Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God

by J. I. Packer

  The fact is that the New Testament never calls on any man to repent on the ground that Christ died specifically and particularly for him. The basis on which the New Testament invites sinners to put faith in Christ is simply that they need him, and that he offers himself to them, and that those who receive him are promised all the benefits that his death secured for his people. What is universal and all-inclusive in the New Testament is the invitation to faith and the promise of salvation to all who believe (see Mt 11:28ff.; 22:9; Lk 2:10-11; 12:8; Jn 1:12; 3:14ff.; 6:40, 54; 7:37; 11:26; 12:46; Acts 2:21; 10:43; 13:39; Rom 1:16; 3:22; 9:33; 10:4ff.; Gal 3:22; Tit 2:11; Rev 22:17; cf. Is 4:1).

  Our task in evangelism is to reproduce as faithfully as possible the New Testament emphasis. To go beyond the New Testament, or to distort its viewpoint or shift its stress, is always wrong. And therefore—if we may at this point speak in the words of James Denney—“we do not think of separating [Christ’s] work from him who achieved it. The New Testament knows only of a living Christ, and all apostolic preaching of the gospel holds up the living Christ to men. But the living Christ is Christ who died, and he is never preached apart from his death, and from its reconciling power. It is the living Christ, with the virtue of his reconciling death in him, who is the burden of the apostolic message. . . . The task of the evangelist is to preach Christ . . . in his character as the Crucified.”[7] The gospel is not “believe that Christ died for everybody’s sins, and therefore for yours,” any more than it is “believe that Christ died only for certain people’s sins, and so perhaps not for yours.” The gospel is “believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, who died for sins, and now offers you himself as your Savior.” This is the message which we are to take to the world. We have no business to ask them to put faith in any view of the extent of the atonement; our job is to point them to the living Christ, and summon them to trust in him.

  It was because they had both grasped this that John Wesley and George Whitefield could regard each other as brothers in evangelism, though they differed on the extent of the atonement. For their views on this subject did not enter into their gospel preaching. Both were content to preach the gospel just as it stands in Scripture: that is, to proclaim “the living Christ, with the virtue of his reconciling death in him,” to offer him to sinners, and to invite the lost to come to him and so find life. This brings us to the final ingredient in the gospel message.

  4. The gospel is a summons to faith and repentance. All who hear the gospel are summoned by God to repent and believe. “He [God] commands all people everywhere to repent,” Paul told the Athenians (Acts 17:30). When asked by his hearers what they should do in order to “be doing the works of God,” our Lord replied: “This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent” (Jn 6:29). And in

  1 John 3:23 we read: “This is his commandment, that we believe in the name of his Son Jesus Christ.” Repentance and faith are rendered matters of duty by God’s direct command, and hence impenitence and unbelief are singled out in the New Testament as most grievous sins (cf. Lk 13:3, 5; 2 Thess 2:11-12). With these universal commands, as we indicated above, go universal promises of salvation to all who obey them: “Everyone who believes in him receives forgiveness of sins through his name” (Acts 10:43), “Let the one who desires take the water of life without price” (Rev 22:17), “God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (Jn 3:16). These words are promises to which God will stand as long as time shall last.

  It needs to be said that faith is not a mere optimistic feeling, any more than repentance is a mere regretful or remorseful feeling. Faith and repentance are both acts, and acts of the whole man. Faith is more than just credence; faith is essentially the casting and resting of oneself and one’s confidence on the promises of mercy, which Christ has given to sinners, and on the Christ who gave those promises. Equally, repentance is more than just sorrow for the past; repentance is a change of mind and heart, a new life of denying self and serving the Savior as king in self’s place. Mere credence without trusting, and mere remorse without turning, do not save. “Even the demons believe—and shudder!” (Jas 2:19). “Worldly grief produces death” (2 Cor 7:10).

  Two further points need to be made also.

  (1) The demand is for faith as well as repentance. It is not enough to resolve to turn from sin, and give up evil habits, and try to put Christ’s teaching into practice by being religious and doing all possible good to others. Aspiration, resolution, morality and religiosity are no substitutes for faith. Martin Luther and John Wesley had all these long before they had faith. If there is to be faith, however, there must be a foundation of knowledge: a man must know of Christ, of his cross and of his promises before saving faith becomes a possibility for him. In our presentation of the gospel, therefore, we need to stress these things, in order to lead sinners to abandon all confidence in themselves and to trust wholly in Christ and the power of his redeeming blood to give them acceptance with God. For nothing less than this is faith.

  (2) The demand is for repentance as well as faith. It is not enough to believe that only through Christ and his death are sinners justified and accepted, and that one’s own record is sufficient to bring down God’s condemning sentence twenty times over, and that, apart from Christ, one has no hope. Knowledge of the gospel, and orthodox belief of it, is no substitute for repentance. If there is to be repentance, however, there must, again, be a foundation of knowledge. A man must know that, in the words of the first of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses, “when our Lord and Master, Jesus Christ, said ‘Repent,’ he called for the entire life of believers to be one of repentance,” and he must also know what repentance involves. More than once, Christ deliberately called attention to the radical break with the past that repentance involves. “If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. . . . [W]hoever loses his life for my sake [but only he] will save it” (Lk 9:23-24). “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life [i.e., put them all decisively second in his esteem], he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26).

