by J. I. Packer
But there is an opposite temptation that threatens us also: namely, the temptation to an exclusive concern with divine sovereignty.
There are some Christians whose minds are constantly taken up with thoughts of the sovereignty of God, This truth means a great deal to them. It has come to them quite suddenly, perhaps, and with the force of a tremendous revelation. They would say that it has caused a real Copernican revolution in their outlook; it has given a new center to their entire personal universe. Previously, as they now see, man had been central in their universe, and God had been on the circumference. They had thought of him as a spectator of events in his world, rather than as their author. They had assumed that the controlling factor in every situation was man’s handling of it rather than God’s plan for it, and they had looked on the happiness of human beings as the most interesting and important thing in creation, for God no less than for themselves. But now they see that this man-centered outlook was sinful and unbiblical; they see that, from one standpoint, the whole purpose of the Bible is to overthrow it, and that books like
Deuteronomy and Isaiah and John’s Gospel and Romans smash it to smithereens in almost every chapter; and they realize that henceforth God must be central in their thoughts and concerns, just as he is central in reality in his own world. Now they feel the force of the famous first answer in the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and [by so doing, and in so doing,] to enjoy him for ever.” Now they see that the way to find the happiness that God promises is not to seek it as an end in itself, but to forget oneself in the daily preoccupation of seeking God’s glory and doing his will and proving his power through the ups and downs and stresses and strains of everyday life. They see that it is the glory and praise of God that must absorb them henceforth, for time and for eternity. They see that the whole purpose of their existence is that with heart and life they should worship and exalt God. In every situation, therefore, their one question is: what will make the most for God’s glory? What should I do in order that in these circumstances God may be magnified?
And they see, as they ask this question, that, though God uses men as means for achieving his purposes, in the last analysis nothing depends on man; everything depends, rather, on the God who raises men up to do his will. They see, too, that God is handling every situation before his servants come on the scene, and that he continues to handle it and work out his will in it through each thing that they do—through their mistakes and failures, no less than through their personal successes. They see, therefore, that they need never fear for the ark of God, as Uzzah feared for it, for God will maintain his own cause. They see that they need never make Uzzah’s mistake, of taking too much on them, and doing God’s work in a forbidden way for fear that otherwise it would not get done at all (2 Sam 6:6-7).[4] They see that, since God is always in control, they need never fear that they will expose him to loss and damage if they limit themselves to serving him in the way that he has appointed. They see that any other supposition would in effect be a denial of his wisdom, or his sovereignty, or both. They see, also, that the Christian must never for one moment imagine himself to be indispensable to God, or allow himself to behave as if he were. The God who sent him, and is pleased to work with him, can do without him. He must be ready to spend and be spent in the tasks that God sets him; but he must never suppose that the loss to the church would be irreparable if God should lay him aside and use someone else. He must not at any point say to himself, “God’s cause would collapse without me and the work I am doing”—for there is never any reason to think this is so. It is never true that God would be at a loss without you and me. Those who have begun to understand the sovereignty of God see all this, and so they seek to efface themselves in all their work for God. They thus bear a practical witness to their belief that God is great, and reigns, by trying to make themselves small, and to act in a way which is itself an acknowledgment that the fruitfulness of their Christian service depends wholly on God, and not on themselves. And up to this point they are right.
They are, however, beset by exactly the opposite temptation to that discussed above. In their zeal to glorify God by acknowledging his sovereignty in grace, and by refusing to imagine that their own services are indispensable to him, they are tempted to lose sight of the church’s responsibility to evangelize. Their temptation is to reason thus: “Agreed, the world is ungodly; but, surely, the less we do about it, the more God will be glorified when at length he breaks in to restore the situation. The most important thing for us to do is to take care that we leave the initiative in his hands.” They are tempted, therefore, to suspect all enterprise in evangelism, whether organized or on the personal level, as if there were something essentially and inescapably man-exalting about it. They are haunted by the fear of running ahead of God, and feel that there is nothing more urgent than to guard against the possibility of doing this.
Perhaps the classic instance of this way of thinking was provided two centuries ago by the chairman of the ministers’ fraternal at which William Carey mooted the founding of a missionary society. “Sit down, young man,” said the old warrior; “when God is pleased to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid, or mine!” The idea of taking the initiative in going out to find men of all nations for Christ struck him as improper and, indeed, presumptuous.
Now, think twice before you condemn that old man. He was not entirely without understanding. He had at least grasped that it is God who saves, and that he saves according to his own purpose, and does not take orders from man in the matter. He had grasped too that we must never suppose that without our help God would be helpless. He had, in other words, learned to take the sovereignty of God perfectly seriously. His mistake was that he was not taking the church’s evangelistic responsibility with equal seriousness. He was forgetting that God’s way of saving men is to send out his servants to tell them the gospel, and that the church has been charged to go into all the world for that very purpose.
