Revisiting the Path of Evangelism | Behold Your God Podcast

Currently, we're in a series discussing the influence of the Puritans on the First Great Awakening. In the UK, the revival work is known as the Evangelical Revival. Now eventually, we're going to be focusing on the great doctrines of our salvation that held up this era.

If you're a long-time listener, Puritans and the Evangelical Revival are not new ideas.

To you.

However, if you recently discovered the podcast, you may not be as familiar with them. So we wanted to take a few weeks and introduce new listeners and perhaps remind those of you who have been with us for a while of previous series where we focused on ministries shaped by Puritan writings.

For this week, we wanted to present you episode five from our Path of Evangelism series, focusing on Samuel Walker of Truro's scheme of personal evangelism.

The Need to Point Sinners to Christ Alone

Welcome to another episode of the Behold Your God podcast. I'm Matthew Robinson, director of Media Gratiae, and I'm here again with Dr. John Snyder, the author and the host of the Behold Your God study series for Media Gratiae.

We're here at Christ Church New Albany, and we are about to begin evangelism podcast number five in our series, our series on evangelism. We have so far seen the need and the role that conviction plays in the proper evangelism of a soul.

It's an emptying from the law. It's causes people to look away from themselves, to stop trusting in their own righteousness. And then last week, we talked about the need to point them to Christ when that point has been reached.

And the two things that we really focused on is Christ's ability to save and Christ's willingness to save. You can go back and listen to those two episodes. They'll be there on the blog at mediagratiae .org.

But this week, John, in our fifth episode on evangelism, what is it that we're focused on?

Well, today we're going to pick back up with Samuel Walker, and we're using Tim Shenton's book as a biography on that, A Cornish Revival, where Walker moves on from those points to the wonderful reality, but so significant for us because of the tendency we have to add something to Christ, you know, as if we could.

But it's built into all of us. We've all tried it. And so Walker moves to the next point and says that the evangelist must be careful to show people not only that Christ is willing and able, but he is the only willing one and he is the only able one.

And he gives us a lot of things to steer people away from as we're pointing them to Christ.

Yeah.

Well, let's listen to Samuel Walker here. So he says,. In those complainings he makes of the want of sensible and particular frames, by which he means attitudes, emotions, a state of mind, which he seeks for to substitute them in place of Christ.

This lies couched under the common expression, God, for Christ's sake, will forgive our sins with true repentance. Here, repentance is made the cause of God's forgiveness and is put in the place of Christ.

Yeah, I think some of the phrases that he gives there, you know, that's 18th century language, so we probably need to pull it apart a little. One of those phrases, for Christ's sake, what a wonderful expression of the heart of the gospel for the sake of what Christ, our representative, has done for us.

The Father who planned all of this, who laid it out as the architect, will forgive those that come to him through Christ. But then the other phrase, the secret, you know, subtle workings of self-righteousness within us.

And he gives some things that we wouldn't normally think of. I mean, Matt, if I were to say to you, when you're talking to a person about Christ and you want to guard them against self-righteousness, I mean, what are the things that in our culture we tend to think of as self-righteousness?

Well, there's our behavior, that we're not quite as bad as other people. We can start to look to our pedigree and to how many churches we've been members of, perhaps, and how many times we've been baptized.

But I don't know that I would immediately, without some help here, think of repentance as something that needs to be guarded against.

Right, right. And that, Walker, is very astute there. The good gifts that God gives us, and repentance is a gift, and we're going to be talking about that in later episodes, faith is a gift. The best things that God gives us, they often are used under the enemy's lying influence.

We are tempted to take those and make those the foundation of our hope. So it's no longer Christ alone, but it's now become Jesus plus. And maybe that's the simplest way to think of it. Jesus plus, and so we've already mentioned a number of them, Jesus plus my frame of mind.

That is, I feel so bad for my sins, plus Jesus Christ, I think God would be willing to forgive me. I feel so hopeful in Christ, my faith feels so strong right now, that plus Christ, I think God will forgive me.

You know, we can think of our experiences. There are a lot of experiences that we might go through. Different people, different experiences. But generally, as God is bringing us from a kingdom of darkness to a kingdom of light, there are a lot of experiences.

The experiences that happen during conviction, the experiences that fill our mind and heart when we very first start to understand the gospel. And those are so new to us, and so precious, that it's very tempting to make those the foundation of our hope.

And you mentioned that, what he mentioned there, that even faith and repentance could become, instead of the empty hands that reach out to the king and say, is it true that you give men like me this free gift?

