The Great Commission
Here is the great commission of Christ Jesus to the Church — the duty of all Christians, and most particularly those called into the ministry, to go and preach the gospel and make disciples of all nations. It is tied to Mark 16:15, “Go ye into all the world, and preach the gospel to every creature.” But how? That is the question many Christians ask. How am I to go, even to my next-door neighbour, and preach the gospel to every creature?
A related question is often flung at those who believe in election: if God has ordained who will be saved and who will not, why bother to preach at all? The answer is simple. If God has ordained the end, He has ordained the means to that end as well. If He has ordained that a man is to be saved, He has also ordained that another man, already saved, is to go and preach the gospel to him. Election reaches not only to the souls who will be saved, but to those who will go and preach to them — and Christ gave that very command: Go.
This is a wide, embracing call — whosoever calls upon His name shall be saved. It is not for us to discern who is elect and who is not, for that is not in our power. Whoever will call has already been given the heart to do so by the Lord, but there must be a preacher for them to hear, and a sender for that preacher to go. God has ordained preachers — used here broadly of all believers as opportunity arises — to go and preach.
False Evangelism: What Must Not Be Done
Before considering what biblical evangelism looks like, it is necessary to consider what is false. False evangelism consists of several things.
First, going to the lost and saying “God loves you.” This cannot be said with certainty, for Ephesians 5 declares that Christ loved the church — and until a person enters the church by regeneration, we do not know that he has been loved eternally of the Father. We can say to a believer, “God loves you,” because there is evidence of it: he has been converted. But Psalm 5:5 says the Lord hates the workers of iniquity. Esau was hated; Pharaoh, Judas, and King Saul were none of them loved by God in that saving sense. Nowhere in Scripture do Peter, Paul, or John say to the lost, “God loves you” — and it is entirely false to preach that today.
Second, going to the lost and saying “Christ died for you.” We do not know that either. “He shall save his people from their sins” (Matthew 1:21) — His people are the elect, not all men. Since we do not know who His elect are until they come to Him, we cannot say “Christ died for you” to someone not yet converted. We may by all means preach that He died for the elect, that He loves the elect, and that whosoever calls on Him will be saved — and that calling is itself the evidence of election. But we may not personalize it to a soul not yet in the kingdom.
Alongside this, we must tell the lost of God’s anger and wrath against sinners — something the popular gospel of “God hates the sin but loves the sinner” entirely omits. Scripture does not teach that. Psalm 5:5 says He hates the workers of iniquity, not merely the iniquity they work.
Third, presenting a formula for salvation. “Just believe in Jesus” is one such formula — yet James tells us the devils believe, and are not saved, for Christ did not die for them. Intellectual belief in a historical Jesus is not saving faith, and millions hold it. Nor do most people today, even those who have sat in church for decades, actually know who the Christ of Scripture is; they know about a Christ, often a false one.
The “ABC of salvation” — Admit you’re a sinner, Believe in Christ, Confess your sins — is another such formula, and it will save no one. Confession is not necessarily repentance; Pharaoh confessed he was a sinner and was never converted. And salvation is the work of God, not of man:
A man will only truly repent if first he was elected, then, as a result of his election, regenerated, and only then will he repent and believe the gospel. There is an order, and no formula of admitting, believing, and confessing substitutes for it.
Laying a Foundation: What Biblical Evangelism Requires
It is not wrong to tell a man he must repent and believe on the Lord Jesus Christ — but the bare statement, with nothing more, is of little use today. There was perhaps a time in English or American history when most people, simply by sitting in sound churches, understood what repentance meant and who Christ was. That time is gone. A foundation must be laid — a clear presentation of gospel truth, leading up to the point where repentance and faith can rightly be called for. And that takes time; there are no quick, easy, one-two-three steps to salvation.
Consider Christ Himself on the road to Emmaus: “And beginning at Moses and all the prophets, he expounded unto them in all the scriptures the things concerning himself” (Luke 24:27). He began right back at Genesis and went through, in careful, detailed examination, what the Scriptures said of Himself — and it took time.
Consider Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch (Acts 8:26-35). The eunuch was reading Isaiah 53 and understood nothing of it. Philip’s first question was, “Understandest thou what thou readest?” The gospel must not only be heard, it must be understood — and that means the preacher must explain it. It is true that the Holy Spirit alone opens the heart, but that does not remove the preacher’s responsibility to set forth the gospel as clearly as possible. Philip “began at the same scripture, and preached unto him Jesus” — he began there; he did not end there. It was a lengthy discourse, using many Scriptures.
Consider the Philippian jailer (Acts 16:29-32). Most preachers today stop at verse 31 — “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved” — and call that the formula. But verse 32 is ignored: “And they spake unto him the word of the Lord, and to all that were in his house.” The words “believe and be saved” were the opening words of an entire sermon, not the whole of it. What good would it have done to say “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ” to a pagan jailer who knew nothing of who Christ was, and stop there?
Paul’s own pattern confirms this. At Thessalonica he “reasoned with them out of the scriptures” over three Sabbath days (Acts 17:2). At Corinth he “disputed… daily” (Acts 17:17) and “persuaded the Jews and the Greeks” Sabbath after Sabbath (Acts 18:4). Reasoning, disputing, persuading, taking time, examining many Scriptures, exercising patience — this is the consistent biblical pattern, and it is nothing like the quick, easy formulas taught in so much modern preaching and literature.
