Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God

by J. I. Packer

  Again, Paul saw himself as Christ’s herald. When he describes himself as “appointed a preacher” of the gospel (2 Tim 1:11; 1 Tim 2:7 rsv), the noun he uses is ke4ryx, which means a herald, a person who makes public announcements on another’s behalf. When he declares, “we preach Christ crucified” (1 Cor 1:23), the verb he uses is ke4rysso4, which denotes the herald’s appointed activity of blazoning abroad what he has been told to make known. When Paul speaks of “my preaching,” and “our preaching,” and lays it down that, after the world’s wisdom had rendered the world ignorant of God, “it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe” (1 Cor 1:21; 2:4; 15:14 kjv), the noun he uses is ke4rygma, meaning not the activity of announcing, but the thing announced, the proclamation itself, the message declared. Paul, in his own estimation, was not a philosopher, not a moralist, not one of the world’s wise men, but simply Christ’s herald. His royal Master had given him a message to proclaim; his whole business, therefore, was to deliver that message with exact and studious faithfulness, adding nothing, altering nothing, and omitting nothing. And he was to deliver it, not as another of man’s bright ideas, needing to be beautified with the cosmetics and high heels of fashionable learning in order to make people look at it, but as a word from God, spoken in Christ’s name, carrying Christ’s authority, and to be authenticated in the hearers by the convincing power of Christ’s Spirit. “And I, when I came to you,” Paul reminds the Corinthians, “[came] proclaiming to you the testimony of God.” I came, Paul is saying, not to give you my own ideas about anything, but simply to deliver God’s message. Therefore, “I decided to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ and him crucified”—for it was just this that God sent me to tell you about. “And my speech and my message [ke4rygma] were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God” (1 Cor 2:1-5 kjv). The figure of the herald thus highlights the authenticity of Paul’s gospel.

  Third, Paul considered himself Christ’s ambassador. What is an ambassador? He is the authorized representative of a sovereign. He speaks not in his own name, but on behalf of the ruler whose deputy he is, and his whole duty and responsibility is to interpret that ruler’s mind faithfully to those to whom he is sent. Paul used this figure twice, both times in connection with his evangelistic work. Pray for me, he wrote from prison, “that utterance may be given me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains; that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.” God, he wrote again, has “entrust[ed] to us the message of reconciliation. So we are ambassadors for Christ, God making his appeal through us. We beseech you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (Eph 6:19-20 rsv; 2 Cor 5:19-20 rsv). Paul called himself an ambassador because he knew that, when he proclaimed the gospel facts and promises, and urged sinners to receive the reconciliation effected at Calvary, it was Christ’s message to the world that he was declaring. The figure of ambassadorship thus highlights the authority that Paul had, as representing his Lord.

  In his evangelism, then, Paul consciously acted as the slave and steward, the mouthpiece and herald, the spokesman and ambassador, of the Lord Jesus Christ. Hence, on the one hand, his sustained boldness and unshakable sense of authority in the face of ridicule and indifference; hence, on the other hand, his intransigent refusal to modify his message in order to suit circumstances. These two things, of course, were connected, for Paul could regard himself as speaking with Christ’s authority only as long as he remained faithful to the terms of his commission and said neither less nor more than he had been given to say (cf. Gal 1:8ff). But while he preached the gospel that Christ had entrusted to him, he spoke as Christ’s commissioned representative, and could therefore speak authoritatively, and claim a right to be heard.

  But the commission to publish the gospel and make disciples was never confined to the apostles. Nor is it now confined to the church’s ministers. It is a commission that rests on the whole church collectively, and therefore on each Christian individually. All God’s people are sent to do as the Philippians did, and “shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life” (Phil 2:15-16). Every Christian, therefore, has a God-given obligation to make known the gospel of Christ. And every Christian who declares the gospel message to any other person does so as Christ’s ambassador and representative, according to the terms of his God-given commission. Such is the authority, and such the responsibility, of the church and of the Christian in evangelism.

  The second point in Paul’s understanding of his own evangelistic ministry follows on from the first.

