Sharing the Gospel is a simple matter of learning your ABCs
Acts 8:26-40
I was called up to annual conference last week, taking a brief break in the midst of the work around the Black Forest Fire, to receive the Harry Denman Evangelism Award. The award is named for the founder of The Foundation for Evangelism and is given to one lay person, one youth, and one clergy in each annual conference.
My first thought upon receiving the award is that it’s really a team award for Tri-Lakes UMC. This church and its leadership is leading the Rocky Mountain Annual Conference in reaching people for Christ and building them as disciples. That only happens when a team of clergy, laity, and staff work together to achieve the singular goal of making disciples of Jesus Christ for the work of his kingdom. As I come upon my three-year anniversary as the lead pastor of this church, I feel blessed beyond measure to be part of a church that is reaching people for Christ through the hospitality, witness, and faith of its members. You have embraced what it means to be a disciple-making congregation, becoming truly “Methodist” in our practices and being willing to experiment with new ways of forming and building people in the image of Christ. This is your award!
My second thought, however, was to really dig into who Harry Denman was and why this award was named after him. You have probably never heard of him, but Dr. Billy Graham, the most famous Christian evangelist of our time, once wrote, “Harry Denman was one of the great mentors for evangelism in my own life and ministry… the thing people will remember above all about Harry Denman was his love of Christ and his desire to see others come to know Him. He truly was one of those rare individuals whose impact will continue for generations to come.”
You may have never heard of Harry Denman because Harry Denman was pretty good about putting the focus on Jesus instead of himself. Harry was a Methodist layman from Alabama. Denman was a frugal man who only owned one pair of shoes and didn’t wear a watch, preferring to ask for the time as a way of starting conversations with strangers that would ultimately become conversations about Jesus. He would rise early in the morning to pray and study the Scriptures, much of the time doing so by copying them in his own handwriting. In his biography, which I purchased after I receive the award, it says He was at his best when telling the story of Jesus and salvation to an individual, something he managed to do every day of his mature life. Yet he always kept in mind and heart the needs and opportunities of the whole church in its wider mission. Harry Denman’s vision grew out of his conviction that it was possible, in God’s time, for the whole world to turn to our Lord. He believed that his job was to do what he could to bring that about, one person at a time”.
Harry would go on to start The Foundation for Evangelism, and the award is named for this man who demonstrated to so many others what it means to bring the good news of Jesus to the world.
I imagine Harry being a kindred spirit to Philip, whom we just read about. Philip, like Harry, was a layperson. This was not the apostle Philip, but one of the people who had been set aside by the apostles to serve tables and act as deacons in the Jerusalem Church. When the early church was scattered and persecuted after the stoning of Stephen (Jason Baxter will loop back to that in next week’s sermon), Philip and others scattered across the area to continue the work, just as Jesus told the apostles would happen in Acts 1 (you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth). In 8:4 we learn that those who had been scattered “moved on, preaching the good news along the way.” And so Philip’s first destination was Samaria, where a revival broke out because of his preaching and the signs he performed in Jesus’ name.
Now, Samaria had traditionally been a hostile place to Jews from Jerusalem, as the Gospels tell us, but now these former enemies were dropping their differences to unite around the good news of Jesus. Even a man named Simon, who had previously practiced sorcery, became a believer. Peter and John would later show up, having heard what was happening in Samaria, but it was Philip the layman who had boldly started the revival.
At that point, Philip could have become as famous as the apostles. If that kind of thing happened in Christendom today Philip would likely be given his own talk show on TBN, written a few books, and then go on the speaking circuit talking about what had happened in Samaria. But I find what happens to Philip next to be most interesting and compelling. Look at verse 26:
An angel of the Lord spoke to Philip, ‘At noon, take the road that leads from Jerusalem to Gaza’.” Luke adds parenthetically that this is a “desert road.” The “Gaza” the angel refers to was a ruin at the time of the first century. In other words, the angel puts Philip on the road to nowhere—not exactly a reward for a job well done in Samaria!
