Video Transcript: Session 9 Euangelizo

I'm glad you're back for this ninth session in preacher preparation and presentation, a class on making and preaching sermons. Now you'll notice that we're still in that division of this class called Preparing to preach. In other words, you know, one of the things you do to prepare, and we've looked at a variety of them, you know, first of all, we pray. And then we are committed to looking at the word that's where our message is going to come from. And we've talked about exegesis, and eisegesis, and he talked about topical or thematic preaching that there are a variety of ways that you are going to look at scripture. And so you make these decisions prior to preaching in your studies. We've talked about exegesis, a great deal, how you find out what, what the passage meant and how you go about doing an exegetical study of a passage. Well, today, I want to move on, you'll notice the title is kinds of sermons. But before that, there are a couple of other words that really need some definition for us hermeneutics. Now, I listed that in previous session, as a word that we need to find our hermeneutics is the science of interpreting the Bible. In other words, its principles for exegesis. Really, it's the rules that you're going to follow when you're studying the Bible. Now, some of those rules are maybe unique to a particular denomination, or typical faith expression, but most are not. They are looking at God's word and finding a way to make God's word relevant to today's life. homiletics, on the other hand, is the science of preaching. Now the two are, are connected, you can't have one without the other. In other words, as the one person put it, David Allen, another person has written a good deal about preaching, so there is no good preaching apart from good interpretation. In other words, you can't have good homiletics you can't have good sermons, unless you have good hermeneutics, a good study of the Word, or here's another man, David Jackman, who's put it this way where the word of God is faithfully taught, the voice of God is authentically heard. And so our goal in preaching is to do good hermeneutics, to do the good study of the Word, and, and then to do good homiletics, to figure out where we are going to make that word applicable to life. I love the illustration that a man named Kerry McGregor gave me, he said, let's say that I buy a new CD. And I put it into my CD player in my car. And I all of a sudden listen to it. And it's it's terrible, the sound is fuzzy there crackles or splits. So you take the CD out, and you look at it. And you wonder, does this have a flaw in it, it's brand new, is it scratched somewhere, there's something wrong with this, that the expression of what was recorded on there isn't coming through clearly in my car. So you take it inside your house, and you put it in your CD player in your house, and you push it in, and it plays beautifully. The sound is glorious. So your conclusion is, there's something wrong with a CD player in the car. And so you bring that down to an audio place that deals with cars. And they find out that there's something wrong with your speakers, you need new speakers. Now, in the analogy, the metaphor, there's nothing wrong with the CD there's, the problem was in how the speakers interpreted how the machine interpreted and sent that message from the CD into the speakers. Now, the metaphor is, there's nothing wrong with the Word of God. We believe the Word of God of the inspired Word of God, God breathed that out, there's something special about this word. And so when we do our hermeneutics, we know we are approaching something that God has said is His Word is something that is expressing his love for mankind is expressing what He wants us to know, and what we need to know about ourselves, and about the world and about him. And so that's dependable. But sometimes, in the process of the translation of that, there are other difficulties that can come through. So there are some implications for the preacher here. One, you must know the Bible well, if you're going to preach well, and there are all kinds of courses, here and CLI and elsewhere. There are things online that you can get, but you should know the Bible, well. You should know the stories you should be able to connect stuff. Now. For some people that's going to be stronger than another. But if you're going to do homiletics, preaching, well, you've got to do hermeneutics well, and so you should know the principles of exegesis, the principle of hermeneutics, kinds of literature, different kinds of literature in the Scripture, all of those things will help you be a better preacher. Now having said that, I want to turn to a little bit more deep knowledge of this science called homiletics. So what I want to do in this session, and maybe the next two, is look at some words that are used in Scripture that are translated as preaching. And what we're going to see in using these words, examining these words, is that there are a variety of kinds of sermons. And so as I'm preparing to preach, one of the things I have to decide, as I'm looking at scriptures, what kind of sermon does this require? And what kind of sermon do my people require? If you're going to do good preaching you not only have to do good hermeneutics, we're going to look at that down the road a little