Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God

by J. I. Packer

  2. Second, imagine a local church, or fellowship of Christians, who are giving themselves wholeheartedly to evangelism by the means mentioned above—personal work, home meetings and gospel preaching at their ordinary services—but have never had occasion to hold, or to join in, evangelistic meetings of the special sort that we are considering. If we equated the Christian duty of evangelism with running and supporting such meetings, we should have to conclude that this church or fellowship, because it eschewed them, was not evangelizing at all. But that would be like arguing that you cannot really be an Englishman unless you live at Frintonon Sea. And it would surely be a little odd to condemn people for not evangelizing just because they do not join in meetings of a type of which there is no trace in the New Testament. Was no evangelizing done, then, in New Testament times?

  3. In the third place, it needs to be said that a meeting, or service, is not necessarily evangelistic just because it includes testimonies, and choruses, and an appeal, any more than a man is necessarily English because he wears striped trousers and a bowler hat. The way to find out whether a particular service was evangelistic is to ask not whether an appeal for a decision was made, but what truth was taught at it. If it transpired that an insufficient gospel was preached, making the appeal for a response unintelligible to the congregation, the right of the meeting to be called evangelistic would be very doubtful.

  We say these things, not to grind a polemical axe, but simply in the interests of clear thinking. It is no part of our purpose to belittle evangelistic meetings and campaigns as such. We are not suggesting that there is no place at all for special evangelistic meetings; that, in face of the rampant paganism of the modern world, would be excessively foolish. The only point we are making here is that there is a place for other forms of evangelistic action too; indeed, under certain circumstances, a prior place. Because God has used meetings, and series of meetings, of this type in the past, there is a certain surface plausibility about the idea that they constitute the normal, natural and necessary, and indeed only, pattern of evangelism for the present and the future. But this does not follow. There can be evangelism without these meetings. They are in no way essential to the practice of evangelism. Wherever, and by whatever means, the gospel is communicated with a view to conversion, there you have evangelism. Evangelism is to be defined not institutionally, in terms of the kind of meeting held, but theologically, in terms of what is taught, and for what purpose.

  What principles should guide us in assessing the value of different methods of evangelism, and how much the Christian duty to evangelize really involves for us, we shall discuss at a later stage.

  What Is the Evangelistic Message?

  We shall have to deal with this fairly summarily. In a word, the evangelistic message is the gospel of Christ, and him crucified; the message of man’s sin and God’s grace, of human guilt and divine forgiveness, of new birth and new life through the gift of the Holy Spirit. It is a message made up of four essential ingredients.

  1. The gospel is a message about God. It tells us who he is, what his character is, what his standards are and what he requires of us, his creatures. It tells us that we owe our very existence to him, that for good or ill we are always in his hands and under his eye, and that he made us to worship and serve him, to show forth his praise and to live for his glory. These truths are the foundation of theistic religion, and until they are grasped the rest of the gospel message will seem neither cogent nor relevant. It is here, with the assertion of man’s complete and constant dependence on his Creator, that the Christian story starts.

  We can learn again from Paul at this point. When preaching to Jews, as at Pisidian Antioch (Acts 13:16ff.), he did not need to mention the fact that men were God’s creatures; he could take this knowledge for granted, for his hearers had the Old Testament faith behind them. He could begin at once to declare Christ to them, as the fulfillment of Old Testament hopes. But when preaching to Gentiles, who knew nothing of the Old Testament, Paul had to go further back and start from the beginning. And the beginning from which Paul started in such cases was the doctrine of God’s Creatorship and man’s creaturehood. So when the Athenians asked him to explain what his talk of Jesus and the resurrection was all about, he spoke to them first of God the Creator, and what he made man for. “God . . . made the world. . . . [H]e himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made . . . every nation of mankind . . . that they should seek God” (Acts 17:24-27; see also Acts 14:15ff.). This was not, as some have supposed, a piece of philosophical apologetic of a kind that Paul afterward renounced, but it was the first and basic lesson in theistic faith. The gospel starts by teaching us that we, as creatures, are absolutely dependent on God, and that he, as Creator, has an absolute claim on us. Only when we have learned this can we see what sin is, and only when we see what sin is can we understand the good news of salvation from sin. We must know what it means to call God Creator before we can grasp what it means to speak of him as Redeemer. Nothing can be achieved by talking about sin and salvation where this preliminary lesson has not in some measure been learned.

  2. The gospel is a message about sin. It tells us how we have fallen short of God’s standard; how we have become guilty, filthy and helpless in sin, and now stand under the wrath of God. It tells us that the reason why we sin con­tinually is that we are sinners by nature, and that nothing we do, or try to do, for ourselves can put us right or bring us back into God’s favor. It shows us ourselves as God sees us, and teaches us to think of ourselves as God thinks of us. Thus it leads us to self-despair. And this also is a necessary step. Not till we have learned our need to get right with God, and our inability to do so by any effort of our own, can we come to know the Christ who saves from sin.

