Our Role and God’s Role in Evangelism

posted on FEBRUARY 4, 2021  (from Theologyforyou.com)

What do you think your job is in evangelism? Are you supposed to present all the logical arguments for the existence of God? Are you supposed to convince someone that they should become a believer? Is it your responsibility to bring someone to faith in Christ?

In this article, we’re going to look at our role in evangelism versus God’s role in evangelism and how, many times, we get the two confused.

This article is part of a series on evangelism using Will Metzger’s book Tell the Truth as our guide. If you don’t have this book we’d highly encourage you to pick up a copy of your own.

We Don't Have to be Confused


A lot of times we get confused in our witness and, in our desire to share our faith with others, we feel like we have the responsibility to bring them to Christ. Believer, be comforted, that’s not your responsibility, it’s God’s.

Our responsibility is to proclaim the gospel with our lips and our lives knowing that it is God who is going to work in people’s hearts to bring them to faith.

We are to see ourselves simply as planters and waterers who trust God to give the growth.

Again, this goes back to our article on the importance of the content of the gospel where we talked about “the herald.” If you haven’t seen that yet, I’d encourage you to check it out by clicking here or the description below. The idea of the herald is that we are to carry and deliver the message that has been given to us.


I’d like to share a quote with you from the little book from 9Marks called What if I’m Discouraged in My Evangelism? It says this, “Our job is to proclaim salvation not produce it. We’re called to deliver a message to people; God’s the one who delivers people from sin.”



“Our job is to proclaim salvation not produce it. We’re called to deliver a message to people; God’s the one who delivers people from sin.”ISAAC ADAMS


Consider also this analogy from Tell the Truth:


Imagine how odd it would be if a mailman was discouraged because he thought “Every time I deliver a letter and someone opens it, they don’t like what they read!” it’s not the mailman’s job to make people like the mail but to deliver it. Likewise, it’s our job to deliver the gospel to people, and God’s job to cause them to believe the gospel. We share the faith, and God grants the faith. As Jesus said, “No one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father” (John 6:65).

So in our evangelism, we should focus on being faithful to share the gospel message that has been delivered to us and not focusing on whether or not the person we’re sharing the gospel with comes to faith. Obviously, we want those with whom we share the gospel to come to a knowledge of the truth and to enter into a right relationship with God, but we should not judge whether or not we have been successful in our evangelism by the number of converts that we have.

Without the Right Focus, we will be confused


If your focus in evangelism is to see how many people you can get to “pray a prayer”, or raise their hand or come forward in a service you’re focussing on the wrong things. I want to challenge you by asking a very simple question: can we find any of these things in the Bible? The answer is: we can’t. They’re not in the Bible. And we’re going to cover this in more detail in our next article when we talk about genuine conversion.

In the Bible, what do we see instead? Jesus and the apostles taught the scriptures and called people to repent and believe in the gospel. They communicated the message given to them and called people to respond to that message, not by praying a prayer, or by going forward in a church service or raising their hand but calling them to repent and believe.

Jesus in Mark 1:15 “repent and believe in the gospel.” Peter in Acts 3:19, “Repent, therefore, and turn back, that your sins may be blotted out,” Acts 17:30 “The times of ignorance God overlooked, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.” The apostles followed the model of Jesus and communicated the message that was given to them as servants of that message.

Paul often considered himself a servant and a witness to God. So should we. We are to witness to others by proclaiming the truths of the Scriptures. We should proclaim God as the maker and creator of all things, including them, and He is a lawmaker and a love-giver and we have failed to follow his commands.

Now separated from God and unable to make ourselves right with Him, we need Him to bring us to himself, and He has provided a way through Christ. By faith, we are to turn from our wicked ways and believe in Christ’s payment for our sins that we may be right with God and live a life pleasing to him. Out of love, we should even plead with people to receive Christ yet, we must not evaluate the success of our evangelism in terms of whether or not someone comes to faith.

As we’ve established in this series on evangelism the primary way we should evaluate our evangelism is, as John Piper says, to “look at the book.” We look at the Bible and see the examples of evangelism in scripture. After doing that we can study the history of the Christian church and see where God has blessed the proclamation of the gospel and drawn people to himself. From one such study, Martyn Lloyd Jones shares five foundational principles to evangelism that honestly completely changed the way that I view evangelism.The supreme object of the work of evangelism is to glorify God, not to save souls.
The only power that can do this work is the Holy Spirit, not our own strength.
The one and only medium which the Spirit works through is the Scriptures. Therefore, we reason out of the Scriptures as Paul did.
These proceeding principles give us the true motivation for evangelism–a zeal for God, and a love for others.
There’s a constant danger of heresy through a false zeal in the employment of unscriptural methods.

