Attitudes of Effective Evangelism

Evangelism begins with a compassion born of a proper assessment of the massive character of the problem. Unbelievers flayed and stripped and depressed and destitute and headed toward divine wrath, destroyed by false shepherds and on their way to a fiery hell. Welcome to Grace to You with John MacArthur.

I'm your host, Phil Johnson. Today John focuses on the single most important reason Christians are on earth—to be witnesses for Christ. The question is, how do you know if you're really carrying out the Great Commission, if you're witnessing in the right way? Do you need special training to give the gospel? And why evangelize when God chooses whom He saves?

Bring those questions to today's broadcast as John looks at attitudes of effective evangelism. That's the title of the lesson today on Grace to You. So get your Bible and turn to Luke chapter 10 and follow along as John begins the lesson. We come now to the tenth chapter of Luke's gospel and let me read the text to you.

Now after this, the Lord appointed 70 others and sent them two and two ahead of Him to every city and place where He Himself was going to come. And He was saying to them, the harvest is plentiful, but the laborers are few. Therefore, beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out laborers into His harvest.

Go your ways. Behold, I send you out as lambs in the midst of wolves, carry no purse, no bag, no shoes and greet no one on the way. Now that is a very practical, straightforward text, but it is loaded with some wonderful application for us.

You'll see that as it unfolds. Since our Lord Jesus walked on the earth at the time He was here and since, there have always been people attracted to Jesus. There have always been people curious about Jesus. There have always been people who wanted to show respect and honor to Jesus. There have been people who believed that Jesus was the Savior. But there have always been people unwilling to follow Him on His terms.

And do you remember what His terms were? Go back to chapter 9, verse 23. He was saying to them all, that is all of the people who were in the crowd that trailed around and heard Him preach and saw Him do His miracles, He was saying to them all, if anyone wishes to come after Me, if you want to really be My disciple, if you want to follow Me seriously, let Him deny Himself, take up His cross daily and follow Me. In other words, Jesus was saying to the attracted and the curious and the interested and even the believing, if you want the salvation that I offer, if you want to enter into the kingdom of God, if you want eternal life, you deny yourself. And we have learned that that means you refuse to associate any longer with the person that you are. You say, I am done with all my hopes and dreams and ambitions. I am weary of my failures and my sins. I am tired of trying to gain my way into heaven. I abandon everything to follow You and take up the cross daily.

That is to say, with such resolve and such commitment that if it means death, you are willing to face death on a daily basis, and that's the way you follow Him. Not everybody by any means was willing to do that. Many of the curious, many of the attracted, many of those enthralled by Jesus, many of those who believed in Jesus were not willing to abandon everything, to say it's the end of Me and the beginning of you, to confess Him as Lord and follow Him wherever He went, whatever it cost. Not everyone was willing to do that. John chapter 6 tells us about some disciples who walked no more with Him because the stakes were too high, the price was more than they wanted to pay.

When the stakes became higher than they were willing to pay, they disappeared into the background. But on the other hand, there were some true disciples. In fact, in chapter 10 verse 1, we meet seventy of them. So the numbers here at least favor the genuine disciples. We meet seventy who were sent by the Lord to prepare the way for His coming. These are those who were willing to deny themselves. These are those who were willing to take up a cross daily and follow Jesus.

These are those who were the genuine and the true disciples who said, we are refusing to deal with the person we are any longer. We abandon everything in our own lives. We submit to Your Lordship. Whatever it is You want us to do, we gladly do. Whatever the price, we gladly pay.

Even if it means death, we will follow You. Genuine followers, no excuses with the seventy. So from among the large group of disciples, learners, students, followers of Jesus, He picks these seventy. He has already picked twelve.

This is seventy more. The twelve were chosen uniquely to be the apostles. There were only twelve. Judas fell out, Matthias was added to take his place, and then there was that apostle sort of out of due season by the name of the apostle Paul. But apart from the twelve and the addition of Matthias and Paul, the twelve were a very unique group. This is in addition to them.

This is the seventy. Genuine followers, yes, sent by our Lord to be missionaries. And while you might not see yourself as an apostle, and rightly so, since theirs was a unique calling and a unique responsibility to proclaim the gospel, to do signs and wonders that attested to the truth of that gospel, also to be responsible to write or to instruct those who did write the New Testament. They are unique. They will in the kingdom reign over the twelve tribes of Israel. They'll have their names embedded on the foundations of the holy city, the New Jerusalem in the eternal state.

So they are unique. We cannot aspire to be apostles. But this next group is important because here the Lord just collects some who remain and sends them out really as the first kingdom missionaries.

