Kennystix's podcast
Reaching Out with the Gospel of God
The following message is by Pastor John Piper. More information from Desiring God is available at www.desiringgod.org. I'd like to pray with you as we get started. Let's pray. Father in Heaven, I'm so thankful for Christ who loved us and gave Himself for us. I'm thankful for grace that conquered all our resistance and made Christ look irresistibly attractive to us. I thank you that you're willing to dirty your hands through the Holy Spirit to help us make progress in sanctification. I'm thankful for the Bible. Where would we be without your authoritative, inerrant Word to give us a strong, solid vision of the universe and of all you're doing in it? I'm thankful for the conference that you've let me be a part of here and I pray that you would make this a powerful evening all the way to the end. By showing Christ to us and establishing us in our teaching ministry for the sake of evangelism, for the sake of reaching our culture like the theme says. So come and help me do my part here faithfully. I pray and give ears to hear and hearts to yield and believe and embrace and make solid resolutions for good. I ask this in Jesus' name, amen. Let me give you a little review so that if you weren't here last night or even if you were, perhaps it will become clear again. Since we have the theme reaching our culture with the gospel, I began by asking, "What is the gospel?" And I took you with me to 2 Corinthians chapter 4, verses 4 through 6 and asked the question, "What's the highest, best, and final good of the good news that makes the good news ultimately good?" And I said, "It isn't justification by faith. And it isn't propitiation of the wrath of God. It isn't escape from hell. It isn't the forgiveness of sins. It isn't the removal of guilt. It isn't the resurrection of the body. It isn't restoration with my mother who's gone to heaven. It is not any of those gloriously good things that Christ died to purchase for us. All of those things are going somewhere. They're moving us. They're getting obstacles out of the way and fitting us for something, namely, to quote the verse, "The gospel of the glory of Christ who is the image of God." And I just commend you to ask yourself, "What does it mean gospel of the glory of Christ?" Because that's Paul's way of stating it in that place, but the only way, it's just this way. And so when I try to order that way with all the other ways, I see this way as the goal. I'm justified for this. I'm forgiven for this. I'm reconciled for this. I'm saved for this. I escape hell for this. I'm going to heaven for this. Therefore, if we don't ever get this clear with our people, I wonder if we preach the whole gospel. Somebody asked me at the back, would you say just another word about the meaning of glory of Christ who is the image of God? And I will, but I won't satisfy anybody because the word "docksa" or "cavode" glory is not definable. Any more than the word "beauty" is definable because I'm going to use the word "beauty" to define "glory." What you do to define "beauty" is to point at something, a sunset, a Grand Canyon, the Alps. You point and you say, "Look!" and if people have eyes to see, they see. And you know it when you see it, but try to put the word "beauty" into words. Say "beauty" with other words. Well, measures of symmetry and order and they all just fall out of your mouth like rocks because they're totally inadequate to put into words. What we know, we all know there is such a thing as beauty. So my definition of the beauty of the glory of Christ or God is to say it is the radiance or the beauty of his manifold perfections. Wow, isn't that just great? I think those are helpful words, but this is so spiritually explosive that definitions just grope toward reality here. So maybe it would help to say this. One more thing on this and then I'm getting on with where I'm going tonight. It's helpful to think about the difference between the holiness of God and the glory of God. Now, what's that? There's my effort to get at the difference between these two massive biblical realities. I mean, there are just no bigger biblical realities than the holiness of God and the glory of God. My understanding of holiness, which in its essential root is separateness from the common, is that holiness is God's absolute uniqueness, his sui generis in a class by himself. Nobody like him and when you find a diamond like that, a diamond like no other diamond, you separate it. You put it behind a big glass case and you put guards in front of it and that's the way we picture the holiness of God. He's separate. He's other. He's high. He's lifted up. He's different. He's out there, holy, holy, holy, and you cover your face and you cover your feet and you just worship. He's absolutely other. Now, glory is when that goes public. In a thousand radiant ways, the heavens are telling the glory of God. Holiness gone public, holiness gone radiant, holiness in the beauty of nature and my point last night was is that it is the gospel, which means, we know from 1 