Jesus comes and He arrives on the scene and the New Testament is written about Him and what He did and what His life meant, this is what the apostle John, who's an eyewitness account of Jesus, who journeyed with Jesus for three years before His crucifixion and resurrection. He writes this in his opening dialogue, in his opening spiel about Jesus. He says this in John 1:1. In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God. Now if you're wondering what is this word referring to, you jump ahead to John 1:14.
This is what he says, the word became flesh and dwelt among us. And we have seen His glory, the glory as of the only son from the father, full of grace and truth. The word became flesh, but he says in verse 1, the word was God. God in flesh. What Paul is saying when he refers to Jesus being the Christ who dies for sins is that Jesus is God who died for sin.
Here's the long awaited arrival of God to earth. Everyone is always saying, if only God would speak to us. If only God would come to us. Friends, Jesus Christ is God. Come to us.
He is a long awaited messiah to show us who God is and as we will find out, to accomplish a particular mission of saving us. So before we get to talking about what Jesus has done, we need to explain who Jesus is. The hearer needs to understand that Jesus is God. Next, we have to explain our sin and our punishment. Before the good news is good news, we need to understand that it is first bad news.
It is first bad news. A person who does not believe he is a sinner, a person who does not believe that he is a sinner, she is a sinner, has no need of a saviour. There is an absolute need to explain the bad news before explaining the good news because there was a reason that God in Jesus came to us. Paul says that the Christ died for sins. He died for sins.
And so the next concept to explain is the issue of human sinfulness. Now the bad news is, Paul says in another place in Romans that none of us are good. We are all sinners. Every single one of us. Romans 3:10 and Romans 3:23 are classic examples of this where Paul just bluntly hits us with a sledgehammer.
None are righteous. Not one. And it's a little bit more troubling than that because we are all sinners, but God is not. God is not a sinner and yet He has created us. God has created us to be sinless.
God has created us to share in His sinless glory. That is the original plan of God for mankind. And then Paul says later in that same chapter, however, Romans 3:23, we all sin and fall short of that glory. Every one of us has transgressed. Every one of us has fallen from the glorious laws of God in our thoughts, in our feelings, and in our actions.
God's law, God's will that we also find all throughout the Bible summed up most succinctly in the 10 commandments. Well, the first one, we don't even get past. The first commandment, we'd fail. The first commandment says, you shall have no other gods before Me. Exodus 20:3.
And the reality is, we don't get past that first one without breaking it. I break this commandment every day when I give no thought to the true and living God, but place things like comfort, like respect, like material things higher than Him and His will in my life. I've broken the very first commandment and I show myself to be an idolater. I idolise other things than God. But unfortunately, it doesn't just end with the first commandment.
There's nine more to go. And as we work down from them, we just keep hearing that we have fallen short of God's glory. Have a listen to this. God says, you shall not give false testimony against your neighbour. Meaning, you shall not lie.
Have you lied? God says, you shall not murder. Jesus tightens this up in the New Testament to say you shall not harbour hatred in your heart because you commit murder every time you do that. Have you hated? God says you shall not commit adultery.
You shall not have intimate relations with anyone who is not your husband or your wife. The one that God has given to you for life. And again, in the New Testament, Jesus puts the spotlight on the motives of that and says, have you looked on anyone with lust and committed in your heart the sin of adultery. Friends, have you committed adultery? The truth is that you are a sinner.
We all are, unfortunately. Before we shrug our shoulders and say, well, no one is perfect. I guess I'm a sinner. Being a sinner has dire consequences, which leads us to the next truth to communicate in evangelism, death. Paul says Christ died for our sins.
Now our friends or family members may also have heard this statement. Those who aren't necessarily Christians, they may have heard that Jesus died. They may know about the cross. They know may know about Easter, but they have no idea what this actually means. So we need to explain to people that this death is punishment from God for sin.
When you read the Bible, you hear that God didn't create humanity to die. God created humanity to exist forever with Him. We were meant to live forever, and I think there's something in us that knows this, even if you're not a Christian, because we get sad when people die. If it's just normal, we wouldn't. It's just how life goes.
There's something in us that knows that this is not how it should be. Death is mentioned, however, in Genesis 2, the second chapter of the book of the Bible. The second chapter after we see God creating Adam and Eve, mankind and womankind to live with Him forever. In Genesis 2, death is the result of their disobedience against God. The God who is perfectly holy and absolutely fair and just cannot accept, cannot dwell with those who have committed crimes against Him.
But now we've heard that it is all of us. It is all of us that are included in that. God's justice demands a fair judgement on our brokenness and our sin. And what is a fair punishment of disobeying an eternal God? Not living in relationship with that eternal God for all eternity.
