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Transcript 563A — A Guide to Witnessing
HC: Good evening. Welcome to Open Forum.
CALLER: Brother Camping, I was Just listening to what you said about witnessing to others. You kind of got me worried. When I witness to others, I try to give them the plan of salvation, and I try to explain to them that we have to receive Jesus Christ into our hearts, and believe that God raised Him from the dead, so we shall be saved. And I don't know if I'm right when I tell them that here we make our Heaven or our hell. Either we accept it here, or we don't, because after we die we're just dead. If we accept Jesus Christ here and try to live the ways of the Lord, I believe we have to try to bring the Gospel to others and help others understand how to receive Jesus within their hearts. But I'd appreciate it very much if you would help me.
HC: At this point what you said begins to make sense, but you haven't answered the big question. And maybe we could talk about this a little bit together. When you tell somebody to receive Christ or to turn their life over to Christ, why do they have to do this? In other words, are you telling them what their predicament is, why they must do this? Is it just that they're going to be dead and they can't go to Heaven if they don't do this? The word is salvation, and what does the word salvation mean? It means that we have been saved. Saved from what?
CALLER: Hell.
HC: From hell. All right. In other words, the way we have to present the Gospel, and the Biblical way, is that first of all we have to indicate that the Bible teaches that all mankind is a sinner. We are sinners, and there is none righteous, no, not one. There's no one that does any good. I don't care how nice a person is, no matter how nobly they have been living, no matter how decent moral lives they have lived. In God's sight every human being is a sinner. They violate the laws of God, and God indicates that they are going to hell. They're going to come into judgment, to answer for their sins, and they're going to be cast into hell to spend eternity there.
Now that lays the foundation as to why we need a Savior. And that's the first point we must get across, that the Bible teaches that we're in a terrible situation, an awful situation. The second thing we have to tell them, I think, is that there's no way out of this predicament by ourselves. We can try to live a good life, we can be noble in our every thought and action, we can read the Bible and try to obey every Commandment. And none of this is going to get us out of hell or out of God's judgment, because every little sin that we commit condemns us afresh and is going to send us to hell anyway.
Now these are bitter pills for people to swallow. And a lot of people by now have turned their hearing aid off, they've, changed the subject, they don't want to hear anymore, because this is very unpalatable. It's very unacceptable. But nevertheless this is what the Bible teaches, and we have to begin where we are.
But then comes the good news. We can know the love of God. God has provided a way of escape from this hell, from the damnation that we so rightly should have. And we can know the love of God by believing on the Lord Jesus Christ. Now notice I didn't say accepting the Lord Jesus Christ. We don't really accept Him. We believe on Him. God is the one who accepts us. He is the one who takes us as His children. We do not accept God. That puts the authority in the wrong place. We believe on the Lord Jesus Christ. Now to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ is to come to that point where, in our fear, in our trauma, in our consternation, we cry out, "0h God, have mercy on me. I'm a sinner. And I want to trust in Jesus as my Savior. I understand that somehow He paid for the sins of those who believe on Him. And I want to hang my whole life on the Lord Jesus Christ and trust in Him as my Savior and Lord."
And if a person really means business with this, if he really does trust in Christ, then he will repent of his sins. He won't want to sin anymore. And he will have an earnest desire to know more about this Savior, and he'll begin to ask all kinds of questions of the Bible, and so on. This I believe is presenting the whole counsel of God. Then a person knows what he's saved from. He's saved from the wrath of God because Christ has come to be his substitute, or to take his place in bearing the wrath of God for his sins.
CALLER: In other words, if I start speaking to them about the Lord, I can't lie to them. I tell them we have all sinned and come short of the glory of God, all of us. I say that the only way that we can get out of this predicament, ourselves we can't do anything so we have to believe in the Lord. We have to believe in Christ because He died for us. And if we do not believe this way, then we're going to be damned, and to begin with, we're damned already. The only way we can come out of this is to go before God and believe that Christ died for our sins.
HC: That He is the one who, yes, and to die for our sins means that He endured the wrath of God that we should have had. In other words, when He went to the cross it was as if He spent an eternity in hell on our behalf. You're on the right track now, I believe.
CALLER: Is it wrong if I tell them that if we do not believe the ways of the Lord we're going to be damned to burn in the fire?
HC: You can put it this way. If you don't want to trust in the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior, then you have to give an account of your life to God on the last day, on Judgment Day. And if sin is found in you, and there will be sin found in you because every man is a sinner, you then will have to pay for your sins on your own behalf, and God will put you in hell eternally so that you can pay for your sins.
And so we have to make a choice. We either have to trust in God, trust in Christ as our sin-bearer, as the one who has paid for our sins, or if we don't want to trust in Him, then we have to pay for our sins by ourselves and spend eternity in hell doing it.
CALLER: Thank you, Brother Camping.
HC: You're welcome. And may God bless you as you reach out to witness to others.