PHILOSOPHY OF EVANGELISM

PHILOSOPHY OF EVANGELISM

There is no doubt that the Bible calls all men and women to be evangelist. Matthew 28 is clear that the Christian is to be a maker of disciples because Jesus has been give all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, we as Christians should take the work of evangelism very seriously because the work of the evangelist is to make disciples. One could argue that there is nothing more important than the work of evangelizing the lost and bringing them to repentance of sins and faith in Jesus Christ. That is the work of the Christian. Our work is to reap the fields that are ripe. We are to expand the borders of the kingdom by speaking forth the gospel of Jesus Christ that those who are captive to the devil might know the truth and be set free from his grasp.

For this task, we should think about some different areas that will help us in the area of evangelism. Evangelism, though it does not take a seminary trained scholar to do, is not something that should be taken lightly and done with half-halfheartedness or half-mindedness. Thus we will work though some simple principles that together will make a philosophy of evangelism.

Becoming an Evangelistic

When it comes to the area of evangelism we must acknowledge that there will be both motivations and hindrances in accomplishing the task. There will be forces for us to evangelize the lost and there will be forces against us evangelizing the lost. Therefore, we must be ready capture the positive motivations and grow off of them while embracing the negative and learning how to minimize there strengths against us.

Motivations

The primary motivation for us to evangelize should be for the glory of God in the man Jesus Christ. Everything we do should ultimately be for the glory of God in Jesus Christ. So it would be foolish for us to give any reason as being primary apart from the glory of Jesus Christ. 1 Corinthians 15 is clear that what ever we do, it must be done with the primary focus of bringing glory to God. But how does evangelism bring glory to God?

There is nothing in this world more beautiful than to see the life of a wretched sinner, one separated from the love of God and at his core an enemy of God, turned to God with peace and adoption by God as son. The greatness of God is so magnified by such an act because it demonstrates the true beauty of His nature, that a sinner would be willing to turn away from the sin that he loves and cling to a Savior who died for Him.

It also magnifies God in that the kingdom of His Son Jesus Christ is expanding into the enemies territory as strong holds are being broken down. We should long to see more and more people become worshipers of Jesus Christ for He along is worthy of worship. We must take into account that there are over a billion Muslims who worship Allah, over a billion Chinese that worship the emperor, and over a billion Hindus who worship some three million gods, yet only Jesus is worthy of their praise. We should be like Paul in Acts 17, were when he saw the idols of the city he was provoked because only Jesus is worth of their praise. Only Jesus is in heaven seated at the Father's right hand and only He was worthy to open the scrolls mentioned in Revelation. Therefore we should hunger that men and women turn from their vain idols and worship the one and only true and living God.

The second motivation should be for the sake of the lost. The nature of things is that what we worship we will end up becoming like. This is seen quite clearly in the Exodus 32-34 narrative as the prophet of God, Moses, goes up the mountain of God to receive the Law of God. While he is gone the people force Aaron to make for them an idol that they may worship. The idol Aaron makes is that of a cow and he proclaims that this is the God who delivered the people out of bondage to Egypt. When Moses descends from the mountains and sees them he calls the people a stiff necked people. The imagery here is that because the people worshiped a cow which has a stiff neck, they to became stiff necked.

Jeremiah continues this thought when he said that the people became vain or worthless because the gods they worshiped were vain and worthless. Therefore, we should seek to be evangelist because we desire good and not harm for out fellow man. In a very generic sense all men are children of God, for all men come from His creation. But that is not enough to keep God from doing harm to those who reject Him. The Lord promises that those who do not give praise to God in the man Jesus Christ will be judged by the full fury of hell because of their great rebellion. However, God has provided for them an escape in His Son for all who would worship Him in Spirit and in truth. Therefore we should be motivated to evangelize because it saves people from themselves and from the wrath of God to come in the end.

Lastly, we should be motivated to evangelize because it is a command of God and we know that if we are faithful to keep His commands it will do us good. Ultimately, doing the work of an evangelist will bring sanctification into our lives. If we are faithful to do as God as commanded, He has promised to bless us abundantly in this life. Now that blessing is not material blessing like many assume, but it is the blessing of His presence and a growing relationship in love with Him. Though ultimately we should do what we do for the good of God and others, we can rejoice in the fact that we are blessed by it as well.