Corinthians 15, Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures. He was buried and he was raised from the dead according to the Scriptures. That is the gospel in terms of events and purposes at one level. Now what's all that about? Why did he die? Why did he die for my sins? Answer so that my eyes would go open and that I would forever be able to enjoy seeing and savoring the glory of God in Christ or the glory of Christ as the image of God. It is the sight of beauty, infinite beauty, for which our hearts were made. Augustine talked about that, that hold in our hearts. We try to fill it with every other kind of beauty and that the degenerate people fill it with pornographic beauty, stuff that turns them on. It's all a hold. It's all a void. It's not going to work in the things, you know, squeaky clean, middle class evangelicals. We fill it with other stuff, money, nice house and suburbs, toys, cars, boats, cabins, long vacations, fat retirements, anything. And the void remains. We're made to behold the beauty of God and be satisfied by it. It's gone public for us in the gospel. So last word, when Christ died on the cross as the infinitely worthy Son of God and bore the sins of the world and prayed for his enemies and did not jerk his hands off and slay them all and stayed there and spoke to a thief today with me in paradise. That's how sovereign I am. If you don't see beauty in that, you're not saved. You're not saved. I mean that. That is no joke. That is no no overstatement. If you do not recognize beauty and glory, I'm talking about moral exquisiteness, unbelievable glory shining forth from that moment, you're not saved yet. You don't have to know the words, don't get me wrong. You don't have to know the word glory. You may have never heard of the word glory or beauty, but if there's not a witness in your soul, there's my king, there's my Lord, there's one I'll follow, there's one I stand in awe of. Whatever words you want to use, I don't care about words here, I'm talking about a spiritual experience of seeing the radiance of wonder and beauty and glory, find the words, streaming forth from that event, and Paul made it very clear, Jews stumble, Gentiles call it foolishness, but those who are called, that is like Lazarus out of the grave, they see it as the wisdom of God and the power of God, which are two of the attributes of glory. When I say the radiance of his manifold perfections, one of those is wisdom, one of those is power, there's lots more streaming out of the cross than those two. If Paul had written a longer book, he would have written a longer list. Okay, that to refer to you friend who asked me at the back to say more about the glory of God. So now we got work to do tonight and very little time to do it in. I said, oh dear, what shall I do? I'm going to skip over the rest of my summary, go to the last point. I asked what's the role of teaching in reaching our culture? So let's go back to my text. Go with me to 2 Timothy chapter 2 verses 24 to 26, this text is so massive for my ministry, for my pastoral life, for my evangelistic life, for my theological understanding, what happens in a counseling session or on the street, witnesses somebody in Phillips neighborhood where I live, this text is just huge, just huge, and I would like it to be huge for you as well. So I'm going to read it again and point out, as I go, the four things we saw last night. Verse 24, "The Lord's servant must not be quarrelsome, but kind to everyone." Now stop there and clearly he's trying to get Timothy to be a kind of person, not just say a true statement, a kind of person, a non-quarreling person, kind person, and then he says, able to teach. So now he's saying, be a teacher, be a teacher, and then he follows it with some more kinds of personhood, patiently enduring evil, correcting his opponents with gentleness. So before and after, you got teaching sandwiched in character, in love, in meekness, in tenderness, in patience. So the job of a pastor or a lay person in some kind of role of witnessing or nurturing a small group is to be a kind of person surrounding the kind of teaching. And when that happens, verse 25 in the middle, God may perhaps grant them repentance. So now we've seen three things. Number one, there is a demeanor that God is pleased to use in bringing about repentance. Sum it up with the word love, gentleness, kindness, patience. And secondly, there are words called teaching, able to teach that God is pleased to use to bring about repentance. And thirdly, God brings about repentance, maybe. You can't make this happen. That word perhaps there, slays me. I have no control in this church. I am to be a loving, faithful teacher of the Word, and God may, on any given Sunday, grant repentance. He may. He may not. You may get a million baptisms, and you may not. I think you should pray like crazy toward that, and all the glorious foundations underneath it. But that's God's work, and I hope that gets sounded loud and clear at the convention. And the fourth thing, look at this, this is so amazing, maybe there are