The Primary Purpose of Evangelism


We must not evaluate the success of our evangelism in terms of whether or not someone comes to faith.


The primary purpose of evangelism is to glorify God, not to save souls. We trust God’s work in people’s lives that He, through the Holy Spirit, is the one that is going to move people. The means by which God moves people is through the Scriptures. It’s not through apologetics or reasoning in a purely logical sense, but primarily we reason out of the Scriptures; we point people to what the Bible says. It is God and not us who is the evangelizer. We get to journey along with Him as he does the work of evangelism while we are just presenting the truths.


Our responsibility in evangelism is to proclaim the gospel with our lips and our lives knowing that it is God who is going to work in people’s hearts to bring them to faith.

In our next article, we’re going to look a little deeper into understanding God’s role in evangelism by looking at what genuine conversion is. What does it mean for someone to truly become a Christian?



The primary purpose of evangelism is to glorify God, not to save souls.

Purpose in Anticipation

(excerpt from Josh Buish article) 

Do you often consider the simple conversations that you have on a daily basis? What about that person that you talked with on the subway this week? What about the Uber driver that you talked with last week? What about the person in the coffee shop who talked with you as you waited on your Frappuccino to be served? The God who rules the Universe also directs the steps of us all—and there is no “chance” conversation that we have in a single day.

If we anticipate the return of Jesus—it will change how we look at such conversations, friendships, family connections, and work relationships. We will look at people through an eschatological lens and our conversations will suddenly have a much deeper purpose. We should not look at people as “projects” or opportunities for notches in our evangelistic belts, but a proper anticipation of Jesus’ return will cause us to engage in disciple-making at a much deeper level.

Furthermore, as we anticipate the return of Christ it will often redirect our priorities to be less self-focused and more Kingdom-focused. Why would we pile up resources to use for our own pleasure and temporal joys when the world needs to know the true joy of Jesus Christ? Longing for the return of Christ doesn’t make you hate taking vacations, but it will certainly prevent you from wasting your resources without any care for the lost world that is perishing around you.

We live in-between the already and the not-yet reality of the rule of Jesus. While Jesus has defeated death and paid for the sins of all of his people, we still live in the world of brokenness and sin. Such reality is heavy and burdensome at times. But, we live with hope of a Christian that Jesus rules today from heaven’s throne and that he will one day return in visible victory for the whole world to see. When Christ returns—all things will be made new.

Sharing the Faith

by Jan Harris


As the season of Easter comes to an end, and the day of Pentecost (May 15) is celebrated, and as the education wing of the church I attend nears completion, I ponder the subject of sharing the faith with others.

What is my responsibility? Am I called, as some may be, to stand on a street corner, proclaiming, "Jesus is Lord." Or, am I called, as some may be, to accost strangers in the street, and ask them the most personal of questions: "Have you asked the Lord Jesus into your heart"?

What resonates with me, when it comes to sharing the faith, is the word of Jesus when he said, "By this will all know that you are my disciples: by your love for one another." Now, that's easy to say, but it's no easy evangelism method. Loving each other is no easy task. There's no way to "fake it." Either we love -- or we don't. And mostly we don't. So, how do we do evangelism if we don't love one another? Not easily, friends. Not easily.

I've been reading Alan Jones' Soul Making, and a line in it struck me as the reason I have so much difficulty with many modern methods of evangelism. He says, 'The way of believing I want to avoid often adopts a bullying attitude with regard to those who don't see things in the same way."1 Until I read that line recently, it had never occurred to me what my real objection was to so much of what is done in the name of the Lord.

I lived in York, England, during the late 70's, and I was a member, and also worked at, a large charismatic Anglican church in the heart of that ancient city. The church had grown from eight people to over a thousand in a few years, because those eight, the rector, and his wife believed in prayer, and he had a gift for evangelism. When he spoke, people turned to God.

Every summer, the 100,000-population York was inundated with two-and-a-half million tourists. Among those tourists was a small contingent of very sincere, but very naive, young evangelists, whose task it was to confront the residents of York on the street and ask them if they had invited Jesus into their hearts. To the average York citizen, these Christian tourists might as well have been asking them in Swahili if they had signed up yet to go to the moon. After the week-long "blitzkreig" of these fervent young people, my church would do "recovery" work with people who had been confronted (and often offended) by this odd method -- for the UK -- of sharing the faith.