Could you love a man like me? And you know, instead of that being the case, we look at repentance and faith and say, you know what? It's like a couple of dollars in my hand, and I'm going to throw that on the pile of Jesus' payment, and together I'm a little more savable than the guy next to me.

And so those are all things we have to guard against.

Self-Emptiness and Paul's Loss of Religious Gain

Yeah, and that's, it's striking. And it's something that we really have to get hold of, that even these good religious things, even what we've talked about already, our conviction, which would sort of go under the category of experiences.

Have I been convicted enough to come to Christ? Maybe the fact that, man, I have been really convicted. Maybe that's a little righteous, that's a little spiritual money that I can use to come to Christ with.

Even those things, in order for us to come, and I love that picture that you used with empty hands to Christ, we even have to lay those things down. But the ultimate, the ultimate is self-emptiness. We have to lay down whatever's in our hand, if that's sin or if that's evil.

Sorry, if that's sin or if that's good things, good things that are even gifts from God.

Yeah, so again, Philippians 3, Paul counts everything as loss. And Paul does not give in that list his most shameful sins. He gives a list of his most earnest religion and said it was all worthless because it was all a substitute for Christ.

One of the things in our culture that we encounter a lot is people who are trusting in a sinner's.

Prayer.

They're trusting in a prayer that they've prayed. Speak to that.

If we think about the sinner's prayer, and I think this is a very important thing for a couple of reasons. One, because the sinner's prayer can be mishandled in such a way that it is really no better than a self-righteous act.

And we can spot that when a person does this. When you say to them, are you a believer? Are you right with God? And they go, oh no, I'm right with God. Don't you worry about me, buddy. You know, you go talk to that guy over there.

Just leave me alone. Well, how do you know you're right with God? And then the next thing that comes out is, I did, and that's self-righteousness. So I did, well, what did you do? I said a sinner's prayer.

I said the sinner's prayer. The preacher told me to pray. I mean, I even repeated the words. Well, other than the fact that that prayer isn't found in Scripture, the problem is not that that prayer isn't found in Scripture primarily, in my opinion.

It's the fact that you've put a prayer in a wrong place. A prayer is the cry of a needy man to a willing and able God. But that cry does not earn the beggar, the king's attention. The cry of a man on death row because he's murdered does not earn the judge's mercy.

And we've got to quit thinking that that's a work we're doing. Like, okay, joining a church doesn't make you a Christian, and quitting doing the bad things I've been doing doesn't make me a Christian.

But if I say this magical prayer, it makes me a Christian. So that's a big problem. There's another problem, though, and I'm glad that we're able to talk about it now because in reaction against the wrongness of that, some people have almost discarded the idea.

Of crying out to the Lord.

They say, well, you know, this whole thing of conversion, I was lost but now I see, that evangelical idea is not really biblical. No, you're just born, maybe you're born in a Christian home, and you kind of grow up in the atmosphere of good teaching, and you know, you just kind of, you're kind of a, in a sense, you're almost kind of a Christian because you're born in that atmosphere and you just blossom.

And unless you become a raging heretic, it's pretty hard to get out of that. So we don't want to do that. We don't want to throw the true nature of conversion out just because we realize the danger of a careless dealing with it.

The Tax Collector, the Philippian Jailer, and the Cry for Mercy

Yeah, we see a sinner's prayer in the Scriptures when Christ gives the account of the two men who went down to the temple to pray. And so there's a sinner who has come to an end of himself, beats his breast, can't even manage to look up toward heaven, but he cries out, Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Now that man went down to his house justified, but it's not because he put his faith in the prayer that he prayed. He didn't know he was praying a sinner's prayer. He was casting himself completely and fully on the Lord.

Yeah, and we find that repeated so often through Scripture. Every time you find the needy man, the needy woman in Scripture, come to feel the weight of the shame and guilt of their sin, you cannot prevent a sinner's prayer.

I mean, Peter is in the middle of the Pentecost sermon and he gets interrupted, you know, he could have said, wait now, like I'm on point three. And they stop him and say, then what must we do? You know, what about us?

We just killed the Messiah, the Philippian jailer. What must I do to be saved? You know, it's almost as if when God brings a sinner to that point, the cry erupts. It's wrung from the heart by the pain of sin and the matching hope of the gospel.

And the Holy Spirit has brought both of those to bear. And he produces in us the cry and the Father hears it every time. But no one in Scripture says, did you hear what I just said? That made me right with God, you know.