more than four. I'm counting differently as I move through here. God may perhaps grant them repentance, leading to a knowledge of the truth. Now the devil knows the truth. So something more is going on here than what the devil knows. The devil is the most orthodox theologian on planet earth. There's nothing in theology he doesn't know better than you do, and he's lost because he hates it. Knowing doesn't save. It's a means to saving because teaching is here. But look what happens when God grants repentance, some kind of lights go on, leading to a knowledge of the truth. And I'm tracing that back to 2 Corinthians 4, 4. The God of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers to keep them from seeing the light of the knowledge, knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ. So the knowledge that you get here is that spiritual apprehension of the glory of God. The devil has none of that. When he looks at God, he hates what he sees. When a born again person looks at God, he loves what he sees. They're seeing the same and not the same, Jesus said, seeing they do not see. The Pharisee is looking at Jesus, and the public is looking at Jesus. They're seeing the same thing, and they're not seeing the same thing. These people are plotting to kill him. These people are going down to their house justified because they've discovered the grace of God and the glory of God, the beauty of God. They'll live with this man. They'll walk with him anywhere they have seen through to glory. So that's what we know when we are granted repentance by God, and none of those. One more step. So good for all of you who have kids or friends who are demonized by Satan in all kinds of crazy ways. We give verse 26. Then if God does this, they will escape. They may escape from the snare of the devil after being captured by him to do his will. Why is it that the deliverance from the devil follows the awakening to this kind of truth? For this reason, the devil enslaves with lies. Pornography will make you happier. Climbing the corporate ladder at the expense of other people will make you happier. Accumulating more boats, more houses, more toys will make you happier. Those are all, that's the way that Satan puts people in bondage. Eating and eating and eating will make you happier. On and on, all kinds of addictions flow from this. All kinds of bondage is flow from this. All kinds of pride flow from this. How do you break the power of the devil? And the answer is God grants repentance unto truth, and the truth sets you free. You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free. The truth here is not just a head knowledge, remember. There are many people, like the son I told you about last night, who are better theologians than many Christians, and they're lost. They can answer more theological questions correctly than Christians can, and they're lost because the knowledge they don't have is the spiritual apprehension of the eyes of the heart of the beauty of God shining through the doctrines that we preach. And when they see that beauty, they are ravished by it, and thereby the root of sin is severed because Satan can't trick them anymore. If he lies to them and says, "You know, if you just don't tell the whole truth about your honor rariums, when you fill out your tax forms, it won't be as much stress on your wife when you send your kid to private school." And Christ has now awakened, repented in a new heart, and you see the glory of God and the beauty of his wisdom as a financial counselor. And you see the beauty of Christ standing behind, they'll shall not lie. I'll provide everything you need, Philippians 4, 19. I died to fulfill this promise for you. My God will supply all your needs according to his riches in glory and Christ Jesus. I died that you might love this promise, live on this promise. Will you believe me? And the heart that's been born of God streams out with admiration for that financial counsel. And the power of Satan is broken. And now, that's what I see in last night's text and it leads me to ask this question. So how important is teaching in evangelism? If all that, we just saw flows from teaching, be patient, be an apt teacher, and in your loving teaching, God may grant repentance, may grant new birth unto seeing all that truth, and may grant deliverance from the devil. All of that is flowing from loving teaching, loving teaching. How important is teaching? My answer is massively important. I'm closing with my little part here tonight by pleading for as much teaching evangelism as relational evangelism. Relational evangelism has had good times in America for the last 30, 40 years. It's just about to spin itself in my judgment in this kind of world, this absolutely amazingly pluralistic world. And the reason is because the people we're talking to, if we think just being nice to them, it's going to wake in faith, we're crazy. They don't have the categories. They don't know the categories. So where I want to go next is to ask just two questions. One, okay, what should we teach? And two, why is this so important? Let