  “Any one of you who does not renounce all that he has cannot be my disciple.” The repentance that Christ requires of his people consists in a settled refusal to set any limit to the claims which he may make on their lives. Our Lord knew—who better?—how costly his followers would find it to maintain this refusal, and let him have his way with them all the time, and therefore he wished them to face out and think through the implications of discipleship before committing themselves. He did not desire to make disciples under false pretenses. He had no interest in gathering vast crowds of professed adherents who would melt away as soon as they found out what following him actually demanded of them. In our own presentation of Christ’s gospel, therefore, we need to lay a similar stress on the cost of following Christ, and make sinners face it soberly before we urge them to respond to the message of free forgiveness. In common honesty, we must not conceal the fact that free forgiveness, in one sense, will cost everything; or else our evangelizing becomes a sort of confidence trick. And where there is no clear knowledge, and hence no realistic recognition of the real claims that Christ makes, there can be no repentance, and therefore no salvation. Such is the evangelistic message that we are sent to make known.

  What Is the Motive for Evangelizing?

  There are, in fact, two motives that should spur us constantly to evangelize. The first is love of God and concern for his glory; the second is love of man and concern for his welfare.

  1. The first motive is primary and fundamental. The chief end of man is to glorify God. The biblical rule of life is “do all to the glory of God” (1 Cor 10:31). Men glorify God by obeying his word and fulfilling his revealed will. Similarly, the first and great commandment is “You shall love the Lord your God” (Mt 22:37). We show love to the Father and the Son, who have so richly loved u
s, by keeping their commandments.

  “Whoever has my commandments and keeps them, he it is who loves me,” said our Lord (Jn 14:21). “This is the love of God,” wrote John, “that we keep his commandments” (1 Jn 5:3). Now, evangelism is one of the activities that the Father and the Son have commanded. “This gospel of the kingdom,” Christ tells us, “will [according to Mark, “must”] be proclaimed throughout the whole world as a testimony” (Mt 24:14; Mk 13:10). And before his ascension Christ charged his disciples in the following categorical terms: “Go . . . and make disciples of all nations.” To this command he added at once a comprehensive promise: “And lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age” (Mt 28:19-20 rsv). The comprehensiveness of this promise shows us how wide is the application of the command to which it is appended. The phrase “to the close of the age” makes it clear that the “you” to whom the promise was given was not solely and exclusively the eleven disciples; this promise extends to the whole Christian church throughout history, the entire community of which the eleven were, so to speak, founding members. It is, therefore, a promise for us no less than for them, and a promise of great comfort too. But if the promise extends to us, then the commission with which it is linked must extend to us also. The promise was given to encourage the eleven, lest they be overwhelmed at the size and difficulty of the task of world evangelism that Christ was laying on them. If it is our privilege to appropriate the promise, then it is also our responsibility to accept the commission. The task laid on the eleven is the church’s constant task. And if it is the church’s task in general, then it is your task and my task in particular. If, therefore, we love God and are concerned to glorify him, we must obey his command to evangelize.

  There is a further strand to this thought. We glorify God by evangelizing, not only because evangelizing is an act of obedience, but also because in evangelism we tell the world what great things God has done for the salvation of sinners. God is glorified when his mighty works of grace are made known. The psalmist exhorts us to “tell of his salvation from day to day. / Declare his glory among the nations, / his marvelous works among all the peoples!” (Ps 96:2-3). For a Christian to talk to the unconverted about the Lord Jesus Christ and his saving power is in itself honoring and glorifying to God.

  2. The second motive that should prompt us to assiduous evangelism is love of our neighbor, and the desire to see our fellow humans saved. The wish to win the lost for Christ should be, and indeed is, the natural, spontaneous outflow of love in the heart of everyone who has been born again. Our Lord confirms the Old Testament demand that we should love our neighbor as ourselves (Mk 12:31; Lk 10:27-28). “As we have opportunity,” writes Paul, “let us do good to everyone” (Gal 6:10). What greater need has any man than the need to know Christ? What greater good can we do to any man than to set before him the knowledge of Christ? Insofar as we really love our neighbor as ourselves, we shall of necessity want him to enjoy the salvation which is so precious to us. This, indeed, should not be a thing that we need to think about, let alone argue about. The impulse to evangelize should spring up spontaneously in us as we see our neighbor’s need of Christ.

  Who is my neighbor? When the lawyer, confronted with the demand of love for one’s neighbor, asked our Lord this question, Christ replied by telling the story of the Good Samaritan (Lk 10:29-37). What that story teaches is simply this: that any fellow human being whom you meet who is in need is your neighbor; God has put him there so that you may help him; and your business is to show yourself neighbor to him by doing all that you can to meet his need, whatever it may be. “You go, and do likewise,” said our Lord to the lawyer. He says the same to us. And the principle applies to all forms of need, spiritual no less than material. So that when we find ourselves in contact with men and women who are without Christ and so face spiritual death, we are to look on them as our neighbors in this sense and ask ourselves what we can do to make Christ known to them.

