Reporting The Good News II, Reporting To Your Family

Acts 16, verse 31, the story of Paul being freed from the Philippian jail. The earthquake comes and breaks his chains. Let's start at verse 29, actually. The jailer called for lights and rushed in and fell trembling before Paul and Silas. He then brought them out and asked, Sirs, what must I do to be saved? And they replied, Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your household. A few weeks ago I had the wonderful experience of praying for many of you by name in accordance with a personal request that you shared with me, kind of like a doctor who used an instrument to get inside and see how the heart was functioning. Your requests gave me an insight into what was really happening in many of your lives. And I felt a kinship with many of you that I had not known before as your pastor. I'd like to read a few of these right now. I'll change all the names. Everyone will remain anonymous. My name is Dave, and I would be very thankful if you would pray for my wife, Joyce. She does not believe in the Lord. I desperately need prayers for my daughter, Janet, to know the Lord in a personal way so her life could then fall into place. She has learning disabilities and behavior problems. Pray for my son, Joey, who has spina bifida. Pray for healing and also, if you can, please pray for my husband to accept the Lord as his Savior. Thank you. Dear Pastor Jay, what I'm praying for is the wisdom and knowledge to find the right words to say that will release my family and friends from religious bondage and non-belief. Please pray for my husband, Tony, to recommit his heart and life to the Lord. I pray that my mom will also start coming to church with me and get to know God. My prayer request is that my husband, Bill, would accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior and that I will remain strong in prayer and waiting for this. Finally, I've been praying for my husband to come to Jesus, and I'm ready to give up, for it's been 14 years since I began to pray for him. As you can tell, these requests, of which I've just sampled a few, are deeply charged with emotion and feeling from people whose loved ones do not know Christ. About 15% of all the requests that I received had some measure of importunity directed toward that loved one, that family member, that spouse that did not know Christ. Hardly a week goes by without someone pulling me aside, as one big young fellow did a few weeks ago, earlier this summer, with tears in his eyes. He said to me, Pastor, I'm going to visit my grandfather this afternoon. He's 76, he's got cancer, and the doctors say he's dying. Though I wouldn't pretend to judge his heart, Jay, he said, he wants nothing to do with God and is not interested in even hearing what I have to say. He never has been. And, Pastor, I'm frightened because I know that unless there's a miracle, he's going to die in his sin. What should I say to him? It's fair to say that the heart of many people is broken over the condition of lost loved ones, parents, children, brothers, sisters, and particularly spouses. And all the requests that I received, particularly the spouses whose husbands and wives don't know the Lord. As one woman who was unequally yoked wrote, she said, it's like running in a perpetual three-legged race, but he's three feet taller and wants to go in a different direction. See, it's not just the fact that you don't go to church together or you don't believe the same way, it's the inability to share and relate your most precious and intimate and deepest feelings and thoughts and blessings and hopes. You just aren't understood and you feel so frustrated because so much of the quality of life is not able to be shared with the one you love. And when you add to that the very sobering realization that, as we said last week, without Jesus Christ, there is no hope for eternal life for that loved one. Without personal faith in a loving God who gave his own life in the form of his Son, the destiny of our loved ones, whether we want to face it or not, is separation from God. You see, given these kinds of things, young people, I find it terribly confusing to understand why just the same, year after year, young people come to my office and the office of the people on my staff and say, would you consider marrying me and such and such a person who isn't a Christian, but they're good and they go to such and such a church, and I know that over time the Lord's going to bring them to faith. And it's not that we have some rule around here that prevents people from enjoying love. It's just that I've seen over and over again the consequences of a husband and wife who marry and are not equally yoked in Christ. But the majority of us here today have unsaved loved ones, not because we chose to, but because they became believers, or we became believers, after we were married or after we had already launched our families or whatever. And so we find ourselves having made a transition in our lives that it's changed our whole perspective, and yet the ones around us have not seen the need to make that same commitment. If you've become a believer after you were married and had a family, it's no surprise to you, it shouldn't be, when they say, well, that's fine for you, but I've got other things I'm interested in. You see, I've not found too many family members who, when someone comes to Christ and whose life has