As Christians we have been taught by God’s grace to put our faith in the finished work of Christ on the cross. Perhaps there was a period of time when we knew that Jesus’ death was the means of salvation, but that knowledge had not yet been translated into true faith and dependence. We knew and even believed that Christ is the Saviour, but we still had not “cast all upon Christ.” There had not yet been a total surrender to the Lord, with a dependence only upon Him for salvation. But that was then, and today, we have given up every shred of personal works and self-righteousness. Our faith in the Lord is as real as Jesus’ illustration of eating His flesh by faith, and drinking His blood. Our faith moved from the realm of the theological into the real world, becoming practical – “experiential.”
Of course, one of the factors in our total surrender to God’s sovereign grace is that we had no alternative. As I say, we had come to learn there was nothing we could contribute to our salvation. Once we reached that understanding, there was no alternative but to trust Christ and Him alone. But then, following that surrender to simple, pure faith, we began to live the life of the Christian. Instead of instantly taking us to glory, the Lord has left us here to glorify His name before the unbeliever. We learned of the Lord’s great commission, and we have tried to do our part in Christ’s great work. We pray for the salvation of lost souls, asking God for His blessings and even for miraculous evidence of His presence in our lives so that we can more powerfully carry out our evangelistic responsibilities.
Since the time of our salvation, we have learned that living this Christian life is a something we must do in cooperation with the Lord. For example, it takes our minds and hearts to read God’s word, and if we are too busy, we don’t take the time. The things of God are discerned through the ministry of the Holy Spirit, but if we don’t put forth our human effort there will be no growth in our understanding. And if we are too tired, we may begin to pray, but after a few minutes our minds wander or we fall asleep. The preacher spends a few hours preparing his message for a particular day, but sometimes he preaches it in the power of his flesh rather than in power of the Spirit. The ability to live the Christian life is entirely of God, nevertheless, it is lived through our human bodies.
Similarly, our faith in God to accomplish His will can become as weak and fleshly as is our home Bible study. We pray for the healing of our sick friend, but still our trust is in his doctor more than in the Great Physician. And in fact we pray for God’s direction on that medical man. We beseech the Lord for the salvation of our daughter, but in the back of our mind we fear that since the pastor has preached his heart out before her so many times, she may have slipped beyond hope. No, we haven’t cast aside our faith that God can heal and that God can save, but we are not longer trusting Him with any real expectation of the miraculous.
What I am hoping to do in this series of lessons, is to push our faith – my faith – away from the theological shore, out into the stormy sea where Christ and even a few disciples walk upon the surface of the water. Since I will be trying to learn these lessons with you as we go, I may do a lot of stuttering and stammering. But if we both pray in expectant faith, we will prosper, because it is the promise of God that we will.
Tonight I would like to consider Noah as the illustration of a church planter.
Paul says in Hebrews 11 – “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet, moved with fear, prepared an ark to the saving of his house; by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.” I know that we have studied this man and his faith as illustrations of trusting the Lord for salvation. I know that we looked at Noah in our study of First Peter as someone saved by the ark God designed. I have no intention of undoing those lessons, because they were apt then and they are true now. But I’d like to ask you to put them aside in order to look at Noah and the ark in a slightly different light.
Genesis 6:5-18 – “And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually. And it repented the LORD that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart. And the LORD said, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth; both man, and beast, and the creeping thing, and the fowls of the air; for it repenteth me that I have made them. But Noah found grace in the eyes of the LORD. These are the generations of Noah: Noah was a just man and perfect in his generations, and Noah walked with God. And Noah begat three sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth. The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence. Make thee an ark of gopher wood; rooms shalt thou make in the ark, and shalt pitch it within and without with pitch. And this is the fashion which thou shalt make it of: The length of the ark shall be three hundred cubits, the breadth of it fifty cubits, and the height of it thirty cubits. A window shalt thou make to the ark, and in a cubit shalt thou finish it above; and the door of the ark shalt thou set in the side thereof; with lower, second, and third stories shalt thou make it. And, behold, I, even I, do bring a flood of waters upon the earth, to destroy all flesh, wherein is the breath of life, from under heaven; and every thing that is in the earth shall die. But with thee will I establish my covenant; and thou shalt come into the ark, thou, and thy sons, and thy wife, and thy sons’ wives with thee.”