Hindrances

There are however hindrances to keep us from being men and women who preach the gospel. There are numerous hindrances that I could mention, but for the sake of time I will only mention one. That is that we fill it will in some way cause us harm, whether that be physical, emotional, or something else. We do not evangelize if we are Christians because we fill that it will cause us more harm than it is worth. Sadly, most of us (including myself) are not the evangelist we should be. The primary way to guard against this sort of hindrance is to understand that any sort of pain that we experience in this world will not compare to the glory we receive in the next. Our motivations should so far exceed the hindrance of self-preservation that it should never even effect us. But it does! Therefore we must always prepare ourselves for the attack of the evil one who will call our desire to evangelize into question and be ready to say, “No matter the cost, I will obey my Lord for His glory, the good of His elect, and for my own joy.”

Qualities in Evangelism

It should also be stated that the evangelist must be a man of high character. No one will ever listen to a man who preaches good news if he fails to live in accordance with it. The evangelist must be a man who is above reproach and is identified with a life like his Savior.

But the fact that he has a high moral character should extend past just keeping the moral code. The evangelist must also be a man of joy and compassion. When we look at the Savior, even when death was before Him, He was a man of joy and contentment. We to must be men of sovereign joy, knowing that out God holds the future in His hands. It is a sad thing to see a man try to tell someone about Jesus, all the while being negative about the circumstances of his life. If we are going to win men and women to Jesus Christ we have to show that He in fact brings us joy. Even if that joy is not placed in the things of this world, but in the things to come, being a Christian should bring about some since of happiness—especially since it means that we now have peace with God.

At the same time, we should be a people marked by compassion. Not only compassion for the sick, aged, widowed, orphaned, and oppressed, but for all sinners in general. To often we look at sinners with disgust because of their heinous acts of immorality, drunkenness, and murder, forgetting that if it were not for the saving grace of Jesus Christ, we do would be just like them. The fact that we are not all homosexuals, drunks, and murders is purely evidence to the grace of God. Therefore we should have a great deal of compassion on those who remain in sin and plead with them and with God that they might enter into the New Covenant, having their sins forgive and their minds changed. Because of the grace of God, we have been made new creatures, superior to the rest of the world by our union with Christ, but not superior in the sense that we are not better in and of ourselves, but superior in our responsibilities to share the gospel of God with all men. Therefore, we should have compassion on the sinner and extend to them the forgiveness of God in Christ Jesus that they might have fellowship with us.

Theology in Evangelism

For someone to be an effective evangelist he must in fact be a theologian. Now, I do not mean that he has to be able to explain the Trinity in concrete terms, nor does he have to be able to expound on the difficult union of divine and flesh in the man Jesus Christ. But he must be a theologian in the sense that He knows the gospel of God and why we call it good news. He must understand what we were before our conversion and what we are after it. He must understand that the law is what leads us to Christ and is not out means to salvation. To often, people seeking to please God by doing the work of evangelism do right in using the law of God to show people their need, but then, against the will of God, make it appear that if they were to keep the law they would find themselves justified before God by the law. We know from Scripture that the law was never given to save, but to condemn. Therefore, for a man to be an evangelist he must know the difference between law and gospel.

The law is what is required of man that he might be found blameless and secure his right to covenant blessings. However, we know that no man is able to keep the law and if you break the law in one area you have broken the whole law and therefore lose merit to obtain covenant blessings and therefore deserve the punishment due: eternal wrath. Thus, the law is a guide to proper living, but more than that, the law is a tutor teaching us of our need for the gospel.

The gospel is quite simply that which God has accomplished for us. The gospel is that God having seen our state of sin and rebellion, chose in divine wisdom to make His Son our substitute, and by placing Him on the judgment tree poured out His full measure of wrath meant for sin on Him so that those who come to Him would not find the wrath they are due, but the blessings merited by Christ's righteousness. Thus, the gospel is the peace of God made available to us by the death of His Son and now we are sons of God and co-inheritors with Christ of all things.

The gospel is not a changed life. The gospel is not a better family life. The gospel is not a community of people that love you. All of these things might be the consequence of the gospel being believed, but they in themselves are not the gospel. The evangelist must always remember that. The evangelist must remember that the gospel is what God has accomplished for us in His Son Jesus Christ.

Testimony in Evangelism

It is true though that our testimony can be a very powerful tool in evangelism. Our testimony is not the gospel, but it is the power of the gospel being manifested in real time. When a person once torn by sin is made whole by the power of the gospel, that speaks to the hearts of people who know what it is like to be torn. Our testimony is a starting point for the conversion of the gospel.