turned around, I haven't heard too many people say, well, I went home and told my family, they say, oh, that's great, I want to get baptized too, where can I go? Usually such news is greeted with skepticism and sometimes even rejection. You know, Scripture gives us plenty of warning as to what we can expect upon coming to Christ. As I just sort of trace through the Bible the story of salvation, over and over again I found things like Joseph and his brothers. When God's blessing came into his life, what happened? Well, his brothers hated him. Look at David and Saul. When God's blessing fell on David, Saul rejected him and fought with him. And Jesus taught us to expect it. He said in Matthew chapter 10, fathers and sons will be separated, a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law, and a man's foes will be of his own household. And more than that, you know, Jesus experienced. You know, Jesus was rejected by his own brothers. Did you know that? He had brothers and sisters like we do. It says in John chapter 7, verse 5, for even his brothers did not believe in him. In the Jewish culture, it's very common for a man or a woman to come to Christ and be thrown out of his home, told that never have your foot in this household again until you renounce this Jesus business. And Christ, our Savior, experienced the same kind of rejection. He says, when they took offense at him, a prophet is not without honor except in his own country and in his own house. So, dear ones, the Bible warned you that when you signed on for this, not everybody was going to think it was a great idea. All right? How many of you would raise your hand and say, I've had something of that experience in my own life? Look at that. That's more than I anticipated. Why is that, you may ask? And I would answer, because human nature is fearful and defensive. Human nature is postured to protect itself against any assault on its own perceived domination. Human nature hates to be seen as being in the wrong. How many of you know what it's like to say, oh, you're right, I'm wrong? Is that the hardest thing for us to say? And when you come in and you say, well, you must know Christ, you must be born again. People say, wait a minute. Now, dear ones, despite all this, there is good news to report to our families. There are victories to be won. There are family members who God wants to save and promises to claim and abundant reports of family members who choose to follow Christ because of the testimony of loved ones and their family. I want to share with you this morning four ingredients of an effective strategy to win family members to Christ. Those of you who are privileged to know that all of your family members are saved, you may want to jot these down just to give to a friend who is not as blessed as you are. Number one, the first important ingredient of the strategy you need to know is this. You are God's point man into your family or God's beachhead, if you will, into your family. You see, although warnings abound and the conflict is certain that a man's foes will be in his own household, there is far more assurance in the Bible that God is moving to save your family and you are the evidence that that is true. Now, listen, the very fact that you came to Christ is a strong signal from God that he has marked your family for salvation. The word of God is packed with illustrations of how God uses one faithful family member to win entire families and even generations to the Lord. And so the fact that you know Christ is an indication to me and should be to you that God has targeted your family to be saved. That can make somebody happy. It's all right to make you a little bit happy on that. Now how do I see this in the Bible? Well, follow on. We have an overhead on this. The first, the very first salvation I could discover was way back in Genesis chapter seven verse one, when God saved Noah. And Genesis seven and verse one, we have it up there, says this, go into the ark, you and your whole family. And God began the salvation process all the way, the redemption process all the way back there. And God said, no, your whole family is to go with you. We read again as we go on down. The old covenant was established with Abraham and said, I will establish my covenant as an everlasting covenant between me and you and your descendants after you see God cares about families. We go on. God used Joseph to save Jacob, his father and all of his brothers. I don't have time to read it, but you can read it. Even though his brothers rejected him, threw me into the pit to be killed, taken off by the Egyptians. Joseph loved them, forgave them. And he was the one that called Jacob, his father and all of his brothers before the Pharaoh and said, these are my family members. I want them to be saved during this famine. And God saved the whole family. Going on, the Lord said to Moses, tell the whole community of Israel that each man is to take a lamb for his family and for each household. In other words, remember the Passover lamb? That's such a picture of salvation. As the angel of death passed over the house, each house had a lamb, one lamb per household. God was moving to save entire families by the sacrifice for each family. Joshua declared, as for me and my house, we will serve the Lord. Jesus added strong weight to this whole argument in the moving story, the story of Zacchaeus in Luke chapter 19. Zacchaeus, a tax