But here’s where we get perhaps the first comprehensive look at personal evangelism, sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, in the whole Book of Acts. From Philip to Harry Denman to us, we learn a pattern here for the witness of the church and its individual people in sharing the good news of Jesus Christ with the world. I call it the ABCs of evangelism: to be AVAILABLE, to be BIBLICAL, and to be CONNECTIONAL.
Now, a word here before we go any further. I know that for some of you talking about evangelism conjures up images of tracts and crusades and people knocking on doors. Yes, God may use those techniques to reach some people, but the evangelism I’m talking about here is really just about being ready for spiritual conversations with people whenever the opportunity presents itself. As Peter puts it in I Peter 3:15, “Whenever anyone asks you to speak of your hope, be ready to defend it.” If we believe that we have something to share with the world, then we should always be prepared to share it!
AVAILABLE
To do so, first we make ourselves AVAILABLE. Philip was available to go wherever the angel sent him, even if it was the middle of nowhere. I like the one verse that appears here after the command of the angel. Look says, “So he [Philip] did.” He paid attention to the voice and followed where it told him to go.
Have you ever experienced God nudging you to go somewhere or to talk with someone? I was once walking in downtown Salt Lake City after a meeting when I passed a homeless man standing on a street corner holding a sign. I walked right past him, as did most of the other people on the street. A couple of blocks later I got into my truck but as I began to turn the key I felt an almost tangible voice speak to my spirit, saying “Go talk to that man.” It was winter, I was cold, and I had places to be, but I couldn’t shake that feeling. So after bargaining with God for a while I finally got out and walked back to talk the man. I had no idea what to say, just introduced myself, asked him if he needed anything. I had no money to give him right then. We talked for maybe 5 minutes and I wish I could say that right then he gave his life to Christ and turned it around—but maybe a seed was planted. All he said afterward was this, “Thanks for talking to me. I really appreciate it. Nobody does that much.” I think we were both blessed by those brief moments—all because God tested my availability.
Philip’s availability on the road to nowhere led him across the path of an Ethiopian eunuch, a high court official in the Ethiopian kingdom on his way back from Jerusalem. It was common in those days for royal officials in some cultures to be neutered as a guard against temptation and while this foreign official was clearly interested in the Jewish faith, he could never really be a Jew. He would be excluded from the Temple, prevented from fully worshipping because of this physical mark.
Not only that, most people in the ancient Mediterranean world considered Africa to be the literal “end of the earth.” Black Africans were exotic foreigners who were not part of the Roman empire, thus they were considered “barbaroi” or barbarians. And yet here was the Ethiopian eunuch from the end of the earth on the road to nowhere reading a scroll from Israel’s Scriptures: the book of the prophet Isaiah. And, Luke says, “The Spirit told Philip, ‘Approach this carriage and stay with it.’” Philip obeys, not only approaching the carriage but running up to it.
How available are we to this kind of leading of the Spirit in our lives? Have you ever felt God prompting you, but you ignored it? What if we took the time to listen to those promptings of the Spirit? You never know whom God will put in your path. Someone who crosses your path this week needs to hear the good news of Jesus. Will you be open to God’s leading in starting the conversation? It doesn’t take a lot of skill or knowledge—Philip was just an ordinary guy—all it takes is offering ourselves as a channel of God’s grace to someone else.
BIBLICAL
The second thing that Philip was equipped for was a BIBLICAL conversation concerning the story of Jesus. He would have known right away what the Ethiopian was reading. In those days, reading to oneself was unheard of. People read everything aloud, and Philip would have heard the familiar words of Isaiah about the suffering servant. Philip sensed that the Ethiopian was wrestling with the text. “Do you really understand what you are reading?” he asked. The man replied, “Without someone to guide me, how could I?”
In Acts 2 we learned that the early church was grounded in the apostle’s teaching. Part of that teaching would have included the Bible, at that time what we now call the Old Testament. Philip and the early Christians understood that the story of Jesus is firmly grounded in the story of Israel, the story of God’s rescue plan for all of creation. Isaiah writes that God would send a servant who would do for Israel what Israel could not do for itself—indeed the servant would accomplish God’s mission by suffering and dying for his people. That servant, Philip explains, was Jesus. The scripture the Ethiopian held in his hands was part of a larger story—a story in which Philip and the early Christians found their place as followers of Christ. Notice how Luke puts it: “Starting with that passage, Philip proclaimed the good news about Jesus to him.
