Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God
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There is a famous old book on personal evangelism by
C. G. Trumbull, entitled Taking Men Alive. In the third chapter of that book, the author tells us of the rule that his father, H. C. Trumbull, made for himself in this matter. It was as follows: “Whenever I am justified in choosing my subject of conversation with another, the theme of themes [Christ] shall have prominence between us, so that I may learn of his need, and, if possible, meet it.” The key words here are: “whenever I am justified in choosing my subject of conversation with another.” They remind us, first, that personal evangelism, like all our dealings with our fellow men, should be courteous. And they remind us, second, that personal evangelism needs normally to be founded on friendship. You are not usually justified in choosing the subject of conversation with another till you have already begun to give yourself
to him in friendship and established a relationship with
him in which he feels that you respect him, are interested in him, and are treating him as a human being and not just as some kind of “case.” With some people, you may establish such a relationship in five minutes, whereas with others it may take months. But the principle remains the same. The right to talk intimately to another person about the Lord Jesus Christ has to be earned, and you earn it by convincing him that you are his friend, and that you really care about him. And therefore the indiscriminate buttonholing, the intrusive barging in to the privacy of other people’s souls, the thick-skinned insistence on expounding the things of God to reluctant strangers who are longing to get away—these modes of behavior, in which strong and loquacious personalities have sometimes indulged in the name of personal evangelism, should be written off as a travesty of personal evangelism. Impersonal evangelism would be a better name for them! In fact, rudeness of this sort dishonors God; moreover, it creates resentment and prejudices people against the Christ whose professed followers act so objectionably. The truth is that real personal evangelism is very costly, just because it demands of us a really personal relationship with the other person. We have to give ourselves in honest friendship to people, if ever our relationship with them is to reach the point at which we are justified in choosing to talk to them about Christ and in speaking to them about their own spiritual needs—without being either discourteous or offensive. If you wish to do personal evangelism, then—and I hope you do; you ought to—pray for the gift of friendship. A genuine friendliness is in any case a prime mark of the man who is learning to love his neighbor as himself.
By What Means and Methods Should
Evangelism Be Practiced?
There is today a controversy in some evangelical circles about evangelistic methods. Some are criticizing, and others are defending, the type of evangelistic meeting that has been a standard feature of English and American evangelical life for almost a century. Meetings of this type are well known, for they are very characteristic. They are deliberately made brisk and bright, in the hope that people who have little interest in the Christian message, and who may never have been inside a Christian church, may nevertheless find them an attraction. Everything is accordingly planned to create an atmosphere of warmth, good humor and happiness. The meeting normally includes a good deal of music—choir items, solo items, choruses and rousing hymns, heartily sung. Heavy emphasis is laid on the realities of Christian experience, both by the choice of hymns and by the use of testimonies. The meeting leads up to an appeal for decision, followed by an after-meeting or a time of personal counseling for the further instruction of those who have made, or wish to make, a decision in response to the appeal.
The main criticisms that are made of such meetings—whether they are wholly justified we would not venture to say—are as follows. Their breezy slickness (it is said) makes for irreverence. The attempt to give them “entertainment value” tends to lessen the sense of God’s majesty, to banish the spirit of worship and to cheapen men’s thoughts of their Creator; moreover, it is the worst possible preparation of the potential converts for the regular Sunday services in the churches which they will in due course join. The seemingly inevitable glamorizing of Christian experience in the testimonies is pastorally irresponsible and gives a falsely romanticized impression of what being a Christian is like. This, together with the tendency to indulge in long, drawn-out wheedling for decisions and the deliberate use of luscious music to stir sentiment, tends to produce “conversions” which are simply psychological and emotional upheavals, and not the fruit of spiritual conviction and renewal at all. The occasional character of the meetings makes it inevitable that appeals for decision will often be made on the basis of inadequate instruction as to what the decision involves and will cost, and such appeals are no better than a confidence trick. The desire to justify the meetings by reaping a crop of converts may prompt the preacher and the counselors to try and force people through the motions of decision prematurely, before they have grasped what it is really all about, and converts produced in this way tend to prove at best stunted and at worst spurious and, in the event, gospel-
hardened. The way ahead in evangelism, it is said, is to break completely with this pattern of evangelistic action, and to develop a new pattern (or, rather, restore the old one which existed before this type of meeting became standard), in which the evangelizing unit is the local church rather than a group or cross-section of churches. Then the evangelistic meeting finds its place among the local church’s services—a pattern, indeed, in which the local church’s services function continually as its evangelistic meetings.