And we can all see ourselves in this group. Like the apostles, these are ordinary people. They don't seem to have any manifest human qualifications. And if we remember 1 Corinthians 1, there are not many noble, not many mighty anyway within the kingdom and within the purpose of God. He chooses the weak and the nobodies and the nothings and the base to do His work so that no man can boast. And the explanation for the advance of the kingdom will never be human because the kind of people that He chooses to do it don't have the human resources, the human power to pull it off and therefore the credit goes to the Lord. So here He moves from that highest rank of spiritual service, the apostles, down to the next level and here we find what everybody else was commissioned to do and that was to proclaim the same message of Jesus Christ. They are set apart to be the first kingdom missionaries. Basically if you go down to the end of verse 11, you will see that they are to say at the end of the verse, the kingdom of God has come near.

That was basically their message. We're here to tell you the kingdom of God has come near. What does that mean? Well the King is here. He's on His way. He's coming to your village.

He's coming to your town. We want to tell you about Him. We want to tell you why He came.

We want to tell you what He's done. And so they were basically missionaries for the King, for the Lord Jesus Christ, introducing the one who would bring the kingdom of salvation. Special people, as I said, not required, no qualification except being a true self-denying cross-bearing follower of Jesus Christ. And as we look at this commissioning, He starts with the essential attitude necessary for being a kingdom missionary. We're going to see the essential attitudes that our Lord requires of these kingdom missionaries. The attitude that is necessary is composed of a number of elements, and they're going to unfold for us in these four verses. And they are transferable, beloved, they really are.

They're transferable to us. They were unique in that they knew Jesus, they followed Jesus, they saw His miracles. They also were unique in that they were given power to do what is miraculous. Verse 9 says they could heal those that were sick. That was unique to the apostolic era.

That is not transferable to us. But all the other components of their ministry, the spiritual dimensions, the attitude, the message, the warning, the joy and the consequent joy of the Lord all applies to us. This is going to be a rich, instructive and rewarding section of Luke as we work our way through it. But let's take the first four verses, and here we're going to learn the appropriate attitude for a kingdom missionary, the appropriate attitude. And let me tell you this, if you're going to do evangelism, if you're going to be a missionary, if you're going to proclaim the kingdom of God, if you're going to tell people about the King, the Lord Jesus Christ, it's going to start with an attitude. It's going to start in the heart. If we're going to do evangelism, we have to start with the motives.

And let's go to the heart of the deal right now. The first necessary motive, the first transferable element of the Lord's preparation for these people is compassion...compassion. And I said this before, I'll say it again, the basis of all effective evangelism is compassion. It isn't training, it is compassion. It is a deep, profound sense of sympathy because of the desperate condition of the unconverted.

It is a heart-wrenching concern over the lost. And that's what comes out in our Lord's words. Let's look at verse 2. He was saying to them, He was saying, this is only a part of what He said, believe me, this is not all of what He said. In fact, as you read the sermons that are recorded of Jesus in the New Testament, you're just getting little snippets, little bits, sound bites, if you were, out of those sermons.

But you start here with the Lord saying to them, and this is among the things He said, this is the salient representation of what He said. The harvest is plentiful or great, but the laborers are few. The harvest is huge.

It is huge. The laborers are few. Now if that sounds familiar to you, it's because it's not the first time the Lord said it. Go back to Matthew chapter 9 of necessity and in Matthew 9 you have Matthew's record of the Lord commissioning the Twelve. We move back some months from the commissioning of the Seventy, back to the official commissioning of the Twelve, and that occurs in the ninth and tenth chapters of Matthew. And as He moves toward the commissioning of the Twelve, I want you to pick up 9, 37, and 38. Commissioning of the Twelve comes immediately in chapter 10. But verse 37 of chapter 9, then He said to His disciples, the harvest is plentiful or great, or huge, but the workers are few.

Exact same words. This is then something that is on the mind of Jesus. The harvest is huge.

The laborers are few. Which is to say, we don't have enough people to go into the harvest and do what needs to be done. Now what spawned this statement? Go back to verse 35, Matthew 9, 35. Jesus was going about all the cities, all the villages, and this is in Galilee, and He was teaching in their synagogues. He was proclaiming the gospel of the kingdom, healing every kind of disease, every kind of sickness. And seeing the multitudes, He felt compassion for them because they were distressed and downcast like sheep without a shepherd.

Then He said to His disciples, the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. That statement was born of His compassion. It was born of His compassion. Everywhere the Lord went in His ministry, in particular in Galilee, but everywhere else the Lord went in His ministry, He was moved with compassion.

For example, if you go through Matthew, you will see Matthew 14, 14, in addition to this. Matthew 15, 32, Matthew 18, 27, Matthew 20, verse 34, and it will say the Lord was moved with compassion, the Lord felt compassion. Luke 7, 13, the Lord was moved with compassion.

