I read a good word today…

I have re-posted it for your instruction. This word is a passage from David Platt, Follow Me, 140-142.

“Just as Jesus filled his disciples with his power and presence to accomplish his purpose in the first century, Jesus has filled every one of his disciples today with his power and his presence to accomplish his purpose in the twenty-first century. Yet we are prone to miss this, even in the way we talk about the Holy Spirit.

I often hear Christians say, “Well, I share the gospel when the Holy Spirit leads me.” As with similar statements, there is one truth here. We want to be led by the Holy Spirit in everything we do. At the same time, we need to remember that the Spirit lives in us for the explicit purpose of spreading the gospel through us. If you have the Holy Spirit in you, you can officially consider yourself led to share the gospel! You don’t have to wait for a tingly feeling to go down your spine or a special message to appear from heaven to lead you to tell people about Christ. You just open your mouth and talk about the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, and you will be carrying out the purpose of Jesus’ presence in you. In other words, when you’re telling others about the wonder of the gospel, you’re carrying out the will of God.

I also hear professing Christians say, “Well, I don’t witness with my words; I witness with my life.” Again, there’s some truth here: we want the character of Christ to be clear in our actions. At the same time, when Jesus told his disciples that they would receive his Spirit and be his witnesses in the world [Acts 1:8], he wasn’t just calling them to be nice to the people around them. Whether in a courtroom or any other circumstance, the basic function of a witness is to speak. As we’ve already seen, ten out of the eleven apostles who heard Jesus’ words in Acts 1 were not martyred because they went into the world doing good deeds; they were murdered because they witnessed to the Word of God.
We have bothers and sisters around the world who are imprisoned, beaten, persecuted, and killed today not because they smile as they serve people. Martyrs from the first century to the twenty-first century die because they speak the gospel. Doesn’t it seem ignorant and even arrogant to say, particularly in areas where we are free to proclaim the gospel, that we will “just witness with our lives”?

God has given us a gospel to believe, a Spirt to empower, and a language to speak for a purpose–a grand, glorious, global, God-exalting purpose that transcends all of history. From the beginning of time through today, God has been at work, drawing people to himself, and he is using us to accomplish his will.”

Re-posted from Secret Church Blog, October 11, 2014