When a scientist encounters something he has never before seen he tries to determine what it is and whether it is inanimate (rocks, clouds, dirt) or living (trees, microscopic organisms, lizards). One of the scientific criteria for defining life is the object's ability to reproduce.
Rocks, clouds, and dirt are not alive because they cannot make new rocks, clouds, and dirt. Trees, microscopic organisms, and lizards are alive because they are constantly making new trees, microscopic organisms, and lizards.
The same is true with spiritual new life. If we are truly alive in Christ we will be involved in the production of other people who are truly alive in Christ. Reproduction is an important part of spiritual formation and discipleship.
- "Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will send you out to fish for people." ~ Matthew 4:19 (TNIV)
- Jesus came and told his disciples, “I have been given all authority in heaven and on earth. Therefore, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. Teach these new disciples to obey all the commands I have given you. And be sure of this: I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” ~ Matthew 28:18-20 (NLT)
- And then he told them, “Go into all the world and preach the Good News to everyone. ~ Mark 16:15 (NLT)
- But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you. And you will be my witnesses, telling people about me everywhere—in Jerusalem, throughout Judea, in Samaria, and to the ends of the earth.” ~ Acts 1:8 (NLT)
- I do everything to spread the Good News and share in its blessings. ~ 1 Corinthians 9:23 (NLT)
- And all of this is a gift from God, who brought us back to himself through Christ. And God has given us this task of reconciling people to him. For God was in Christ, reconciling the world to himself, no longer counting people’s sins against them. And he gave us this wonderful message of reconciliation. So we are Christ’s ambassadors; God is making his appeal through us. We speak for Christ when we plead, “Come back to God!” ~ 2 Corinthians 5:18-20 (NLT)
Of course, the desire to share and actually doing so are two different things. Sometimes we're afraid -- afraid that we won't do it right or that we'll unnecessarily offend someone.
Dr Ken Boa has some important thoughts about the importance of sharing the gospel.
The believer’s highest call in ministry is to reproduce the life of Christ in others. Reproduction takes the form of evangelism for those who do not know Christ, and edification for those who do. This series develops a philosophy of discipleship and evangelism and looks at edification and evangelism as a way of life; lifestyle discipleship and evangelism are the most effective and realistic approaches to unbelievers and believers within our sphere of influence.The following is from one of Dr Boa's talks on the book of Colossians. I include it here because he provides some practical assistance for hesitant evangelists. These are three models of evangelism.
Discipleship: A Lifestyle of Nurturing Others
In the first birth we receive the gift of bios, biological life; in the second birth we receive the greater gift of zoe, spiritual life. Just as we mature and reproduce on the biological level, God wants us to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Genesis 1:28; 9:1) on the spiritual level. This divinely-ordained process of growth and reproduction after our kind is a significant facet of the spiritual life, because it is directly related to God’s purpose for us to become like His Son and to reproduce the life of Jesus in others. He calls us to nurture people spiritually by building into them, feeding them, protecting them, encouraging them, training them, and assisting in their maturation so that they can learn to do the same with others.
Nurturing spirituality relates to a lifestyle of evangelism and discipleship. When we are part of the process of introducing people to Jesus and encouraging them to grow after they have come to know Him, we discover that our own passion and spiritual vitality is enhanced. Few joys compare with the experience of seeing a friend come to new life in Christ. And one of life’s deepest satisfactions is witnessing the gradual miracle of personal transformation in converts who get serious about becoming disciples. By contrast, the mediocrity of nondiscipleship cuts off the fruit of the Spirit and leads to a lack of love, joy, and peace. Dallas Willard puts it this way in The Spirit of the Disciplines:
Nondiscipleship costs abiding peace, a life penetrated throughout by love, faith that sees everything in the light of God’s overriding governance for good, hopefulness that stands firm in the most discouraging of circumstances, power to do what is right and withstand the forces of evil. In short, it costs exactly that abundance of life Jesus said he came to bring (John 10:10).
Evangelism and discipleship are concrete expressions of love and purpose. Since the God-infused love of agape relates to the steady intention of one’s will toward another’s highest good, it chooses to seek the supreme good for both unbelievers and believers. Clearly, the greatest good for those who do not know Christ is to be delivered from the domain of darkness, death, and condemnation and to be transferred to the kingdom of the light, life, and love of God (Colossians 1:13-14). And the highest good for those who do know Christ is to mature into His likeness through growing conformity to His image (Romans 8:29). Thus, nurturing spirituality personally expresses the agape of God through evangelism (unbelievers) and edification (believers). The Great Commandment relates to the vertical dimension of loving God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and to the horizontal dimension of loving our neighbors as ourselves (Mark 12:30-31). This Great Commandment is like a bow that gives impetus to the focused arrow of the Great Commission to make disciples of all the nations (Matthew 28:18-20). Our love for God gives us the power to love others as He would have us love them, and this other-centered love is expressed in evangelism and edification. Thus, we are divinely commissioned to display and reproduce the life of Christ in the lives of the people in our spheres of influence. We are charged to be ambassadors of the King (2 Corinthians 5:14-21), and when we take this commission seriously, we find that our souls are enlarged by embracing a clear sense of destiny and purpose. When we are on the King’s business as agents of reconciliation, we develop a kingdom mentality and order our lives in accordance with our Lord’s purposes.