collector, an embezzler, a man who was whipping people off. Jesus said, I'm going to come to your house today. Remember Zacchaeus jumped out of the tree, went, he heard the gospel and he turned to the Lord and he said, I'm going to pay back four times what I've stolen from people. And Jesus said, today, salvation has come to this house. We read in Acts 16, 31, Paul told the Philippian jailer after he had repented, he said, believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved, you and your whole household. And there's ample other opportunities to study these things in scripture. Do you know the word house appears over 2000 times in the Bible? You're the proof, you're the evidence that God cares about your whole family. And far too many believers get focused on all the negatives in their situation. Well, my husband could care less about God. Or my kids think church is boring and they don't ever want to come and they don't want anything to do with spiritual matters. Or my parents are in a dead church and they don't know the difference. And it's not long before these faults and negatives are bigger realities in our mind than the power of God to save our loved ones. Do you know what I'm saying? We get so focused on what isn't happening that we forget that God is able to save even the hardest of sinners. And rather than be brought down by your family's lack of faith, learn to expect that they're not going to jump up and say, oh, great. Learn to brush off their rejections and their put downs and take authority in your family. Wednesday night, we talked about being an ambassador for Christ. We said that an ambassador is a person who is a personal representative of a higher authority. I heard one parent share with me some time back that they had a teenager who was really getting off the wall, getting into different things that they were not just totally in agreement with. They had great struggle with the kinds of relationships their teenage son was making, the kinds of music and activities he was getting into. And every night, late into the night, actually in the early morning, they would go in as a couple when their son was sound asleep, and they would pray over his room. And they would take authority over every demonic power that was assaulting that child. They would bind the spirits of darkness that was seeking to pull that child down into the pit of deception. And they said nothing happened the first month. They said one time their son woke up and said, what are you doing? I'm just checking your room out, make sure you're okay. But they said as the months went by, they began to see a change in their son's attitude. They began to see that he wasn't quite as drawn to these things. And then one day some big falling out happened between him and his friends, and they realized that what God had done is He had severed the connection that was holding the child back. Dear ones, remember, please remember this, it's not you against your family. It's not you against your father or mother or husband or wife or brother or sister. It's you and God, the Holy Spirit, against the powers of darkness that have sought to bind your family members. You see, when Joseph was sold out by his brothers, I mean, they wanted him killed. They dumped him in a well and said, well, maybe someone will pick him up and take him away. Joseph had no bitterness in his heart, but rather he wept for them. It's a touching story. And he bound the powers that had sought to kill him. But he moved to see his brothers and his father safe and fair. Number two, the second part of the strategy. Number one, understand your important role. You're God's evidence that He wants to save your household. Number two, your life's message will be much louder than your spoken message. What you are is far more powerful in your family than what you say. Now, this is not good news for some of us. We would much rather be able to walk into our homes, call our husband and kids into the family room, deliver a powerful sermon with three Ps, ask for a show of hands, see them all come forward and get saved and live happily ever after. How many have ever had that happen? You see, it just doesn't happen that way. Our families are not interested many times, at least initially, in what we have to say. Family members have heard so much of this in bits and pieces that many of them have become inoculated, immunized to the words we would say. This is very difficult for us, isn't it? Because, you see, we know and they know that we're not perfect. It'd be a lot easier to win our family members if we never made a mistake. But how many of you know, as soon as the word is out that Amy has religion, everyone starts to watch Amy very carefully. In fact, they're kind of hounding her steps, seeing the first time that she's going to step out of line and prove that she doesn't really have any religion. I want you to know something, folks. It's far worse for those of us in full-time ministry. Carol's mom has a particular delight in introducing me to her family members as, this is Carol's husband, Jay. He's a preacher. I don't like that word. He's a preacher. And all the family members are going to take one step back. And they watch. Her mom, she just presents me. I know it's a statement of faith on her part, more than anything. It's this godly model. And they're watching to see if I laugh at one of their jokes. If I agree with some of their fault-finding and critical spirits and those kinds of things. They're watching to see if I get the least little bit bent. Out of shape when one of my kids does something that they shouldn't do. Of course, I never do. I'm sorry about that. But what do you do in those tough places? What do you do when you know everyone's kind of watching you and the word's out and all that? Parents, you and I know that when our kids see us not modeling godliness, we know that we're erasing all the kinds of stuff we want to see them believe. But what do we do? Well, we don't give up. We don't give up. Turn in your Bibles, if you would, very quickly, back to 1 Peter chapter 3. 