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1. Evangelistic Preaching

“Peter said to them, ‘Repent’.”

In this book we are looking at the characteristics that marked the early church in Acts and how these characteristics might mark our churches today. It is clear, to start with, that a New Testament church is of necessity an evangelistic church. The first purpose of the church is to connect people to Jesus Christ. This is called the “Great Commission,” and it is good news in every way. Here’s how Matthew recorded it (Matt. 28:19-20):

So wherever you go, train everyone you meet — the people in every nation — how to be My followers. Mark them publicly by baptism in the triune name of God: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Then instruct them not just in knowledge but in the practice of everything I’ve commanded you. And as you do this, remember: I will be with you, day after day after day, until the very end of the age.

Mark’s version is as follows: “Go everywhere in the world and share the Good News with everyone” (Mark 16:15). Proclaiming the Good News of the Gospel was a decisive factor in the formation and growth of the early church. For it is here, in the event that happened at Calvary and on the first Easter Sunday, that the Christian church distinguishes itself from all the world’s religions. See how carefully Luke expounds this theme in our text (Acts 2:37-41):

Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the other apostles, “Brothers, what should we do?” Peter said to them, “Repent, and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ so that your sins may be forgiven, and you will receive the Holy Spirit as a gift. For the promise is for you, for your children, and for all who are far away, everyone whom the Lord our God calls to Him.” And he testified with many other arguments and exhorted them, saying, “Be saved from this corrupt generation!” So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand people were added to the group.

Clearly the risen Savior is eager to add new members to His body. So when we say that evangelistic preaching is the first mark of the church, what is meant is that a healthy church, like a healthy body, is always growing. Hence the first Christians were committed to evangelistic outreach. They were faithful to the duty their Master had placed on them. There was a whole world out there waiting to hear the Good News. Opportunities abounded for infusing the love of Christ into sin-sickened hearts. And the early Christians made the most of them. That is the sort of commitment that packs power in the twenty-first century, as it did in the first.

Of course, there is an entirely different way of looking at “preaching” today, and it would be helpful for us to consider it briefly. The trend in recent years is to apply the term

“preaching” to the modern thirty-minute sermon delivered on Sunday mornings. It is the pastor, we are told, and not the evangelist, who is in view when the idea of preaching is under consideration. This understanding will not stand. In the first place, it is plain from the New Testament that preaching takes place in an evangelistic context. The sermons in Acts are good examples of this. Note that the lost, not the saved, were the objects of Peter’s preaching on the Day of Pentecost. And so it is elsewhere in Acts. In the second place, to call New Testament pastors “preachers” is to ignore the biblical texts that consistently portray the role of pastor as that of teacher. Two texts are of greatest importance here: Eph. 4:11 (“And He gifted some to be apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, and some pastor-teachers….”) and 1 Tim. 3:2 (“Now an overseer must be above reproach, the husband of one wife, temperate, sensible, respectable, hospitable, able to teach….”). If, therefore, we would retain the New Testament’s own perspective on the role of a pastor, we must be wary of applying the term “preaching” to what takes place when believers gather for mutual edification. Preaching is neither the sole nor primary task of pastor-teachers. It is simply sharing the Good News, and the first believers were so successful at it that they were accused of “turning the world upside down” (Acts 17:6). The Christians of New Testament days saw bold evangelism as the purpose for which the church existed.

But what exactly is evangelism? And how is it to be practiced today? There are at least five characteristics that always mark genuine evangelism. Let us examine them a little more closely.

A Christ-exalting message is perhaps the first characteristic that strikes us. Evangelism is neither a system nor a method. It is simply bringing people face to face with a Person. It is sharing the Good News of what God has done in Jesus Christ through His death and resurrection. It is the wonderful story of how God rescues people in their need and transforms them into a new society. And note: There is nothing shallow about this message. The Gospel is a life-changing message, and the Christians who first turned the world upside down knew it.

Do we truly understand this message, and are we able to share it with others? We would be wise to store away in our memories certain key verses from Scripture that summarize the Gospel. A good example is 1 Cor. 15:1-4. Here we see that Paul had a deep assurance of the truth of what he was preaching, and supremely of the reality of the death, burial, resurrection, and post-resurrection appearances of Christ. Conversion is unthinkable without such an understanding of the significance of Calvary and the empty tomb. Another passage is Rom. 10:9-10. Unless we confess Jesus as Lord and believe that God raised Him from the dead, we cannot be saved. The intellectual content of saving faith can be as simple as “Jesus is Lord” (1 Cor. 12:2). This confession, indeed, lies at the heart of every true conversion.