All of us give our lives in exchange for something, whether this is temporal or eternal. “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul?” (Matthew 16:26). If we are wise, we will follow Jesus by giving our lives in exchange for people. The apostle Paul knew this was the most significant way to live: “Having so fond an affection for you, we were well-pleased to impart to you not only the gospel of God but also our own lives, because you had become very dear to us” (1 Thessalonians 2:8). As Dag Hammarskjold noted, “It is more noble to give yourself completely to one individual than to labor diligently for the salvation of the masses.”(1)
Sometimes when we think of evangelism, either it is all relationships and no evangelism, or all evangelism and no relationships.Evangelism and discipleship are really just about helping people take one step closer to God. There are lots of ways that "stepping" people happens. But mostly it is about genuinely loving and caring for them.
There are actually three models of evangelism that you see in the New Testament. The first model is proclamational evangelism; and this would be best illustrated in Peter’s sermon on the Day of Pentecost in Acts chapter two, where he is proclaiming this message to a large crowd and those people responded to that message. That is proclamational evangelism. Only a tiny handful of people have a gift along those lines. It is something that Billy Graham clearly has; but it is not something that you or I would be comfortable in doing.
The second model is confrontational evangelism; and I would use the illustration of the Ethiopian eunuch and Philip as an example of that, where there is no relationship whatsoever. He just comes up to this person he has never met and talks to him about ultimate life issues. We sometimes hear about somebody who has never met somebody and sits next to them on a plane and they lead that person to Christ. That represents a small mix of people; and it may be more than proclamational, but only a modest number of people would feel comfortable with that kind of encounter. That is to say, they have somehow been given the gift of being able to adapt to a perfect stranger and make their message clear and make it compelling.
I am suggesting, though, even in that situation, the person who saw the other come to faith is not the only one who was involved. In fact, I want to stress something right away; when it comes to evangelism, it is a process; and God is the One who is going to take care of the outcome. He is responsible for the results. I will unpack that a bit more in just a moment, but it means that, invariably, there will be many encounters and many people will have been praying for them all along. So, the one extreme is to say that this person is the one who led him to Christ, and the opposite extreme is the person who didn’t see him come to faith, and feels they failed, even though they planted the seeds. Both extremes are wrong views, because it is a process.
But, the third approach to evangelism, besides proclamational and confrontational, is relational. Back in 1972, I began to work for an organization called New Life, which was in Knoxville, and they were on the cutting edge of lifestyle or relational evangelism. We used to do these open forum discussion parties about life and God and we could get people to come to those who would never dream of going to a Bible study.
The ideal forum was actually where we were outnumbered by unbelievers. It made for a fantastic discussion. We usually had four nights of discussion, say every Tuesday night for four weeks, and we had around a half an hour for refreshments and then we get into a one hour discussion. Usually people would want to stay on for more.
It was a very successful approach and out of those open forum discussion parties I was able to write a book, in 1982, called, I’m Glad You Asked. It dealt with the twelve fundamental questions that I discovered were always involved in these open forums. It occurred to me that if you always encountered these twelve issues, it would be a good idea to think through what your answer would be. One objection was, “Isn’t the Bible full of errors?” Another was, “How can a good God allow the innocent to suffer?” And another question was, “How can Christ claim to be the only way; isn’t that narrow-minded, bigoted, and intolerant?” Or, another was, “What about those who never heard?” Yet another was, “Isn’t Christianity just a psychological crutch for emotionally weak people?”
These were fundamental questions that would continually come up again and again; and Larry Moody and I came up with a book that gave you a way of basically approaching these. One critical thing to do is to discern just what questions are being asked. Often you will be hit with two or three at the same time. It is important to focus on them one at a time. My point is that if you are hit with a question and you don’t have the answer, you are not responsible; but if you are hit again and again with the same question and you still don’t have the answer, then you are responsible. In other words, it is called research. We live in a time when there are more answers and more resources available than ever before to help us deal with the intellectual objections.
In my view, I want people to ask these questions because an objection is really an opportunity. It is not a confrontational kind of context, but rather it is one where you can use dialog and think it through; reason together and think it through. We were involved in lifestyle evangelism in these contexts because these were built on lifestyle relationships and they were not just a bunch of strangers who would come to these parties. We would teach the people themselves how to share with their friends rather than just have me doing it all the time.