I believe the Lord Jesus brought Noah into the 21st century, when He said, “As it was in the days of Noe, so shall it be also in the days of the Son of man.” I believe we have the scriptural authority to look at Noah’s world and to make comparisons with today. And what do we see? Noah’s world was a mess just as our world is a mess. “The earth was corrupt before God and… filled with violence.” God was angry with the people of Noah’s day, and today God remains angry. “The Lord said, I will destroy man whom I have created,” and even though the manner of that destruction will be different, destruction is still on the books.
“But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord,” which means that God graciously saved his soul. Did the Lord then immediately transport the man to heaven the way He eventually did with his father Enoch. No. Rather, God commissioned Noah to build an ark; to construct a saving station, making it available to any sinner who had the will to come. I know that I’m stretching things a little bit, but please bear with me.
What if we look at the construction of the ark as the work of a missionary working in a nation of dying sinners? Didn’t the Lord give to Noah a commission which somewhat parallels ours? Didn’t God give to Noah blue prints, telling him, “This is the fashion which thou shalt make it of”? Not everyone has God’s authority to build a church of Christ and for Christ. And there are things which that church is to believe and practice. For years, Noah and his sons went out falling and cutting trees, refining the waterproofing pitch, and putting timbers into place, fitly framing together an holy temple of the Lord in that wilderness. I have no doubt that the ark, while under construction was a preaching station. Every sabbath, the work probably stopped and God’s missionary lead his tiny congregation in worship. And throughout the weeks when someone came by saying, “What do these feeble Jews,”, Noah, like Nehemiah, put his hammer down for a moment in order to hammer down the truth that judgment was coming and God demanded repentance and faith.
It might be instructive and enjoyable to pursue this analogy, but that is only the catalyst for my primary interest. tonight. I would like to tie Noah into the subject which we began last Wednesday. Noah’s faith in God was practical. It involved work, and trust, and the glory of the Lord.
Let’s consider the practical faith of Noah the church planter.
The writer of the Book of Hebrews highlighted Noah’s faith, because it was outstanding and considerable. First, God revealed to the man that the Lord had chosen to save him out of the millions then on the earth. There was nothing in Noah which made him different from anyone else, except God’s sovereign grace. And the first aspect of Noah’s faith was to believe that God chose to save him and that he was saved. But again, that is akin to our saving faith – he had no other place to turn for salvation. But then Noah put his faith on the line by building his church and sharing with his neighbors what God had revealed. He wasn’t trying to isolate himself from the world, nor was he stepping onto some pulpit, but by choosing to apply God’s Word to his life that was what he was doing. And he was doing that by faith, believing and preaching something totally absurd and unheard of. By faith he was risking his life, because you can be sure in that violent society there were people willing to kill him for condemning their sins. But God was there to protect the man, and to protect his family, and Noah had faith to trust Him.
No one had ever seen the kind of rain that would be necessary to submerge the world in water, but Noah preached it by faith as the truth. No one knew or had ever heard that there were fountains of water under the earth that would explode to the surface, but Noah had been told, and he was preaching it with assured confidence. How did that go over with the neighbors? Do you suppose he was ever hit with a rotten egg or struck by a rock thrown by a rotten neighbor? He not only had faith to build his preaching station in the wilderness, he had faith to move his family into it’s unfinished cabins. He had the firm, practical faith to tell violent people around him what he was doing and what they ought to do.
By faith Noah stepped out of the shadows to witness to the world that judgment and death were coming. He also told the world that he and his family would be safe within the castle of God’s grace. I won’t tell you that he invited others to join him, but the implication of his ministry left that option open.
Was Noah’s situation much different to that of the New Testament evangelists?
In Acts 8:5 when Philip went down from Jerusalem to Samaria to preach the gospel and start churches, he went by faith after receiving directions from the Lord. “Then Philip went down to the city of Samaria, and preached Christ unto them. And the people with one accord gave heed unto those things which Philip spake, hearing and seeing the miracles which he did. For unclean spirits, crying with loud voice, came out of many that were possessed with them: and many taken with palsies, and that were lame, were healed. And there was great joy in that city.” We know that Philip was a church planter because Acts 9:31 tells there were churches in Samaria. And then by faith Philip left Samaria to run out into the Gaza desert on an evangelistic mission. The only thing he had to go on was what appeared to be the word God through an angel. Philip was a man of practical faith, not just the theological kind, so he didn’t argue, debate, ask for corroborating evidence, “He arose and went.” Missions and church planting takes faith. And the more faith and the more we surrender to the Lord through faith, the greater the victories for Christ.