  May I stress again: if we ourselves have known anything of the love of Christ for us, and if our hearts have felt any measure of gratitude for the grace that has saved us from death and hell, then this attitude of compassion and care for our spiritually needy fellow men ought to come naturally and spontaneously to us. It was in connection with aggressive evangelism that Paul declared that “the love of Christ controls us” (2 Cor 5:14). It is a tragic and ugly thing when Christians lack desire, and are actually reluctant, to share the precious knowledge that they have with others whose need of it is just as great as their own. It was natural for Andrew, when he found the Messiah, to go off and tell his brother Simon, and for Philip to hurry to break the good news to his friend Nathanael (Jn 1:40ff.). They did not need to be told to do this; they did it naturally and spontaneously, just as one would naturally and spontaneously share with one’s family and friends any other piece of news that vitally affected them. There is something very wrong with us if we do not ourselves find it natural to act in this way: let us be quite clear about that. It is a great privilege to evangelize; it is a wonderful thing to be able to tell others of the love of Christ, knowing that there is nothing that they need more urgently to know, and no knowledge in the world that can do them so much good. We should not, therefore, be reluctant and backward to evangelize on the personal and individual level. We should be glad and happy to do it. We should not look for excuses for wriggling out of our obligation when occasion offers to talk to others about the Lord Jesus Christ. If we find ourselves shrinking from this responsibility and trying to evade it, we need to face ourselves with the fact that in this we are yielding to sin and Satan. If (as is usual) it is the fear of being thought odd and ridiculous, or of losing popularity in certain circles, that holds us back, we need to ask ourselves in the presence of God: Ought these things to stop us loving our neighbor? If it is a false shame, which is not shame at all but pride in disguise, that keeps our tongue from Christian witness when we are with other people. We need to press on our conscience this question: Which matters more—our reputation or their salvation? We cannot be complacent about this gangrene of conceit and cowardice when we weigh up our lives in the presence of God. What we need to do is to ask for grace to be truly ashamed of ourselves, and to pray that we may so overflow in love for God that we will overflow in love for our fellow men, and so find it an easy and natural and joyful thing to share with them the good news of Christ.

  By now, I hope, it is becoming clear to us how we should regard our evangelistic responsibility. Evangelism is not the only task that our Lord has given us, nor is it a task that we are all called to discharge in the same way. We are not all called to be preachers; we are not all given equal opportunities or comparable abilities for personal dealing with men and women who need Christ. But we all have some evangel­istic responsibility which we cannot shirk without failing in love both to our God and to our neighbor. To start with, we all can and should be praying for the salvation of unconverted people, particularly in our families, and among our friends and everyday associates. And then we must learn to see what possibilities of evangelism our everyday situation holds, and to be enterprising in our use of them. It is the nature of love to be enterprising. If you love someone, you are constantly trying to think out what is the best you can do for him and how best you can please him, and it is your pleasure to give him pleasure by the things you devise for him. If, then, we love God—Father, Son and Spirit—for all that they have done for us, we shall muster all our initiative and enterprise to make the most that we can of every situation for their glory—and one chief way of doing this is to seek out ways and means of spreading the gospel, and obeying the divine command to make disciples everywhere. Similarly, if we love our neighbor, we shall muster all our initiative and enterprise to find ways and means of doing him good. And one chief way of doing him good is to share with him our knowledge of Christ. Thus, if we love God and our neighbor, we shall evangelize, and we shall be enterprising in our evangelism. We shall not ask with reluctance how much we have to do i
n this realm, as if evangelizing were a distasteful and burdensome task. We shall not inquire anxiously after the minimum outlay of effort in evangelism that will satisfy God. But we shall ask eagerly, and pray earnestly to be shown, just how much it is in our power to do to spread the knowledge of Christ among men; and once we see what the possibilities are, we shall give ourselves wholeheartedly to the task.

  One further point must be added, however, lest what we have said be misapplied. It must never be forgotten that the enterprise required of us in evangelism is the enterprise of love: an enterprise that springs from a genuine interest in those whom we seek to win, and a genuine care for their well-being, and expresses itself in a genuine respect for them and a genuine friendliness toward them. One sometimes meets a scalp-hunting zeal in evangelism, both in the pulpit and on the personal level, which is both discreditable and alarming. It is discreditable, because it reflects, not love and care nor the desire to be of help, but arrogance and conceit and pleasure in having power over the lives of others. It is alarming, because it finds expression in a ferocious psychological pummeling of the poor victim, which may do great damage to sensitive and impressionable souls. But if love prompts and rules our evangelistic work, we shall approach other people in a different spirit. If we truly care for them, and if our hearts truly love and fear God, then we shall seek to present Christ to them in a way that is both honoring to God and respectful to them. We shall not try to violate their personalities, or exploit their weaknesses, or ride roughshod over their feelings. What we shall be trying to do, rather, is to show them the reality of our friendship and concern by sharing with them our most valuable possession. And this spirit of friendship and concern will shine through all that we say to them, whether in the pulpit or in private, however drastic and shattering the truths that we tell them may be.