And again, other places in Luke, this is just a sampling, the Lord moved through His ministry, literally overcome with compassion. Now this word is the strongest word for compassion in the language, the Greek language. It refers to a deeply felt sympathy. It refers to a deep pain that comes from empathy or affection.

You feel this one. It actually comes from a root word that has to do with abdominal pain. You feel it in the pit of your stomach where suffering emotions are felt even by folks like us. What it's saying is the Lord felt an aching in His stomach. It is to say the Lord was nauseated physically. You see Him, for example, at the tomb of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter of John, and the picture of Him there is first He's sobbing, and then He's groaning, and then He bursts out into tears, and then He shudders over the plight of sinners when He sees the reality of a dead Lazarus and a weeping Mary and Martha. And it's not all this agony simply over Lazarus and Mary and Martha because He was going to raise Him from the dead and stop all the pain.

But it's the agony of seeing that as an illustration of the horrendous suffering in the world. Lazarus was an illustration of what all of humanity goes through. And Jesus literally sobbed, groaned, burst into tears and shuddered with agony. Isaiah said about Him, He would be a man of sorrows acquainted with grief. And Matthew, as I said, uses the strongest word for compassion, one that indicates that the Lord had a deep ache, a pain, a nauseating churning in His stomach over the future condition of the unregenerate, as well as their present state.

Look back at that passage in Matthew. It says He saw them as distressed and downcast, es kul minoi and ere minoi. Those two words mean worn out, exhausted, or literally flayed, skinned, like sheep whose shepherds had not only exhausted them, not fed them, but then flayed them, as it were, injured them, wounded them.

The second word, ere minoi, means thrown down, lying prostrate, totally helpless. He looked at the sheep of the shepherds of Israel, the scribes and the Pharisees and religious leaders, and their sheep were not healthy. They were not well fed. They were not well watered. They were not well cared for. They were literally wounded and injured. They had been attacked and assaulted and left for near dead by their evil false shepherds.

And these people would have some kind of vague craving for satisfaction and not have any idea how to find it. And as Psalm 111 4 says, the Lord is gracious and full of compassion. That's describing God. And here is God in human flesh and His heart is literally aching. On another occasion He wept over the city of Jerusalem.

The ache was so profound. He looks at the people of Israel and He sees them like flayed, mangled corpses. They're sort of like roadkill sheep who have been totally destroyed by their own shepherds. And there they lie bewildered and desolate.

They have been treated mercilessly. They have been devoured by their own shepherds, as Jesus said of the Pharisees in Matthew 23 13. And so He is so overwhelmed with sympathy for them that He says to His disciples, the harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Now what are we talking about when we talk about harvest here?

What does He have in mind? You can go back to Luke chapter 10 now because we're down to that same phrase. What does He mean, the harvest is big, the harvest is great, the harvest is plentiful? This is not the field of John 4 35, Jesus and the field with the Samaritan woman.

That's a different picture altogether. What is this harvest that He is talking about? The Jews knew about a harvest. They knew about a harvest. The prophets had talked about a harvest. In fact, Joel chapter 3 verse 12, let the nations be aroused and come to the valley of Jehoshaphat, I'll sit to judge and all the surrounding nations put in the sickle for the harvest is ripe.

Come tread for the winepress is full, the vats overflow for their wickedness is great. Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision. The sun and the moon grew dark, the stars lost their brightness as the Lord roars from Zion. That's the harvest. It's the harvest of the final judgment. And that's why the compassion of the Lord is excited because He sees these people on a path to devastation.

He sees them not only in their stricken condition, but in their disastrous future. He looks ahead, down human history, as it were, and He sees many who will be literally devastated, depressed and destroyed by false leaders, false shepherds. And His heart aches over them because they're headed for the final harvest and it is a harvest of judgment. The New Testament follows that imagery, the Lord Himself in Matthew 13 verse 30 talks about the wheat and the tares growing together and He says, they will grow together until the harvest. And the time of harvest will come, I'll say to the reapers, gather up the tares, bind them in bundles to burn them, but gather the wheat into My barn. Again the harvest is the end of the age when the angels gather together God's people and put them in His kingdom, that's the barn, and gathers together the ungodly and they burn forever in hell. That is clearly explained later in Matthew 13 verse 39.

The enemy who sowed the tares is the devil. The harvest is the end of the age and the reapers are angels. Therefore just as the tares are gathered up and burned with fire, so shall it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send forth His angels, they'll gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, all those who commit lawlessness, cast them into the furnace of fire.

In that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. That's the harvest. The harvest is associated with wrath, wrath at the end of the tribulation, wrath at any point at the coming of Jesus Christ. It is the wrath of God at the end of time. And so the Lord looks at the people and His heart is just overturned.