me just do that as fast as I can. What should we teach? Wow. What in the world am I going to do to answer that question? I'm going to take you to Acts 20. So you want to go there with me? Acts 20. I want to pick up on two phrases in verses. Let's see. What verses are they? They'll find my place here. There they are, 24 to 27. This is Paul to the elders of Ephesus, down in my lead us on the beach. May never see them again. Very emotional moment for Paul. There's 24, Acts 20. I do not count my life of any value, nor as precious to myself. If only I may finish my course in the ministry that I receive from the Lord Jesus to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. Let's just let that land on you. I care about one thing. I don't want to stay alive. I just want to finish the course appointed for me, and then he sums it up to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. So that's got to be taught. What is that? People don't know what that is. You see that to a person on the street? I exist to share with you the gospel of the grace of God means nothing, or it means something wrong like a gospel of self-esteem or a gospel of prosperity. It's got to be taught. What is grace? What is gospel? What is God? Keep reading verse 25. And now, behold, I know that none of you, among whom I have gone about, proclaiming the kingdom, will see my face again, and therefore I testify to you this day that I am innocent of the blood of you all, for I did not shrink from declaring to you, and then instead of saying the gospel of the grace of God, he says the whole counsel of God. The whole counsel of God, your blood is not on my hands. I have spent time with you. I have poured my life into you for these months, and now if you perish, your blood is not on my hands because I taught you, well, whole counsel. What is that? That's an important question. If you want people's blood not on your hands after a couple of years of ministry, you got to get this. You got to know, what should I teach them? You can't do this evangelistic little routine every Sunday that I grew up with, why don't I make this church, you can't do that, not be faithful to this text, not to wipe the blood off the hands. That takes a couple of years. That's how long Paul took to do it in Ephesus. So I want to ask the question, Paul, is there such a thing as the whole counsel of God? I mean, can you do that? Let me give you a couple of phrases so that you can get your hands around this term, whole counsel of God, Romans 6, 17. Thanks be to God that you who are once slaves of sin have become obedient from the heart to the standard of teaching. What's that? I'm thinking, God, that once these slaves of sin are now obedient to the standard of teaching. I think it's another phrase for a whole counsel. There was a body of doctrine, there was a body called the standard of teaching or the whole counsel of God and every apostle knew, I must transmit this to the next generation. I must teach this standard of teaching or here's another phrase for it. Turn to Timothy 1, 13. Follow Timothy, follow the pattern of sound words. What is that? Follow the pattern of sound words that have been heard from me in the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus by the Holy Spirit who dwells within us. God, here's the fourth illustration, guard the good deposit entrusted to you. Now you've got four statements, there are more, I'll just stop with these four. Whole counsel of God, Acts 20, 27. Standard of teaching, Romans 6, 17, and pattern of sound words, 2 Timothy 1, 13, and the good deposit entrusted to you. When I read those as a pastor, I feel so charged, I've got to work to do here. I've got to work to do for Minneapolis, I've got to work to do for Bethlehem Baptist Church, I've got to work to do and that is, I must impart to my people and through my people to this city the whole counsel of God, the standard of teaching. There is something like that, now I'm going to do the impossible and try to outline what that is. I mean, I thought, wow, what in the world? I'm going to tell you in five minutes what I think that is. Now this is going to be fallible, fallible, this is infallible, this is fallible, okay? But if we never try, how are you going to do it? So here's my effort, it's going to bang, bang, bang, right through the whole counsel. Now stop here and say, I'm getting my parameters, for what I say, by putting together verse 27 of Acts 20 and verse 24, I'm taking the phrase, I want to live to testify to the gospel of the grace of God. I'm taking the phrase gospel of the grace of God and I'm taking the phrase, your blood is not on my hands because I've shared with you, I have not shrunk back, which implies there's some difficult things here. I have not shrunk back from declaring to the whole counsel, so I think whole counsel doesn't mean everything in the Bible, that's impossible, it can't teach everything in the Bible. I don't think whole counsel means everything in the Bible, I think whole counsel means that body of truth which surrounds the gospel and makes the