The usual reply is that, while the things stigmatized are certainly real abuses, evangelistic meetings of the standard pattern can be, and frequently are, run in a way that avoids them. Such meetings, it is said, have proved their usefulness in the past; experience shows that God uses them still; and there seems to be no sufficient reason for abandoning them. It is argued that, while so many churches in each major denomination are failing in their evangelistic responsibility, these meetings may well be the only opportunity for presenting the gospel to vast multitudes of our fellow men and women. The way ahead, it is maintained, is not to abolish them but to reform them where abuses exist.
The debate continues. No doubt it will remain with us for some time to come. What I want to do here is not to go into this controversy but to go behind it. I want to isolate the key principle that should guide us in our assessment both of these and any other methods of evangelism that may be practiced or proposed.
What is this key principle? The following line of thought will make it clear.
Evangelism, as we have seen, is an act of communication with a view to conversion. In the last analysis, therefore, there is only one means of evangelism: namely, the gospel of Christ, explained and applied. Faith and repentance, the two complementary elements of which conversion consists, occur as a response to the gospel. “Faith comes from hearing,” Paul tells us, “and hearing through the word of
Christ” (Rom 10:17)—or, as The New English Bible expands the verse, “faith is awakened by the message, and the message that awakens it comes through the word of Christ.”
Again, in the last analysis, there is only one agent of evangelism: namely, the Lord Jesus Christ. It is Christ himself who through his Holy Spirit enables his servants to explain the gospel truly and apply it powerfully and effectively; just as it is Christ himself who through his Holy Spirit opens people’s minds (Lk 24:25) and hearts (Acts 16:14) to receive the gospel, and so draws them savingly to himself (Jn 12:32). Paul speaks of his achievements as an evangelist as “what Christ has wrought through me to win obedience from the Gentiles, by word and deed . . . by the power of the Holy Spirit” (Rom 15:18-19 rsv). Since Augustine, the point has often been made that Christ is the true minister of the gospel sacraments, and the human celebrant acts merely as his hand. We need to remember the equally basic truth that Christ is the true minister of the gospel word, and the human preacher or witness acts merely as his mouth.
So, in the last analysis, there
is only one method of evangelism: namely, the faithful explanation and application of the gospel message. From which it follows—and this is the key principle which we are seeking—that the test for any proposed strategy, technique or style of evangelistic action must be this: will it in fact serve the word? Is it calculated to be a means of explaining the gospel truly and fully and applying it deeply and exactly? To the extent to which it is so calculated, it is lawful and right; to the extent to which it tends to overlay and obscure the realities of the message, and to blunt the edge of their application, it is ungodly and wrong.
Let us work this out. It means that we need to bring under review all our evangelistic plans and practices—our missions, rallies and campaigns; our sermons, talks and testimonies; our big meetings, our little meetings and our presentation of the gospel in personal dealing; the tracts that we give, the books that we lend, the letters that we write—and to ask about each of them questions such as the following:
Is this way of presenting Christ calculated to impress on people that the gospel is a word from God? Is it calculated to divert their attention from human and all things merely human to God and his truth? Or is its tendency rather to distract attention from the Author and authority of the message to the person and performance of the messenger? Does it make the gospel sound like a human idea, a preacher’s plaything, or like a divine revelation, before which the human messenger himself stands in awe? Does this way of presenting Christ savor of human cleverness and showmanship? Does it tend thereby to exalt man? Or does it embody rather the straightforward, unaffected simplicity of the messenger whose sole concern is to deliver his message, and who has no wish to call attention to himself, and who desires so far as he can to blot himself out and hide, as it were, behind his message, fearing nothing so much as that men should admire and applaud him when they ought to be bowing down and humbling themselves before the mighty Lord whom he represents?