ways. But you have to do a good examination of the culture of your people of the place you are preaching, what are their issues? What are what did they need to hear from God? And so we do those good hermeneutics, we are going to do better homiletics. So what kind of sermon do your people need at a particular time? One is involved, with Greek words that are translated as described as a precipitating event. What we're going to look at today is the word Euangelizo. That's a transliteration of the Greek New Testament. And here's the definition of it. It's the good news of the kingdom of God that has come to earth and subsequently, also of Jesus, the Messiah, the founder of his kingdom, is the Strong's Dictionary of the New Testament. It is also the glad tidings of salvation through Christ. or thirdly, it's the proclamation of the grace of God manifest and pledged in Christ. Or it's the gospel. That's the simple term. That's what it means to Euangelizo, and five, it's the narrative of Jesus life and teaching. In other words, the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, we call the Gospels. This is the word Euangelizo. Now, we're going to spend some minutes with a man named Geoffrey Plant, Geoffrey Plant is, as you see, he's a parish priest at St. Michael's parish within the Archdiocese of Sydney, Australia. And he's got a kind of video blog. And you can find him on YouTube. Got a variety of things he does on there. But one thing he does is examine some words that are used in the New Testament. And one of the words he examines is the word Euangelizo, and did a marvelous job. And for me as an American. Just gotta love his accent. Let's put it that way. And I remember years ago, Professor mine introducing a guest speaker at a lecture time, and said, you know, one thing he had learned from this man who was quite famous himself, He was a Brit. He said, I realized that if you can speak with a British accent, you really don't need theology, because people will pay attention to Father Plant is similar to that he's got an Australian accent that is delightful to listen to, for me as an American, but he examines the word Euangelizo in a variety of ways. And so take about I think, is about four minutes and 32 seconds, and we're going to just explore with him that word. New Testament words. euangelion. Our English word gospel comes from the Old English Godspell which means good news. Gospel is a translation of the Greek word, euangelion. Eu epsilon, upsilon means good. And Angelion means message. So euangelion means a good message or good news. A related word is angelos, it means messenger, but it's also the Greek word for Angel. So an angel is a messenger. Or to be more precise, these spirits are angels, when God entrust them with a message. The verb is euangelizo which means to announce good news. In secular usage at the time, euangelion meant good news, such as news of victory in battle, or the Emperor's birthday, or the Emperor's presence in a particular place. We have an example of how the word was used on an inscription found at Priene, it's dated to 9 BC engraved in stone, it's a letter from the Proconsul Paulus Fabius Maximus. Priene was a city in what is now Turkey, but at the time of Jesus, it was within the Roman province of Asia Minor. It's just to the south of Ephesus You can see the inscription in Greek but notice the word circled in red, euangelion. So let's see what it says. The section of the inscription we're interested in speaks of the birthday of the god Augustus. So the Roman Emperor Caesar Augustus is referred to as a god. And his birthday is the beginning of the euangelion. The good news of good tidings for the world. But now, euangelion occurred 76 times in the New Testament, it occurs 56 times in the Pauline letters. But notice that Paul's understanding of euangelion doesn't refer to a book about Jesus. The word focuses on the person of Jesus Christ and what God has done for us through Jesus. In the Pauline letters, the verb euangelizon occurs 21 times. In Mark's gospel, the noun occurs eight times. In Matthew's Gospel, the noun occurs four times and the verb once. The verb euangelizo occurs 54 times in the New Testament, and almost half of those occurrences are in the Gospel of St. Luke, and the Acts of the Apostles. So in the New Testament, euangelion doesn't refer to a book or writing but to a proclamation or a message. The four gospels proclaim the good news by telling stories about the life and death of Jesus, His birth, ministry, miracles, teaching last days, crucifixion and resurrection. In the second century AD, we find the Christian writings that we now know as gospels, designated as euangelion and that may be because Mark the first of the Gospels to be written, begins with the word. Arche tou euangeliou lesou Christou, the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ. euangelion good news. Now, when you look at Jesus, you find that he talked about euangelizoing of proclaiming the good news. In Mark chapter 14, he said And this gospel of the kingdom must be preached as reach it should be preached to the whole world, it should be euangelizo to the whole world, it should be announcing this good news to the whole world. That's how Jesus used the said, this gospel has to be preach good news has to be euangelizoed to the whole world. After you do that. You are how