The Reluctant Evangelist: Moving from can't and don't to can and do

by Richard Coekin

Indeed, this is a book by someone who has been a reluctant evangelist. Some years ago, before I was a pastor and church-planter, I managed to invite a friend I’d known at university called Rachel to come to a guest service at my church in London. When I phoned to remind her to come, her flatmate Sarah explained that Rachel had gone away for the weekend with friends. “Why, what were you inviting her to?” she asked. “Oh, nothing much,” I replied, feeling embarrassed. “No really,” she insisted. “Where were you going?” “Oh, just church—don’t worry about it,” I mumbled. “Oh great—can I come instead?” said Sarah brightly. So she came to church that Sunday, and when the evangelist finished preaching, he asked if those who wanted to become Christians would come to the front of the congregation to be prayed for. To my complete shock, Sarah stood up and walked down to the front to become a Christian!

For most of us, our reluctance is motivational—we have so many responsibilities and problems to face that we’re not persuaded that evangelism should really be an urgent priority for us right now. But evangelism is not optional for Christians.

Thankfully, our reluctance is treatable—we really don’t have to find evangelism so hard or frightening. For, as we shall see, Almighty God is a compassionate Evangelist, and his Spirit can transform us by his word to share his passion for mission. He really can teach us to find personal evangelism, church-planting and cross-cultural mission exciting—indeed the fulfilling purpose of our lives.

Well, Almighty God once dramatically demonstrated that he can save anyone by saving a whole city of violent, idolatrous pagans in one go!

When the 2011 National Census asked, “What religion are you?”, 48% of Londoners replied “Christian”. However, the Times YouGov survey of 2015 revealed that only 55% of them believe in God. The London City Mission census of 2012 revealed that only 9% of Londoners are attending church on Sunday—and only 5.4% are attending evangelical churches. (UK church 2010-2020 Statistics, Peter Brierley, Brierley consultancy, ADBC publishing 2014, page 61, section 12.1)

According to the 2011 Census there are more than a million Muslims, (more than 12% of Londoners, including the current mayor, Sadiq Khan); more than 450,000 Hindus (5% of Londoners), and numerous Sikhs, Buddhists and Jews.

Jonah gives us the foundational evangelistic theology that is our primary need.

The central message of the book is that God himself is an evangelistic Saviour.

Biblical evangelism is not the poor cousin of Bible exposition, for the ruffians who can’t be scholars. Rather, if “salvation comes from the Lord”, then biblical exposition serves to equip God’s people for lives of biblical evangelism.

After all, evangelism is why God has delayed the end of the world and why Christians are still here and not in heaven—”he is patient with you, not wanting anyone to perish, but everyone to come to repentance” (2 Peter 3 v 9).

Chapter 1: His holiness is combined with his omnipotence (unlimited power). Chapter 2: His grace is combined with his omnipresence (unrestricted involvement). Chapter 3: His wrath is combined with his relenting (promised mercy). Chapter 4: His compassion is combined with his providence (constant care).

Piper rightly concludes, “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him”. So we’re going to thoroughly enjoy God as we study Jonah; and as we marvel and delight in him, we will want to glorify him by telling others about him. Indeed, do stop to pray as you read through this book—for if we don’t want to praise God to his face, we will never want to praise him to other people.

When we are amazed and delighted by God, we won’t struggle to commend him to others.

The main reason most of us struggle to speak about Christ to friends and colleagues is not because we’re struggling to understand our culture, but because we’re not very excited about God. Jonah can fix that!

Jonah’s memoirs recount the heartwarming tale of how the Lord saved a whole city of sinners, through and despite the disobedient reluctance and shocking selfishness of his messenger. God is showing us that his holy love is expressed in our world today primarily in recruiting ordinary, screwed-up people like us into his mission to save sinners. And if he used a reluctant evangelist like Jonah, he can use us too.

But until we get to heaven, the primary purpose of our lives must be the same as God’s primary purpose in the world, which is to glorify him through evangelism.

So the first principle of Jonah is that our Lord can save anyone and wants to save everyone—for he is “God our Saviour, who wants all people to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2 v 3-4).

So let us pray that, through reading Jonah, we will become a lot less like Jonah, and a lot more like Jesus.

This is why the defining activity of every church should be gathering together to hear God’s word.

For example, it has been hugely encouraging to hear mission-hearted Christians in Kenya and Korea, having received the gospel from England and Wales respectively, speaking of their sense of obligation to send their missionaries back to our land, now that we are a spiritual desert and mission-field once more.

Sadly, Jonah is uncomfortably like us. As God’s prophet, Jonah should have cheerfully obeyed his sovereign Lord.

By ancient standards, Nineveh was a major city of 120,000 people, already a royal residence in the Assyrian empire. But the Lord’s opinion of Nineveh is revealed in two significant words, “great” and “wicked”.

So it’s loving to seek the welfare of the city in every way—but especially with the gospel of Christ, which grants eternal welfare.

Our Lord’s primary evangelistic strategy in his world has always been the godliness of his people.

Which miracle experienced in that unforgettable meeting with Jesus do you think he is now thanking God for most: his forgiveness or his healing? His forgiveness for sure.

So Nineveh, London, Beijing, New Delhi, Moscow, Lagos and our town or city may be “great” for many reasons—but primarily because they are home to so many precious people who need to hear God’s gospel message explained in a language they can understand!

Because “its wickedness has come up before me” (Jonah 1 v 2). The wickedness of Nineveh, London and our own village, town or city, offends God because he’s sovereign everywhere!