But this is something that we must not forget. Christ’s command means that we all should be devoting all our resources of ingenuity and enterprise to the task of making the gospel known in every possible way to every possible person. Unconcern and inaction with regard to evangelism are always, therefore, inexcusable. And the doctrine of divine sovereignty would be grossly misapplied if we should invoke it in such a way as to lessen the urgency, and immediacy, and priority, and binding constraint, of the evangelistic imperative. No revealed truth may be invoked to extenuate sin. God did not teach us the reality of his rule in order to give us an excuse for neglecting his orders.
In our Lord’s parable of the talents (Mt 25:14-30), the “good and faithful” servants were those who furthered their master’s interests by making the most enterprising lawful use that they could of what was entrusted to them. The servant who buried his talent, and did nothing with it beyond keeping it intact, no doubt imagined that he was being extremely good and faithful, but his master judged him to be “wicked,” “slothful” and “unprofitable.” For what Christ has given us to use must be put to use; it is not enough simply to hide it away. We may apply this to our stewardship of the gospel. The truth about salvation has been made known to us, not for us simply to preserve (though we must certainly do that), but also, and primarily, for us to spread. The light is not meant to be hidden under the bushel. It is meant to shine; and it is our business to see that it shines. “You are the light of the world,” says our Lord (Mt 5:14-16). He who does not devote himself to evangelism in every way that he can is not, therefore, playing the part of a good and faithful servant of Jesus Christ.
Here, then, are two opposite pitfalls: a Scylla and Charybdis of error. Each is the result of partial vision, which means partial blindness; each reveals a failure to face squarely the biblical antinomy of the responsibility of man and the sovereignty of God. Both unite to warn us not to pit these truths against each other, nor to allow either to obscure or overshadow the other in our minds
. Both unite to warn us also against reacting from one extreme of error into the other. If we did that, our last state might well be worse than the first. What are we to do, then? To direct our course along the narrow channel that leads between Scylla and Charybdis; in other words, to avoid both extremes. How? By making it our business to believe both these doctrines with all our might, and to keep both constantly before us for the guidance and government of our lives.
We shall proceed now according to this maxim. In what follows, we shall try to take both doctrines perfectly seriously, as the Bible does, and to view them in their positive biblical relationship. We shall not oppose them to each other, for the Bible does not oppose them to each other. Nor shall we qualify, or modify, or water down, either of them in terms of the other, for this is not what the Bible does either. What the Bible does is to assert both truths side by side in the strongest and most unambiguous terms as two ultimate facts; this, therefore, is the position that we must take in our own thinking. C. H. Spurgeon was once asked if he could reconcile these two truths to each other. “I wouldn’t try,” he replied; “I never reconcile friends.” Friends?—yes, friends. This is the point that we have to grasp. In the Bible, divine sovereignty and human responsibility are not enemies. They are not uneasy neighbors; they are not in an endless state of cold war with each other. They are friends, and they work together. I hope that what I am to say now about evangelism will help to make this clear.
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Evangelism
We shall now try to answer from Scripture the following four questions concerning the Christian’s evangelistic responsibility. What is evangelism? What is the evangelistic message? What is the motive for evangelizing? By what means and methods should evangelism be practiced?
What Is Evangelism?
It might be expected that evangelical Christians would not need to spend time discussing this question. In view of the emphasis that evangelicals always, and rightly, lay on the primacy of evangelism, it would be natural to assume that we were all perfectly unanimous as to what evangelism is. Yet, in fact, much of the confusion in present-day debates about evangelism arises from lack of agreement at this point. The root of the confusion can be stated in a sentence. It is our widespread and persistent habit of defining evangelism in terms, not of a message delivered, but of an effect produced in our hearers.
For illustration of this, look at the famous definition of evangelism which the Archbishops’ Committee gave in its report on the evangelistic work of the Church in 1918. “To evangelize,” declared the Committee, “is so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come to put their trust in God through him, to accept him as their Savior, and serve him as their King in the fellowship of his Church.”
Now this is in many ways an excellent definition. It states admirably the aim and purpose of the evangelistic enterprise, and rules out many inadequate and misleading ideas. To start with, it makes the point that evangelizing means declaring a specific message. According to this definition, it is not evangelism merely to teach general truths about God’s existence or the moral law; evangelism means to present Christ Jesus, the divine Son who became man at a particular point in world history in order to save a ruined race. Nor, according to this definition, is it evangelism merely to present the teaching and example of the historical Jesus, or even the truth about his saving work; evangelism means to present Christ Jesus himself, the living Savior and the reigning Lord. Nor, again, is it evangelism, according to this definition, merely to set forth the living Jesus as Helper and Friend, without reference to his saving work on the cross; evangelism means to present Jesus as Christ, God’s anointed Servant, fulfilling the tasks of his appointed office as Priest and King. “The man Christ Jesus” is to be presented as the “one mediator between God and men” (1 Tim 2:5), who “suffered once for sins . . . that he might bring us to God” (1 Pet 3:18) the One through whom, and through whom alone, men may come to put their trust in God, according to his own claim: “I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn 14:6). He is to be proclaimed as the Savior, the One who “came into the world to save sinners” (1 Tim 1:15) and “redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Gal 3:13)—“Jesus who delivers us from the wrath to come” (1 Thess 1:10 rsv). And he is to be set forth as King: “For to this end Christ died and lived again, that he might be Lord both of the dead and of the living” (Rom 14:9 rsv). There is no evangelism where this specific message is not declared.