  2. His primary task in evangelism was to teach the truth about the Lord Jesus Christ. As Christ’s ambassador, Paul’s first job was to “get across” the message that his Sovereign had charged him to deliver. Christ sent me, he declared—to do what?—“to preach the gospel” (1 Cor 1:17). The Greek word here is euangelizomai, meaning publish the euangelion, literally the “good news.” For that is what Paul’s gospel was. Good news, Paul proclaimed, has come into the world—good news from God. It is unlike anything that the world, Jewish or Gentile, had guessed or expected, but it is something that the whole world needs. This good news, the “word of God” in the usual New Testament sense of that phrase (cf. Acts 4:31; 8:14; 11:1; 13:46; 2 Cor 2:17; Col 1:25; 1 Thess 2:13; 2 Tim 2:9), “the truth” as Paul often called it (cf. 2 Cor 4:2; Gal 2:5, 14; 2 Thess 2:10ff.; 2 Tim 2:18, 25; 3:8), is a full and final disclosure of what the Creator has done, and will do, to save sinners. It is a complete unfolding of the spiritual facts of life in God’s apostate world.

  What was this good news that Paul preached? It was the news about Jesus of Nazareth. It was the news of the incarnation, the atonement and the kingdom—the cradle, the cross and the crown—of the Son of God. It was the news of how God “glorified his servant Jesus” (Acts 3:13 rsv) by making him Christ, the world’s long-awaited “Leader and Savior” (Acts 5:31). It was the news of how God made his Son man; and how, as man, God made him Priest, and Prophet, and King; and how, as Priest, God also made him a sacrifice for sins; and how, as Prophet, God also made him a Lawgiver to his people; and how, as King, God has also made him Judge of all the world and given him prerogatives which in the Old Testament are exclusively Jehovah’s own, namely to reign till every knee bows before him and to save all who call on his name. In short, the good news was just this: that God has executed his eternal intention of glorifying his Son by exalting him as a great Savior for great sinners.

  Such is the gospel which Paul was sent to preach. It is a message of some complexity, needing to be learned before it can be lived by, and understood before it can be applied. It needs, therefore, to be taught. Hence Paul, as a preacher of it, had to become a teacher. He saw this as part of his calling; he speaks of “the gospel, for which I was appointed a preacher

  . . . and teacher” (2 Tim 1:10-11).

  And he tells us that teaching was basic to his evangel­istic practice; he speaks of “him [Christ] we proclaim . . . teaching everyone with all wisdom” (Col 1:28). In both texts the reference to teaching is explanatory of the reference to preaching. In other words: it is by teaching that the gospel preacher fulfills his ministry. To teach the gospel is his first responsibility: to reduce it to its simplest essentials, to analyze it point by point, to fix its meaning by positive and negative definition, to show how each part of the message links up with the rest—and to go on explaining it till he is quite sure that his listeners have grasped it. And therefore when Paul preached the gospel, formally or informally, in the synagogue or in the streets, to Jews or to Gentiles, to a crowd or to one man, what he did was to teach—engaging attention, capturing interest, setting out the facts, explaining their significance, solving difficulties, answering objections, and showing how the message bears on life. Luke’s regular way of describing Paul’s evangelistic ministry is to say that he disputed (Acts 9:29), or reasoned (A
cts 17:2, 17; 18:4; 19:8-9 [dialegomai rendered “argued” in the rsv]; 24:25), or taught (Acts 18:11; 28:31), or persuaded (i.e., sought to carry his hearers’ judgments; Acts 18:4; 19:8, 26; 28:23; cf. 26:28). And Paul himself refers to his ministry among the Gentiles as primarily a task of instruction: “to me . . . to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the plan of the mystery” (Eph 3:8-9 rsv). Clearly, in Paul’s view, his first and fundamental job as a preacher of the gospel was to communicate knowledge—to get gospel truth fixed in people’s minds. To him, teaching the truth was the basic evangelistic activity; to him, therefore, the only right method of evangelism was the teaching method.