But the primary offence for which all humanity in every time and place stands condemned to hell isn’t tyranny or murder; it is neglect of God.

Some of us trash our lives—the relational wreckage is everywhere. Others of us are religious and well-behaved. But we have all ignored him, proudly claiming that we have the right to live in heaven.

When we evangelise our family and friends, we’re not just speaking to them about our Lord, but about their Lord—introducing them to their Sovereign, who is so offended by their sin that they are left in desperate need of his Saviour; and who still loves them so much that he sends his reluctant evangelists to tell them about him.

When Jonah was told to head east across the desert to Nineveh, he headed west across the sea to Tarshish in Spain. Knowing that the God of heaven made the sea and the dry land (Jonah 1 v 9), Jonah was pretty stupid to do this—but sin always is stupid.

So often in public life, unbelievers are waiting for Christians to say something and are shocked to find us sleeping. The captain pointedly comments, “Maybe [God] will take notice of us so that we will not perish” (v 6)—a note of humility that will recur in the unbelievers of Nineveh.

Many Christians are too much like chameleons at work, indistinguishable from unbelievers—and sadly proud of it.

Why not just send angels to evangelise the nations, or drop Bibles and pamphlets from the sky? Well, first, because God wants us to learn to be evangelistic like Jesus. And since he loves us, he will never give up on us.

And second, because we can translate God’s word into the language of our friends better than anyone else. We can be better missionaries to our friends and colleagues than famous evangelists like Tim Keller or Rico Tice, because our friends and colleagues know us and trust us!

God had engineered both the circumstances of the storm and the conversation with these pagan sailors to discipline Jonah and save these unbelievers at the same time.

Why not ask your unbelieving friends to allow you to practise with them? I have often used and encouraged groups I train to use the “Two Ways to Live” presentation of the gospel (matthiasmedia.com.au/2wtl/). They have often reported that their friends and colleagues have been glad to allow them to practise their presentation on them, leading to great evangelistic conversations.

“I’d like you all to know that I agree with everything that preacher just said! I’ve been following the Lord Jesus since 1947 and there hasn’t been a day when I have regretted it. I am pretty sure that I won’t be here next Christmas, but I am not afraid of dying because I believe that Jesus will take me to heaven. So if you would like to know how to be saved and come to heaven, please tell me because I would love to explain it to you!” He sat down; his fellow residents apparently burst into spontaneous applause, and my dad went back to his room and wept with gratitude for the opportunity. He’s an old man who can hardly breathe—but he took the opportunity that the divine Evangelist crafted for him to “do the work of an evangelist” (2 Timothy 4 v 5).

In an extraordinary and emotional tribute, he then explained how being Freddie’s father had taught him so much about God’s tender love towards us. And he ended by explaining that the anguish of watching his beloved son Freddie die in hospital had taught him a bit more of what it cost God our Father in heaven to watch his Son, Jesus, die in our place on a cross—suffering the horrors of the hell that his people deserve, so that we never have to!

Wicked men put Jesus to death, but God used their wickedness to accomplish his salvation plans.

But somebody had to take the consequences of breaking God’s law, or God would be the unjust liar who doesn’t punish sin after all—a God who allows us to damage other people and rebel against him without consequence.

God is present to exert his presence variously as he chooses—as a fire may give warmth or light or cause destruction without ever ceasing to be fire, so God is present to provide our daily needs, enlighten us by his word or punish his enemies in his hell.

Without being clothed in the righteous holiness of Christ, unbelievers will arrive in the presence of God rather as if they were landing on the surface of the sun naked. It seems that God will not light the fires of hell for he is the fire in hell.

And in the cramped, slimy darkness of the fish’s stomach, gulping in fetid air stinking of rotting fish, Jonah realised that against all odds he was safe! It’s obvious that such a bizarre salvation can only be due to God’s amazing grace. There are dubious Victorian reports of a young whaler called James Bartley, who in 1891 fell into the mouth of a sperm whale. Eighteen hours later, with permanently mottled skin, he was apparently cut out of its belly on the deck of a ship called Star of the East.

You see, no one is beyond the love of the God who is everywhere. Jonah tried to run away from the Lord, but “the Lord provided a huge fish to swallow Jonah”. So never give up on the lost, however far they’ve run and however low they’ve sunk. Because God knows exactly where they are and is right there to rescue them, from the moment they repent and cry out to him.

Let’s notice the order here: it is not that Jonah changed his attitude and so earned God’s salvation; rather, God’s saving grace is what transformed Jonah’s attitude.

The reason God wants us to understand this is so that we don’t start telling people that praying like Jonah is how we save ourselves. Rather, we start praying like Jonah when God has saved us—for this is how his grace begins to transform our hearts.

If we want obedient children, respectful teenagers, sexually disciplined students, faithful spouses, generous workers, prayerful retirees, and above all evangelistic Christians, we must keep proclaiming the saving grace of God towards us in Christ!

Improving our performance sufficiently to qualify ourselves for heaven is always a doomed exercise—and now it was too late for Jonah go to synagogue, too late to give more money, too late to learn more Bible. All he could do was humble himself before the Lord and cry out for help—”I called to the Lord … I called for help” (v 2); “I remembered you, Lord, and my prayer rose to you” (v 7).

This psalm looked forward to our Saviour, Jesus, experiencing the death that sinners deserve under God’s wrath in our place, described in terms of a death by drowning, such as nearly engulfed Jonah. Jonah was delivered from drowning for his sins, because Christ was drowned for our sins on the cross of Calvary. This is why people saved by grace, like Jonah and us, respond to the gospel in prayers that say, “Sorry… please… thank you”.