Again, the definition makes the point that evangelizing means declaring this specific message with a specific application. It is not evangelism, according to this definition, to present Christ Jesus as a subject for detached critical and comparative study. Evangelism, according to this definition, means presenting Christ Jesus and his work in relation to the needs of fallen men and women, who are without God as a Father and under the wrath of God as a Judge. Evangelism means presenting Christ Jesus to them as their only hope, in this world or the next. Evangelism means exhorting sinners to accept Christ Jesus as their Savior, recognizing that in the most final and far-reaching sense they are lost without him. Nor is this all. Evangelism also means summoning men to receive Christ Jesus as all that he is—Lord, as well as Savior—and therefore to serve him as their King in the fellowship of his church, the company of those who worship him, witness to him, and work for him here on earth. In other words, evangelism is the issuing of a call to turn, as well as to trust; it is the delivering, not merely of a divine invitation to receive a Savior, but of a divine command to repent of sin. And there is no evangelism where this specific application is not made.
The definition under review establishes these vital points well. But on one fundamental matter it goes astray. It puts a consecutive clause where a final clause should be. Had it begun: “to evangelize is to present Christ Jesus to sinful men in order that, through the power of the Holy Spirit, they may come,” there would be no fault to find with it. But it does not say this. What it does say is quite different. “To evangelize is so to present Christ Jesus in the power of the Holy Spirit, that men shall come.” This is to define evangelism in terms of an effect achieved in the lives of others; which amounts to saying that the essence of evangelizing is producing converts.
But this cannot be right, as we pointed out at an earlier stage. Evangelism is man’s work, but the giving of faith is God’s. It is true, indeed, that every evangelist’s aim is to convert, and that our definition perfectly expresses the ideal which he longs to see fulfilled in his own ministry; but the question whether or not one is evangelizing cannot be settled simply by asking whether one has had conversions. There have been missionaries to Muslims who labored for a lifetime and saw no converts; must we conclude from this that they were not evangelizing? There have been un-evangelical preachers through whose words (not always understood in the sense intended) individuals have been soundly converted; must we conclude from this that these preachers were evangelizing after all? The answer, surely, is no in both cases. The results of preaching depend, not on the wishes and intentions of men, but on the will of God Almighty. This consideration does not mean that we should be indifferent as to whether we see fruit from our witness to Christ or not; if fruit is not appearing, we should seek God’s face about it to find out why. But this consideration does mean that we ought not to define evangelism in terms of achieved results.
How, then, should evangelism be defined? The New Testament answer is very simple. According to the New Testament, evangelism is just preaching the gospel, the evangel. It is a work of communication in which Christians make themselves mouthpieces for God’s message of mercy to sinners. Anyone who faithfully delivers that message, under whatever circumstances, in a large meeting, in a small meeting, from a pulpit, or in a private conversation, is evangelizing. Since the divine message finds its climax in a plea from the Creator to a rebel world to turn and put faith in Christ, the delivering of it involves t
he summoning of one’s hearers to conversion. If you are not, in this sense, seeking to bring about conversions, you are not evangelizing; this we have seen already. But the way to tell whether in fact you are evangelizing is not to ask whether conversions are known to have resulted from your witness. It is to ask whether you are faithfully making known the gospel message.
For a complete picture of what the New Testament means by evangelism, we need not look further than the apostle Paul’s account of the nature of his own evangelistic ministry. There are three points to note about it.
1. Paul evangelized as the commissioned representative of the Lord Jesus Christ. Evangelism was a task that had been specifically entrusted to him. “Christ . . . [sent] me . . . to preach the gospel” (1 Cor 1:17). Now, see how he regarded himself in virtue of this commission. In the first place, he saw himself as Christ’s steward. “This is how one should regard us [myself, and my fellow-preacher Apollos],” he wrote to the Corinthians, “as servants of Christ, and [in that capacity] stewards of the mysteries of God” (1 Cor 4:1 rsv). “I am . . . entrusted with a stewardship [of the gospel]” (1 Cor 9:17). Paul saw himself as a bondslave raised to a position of high trust, as the steward of a household in New Testament times always was; he had been “approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel” (1 Thess 2:4 rsv; cf. 1 Tim 1:11-12; Tit 1:3), and the responsibility now rested on him to be faithful to his trust, as a steward must be (cf. 1 Cor 4:2), guarding the precious truth that had been committed to him (as he later charges Timothy to do [1 Tim 6:20; 2 Tim 1:13-14]), and distributing and dispensing it according to his Master’s instructions. The fact that he had been entrusted with this stewardship meant, as he told the Corinthians, that “necessity is laid upon me. Woe to me if I do not preach the gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16; cf. Acts 20:20, 26-27; 2 Cor 5:10-11; Ezek 3:16ff.; 33:7ff.). The figure of stewardship thus highlights Paul’s responsibility to evangelize.