The God who gave us life, a life that no one has conjured up for themselves, no one has invented their own creation, no one has sort of said in a primordial ooze, I think today I will exist. God is the one that gives life. God is the one who created us. God is the one who can take that life. But the God who has given us life is the same God that we have rejected through walking with our rules, with living for our own existence.
And now He has, in all fairness, the ability to say, I am taking away that life. I am taking it away for eternity. But this death is a death across all parts that make us, us. It's a death of all aspects of humanity. It is a physical death that our hearts stop beating, but there's also a spiritual death.
Whether we believe it or not, we have souls. We are spiritual beings. There is something in us that transcends this. That spiritual side of us also dies when we are cut off from God, who Himself the Bible calls a spirit. But then thirdly, this death is forever, eternally.
This punishment lasts forever. We are given the chance to turn from our unbelief, however, and put our trust in Christ. But if we don't, there are eternal ramifications for that decision. We remain uncovered. We remain in our sin.
And so this makes this gospel declaration a very weighty moment. It is the most important decision that you will ever make. And so when we explain that Jesus died for our sins, and we can say that very, very quickly, we must refer to the fact that God became a man, lived a perfect holy life, that He allowed Himself to be arrested, to be tried, to be convicted and crucified, but for a very specific purpose. As Jesus hung on the cross, God took every sin that I committed, every sin I will ever commit, and He put it on Jesus and punished it in my place. The rejection I should have experienced was on Jesus.
The punishment I should have received, Jesus received, and He died physically and He died spiritually in my place. And so Jesus becomes my substitute. Jesus becomes my substitute, taking my sins on Him, receiving my wrath, my punishment on my behalf. The Bible again has talked about this and has predicted this even in the Old Testament. Again, the prophet Isaiah says this, we all, again, like sheep have gone astray.
We have all turned everyone to his own way, but the Lord has laid on Him, Jesus, the iniquity of us all. In the New Testament, the apostle Peter puts it this way, He Himself, Jesus, bore our sins in His body on the tree, on the cross that we might die to sin, yet live to righteousness. By His wounds, you have been healed. God punished Jesus so He can forgive us and not punish us. And this is verified by the fourth bit of truth that we must communicate when we share the gospel, and that is to explain the resurrection.
After telling the Corinthians about who Jesus was, why He came, telling them about their sin, telling them about the punishment that Jesus took on their behalf, Paul finishes his gospel presentation by talking about the resurrection, by saying in verse 4 that He was buried, He was really dead, but that He was raised again on the third day. The resurrection is essential in the gospel, essential in our evangelism because it proves that Jesus has overcome sin and death. Think about it this way. Jesus would still be dead if there had just been one more sin, one remaining sin in Him.
It means every sin has been conquered. Otherwise, He would not be alive because the wages of sin is death, Paul also says. After three days in the tomb, meaning God let that happen for three days, meaning He's really dead. It's not like He's just been knocked unconscious or something like that. Three days, He's officially dead.
After three days, Jesus comes back to life. What does that mean? This is what it means. It proves all that Jesus has claimed about Himself. It proves that He is God in the flesh, the powerful son of God who has come to deal with sin.
Who has come to deal with the problem, the greatest problem humanity will ever face. The resurrection proves that He was guiltless. It proves that He was without sin, but that He took on my sin, our sin, so that we may be reconciled to God. This is how Paul explains or understands the resurrection. And again, it is from that great letter that he writes in Romans.
It's the opening verses. So he really like sets a scene here. He introduces himself. Paul, a servant of Christ Jesus called to be an apostle, set apart for the gospel of God, which he promised beforehand through the prophets in the holy scriptures concerning His son, who was descended from David, so the messianic promise there, according to the flesh, according to the nature, human nature, and was declared to be the son of God in power according to the Spirit of holiness by what? His resurrection from the dead.
He was declared to be the son of God because He was raised from the dead. And so these four aspects are of central importance when we share the biblical gospel with people. They are critical elements in telling this story. Those four that we have here.
We can't remove any one of them without the whole thing not making sense. Without the whole thing not being powerful or persuasive. They sit together. They must remain together. But including all of these aspects, putting them together, by doing that, we see the majesty.
We see the glory. We see the fact that we can say, hallelujah. This is a great savior. By holding those four together. In finishing, the last point, and it's a quick point.
Our evangelism, our sharing of the faith must include an invitation to believe in Jesus. Because this is why Paul is writing to the Corinthian Christians. He's saying, you must remember this and believe it. I'm not just wasting my ink here. This is what you must believe.
This is what you must stand in. Ground yourself in. And so when we share the gospel, we must say, believe this, brother. Believe this, sister. I so desperately want you to understand and believe.
