This week’s guest blogger is my best friend Josh Johnson. He’s a senior at Bob Jones University studying missions. I asked him to write this specific article after hearing him preach it in church one day. I knew he could bring it to you better than I could ever summarize it.
Doing Evangelism, the Way Christ Did It.
When many of you read that sentence, you’re already starting to turn your Bibles to John 4 where Christ shares the Gospel with the woman at the well. It is a fair assumption, seeing as most people use this to talk about Christ’s form of evangelism, but this isn’t what I want to focus on. John 4 is great for one time evangelism, but we want to focus more on Christ’s long term goal with evangelism, discipleship. Through this study, we will see how Christ’s long term goal through His evangelism was discipleship with the twelve, and ultimately, teaching them to evangelize and disciple other people.
When we talk about Christ’s disciples and Christ pouring his life into them, I really want to focus on the “inner three”. This term is used to describe Christ’s closest disciples: James, John, and Peter. The best two references to this are Matt 17:1 (Christ’s Transfiguration) and Matt 26:37 (Garden of Gethsemane). Towards the end of His earthly ministry to his disciples in Matt 28:16-20, He charged them to go unto all the world and do what? “Make disciples”.
Now, Christ began his formal ministry at the age of thirty. He was crucified at the age of thirty-three, so we know that he ministered and taught his disciples for roughly three years. The disciples that he ministered to the most were three, so for posterity’s sake, let’s average that out to about one disciple a year that Christ would pour his life into.
Since we know that Christ calls us all to share the gospel, let me create a scenario for you. Let’s say that you are an amazing preacher. You have all the attributes of the best preachers, plus you’re constantly filled with the convicting power of the Holy Spirit. Because of all this you are able to lead one-thousand people to the Lord every day. If the population of the world were to freeze where it stands today, it would take over seventeen-thousand years for you would lead the entire world to Christ. That’s longer than the world has been around!
Since the Bible calls men to “make disciples”, let me pose another example to you doing evangelism Christ’s way. Pretend that you take one person a year and you witness to this person, and eventually he gets saved. Now for the rest of the year you teach him how to do the same thing with other people. At the end of that year, you both go out and each make a separate disciple and do the same with him. After one year there would be two of you. After two years, there would be four of you. After three years, there would be eight of you, and so on. Following this scenario, the entire world would be saved in thirty-three years!
Let me remind you that the thirty-three years starts out with just one person. Most estimates say that one-billion people claim to be Christians. I highly disagree that all those people in the surveys are saved, so let’s give ourselves a more realistic number and say that it’s half of that. Of the thirty-three years, we are already 27 years into the process. This means that if we each follow Christ’s example by taking one person, leading that person to the Lord and teaching him to do the same (according to the scenario) the whole world could be saved in 6 years. We must remember that the Holy Spirit is our chief means to leading someone to Christ through conviction, but we also have to remember that God has given us a charge, and by following His example, seeing billions of people saved in the next few years is not impractical at all. If you’re trying to be Christlike in most things in your life, be Christlike in your evangelism as well.
-Josh
