Iron Works Church of the Nazarene

Let's start from the beginning and recap last Sunday's lesson. Remember that story in Luke 11?

The guy has a friend come by and he needed something to feed him so he goes to his neighbor at midnight and asks for bread.

Read Verse 8 - Shameless Audacity

So that is how we are allowed to approach God, because He tells this story after they ask Him to teach them how to pray

Now Shameless Audacity with others
Remember Love God and Love Others

So today we will talk about our shameless audacity to tell others about Christ because of our love for others.

To understand how that works we have to go back when we signed up to be His follower.

- When we enlist, we go to the front lines immediately.
- We don't even get trained. It comes while we are in the battle.
- The attacks are relentless, the carnage and collateral damage is very noticeable.
- We hear someone say that we need to tell others the good news and we are clinging to a life raft.
- The doubts, fears and questions flood our minds and the only thing we have is the Holy Spirit that is living and breathing inside our very beings.
- Our step is His step, our way is His way. He is our comfort, our defender, our strength and our encourager.

In our own journey, we must understand a very simple idea.

- When God enters our life we instantly fall into disagreement with a dark world
- If we don't fall into disagreement, then the world must have changed or we didn't change.
- So this very world that is dark and now very much unlike we are with our changing passions, desires, loves totally disagrees with us, and is the very world that I’m suppose to help change.
- You see the world becomes not our enemy, but our mission. We don't fight against flesh and blood our fight is against Satan. The people that are living in darkness may be the method to Satan's attacks, but we have to differentiate between the enemy and those who do his bidding.
- The people in your world may not even realize that something is missing. So when you approach someone that is happy with life but don’t know Jesus will probably not take real kindly to you telling them that they need to have a life change.
- We love our neighbors as ourselves. We become righteousness to them, we become salt to them, we become light to them and it all may go unheeded.

So how do we show shameless audacity with others?

First - By not watering the truth down.

What is the watered down effect?

- By giving Others no truth or partial truth so that they won’t be offended.
- If we love God and our neighbor being false or untruthful with God or our neighbor will never be Ok.
- We don't want to offend.
- We want to offer a gentle truth
- Black and white is so dividing
- Partial truth isn't truth
- Non-offensive truth isn't possible
- If truth is so watered down that it doesn't offend it lowers the bar
- See a watered down truth isn't what the world needs, they need to see that they can be different. They can have hope and a future. They can have a peace in their lives that they don't see in themselves but they see in us. Watered down truth, watered down lives, don't intrigue the world, why, because it looks too much like what they already have. The only difference is that they can sleep in on Sunday mornings.

Leonard Ravenhill said this, “ There is a fallacy today that authentic Christianity can be lived in this world without giving offense to anyone, and that we can expect that everyone will sooner or later come to appreciate us and our convictions. We have only to consider the history of the One we serve to know better than this. There was no room for Jesus in the inn; the innkeeper turned Him out. When He got a bit older, there was no room in His family; His family turned on Him. He went to the temple and found no room in the temple; the temple turned on Him. And when He died, there was no room to bury Him; He died outside the city. Why then is it that we expect to be accepted everywhere and by everyone? How is it that the world couldn’t get along with the holiest Man who ever lived and yet we expect it to get along well with us?”

Sanctified lives, a life that is set apart for God, those are the ones that are attractive. They aren't the "flamers". You know the people that get a little bit of God and set the world on fire for a week then they become just another casualty of the Jesus fashion trend.

No, I'm talking about Holy Spirit Filled followers of God, that either in good times or bad, mountains or valleys, day or night they will always be found in the fight. They don't have to have an audience to be a fully devoted follower of Christ, it is just who we are.

So when we share the truth, understand this, when we share the truth it may go unheeded, we may not be liked, we may lose some of our popularity because, Darkness is strangely indifferent to the gospel.

Why?

So why do people hate the light? V. 20 Because they will be exposed. Everyone hates to be exposed.

It is like a raw nerve that they try to keep covered. Problem is that the raw nerve is their undoing, their hurt, their struggle, their inability to make progress.

It is the thing that keeps them at war with themselves and without a meaningful relationship with the savior.

You see when we come into the light, we start seeing the world as God sees the world.

We see the hopelessness and the despair.

Then God says I need you to be light to that world.

That world that is at odds with you, that world that may not respond to you, that world that used to be your home is now strange, unfamiliar and honestly grotesque to you.

God calls us to be separate but still be in world. In it not of it.

So now, the thing that use to please our appetite is no longer palatable. Our tastes have changed.

“Taste and see that the Lord is good; ‭‭Psalm‬ ‭34:8‬ ‭NIV‬‬

Now, we have to go into to the filth, the thing we no longer want to be exposed to, just so that God's light can shine through.

We can water it down, we can try to play it off, but God wants shameless audacity.

Next way to show shameless audacity to others is by not being ashamed of the gospel.

As a child of God, we cannot be ashamed of the gospel. It is in our DNA to love, live and share it.