Missions Textbook 17
Preach the Gospel

We Never Saw It Coming: An Introduction to Christian Missions (textbook)

In First Corinthians 15:1-6 the apostle Paul wrote to the people in the little church in Corinth:

"Now I make known to you, brothers and sisters, the gospel, which I preached to you, which also you received, in which also you stand, by which also you are saved, if you hold fast the word which I preached to you, unless you believed in vain.

"For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: That Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, and that He appeared to Cephas [Peter], then to the twelve. After that He appeared to more than 500 at one time."

This is the Gospel in a nutshell: It must be communicated, using words. It must be received, either through the ears or through the eyes, believed, and held firmly for it to be effective in the lives of the hearers. It must include the necessity of Christ to die for our sins to rescue us from the wrath of God. It must include Christ’s physical death, burial, and resurrection, with proof of all three. Most importantly, mentioned twice, it must come from the Scriptures.

The word “Gospel” comes from an Old English word, “Godspell.” The Greek word, however, sounds vaguely like our word “evangelism,” and means “good news.” Over the centuries, there have been many methods of giving out the Gospel, but the Gospel has never changed. The apostle Paul wrote the whole book of Galatians to warn against changing the Gospel or adding anything to it.

Let’s look at the Gospel a little more closely, and also consider a few things it is not.

First, although the Gospel is Good News, it does not start out that way. The bad news is that we are separated from God, our Creator, by our own sin, and there is nothing we can do about it. The theological word for this is Total Depravity. It means that “the heart is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked” (Jeremiah 17:9). This is not a popular message, nor is it even believed by most people in the world.

Eleven years after we had graduated from Bible college, we went back to visit one of Floyd’s favorite Bible professors. He invited us to sit in his class on Romans. It was halfway through the semester, and he was still in chapter 1. Later Floyd asked him why he had not made more progress in seven weeks. “It takes that long to convince them that mankind is truly depraved and cannot save himself. Even our churches preach that people are basically good.”

People only compound the situation by trying to fix this their own way. They try to do good works, pay money, and dig deeper into their religion to appease God or at least to calm their own conscience.

For those called to go forth and bring the Gospel to the unsaved, this part of the message is very important because they need to know from what they need to be saved. Bringing medicine or clean water to a country, while it may catch the attention of the people, does not in itself answer the sin problem. No matter what method we may choose to win people to faith in Jesus Christ, it must never become more important than the simple Gospel.

The second part of the message begins to sound better. “God so loved the world . . ..” (John 3:16). Most everyone wants to be loved and accepted just as they are by someone more important than they are. Not only does God love human beings, but He has been working to win them back to Himself since Adam and Eve hid in the Garden of Eden.

For the person bringing this Good News to unbelievers, this love can flow from God through the believer in many ways. Medical work, teaching literacy, digging wells for clean water, and many other services can demonstrate God’s love to people. It also can be as simple as bringing a new neighbor a jar of homemade jam or mowing his lawn. We just need to avoid getting so tied up in the service we are performing that we forget to give them the Gospel with words. They need the message, and messages require either spoken or written words.

God’s solution to the sin problem is the third point of the Gospel, and it is shattering in its implications. “God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son . . ..” (John 3:16). More specifically, God gave His Son as a fitting sacrifice for the sins of everyone in the whole world, substituting the death of His Son for our death (1 John 2:2). In fact, the apostle Paul writes that “while we were still helpless, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly” (Romans 5:6). Even more astounding is this: that God “. . . made Him who knew no sin to be sin on our behalf, so that we might become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

That is really Good News! Not only are we loved and Jesus died for our sins, but God even made it possible for us to be justified – to be made righteous – before God. Sin no longer has to separate us from God.

Here, of course, is the catch. In John 1:12, we read that a person must become a child of God. Although we are all creations of God, He is not our Father unless we want Him to be. And if we want Him to be, then we must love and receive His Son as our Savior and the only Solution to our sin problem. This is a decision, and not a decision made lightly. We are not offering a quick fix to sin; we are offering an alternate life – one free from the burden and guilt of sin, but one also requiring obedience and love toward that God who has offered eternal life.

When we are presenting the Gospel to people, it’s really important that they are not coaxed into making a decision they don’t understand. In Russia, we attended a large Bible study, where the Russians were coming to learn English by reading a simple English translation of the Bible. At the end of the Bible study, everyone was given a short questionnaire to fill out. One of the questions was, “Would you like to accept Jesus as your Savior?” We could understand some Russian, and we overheard a teenage girl ask her father what she should write. “Say ‘yes,’” he told her, “Otherwise, we won’t be able to keep coming to these English classes.”

By now, if you have read this whole book up to this point, you know that we believe the best way to present the Gospel is through the gospels – Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. We read in Hebrews 4:12, that “the Word of God is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword, and . . . able to judge the thoughts and intentions of the heart.” As Floyd often says: It does not say that the word of Floyd or even Billy Graham is living and active and sharper than a two-edged sword. The Holy Spirit speaks through God’s word, and He can speak to the heart in a way no human can.

It is important that we, as evangelists, know where the Gospel comes from. It comes from God’s word, and God’s word is the only written word on the face of the earth that is inspired by God (2 Timothy 3:16), is living and powerful (Hebrews 4:12), and that has the ability to change lives (Colossians 3:16).

There is also a reason for four “different” gospels. Matthew, written by a Jewish ex-tax collector and one of Jesus’ disciples, is full of fulfilled prophecies from the Jewish Old Testament. They demonstrate that Jesus and His message, life, death, and resurrection were already predicted hundreds of years before He lived. This is a great book to read with Jewish or Muslim friends who revere the Old Testament.

The book of Mark was written by a Jewish man to the Romans, who were, of course Gentiles. The Romans were not so interested in who a man was, but in what he could do. The book is short and fast-paced. It’s actually a good book for Americans, who don’t have much time and want to hurry to the ending. If you read Mark with your unsaved friends, however, don’t get in a hurry. Every story is rich with information they will need to make an informed decision for or against Christ.

Luke was a Greek doctor, and his gospel is full of stories with a medical slant. Greeks were also interested in who a person was, and Luke gives a very complete picture of where Jesus came from and why.

Finally, John reaches out to the thoughtful intellectual. It begins with simple words to describe deep theological truths. We found this book to be life-changing with university students and Europeans who were very religious. You can find a lot more information on how to lead an evangelistic Bible study in Floyd’s book, Evangelism for the Fainthearted.[1]

There is, of course, no way to know if a person really has made a decision to follow Christ. There is only evidence. While we were in Austria, we would see people decide to get married, to love a difficult spouse, to forgive a child, to stop cheating on exams, and we would understand that they were saying yes to God. Would they continue to say yes? That came from further leading them to study God’s word and to help them to discover how a child of God lives. As we look back now, and see their children and grandchildren making decisions to follow Jesus, we have to say, “Yes, they made that decision way back then.” The only real proof any of us has is that we persevere in the faith until we draw our last breath.

In the meanwhile, we, who want to bring the Gospel to our little part of the unsaved world, would do well to listen to some of Paul’s last words to his young disciple, Timothy:

I solemnly charge you in the presence of God and of Christ Jesus, who is to judge the living and the dead, and by His appearing and His kingdom:

Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort, with great patience and instruction. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths

But you, be sober in all things, endure hardship, do the work of an evangelist, fulfill your ministry (2 Timothy 4:1-6).

[1] Schneider, Floyd. Evangelism for the Fainthearted, Kregel, 2000, 197-234.

We Never Saw It Coming: An Introduction to Christian Missions (textbook)

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