Do You Know Them?

The Corinthians of Paul's day were preoccupied with their rights and freedoms. But they weren't really thinking about others. They had knowledge that puffs up, but not love that builds up. In 1 Corinthians 8, Paul taught that the gospel frees us to love others more than our rights (as I mentioned in "My Rights Box" last week).

In 1 Corinthians 9, Paul shares an example from his wn life to drive home the point that we need to be willing to lay down our rights to serve others. As an Apostle, he had a right to financial support, but he never made use of it out because he didn't want to be a hindrance to the gospel.

As he shares from his own life and explains his motivations, a portrait emerges of radical selflessness for the sake of spreading the gospel. As it turns out, how we handle our "rights box" relates not only to our relationships with fellow Christians, but also to our relationships with unbelievers. Here's the key truth we learn from Paul's example: The gospel advances when we're more concerned with reaching the lost than protecting our rights.

Paul said that everything he did was for the sake of the gospel (verse 23). He made himself a servant so that he could win more men and women to the gospel (verse 19). Over the next few days, I want to consider three things we learn from Paul's example about winning the lost. The first is this:

1. To win the lost we need to know them.

Paul knew his audience. For example, in verse 12 he was aware that getting paid for preaching would hinder some people from receiving the gospel, suspecting he was only in it for the money. In verse 20 and following, we learn that he's keenly aware of the different values and habits of Jews and non-Jews.

Paul not only sought to know God and the unchanging truth of his gospel but, out of love, he also sought to know and understand the lost people he was trying to reach with the gospel.

Who is it that God has called you to reach with the gospel? Who are the unbelieving people in your life? In your family, neighborhood, job or work? Do you know them?

Not just their name and address, do you really know them?

Do you know their fears? Do you know what they trust in? Do you know the values and ideals that they've built their life around? Do you know the questions that keep them from faith? And if you don't know these things are you willing to ask? Are you willing to learn? Are you willing to listen and ask probing questions?

Too often we treat evangelism as a duty we want to get over as quickly as possible. Instead of taking the time to know who we're talking to, instead of investing in a friendship and truly caring for them, we often just use the same approach, the same tract, the same phrases on every person we come across. In a sense we just "dump" gospel data on them and run away.

But is it really wise or loving to use the same approach to sharing the gospel with people who have radically different worldviews and ideas and backgrounds?

Recently I've been studying the writings of Francis Schaeffer, a significant Christian author and apologist of the last century. Schaeffer's approach to apologetics was based on Christ's call to love others as we love ourselves--and this involved a willingness to be as he put it, "entirely exposed to the person to whom we are talking."

In his book about Schaeffer's apologetics titlted Truth and Love, Bryan Follis writes that, when critics of this method said that he should just preach "the simple gospel," Schaeffer replied that "you have to preach the simple gospel so that it is simple to the person to whom you are talking or it is no longer simple."

If we don't understand and know the person we're talking to, we can't be sure that they grasp or understand the "simple gospel." If words like "salvation" and "sin" have no meaning to them, then our simple statement of the gospel will not make any sense at all.

Motivated by love, we need to know who it is we're seeking to win.

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More to Come: In the coming days. Lord willing, I'll share two more points on winning the lost. In the mean time, you can also listen to the full message that this post is drawn from.

Your Comments: I welcome your comments on what it means to truly know the people God has called you to reach. Is this the way you think? How have you done this in relationships, and what have you learned in the process?