When it comes to evangelism, it can often seem the choice is like when the dentist tells you it’s time for a check-up. You either make your excuses and put it off—I once avoided going for seven years—or you grit your teeth, get on with it and get it over with—which is what I do now.
But there’s another way to think about evangelism, where we talk to people about Jesus because we want to, long to, and are excited to, even though it’s tough.
In the second half of this book (from chapter 5 on), we’ll be thinking practically about evangelism: what to say, how to be ourselves, how to get going. But of course, unless we want to do it, none of those chapters will matter very much.
So here are three truths that have helped motivate me over the years when it comes to evangelism. My prayer is that our hearts will be stirred by them, and that by having them in place, we will want to witness because we will know that it is always worth it; that “knowledge of the truth … leads to godliness” (Titus 1:1 NIV).
Here they are:
- The glory of Jesus
- The guarantee of the new creation
- The grim reality of death and hell
The Glory of Jesus
Glory. It’s a religious-sounding word, and I make no apology for using it. When it comes to Jesus, no other word will do. The glory of something is its weight, its unique worth. It’s what sets something apart in an inimitable way. The glory of a sunset is its color; the glory of a lion is its strength; the glory of a master craftsman is his skill. And in Jesus we see the nature and presence of God flood out.
God’s glory is almost too much to take in. When Peter, James and John caught a glimpse of it as Jesus was transfigured in blazing white on a mountaintop, Peter spluttered rubbish—he was so “frightened” (Mark 9:6 NIV). When John saw the risen Jesus in his glory on Patmos, he says: “I fell at his feet as though dead” (Revelation 1:17 NIV). This is the glory of God, seen in Jesus; and Jesus himself said it was displayed most clearly of all, not on the mountaintop or in John’s vision, but at the cross (John 12:23-24).
And what is our response to be to this glory? We pray for it each time we pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Hallowed be your name” (Luke 11:2 NIV). Has it ever occurred to you that this is the number one motivation for evangelism in the Bible? The prayer here is about a concern for the honor of the Lord Jesus’ name. We’re asking that the Lord be treated appropriately—that at his name, every knee would bow and every tongue confess that he is Lord. So Paul describes his evangelistic mission, at the start of his letter to the Romans, as calling “all the Gentiles to the obedience that comes from faith for his name’s sake” (Romans 1:5 NIV). Ordinary Christians in the early church “went out” to evangelize “for the sake of the Name” (3 John 1:7 NIV).
This is all about Jesus being treated in a way that recognizes his glory. Jesus himself tells us how he should be treated in the world he has made. He is its creator, and therefore he has authority over it. His last words to his disciples are:
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore go and make disciples of all nations. (Matthew 28:18-19 NIV)
The theologian and statesman Abraham Kuyper put it like this: “There is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry, ‘Mine!’” Here is our mandate for worldwide evangelism. We need permission from no one else. The four “alls” are quite overwhelming in their breadth:
All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations …
Teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
And behold, I am with you always. (Matthew 28:18-20 ESV)
But the glory of Jesus is not just in his power and authority, supreme as those are. To hallow his name is to be overwhelmed by the sweetness of his sacrifice. He “came to them” in Matthew 28:18 after he’d risen from the dead, with the nail marks from his cross still fresh in his skin. He sits on the throne as the crucified one: as Revelation puts it, as “a Lamb, looking as if it had been slain” (Revelation 5:6). And at this point it gets very, very personal because every Christian knows that the Lamb was slain for us, for each one of us:
He was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was on him,
and by his wounds we are healed.
(Isaiah 53:5 NIV)
Can you see what the one with all authority was doing for you? Can you see how he loved you? He was dying for you. And the only response to the one with all power being crushed in our place is to echo the chorus of the hymn we sing each Christmas: O come, let us adore him.
The Grief of Un-Adoration
So it should grieve us when Jesus is not adored, not worshipped, when his glory is not acknowledged—when he is ignored, sidelined and derided. It should grieve us when that happens in our hearts and lives; and when it happens in the hearts and lives of those around us.
