When Your Evangelism Has No Jesus
I was at a conference in Sydney when I met him. He was hard to miss. He was wearing a bright pink jacket and a red hat that said, “Make Australia Godly Again.” I’m not sure why he singled me out. Perhaps it was because I only knew a few people at this conference and I was standing there solo drinking my coffee during a break.
We got to talking and, since the conference was about religious freedom, I asked why he had an interest in this topic. That’s when his face lit up. He whipped out his smartphone and he showed me a picture of him standing in downtown Sydney with a giant sign. It said, “Politicians & Bureaucrats Who Do Not Repent Will Perish, the Same as Anyone Else.” He told me he took this sign into Sydney weekly.
I asked him what kind of a reaction he got from people passing by. He enthusiastically told me about the great positive response. Many young people would stop and ask if they could have a picture with him. In his mind, this was because they were on board with his message. I asked him if he ever faced any negativity. He didn’t. According to him, people appreciated what he was trying to say.
I was intrigued. So I dug a little deeper. Did he ever encounter other people doing the same kind of thing? “Oh yeah mate, but all they do is tell people about salvation and about how to have their sins forgiven. I don’t do that.” At that point, the conference was about to resume, so I excused myself and went back to my seat.
I would’ve been quite happy not to speak with him again. But later in the conference, during another break, he hunted me down again. This time he wanted to share a little card he made up. On one side it had the same message as the sign he showed me before. On the other side, it said, “Without repentance, there’ll be no peace or rest. Seek first the Kingdom of God, and the righteousness which comes from God,…etc” I took a look. I pondered for a moment. Then I said, “It’s interesting, but I have a question. I don’t read anything about Jesus on this card. Why is that?”
Now there is possibly a good answer to that question. He could have said that repentance means turning away from sin and turning to Jesus. Or he could have said that when the back side of his little card tells people to seek the righteousness which comes from God, that means they should turn to Christ. Or, even as a last resort, he could have said the card is just a conversation starter and when he speaks with people, he eventually brings them to Jesus and the gospel message. I was hoping he’d respond in one of those ways. But sadly, no.
“I tell people what they need to hear. What God has told me to tell them. They need to repent from their sin and start doing what’s right. They have to straighten out.”
“But what about the gospel?”
“That’s not what God gave me to say. I just share this message and then see what God will do with it.”
Experience has taught me that when someone uses the “God told me” line, discussion becomes futile. Who am I to argue with what “God” told him? Even if God actually said something different in the Bible, the main thing is what he was directly told. “God’s voice” to him today trumps God’s voice of yesterday in the Bible. So I gave up at that point and excused myself to use the toilet before the next conference session began.
The Bible certainly includes the call to repentance in evangelism. Luke’s version of the Great Commission (Luke 24:47) says that repentance should be proclaimed in Christ’s name to all the nations, starting with Jerusalem. But it also adds something else that must be proclaimed in Christ’s name: forgiveness of sins. That’s only possible through faith in what Jesus did on the cross. So when we hear the apostles evangelizing in the book of Acts, they’re not preaching repentance à la behaviour modification. They preach repentance as in turning away from sin and turning to Christ for the forgiveness of sins. Their message always involved Jesus.
That’s to be our model for evangelism too. If we’re not witnessing to Jesus, we’re not witnessing. If our good news doesn’t include him, it’s not good news. When your message is “do better” or “be better,” that’s actually what Paul calls “a different gospel” (Gal. 1:6). Those who preach such a message are under the same threat as “politicians & bureaucrats who do not repent.”