  3. Paul’s ultimate aim in evangelism was to convert his hearers to faith in Christ. The word “convert” is a translation of the Greek epistrepho4, which means—and is sometimes translated—“turn.” We think of conversion as a work of God, and so from one standpoint it is; but it is striking to observe that in the three New Testament passages where epistrepho4 is used transitively, of “converting” someone to God, the subject of the verb is not God, as we might have expected, but a preacher. The angel said of John the Baptist: “And he will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God” (Lk 1:16). James says: “My brothers, if anyone among you wanders from the truth and someone brings him back, let him know that whoever brings back a sinner . . . will save his soul from death” (Jas 5:19-20). And Paul himself tells Agrippa how Christ had said to him: “the Gentiles—to whom I am sending you to open their eyes, so that they may turn from darkness to light and from the power of Satan to God,” and how he had obeyed the heavenly vision by proclaiming to both Jews and Gentiles “that they should repent and turn to God” (Acts 26:17-18, 20). These passages represent the converting of others as the work of God’s people, a task that they are to perform by summoning people to turn to God in repentance and faith.

  When the Scriptures speak in this way of converting, and of saving too, as a task for God’s people to perform, they are not, of course, calling in question the truth that, properly speaking, it is God who converts and saves. What they are saying is simply that the conversion and salvation of others should be the Christian’s objective. The preacher should work to convert his congregation; the wife should work to save her unbelieving husband (1 Cor 7:16). Christians are sent to convert, and they should not allow themselves, as Christ’s representatives in the world, to aim at anything less. Evangelizing, therefore, is not simply a matter of teaching, and instructing, and imparting information to the mind. There is more to it than that. Evangelizing includes the endeavor to elicit a response to the truth taught. It is communication with a view to conversion. It is a matter, not merely of informing, but also of inviting. It is an attempt to gain

  (kjv), or win (esv), or catch our fellow men for Christ (see

  1 Cor 9:19ff.; 1 Pet 3:1; Lk 5:10). Our Lord depicts it as fishermen’s work (Mt 4:19; cf. 13:47).

  Paul, again, is our model here. Paul, as we saw, knew himself to be sent by Christ, not only to open men’s minds by teaching them the gospel (though that must come first), but also to turn them to God by exhorting and applying the truth to their lives. Accordingly, his avowed aim was not just to spread information, but to save sinners: “that by all means I might save some” (1 Cor 9:22; cf. Rom 11:14). Thus, there was in his evangelistic preaching both instruction—“in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself”—and entreaty—“We implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God” (2 Cor 5:19-20). His responsibility extended not only toward the gospel which he was charged to preach and preserve but also toward the needy people to whom he was sent to impart it and who were perishing without it (cf. Rom 1:13ff.). As an apostle of Christ, he was more than a teacher of truth; he was a shepherd of souls, sent into the world, not to lecture sinners, but to love them. For he was an apostle second and a Christian first; and, as a Christian, he was a man called to love his neighbor. This meant simply that in every situation, and by every means in his power, it was his business to seek other people’s good. From this standpoint, the significance of his apostolic commission to evangelize and found churches was simply that this was the particular way in which Christ was calling him to fulfill the law of love to his neighbor. He might not, therefore, preach the gospel in a harsh, callous way, putting it before his neighbor with a contemptuous air of “there you are—take it or leave it,” and excusing himself for his unconcern about people on the grounds of his faithfulness to the truth. Such conduct would be a failure of love on his part. His business was to present truth in a spirit of love, as an expression and implementation of his desire to save his hearers. The attitude which informed all Paul’s evangelism was this: “I seek not what is yours but you . . . I will most gladly spend and be spent for your souls” (2 Cor 12:14-15).

  And all our own evangelism must be done in the same spirit. As love to our neighbor suggests and demands that we evangelize, so the command to evangelize is a specific application of the command to love others for Christ’s sake, and must be fulfilled as such.