What took Paul from the relative comfort of Asia Minor and the regions around his birthplace, to the Roman military city of Philippi? God spoke to his heart through a vision in which a man of Macedonia invited him saying, “Come over into Macedonia and help us.” “And after he had seen the vision, immediately we endeavoured to go into Macedonia, assuredly gathering that the Lord had called us for to preach the gospel unto them.” By faith – with practical faith in the direction and blessing of God – Paul stepped out risking his life once again for the sake of souls and establishing another church of Christ. He demonstrated and lived his faith. So a church was planted in Philippi and then there was one in Thessalonica and another in Berea, before the missionary team moved down into Greece. Why did the brethren move so quickly and with such confidence? Their faith in God gave them the confidence to risk themselves for God’s blessings.
Brethren, the work of evangelistic missions and church planting is not something for the faint-hearted nor for the man with mere intellectual or theological faith in God. Successful missionaries go into their work, trusting God for whatever the Lord is willing to do. He goes expecting to be blessed and protected, even if it means protection in a Roman prison with the walls falling down around him. He doesn’t necessarily have an agenda and a detailed itinerary, with dates set aside for a week in this place and three weeks in another. And when we accompany that missionary, praying for him from ten thousand miles away we need to pray with the same practical faith and expectation. We need to be bold with God, grabbing the Lord’s promises and anticipating the Lord’s fulfilments. And the more faith we and the missionary employ, the greater will be the victories on that mission field.
Consider two more recent illustrations.
Daniel Marshall and his family had been zealously trying to evangelize the Mohawk Indians in New York. When the French and Indian War forced him to give up his plans he eventually settled in Opekon, Virginia. It was there he was baptized and licenced to preach, and there he resumed his preaching. He preached in faith, expecting God to honor His word, keeping His promises. And God did bless and people were being saved, astounding the Baptist world at the time.
Meanwhile, Marshall’s brother-in-law, Shubal Stearns pastor of the Baptist Church at Tolland, Connecticut, felt the call of God to start a new ministry on the western frontier. Leaving the Tolland church in good hands, Stearns and five other couples moved southwest where they met up with Daniel Marshall and his family. Together, trusting God alone, and committing their lives and their wives to the Lord, they eventually traveled down the Shenandoah Valley, and at some point at the lower end, they crossed the Blue Ridge, entering the Piedmont country of Pittsylvania, resting on the edge of a small sandy creek.
Here is the thing – even though the Marshalls and Stearns knew of people in North Carolina none of them lived in the area of Sandy Creek. They knew of no one in the area, and in fact there were very few people who then lived in Guilford County. There are no mountains, lakes or rivers in the area to entice growth or to guarantee success. The only notable feature on the primitive maps was the intersection of two roads at Sandy Creek. And today, those roads are hardly discernable on the average map. Stearns and Marshall picked that site to settle and begin preaching the gospel, totally by faith.
And in faith, those few families erected crude shelters for themselves, but then they built a meeting house for the crowds who didn’t yet live in the district. Those believers then formed themselves into a Baptist church, with a membership of sixteen. They didn’t wait for the Lord to save a hundred souls before they organized. They didn’t wait for offerings large enough to support Bro. Stearns and his two associates. They didn’t wait for anything. They were people of faith, and they expected the Lord to bless and to keep His promises. As soon as the pulpit was in place, Stearns began preaching Christ, and the people began singing the hymns of Zion. God did blessed their faith, and travelers stopped on their way south to hear the gospel. Some of them looked around an saw the same rolling hills and fertile soil that Judy and I saw last September. Soon that church had about 600 members, and an by faith Marshall and others took the gospel across North Carolina, South Carolina and into Georgia, starting other churches.
The victories won at Sandy Creek were won by faith – practical, expectant, sacrificing faith. They were not victories through persistence, or oratory, or excitement, or organization. As I say, they began with nothing but confidence in the Lord, and God loved it, choosing bless with victory. It was the same kind of faith that Philip demonstrated in Samaria, and it was the same as Paul’s in Philippi. I know that Noah didn’t see the same degree of victory as Shubal Stearns, because it was not God’s will. But I believe that Noah was pleased with God’s will, because his faith was settled on the Lord. This is the faith we need to have today as we step into our responsibilities in carrying out our commission.