will you go about doing that is different in some situations, most often, we will euangelizo to one person or two people. That's how we engage. My wife and I support a missionary in Spain who works with Muslim refugees. And God is speaking to Muslims these days, especially with so much migrant and refugee movement among peoples in the Middle East and through Europe. And recently, it was a time of recognizing refugee week. And so she told a story every day, she wrote us a story every day about somebody in in their situation that was coming to Christ or being impacted by Christ. Well, one of the stories was a man named Abdullah. Abdullah had escaped from Syria, where he was going to be either killed or he would have been taken into the army of the rebels and forced to fight. And so he and his brother ran away from home, knowing they probably never see their parents again, they will probably never go home again. And they ended up going on this migration, this trip across Europe and they end up you know, finally safe in Spain. And there, Abdullah is just angry, because his past is just a blur, and he knows he can never go back. And so he's angry at Allah. He's wondering if there is a God, this God that he committed himself to. And so he began to have dreams. And in his dreams, he sees the shining being and the shining being begins to talk to him. And any Abdullah wants to know who the shining being is. And the one night he has just a particularly Stark dream. He's sitting there and this shining beam comes to him again and says, Now, I'm going to tell you who I am. He said, But first, I want you to go and help your neighbor. Well, he wakes up and he's just compelled to go knock out his neighbor's door now it's the middle of the night 2am and knocks very softly of course he calls his neighbor who's named Achmud and Achmud, are you in there? And then he knocks a little louder, knocks a little louder. And getting no response. Finally he breaks down the door. He's, he's so compelled because he wants to know who is the shining being who's offering some hope is and he finds finds that Achmud has just hung himself. And he's able to cut him down and revive him. And, and they come to our missionary friend, and talk about this being of light. And she euangelizo, she proclaims the good news of Jesus Christ. That's often how it happens one on one, one on two. But there are times in Scripture where you find it happening to groups. That's why we call this preaching right. Now you can find it on Pentecost, in Acts 2, when Peter gets up, and he addresses the crowd, and he tells them about Jesus. He's telling the good news, and it's to a large group of people or Acts 10. With Cornelius, you remember that Cornelius is a Gentile. And yet, an angel appears to him and says, Go call for Peter and have him come and listen to what he says. And so someone sent to go and find Peter, Peter comes there. Because he's had this dream, and he knows that this is God's will. And he enters the presence of a Gentile, not just a Gentile, but a centurion, somebody who's a Roman officer, and he begins to speak this Peter talking about Jesus Christ as the hope of the world. And the Holy Spirit falls upon this group of Gentiles. And Peter is preaching, or Paul in Athens. That is, without a doubt one of my favorite passages. I've had the privilege of traveling to Greece and standing the little hill, right below the Parthenon and those other temples up on the hill on the Acropolis. And reading Acts 17. And you remember the story there, that in Acts chapter 17, Paul is going around and he sees all of these altars and all of these idols all over the place, and his heart is troubled by it. And so he goes to the Areopagus, which is this little hill area market area right below the all of these evidences all their different gods or pantheon of gods. And he says, You know, I see you're very religious. And I, I see that and you even have, you even have an altar here to an unknown god in case you missed somebody, well, I want to tell you about him. And he, euangelizos, he tells the good news about God, who loves even these people in Athens and wanted them to come to salvation in an intimate relationship with God. That's a important passage for me, because one time I got to stand up on the hill and read Acts 17, with the group that I was working with that day, I was a host for a group of people traveling there. And one man took a picture of that, and my daughter made a pencil drawing of a colored pencil drawing which is fantastic, and hangs today in my study, and it's reminder that we are to be euangelizoing all the time. So what happens when you euangelizo, you tell the way of salvation. You talk about our sinfulness. You talk about God's decision to save through the cross, and it's a substitutionary sacrifice for sins, so that his justice can be satisfied, but his love and mercy and grace can be expressed to human kind. And you're talking about grace. That is not because we deserve it, or we've gotten to some level of goodness. But it's because God decided to give it to us even though we don't deserve it. And that involves an invitation. Now, in my culture, probably the most famous evangelist, evangelist, somebody who euangelizod is Billy Graham, now with the Lord, but he preached to millions and he always preached the gospel, the good news, the good