We must, then, immerse ourselves in the Word we proclaim. This is an age of relativity, but people are crying out for truth. It is up to us to explain the Gospel to them in words they can grasp. Like the early Christians, we must discover the need for a Jesus-centered presentation, however flexible our evangelistic methods might be. This means that, like the apostles in Acts, we must always seek to exalt Christ in our preaching. The early Christians were consumed with a passion for Jesus. No one else was so important to them. If people have really found the Good News, they will always be eager to tell others of Jesus and His love. And there is nothing so attractive in this world as a church in which Jesus is exalted.

A second characteristic that stands out when we think of evangelism is its Spirit-dependence. As David Wells puts it in his book God the Evangelist, it is the Holy Spirit who initiates, motivates, and empowers evangelism. Indeed, the Holy Spirit is the supreme actor in the book of Acts, and He was the source of power in the lives of the earliest disciples. It was the Spirit who launched the first evangelistic outreach on the Day of Pentecost (Acts 2:38 ff.), and it was the Spirit who stirred up the hearts of the believers in Antioch to begin evangelizing Asia Minor (Acts 13-14). The same theme is apparent throughout Acts. These followers of Jesus lived in total dependence on the Holy Spirit. Nothing was allowed to hinder His power in their lives.

What about us? We know little of the Spirit’s presence and power today. We rely instead on our methods, education, and finances. Perhaps there is no greater challenge to the contemporary church than to repent of our overdependence on manmade evangelistic strategies. The first Christians sought to be filled with the Spirit (Eph. 5:18) and to obey Him (Acts 5:32). Soul-winning was just that simple for them. They knew that evangelism was impossible without staying in close communion with their unseen Guide. If we wish to see a resurgence of the evangelistic fervor that marked the early church, we must have the same commitment. A. W. Tozer, the famous Bible teacher, is very explicit about the Spirit’s role in evangelism (Paths of Power, p.9):

The church began in power, moved in power, and moved just as long as she had power. When she no longer had power, she dug in for safety. But her blessings were like manna. When they tried to keep it overnight, it bred worms and stank. So we have had monasticism, scholasticism, institutionalism — all indicative of one thing: absence of spiritual power. In church history every return to the New Testament has been marked by a new advance somewhere, a fresh proclamation of the gospel and an upsurge of missionary zeal.

We need to take this warning seriously. Just as the Holy Spirit commissioned Jesus for servanthood and empowered Him for witness, so He desires to do the same thing in our lives today. The book of Acts shows what God can do through men and women who are empowered by the Spirit. If you allow Him, the Spirit will come and bear witness to Christ through you. This is the promise of our Lord (Acts 1:8).

A third characteristic of evangelism that was highly evident among the first Christians is its equal-opportunity nature. It was not a task that was delegated to the leadership alone. All were to share the Good News with their neighbors. Thus Jude can urge his readers to “save some by snatching them out of the fire” (Jude 23), while Paul can commend the newly fledged Thessalonian believers for “trumpeting forth the Word of God” (1 Thess. 1:8). Every believer was expected to do the work of evangelism wherever they went. Now if every Christian is called to be a witness, and if every church has a global mission at its doorstep, why are only certain people called “missionaries,” and why do boards and agencies try to do the work of the local church? There is not a single hint in the New Testament that the early Christians saw evangelism as the responsibility of certain professionals. Of course, people and agencies that work with and through the local church may be said to be fulfilling their mission responsibility. But in reality, every one of us ought to be a “full-time missionary.”

We could take all this much further. I have tried to do so in my book Will You Join the Cause of Global Missions? Jesus Himself was the ultimate missionary, and He entrusted to His followers world missions. Even if we cannot travel to a foreign field, the “uttermost parts of the world” have come to us. Just look at any college or university campus today. Missiologists call this “global missions in reverse,” but it is no less missions. That’s why I was so pleased to hear that one of my doctoral students in New Testament was recently asked to teach communications at a secular university. I imagine he will do more than disseminate information, too. I can see him giving himself in time-consuming acts of missional love simply because they are needed. After all, sharing one’s faith is simply helping another person take a step closer to Jesus. If you want evangelism in your church, do not call for a professional evangelist. Equip your people for Gospel witness. The results will amaze you.

