The Gospel and Personal Evangelism (Foreword by C. J. Mahaney) E-Book

Mark Dever

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 168

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2007

Beschreibung

Evangelism is not only misunderstood, it is often unpracticed. Many Christians want to share the gospel with others, but because those Christians don't grasp the fundamentals of witnessing, they feel intimidated and incapable of sharing the truth of the gospel. Yet those believers fail to recognize that God has already established who and how we are to evangelize. In The Gospel and Personal Evangelism, Dr. Mark Dever seeks to answer the four basic questions about evangelism that many Christians ask: Who should we evangelize? How should we evangelize? What is evangelism? Why should we evangelize? In his answers Dever draws on New Testament truths and helps believers apply those truths in practical ways. As readers understand the fundamentals of evangelism, they will begin to develop a culture of evangelism in their lives and their local churches.

Leseprobe

“Mark Dever persuasively covers in this well-written book the basics of reaching the lost with the gospel. Refreshing in its simplicity and practical application.”

—ROBERT E. COLEMAN, distinguished professor of evangelism and discipleship, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

“The author led me to Christ more than a decade ago. He knows whereof he speaks. He’s the only Christian I know who once led a college “atheists’ group” for evangelistic purposes! This book—filled with practical insights about how to obey the Great Commission—should spur us on, both individually and as churches, to shine like stars in the universe.”

—JOHN FOLMAR, pastor, United Christian Church of Dubai, United Arab Emirates

“Our theological lenses vary, but this we all still see the same: the fulfillment of the Christian life and the vocation of the church is to share in God’s redeeming work in the world. And whatever your tradition, there is something in this book that will help you understand and do that better. In the thirty years I have known Mark Dever, he has always been studying and practicing what he writes about here. Read, grow, and go!”

—DAVID R. THOMAS, senior pastor, Centenary, A United Methodist Congregation, Lexington, Kentucky

“Mark’s deep felt desire to see people come to Christ combined with a rock steady commitment to Biblical evangelism has birthed an important book for our times; a book that everyone who desires to share their faith—faithfully—should read.”

—J. MACK STILES, general secretary, IFES, Dubai; author, Speaking of Jesus

Crossway Books by Mark Dever

12 Challenges Churches Face

The Compelling Community: Where God’s Power Makes a Church Attractive (coauthor)

The Deliberate Church: Building Your Ministry on the Gospel (coauthor)

Discipling: How to Help Others Follow Jesus

In My Place Condemned He Stood: Celebrating the Glory of the Atonement (coauthor)

It Is Well: Expositions on Substitutionary Atonement (coauthor)

The Message of the New Testament: Promises Kept

The Message of the Old Testament: Promises Made

Nine Marks of a Healthy Church (New Expanded Edition)

Preaching the Cross (coauthor)

Proclaiming a Cross-Centered Theology (coauthor)

The Unadjusted Gospel (coauthor)

What Does God Want of Us Anyway?

A Quick Overview of the Whole Bible

What Is a Healthy Church?

THE GOSPEL &PERSONAL EVANGELISM

Mark E. Dever

Foreword by C.J. Mahaney

The Gospel and Personal Evangelism

© 2007 by Mark Dever

Published by Crossway Booksa publishing ministry of Good News Publishers 1300 Crescent Street Wheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law.

Unless otherwise indicated, Scripture quotations are from The Holy Bible: New International Version.® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan Publishing House. All rights reserved.

The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by International Bible Society. Use of either trademark requires the permission of International Bible Society.

Cover art direction: Josh Dennis

Cover design: Luke Daab

Cover illustration: Bridgeman Art Gallery

First printing 2007

Printed in the United States of America

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dever, Mark.

The Gospel and Personal Evangelism / Mark E. Dever; foreword by C.J. Mahaney.

p. cm.