In 2011, I went to St Paul’s Cathedral in London for the memorial service of the Christian leader John Stott, with whom I served at All Soul’s Langham Place. My most striking memory from the service was hearing his secretary of fifty-five years, Frances Whitehead, commend him to us. She said of him: “The closer I got to him, the more integrity I saw.” And so her concern was that we held him in the right esteem, because she knew his character deserved it.
John Stott was a great man, but he was a mere man. How much more esteem, glory, and worship does the God-man—the one with all authority, who came to be killed in our place and for our salvation—deserve? The closer you get to Jesus—the more you read of him in the Bible and see him at work in your life—the more glory you will see, and the more you will long for him to be treated as he deserves.
It’s that longing that drove Paul’s evangelism in Athens. There he was, in the city known for its advanced philosophy, democracy and intellectual capability… but what does he notice? What was on his postcard from Athens? What he saw was “that the city was full of idols” (Acts 17:16 ESV). And he was moved by what he saw; he was “greatly distressed” by those idols. He was stirred up; he was angered by what he saw— because while many false gods were being worshipped and praised, the living God, the Lord Jesus, was not. That’s how he felt about a city that had pushed the true God out of the picture, that lived as though Jesus was not Lord. In his book Our Guilty Silence, John Stott tells the story of Henry Martyn, a 19th-century missionary who died young, aged just 31, having given up a brilliant academic career to take the gospel to India and then to Persia (modern-day Iran):
[Martyn’s] customary serenity was only disturbed when anybody insulted his Lord. On one occasion the sentiment was expressed [to Martyn] that “Prince Abbas Mirza had killed so many Christians that Christ from the fourth heaven took hold of Mahomet’s skirt to entreat him to desist”. It was a dramatic fantasy. Here was Christ kneeling before Mahommed. How would Martyn react? [Martyn wrote] “I was cut to the soul at this blasphemy.” Seeing his discomfiture, his visitor asked what it was that was so offensive. Martyn replied: “I could not endure existence if Jesus were to be always thus dishonored.” His Muslim visitor was astonished and again asked why. “If anyone pluck out your eyes”, he answered, “there is no saying why you feel pain; it is feeling. It is because I am one with Christ that I am thus dreadfully wounded.”
Stott then writes:
I never read these words of Martyn’s without being rebuked, for I do not have this passionate love for Christ’s honor or feel this acute pain. Nor do I see it much (if at all) in the contemporary Church. But is not this the cause of our guilty silence? We do not speak for Christ because we do not so love his name that we cannot bear to see him unacknowledged and unadored. If only our eyes were opened to see his glory, and if only we felt wounded by the shame of his public humiliation among men, we should not be able to remain silent. Rather would we echo the apostles’ words [in Acts 4:20 NIV]: “we cannot but speak of what we have seen and heard.”
Paul saw Jesus’ glory, just as Henry Martyn did and we should; so he reacted to what he saw in Athens by telling them about the One who deserved their worship:
He was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the market-place day by day with those who happened to be there. A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. (Acts 17:16-18 NIV)
Paul could not stay silent when Jesus was not known and worshipped. He was stirred up by the false worship around him. It motivated him to cross the painline, be derided as a babbler, and tell people that there is a God, who came to earth and died and rose and is on the throne of heaven; to declare that that God demands and deserves the worship of every single Athenian, every single human, every single inhabitant of your home and your community and your country. These words will not be popular in a culture that calls for tolerance over truth, but we need to pray for the same spirit of indignation that we see in
Paul in Athens and Henry Martyn in India. This needs to be personal. This needs to be emotional. When we see Jesus’ name dishonored, we need to pray against apathy. We need to pray for the heart of Paul, who was greatly distressed to see the godlessness of Athens, and so he spoke.
To move from giants to mice, one of the things I’m grateful for from that time at school was the grief that I, as a baby Christian, felt when my contemporaries at school did not just malign me but mocked Jesus. Thirty years later, I’m glad that I never really got over it. I shouldn’t. Of course, we keep loving people and keep forgiving them even as they reject us and (worse) reject our Lord. But let’s pray that the Lord will keep us from apathy about his name.
Hallowed be your name. How? We look to Jesus. Every day, we ask his Spirit to stir our hearts, so that as we read our Bibles we will not miss any of his glory. And then we will long for others to see that glory too, for his name’s sake.