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

by Richard Coekin

A Palestinian friend of mine living in Jerusalem, once a Muslim and member of the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organisation) but now a Christian, explained to me that he regularly gets death threats from Hamas (an Islamic political and military organisation). When he first became a Christian, he took bread to his village and tried to tell his people the gospel of Christ; but his former friends machine-gunned his car and warned him that they would behead him if he ever returned.

What we might call the “performance” worldview of older generations and many non-Western cultures, concerned with social hierarchy, family responsibility, duty, good works and honesty.

What we might call the “rights” worldview of Western cultures flooding younger generations in our cities via the internet. This is the confident assertion of personal autonomy—our right to choose our own objects of worship.

Whatever we sing on Sundays, we can tell which god we really worship by how we spend our spare time, what we’re devastated by losing, and where we turn in trouble.

Tim Keller has written extensively and brilliantly on this subject. He points out that whether we cling to the culturally inherited gods of ancient religions or the chosen objects of modern worship, our idols will be enormously costly, requiring huge sacrifice from us, whether of animals on an altar or of hours in the office.

“Let us continually offer to God a sacrifice of praise—the fruit of lips that openly profess his name”—that is, praising God, to his face in prayer and to others in evangelism, whatever the social or physical cost. For us, this may mean some embarrassment and the mockery of friends and family. Let’s remember that for our Eritrean brothers and sisters in Christ, it may well mean being locked in a metal shipping container in the desert for weeks until we perish; or in North Korea, it may mean being laid down to have our heads crushed by a steamroller. So let’s not be quick to complain.

I have a dear friend called Sergei, who lives in Belarus. He’s a church leader and church-planter. As a young man, he fought in Afghanistan with the legendary elite Russian special forces, the Spetsnaz. Once, when visiting his home in Minsk, I was thumbing through his photo album and came across a picture of him and his comrades leaning against a tank in the Afghan mountains. Sergei looked so violent, with ammunition belts criss-crossing his bare chest and holding a machine gun on each hip. He looked like Rambo! But the next photo in the album caught the moment he was baptised in a silly white nightie in a river in Minsk.

But at least he has realised the emptiness of serving created things in place of our gracious Creator. We need to believe this for ourselves, or we will never try to persuade unbelievers that they have forfeited the amazing grace that could be theirs in Christ.

But the message from each of the “bringers” was the same, and delivered in the bluntest terms—”If I finally manage to get one of my friends to come to church, you better tell them the gospel!”

The simplest way to summarise this saving gospel is one four letter word: “swap”. God loves us so passionately that he became one of us in Jesus in order to swap places with us on the cross—where he was treated as we should be treated and judged for our sin, so that we can be treated as he should be treated and accepted into heaven as perfect children of God.

If we only talk of the benefits of being Christians in this life, it may not be so obvious to unbelievers why it is worth becoming a Christian, and we will be tempted to exaggerate the blessings and lie about the costs of following Jesus.

Jonah is told to proclaim the message he is given—forestalling every temptation to modify God’s word to make it more popular. Nor are we at liberty to remove the pages or twist the parts of the Bible that are politically incorrect in our culture. This would not only be disobedient but ineffective—because if it’s not God’s word, it won’t have God’s power to save.

So what did this visiting speaker proclaim? “Jonah began by going a day’s journey into the city, proclaiming, ‘Forty more days and Nineveh will be overthrown.’” (Jonah 3 v 4) It is very unlikely that this is all he said. After all, Jesus later says that Jonah’s survival in a fish was a sign to Nineveh in the same way that Jesus’ resurrection is a sign for us today. So presumably Jonah had to explain his experience of the Lord’s deliverance (perhaps illustrated by some very strange burns on his skin from the stomach acid of the fish) just as we must explain the evidence for the resurrection of Christ provided for us in the Bible.

“I’m not afraid of being charged, as I frequently am, with trying to frighten you, for I am definitely trying to do so. If the wondrous love of God in Christ Jesus and the hope of glory is not sufficient to attract you, then, such is the value I attach to the worth of your soul, I will do my utmost to alarm you with a sight of the terrors of hell.” (Iain H. Murray, D. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 2008), p 216)

Without using medieval language or being unwisely hasty or self-righteous, we need to find appropriate ways to warn people of the wrath to come.

Jesus talked like this because he doesn’t want any of us to go there. It’s an expression of his love. It’s like a roadside warning that reads, “Tiredness can kill—take a break” or a mother yelling at her active toddler, “Don’t go near the road or a car will kill you!”

It’s no accident that preachers like Jonathan Edwards were greatly used by God in the 1730s Evangelical Revival in New England. For Edwards not only proclaimed the attractive beauty of Christ but also the dreadful torments of his judgment.