What Gospel Preaching Must Actually Include
To preach Jesus, as Philip did to the eunuch, is to preach who Christ really is, and it must involve preaching the state of man — the depravity of all men since the fall, and man’s condemnation by God for breaking His moral law. It is not enough to say He is “Saviour and Lord” without explaining what those terms mean, given the false Christs presented in so many churches today. To preach Jesus in His fulness is to preach:
- His deity — God without beginning and without end
- His virgin birth, and its necessity to preserve Him from original sin
- His sinless life — a Lamb without blemish and without spot
- His uniqueness — the way, the truth, and the life, and that no man comes to the Father but by Him
- His death for the elect, and His resurrection for their justification
- The necessity of regeneration, without which no man shall see the kingdom of God
- The call to repentance — ignored alike by Arminians and by Hyper-Calvinists — and the call to believe on the Lord Jesus Christ
It is worth every believer asking honestly: what was my own understanding of Christ before I was converted? How biblical was it, in truth? Many who could have answered “He is the Son of God, Lord and Saviour” before conversion knew, in reality, nothing about Him at all.
Approaching Different Kinds of People
Different hearers must be approached somewhat differently. To a Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or Jew — someone who has never claimed to be Christian and to whom the gospel has never truly been heard — you must first show why the Bible can be trusted as the word of God, since to them it carries no automatic authority. Only once that foundation is laid does it become possible to show, in love, why their own religion is false and contrary to Scripture. This requires knowing something of what they believe — not mastering the Quran or every book of comparative religion, but enough to reason intelligently, as Paul did when he quoted the pagan poets to his advantage.
To a Roman Catholic, a Jehovah’s Witness, a Mormon, or anyone in a cult claiming the name of Christ, the approach differs again — they already claim to believe the Bible is true, so there is a starting point already in hand. What must be shown from Scripture is why their institution is not Christian, and why they themselves are not, pulling out the false foundation in order to build a true one. We cannot be ignorant of what such groups actually teach; it is one of the things thrown in our faces most often, and Paul himself became all things to all men, knowing something about everything so that he might preach to them intelligently.
To liberal Protestants who do not believe the Bible at all, though they sit in churches and use the name — approach as with the Hindu or Buddhist: show why the Scriptures are true and can be trusted.
To the atheist, begin with the evidence of God in creation, for the Bible itself calls him a fool: “The fool hath said in his heart, There is no God” (Psalm 14:1). “The heavens declare the glory of God” (Psalm 19:1) — nature cannot save a man, but it can prove there is a God, and Romans 1 shows how the invisible things of God are understood by the things that are made. From there the errors of evolution can be addressed, and if there is a God, the natural next question — where has He revealed Himself? — leads back to the Bible and to the same case for its trustworthiness used with the Hindu or Buddhist.
Why the Bible Can Be Trusted
The apostles performed miracles to authenticate a message that was, at the time, brand new (Mark 16:20). We cannot perform miracles today, but we now possess the completed, authenticated revelation, and its own internal evidence is considerable. If the Bible was written only by men, it was written either by good men or by evil men. If good men wrote it, they lied, for they said God wrote it. If evil men wrote it, they would have written it to their own liking — yet it declares evil men to be sinners on their way to hell. Therefore it was written by God.
Its portrait of God is unlike any pagan mythology, in which the gods are themselves violent, fornicating, and petty; Scripture presents a God holy, just, and untouched by the evil of the world. Its account of Christ is simple and matter-of-fact, without sensationalism, unlike any other religious literature. It contains no contradiction, though many have tried to find one. Its way of salvation — election and salvation through Christ alone — is unique among all the religions of the world, which teach only the words of men. It was written over some 1,500 years by many different authors — fishermen, kings, tax collectors, herdsmen, prophets — and yet stands united in theme and without contradiction. Its fulfilled prophecies, its historical and geographical accuracy repeatedly confirmed by archaeology, its providential preservation across millennia, and above all its power to transform lives — turning a Saul into a Paul — testify together to what no other book has ever done.
A Closing Word About Tracts
Tracts are an excellent means of evangelism — if they are gospel tracts, and if they are adequate ones. Just as there are sermons preached to believers and sermons preached to unbelievers, there are tracts written for each, and the right one must be used. A tract of great value to a Christian may be of no use whatsoever to the lost; the unbeliever needs a tract that speaks to the sinfulness of his own heart and his need of a Saviour. A two-page tract that says little more than “believe in Jesus” does in print exactly what should not be done in preaching. A tract is, after all, a sermon in print, and should contain what a sound sermon would contain: who Christ really is, what man is really like, and, where relevant, what a hearer’s own false religion actually teaches. Many tracts today are still written as though for a Christianized society that no longer exists, assuming a knowledge of Christ and of sin that most readers simply do not have. Where no adequate tract can be found, it is better to speak the words directly than to hand over something inadequate.
Closing
Not all are ministers, but all Christians are called to preach as opportunity allows. Ask what you would be able to do, and what grace the Lord would give you to do it, and pray that He would lead you to it. Whatever the effort, however humble or small its beginnings, the Lord will bless it to His glory as He wills.