  Love made Paul warm-hearted and affectionate in his evangelism. “We were gentle among you,” he reminded the Thessalonians; “being affectionately desirous of you, we were ready to share with you not only the gospel of God but also our own selves, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thess 2:7-8). Love also made Paul considerate and adaptable in his evangelism; though he peremptorily refused to change his message to please men (cf. Gal 1:10;

  2 Cor 2:17; 1 Thess 2:4), he would go to any lengths in his presentation of it to avoid giving offense and putting needless difficulties in the way of men’s accepting and responding to it. “Though I am free from all,” he wrote to the Corinthians, “I have made myself a slave to all, that I might win the more. To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews; to those under the law I became as one under the law . . . that I might win those under the law. To those outside the law I became as one outside the law . . . that I might win those outside the law. To the weak I became weak, that I might win the weak. I have become all things to all men, that I might by all means save some” (1 Cor 9:19-22 rsv; cf. 10:33). Paul sought to save men; and because he sought to save them, he was not content merely to throw truth at them; but he went out of his way to get alongside them, and to start thinking with them from where they were, and to speak to them in terms that they could understand, and above all, to avoid everything that would prejudice them against the gospel and put stumbling blocks in their path. In his zeal to maintain truth, he never lost sight of the needs and claims of people. His aim and object in all his handling of the gospel, even in the heat of the polemics which contrary views evoked, was never less than to win souls, by converting those whom he saw as his neighbors, to faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.

  Such was evangelism according to Paul: going out in love, as Christ’s agent in the world, to teach sinners the truth of the gospel with a view to converting and saving them. If, therefore, we are engaging in this activity, in this spirit and with this aim, we are evangelizing, irrespective of the particular means by which we are doing it.

  We saw earlier how wrong our thinking would go if we defined evangelism too broadly and fell into assuming that the production of converts was our personal responsibility. We would now point out that there is an opposite mistake which we must also avoid: the mistake, that is, of defining evangelism too narrowly. One way of making this mistake would be to define evangelism institutionally, in terms of holding some particular type of evangelistic meeting—a meeting, let us say, run on informal lines, at which testimonies are given, choruses are sung, and an appeal is made at the close for some outward sign of having received Christ, such as raising the hand, or standing, or walking to the front. Should we equate the church’s evangelistic responsibility with the holding of such meetings, or the Christian’s evangelistic responsibility with bringing unconverted people to such meetings, we should be grievously astray, as the following considera
tions will show.

  1. In the first place, there are many ways of bringing the gospel before the unconverted in order to win them, besides getting them to meetings of this type. There is, to start with, the way of personal evangelism, by which Andrew won Peter, and Philip won Nathanael, and Paul won Onesimus (Jn 1:40-51; Philem 10). There is the home meeting and the group Bible study. Also, and most important, there are the regular services Sunday by Sunday in local churches. Insofar as the preaching at our Sunday services is scriptural, those services will of necessity be evangelistic. It is a mistake to suppose that evangelistic sermons are a special brand of sermons, having their own peculiar style and conventions; evangelistic sermons are just scriptural sermons, the sort of sermons that a man cannot help preaching if he is preaching the Bible biblically. Proper sermons seek to expound and apply what is in the Bible. But what is in the Bible is just the whole counsel of God for man’s salvation; all Scripture bears witness, in one way or another, to Christ, and all biblical themes relate to him. All proper sermons, therefore, will of necessity declare Christ in some fashion and so be more or less directly evangelistic. Some sermons, of course, will aim more narrowly and exclusively at converting sinners than do others. But you cannot present the Lord Jesus Christ as the Bible presents him, as God’s answer to every problem in the sinner’s relationship with himself, and not be in effect evangelistic all the time. The Lord Jesus Christ, said Robert Bolton, is “offered most freely, and without exception of any person, every Sabbath, every Sermon, either in plaine, and direct terms, or implyedly, at the least.”[5] So it is, inevitably, wherever the Bible is preached biblically. And there is something terribly wrong in any church, or any man’s ministry, to which Bolton’s generalization does not apply. If in our churches “evangelistic” meetings, and “evangelistic” sermons, are thought of as special occasions, different from the ordinary run of things, it is a damning indictment of our normal Sunday services. So that if we should imagine that the essential work of evangel­ism lies in holding meetings of the special type described out of church hours, so to speak, that would simply prove that we had failed to understand what our regular Sunday services are for.