Justifying Faith, Doctrine, and the Danger of Delayed Conversion

Well, let me try to get this second quote in from Walker before our break, because there are other good things that we don't need to substitute in the place for Christ. So Walker says, at this point, at this point in your evangelistic effort with this person, at this point cooperating with the work of God in the soul, the person to be instructed must not try to understand the precise nature of justifying faith in case he is perplexed with notions or tempted to speculate, nor is it important for him to know the time he first believed.

Though the instructor should be clear that it is such a persuasion of Christ's sufficiency as determines the heart to rest wholly upon him, should separate in his own idea of it faith from feeling, faith from sight, faith from the fruits and proofs of it.

Now, we'll be entangling that a pretty good bit when we come back from this break. But it's a good thing to point out that there are a couple things in there. So what are we going to bring out from that?

So doctrine, clarity about doctrine and clarity in the way we understand what God's been doing on the inside of us must not become a distraction or a cause of delay for the sinner to embrace Christ.

Well, we'll take a quick break and we'll come right back and we'll dig more into that. One of the things that we love about attending conferences is when people drop by our booth and they tell us about how one of our studies or our films has helped or influenced them, their church, their family, their small groups.

Eventually we started asking if they would let us record their stories so that we could share them with you. This is Chris, and we talked to him at the G3 conference about rethinking God biblically.

As a pastor looking for good resources and really became challenged by it, and he was able to lead our church through in California and to see how God used that in such unique ways to drive us back to a biblical definition of who is God, who is man, what is the gospel.

And when we twist that around, we end up with a false gospel and really an empty hope. And to see how the workbook really challenged the people to dive into scripture in a way that maybe they don't normally, and so to see the byproduct of really what the scripture produced was such a blessing as a pastor, as a shepherd.

I think the biggest thing that the congregation walked away with was understanding that we don't get the gospel right if we don't begin with God. And when they talk to other people, they hear, well, I think God is, well, it's not about what we think, it's about what scripture says and who God is.

For more information about Behold Your God, Rethinking God Biblically, visit themeansofgrace .org. Welcome back to the Behold Your God podcast. We've just read a nice quote here from Samuel Walker that is wordy and has a lot of, a lot of period language, but we're going to deconstruct it a little bit because there are two very important things that we both agree need to be understood if we're going to cooperate with God in the work of evangelism.

So those two things, as you just mentioned before the break, are trusting in our doctrinal understanding and trusting in our experience of conversion and knowing the details about.

It.

And that's one that's especially prevalent in our culture. So we'll talk about that in just a second, but let's start with, I remember hearing Richard Owen Roberts preach a sermon on lots of false regenerations, regenerations that are believed, but are false.

And one of those was a doctrinal regeneration, coming to understand doctrine in such a precise way that God then rewards you by regenerating your heart. Now, I don't know if that's exactly what we're talking about here, but that's certainly.

In view.

Yeah, I think that is in the camp there. And that would depend on the kind of the religious culture you're in. I think that sadly, many that might listen to the broadcast, including me, would have grown up in a church where doctrinal clarity was not touted as the great end all of Christianity.

It might be duties. So you might be the kind of person that says, well, I've done a lot, but what about the doctrinal clarity? That certainly seems like something that would be good to really get nailed down before you cry out to Christ, before you embrace Him on His terms for His glory.

And Walker warns, and Walker is wanting us to be serious about the doctrine, but he warns us that the enemy will take that seriousness about doctrine, and he'll make it kind of a pit stop, a distraction, a delay.

Yeah, just camp out here until you get it figured out.

Yeah, so imagine you're talking to someone, and in Walker's day, justification by faith is what he mentioned. That was a big one. Like, you know, and as a member of a Church of England person, you might have interrupted Walker and said, wait, wait, Pastor, are you saying that all the good stuff I've done doesn't add to my justification?

And Walker would have to explain it again. But then a person might say, well, I need to think some more on that, you know. And there's always the desire to know better, to know more, but we'll never exhaust the depths of these truths in this life.

And so if you wait until you figure out justification, you're never going to embrace Christ. But more importantly, if you think that figuring out justification by faith to a greater degree makes you a little more attractive to God, then you've misunderstood the gospel.

But that isn't the only one. I mean, in our day, you could think of Arminianism and Calvinism. So a person, maybe they are, they grew up in a church that didn't really mention God's side of the rescue very much, other than God loved you and sent His Son for you.

But what about the great, who's the great architect of this plan? Who chose Adam to be a representative and Christ to be a representative? And who set the boundaries of this covenant, the threatenings and the rewards?

