Prayerfully, Intentionally, Preaching The Gospel tagged: ,

Prayerfully, Intentionally, Preaching The Gospel

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“Always and everywhere the servants of Christ are under orders to evangelize, and I hope that what I shall say now will act as an incentive to this task. I hope, too, that it will serve a further purpose. There is in Christian circles at the present time much heart-searching and dispute about ways and means of evangelism.” (J. I. Packer, Evangelism And The Sovereignty Of God, p.9, 1961)

And I thought this dispute was something new. It’s been going on for my entire lifetime, and long before that. Long before traditionalists, missionalists, and emergents squared off over method, there were others. There have always been people who went house to house, and there have always been people who didn’t. There have always been those whose view of God’s sovereignty seemed to excuse them from evangelism and those whose view of personal responsibility seemed almost to make them solely responsible for the eternal destiny of the souls around them.

I have had an unusual life. At the age of 12, I was the person designated to pray on a WIN team that went out from my church. Two years later I was walking door-to-door in Fort Worth sharing the gospel after a week at Super Summer. Four years after that I was sitting in a living room with people two and three times my age, from multiple churches across my rural community, praying for the lost to be saved at an area-wide tent revival. That was in 1981. For thirteen years after that revival, I worked in or attended five different Southern Bapist churches, and none of them had any plan, or stated purpose to preach the gospel to the lost other than getting lost people to come to church. There were no Roman Road trainings, no Evangelism Explosion, no Relationship Evangelism . . . nothing . . . nada . . . zilch . . . just an occasional sermon on the Great Commission and that we all should share our faith. Today, in an informal survey of about 100 Southern Baptist Churches, I have found essentially the same situation. No training, no plan, and a misconception about what it takes for someone to be born again.

Let me start with the misconception. “Sharing our faith” isn’t always the same as “preaching the gospel.” Barna’s 2005 survey confirmed that 60% or more of evangelical Christians have shared their faith in the last year. However, that can mean anything from praying for someone, to expressing a belief in God, to just talking about personal beliefs. Those are not “preaching the gospel.” At some point people must hear that they are sinners, that Jesus died for sinners, and that they must believe in Jesus in order for them to be forgiven. A friend recently wrote an article entitled, Miming The Gospel To Death, in which he pointed out the fallacy of thinking that people get saved by watching us act out the Christian life. God certainly uses our lives to call attention to Him, but people are not saved by mime. Faith comes by hearing the Word of God.

We must pray for laborers for the harvest and for the lost. We need the prayer. The most difficult conversation in the world to start is the one we have with people when we preach the gospel. We need the courage and compassion of Jesus so that we will do it. The lost need the prayer. People are increasingly skeptical in this postChristian era, but God is greater than skepticism and the gospel transcends all cultures.

We must have a plan. Churches need plans to equip their members. Members need personal plans. If we wait until visitation night, we’ve wasted 166 hours each week. I have a personal and a corporate plan to share the gospel. Without both, I don’t. Our plan needs to be smart and sensitive and filled with compassion and zeal. I have a personal plan to encounter lost people, build relationships with them, and share the gospel with them. I don’t treat them like projects. I would never work this hard on a project. I love them and so I share the gospel with them (a.k.a., preach the gospel).

We need to do it and to it till He comes. Method is not immaterial, but it is vastly less important than the message. I have a theory. I believe that no church would ever die if every member prayerfully and intentionally preached the gospel. I have another theory. I believe no Christian ever really lives until he does that very thing as a matter of course.