Doing What Dad's Doing // The Freedom to Share Jesus with Others, Part 4

One of the things that can stop us from telling other people about Jesus, is well, there are so many of them. The task is overwhelming. Where do I start?  Too hard – I’ll just leave it to the experts.

For me, being someone who has come to know Jesus is just the most awesome thing in my life and has been for the last decade and a half. But for a good many years the notion that I have some role to play in sharing Jesus with others, well it was like a millstone around my neck.

I suspect it's like that for a lot of Christians. But when I really spent some time figuring out God’s plan for me in this whole evangelism thing, all of a sudden I discovered a freedom to get out there and share my Jesus with other people.

One of the things that use to really get to me was the overwhelming size of the task. I know so many people who don't know Jesus and yet I don't feel gifted to tell them. It was such a burden. And then, I saw something in Jesus that set me free from that.

There are so many things that paralyse us from sharing Jesus with others and one of them is the sheer volume of effort. It's demanding. We all know lots of people who have never met Jesus Christ. We can't tell them all about Jesus, can we?

I remember being in India a few years back. India is a place with so many people and I'm looking around thinking, "Wow, most of these people have never met Jesus Christ. I can't do all this. It's not me. God hasn't called me to do this. I'll leave it to the experts. That's what the Billy Graham's of this world are made for after all. That's what they do."

And when we take that attitude, when the volume and the size of the task just kind of gets to us and we give up, as surely as God made little green apples, guilt begins to set in. We have this attitude that all of those people out there who need to know Jesus and don't know Him because I know them, they're my problem, they're my burden, I have to do something about it.

"Oh Lord, what am I going to do? There are too many of them. I can't do this. It's too hard. I'll leave it to someone else. The minister will. The evangelism committee with all the street ministry team at my Church or you know, somebody else’s job, it must be, it's not mine."

But you know, Jesus won't let it rest there because He has a plan. He has a plan to use you and to use me to touch people’s lives with His love. And the reason that this niggles away at us and it never seems to ever quite go away is because Jesus has this plan. Question is, how do we deal with the fact that there are so many people who need Jesus? And you and I are just one person each, you know.

There's a wonderful story, if you have a Bible it's in the 5th chapter of John's gospel which is the 4th book in the New Testament. It runs over the first 20 or so verses of chapter 5 of John’s gospel. There's a festival happening in Jerusalem and Jesus goes to a pool near the sheep gate in Jerusalem and there are so many sick and blind and lame and crippled people lying close to the pool. Lot's of them.

And beside the pool there was a man who'd been sick and lame for 38 years. That's most if not all of this guy’s life. Now what does Jesus do when He wanders into a place where there are so many people who need healing? I mean Jesus is the Son of God. Jesus has the power to heal all of them.

What does He do? What would you and I do if we had the power to heal all of them? Well, He sees this one guy who's been sick for 38 years and when Jesus realised that He said:

Do you want to be healed? And the man said, 'Lord, I don't have anyone to put me down in the pool when the water's stirred up. I try to get in but someone always gets there before me.' And so Jesus said to him, 'pick up your mat and walk.' And right then and there the man was healed. He picked up his mat and he started walking around.

Now it was the Sabbath day. Jesus heals this one guy, just one. This was Jesus remember. He could have had a mass healing service that day. It could have been a really spectacular event you know. Why does He only heal one? Well just a few verses later He tells us. Jesus told the people:

Truly I tell you, the Son of man cannot do anything on His own, He can only do what He sees the Father doing. And so He does exactly what He sees the Father doing that day.

That just blows me away. This is Jesus, the Son of God and He says, "the Son cannot do anything on His own." What is it that makes you and me think that we can? If Jesus says, "I can't heal people on my own. I can only do what Dad's doing today and when I see what Dad's doing, I go and do that."

I've heard someone refer to this particular verse, John chapter 5, verse 19, just really simply, "do what Dad's doing." Now why was His Dad, why was God the Father only healing one guy that day? I don't know but that's what God was doing that day. That's what Jesus saw Him doing and so Jesus walks into that one thing because God had prepared it, ordained it, it was for Him to do on that day.

If you listen to the first message in this series we talked about Ephesians chapter 2, verse 10 and it said:

We are God's workmanship created in Christ Jesus to do the good works that He prepared beforehand for us to do.

Why did Jesus only heal one man that day? Because God had only prepared that man to be healed on that day. Now let's unpack that a little. I think this takes a huge burden off my shoulders and off your shoulders because we look at all those people out there.

People whom God created. People who God knows and all of a sudden God's saying, "well My Son can't do anything without Me when He's walking around here, so why is it that you think you can? Why is it that you think that it's up to you, that you have to pick the people to talk to?"

What is it that makes us think that we have to go in there on our own and heal everybody and bring Jesus to everybody? That's God's responsibility, it's God's timing, it's God's choice. God is doing stuff out there. Do what Dad's doing.

So what's our responsibility, yours and mine? I think it's like Jesus when He walked into that pool area. Our job isn't to heal them all. Our job isn't to bring them all to Christ. Our job is to get close enough to Jesus to hear Him whisper in our heart what He's doing today.

Today, call so and so, ask them out for a coffee. Or today, send so and so an email, ask them how they're going. Our responsibility is to figure out what Dad's got planned for today.

Let me ask you a radical question. What if we started every day, every meeting, every Church service, every barbecue with friends with a prayer that goes something like this:

Dad, show me today what you’re doing. Tell me who you want me to encourage or pat on the shoulder or have a cup of coffee with or help.

I've already said before in this series, my gift is doing exactly what I'm doing right now. My gift, in particular, is not one on one evangelism. I'm passionate about what I'm doing right now but that one on one evangelism thing, to be truthful, doesn't flick my switch.

Yet I can point to over the last year, a half a dozen people who have come to me when they were ready. Who know who I am. Who've worked with me or fellowshipped with me and they've come to me and said, "Tell me about your Jesus."

I had a close friend who I've known for years, we're great mates. He's made some mistakes in his life and he's worn the consequences. And I've never felt to preach at him and tell him what I think. I just felt to be there and encourage him and he contacted me recently and he said, "I want to get together with you to talk about Jesus. I'm ready now."

See we can try and do things in our own strength and they're called dead works. And they're worse than a waste of time. Not only will they not work. Not only will they not have worked for Jesus had He walked into that pool to try to heal all those people because Dad was only healing one guy that day.

That it's down right destructive when we try to shove the good news about Jesus Christ down the throat of someone who's not ready to listen. But when we do what Dad's doing then we experience the power of God in people's lives.

Can I set you free? Telling other people about Jesus isn't taking it all on our own shoulders. And it's not about me taking it on my shoulders. Telling people about Jesus is listening to Dad and doing Dad's stuff. Doing the stuff He's already doing and the closer we get the more we'll hear His call to do our little bit, the more we hear His heart beat for that one person that He wants us to touch today.