That is a danger we have; we like to pay the professionals to pray and share and do all that stuff. Actually, the most effective people are the ones who have the relationships. My point is that you learn by doing and gain skills by practice. So, frankly it is something any of us can do.
I want to lead you through the highlights of my seminar on evangelism just to give you some thoughts. In my book, Conformed to His Image, I have a summary of these thoughts and I call it ‘nurturing spirituality’, which is developing a lifestyle of discipleship and evangelism. At the end of the day, we are called, in the Great Commission, to make disciples and not converts. But, when people do come to faith, we want them to grow in their relationship; but the idea is that evangelism ought to lead to discipleship, but discipleship ought to lead to evangelism, as well. The two really go together.
At any rate, I want to give you a few Biblical thoughts concerning evangelism. The first one is one I just gave you; evangelism is a process. What I mean by that is that Biblical metaphors for evangelism are agricultural; preparing the soil; sowing the seed; cultivating the soil; and reaping the harvest. You could even add a fifth one if you want: gathering it into the barn, but the idea is that I did the planting and God caused the growth.
Jesus also uses this imagery in John chapter four, where the fields are ripe for the harvest. This is an interesting idea, because if we see it this way, we see that the process of preparing the soil might well be just to build relationships with people and prayerfully pray for them; but remember that people are not projects. Understand that you share and you want to share because you want what is best for them.
If I believe that agape is the steady intention of my will for another’s highest good, then I have to then ask what that highest good truly is. If they don’t know Christ, what is their highest good? The highest good for a person who doesn’t know Christ, of course, is to move from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s beloved Son; it is to move from a sphere of death to a sphere of life; from being a condemned criminal to being an adopted child.
Ultimately, my view of the highest good for a person is for them to have an encounter with Christ; and the highest good, parenthetically, for a believer is to become like Him; and so that would be edification or discipleship. So, whenever I love a person, my desire should be to choose what is best for them to help them move more in those directions without manipulating the process. The reason why I can enjoy this is because the process is something I can be involved in; whether I am preparing the soil for the planting of the seed or sowing the seed itself, which is to sow the seed of the word; or third, and this is going to be the bulk of the time, doing the cultivation.
After the seed has been planted, cultivation is, agriculturally, the largest portion of the time. What is involved with cultivation? You water the soil and you provide fertilizer and you weed it and you provide the conditions for growth that are necessary to sustain it; and at the end of the day there is the final process, which is a short one, and that is reaping the harvest.
I fear that most models of evangelism focus on the harvest and minimize the cultivation. My view, actually, is to focus on the cultivation and view the harvest as an end goal, but really that is not the bulk of the time involved. Otherwise, if you have that mindset, you are going to have the idea that only when they sign on the dotted line are you doing evangelism.
My belief is that you can be doing evangelism just as much as the person who reaps the harvest if you are anywhere in that process. That view is liberating; it is freeing, somehow, to me, because I don’t have to manipulate the process.
Along those lines, I want to add that the results belong to God and not to me. This, too, liberates me, because I don’t have to make something happen. I can be available; I can pray for the person; I can share with them and discern where they are; but I am going to look to God for the results because I can’t bring that about.
The dumbest thing I can do is to embrace the goal of changing another person. You all know this is true of your friends and your spouses. It may be a legitimate desire, but the minute you make it a goal you are committed to manipulating them. Frankly, we can’t even change ourselves, let alone change somebody else. It is the Spirit of God that makes that happen. In other words, I am saying that I can enjoy the process because I don’t have to try and make it happen. You see the idea there? It frees me; otherwise people get weird when they get involved in evangelism. Their voice goes up a notch; they get nervous; and that is a dangerous thing, indeed. I have seen people do this; the pressure mounts and they feel guilty and finally they blow up and both parties run off with their tail between their legs.
When it comes to evangelism, both believers and non-believers have one thing in common; they are both uncomfortable with it. The problem, however, isn’t evangelism; it is the model for it that we are given. So, I believe that there are multiple encounters and exposures and only God knows what those all look like. Therefore you can never know the degree of your own impact in that setting; even if you see them come to faith, you can’t measure and quantify it because there were many other people involved in the process. That is my argument there.
So, there is a history of intercession and a history of exposure. A lot of people have a particular calling and I think it was Francis Schaffer than coined this term; ‘pre-evangelism’, and that is what I would call it; it has to do with preparing the soil. But, pre-evangelism is a very legitimate approach to take, because it is as much of the process as anything else.