  There is a pitfall here. Everybody’s life includes things which cause dissatisfaction and shame. Everyone has a bad conscience about some things in his past, matters in which

  he has fallen short of the standard which he set for himself, or which was expected of him by others. The danger is that in our evangelism we should content ourselves with evoking thoughts of these things and making people feel uncomfortable about them, and then depicting Christ as the One who saves us from these elements of ourselves, without even raising the question of our relationship with God. But this is just the question that has to be raised when we speak about sin. For the very idea of sin in the Bible is of an offense against God, which disrupts a man’s relationship with God. Unless we see our shortcomings in the light of the law and holiness of God, we do not see them as sin at all. For sin is not a social concept; it is a theological concept. Though sin is committed by man, and many sins are against society, sin cannot be

  defined in terms of either man or society. We never know what sin really is till we have learned to think of it in terms of God, and to measure it, not by human standards, but by the yardstick of his total demand on our lives.

  What we have to grasp, then, is that the bad conscience

  of the natural man is not at all the same thing as conviction of sin. It does not, therefore, follow that a man is convicted of sin when he is distressed about his weaknesses and the wrong things he has done. It is not conviction of sin just to feel miserable about yourself and your failures and your inadequacy to meet life’s demands. Nor would it be saving faith if a man in that condition called on the Lord Jesus Christ just to soothe him, cheer him up and make him feel confident again. Nor should we be preaching the gospel (though we might imagine we were) if all that we did was to present Christ in terms of a human’s felt wants. (“Are you happy? Are you satisfied? Do you want peace of mind? Do you feel that you have failed? Are you fed up with yourself? Do you want a friend? Then come to Christ; he will meet your every need”—as if the Lord Jesus Christ were to be thought of as a fairy godmother, or a super-psychiatrist.) No; we have to go deeper than this. To preach sin means not to make capital out of people’s felt frailties (the brainwasher’s trick), but to measure their lives b
y the holy law of God. To be convicted of sin means not just to feel that one is an all-around flop, but to realize that one has offended God, flouted his authority, defied him, gone against him and put oneself

  in the wrong with him. To preach Christ means to set

  him forth as the One who, through his cross, sets men right with God again. To put faith in Christ means relying

  on him, and him alone, to restore us to God’s fellowship and favor.

  It is indeed true that the real Christ, the Christ of the Bible, who offers himself to us as Savior from sin and Advocate with God, does in fact give peace and joy and moral strength and the privilege of his own friendship to those who trust him. But the Christ who is depicted and desired merely to make the lot of life’s casualties easier by supplying them with aids and comforts is not the real Christ, but a misrepresented and misconceived Christ—in effect, an imaginary Christ. And if we taught people to look to an imaginary Christ, we should have no grounds for expecting that they would find real salvation. We must be on our guard, therefore, against equating a natural bad conscience and sense of wretchedness with spiritual conviction of sin, and so omitting in our evangelism to sinners the basic truth about their condition—namely, that their sin has alienated them from God and exposed them to his condemnation, hostility and wrath, so that their first need is for a restored relationship with him.

  It may be asked: what are the signs of true conviction of sin, as distinct from the mere smart of a natural bad conscience, or the mere disgust at life which any disillusioned person may feel?

  The signs seem to be three in number.

  (1) Conviction of sin is essentially an awareness of a wrong relationship with God. It is not just a wrong relationship with one’s neighbor, or one’s own conscience and ideals for oneself, but with one’s Maker, the God in whose hand one’s breath is and on whom one depends for existence every moment. To define conviction of sin as a sense of need, without qualification, would not be enough; it is not any sense of need, but a sense of a particular need—a need, namely, for restoration of fellowship with God. It is the realization that, as one stands at present, one is in a relationship with God that spells only rejection, retribution, wrath and pain for the present and the future; and a realization that this is an intolerable relationship to remain in, and therefore a desire that, at whatever cost and on whatever terms, it might be changed. Conviction of sin may center on the sense of one’s guilt before God, or one’s uncleanness in his sight, or one’s rebellion against him, or one’s alienation and estrangement from him; but always it is a sense of the need to get right, not simply with oneself or other people, but with God.

  (2) Conviction of sin always includes conviction of sins. It involves a sense of guilt for particular wrongs done in the sight of God, from which one needs to turn and be rid of them if one is ever to be right with God. Thus, Isaiah was convicted specifically of sins of speech (Is 6:5) and Zacchaeus of sins of extortion (Lk 19:8).

  (3) Conviction of sin always includes conviction of sinfulness. Sinfulness is a sense of one’s complete corruption and perversity in God’s sight, and one’s consequent need of what Ezekiel called a “new heart” (Ezek 36:26), and in our Lord, a new birth (Jn 3:3-7, i.e., a moral re-creation). Thus, the author of Psalm 51—traditionally identified with David, convicted of his sin with Bathsheba—confesses not only particular transgressions (verses 1-4) but also the depravity of his nature (verses 5-6), and seeks cleansing from the guilt and defilement of both (verses 7-10). Indeed, perhaps the shortest way to tell whether a person is convicted of sin or not is to take him through Psalm 51, and see whether his heart is in fact speaking anything like the language of the psalmist.

