Rob Blackaby challenges believers to proclaim Christ to the lost

Preaching on the story of Zacchaeus during his Nov. 16 sermon at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, Rob Blackaby challenged students to see the lost around them and to live a life that reflects Christ.

Blackaby is the president of the Canadian Southern Baptist Seminary and College in Cochrane, Alberta. He is a two-time graduate of Southwestern Seminary, having earned a Master of Divinity in 1986, and a Ph.D. in 1990. He served as the senior pastor for 12 years at Trinity Baptist Church in Calgary, Alberta, and as the lead pastor for the church plant, Southwinds Church. He also assisted with the development of the SouthTrails church-planting network and served as president of the Canadian Convention of Southern Baptists from 2003-2006 before assuming his current role in 2007.

Leading the chapel audience through a reading of Luke 9:1-10, Blackaby opened with the question: “Do you remember a time when you suddenly realized you were lost?”

Blackaby noted that in reading the passage, he observed two characteristics of Jesus, articulated in verse 10: “Jesus seeks, and Jesus saves.”

Zacchaeus was disoriented, Blackaby said, but eventually came to understand he was lost, and that Jesus was the one to help him.

“Zacchaeus, like the rest of us, was living his life as a sequence of choices,” Blackaby said. “Every decision you and I make makes it more or less likely that we will obey Christ with the next breath we breathe.”

Blackaby asked students to consider how their sequence of choices, even while studying at a seminary, have either led them “further into intimacy with Christ or farther away from Him?”

Then noting the fourth verse of the chapter wherein Zacchaeus climbs the tree so he could see who Jesus was, Blackaby said Zacchaeus did all he could do and “Jesus did the rest.”

“Jesus came to him,” Blackaby said. “He saw him, He told him to come down, He went to his house; that was all Jesus. Jesus sees him, He seeks him, and He says, ‘I’ve come to seek and to save you.’”

“I believe that Jesus may well have gone to the city of Jericho for the express reason of actually encountering Zacchaeus, of seeking him out, of finding him,” Blackaby said. “It’s possible to be in a school like Southwestern, or the Canadian Southern Baptist Seminary and College, and actually be disoriented to the ways of God.”

The story is not just for the lost, Blackaby said, but “for you and I, too. Jesus sees you. He seeks you out.”

Blackaby continued with an additional reflection on the passage, describing the crowd who ultimately becomes “indignant with Jesus” and frustrated for his attention to Zacchaeus. 

Blackaby said that when he read the passage, he had to ask himself if he was Zacchaeus, or “are you part of the crowd that is getting in the way of Zacchaeus and Jesus?”

“A righteous cause is not sufficient without a righteous character,” Blackaby further explained. “A deficient character will, by necessity, contaminate what you think is a righteous cause. It will pervert it, and the witness to Christ will be diminished.”

“What is the chief toxin in our pursuit of righteous causes? Lovelessness,” Blackaby concluded. “In the absence of love, we will not seek. In the absence of love, we will not see people.”

Blackaby concluded with a challenge to the chapel audience to consider the people they encounter and ask themselves if they are willing to merely pass them like anybody else, or “will you stop and in the power of Christ look and proclaim, “He came to seek and save you.’”

The entire sermon can be viewed here.

Chapel is held every Tuesday and Thursday morning at 10 a.m. (CT) in MacGorman Chapel on the campus of Southwestern Seminary. Chapel may be viewed live at swbts.edu/live.