1. Evangelistic work. 2. Witness bearing (Christianity) I. Title.

BV3790.D4765 2007

248'.5—dc22

2007016748

With thanks to Godfor his faithfulnessin fruit given through evangelism,now precious friends—John, Karan, Ryan—and infriends who’ve taught me about evangelism:

JIM PACKER WILL METZGER MACK STILES

and SEBASTIAN TRAEGER

Contents

Foreword

Introduction: An Amazing Story

1 Why Don’t We Evangelize?

2 What Is the Gospel?

3 Who Should Evangelize?

4 How Should We Evangelize?

5 What Isn’t Evangelism?

6 What Should We Do After We Evangelize?

7 Why Should We Evangelize?

Conclusion: Closing the Sale

Recommended Reading

Appendix: A Word to Pastors

Notes

Foreword

One of the first things I discovered about my very good friend Mark Dever is that he walks as fast as he talks. It was over ten years ago that I drove from my home church in the suburbs of Washington DC to meet Mark at Capitol Hill Baptist Church, where he serves as senior pastor. It was a pleasant day, so Mark suggested we walk the short distance from his church’s historic building to a nearby Subway restaurant. Even though I usually walk at a brisk pace myself, I had trouble keeping up with Mark.

Moments before entering the fast-food establishment, Mark explained that he ate there often, not because of the fine cuisine, but for the purpose of sharing the gospel. Inside, he greeted the owners—a Muslim couple from India—by name and engaged them in friendly conversation.

As we sat down, I began to quiz Mark about his heart for unbelievers and his strategy for sharing the gospel. He told me that he intentionally frequents the same restaurants and businesses so he can develop relationships and hopefully create evangelistic opportunities.

Since that day, I’ve attempted to follow Mark’s example and had the joy of sharing the good news with many people I meet along the seemingly uneventful route of daily life.

If you, like me, have walked through entire days unconcerned and unaware of the lost sinners all around you, or if you desire to share the gospel but are unsure how to build a relationship or start a conversation, The Gospel and Personal Evangelism will encourage and equip you. As you read, you will catch Mark’s contagious passion to share the gospel of Jesus Christ and receive practical instruction in personal evangelism.

While this book is for all Christians, it is also a gift to pastors. Cultivating evangelism in the local church is one of a pastor’s most important responsibilities and difficult challenges. Perhaps the most difficult. However, through the pages of The Gospel and Personal Evangelism, Mark’s wisdom, teaching, and experience will support you in this vital work of ministry.

That’s why, for many years now, I’ve been pestering Mark to write this book. It’s so that by the grace of God, church members and pastors and you and I will notice those we once ignored. It’s so that we will befriend sinners who are without hope and without God. It’s so that we will share with them the good news of Jesus Christ’s substitutionary sacrifice on the cross. It’s so that someday those lost souls might turn from their sins and trust in the Savior’s death and resurrection on their behalf. And then, there will be some serious rejoicing—on earth and in heaven (Luke 15:10)!

Mark, thank you for writing The Gospel and Personal Evangelism. Thank you even more for your compelling example of compassion for the lost and for your faithfulness to proclaim Jesus Christ and him crucified. May there be many gospel conversations and abundant evangelistic fruit as a result of this book.

I’m looking forward to our next lunch together, my friend. Let’s walk to Subway.

C.J. Mahaney Sovereign Grace Ministries

Introduction An Amazing Story

Let me tell you an amazing story about a person you want to be like. And please hang in there through some of the details. I can’t tell stories any other way.

John Harper was born in a Christian home in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1872. When he was about fourteen years old, he became a Christian himself, and from that time on, he began to tell others about Christ. At seventeen years of age, he began to preach, going down the streets of his village and pouring out his soul in passionate pleading for men to be reconciled to God.

After five or six years of toiling on street corners preaching the gospel and working in the mill during the day, Harper was taken in by the Reverend E. A. Carter of Baptist Pioneer Mission in London. This set Harper free to devote his whole time and energy to the work so dear to his heart—evangelism. Soon, in September 1896, Harper started his own church. This church, which he began with just twenty-five members, numbered over five hundred by the time he left thirteen years later. During this time he had been both married and widowed. Before he lost his wife, God blessed Harper with a beautiful little girl named Nana.

Harper’s life was an eventful one. He almost drowned several times. When he was two-and-a-half years of age, he fell into a well but was resuscitated by his mother. At the age of twenty-six, he was swept out to sea by a reverse current an]d barely survived. And at thirty-two he faced death on a leaking ship in the Mediterranean. If anything, these brushes with death simply seemed to confirm John Harper in his zeal for evangelism, which marked him out for the rest of the days of his life.

