Let's Save Everyone!

Why can't everyone be saved? Do you have to have family members who are lost? Is it written somewhere that most of your friends won't be saved? NO!  The message of Christ is for all men. God wants to save all men. The Gospel has the power to save everyone! Our attitude towards evangelism ought to be optimistic and hopeful.

Every single person who comes to the realization of the foolishness of their choices is ready to be saved by God. His grace is refreshing to all who have experienced life without Him... and that's a lot of people! Will you and I be the messenger of hope for people who suffer? We can and we should. Let's look at an amazing story in Acts 27, where everyone was saved, and draw strength to share that message with everyone we know!

- Is it true that most of the people we know will not be saved?

- Is God's message more optimistic and hopeful than that in Christ?

- So who can be saved? And what must they realize to actually find salvation?

- How were 276 people saved in Acts 27 and what does it teach us about God's grace?

- Are you ready to find the hurting and tell them about the mercy of the Healer?

Transcript

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Hello, welcome back for season two of the Excel Still More podcast. I am your host, Chris Emerson, and I'm here to encourage you with tips and strategies to help you deepen your faith, build stronger relationships, and do the most with your life in Christ. Thank you for joining. Let's get started. Welcome back. Today I'm excited to talk to you about building hopeful, positive attitudes concerning evangelism. When it comes to that, we should be the most optimistic people in the world. We should consider salvation to be something for everyone, and we should have as our goal to save everyone. I mean, the Bible's pretty clear that Jesus died for everyone, that God desires all men to be saved, and that the gospel has the power to save every person. So why not your family? Is there some rule somewhere that says that you have to have lost people in your family? Or that your friends, acquaintances, co-workers, that it's just the way it is, that most of those people will be lost. There's no rule that says that. Now, as I introduced that today, you might be thinking, well, actually, Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that many will go the way of destruction, but few will travel the road to salvation. Well, obviously he's right about that. But consider this, he was speaking in a time where Judaism repudiated the deity of Jesus, and most in that land would never give up those ideas to follow him. Maybe Jesus was talking about the world as a whole. Even now, out of the seven or eight billion people on earth, most of them do not believe in Jesus, just as he said. But that's not the way it is where I live. Is that the way it is where you live? Where I live, most people I meet and know, my friends and neighbors, believe in God, the true God. They believe in the Bible, at least to some degree, and they believe in Jesus, even if they don't fully understand his authority in their life. Why can't we save all of those people? And I don't mean we, I mean God, but why can't God save those people through us? It sounds like they have a lot of the pieces. Why can't we pull those things together? So that's our topic today. Let's save everyone. And it's really an attitude check for the saved. If you're a child of God and there are people in your life who believe in God, the Bible, Jesus, why not them? What would hold them back? If you're someone who is not saved, let me just say this we can't save everyone until we save you. You're a part of that. I hope that you'll be listening today as I talk to you about the grace of God to fix people when they are broken. All you need to do in order to be saved is realize that you are lost. If you can come to a point of seeing what sin does in your life and what it's like to have no purpose or direction, you are exactly where God needs you to be to follow Him and be saved. And I think that everyone at some point or another feels all of those negative things, and therefore everyone at some point in their life is ready for the grace of God through Jesus. In order to get you keyed up about all of that, I want to tell you a story found in Acts chapter 27. We will walk through that for a few minutes today. I'll bring it around full circle with a little bit of discussion of the Roman road of Romans 1 through 8, a beautiful road to salvation, and we'll wrap it up. Before we get into it, I want to tell you it's late. It's 9 p.m. on Sunday night, May the 24th. This episode releases in like eight hours. That's unusual for me to be delayed in that way, but I was out of town this last week and I had two episodes release on the same day last Monday accidentally burning the one in the can. So I'm getting it out tonight, but I really think it's God's providence. Ever since I left this building this morning to go home and spend the day with the family, I've been looking forward to getting back here tonight to share this message with you. Thanks for joining in on this. To explain the preaching twice today, I'll fill you in on what's been going on around here. We are still having those split services where half the congregation meets at 9 a.m. and I preach, and then at 10 50 we meet again, the second half meets and I preach the same sermon. We've been doing that for about a month. And I wanted to talk to our people here at Lyndale about how we interact with others as we start headed back to more of a social norm. And what I wanted them to know is that God can save everybody. And there will be people looking, and we need to help those people find the Lord. So in the sermon, I did a lot more Bible work. We read the entirety of Acts chapter 27, at least beginning in around verse 9, all the way through verse 44. I super encourage you to read that. Then we headed over to Romans chapters 1 through 8, picked up a little bit in chapter 12 as well, and I showed how the physical story of salvation in Acts 27 and the components of that story are fulfilled in a