Posts Tagged ‘men’

The basis of evangelism is the Great Commission. Christ’s command is: “go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15). Luke 5:1-11 tells us about one of the first things Christ taught his disciples in evangelism. Using the metaphor of catching fish, He taught them to catch men. After they had fished an entire night with no success, Christ said to Peter, “Launch out into the deep and let down your nets for a catch.” Any fisherman acquainted with the Sea of Galilee would understand that if you don’t catch any fish at night , you might as well settle for no fish. Despite this fact, Peter answered, “Master, we have toiled all night and caught nothing; nevertheless at Your word I will let down the net.” Miraculously they caught a net breaking, boat-sinking load, and Jesus said, “Do not be afraid. From now on you will catch men.” His message was simple: “When I say do it, do it!”

We sometimes think that we aren’t called to speak to a lost neighbor about the Gospel because we may not be able to answer his or her questions. Sometimes this concern has some merit. At other times, it becomes an excuse behind which we hide. After all, Christ’s calling is to us as well as to the first disciples, and He can provide the miraculous catch.

The Gospel contradicts every tenant and ism in our culture, relativism, Pluralism and Humanism.

We live in an age of relativism, a belief system based on the absolute certainty that there are no absolute certainties. We hypocritically applaud men for seeking the truth, but we call for the public execution of any man who believes he has found it. We live in a self imposed dark age. Why? The reason for this is clear, natural man is a fallen creature, he is morally corrupt and he is hell bent on autonomy or self-government.

He hates God because God is righteous, he hates God’s laws because they censor him and restrict his evil. He hates the truth because it exposes him for what he is and troubles what is left of his guilty conscience. Therefore, fallen man seeks to push the truth, especially the truth about God, as far from him as he possibly can remove it. He will go to any extent to suppress the truth, even to the point of pretending there is no such thing as truth or that if it does exist, it can not be known or have any bearing on our lives.

Realize this about the Gospel, it is never the case of a hiding God, but of a hiding man.

The problem is never the intellect, but the will. I do not believe that the bible gives any room for atheism, there are liars and God haters who push the truth out of their minds, but there are no such thing as atheists. For although they knew Him, you see, like a man who hides his head in the sand to avoid a charging rhino, modern man denies the righteous truth of God and moral absolutes in hopes of quieting his conscience and putting out of his mind the judgment that he knows must come.

Now the Christian Gospel is a scandal to the man involved in relativism and his culture because the Christian Gospel does the one thing that man so hopes to avoid, it awakens him from his self imposed slumber to the reality to his fallen-ness and rebellion and calls him to reject his autonomy (self-government) and to submit to God in repentance and faith through Jesus Christ.

We need to be aware of this as we learn how to share our faith in this fallen world. One of our biggest fears in personal evangelism is fear of rejection, we must understand, it’s not us that they are rejecting. It is Christ they are rejecting.