While pastoring his church in London, Harper continued his fervent and faithful evangelism. In fact, he was such a zealous evangelist that the Moody Church in Chicago asked him to come over to America for a series of meetings. He did, and they went well. A few years later, Moody Church asked him if he would come back again. And so it was that Harper boarded a ship one day with a second-class ticket at Southampton, England, for the voyage to America.

Harper’s wife had died just a few years before, and he had with him his only child, Nana, age six. What happened after this we know mainly from two sources. One is Nana, who died in 1986 at the age of eighty. She remembered being woken up by her father a few nights into their journey. It was about midnight, and he said that the ship they were on had struck an iceberg. Harper told Nana that another ship was just about there to rescue them, but, as a precaution, he was going to put her in a lifeboat with an older cousin, who had accompanied them. As for Harper, he would wait until the other ship arrived.

The rest of the story is a tragedy well known. Little Nana and her cousin were saved. But the ship they were on was the Titanic. The only way we know what happened to John Harper after is because, in a prayer meeting in Hamilton, Ontario, some months later, a young Scotsman stood up in tears and told the extraordinary story of how he was converted. He explained that he had been on the Titanic the night it struck the iceberg. He had clung to a piece of floating debris in the freezing waters. “Suddenly,” he said, “a wave brought a man near, John Harper. He, too, was holding a piece of wreckage.

“He called out, ‘Man, are you saved?’

“‘No, I am not,’ I replied.

“He shouted back, ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.’

“The waves bore [Harper] away, but a little later, he was washed back beside me again. ‘Are you saved now?’ he called out.

“‘No,’ I answered. ‘Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.’

“Then losing his hold on the wood, [Harper] sank. And there, alone in the night with two miles of water under me, I trusted Christ as my savior. I am John Harper’s last convert.”1

Now for something completely different—my life story as an evangelist. I am no John Harper. Sometimes I’m a reluctant evangelist. In fact, not only am I sometimes a reluctant evangelist, sometimes I’m no evangelist at all. There have been times of wrestling: “Should I talk to him?” Normally a very forward person, even by American standards, I can get quiet, respectful of the other people’s space. Maybe I’m sitting next to someone on an airplane (in which case I’ve already left that person little space!); maybe it’s someone talking to me about some other matter. It may be a family member I’ve known for years, or a person I’ve never met before; but, whoever it is, the person becomes for me, at that moment, a witness-stopping, excuse-inspiring spiritual challenge.

If there is a time in the future when God reviews all of our missed evangelistic opportunities, I fear that I could cause more than a minor delay in eternity.

If you are anything like me when it comes to evangelism (and many people are), then let me encourage you for picking up this little book at all. It is meant to be an encouragement, a clarification, an instruction, a rebuke, and a challenge all rolled up into several short chapters. My prayer is that because of the time you spend reading this book, more people will hear the good news of Jesus Christ.

Isn’t it amazing that we have trouble sharing such wonderful news? Who would mind telling a friend that they held a winning lottery ticket? What doctor wouldn’t want to tell their patient that the tests came back negative (which, of course, is a good thing)? Who wouldn’t be honored by a phone call from the White House saying that the president wanted to meet with him?

So why is it, when we have the best news in the world, that we are so slow to tell it to others? Sometimes our problem may be any one of a long list of excuses. Perhaps we don’t know the gospel well enough—or we don’t think we do. Maybe we think it’s someone else’s job, the work of a minister or a missionary. Maybe we just don’t really know how to go about it. Or perhaps we think we are evangelizing when we really are not.

Let’s say that we are faithful with evangelism, but what do we do if the one we are evangelizing gets upset or even gets mad at us? On the other hand, what do we do if it works, if someone “prays the prayer” with us, or at least says that she wants to be a Christian?

And one more question Christians often ask about evange-lism: is it okay if I don’t really want to evangelize but simply do it out of guilt? I know it’s not best, but is it at least okay? These are some of the questions we want to answer. In addition to those, I want to look at a few other questions about sharing the good news: Why don’t we evangelize? What is the gospel? Who should evangelize? How should we evangelize? What isn’t evangelism? What should we do after we evangelize? Why should we evangelize? In sum, we discuss in this book the best news that there has ever been, and how we should share that news.