1 Peter chapter 3. I should have had you turn there earlier, but flip back there. 1 Peter chapter 3. It says this, Wives, in the same way, be submissive to your husbands, so that if any of them do not believe the word, they may be won over without talk by the behavior of their wives, when they see the purity and reverence of your lives. You see, the Bible says that they will be won over as they watch your life. And you can begin to claim that even in the failings and faults that you may have, that as they watch you live out your life before God, they're going to be won over. Look at it. Look at it very carefully, ladies. Without a word. Now, I don't know what the greater miracle is. I have a long line of husbands who've told me it's very difficult when something means so much to you and you so want to share it with someone that you love, and have committed your life to, and they don't want to hear it, just to keep on it, just to keep on it. Some of the letters that I get from both husbands and wives are ample evidence to me that after a wife reaches that frustration level, she just has a very difficult time being quiet about it and living out her life. Now, I believe there's a key to this, and I want to share it with you. I believe the key in this whole issue of living out our lives in such a way as to win our family members has to do with moving it from a defensive posture to an offensive one. You've got to move it away from being afraid of making a mistake. You've got to get out of the mentality that you're so concerned about doing everything just right, so afraid of failing, so afraid of your shortcomings and inabilities, that you're sure to fail. You've got to get away from that, because once you get mindful of all your weaknesses, then you get defensive. Once you get defensive, you get critical. Once you get critical, you get judgmental. And once you're judgmental, you do the exact opposite thing that your family member needs to see in order to come to Christ. How many know judgmentalism and defensiveness is the last thing that Jesus did and modeled? The key is to begin to set yourself over the long haul to demonstrate your increased capacity to love. You see, you've got a new power source of love in you. And what you want to be able to do is to show that family member that you can give them more love and more respect and more sensitivity than you could without Christ. You know, one person said to me, I can't stand to be around my family. They're all non-believers, pagans. They swear and drink and they're crude. They have different values than I do. They're wasting their lives. They go to parties all the time. They could care less about... I said, well, what do you expect them to do? What do you really expect people who don't know God to do? You know, I said, oh, let's have a praise time. Paul reminds us in 1 Corinthians 6, Do you not know that the deceived, nor the immoral, nor adulterers, nor sexual perverts, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, scoffers, or robbers will inherit the kingdom of God? And he said this, And such were some of you. Can I urge you to be reminded that there but for the grace of God go you and me. You see, we have an opportunity to demonstrate the love of God in a way that will surely evidence to the people that we care about that there's something different in our lives. Interestingly to me, the Bible reports that Jesus enjoyed being with sinners. Chapter 15, Luke, verse 1, Now the tax collectors and sinners were all drawing near to hear him. And the Pharisees and scribes murmured, saying, This man receives sinners or welcomes them and eats with them. Dear ones, there's no way I'm going to want to look and go out of my way to be with somebody that's putting me down and judging me and finding fault with me. So apparently Jesus was not doing that. He sent a message to those people that there was something different He wanted to give them. There was a love, a quality of life, an understanding, a value that they didn't have that He wanted to share with them. And Peter tells us here in chapter 3, 1 Peter 3, look at it. He tells us how to act. He says, Submit yourself to them. The word to submit means just to prefer them. Look for a way to put them first. When they see your purity and reverence, those words mean to be loyal, to be devoted, to not talk negatively and critically, to speak favorably about them. This is not easy to do when you see their behavior. But dear ones, you can find something good to say about everybody. When they see your gentle and quiet spirit, ladies, that means not to be harsh or agitated or badgering. They're going to see something happen that they can't explain and begins to draw them. I want to say one other word here, particularly now to