news that we've just summarized, and was able to travel throughout the world, because he became so well known as somebody who brought good news. He was able to counsel presidents here in the United States, I think it was six of them, that they looked for his wisdom because they knew he was somebody who brought good news. And so he's incredible example of somebody who would get up in stadiums. There are others in history in the United States and England, we've got people like, Dwight L. Moody is one of my favorites, and favorites in the United States. We've got Billy Sunday, and others and, you know, you can look into missions class and my class on revivals. And we look at some of these people Charles Finney and the way God has used them in a variety ways, Bill McCarthy to to preach the good news. Now sometimes, you are going to have a call to preach the Good News. Where, what street preaching would be one of them? Have you ever thought of that? Stand on a corner and proclaim good news? Now. around where I live, you don't see that very much anymore used to. And usually it wasn't a statement about good news, right? The cartoons always talk about, you know, somebody standing on the corner and saying, the world is coming to an end, you know, you're going to be judged or gonna go to hell. So you better get your life, right. It's it's not good news. It's fear, fear inducing. It's scaring the hell out of people, as sometimes put colloquially, but I wonder sometimes, when I was in high school, I did a mission trip to Ogden, Utah, one of the centers of Mormonism and one of the assignments the pastor was there gave us was to go into the park, in on Friday night in the park downtown was crowded with people, and we had the handout tracts. And if the opportunity presented itself didn't, you know, get up and speak to a group of people, and it was terrifying. But you never know, if we're so in God's word, what God is going to do with that. I get to visit the rescue mission in his area quite frequently. And in that situation, I get to share the good news. Now it comes out in a couple of different ways. One,I'll talk to their felt means about being lonely about being abandoned by their family about having lost everything, and is there a God who loves them, but it comes down to the good news, that God is constantly making invitations for intimate relationship with us and, and invites you to respond to that. Now in church, I served in California for a while we tried the tactic of friendship Sunday where we encourage people to invite their neighbors and friends to church. And I assured people who are going to do that take that risky situation of talking to their friend about coming to church that on that day, they would hear a clear explanation of the gospel. And so it became patterned into my preaching schedule. Think interfaith gatherings is another place that this could be used well to say, I'm going to use this as an opportunity to euangelizo, where I was in California, we sometimes had interfaith gatherings. And what they would do is on a Sunday afternoon, they would get representatives of various religions. And each one would give a few minutes talk about the founder of their religion, and so we've got Hindus there, we've got Buddhists, we've got Muslims, we've got Christian, a guy from a Presbyterian Church near me, and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, we've got all these expressions, and they're giving, you know, these 10 minute summaries about their founder and what his message was. And I remember how disappointed I was when we got to the Christian. Because a basically, all he said about what Jesus taught is that Jesus taught what every other religion was teaching, that there are a variety of ways to Christ, but the way there is doing good, is being good. And I wrote a note after that, saying, I'd like to be the one who does that next time, because there's so much more, it isn't just obeying the golden rule and the 10 commandments. It's the fact that we are sinners, and that God sent Jesus to pay for our sins, proclaim good news. But I think it should also be a regular part of your preaching. Now, you don't want to do this every week, maybe. Or maybe you do. In some traditions. My brother is a pastor, and retired now living in Knoxville, Tennessee, here in the United States. And he's from the Baptist tradition. And so every week in his tradition, they would give an altar call where they, they would explain the gospel, they preach the gospel. In my tradition, that's not the way it works, generally speaking, and we'll talk about that when we get to some of the other words, and they have to do with preaching, but for a time, I will preach euangelizo. And it might be on a particular Sunday, it might be when I just sense it's time again that some people in my church have the wrong idea about how we get to heaven. And I do it when we got new people when we have new people gatherings. And it's a wonderful thing, to be able to put down in your words, sharing your experience of Christ, others experience of Christ and giving an invitation. It's one of the things that should be part of your preaching. So as you're preparing to preach, do you want to preach a euangelizo sermon? That's one of the questions you should ask. We'll see you next time as we continue to explore these various kinds of sermons