It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh is no help at all. The words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life. But there are some of you who do not believe.” (For Jesus knew from the beginning who those were who did not believe, and who it was who would betray him.) And he said, “This is why I told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by the Father.” | John 6:63–65
On Sunday, we looked at Jesus’ description of the feeding of the 5,000 and what it means that He is the true bread. A large part of Jesus’ statement points to the fact of the Father’s drawing His people to Himself. Jesus continues to talk about those the Father has ‘given’ to Him and that the Father must teach them. That no one comes on their own, but because of the work of the Father.
I said Sunday that this is the known theologically as monergism: that God works in the heart of a person (through the Holy Spirit) to bring them to spiritual regeneration prior to the human experience of belief. When we believe, it is because God has already worked in us to bring us to life. Jesus summarizes this view well in v.44:
No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day.
This has a lot of consequences for what we think of God, salvation, and the Christian life, especially in the realm of evangelism and belief. If a person cannot truly believe without the Spirit preparing them, then we are wasting a lot of time sharing the gospel with people who are spiritually dead. Or are we?
As I mentioned Sunday, Jesus’ main concern is not saving as many people as possible. When faced with the opportunity to soften His stance and make His presentation a bit more acceptable, Jesus actually leans in and makes it more difficult. He lets the people leave. This doesn’t mean that we should be seeker UNfriendly, but that we should not be lured into believing that getting people to believe is God’s expectation of us. He is concerned with our faithfulness as it relates to proclamation, not the results.
This makes the act of evangelism, in itself, a valuable thing. The benefit of worshipping God through declaring His truth to the world exists in the act of proclamation. It is never a waste of time. We are not failing when we don’t get the results we desire. We don’t need to feel discouraged when our efforts seemingly return void. We cannot control this part. We CAN control whether or not we share the gospel.
Into this, someone usually makes the statement: wouldn’t it be much more effective to simply find the elect and evangelize them? I used to always respond to this with Charles Spurgeon’s famous reply:
If God had put a yellow stripe up and down the backs of the elect, I’d go up and down the streets lifting up shirt tails to find out who had the yellow stripe up and down his back. Then I’d give that person the gospel. But God didn’t do that. He told me to preach the gospel to every creature and that whosoever will may come.
I still think this is a great reply, even though some recent scholars poured over all of Spurgeon’s work and decided that He never said it. They did however find a sermon where he quoted another pastor with a similar idea:
“I remember Rowland Hill’s reply, when somebody said that he ought to preach only to the elect. “Very well,” he said, “next Sunday morning, chalk them all on the back and when you have done that, I will preach to them.” But the chalking of them on the back is the difficulty—we cannot do that and, as we cannot do that, the best way is for us to leave our God to carry out the purposes of His distinguishing Grace in His own effectual way and not attempt to do what we certainly can never accomplish!”
I actually like Rowland Hill’s reply better, because it accentuates our limitations and responsibilities. We do not know who God has chosen to draw to Himself. We never know the conversation that God may use to bring a person to belief. We should enter into every conversation as a potential moment of God using us to fulfill His sovereign plan. While knowing how God works takes away your ability to take credit, it does not change the joy of watching someone realize what it means to be drawn into relationship with the Creator of the universe.
In this, we should expect rejection. We should not be surprised when people don’t respond to our presentation of the gospel; in the parable of the sower, many more soils are hard than tilled. God graciously prepares some of the soil and allows our witness to be the means by which it grows. Rather than spending our time testing the soil, let us share our faith generously and continuously, focusing on the glory of God rather than the results of our efforts.