spouses. It has to do with sexuality. I hear strange things when it comes to sex between unequally ill partners. Women will say that, you know, once I've come to Christ, I have a real problem enjoying sex with my husband anymore. And I don't mean this to be funny. And they say things like, I feel really unclean. I feel like something that's pure that God's put into me is being tainted by something that isn't pure. It's almost like, in the extreme case, a child of God. And doesn't the Bible say that the unbelievers have the devil as their father, so they're a child of Satan? A child of God and a child of Satan are being joined together? How could God bless something like that? I want to speak to that for just a second. Because, you see, marriage was instituted by God, and the Bible says that the marriage bed is pure and undefiled. Hebrews 13, verse 4. So sex is really for marriage. It's not just for Christians. Now, most of the world's discovered that. And I want to say that Christians should have great sexual lives because they are communicating body, soul, and spirit. And really, sex is just communication. So Christians should have a wonderful sex life. But the Christian wife and or husband, whichever it may be, should still enjoy sex because God gave it to marriage. It's as though, you know, it was God's gift to marriage. You know, some people give us a blender, some will give us silverware, and God says, Here, have sex. That's my gift. He knows what he's doing, doesn't he? The blender wears out, the silverware gets old. Loved ones, one sure way not to win your spouse over to Christ is to say, Well, until you come to Christ, you know, we're not going in there. Now, that's not as far-fetched as I know it sounds. As I said, I don't mean to be funny. One writer said, well, I agree with him, sex should be seen as an opportunity to bless your spouse and increase communication. I can hear men now saying, Honey, we're going to get blessed tonight, you know. It's a gift. It's a gift. Number three, your prayers will open their eyes. Let me move quickly. Your prayers will open their eyes. You see, your effectiveness in winning your family will greatly improve when you understand fully that they are not rejecting you. They are not putting you down. They are rejecting the God that they have not yet been able to see. They are not fully able to choose Him. A very important verse. Write it down. 2 Corinthians chapter 4 and verse 4. A verse that we've been praying over and over again in our morning prayer time. 2 Corinthians 4 and verse 4. I want to read it to you. It says this, The God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers so that they cannot see the light of the gospel, of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. Listen, they cannot see. How many of you had a conversation with someone and you know that you shared your faith and you gave the gospel in such a clear way and in the end they just said, well, you know, maybe some other time. And you know that they didn't really hear anything you were saying. Every time you thought you made a point, they had an answer. Well, the devil blinds their minds. And prayer is the only way that we have, the only weapon that we have to take the blinders off people's eyes. You say, well, I've tried that. It doesn't work. Dear ones, understand something. The Bible tells us that much prayer is needed in these kinds of situations, much prayer. There's many illustrations of people, such as Anna in the temple, praying for the Messiah to come. She prayed, the Bible says, for 65 years. And there are many illustrations, right down to Ezekiel 28-29, where the Bible says that Aaron was to put on himself that breastplate with the 12 stones of the tribes of Israel. And he was to take that breastplate, put it on and walk into the holy place and name the names of the 12 tribes of Israel. I want to say to you, fathers, you believing fathers, you put the names of your children on the breastplate and you walk into the temple of the Lord and you call their names out before God. You priests of the Lord, you call out the names of your family members. Call out the names of your uncles and aunts and grandparents and cousins and all the rest. Call them out because you've been given the authority in Christ to see them saved. There are two important ingredients about prayer I just want to touch on. Number one, consider the possibility of fasting for a loved one. You say, well, I can do that for a week or two, but I can never do that over a long period of time. Yes, you can. Yes, you can. Dick Eastman writes in one of his new books, he says that God put it on his heart to fast every Wednesday for his two daughters who were becoming teenagers and beginning to say, well, I don't know what I think about all this. So he gave the Lord every Wednesday to fast two meals, breakfast and lunch, while he prayed for his daughters. And he did that for the next seven years as they went through all those teenage things. And he said it was as though God put a hedge around them and all the things that could have brought them down, God protected and spared his family. And now his daughters are serving Christ. Fasting is an important weapon in our armor, in our armory, rather, for fighting against the devil. And number two, this, fasting is number one. Number two is forgiveness. I was startled as I read 1 John 2 in my quiet time, where it says that hate