But, how to share the faith? How did Jesus do it? Did he bully people into thinking as he did about God? Should we?

My dad, who was a strong advocate of independent thinking and who believed, "If two people always agree, one of them is not thinking," taught us, his children, to express our opinions, to state our disagreements with each other, but to realize, no matter how well we did it, that we could not persuade or argue people into agreeing with us. "Remember," he would say in a sing-song voice:
A person persuaded against his will,
Is of the same opinion still.

That first Pentecost in the Christian era was a very interesting day. A crowd of people gathered obediently to celebrate the Jewish holy day. And something incredible happened. The Holy Spirit came among the crowd, and the people, many of whom were from other lands, and who speak other languages, heard the good news of the kingdom of God in their own native tongue. As a result, the Scripture tells us, many were added to the church that day.

What made the difference for those people? Since they had gathered to celebrate a holy day ordained by the God of Israel for the Jews, one can safely assume they were open to God. What those God-seekers experienced was an incredibly loving act by an incredibly loving God as he revealed the purpose of life to them.

So, I wonder -- is there a clue here for us in the events of Pentecost? Something for us to emulate? Do we "share the faith" with everyone we come in contact with -- or just with those who come seeking God? Do we always use a script, a formula, or do we use various methods? How should our love for one another affect our evangelism?

Jesus said, "I was hungry, and you fed me; I was thirsty, and you gave me water -- as you did this to the least of my brethren, you did it to me." We all know how far we fall short of these words of Jesus -- for most of us, we find it difficult enough to be kind to members of our own family and the people we approve of, without being confronted by strangers in need of kindness.

The church in York used many ways of attracting people throughout the city. Drama groups performed mini-plays in the many public places during the lunch hour: scruffily dressed youth workers sat on street benches, in parks, and in pubs, and struck up conversations with lonely people; various groups freely shopped, gardened, cleaned for, and drank tea with "shut-in's" and other city residents who didn’t even claim to be church members; every Sunday, several groups in the church provided and served a free pot-luck lunch in a nearby hall to which visitors to the church and to the city were invited; a small shop, owned and run by church members, within walking distance of the church, served light, home-cooked meals, and sold cottage crafts six days a week, offering companionship to anyone who dropped in; forty-plus small groups met all over the city on a weekly basis, inviting their neighbors to attend, and regularly helping those same neighbors (church members or not) with such things as child-care, shopping, and gardening chores.

Here is a thought from Alan Jones about sharing the faith:

Even though I am not much of a lover, I know that I am loved. This is a statement of faith the effects of which spill over, from time to time, into my experience. One of the side-effects of knowing that one is loved is the desire to tell others -- and to tell them in such a way that they are included in, not excluded from, the circle of love. 2

As my church completes its education building (sometime in the autumn), we will all be thinking seriously about how to share the faith that is such an important part of our lives. How best do we share the great gift we have been given? Because we know we are loved -- even though we may not yet be very good at loving -- we have a desire to share what we have received. How do we do it without bullying, without hurting, people? How do we share it so that it is a gentle gift? It seems that we must demonstrate it before we speak of it. Somehow we must show our love -- for God, for one another, and for all whom we desire be included in the loving circle that embraces us.

Sharing the faith with others bears thinking about, praying about, and doing something about -- not because we have to do something, but for love's sake. Because we have received so great a gift, because we are loved, and we know it, we are compelled to share what we have received, freely, without conditions. "Love one another, as I have loved you."

Why People Don't Make Disciples - David Platt

The Modern Church

from Today's Gospel:  Authentic or Synthetic by Walter Chantry:

"Much of modern preaching is anaemic, with the lifeblood of God's nature absent from the message.  Evangelists centre their message upon man.  Man has sinned and missed a great blessing.  If man wants to retrieve his immense loss he must act thus and so. But the Gospel of Christ is very different.  It begins with God and His glory.  It tells men that they have offended a holy God, who will by no means pass by sin.  It reminds sinners that the only hope of salvation is to be found in the grace and power of this same God. Christ's Gospel sends men to beg pardon of the Holy One.

There is a wide difference between these two messages.  The one seeks to blaze a trail to Heaven for man while ignoring the Lord of Glory.  The other labours to magnify the God of all grace in the salvation of men."