gospel intelligible in the way that people all over the world can get it and live it. That's where I'm getting my parameters. So here we go, number one, you got to teach about God, that He exists, that He created everything, that He has rights over His creatures, that He owes us nothing, that He deserves our trust, our admiration and our thanks and our honor. Number two, you got to teach people about man. Our culture doesn't know who God is, our culture doesn't know who man is. You got to teach people about man, number one, He's created in the image of God, He has a moral will, He has reason, He has affections, He is obliged to trust and admire and thank and glorify God. Number three, you got to teach people about sin, they don't know what sin is, you know what the world thinks sin is, hurting people, that's not what sin is. Sin is offending the glory of God. Sin is all about God, nobody in America knows that, you got to teach that. They think if you hurt somebody, you're sinning. If you don't hurt anybody, you're not sinning, it's all man centered. So sin is both choice and indwelling contamination and depravity. It's blindness, it's helplessness, it's deadness, it's rebellion, it's insubordination to God. It's first Godward and secondly, man would, we have to teach that. Number four, we have to teach about Christ, who is He? He was a real historical person, He was a God man, He was fulfilling all the promises as the Messiah, He was perfect and righteous and never sinned. Fifth, we must preach about the cross and the death of Christ. It was designed by God. It was willing and obedient. It was substitutionary, He took our place when He died. It was sin bearing and wrath bearing. It was a purchase of the new covenant promises. This cup is the new covenant in my blood. That's one of those massive statements in the New Testament. It means that every new covenant promise, like I'll take out the heart of flesh, the heart of stone, I'll put in the heart of flesh. I'll write my law in your heart, I'll put a new spirit within you, I'll cause you to walk in my statutes. Jesus bought that at the cross for everyone who believes in Him. That's crucial that we get clear of what happened at the cross. Number six or whatever, I'm going to lose track because I don't have them numbered here. The resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead has got to be taught. He really rose, it was bodily, it was triumphant over death and hell. He reigns with God. He has all authority in heaven, He's coming again. Seven, we have to teach the work of the Holy Spirit. Who is He? And what did He do? He opens the eyes of the blind. He reveals and illumines Jesus Christ. He convicts us in. He calls out of death and darkness into light. He regenerates a year's worth of servants, or at least several months, on the work of the Holy Spirit. People don't know anything about the Holy Spirit in the world. How are they going to get saved by the Holy Spirit when they know so little? Or let's see, the last one I have here is repentance and faith. I'm going to teach you about repentance and faith. Faith is the soul instrument by which we are justified. Faith alone, apart from works and how that works, home. Most people think you get justified by being good enough. I've been preaching on justification by faith in my church for years, trying to help people get this glorious center of the gospel and so many people don't have it yet. We are so wired by nature to work our way to heaven, it just can't be true. It can't be true that I'm accepted in the beloved with the righteousness imputed to me that's alien to me and all my sins were given by trusting another because it can't be true. It just can't be true and everything in us fights against it. We're so prone. I'm going to do this to myself, I'm going to make it myself, that's a challenge. It's a gift of God. Faith is a gift of God. I can give you a half a dozen texts on that. It's the duty of man, put those two together and you've got paradox, we're going to live with that. I'm living with that. You must believe God gives faith. I'm going to live with that biblical mystery and then I'm so thankful it's a gift because I can't make it happen and I want it to happen to so many people in my life. It comes from seeing the truth of Christ and savoring Christ and so on. Okay, that's the whole council of God. In other words, that's my effort to figure out what body of truth surrounding the center of the gospel is needed to make that understood. You've got to know about God, you've got to know about man, you've got to know about sin, you've got to know about Christ, you've got to know about the cross, you've got to know about the resurrection, you've got to know about the work of the Holy Spirit, you've got to know about the nature of faith, you've got to know these things in some rudimentary way at least and the more the better. So that's my answer to the question and fallible, inadequate, you can improve. In fact, as I was working through, as I was working through this this afternoon, I prepared this weeks