is as darkness. And I began to see that when we hate somebody, we transmit darkness, we contribute to the blindness that the Bible says the devil uses to keep these people out of the light of Christ. I was startled when I read that because, you see, when we hate, and I know, listen, I know that some of you have come from abusive situations. Some of you have been so ignored and maligned by parents, relatives, and spouses that it would be very natural for you to hate them. But may you hear today from the Word of God that once you hate, if you have unforgiveness in your heart, you have put a prison around that person. You've contributed to their blindness. And I appeal to you in the name of Jesus, He who forgave you of all of your sin, can you not forgive that one who's hurt you? Your prayers will not be answered for their salvation until you've forgiven them, no matter what they've done to you. You must forgive them. Finally, let me conclude with this. The fourth part of the strategy is your family matters to God. They do. You have to believe, dear ones, you have to believe this and remind yourself every day that God loves your family. He wants them to be saved more than you do. You say, well, if that's true and He's God, why does He just make it happen? That's the mystery of our free will, is it not? You see, God could decree that all the Blahniks would be saved or all the Rinks would be saved. But God says, no, each one has been given the awesome privilege of having free choice. And you can do no more to see them saved than to be faithful, to live your life before them, faithful to pray for them, and faithful to give testimony as God prompts you to. But God must be the one that saves them. God must be the one that moves in their hearts. And I want to free many of you from guilt. Some of you have told me, you know, it's your fault that your husband or wife or son or daughter isn't following Christ. And I want to free you from guilt. I want to say today, begin to trust God that He loves your parents, He loves your spouse, He loves your kids even more than you do. And if you've failed, ask forgiveness and go on. Start today to live holy for Christ in a moment-by-moment way. Some people might be saying today, you know, Jay, you don't know how far my husband is from God. He hates all this stuff. I get people who tell me, you know, that they fight every Sunday morning because one wants to come to church and the other one wants to go just as far away as possible. And I want to just kind of bring this to a conclusion by reminding you of one very profound story in the Old Testament. It's a story about Hezekiah. Hezekiah was a great king. He served the Lord. He loved God. And you remember the story in 2 Kings where he's about to die? You know, Isaiah comes in and says, Hezekiah, get your life in order. You're going to die. And what did Hezekiah do? He started weeping. He said, God, don't you know I've been faithful? I've loved you. I don't want to die yet. And what did God do? Isaiah was walking out the door and the Bible said the word of the Lord came to Isaiah again. He came back and he said, Okay, the Lord heard your cry. He heard your prayer. He saw your tears. You're going to get 15 more years. Whoa, that's great. 15 more years. Well, three years into that extra extension of life, Hezekiah had a son named Manasseh. And Manasseh, if you'll forgive the term, was a hell-raiser. Manasseh was one of the most evil kings that came along in the reign of the tribes of Judah. 2 Chronicles tells us, he took the carved image he'd made and put it in God's temple. He worshiped idols. And it even says this, he did much to provoke the Lord his God. He sacrificed his sons in the fire in the valley of Ben-Hinnom, practiced sorcery, divination, and witchcraft, and consulted mediums. He did much evil in the eyes of the Lord, the Bible says. Now, I don't know how bad your situation is, but how many of you would say that maybe your loved one hasn't gone quite that far yet? Alright. I don't have time to develop the story, but the good news is this, that in the end, when the anger of the Lord began to burn against Manasseh, it says this, in his distress, he sought the favor of the Lord his God and humbled himself greatly before the God of his fathers. And when he prayed to Him, then the Lord was moved by his entreaty and listened to his plea, so that He brought him back to Jerusalem. And then Manasseh knew that the Lord was God. Father, your son will come back to God. Wives, your husbands will come to know God. If, number one, you see that God's placed you there to take authority and be the representation of His life. Number two, if you live a life that doesn't beat down, but lifts up the Lord by model and example. Number three, when you pray effectively with fasting and forgiveness. And number four, when you realize you can trust God with your family, He loves them more than you do. And I want to ask God from this day, August 20th, 1989, for you to mark it as a time when you renew your prayer, you renew your life, you renew your commitment to see your loved one saved, because they're worth it. They matter to God. Amen. Let's stand, shall we? Join a hand with a family member of the kingdom right now. Father, in the name of Jesus, I pray right now. Go ahead, you pray right now, would you please? Pray right now for the family member that God would put in your heart. The husband, the wife,