He is literally sick in His stomach because He sees the future all the way out to the great horrific wrath of the final harvest. And to compound the matter, back to verse 2, the laborers are few. You've got this mass of humanity moving toward judgment and only a few laborers, only a few. So this is where evangelism begins. You understand the massive issue. How can you be content to do nothing?

How can you be content to sit idly by? Evangelism begins with a compassion born of a proper assessment of the massive character of the problem. Unbelievers flayed and stripped and depressed and destitute and made so by false religions all over the face of the earth, lying as it were on the highways and byways of the earth, destitute, desolate, bewildered, confused and headed toward divine wrath, destroyed by false shepherds and on their way to a fiery hell.

You know, you have people in evangelicalism today who don't even want to talk about hell, but that's where all evangelism starts as to its motivation. I heard a sermon on the TV yesterday and a guy was saying, would you like to be delivered from stress? Would you like to be delivered from anxiety? Would you like to be delivered from the issues of life that trouble you and that rankle you and that steal your peace? And I wanted to say, well, don't come to Christ because you may not be. We all have stress.

We all have anxiety and life can rankle us and be very, very difficult. But if you would like to be delivered from hell, come to Jesus. Now I mention hell on television and it makes people shudder and shake, as some of you saw.

But that...if you don't...you know, R.C. Sproul wrote a little book Saved From What?, a very helpful book, and the bottom line, you've got to think of it this way, folks, the bottom line, salvation saves you from hell, saves you from the God who will send you there. We have to understand the eternal plight. Instead of evangelicalism owning up to that and proclaiming that in its seeker-friendly new environment, it wants to eliminate the doctrine of hell and invent a new doctrine that says, well, just about everybody on the planet's going to heaven.

That's the opposite of what responsibility we should have. The Lord was wrenching in His stomach, feeling physical agony over the hell that the mass of humanity were headed toward. You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur, Chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary. John's lesson today, Attitudes of Effective Evangelism, showing you how to be faithful in sharing the gospel message. Now, regarding the issue of evangelism, we have a call queued up from our question-and-answer phone line. This man has a question that comes up a lot, and it's important that people have an answer for it, so let's hear the caller, and then John, you respond. Hi, this is Mike, and my question is, if there's two types of people, one that's elect and one that's not, then if no amount of preaching or evangelism will save those who are in elect, then what is the point of evangelism?

Okay, thank you. Yeah, that's a very common question, and the simple answer to that is that God has not only chosen who will be saved, but He has chosen the means by which they will be saved. And it comes to clarity in Romans 10, whoever calls on the name of the Lord will be saved, but how will they call on the name of the Lord if they haven't heard, and how will they hear without a preacher? So, you have the election as God's decree before the foundation of the world, but you have evangelism as God's means to bring the elect to salvation. Paul even says that to Timothy, that he is called into ministry for the faith of the elect, who cannot come to salvation apart from the truth of the gospel.

They have to hear, there has to be a preacher, and saving faith in that Romans 10 passage comes by hearing the truth concerning Christ. So, the decree of God, of course, is mystery. We don't know who is God's elect. We don't know who God has placed His hand on.

That's a secret decree. We have been told in very explicit terms by Christ to go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature. So, as a matter of obedience, we proclaim Christ. As a matter of obedience, we evangelize the world. And as a matter of truth, we understand that no one can be saved, not even the elect, unless they hear the gospel. And so, that's our role in God's eternal plan. Thank you, Jon. That's a helpful answer to an important question. And friend, if you have more questions like the one you just heard from Mike just now, maybe you want to dig deeper into the doctrine of election, be sure to take advantage of the variety of resources that are available to you free of charge at our website, GTY.org.

Contact us today. At GTY.org, you'll find thousands of free Bible study tools, including blog articles by Jon and the staff, daily devotionals, and Jon's entire sermon archive. That's more than 3,500 sermons, free to download in MP3 and transcript format.

So, if you're looking for further study on the doctrine of election, or any other difficult doctrine of Scripture, you're sure to find something that meets your need. Our website again, GTY.org. And when you get in touch, let us know how Jon's verse-by-verse teaching is ministering to you.

Perhaps today's lesson on evangelism has helped you feel more confident about sharing the gospel, and we would love to hear if you or someone you know has come to faith in Christ after listening to Grace To You. Email your story to letters at GTY.org. That's our email address, letters at GTY.org. You can also send your letter to Grace To You, P. O. Box 4000, Panorama City, California, 91412. Now for Jon McArthur and our entire staff, I'm Phil Johnson. Thank you for making this broadcast part of your day, and be back tomorrow for another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.