Biblical Evangelism

I was listening to Paul Washer yesterday morning on my iPod (not a good idea when the roads are snowy, listening to Washer makes me a little jittery!) and he was talking about Biblical evangelism, which is a world different than the evangelism we see in most churches. Evangelism is not one of my strengths, at least personal one on one evangelism. Put me on stage in front of a dozen or a thousand people, and I am fine. With an individual I have a lot harder time. But the Bible models for us by command and example not just that we should evangelize but how we should evangelize.

I remember sitting under the preaching of a man at a scheduled “revival crusade” when we lived in Kentucky and were members of the big Southern Baptist church in town (we had several SBC churches in our small suburban town, it was Kentucky after all!). Our church brought in a well-known revival preacher who shall remain nameless (it was not Billy Graham). This is a famous man, a man who is huge in Southern Baptist circles and someone who brags on his website that: “As a pastor, he has led more people to Christ than any other Southern Baptist pastor in an equal period of time in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention.”, along with a grotesque litany of other self-exalting accolades and fawning adoration from other Christian leaders about the great things he has accomplished. Back then as a very new Christian I didn’t understand that no human leads anyone to Christ, that it is the Spirit working in the heart of the sinner who changes that heart to become receptive to the Word of God. But I digress.

At the time, I thought this guy was great. He is an accomplished showman, everyone seemed to like him, he preached with passion and just look at all the “decisions” he got! He was a stereotypical decision generating preacher. He did the whole “Every head bowed and every eye closed”, “I see that hand!”, “Play through the last stanza of that hymn one more time.” shtick. People came forward in droves, people who had been in church for their whole lives. He preached for an emotional response and like a master craftsman he got the exact response he intended. I really thought this guy was a Gospel preaching machine and that genuine revival had broken out in this church because everyone knows that revival is something you plan for and schedule speakers for, not a working of the Holy Spirit when and where He pleases.

The problem, as Paul Washer pointed out, is that we never see that style of evangelism in the Bible. We see lots of evangelism, lots of people truly repenting and coming to Christ, plenty of direct commands and examples but nothing like the decisional model in vogue today. Jesus doesn’t knock on the door and ask to come in. He kicks the door down! As we are before the Spirit changes us, we would never open the door for Him and indeed we would never even hear Him knocking. He doesn’t wait for us to have a change of heart, He tears out that old heart of stone and replaces it with a heart of flesh. The sort of preaching we get in church today is a lot more Charles Finney or P.T. Barnum than it is Paul, Peter or John the Baptist.

I would without hesitation say that it is because of this style of decisional evangelism, exemplified in this preacher and many others who emulate his style, that we see the state of the Southern Baptist Convention today. 16 million “members”. Do half of them show up on Sunday? Perhaps. Of those that show up every now and again, how many of them are actually believers? I am not sure and neither is anyone else because the preaching they sit under every week is not the sort of preaching that is going to convict anyone. In the SBC churches I have been a member of or frequent attender in, an unregenerate sinner could very comfortably sit in a pew month after month, year after year and never realize anything was wrong. That is not reserved for Baptist churches. The last two weeks I have been to a Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod church and an Orthodox Presbyterian church. In the LCMS church, there was virtually no preaching at all of any sort and in the OPC church it was sound exposition but there was little or nothing that would expose an unregenerate sinner to the cross.

If you are going to gather in a church building and have preaching, that preaching must be preaching that is Christ centered and cross focused. All the upbeat music and entertainment in the world, all the altar calls and the exhortations to walk an aisle, all the sacramentalism and liturgy, all the deep theology with frequent quotes from Calvin, Edwards and Spurgeon sprinkled liberally with references in Greek and Hebrew are meaningless to a lost sinner. I kind of use the formula “The garden and the cross”. If you miss the Fall and the lost estate of man, how can someone be convicted of sin? If you skip the cross, the substitutionary atonement of Christ, how can you preach grace? You can, and should, preach expositorally, but you can miss the grand unveiling of redemption in the minutiae of the text. Not every verse in the Bible mentions Christ, but the whole Bible preaches Christ. Preach Nehemiah, preach Habakkuk, preach James but don’t preach it without the shadow of the cross. Preach repentance, preach salvation but never, ever without the terrible cost of the cross. For the sake of souls, never preach decisions as a substitute for Spirit driven regeneration. God has been handling things on His own timetable for millennial, He doesn’t need us to nudge things along now.

Here is the sermon from Washer