In this first of two parts, Nicholas Fuller challenges us to keep bearing witness to the crucified Christ
Sometimes I find myself getting a little dis-couraged by the lack of conversions we see in our church.
I honestly do not think it is for want of prayer or evangelism, though there is always room for more of both. So do we just give up on a lost cause? Personally, I have found tremendous encouragement from looking again at what I call here ‘a forgotten commission’.
Matthew’s commission
The Great Commission in Matthew 28:18-20 is one that rightly drives us in our evangelism, as we are given great hope to see people converted and becoming disciples of Christ, whom we train up to follow Him more faithfully. But Matthew’s is not the only record of the commission, and we miss something significant if we only ever focus on this one.
What is your experience of living out Matthew’s account of the commission, I wonder? Bear in mind that the command in the Greek is not so much to go, but having gone, to make disciples. Have you made many disciples? Obviously, I don’t want to minimise Jesus’ words here in any way. But if your experience of evangelism is anything like mine, working in the 21st-century post-Christian UK, you won’t have seen vast hordes of people flocking into the kingdom. So then, perhaps already discouraged, are we also failing culpably in our obedience to the commission? Well, quite possibly. But we need to be careful not to apportion blame where there need be none.
As those who believe that salvation is all of God (that it is He who brings new birth, conviction of sin, repentance and faith; all by the inward working of the Holy Spirit), we might be left wondering just how we can be expected to make disciples in any case. We can go, baptise and teach, but we cannot convert; that is God’s work. But the great privilege and honour for us is that he chooses to use Christians as his instruments – even weak, tongue-tied, sinful, perhaps even cowardly Christians like you and me. If we hold back from offering our services for the King in this great work, then yes, we might consider that culpable sin.
Luke’s commission
So what of this forgotten commission? I refer to Luke’s account in Acts 1:8. We know it as programmatic for the book of Acts, describing how the apostles would be Christ’s witnesses first in Jerusalem, then in all Judea and Samaria, and then to the ends of the earth, culminating with Paul evangelising in the heart of the Roman Empire. But let’s look again at Jesus’ words: ‘You will be my witnesses’, or ‘my testifiers’. Their task was to bear witness, or testify, to the crucified and risen Lord Jesus Christ. They had seen Him living, teaching and miracle-working; they had seen him dying on the cross; and they had seen Him risen from the dead. Now they were to tell the world what they had seen. We read of their obedience as not only do they ‘go’ to the ends of the earth, but they go, proclaiming Jesus’ death and resurrection. That is the heart of their message again and again in Acts: Jesus died and rose.
Now obviously, there is a uniqueness to the commission for the apostles here: they uniquely saw the risen Jesus with their own eyes, and could testify authoritatively to what they saw. But the commission comes to us to proclaim the same message: ‘Jesus died and rose’. Our commission is to proclaim what the eyewitnesses saw, to stress that the Gospels are eyewitness accounts: ‘No, I haven’t seen the risen Jesus, but there were plenty of people who did!’
I want to stress this commission in Acts, because I fear that we too easily become discouraged and give up, when we see few, if any, people being converted. We look longingly at other countries, and at other times in our own country, when it seems that, at the very mention of the gospel, floods are converted! When the same does not happen in our setting, after the most ardent and faithful evangelism and prayer, we question whether we are doing something wrong, and give up on what has not ‘worked’. We give up on the simple sowing of the seed and proclamation of the gospel, because it has not produced any fruit that we can see.
Now, we may need to question whether we are communicating the full gospel, enough for a person to be saved. We may need to ask whether our manner contradicts our message, and whether the good news of grace and salvation is thundered into oblivion by the bad news of sin and judgement. We may need to ask whether our churches are welcoming, friendly and beacons of love and integrity, or whether our behaviour and church culture puts people off unnecessarily. But we do need to recognise that conversions are not the coins that come pouring out of the slot machine when we do everything ‘right’.
Our modern default
I don’t want to minimise the importance of what we call ‘friendship evangelism’. Statisticians would have us believe that most people in the UK are converted through Christian friends, and this may well be true. Building friendships with unbelievers and faithfully sharing the gospel with them is a courageous and demanding work. But I wonder if we tend to default to friendship evangelism these days because other forms of evangelism have been tried and failed to yield any conversions to speak of; we engage in friendship evangelism because it works (sometimes). There are obvious dangers with this approach, if we simply develop the friendship but then lack the courage or opportunity to share the gospel and bring the challenge to repent and believe. That aside, even with faithful friendship evangelism, are we adequately obeying Christ’s commission?
Facing a task unfinished
So I come back to the commission in Acts. We are tempted to dispense with the seed-sowing evangelism, the proclamation to multitudes, for pragmatic reasons: it didn’t yield any converts from which to make disciples.
But what of our commission in Acts 1:8? Does Jesus in this passage give any assurance that people will be converted as a result of faithful testifying? Not that I can see. Is the emphasis in this account of the commission to see people converted? We have to say, ‘No’. The clear emphasis is that Christ be proclaimed. Obviously, in Acts, many people are converted – thousands! And we can’t divorce Luke’s account from Matthew’s: we need both; they complement each other. But that is my point. Where Matthew urges us to go about the work of seeing people converted, Luke urges us to go about the work simply of proclaiming Christ, whether or not anyone is converted.
Our task, from Acts, is to tell as many as we can that Jesus died and rose. We might want to add to that, as the apostles did, the implications of His death and resurrection: that Jesus is Lord (God to be worshipped and obeyed), that there will be a day of judgement, and that there is forgiveness for all who repent and trust in Jesus. But our basic task is straightforward: tell people that Jesus rose from the dead!