Again: is this way of presenting Christ calculated to promote, or impede, the work of the word in men’s minds? Is it going to clarify the meaning of the message or leave it enigmatic and obscure, locked up in pious jargon and oracular formulae? Is it going to make people think, and think hard, and think hard about God, and about themselves in relation to God? Or will it tend to stifle thought by playing exclusively on the emotions? Is it calculated to stir the mind or put it to sleep? Is this way of presenting Christ an attempt to move men by the force of feeling or of truth? Not, of course, that there is anything wrong with emotion; it is strange for a person to be converted without emotion; what is wrong is the sort of appeal to emotion, and playing on emotion, which harrows people’s feelings as a substitute for instructing their minds.
Again: we have to ask, is this way of presenting Christ calculated to convey to people the doctrine of the gospel, and not just part of it but the whole of it—the truth about our Creator and his claims, and about ourselves as guilty, lost and helpless sinners, needing to be born again, and about the Son of God who became man, died for sins and lives to forgive sinners and bring them to God? Or is it likely to be deficient here, deal in half-truths and leave people with an incomplete understanding of these things, hurrying them on to the demand for faith and repentance without having made it clear just what they need to repent of or what they ought to believe?
Again: we have to ask, is this way of presenting Christ calculated to convey to people the application of the gospel, and not just part of it but the whole of it—the summons to see and know oneself as God sees and knows one, that is, as a sinful creature, and to face the breadth and depth of the need into which a wrong relationship with God has brought one and to face too the cost and consequences of turning to receive Christ as Savior and Lord? Or is it likely to be deficient here, and to gloss over some of this, and to give an inadequate, distorted impression of what the gospel requires? Will it, for instance, leave people unaware that they have any immediate obligation to respond to Christ at all? Or will it leave them supposing that all they have to do is to trust Christ as a sin-bearer, not realizing that they must also deny themselves and enthrone him as their Lord (the error which we might call only-believism)? Or will it leave them imagining that the whole of what they have to do is to consecrate themselves to Christ as their Master, not realizing that they must also receive him as their Savior (the error which we might call good-resolutionism)? We need to remember here that spiritually it is even more dangerous for a man whose conscience is roused to make a misconceived response to the gospel and take up with a defective religious practice than for him to make no response at all. If you turn a publican into a Pharisee, you make his condition worse, not better.
Again: we have to ask, is this way of presenting Christ calculated to convey gospel truth in a manner that is appropriately serious? Is it calculated to make people feel that they are indeed facing a matter of life and death? Is it calculated to make them see and feel the greatness of God, and the greatness of their sin and need, and the greatness of the grace of Christ? Is it calculated to make them aware of the awful majesty and holiness of God? Will it help them to realize that it is a fearful thing to fall into his hands? Or is this way of presenting Christ so light and casual and cozy and jolly as to make it hard for the hearers to feel that the gospel is a matter of any consequence, save as a pick-me-up for life’s misfits? It is a gross insult to God, and a real disservice to men, to cheapen and trivialize the gospel by one’s presentation of it. Not that we should put on an affected solemnity when speaking of spiritual things; there is nothing more essentially frivolous than a mock seriousness, and nothing more likely to make hypocrites out of our hearers. What is needed is this: that we, who would speak for Christ, should pray constantly that God will put and keep in our hearts a sense of his greatness and glory, of the joy of fellowship with him, and of the dreadfulness of spending time and eternity without him; and then that God will enable us to speak honestly, straightforwardly and just as we feel about these matters. Then we shall be really natural in presenting the gospel—and really serious too.