In the fourth place, evangelism in the New Testament was always characterized by genuine concern for the social needs of the lost. When I was in seminary, a good deal of distrust existed between those who emphasized personal salvation in evangelism and those who emphasized the so-called social gospel. The two, however, are indivisible. Writes John Stott in his outstanding book Balanced Christianity (p. 46):

It is true that the risen Lord Jesus left his church a Great Commission to preach, to evangelise, and to make disciples. And this commission is still binding upon the church. But the commission does not supersede the commandment, as if ‘you shall love your neighbour’ were now replaced by ‘you shall preach the gospel’. Nor does it re-interpret neighbor-love in exclusively evangelistic terms. Instead, it enriches the commandment to love our neighbor by adding to it a new and Christian dimension, namely the duty to make Christ known to him.

It is worth reflecting for a moment on what Stott is saying. For example, what led the pagan community in Antioch to coin the term “Christians” to describe the followers of the Way in their midst (Acts 11:26)? Was it not their new “Way” of life, their Christ-like behavior? These “Christians” were nothing other than the hands and feet of Jesus in their world. They proclaimed and cared. And so it should be with us today. We separate evangelism and social care to our own injury. No one can be a genuine Christian without letting Christ serve others through him or her. Of course, proclamation of the Gospel is primary. Yet proclamation without presence is a failure, and the first Christians were certainly not guilty of it.

Our churches have to get back to this balance if there is to be successful evangelism in our day. Nothing authenticates the Gospel like a passionate concern for people’s needs and an involvement in their daily struggles. I think of the health center my wife and I established in Ethiopia several years ago. People came for healing, and many of them left born again. There was no need to convince the patients of their physical predicament. They were well aware of that! They needed to understand that Jesus cared about their whole person — body, soul, and spirit. Many have found Jesus’ own example helpful in this regard. A classic text is Matt. 9:35: “Then Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and every sickness.” Not only did Jesus teach and preach — He healed! Not only did He feed the multitudes — He told them where the Bread of Life could be found! Social compassion, then, is not an optional extra for those who like that sort of thing. It is absolutely essential. We are not to overvalue social involvement, but neither are we to despise it. In short, if you believe Jesus Christ, you can scarcely ignore the social needs of people.

There is a final characteristic of evangelism in the early church that we would be foolish to neglect, and that is its emphasis on follow-up. It would be impossible to exaggerate the importance of after-care in the life of the early church. The earliest Christians were not content with the hit-and-run tactics of some modern-day evangelists. Notice how follow-up is described in Acts 2:41-42:

So those who welcomed his message were baptized, and that day about three thousand people were added to the group. They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers.

New believers need teaching and fellowship, and the early church took great pains to see that these needs were met. That has a lot to say to the modern church. I cannot help being struck by the way we undervalue after-care. It amazes me that some can claim “twenty professions of faith” and not give testimony of how these new converts are being nurtured. It is interesting to observe that baptism seems to have been administered immediately after one’s profession of faith. We shall see in our next chapter how important that act of obedience is. Suffice it to say here that in our eagerness to make “decisions” for Christ, we all too often fail to make “disciples” as we are commanded to do (Matt. 28:19-20). Unless there is careful follow-up, very little is likely to become of the profession.

In subsequent chapters we shall look in detail at this matter of after-care. But there is one final point I wish to make in this chapter. As we have seen, there is a tremendous amount of evangelism taking place in the book of Acts. This is not surprising in light of Jesus’ words, “You shall be My witnesses” (Acts 1:8). In Acts, witnessing is central. It is a sign of genuine spiritual life, and it is to be our top priority. It is not good enough to claim “I am a follower of Jesus.” If we are followers of Jesus, then we are to become His witnesses. And why can we not do that? If we do not make evangelism a matter of the greatest importance as the earliest Christians did, we will reap the consequences for our neglect. Evangelism is the supreme instrument of church growth. That’s why the early church made it such a high priority, and that is why our churches must do the same. If we are to profit from the example of these early Christians, there are few areas to which we need to pay closer attention than to the way they joyfully and passionately shared the Good News with others. Once we grasp their joy and passion, it will be impossible for us to sit back and rest on our laurels.