ago, this list and I saw this gaping hole. I didn't have resurrection in the list. So I'm wondering tonight, why am I going to go home and realize this missing from this list tonight? And you're going to say, Piper doesn't believe it's essential that and you're going to finish the list and I'm going to get crucified for something's missing from the whole. I just want to communicate the necessity of teaching in evangelism. So let's close with that. Why is it so crucial? You may see the parameters a little differently, I'm okay with that, but why is it so crucial that we have teaching evangelism as well as relational? And you see in the text here, they're not separate in Second Timothy, being patient and being loving and correcting the gentleness, that's all relationships, right? That's a certain kind of relational person. So I don't mean to separate these two at all. I just plead that we become a people who have both theology and affection. We have both truth and emotion. We have doctrine and we have entrepreneurial evangelistic strategies. It's not either or. It's not pragmatists and intellectuals and theoreticians and theologians. We got to get this together, somebody asked me downstairs today, what's the genius of the American pulpit over against the old Puritan pulpit? And the genius of the American pulpit is not God-centeredness. Would it that were it? But it has its strengths and one of them is it's practical. It's entrepreneurial. It cares about people. That's a beautiful thing. I want that to be true in my church and in your churches, but oh, the crucial dimension of teaching these great truths to the world. So here's my closing three quick reasons for why it is so crucial, number one. People come to know Christ, the living person, through gospel propositions about Christ. Duh, I wish it were duh, we live in a church where the emergent church has a philosophical orientation on propositions that likes to call themselves post-propositional. We're post-modern, so we're going to be post-propositional. It's hard for me not to swear at this point. My wife, bless her heart, just keeps the lid on me and the language I use in the pulpit. I'll just say it this way, I love Athanasius who died for propositions, he was banished five times, he didn't have to die, almost did. There are propositions that is subject, verb, object, predicate, nominative. There are propositions which if you embrace them, will damn you to hell. Like using Athanasius, there was a time when the son was not, S-O-N. There was a time when the son was not, that's damnable. You say that sentence and believe it, you will go to hell. Anybody who minimizes propositions are slitting their throat and everybody they preach to. We come to know the living Christ personally, warmly, relationally, eternally through propositions about him that are true. Anybody that comes along minimizing the importance of accurate, true propositions about Jesus and Christ is cutting the church in half. Don't let that happen in your church, don't, you see all this emergence, if you know what it is, it's a reaction to their parents fundamentalism which seems so wooden and so heartless and so lifeless and so doctrinaire as though the way to solve that problem is to chuck the doctrine. That's not the way you solve the problem, the problem is see through it to God, see through it and embrace the old truth, my dad, I will own the label fundamentalist. I will take it if I could just leave aside all that attitudinal stuff that is being kicked against. I would just long for this convention and you folks in particular to be able to say we're not giving up on any biblical propositions and we believe that in saying these we can write poems about them, we can write hymns about them, we can lay down our life for them, we can preserve marriages with them, we can help kids get off drugs with them, we believe in true propositions encased in a relation a lot but laid on its life we're not giving up the propositions to become whole people. We're using the propositions to become whole people. So that's my first reason to believe in teaching is because you come to know Jesus relationally with true propositions. Number two and these quickly. People today don't have the categories for understanding our witness unless we teach them the categories. Now I know that's a generalization. I grew up in the south, I said last night, was it here that I said this, that in whole room in Whitehampton High School in 1962 we had devotions from the Bible in a secular school with the Jews sitting beside me. That's unheard of. You can't do that in a secular society, right? And so I know that in those days and maybe in some pockets of North Carolina today when you use all these languages, God, sin, man, cross, people know what you mean, deep biblical right understanding where I live, that is not true. Minneapolis is liberal city. I mean as left wing as you can get in our city and for me to go out on the street and use all that language and not teach, that's useless. Everybody believes in my neighborhood, prostitutes