There is a lesson to be learned here; namely, you don't have to be an apostle to share the gospel effectively with others. But it does help to have some tools in your toolbox.

One simple, straightforward, clear, and brief tool is called, "DO - DONE." I don't know who made it up. All I know is that I didn't. And it's quite good. Here's how it goes...

Every religion in the world is a DO religion - do these good things or do these religious activities and God will accept you or you'll achieve inner peace.

But Christianity is a DONE religion. God sent his son, Jesus, to live the life you could never live and to die the death you deserved to die in order to bring you to God. He did what you could never do for yourself.

Becoming a Christian involves turning from DO to DONE. Turning from trying to save yourself through your own efforts and goodness to submit to what Jesus has done for you on the cross.

DO - DONE. Simple. Clear. Straightforward. Brief. One of many tools for communicating the gospel wherever you go.

Instead, if you're looking for the closest modern parallel to New Testament sorcerers, look no further than the world of the health, wealth, prosperity preacher. Now I know it seems like a strange parallel to draw, but when you understand what magicians really were during the days of the early church, the comparison is all but obvious. Consider this scholarly definition of ancient magic:

Magic is defined as that form of religious deviance whereby individual or social goals are sought by means alternate to those normally sanctioned by the dominant religious institution....[G]oals sought within the context of religious deviance are magical when attained [by] the management of supernatural powers in such a way that results are virtually guaranteed (David Aune quoted in David G Peterson, The Acts of the Apostles [Eerdmans, 2009], 88).

So you have religious deviance, supernatural power management, and guaranteed results. If that doesn't sound like the health, wealth, prosperity preachers, I don't know what does. They say, "The gospel is aimed at your prosperity (prosperity is the goal). You get prosperous through the powerful words you speak (there's the management of supernatural powers). And your results are guaranteed."

Kenneth Copeland, Creflo Dollar, Benny Hinn and the rest of their kind might not be wearing pointed gray hats whilst standing on hills whilst shooting lightning from their fingers, but they are sorcerers nonetheless. They are the new sorcerers - conjuring their counterfeit gospel with counterfeit miracles at the expense of hundreds of thousands of people around the world.

This is so counter-intuitive. Everything inside of you says that if you are going to be right with God, if you are going to be acquitted in the divine courtroom, you've got to earn it. So when you hear that it is the one who does not work who's justified, it feels a little strange to you.

Every day, you wake up sensing that you need to make up for what you've done or to perform double for the deed you failed to do. You and I wake up, and without thinking about it, jump onto the treadmill of working for our justification, of working for our acceptance with God. But why would we do this? Answer: we forget Rom 4:5 - that God justifies the ungodly. And if God justifies those who are not godly - those who have not amassed a stellar spiritual resume, those who have all kinds of strikes against them - if God justifies the ungodly, then working for justification makes absolutely no sense. Why work for something you don't have to work for?

So stop working. Quit your job. Forget about beefing up your resume to be acceptable to God. Instead, don't stop believing in the one who justifies the ungodly, the one who justified you.

Last week, Wretched launched "The Biggest Project," which is aimed at the distribution of "The Biggest Question" - 250,000 copies worldwide! The goal of the project is "to educate, inform, and alert as many individuals as possible to the most important truth on earth: who they are, who God is and how they can be reconciled to him." Not bad, don't you think?

If you'd like to get involved in practical ways, go here, and then pray like crazy that the Lord would use "The Biggest Question" to bring many people to faith in Christ.

Here's a clip to whet your appetite:

1. Use trusted resources for narrowing the field. I would recommend two very highly. The first is available through 9Marks, Mark Dever's ministry based on the title of his book. Nine Marks has a tool that allows you to search for churches who have affirmed both the 9Marks mission statement and the T4G (Together for the Gospel) Affirmations and Denials. I also recommend the list of churches available at The Gospel Coalition. The churches who are included on the list must affirm TGC's foundation documents.

2. Visit the church's website to glean as much information as you can about its doctrine and practice. Many, if not most, churches these days make lots of information available via the web, not least the audio or video of their sermons. Take time to listen to a few messages and to read the relevant pages of their website to get a sense of what the church is all about.

3. Visit the church's public worship service when both the main preacher and main worship leader are there. You certainly don't want to make a judgment about the quality of the public ministry of a church on the basis of substitutes, especially in a small church setting and if the substitutes rarely take leadership. So give the church a call or send an email to find out the schedule for public worship.