Indeed, when unbelievers discover that we believe in judgment, they are bound to ask why we haven’t bothered to mention it if we claim to care about them.

And if we don’t explain God’s judgment, then the death of Christ doesn’t seem at all wonderful. Imagine walking out of your house and seeing Jesus standing on the other side of the road. Then he yells, “I love you”, and throws himself under a truck, so that there’s blood all over the road! Well, it’s certainly dramatic—but you never asked him to do that.

Tim Keller has brilliantly observed that God generally saves secular Westerners when they… hear sensible truth; encounter credible people; and experience a deep sense of need.

So let me tell you an uncomfortable truth: your whole street is on fire! Because your street is filled with people who don’t know of the judgment to come or of the loving Saviour who can rescue them. But that’s why God has arranged for you to live where you live. I don’t know what that means for you—perhaps it means organising a Christmas drinks evening where you invite your church pastor to explain the true meaning of Christmas, or knocking on every door with an invitation to an Easter outreach event, or a summer barbecue where you give your testimony? The one thing I know you can’t do is… nothing. The first step to saving grace for Nineveh was that Jonah preached the judgment of God. God’s gospel requires us to find a way to do the same. Anything less is just not loving.

The simple answer is that God calls us through his gospel to turn in repentant faith. Paul told the church leaders in Ephesus, “I have declared to both Jews and Greeks that they must turn to God in repentance and have faith in our Lord Jesus” (Acts 20 v 21).

Notice that we’re saved not so much by our repentant faith as by Christ through our repentant faith (which the Spirit of God creates through his gospel)—just as an exhausted swimmer at Bondi Beach in Sydney, being carried to safety on a lifeguard’s surfboard, is being saved by the lifeguard through lying down on his board, because the lifeguard told him to.

It means changing our minds to the depth of our will (the intentions of our minds) and the core of our desires (the affections of our hearts), which will always be expressed in costly behavioural change.

Repentance is not promising to be perfect—because our sinful nature remains in us and we will keep failing. But repentance is promising to try—a genuine commitment to change.

That’s why the method by which people come to saving faith throughout Acts is not emotional manipulation that bypasses the mind but persuasion that addresses the mind; for example, Paul “reasoned with them from the Scriptures, explaining and proving ... arguing persuasively about the kingdom of God” (Acts 17 v 2-3, 19 v 8).

God likes unbelievers to realise that he is the Saviour and not us, and that we evangelise because the gospel is true and not for any personal benefit.

Some who grew up in Christian families may not be able to remember when they turned to God. Or we may have come to repentant faith over a period of time rather than on a particular date. It’s been helpfully said that we can cross a national border either consciously on the ground at a checkpoint or unconsciously in the sky in an aeroplane, but either way we are now in a different country than before. Some of us know a specific time and others don’t; but even if we don’t know exactly when it happened, we do need to be consciously living by repentant faith now, which is to be in a very different place to where we once were.

To summarise with an easily remembered answer to the question, “What must I do to be saved?” I find it useful to urge people to pray, “Sorry… thank you… please” as follows: “Dear God, Sorry for my sin (repentance). Thank you for sending Jesus to die and rise again for me (the gospel). Please forgive me and help me to follow Jesus from now on (faith). Amen.”

We’ve seen that Jonah isn’t about Jonah and a whale but about the Lord and a reluctant evangelist. We’ve seen that God is the global Evangelist who is sovereign (Jonah 1), gracious (Jonah 2), merciful (Jonah 3) and compassionate (Jonah 4), saving a city of 120,000 spiritually clueless pagans through his gospel message, despite their wickedness and despite the reluctance of his prophet, because “Salvation comes from the Lord” (Jonah 2 v 9).

Notice that it’s not Jesus’ resurrection itself that is the sign of Jonah—but the teaching of the resurrected Jesus that is the sign. For just as the Ninevites heard Jonah’s teaching but didn’t watch Jonah being spewed out of the great fish, we hear Jesus’ teaching but can’t watch Jesus emerging from his tomb. But as Jonah’s extraordinary experience authenticated his message to the Ninevites as coming from God to them, so Jesus’ resurrection authenticates his teaching, proclaimed by the apostles and now preserved in the Bible, as coming from God to us. We need to take the teaching of Jesus, God’s resurrected preacher, to the nations. His teaching is the sign that they need.

God never needs to change his mind because his knowledge and wisdom are always perfect. God is said to be “immutable”, meaning that he’s unchanging and utterly reliable in his character, will and promises. Indeed, God cannot change, because if he did, he was either imperfect before that change or imperfect after that change—and in either case he wouldn’t be God!

Dependence—so that our hearts become inflamed with “burning desire to seek, love and serve him … and become accustomed in every need to flee to him as to a sacred anchor”.