  3. The gospel is a message about Christ. Christ is the Son of God incarnate; Christ is the Lamb of God, who died for sin; Christ is the risen Lord; Christ is the perfect Savior. Two points need to be made about the declaring of this part of the message.

  (1) We must not present the Person of Christ apart from his saving work. It is sometimes said that it is the presentation of Christ’s Person, rather than of doctrines about him, that draws sinners to his feet. It is true that it is the living Christ who saves, and that a theory of the atonement, however orthodox, is no substitute. When this remark is made, however, what is usually being suggested is that doctrinal instruction is dispensable in evangelistic preaching, and that all the evangelist need do is paint a vivid word-picture of the Man of Galilee who went about doing good and then assure the hearers that this Jesus is still alive to help them in their troubles. But such a message could hardly be called the gospel. It would, in reality, be a mere conundrum, serving only to mystify. Who was this Jesus? we should ask; and what is his position now? Such preaching would raise these questions while concealing the answers. And thus it would completely baffle the thoughtful listener.

  For the truth is that you cannot make sense of the historic figure of Jesus till you know about the incarnation—that this Jesus was in fact God the Son, made man to save sinners according to his Father’s eternal purpose. Nor can you make sense of his life till you know about the atonement—that he lived as man so that he might die as man for men, and that his passion, his judicial murder, was really his saving action of bearing away the world’s sins. Nor can you tell on what terms to approach him now till you know about the resurrection, ascension and heavenly session—that Jesus has been raised, and enthroned, and made King, and lives to save to the uttermost all who acknowledge his lordship. These doctrines, to mention no others, are essential to the gospel. Without them, there is no gospel, only a puzzle story about a man named Jesus. To oppose the teaching of doctrines about Christ to the presenting of his Person is, therefore, to put asunder two things which God has joined. It is really very perverse indeed; for the whole purpose of teaching these doctrines in evangelism is to throw light on the Person of the Lord Jesus Christ, and to make clear to our hearers just who it is that we want them to meet. When, in ordinary social life, we want people to know who it is that we are introducing them to, we tell them something about him and what he has done; and so it is here. The apostles themselves preached these doctrines in order to preach Christ, as the New Testament shows. In fact, without these doctrines you would have no gospel to preach at all. But there is a second and complementary point.

  (2) We must not present the saving work of Christ apart from his Person. Evangelistic preachers and personal workers have sometimes been known to make this mistake. In their concern to focus attention on the atoning death of Christ, as

  the sole sufficient ground on which sinners may be accepted with God, they have expounded the summons to saving faith in these terms: “Believe that Christ died for your sins.” The effect of this exposition is to represent the saving work of Christ in the past, dissociated from his Person in the pres-ent, as the whole object of our trust. But it is not biblical thus to isolate the work from the Worker. Nowhere in the New Testament is the call to believe expressed in such terms. What the New Testament calls for is faith in (en) or into (eis) or upon (epi) Christ himself—the placing of our trust in the living Savior, who died for sins. The object of saving faith is thus not, strictly speaking, the atonement, but the Lord Jesus Christ, who made atonement. We must not, in presenting the gospel, isolate the cross and its benefits from the Christ whose cross it was. For the persons to whom the benefits of Christ’s death belong are just those who trust his Person, and believe not upon his saving death simply, but upon him, the living Savior. “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31), said Paul. “Come to me . . . and I will give you rest” (Mt 11:28), said our Lord.

  This being so, one thing becomes clear straight away: namely, that the question about the extent of the atonement, which is being much agitated in some quarters, has no bearing on the content of the evangelistic message at this particular point. I do not propose to discuss this question now; I have done that elsewhere.[6] I am not at present asking you whether you think it is true to say that
Christ died in order to save every single human being—past, present and future—or not. Nor am I at present inviting you to make up your mind on this question, if you have not done so already. All I want to say here is that even if you think the above assertion is true, your presentation of Christ in evangelism ought not differ from that of the man who thinks it false.

  What I mean is this. It is obvious that if a preacher thought that the statement “Christ died for every one of you,” made to any congregation, would be unverifiable, and probably not true, he would take care not to make it in his gospel preaching. You do not find such statements in the sermons of, for instance, George Whitefield or Charles Spurgeon. But now, my point is that, even if a man thinks that this statement would be true if he made it, it is not a thing that he ever needs to say, or ever has reason to say, when preaching the gospel. For preaching the gospel, as we have just seen, means inviting sinners to come to Jesus Christ, the living Savior, who, by virtue of his atoning death, is able to forgive and save all those who put their trust in him. What has to be said about the cross when preaching the gospel is simply that Christ’s death is the ground on which Christ’s forgiveness is given. And this is all that has to be said. The question of the designed extent of the atonement does not come into the story at all.