spiritual way in people's lives today, as articulated in Romans. So I'll tell you this: if you did not hear that sermon, but you would like more information on the actual passages and how we use them, just remember you can go to the Lindale Church of Christ podcast or the Facebook page or the web page or whatever, and you can listen or watch those sermons there. If you did check out that lesson, hang with me today. It's a shorter, tighter presentation of the material. And maybe I'll present it in a little different way in this format, but perhaps this will give you something you can share with others to try and motivate them. If you would like for them to know that everybody can be saved at any moment, but maybe they're not willing to listen to a full and boring sermon. Okay, one last thing before we jump in. The Thursday email this week will include all seven of the typed out points that I had on the slides today, as well as all of the verse references from Acts 27 and from Romans. If you are not receiving that email, but you would like to be, you can reach out to me via Facebook or whatever means that will work. You can always email me at Emerson K78 at me.com and I'll add you to the list. Okay, so here is the Cliff Notes version of Acts 27. The Apostle Paul had appealed to appear before Caesar, so he was being shipped from Judea in the east all the way across the Mediterranean Sea to Rome. They had gone as far as a specific little island there, and they were about to set sail for the large journey to Rome when Paul approached Julius, the centurion who was overseeing him, and he said in verses nine and ten, Don't go. God does not want us to make this journey. If we leave now, not only will this ship be lost, but all of us will die. And while Julius should have listened to Paul, he was a prophet of God after all, Julius and many others on that boat did not have that level of faith, so they decided to go anyway. It's a very interesting read. The pilot said it would be fine. The commander of the ship said it would be fine. The majority wanted to go, and they made some decision. They said, look, we won't go all the way to Rome. We'll just sail a little while. I know you said not to go, but we're just going to go a little while. Everybody wants to do it. The professionals said it would be fine, and then we'll get to the west side of the island. Everything will be great. So they set sail. And guess what happened? Everything Paul said was going to happen began to happen. This wind came up and pushed them away from the island. They missed their stop and they just started drifting out into the middle of the Mediterranean Sea. It got dark, stormy, dangerous. They were throwing cargo overboard to keep from getting weighed down by it all. They were desperate, they were scared, and after day after day passed, the Bible says around verse 20, Acts 27, that slowly, and you can almost feel the agony in the read, they lost hope that they would live. In other words, they got what they deserved. They were told not to go, they went anyway, things went terribly. And you know, I guess that could have been the end of the story. Disobey the will of God, suffer the consequences. But instead, at that moment, at their lowest moment, at the moment they realized the mistake that they had made and that there was no way to fix it, God's grace appears. Paul gathers them together and says, Listen, God has decided to save me and you. You should not have gone, that's for sure. But God has decided to save everyone, not just me, not just Luke, my traveling companion, but everybody, all the prisoners, all of the sailors, all of the guards. And you know, a message they were not ready for when everything was going fine, they were ready for now. They had nowhere to turn. God was a ray of light in literal darkness, fourteen days of it. And so Paul basically tells them, look, you need to believe that God can do this, and you need to stay in the boat. In other words, this time obey God. And it seemed like they had agreed to that until the next day came and they thought they saw some land far away, and everyone wanted to jump off the ship. And Paul went to Julius and said, Listen carefully, if they jump off this ship, disobeying God again, we are all going to die. And this time they listened. They had lowered the boat into the water that they would have used for their escape, and they cut the rope and let that boat float away. What I think is very interesting about this is in both cases what God told them to do was counterintuitive to what they thought was right. He told them not to go, they thought it would be fine. He told them now to stay in the boat, and they thought they could make it to land. But at least this time they trusted God. I really love what came after that. After that, the text talks about how Paul gathered everybody together and said, Look, guys, I know that you haven't eaten in like two weeks because of the stress of this. I'm telling you, you've sided with God, not a single hair on anyone's head will be damaged, you will be saved, let's have a meal together. And so on this boat, they all come together, I don't know, maybe prisoners, soldiers, everybody, and they eat together, and Paul encourages them that they're going to make it. Now, that didn't mean it was going to be easy. God said, This ship will crash. Shipwreck is the only way out of this thing. You decided to set sail, the boat will now be destroyed, but I will preserve all of you. And so the text says that the ship did indeed crash on the rocks, but they all escaped. Every single one of them. All two hundred and seventy-six people on board found their way to land. God saved everyone. At the beginning of this story, you would have thought that was impossible. In fact, I might go even further and say it was impossible. Julius wouldn't listen to God, the pilot wouldn't listen, Paul wasn't being heeded or respected for his message, but by the end, they stuck together, and even in a scary finale, the outcome was life. All of that lays out as seven points on the sermon slides that I presented today. Number one, a warning is given. Number two, the advice is ignored. Number three, consequences followed. But number four, hope of salvation is given. Number five, faith and obedience was required. Number six, encouragement ensued together. And then number seven, though the end was rough, all lived. Listen, I think that hopeful story can help you in your evangelism and your attitude towards the people of this world. First of all, those first three things, they represent everyone. Every single one of us has been warned by God on what to do. We have ignored that advice, and we have faced the consequences. There is none righteous, not even one. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, and the wages of that is death. And until someone realizes that that has happened, they can never be saved. You can't save someone who doesn't believe that they are lost. But listen carefully. Everyone, I don't care who it is, everyone who recognizes that they have disobeyed God and the consequences stink, but they deserve those consequences, and now they live in hopelessness, realizing what a mess they've made. All of those people can be saved. We can save every single one of them. Because that's when the message of God's grace is heard. When we go to people who've made messes and we say, Yeah, you did that, but God is willing to save you even now, even on a ship that you shouldn't even be on, heading in a direction he told you not to go, God can still save you. He has offered his son, the price has been paid, and he can help you make this right. I am convinced that every family member, every friend, every neighbor, everyone who visits our church, at some point everyone knows that they've made a mess and they're hopeless. And that's when someone needs to tell them that God will save them anyway. Now, just like in the story, it wasn't just some recognition of God that changed everything. They had to believe that he could save them. And they had to obey what he told them to do. In that case, it was stay in the boat, but it's not that much more complicated now, is it? If you want God to save you from the mess that you have made, just obey him. Have your sins washed away in baptism. I cannot believe that anyone would be listening to this podcast today not having been baptized in water for the remission of their sins and to be united, Romans 6, with the power of the blood of Jesus. That is a simple command of God. This isn't about you anymore. It's not about what makes sense to you. The people on that ship did what made sense to them and they almost died. Then they did what God said even when it did not fit with their reasonings. He told them to stay in the boat. They wanted to bail. God has told you and me to believe and be baptized into Christ and then give our lives to Him, serve Him, worship Him, love Him, because we were nothing. We'd made ourselves nothing, and yet He has restored us with the promise of salvation. And listen, I understand that kind of a decision can be very scary, but here's some great news. You will never have to do that on your own. Jesus promised a family of believers, people who will encourage you, people who will sit down with you, have conversations with you, enjoy meals with you, worship God with you, in a word, encourage you, even through the dark and difficult parts of this life and this journey. That's what Paul did. I love that part of the story. He gathers everybody together. He says, You guys haven't eaten in a while. Let's sit down and pray and eat and celebrate. We're going to be okay. If you don't have that kind of a fellowship in your life, you not only need Christ, you need Christians. And that's what we are supposed to be for one another: a collection of believers who support, encourage, and strengthen one another. I don't have a ton of time to talk about this today, but unfortunately, as discussed in Galatians 5, some Christians are redeemed from the hopelessness of their life and they begin to elevate themselves above others and they turn their liberty into a way of actually hurting brethren. Real Christians don't do that. It's like in our story, after they realized that the ship was about to crash, the soldiers wanted to kill all the prisoners. The same people they were praying with like the day before. And of course, they were convinced not to do so. Sometimes I just don't understand the way brethren are. It's like they actually want to kill the prisoners. Like they want to elevate themselves over those that they think are less worthy, and it's just a mess. But let me tell you, that is not who we are. That is not who we can be if we really want to save everybody. We need people to know no matter who you are, no matter what you've done, no matter your background, you are welcome in our family. We love you. We are going to be saved together. If this is the message we are presenting to the world, we are going to see so many people come to Jesus. Now, lastly, let me say this: it wasn't like they all decided to do the right thing and so the ship didn't crash. The ship had set sail when it ought not, and the end of that ship would be destruction, but they could be saved. In the same way, even if we decide to give our lives over to God and live in the hope of heaven, because of the sin that started it all, we will die. There will be a sad, maybe a frightening, maybe a sorrowful, maybe even a painful end to this life. The ship will crash, but we don't have to fear it because we know that God has promised preservation of our souls. And there is nothing as hopeful as knowing that not even death can separate us from the love and the grace of God. I believe that everyone needs that message and God built us to yearn for it. So go out and live that hope. And also, let's save everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in today. If you enjoyed the program, please remember to share with your family and your friends. Also, you can go to excelstillmore.life to sign up for emails, order the three month journals, or just catch up on old episodes. So until next time, let me leave you with this whatever you choose to do today in the name of the Lord Jesus, excel stillmore.