In order to say that we have shared the gospel, we must be able to say that we have told people how to receive the amazing forgiveness and reconciliation that God wants for us, that our hearts, our convicted hearts are crying out for. Without inviting a person to repent from their sin. Repent is an old timey word to simply mean turn around. Turn around from your unbelief to belief. Turn around from your way of doing things because you've always done it or you think that's how we should do it.
To live the life that God wants for you to live. If we don't lead someone ultimately to that point, to faith and repentance, we haven't given them everything they need. What use is the best news in the universe if a person doesn't know how to apply it to themselves or that it's for them? We need to ask them, do you want Jesus for the forgiveness of your sin? Do you want Jesus?
If God has been working on their heart as you've been sharing, perhaps they don't fully understand. Perhaps they don't really see how this concept of sin works or when God's judgement will happen or whatever, but something in them, through the work of the Holy Spirit, may think, I want this. I need this. That's where we need to invite them to put their faith in Jesus Christ, to receive Him as their protector and as the one who can save them. Now, of course, we don't want to press this point too far.
Sometimes we can't. There may be times when we are faithfully presenting the whole gospel and they're not ready. And you ask them and they say, I'm just not there yet. That's okay. Come back to it.
It's not like, oh, well, I've given it a try. That's it. See you later. Come back to it. But perhaps a week later, perhaps a month later, a year later, are you ready to receive Jesus?
I've shared a lot of information this morning. A lot of information. So I hope it's not too overwhelming. We've had to deal with all of it because, again, if you take one over the other, you kinda lose track. But it's really important for us to come back to the basics.
Come back to the central message of Christianity. So I want to encourage you to become familiar with these aspects, these elements, to memorise them, to have written them down. I'm happy to send you through this PowerPoint if you need it. You can take a photo of that if you need it. Why do we need to hear this, however?
Why do we need to know this? Because at one point, friend, you needed to hear this. At one point, you did hear this somehow. And if it does sound confusing or if you think that I just don't know if I'll be able to explain, I wanna give you one final practical way, again, to take a photo of and to memorise. This is a wonderful summary of the gospel written by author and pastor Ed Stetzer, who puts the Christian gospel and the call to respond in this way.
He says, the gospel is the truth. This is what we communicate to someone. It takes two minutes. The gospel is the truth that we are all sinners or we can call it criminals before God. And under the sentence of eternal death or separation from God and all that is good.
In His love for us, God the father sent God the son to earth to become a man. Jesus was born without a sin nature and lived a sinless life. He allowed Himself to be crucified. And as He hung on the cross, God the father took all of my sins, put them on Jesus, and punished Him in my place. Jesus took the wrath of God for me and He died.
His body was placed in a tomb and on the third day, He came back from the dead, never to die again. This shows that God, in His love and grace, has overcome our two greatest enemies of sin and death. And those who acknowledge to Jesus Christ that they are sinners and trust Him to save them from eternal condemnation are forgiven their sins and given the gift of eternal life with God. That is all of this.
Now you might be here this morning, I wanna close with this, for the first time, or perhaps you're hearing it this clearly for the first time. And perhaps this morning, it is just all dawning on you. And you realise the enormity of this message, this news. And perhaps this morning you realise just how far from God you are. And you just feel it.
And you just know it. Friend, I wanna tell you there is good news. I wanna invite you to receive Jesus Christ, to believe that He was God who came for you. That He took what is fairly yours to be punished for. He died in your place, and He received a vindication for that three days later when He rose from the dead.
If you are ready to ask Jesus to be your savior, I wanna ask you to make the prayer I will pray now your prayer. And when I'm finished, after I'm finished, if this is you, if this prayer has been yours, talk to someone. Please, talk to someone. Talk to the friend you came with. Talk to the husband or wife or the random person in front of you.
Talk to someone about this. Come and talk to me about this. But tell someone that you have made a decision today. Today, eternity has been born in you. And then lastly, I wanna tell you, if you're not sure or even if you've made that decision, come back next week.
Come back to church because this is the place we learn. This is the place we grow. This is the place where we develop and where we get to who this God is, who loved us so much. Let me lead us in prayer. Father, I'm gonna pray for my behalf and on behalf of those who also need to pray this.
Lord Jesus, I come to You this morning to ask forgiveness for my sin. I have broken Your laws in so many ways. I have rebelled and disobeyed the God who has created me for a certain purpose, for a certain life. And this morning, I am convicted. I am challenged by the reality of my sin and my brokenness.
This morning, I also come to receive the forgiveness and the love that has been shown in Jesus Christ. I believe that He died for my sin. I believe that I am forgiven because of what happened on the cross. And I believe that I have eternal life because He was raised again on the third day. Lord Jesus, I promise now to live my life for You.
As I receive You as my saviour, I also make You my king. I want to live for You now. And I pray this all because You have made it possible. Amen.