I stress, again, that you can not contribute to the work of God. To contribute to God is to give Him something that He needs, and God doesn’t need anything; but, you can participate in the work of God. If you don’t do it, He will accomplish His work, but you will miss out on the opportunity. It’s not like God is biting His fingernails, hoping that you’re going to get there in time. Rather, he will take care of His work, but He gives us the privilege of participation.
The best argument against Christianity is Christians, but the other side of the coin is also true: the best argument for Christianity is also Christians. In fact, when Paul says, “…with wisdom,” it means that you need to be discerning; and to be wise, not foolish, in making the most of the opportunity God gives you. Notice how he says, “…let your speech be with grace.” That is what many are lacking.
Notice, too, that he says, “…as though seasoned with salt, so that you will know how to respond to each person.” It is not ‘one size fits all’; the idea of a canned presentation is failing to realize that people are coming at things from very different angles; and you must graciously and wisely adapt in a loving way, discerning where they are coming from and then adapting accordingly and looking to God for the outcome.
I like the idea of “seasoning your speech with salt,” which means to make it flavorable and palatable, so that you will know how to respond to each person; and that is, in fact, a person-specific approach that you are taking. Notice that Jesus did this somewhat, in John chapters three and four; in chapter three he dealt very directly and openly with Nicodemus and dealt with Him in a more forceful way than He did with the woman at the well in chapter four. He adapted according to the need of the person and we need to do the same thing by discerning where they are coming from.
By the way, I think one of the most important things that you and I can do is to build common ground and part of that is by asking good questions and then listening well; to try and pull out from that person where they are coming from and what are the issues in their life. By asking good questions following on those questions, I can begin to penetrate the things that they are most concerned about and I will have a better and better idea of how to adapt according to the need of that person. That is just being prudent and wise.
By the way, when it comes to apologetics, I have found that is the most effective approach as well; instead of being on the defensive, I simply ask good questions, not in an adversarial way, but ask good questions and then listen carefully to their answer, and then to ask questions that follow up on those answers. In doing that, you are actually helping a person think through the issue. Most people have not thought through the logical implications of their worldview at all. So, you are kind of birthing an understanding by helping them think that through. Take a person, for example, who might say, “How can God let a hurricane destroy so many people?” Instead of answering them, I might ask them why it was such a concern to them. If they say, “It just seems wrong,” I might ask them how they know it is a wrong thing. In other words, I am trying to help them understand that they are appealing to a standard of right and wrong, or good and evil, that their worldview may not actually sustain.
As soon as a person declares something wrong, they are appealing to a right; but what is their basis for right? You can not really call a thing evil unless you appeal to an absolute for good. If, in fact, a thing is evil, or if there is no absolute for good; or morality is just a matter of your own opinion, or a matter of social conditioning, or a matter of instincts, then there is no morality. You see the point here?
Yet, we don’t act like there is no morality. Even the relativist, who claims there isn’t any, when something terrible happens to a friend of theirs, they suddenly become an absolutist.
In any event, by helping a person along, you are bringing them to a point where they realize they don’t have answers. Many times we don’t come to the position until we realize that we have a problem; and that is exactly, by the way, what Paul does in Romans chapter one. He says before you are ready to come to faith in Christ you need to understand the problem you’ve got. So, Romans chapters one through three focuses on the problem and tries to create a very careful case for the fact that we are not in as good a shape as we think and we are not as good a people as we thought. Only then are we ready to respond and receive the good news because it is not good news until you know the bad news.(2)
'Love your neighbor
as you love yourself.'"
SECTION #28 NOTES
(1) www.kenboa.org/text_resources/teaching_letters/kens_teaching_letter/2015
(2) www.kenboa.org/text_resources/unedited_transcripts?id=6058
SECTION #28 ASSIGNMENT
1. In your own words describe the three kinds of evangelism discussed by Dr Boa. Which of these approaches is most natural to you? Give an illustration of why you think that it is so. (10 points possible)
2. Identify at least three people who do not know Christ as Savior and Lord. Commit yourself to pray for, care about, and share with these people over the next six months. This means that you will be on duty and ready to help them take steps closer to God as the Holy Spirit leads. Expect that God will be moving in their lives in some significant ways during this time. The first names of the people I am committed to are _______________________________________. (10 points possible)
3. Dr Boa talks about helping by asking appropriate questions. What does he mean by that? Give an illustration of a time when you have helped someone take a step closer to God by asking a question of them. (15 points possible)
4. BONUS: There are several words in the Section #28 reading which might be unfamiliar to many people. Find up to five words in the article that are new to you and write proper definitions of them using your own words. (10 points possible)
5. BONUS: Dr Boa says, "The dumbest thing I can do is to embrace the goal of changing another person." What does he mean by that? Why is it dumb? Describe a situation where you have tried to change someone. What happened? (10 points possible)