It is by asking questions of this sort that we must test and, where necessary, reform our evangelistic methods. The principle is that the best method of evangelism is the one which serves the gospel most completely. It is the one which bears the clearest witness to the divine origin of the message and to the life-and-death character of the issues which it raises. It is the one which makes possible the most full and thorough explanation of the good news of Christ and his cross, and the most exacting and searching application of it. It is the one which most effectively engages the minds of those to whom witness is borne and makes them most vividly aware that the gospel is God’s word, addressed personally to them in their own situation. What that best method is in each case, you and I have to find out for ourselves. It is in the light of this principle that all debates about evangelistic methods must be decided. For the present, we leave the matter there.
4
Divine Sovereignty and Evangelism
We start this final section by summing up what we have learned so far about evangelism.
Evangelism, we have learned, is a task appointed to all God’s people everywhere. It is the task of communicating a message from the Creator to rebel mankind. The message begins with information and ends with an invitation. The information concerns God’s work of making his Son a perfect Savior for sinners. The invitation is God’s summons to mankind generally to come to the Savior and find life. God commands all men everywhere to repent, and promises forgiveness and restoration to all who do. The Christian is sent into the world as God’s herald and Christ’s ambassador, to broadcast this message as widely as he can. This is both his duty (because God commands it, and love to our neighbor requires it) and his privilege (because it is a great thing to speak for God, and to take our neighbor the remedy—the only remedy—that can save him from the terrors of spiritual death). Our job, then, is to go to our fellow men and tell them the gospel of Christ, and try by every means to make it clear to t
hem, to remove as best we can any difficulties that they may find in it, to impress them with its seriousness, and to urge them to respond to it. This is our abiding responsibility; it is a basic part of our Christian calling.
But now we come to the question that has loomed over us from the outset. How is all this affected by our belief in the sovereignty of God?
We saw earlier that divine sovereignty is one of a pair of truths which form an antinomy in biblical thinking. The God of the Bible is both Lord and Lawgiver in his world; he is both man’s King and man’s Judge. Consequently, if we would be biblical in our outlook, we have to make room in our minds for the thoughts of divine sovereignty and of human responsibility to stand side by side. Man is indubitably responsible to God, for God is the Lawgiver who fixes his duty, and the Judge who takes account of him as to whether or not he has done it. And God is indubitably sovereign over man, for he controls and orders all human deeds, as he controls and orders all else in his universe. Man’s responsibility for his actions, and God’s sovereignty in relation to those same actions, are thus, as we saw, equally real and ultimate facts.
The apostle Paul forces this antinomy upon our notice by speaking of God’s will (thele4ma) in connection with both these seemingly incompatible relations of the Creator to his human creatures, and that within the limits of a single short epistle. In the fifth and sixth chapters of Ephesians, he desires that his readers may “understand what the will of the Lord is” (5:17) and “[do] the will of God from the heart” (6:6). This is the will of God as Lawgiver, the will of God that man is to know and obey. In the same sense, Paul writes to the Thessalonians: “This is the will of God, your sanctification: that you abstain from sexual immorality” (1 Thess 4:3; cf. Mt 7:21; 12:50; Jn 7:17; 1 Jn 2:17, etc.). In the first chapter of Ephesians, however, Paul speaks of God’s having chosen him and his fellow Christians in Christ before the world began “according to the purpose of his will” (verse 5); he calls God’s intention to sum up all things in Christ at the end of the world “the mystery of his will” (verse 9); and he speaks of God himself as “him who works all things according to the counsel of his will” (verse 11). Here God’s “will” is clearly his eternal purpose for the disposal of his creatures, his will as the world’s sovereign Lord. This is the will that God actually fulfills in and through everything that actually happens—even man’s transgressions of his law.[8] Older theology distinguished the two as God’s will of precept and his will of purpose, the former being his published declaration of what man ought to do, the latter his (largely secret) decision as to what he himself will do. The distinction is between God’s law and his plan. The former tells man what he should be; the latter settles what he will be. Both aspects of the will of God are facts, though how they are related in the mind of God is inscrutable to us. This is one of the reasons why we speak of God as incomprehensible.