believe, drunk believe, homeless people believe, everybody believes. I try to walk around witness to Jesus, everybody already believes. They don't know what I'm talking about. So I learned how to do evangelism from Acts 19, 8 to 10. Listen to this, all you church planters, heads up. Acts 19, 8 to 9, maybe 10 we'll close with. He entered the synagogues and for three months spoke boldly reasoning and persuading about the kingdom of God. Now look at that strategy. It's just three months in the synagogue reasoning and persuading. So he's got Jews. He's starting with a pretty good foundation here and he's taken three months to reason and persuade. But when some stubborn and continued in unbelief speaking evil of the way before the congregation, he withdrew from them and taking his disciples with him reasoning daily in the Hall of Tyrannus. This continued for two years. That's a church planting strategy unlike many we see today. Now whether it's appropriate for your setting, you gotta decide. But I think in my setting, that's not a bad idea. Riddle Hall put up a sign, we teach about Christianity here and take two years and one texture, the texture, the texture, it was from 11 in the morning to 4 in the afternoon. Five hours a day for two years. You do the math. That's a lot of time to get God, sin, cross, man, resurrection, spirit, faith, clear in these pagans. They're all polytheists. They don't know what you're talking about. And America today is like the first century, gloriously like the first century. Not an opportunity for us to teach America and my last, that's number two. People don't have the categories and we need to take time to teach them and the last one and I close is that the more you know about your treasure, front end of Christianity as you're coming to him or back end as you're growing in him, the more you know about your treasure, the more passion you're going to have for him. To go for him, to risk for him, to die for him and I just closed by looking at two verses X, 1910, next verse in the text. I didn't read it. You wonder why I stopped because I wanted to close with it. Verse 10, "After he did this for two years, teaching daily in this, in the Hall of Terenas, this continued for two years, so that, so that all the residents of Asia heard the word of the Lord." Does that boggle your mind? He stayed in one place doing teaching evangelism and the whole province heard the word of the Lord. A church that fires people with the fullness of the whole council of God so that people know they know him, they can handle anything. Any cancer, any straight child, any crisis like Katrina, they can handle it. Their roots are down deep and they can talk to people with confidence because they know him, they know, don't leave your people without knowing him and I closed with this one. I said, "Two verses, last one." Acts 5, 28, "Oh, I want this to be said of me and my church and your church." They're really mad at the apostles and they said to them, "We strictly charge you not to teach in this name." So they're doing public evangelistic teaching, "We strictly charge you not to teach in this name, yet here you are and you have filled Jerusalem with your teaching." Oh Lord, Phil Winston Santa, Phil Greensboro, Phil Charlotte, Phil Asheville, Phil Virginia Beach, Phil every city and town in this state with teaching. That's what it says, "We strictly charge you not to do this kind of public teaching and here you have filled all of Jerusalem with your teaching." And I just want to end by saying, "God, come, God, give us the grace to do this. Help us in our churches and in public settings, on beaches with 160 people being baptized. Let us teach the people with this visual demonstration. Let's teach the people the whole council of God, the fullness of the gospel, of the grace of God, everything it takes to make that understood in our day, Lord. Thank you for the gospel and all the truth that surrounds it in Jesus' name. Thank you for listening to this message by John Piper, pastor for preaching at Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Feel free to make copies of this message to give to others, but please do not charge for those copies or alter the content in any way without permission. We invite you to visit Desiring God Online at www.desiringgod.org. There you'll find hundreds of sermons, articles, radio broadcasts and much more, all available to you at no charge. Our online store carries all of Pastor John's books, audio and video resources. You can also stay up to date on what's new at Desiring God. Again, our website is www.desiringgod.org or call us toll free at 1-888-346-4700. Our mailing address is Desiring God 20601 East Franklin Avenue, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55406. Thank God exists to help you make God your treasure, because God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him. [BLANK_AUDIO]
John Piper | Teaching the whole counsel of God is needed in our evangelism so that people will encounter Christ, have the correct categories in their minds, and know and savor the truth.