Let me give you another example of mission work built on faith. William Fetler was born in predominantly Lutheran Latvia on the Baltic Sea in 1883. His father was a Baptist. At the age of fifteen William was born again, and at the time of his baptism, his father was pelted with rocks so that blood streaked down his face, but his heart was filled with joy. Outside of Riga, Lativia, William preached his first sermon, stuttering and stammering over his testimony. He was twenty when the Lord called him into the ministry, and about that time he learned to live by faith. Not only did he have a burden for the people of Latvia, but next door was the huge Russian empire. Speaking only 3 languages at the time: Latvian, Russian and German, he used a Russian-English dictionary to send a post card to Spurgeon’s College in London, saying only, “I want to study to be a pastor.” Thomas Spurgeon, C.H. Spurgeon’s son, immediately said, “Czarist Russia is knocking on our door,” and William was invited to register. He bought a steerage ticket on a ship to London and then gave all the rest of his savings to his parents. He had no idea how he would survive in London without a job and without speaking English, but he trusted God to meet his needs. The Lord did exactly that.
While in London, not only did William learn English and some Baptist doctrine, he grew in the Lord. He experienced first hand, the Welsh revival, witnessing how the faith of a few believers was setting that country on fire. James A. Stewart, who I have been quoting a lot lately, said of Fetler: “It was in the Welsh Revival that William came into a real definite experience of not only recognizing the Holy Spirit as a Person but knowing Him in a deep, intimate, personal way.” Later he added, “He lived and breathed in the atmosphere of revival because he lived and breathed in the atmosphere of prayer meetings” – prayer meetings where there was genuine practical faith in the power of the Almighty.
Thomas Spurgeon had said, “Czarist Russia is knocking on our door.” But Russia was closed to the gospel. Evangelical preaching and Baptist missionaries were forbidden. But then in 1905 under problems created by the defeat of the Russian fleet by the Japanese and by riots at home, the Czar signed a document granting a limited degree of religion freedom. The faith of Thomas Spurgeon and William Fetler was being honored by God. And then the Lord raised up Charles Phillips, a real estate businessman, to finance Fetler’s ministry. Everything about his ministry in Latvia and Russia was predicated on faith. William set sail for home, but as he stepped off the ship, the Czarist police tried to arrest him, but he showed them his British Baptist ordination papers, and they surprisingly let him go. Eventually he traveled to St. Petersburg, where there wasn’t a single Baptist church, but soon he was meeting with 300 students who were hungry for God’s Word. And then to the surprise of everyone, Russian aristocrats started to attend his services. Those connections would eventually keep Fetler from death in Siberia.
By faith Fetler began to rent larger and larger auditoria. After two years, he was renting twelve meeting halls at the same time in different parts of the city, some seating as many as a thousand people, and the preacher would run between meetings. His congregations were not registered with the government and as such were illegal and vulnerable, but by faith Fetler continued his work of evangelism, sacrificing himself in every way. Then he stepped out by faith again, and proposed to his friends that they erect a building for the largest evangelical church in the Russian Empire. By 1911 it was completed, seating about 3,000 in the main auditorium and two connected halls.
At that point Felter’s faith directed him to the heart of Russian Orthodoxy – the city of Moscow. And by the way, the gospel he preached was the same as our own. He declared the utter sinfulness of man, and the absolute sovereignty of God in salvation. Nothing but the perfect atoning sacrifice of Christ can meet the spiritual deadness of the human spirit. It was absolutely contrary to the so-called “gospel” of the Orthodox religion. And the Lord blessed the man’s faith and his Biblical doctrine with an abundance of souls saved.
Back in St. Petersburg, on the last Saturday of November in 1914, Fetler was leading his church in prayer, pleading with God for His continued blessings, when the church’s chief usher came in to tell him that there were police awaiting to arrest him. They show him a paper which read: “By order of the military governor of St. Petersburg, Pastor Vasily Andreyevitch Felter is to be immediately arrested and exiled to Siberia.” But then the grace of God stepped in once again, and some of Fetler’s friends convinced the government that it would be better to have the pastor exiled from Russia rather than to have him incarcerated. He left his beloved Russia eventually coming to America, where by faith he continued to minister to Russia. He was actually in Russia for less than ten years, but because it was a ministry rooted in absolute trust in the power of God, the blessings fell almost over night. And before the door closed for another century God honored the faith of that one man with an army of souls saved.
Of course, we have no control over the length or the permanence of our ministries. It is our job simply to believe God and His promises and build our ark according to the plans God has designed. It may be burned to the ground in less than a decade which was essentially what happened in Riga, Latvia, and St. Petersburg and Moscow, Russia. It may flourish throughout a half dozen states as was the work of Stearns and Marshall. Or it may become a salvation station for only a small family. But when that work is carried out with an absolute trust in God and His promises, it will go down in God’s record book as a great victory. “By faith Noah, being warned of God of things not seen as yet… prepared an ark… by the which he condemned the world, and became heir of the righteousness which is by faith.”
I believe that Noah is an example not only of salvation by faith, but also of service by faith.