4. Be a part of the church's life for six straight weeks. This is what I call "the Six Week Test." It is virtually impossible for you to get a real sense of the church's life through even two or three visits to their Sunday morning worship. Instead, you need to be part of the church's body life for a significant period of time in order to catch the congregation's ethos. I recommend that for six weeks you attend anything and everything - from church work days to the social at the ballpark. 

5. Pray, pray, pray for wisdom. You should take very seriously your decision to join a local church. After all, your membership communicates a willingness not only to serve the church family in a given locale, but it also commits you to submit to that church's leadership. Prayerfully consider your calling to a particular local church.

6. Pull the trigger. This is the counterweight to #5. Too many Christians put off their decision to join a local church far too long. In this life, you will never find a perfect church - ever. Even the Westminster Confession says that "the purest churches under heaven are subject both to mixture and error." Every church has its flaws, just like every family. And just like every family, you know a healthy church when you see it. So when you do, don't wait. Join its membership and enjoy the privileges and responsibilities of life in the local church.

A pastor is someone who leads, an undershepherd. He loves the sheep and is willing to die for them. That means at times he is willing to lead them where they are not prepared or willing to go. He is willing to put up with their opposition and complaints just because he loves them, but he still does not let himself be guided by them in their stubbornness. What he wants is to learn from their wisdom, but he must also take up their wisdom and combine it with his own and then move forward. If he does not do that he is not really being their shepherd (C John Miller, The Heart of a Servant Leader [P & R, 2004], 107).

Some questions:

1. Do you love the people under your care?

2. How far are you willing to go to help them to see Jesus?

3. Do you love them enough to put up with their opposition and complaints?

4. Do you lead your people, or does their stubbornness paralyze you?

These are searching questions for all of us who take up the mantle of pastoral ministry. And when we allow them truly to penetrate our hearts, we all must admit that we are failures.

Enter the Chief Shepherd, Jesus Christ.

What a blessing to know that though our best ministry will be marred by our weaknesses, flaws, and sins, the people of our churches are not ultimately led by us! We are undershepherds to a Chief Shepherd who laid down his life for his sheep.

And what a privilege it is to fight our sin for Jesus! Every time we put our sin to death we avenge Jesus of the very enemy that nailed him to the cross. Every time by the Spirit you kill your sin is the time you execute the chief enemy of King Jesus.

So resist. Resist and resist more. Expect pain in the battle. And suffer like a warrior for the high king of heaven. And when you get weary, "consider him who has endured such hostility by sinners against himself" (Heb 12:3). Remember Jesus, the one who fought and already has the victory! Like the song says, "Death is dead. Love has won. Christ has conquered." Amen. 

At the same time, many Christians find that self-examination leads them more often to insecurity and despair, rather than confidence and joy, assured of their acceptance with God.

In his excellent book on revival, the great Welsh preacher of the last century, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, offers his explanation for why Christians who engage in self-examination end up miserable:

So why are people so often in this condition? It seems to me that the answer is that they are not examining themselves in the light of the Scriptures. For if you follow the scriptural method you will do something like this: you will allow the truth to search you; you will apply it to yourself; you will preach to yourself; you will talk to yourself; you will meditate about these things. You will bring yourself under conviction, and you will not let yourself escape. But you do not stop at that. Having thus found your true condition, you will allow the Scriptures to lead you to the Lord Jesus Christ, and to the cleansing of his blood....If you stop in your sins, if you stop in the dust and ashes and in the sackcloth, I say, you are not scriptural. You must go on from that and look to him, and apply again the truth to yourself. You must be certain that you end in a condition of thanksgiving and praise, with a realization that your sins are covered and blotted out, and that you are renewed, and that you are able to go forward (emphasis added).

I would put it like this: since the Scriptures are centered on Jesus Christ, if your self-examination ends with you, you haven't examined yourself by the Scriptures. The Scriptures will always lead you to Jesus - to who he is and what he's done for you. And once there, you can't help but leave full of confidence, gratitude, and joy.