We must be careful however not to allow our testimony to become the center of our witnessing act. Our testimony is merely an introduction to what Jesus has done for us on the cross and by raising in power. It is by faith in this that a man is saved, not by desiring to be changed like the justified saint. Therefore, we should be ready to give an answer for the hope we have and we have the right to use our testimony to show the effectiveness of the gospel. Therefore, we should long to share our lives with people and by doing so open the door for sharing the good news of God in Christ Jesus.

Familial Evangelism

The last section of my paper will be focused on where evangelism takes place. There could be more divisions to these to make them more specific, but I feel that these three sections do the job well. The first is familial evangelism. What I mean by that is the evangelism that takes place inside one's own family.

Most of us I would say have a great deal of family members who are lost. Yet many times these tend to be the family members that we spend the least amount of effort in building relationships with. However, we should seek to build relationships with our lost family members that through those relationships we can share the good news of Jesus Christ.

What I have found in most family situations is that people genuinely want to be close to their families, whether immediate or distant. We as believers should seek to take advantage of peoples desires to be close to their families and make those connections for the kingdom of Jesus Christ. After we build a strong relationship with our family and show them that we really do love them and aren't just trying to use them, ofter times they will be very open to what we have to say (figuring that our lives are examples of what they should be). After these ties are built we can start to deal with the issue of sin in their lives and their need for a Savior. Something that usually isn't taken well by people who don't have a close relationship with you. Therefore we should take advantage of the opportunities God has given us by putting us in the families we are born into.

Relational Evangelism

The next area of evangelism is relational evangelism. This is much like familial, in that it starts with solid relationships of love and care, but differs in the fact that they are not family. In relational evangelism it starts by getting out into the world and meeting people and building friendships. These can start at jobs or social groups. The idea is to get out into the world and meet people and build relationships with them so that they can see that you care about them and can be trusted.

After having this sort of relationship for a while the person will begin to notice differences in you that he might not see in others. Because of this he will wonder about you and why you do what you do. It is at that time that out testimony must go beyond actions and into words. Because of our behavior before our friends, they will see us as experts on what we talk about. Not because we are scholars, but because we live it out. What we believe affects out lives. Therefore we should seek out ways to meet people and get into peoples lives that through those relationships we can share the goodness of Christ.

Confrontational Evangelism

The previous two forms of evangelism are probably the best and will most likely return the greatest amount of converts and therefore we need to be about the gospel with people we know well. However, the amount of people that we know is very limited. We don't have the time to build relationships with everyone. But in our day to day work we meet a tons of people. Therefore we should be about the work of doing evangelism with the people we meet every day.

A professor once told me a story about another professor who was traveling through the middle of nowhere when he came to a gas station. He stopped to get gas and went inside to pay. When he got in there to pay he felt a nudging of the Spirit to tell this young lady working at the counter about Jesus. He thought to himself how he did not know her and how she would not listen anyway. So he did not tell her about the gospel of Jesus Christ.

As he was leaving another man walked into the gas station. He was a big man and sort of scary to look at. He walked right up to the counter and said to the lady, “You need Jesus!” The professor was shocked by this man's words and thought how he was doing it all wrong. He knew that was not the way to do evangelism. To the professors surprise the girl broke down in tears and said how she had been waiting all day for someone to tell her that. She had been waiting all day for someone to tell her of her need for a Savior and of a Savior who offers salvation.

The purpose of that story is not to set a standard for confrontational evangelism. Going up to someone and just telling them they need Jesus is not usually the best way. But it does show that the Spirit of God is working in ways we do not yet understand. God is at work preparing the harvest and as Jesus said, they are ready for the reaping. We must be men and women who are ready and willing to go out into the fields and gather, even if we do not have a good relationship with that person or if we do not have time to devote to hours of conversation. We must be ready to share the good news at any time. Therefore we must be devoted to confrontational evangelism.

Conclusion

This paper has set out a few of the guidelines for the work of evangelism. This should not be understood as a comprehensive work on evangelism though. Rather, it is a simply philosophy of evangelism. For a man to be an evangelist he must be motivated, while understanding the hindrances; have the qualities of an evangelist in his character; be theologically grounded and know that he is converting people to Christ and not to legalism or Christianity; how to use his testimony to open the door for the gospel; and lastly how important it is to evangelize family, friends, and strangers. With this simple philosophy one can be emboldened to do the work of evangelism and carry on the work of the Great Commission.