God has established who and how we should evangelize. God himself is at the heart of the evangel—the good news we are spreading. And we should evangelize, ultimately, because of God. All we are doing in this book is connecting some of those dots in our thinking, and, I pray, in our speaking, as well.

Our answers to these questions are not all completely distinct. They weave in and out and one influences the other, but they each provide a separate viewpoint from which to see and understand this great biblical topic of evangelism. To answer these questions, we will look through all the New Testament, from that epicenter of evangelism—the book of Acts—to the Gospels and the letters.

Of course, this little book can’t answer all the questions there are about evangelism (because I can’t answer all the questions!), but my prayer is that by considering them, you’ll find that you can be more understanding and obedient in evangelism. I can’t promise you’ll become another John Harper (I haven’t yet), but we can all become more faithful.

I also pray that as you come to evangelize more, you will help your church to develop a culture of evangelism. What do I mean by a culture of evangelism? I mean an expectation that Christians will share the gospel with others, talk about doing that, pray about it, and regularly plan and work together to help each other evangelize. We want evangelism to be normal—in our own lives and in our churches.

It’s to this end I’ve written this book, and I pray it’s to this end you’re reading it.

1: Why Don’t We Evangelize?

A. T. Robertson was a famous Bible teacher and a beloved seminary lecturer. He was also known as a tough professor. At the time, students would stand in class and recite from memory long passages from their assigned books. Sometimes it went well for students; other times it didn’t. Once after a particularly poor performance, Dr. Robertson said to a student, “Well, excuse me, brother, but all I can do for you is pray for you and flunk you.”1

“Flunk” is a word we don’t use much anymore. It’s a hard, sharp, inflexible kind of word. But it’s probably a good word to use to quickly summarize how most of us have done in obeying the call to evangelize. Jesus says to tell all nations the good news, but we haven’t. Jesus calls people to be fishers of men, but we prefer to watch. Peter says to always be ready to give a reason for the hope that we have, but we are not. Solomon says he who wins souls is wise, but we flunk.

But if you’re anything like me, you’re probably not quite so blunt about your failures in evangelism. You’ve altered your mental records. In fact, even at the time you’re not witnessing, you’re busy spinning, justifying, rationalizing, and explaining to your conscience why it was really wise and faithful and kind and obedient not to share the gospel with a particular person at that time and in that situation.

Throughout the rest of this chapter, we want to consider some of the most common excuses we use to justify our non-evangelism. Generally, those excuses just come into our minds, save us from having certain conversations, and then quickly pass by. In this chapter, we want to slow down our excuses and keep them quiet for just a moment so that we can talk to each of them. Of course, there are thousands more excuses than those listed here, but these are some particularly popular ones. First we’ll consider five especially common ones. Then we’ll look at a few excuses that are rooted in unbelievers, those who are refusing the gospel news we try to bring. Finally, we’ll consider the excuses that are more about ourselves, and we’ll see what we can do about them.

Basic Excuse 1: “I don’t know their language.”

Now, a language barrier is an impressive excuse. And it’s got to be about the best one in this chapter. If you’re sitting next to people who only speak Chinese or French, you don’t have much of an opportunity to share any news with them, let alone news about Christ and their own soul. Of course, you can work to learn another language and so be able to share with many other people. You can keep around Bibles or evangelistic literature in other languages to give away as you have opportunity. But ever since the Tower of Babel, “I don’t know” has been one of the most legitimate excuses we could imagine. Paul warns the Corinthians of the uselessness of speaking words that are unintelligible to someone (1 Cor. 14:10–11, 16, 23). After all, the whole point of our using words is to be understood!

Basic Excuse 2: “Evangelism is illegal.”

In some places, evangelism is illegal. There are countries around the world in which tyrannies of darkness reign. They might be atheistic or Muslim, secular or even “Christian” (in name). But in many countries, sharing the evangelical gospel is forbidden. And it certainly is not to be believed by people who are not already confessing Christians! In such countries, you can usually go out and evangelize—once. It’s the second or third time that might be prevented by social pressure, or laws, or jails, or guns. Not many of us reading this book are probably in that position, though.

Basic Excuse 3: “Evangelism could cause problems at work.”