Too often we have settled for seeing Scripture as a series of little proofs for Jesus, rather than seeing it as a whole story in which God’s mission in the world is becoming a reality. We don’t merely study the Bible for more information, we study it because it is the foundational story through which the world and God’s people become whole again. We study it until it becomes part of who we are, the story that we live out every day of our lives. Harry Denman got up early every morning to copy the Scriptures and it became who he was. He wasn’t just throwing out verses, he was living the story. Philip had sat under the apostles’ teaching, had heard the word read in the synagogue and temple, and when he ran up to that chariot he knew exactly who the text was talking about.
The truth is that if we want to reach people for Christ, we have to do so with the story and life of Scripture as the grounding of our story. Too much evangelism has settled for proof texts—little snippets of truth rather than the great story. People don’t line up to hear a series of propositions, they line up to hear the story and to experience the story through the pathos and ethos of the storyteller. We have to study Scripture until we become part of it!
I want to give you a heads up that this fall we will be inviting you to become immersed in the story of Scripture through a Disciple Bible Study Class. Disciple will take you through the whole Bible in 34 weeks. It involves daily study and a chance to learn together and share where you find yourself in that story. Bible study isn’t an end in itself, it is an equipping for ministry. Both Philip and Harry Denman would tell us that there is no better way to spend your time than in making the story of Scripture, the story of Jesus, your story. I hope you’ll want to be part of that experience or one of the many other opportunities we offer to help you learn the story so that you might share it with others.
CONNECTIONAL
Having heard the story, the Ethiopian knows that he must respond. He wants to become part of the story. As they went down that desert road, they came to some water—probably not a lot of water, but water nonetheless. “Look! Water!” cries the eunuch, but not because he’s thirsty. “What would keep me from being baptized?” When he had been in Jerusalem, there were plenty of things that kept him from worshipping in the temple and being a Jew. Here, on the road in the desert, however, there was nothing to prevent him from being a follower of Christ!
Philip thus acts as a CONNECTION for his new friend. Baptism connects people to the saving power of Christ. It connects to the church, Christ’s Body, and it connects us to others by commissioning us for ministry in the world. Philip would disappear, sent on to another preaching mission, but this Ethiopian eunuch would go home as a follower of Christ and do for others what Philip had done. Tradition says that this eunuch planted the first Christian church in Africa—a church that now has now grown to some 400 million Christians. No one in the Book of Acts could keep the good news about Jesus to themselves, even one who lived at the end of the earth. Then again, Jesus told them that’s where the message would go: Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the ends of the earth.
A lot of people in the church thought Harry Denman was a little odd, given his propensity to talk about Jesus at every turn. Some criticized his boldness in sharing his faith. In response he could have used a line by another famous evangelist, Dwight L. Moody, who said, “I like the way I am doing evangelism better than the way you are not doing it!”
The purpose of evangelism is to tell people the good news of Jesus Christ, to have it change and save their lives, and to equip them to join in God’s kingdom mission of saving the world. When we are available, when we are grounded in the biblical story, and when we are always looking for ways to connect people to Christ and his church, then we are multiplying the good news of Christ in the lives of people.
We don’t need to be knocking on doors to be good evangelists, but we do need to be ready and listen for the Spirit’s nudging every day. When we take the time to invite people into conversation or invite them to church, when we engage a person in need, when we see broken people around us, it’s then that we need to be ready, always, to share the good news.
Truth is that we shouldn’t get an award for doing this. That an award exists suggests that we do it so infrequently that it’s unusual when we see it happening. I prefer to see this less as an award than as a commission—to be like Philip, to be like Harry Denman, and to give our lives over to the work of Christ. These evangelists were always on the road, ready to give an account of the hope that was with them. I pray that I can follow their example, and that as a church we would be known as people who will take any road to bring someone to Christ!
Source:
Prophetic Evangelist: The Legacy of Harry Denman. Upper Room Books, 1993.