Our Christian reluctance to speak honestly about temptation is precisely why Christians...often believe themselves to be unbelievers. All they of other believers is this facade of smiling, peaceful Christ-followers. They assume then that the internal life of every other Christian is just a continual festival of hymns as opposed to their own internal life, in which the hymns are interrupted with constant gossipy chatter, violent rage, and hard-core pornography. This is exactly how the satanic powers want it. They want the prideful and oblivious to stay that way until they fall and slink away in isolation, where they can be devoured. Preaching the gospel to ourselves, though, reminds us continually that we are sinners and that we can stand only by the blood of Jesus. We can walk only by his Spirit prodding us on.

And not only will preaching the gospel to ourselves remind us that we are sinners, led by the Spirit, standing by the blood of Jesus, it will also give us the courage and humility to open up the recesses of our weaknesses and failures and sins to the hearts of trusted Christian brothers and sisters. 

So preach the gospel to yourself, take advantage of the benefits of Christian community, and fight your sin to the death.

And this needs to be said for two reasons:

First, our non-Christian friends think we're the most mirthless people on earth. We're so serious and worried about breaking the rules and coloring within the lines that there's little room for mirth. By our demeanor, we've taken the "Merry" out of "Merry Christmas."

Second, Christians themselves have a hard time embracing the merriness of Christmas. We feel guilty and like we have to apologize for it, as if the fun of Christmas gets in the way of the meaning of Christmas. But the reality is that Christmas without fun is what distorts the meaning of Christmas.

Did you know that the heavenly father feels compelled to celebrate? But we had to celebrate and rejoice, for this brother of yours was dead and has begun to live, and was lost and has been found (Luke 15:32).

Is this how you see God - as a father compelled to celebrate? This verse from Jesus' Parable of the Prodigal Son demonstrates that our father has a Christmas feeling about us. He's a father full of mirth toward his children.

But the irony is you only get to experience it when you see what a sinner you are - when you see your sin for what it is and return to your heavenly father.

Jesus helps us to see ourselves by depicting three kinds of sinners in this parable:

1. The younger brother before he leaves his father: "Father, give me the share of the estate that falls to me." And not many days later, the younger son gathered everything together and...squandered his estate with loose living (Luke 15:12-13).

This is the sinner that's most familiar: the kind who breaks all the rules in defiance of his father.

2. The older brother: For so many years I have been serving you and I have never neglected a command of yours; and yet you have never given me a young goat, so that I might celebrate with my friends (Luke 15:29-30).

This depicts our struggle with sin in a way that isn't so familiar: keeping all the rules to get leverage over God. It's the sin of obedience - of obeying God not because you love God, but because you want God to give you whatever goodies you value more than him and think he owes you.

3. The younger brother before he returns to his father: But when he came to his senses, he said, "I will get up and go to my father, and will say to him, 'Father, I have sinned against heaven, and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son; make me as one of your hired men' (Luke 15:17-19).

Amazing! The younger brother has come to his senses, realizes where his rule-breaking has led him, and no longer wants to live this way, but instead of running back to his father as his son, he resolves to live as his father's slave! In essence, he's saying, "I'll make up for what I've done. I'll do more and be better and try harder." The problem here is that the younger brother is not yet convinced that his father is full of mercy and mirth. He still has a wrong view of his father. He feels the need to earn a place at the father's table...which is the opposite of the truth.

For even as the younger brother returns, his father shamelessly runs to embrace him and to cut off his son in the middle of his speech about being the father's slave rather than his father's son: But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him, "Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son." But the father said to his slaves, "Give this boy some work to do! He can come home, but only as one of you!" Is that what his father says? Absolutely not! He says to his slaves, "Quickly bring out the best robe and put it on him, and put a ring on his hand and sandals on his feet; and bring the fattened calf, kill it, and let us eat and celebrate; for this son of mine was dead and has come to life again; he was lost and has been found." And they began to celebrate (Luke 15:20-24).

So knowing you're a sinner is essential to your repentance, but it's not enough. You also need to know the mirth of your heavenly father - that he's not at all reluctant to receive you as a son, but is eager to do it! He feels compelled to celebrate your return, even your many, many returns.

What will convince you that this really is your heavenly father's disposition toward you? Look to the son who's conspicuously missing from the parable - the one who is telling it! It's only when you see that the heavenly father gave his only son for older and younger brothers like you that you'll be convinced that he loves you. God's lavish grace revealed at the cross proves that he is the father of mirth.

So this Christmas, I plead with you to repent and return to the father of mirth. Then celebrate. Enjoy every minute of your Christmas as an echo of the true party that your heavenly father is throwing in heaven every time you repent.