And I mean, who even made me interested in all of this? Why do I even pay attention to an old book and give my life to a God I've never seen? Well, there's a lot more than just my response. There's this wonderful mountain range of truths that the Reformers rediscovered.

And these truths are so precious and they are so intertwined with the honor of our God that it's natural, and especially if you've not heard them before, it's natural for a person to say, you know, I want to hand my life to this King.

No King like that.

No.

And, but I need to figure this out first. I need to figure out this Calvinism stuff.

Yeah.

And we've experienced that here, you know, we, I mean, in our area, I mean, we are known for when, when a person gets out on YouTube because they can't find the doctrinal preaching that they know that they're missing in their, in their church that they visited or whatever.

Well, I mean, they, they hear, well, there's a church that believes that stuff, you know, in New Albany, you should go whether now, whether that's true or not, we get it nailed to us. So people come and, and we've had, I mean, we have some dear friends, we won't say name, but in, when they first came, they were unconverted.

They didn't know the gospel, but they were really, really bothered about this Calvinism thing. And they had grown up in a free will environment where that was really stressed. And they had led, you know, knocking on door expeditions and, you know, the stuff that you guys, you grew up doing that.

So, but, but they didn't really have a grasp on the gospel. And it was kind of clear in talking with them in the beginning that there may, that may not be the thing that we need to really be talking about.

And so they would, they would say, now explain this aspect of Calvinism to me. And it's, it's very tempting when you do love those truths and those are beautiful truths and you do want to explain how beautifully they do fit together and they do come from the scriptures, but to recognize, you know, this is not the time to really go here in this conversation.

I mean, the way that Truro says it is, should not begin to understand, or the way that Walker.

Says it.

Oh, sorry.

Yeah.

The way that, the way that that entire town said it, the way that Walker said it is, they shouldn't right then try to understand the precise nature of justifying faith in case he's perplexed with notions or tempted to speculate.

So I mean, that's just old language for maybe you get a crazy idea and you start chasing it off down some rabbit trail with notions and then, or maybe with spec, you waste time speculating about all these different things that it could be when what you need to do is run to Christ.

And you don't need to build some new self-righteous thing to hold in your hand and say, look, I figured it out and see, I know how you save people. And then bring that as if that were some sort of religious money to the Lord.

Yeah.

I often have been asked by folks in the church, you know, can I talk with you about something? We come to this study and they'll say, you know, I'm not sure where I am with the Lord. Not sure I'm even a Christian.

But can you explain election to me? And I just look at him for a second thinking, is that really what you want answered? Or are you, is there another question underneath that? Like, how do I know that God would forgive a person like me?

Or this question, how can I become a better churchy person so that God would love me? You know, if I figure out election, I'll be there. I remember speaking with one man whose life was pretty wretched and he was under terrible conviction, terrible.

And we had many, many, many meetings after the sermons. And there was a slow but wonderful process of the Lord bringing him to him. But the conviction process was a long time. And this guy knew theology.

That wasn't the problem. His head was big. The heart was all for him. So he would say things like this to me, in a sense. He would say, well, look, I know I've been a rotten guy or I know I've ruined my life or I know I've wasted my life or I know I'm not a Christian.

He said, but at least, at least I'm not an Arminian. And I would say to him, you are so self-righteous. You think that you're a special kind of Christian, you're a special kind of lost person. You're a lost person who at least knows that that group over there isn't reading their Bible well enough.

Or he would say, well, at least I don't trust in some sinner's prayer. I mean, I know better than that. And I would say, so you think you're in a special category. You're a lost man, but you're not just the average hopeless lost man.

You're a lost man that's got some pretty good ideas. And you think that that has made you one fragment of a centimeter higher in God's eyes than the guy that thinks if I gave him a sinner's prayer, that would fix him.

And I said, you know, really, your knowledge has made you guiltier, not better, because you have you have not come to Christ. And it was a long time, but very grateful to say that the Lord seems to have brought.

Him.

Regeneration, the Date of Conversion, and Coming to Christ as a Person

Yeah.

Well, let's just sum this part up by saying, praise God that it isn't our grasp on doctrinal truth that saves us. Because we do have many people who, look, they haven't given a lot of thought to doctrine, but they love the Lord Jesus Christ and they've come to him.

They've cast themselves on him and they are beautiful Christians. Now, we'd like to see them grow. And, you know, in a normal situation and under the preaching of the gospel, there will be a hunger to grow in what we call doctrine, which is really just the truth of God.

But we all have theological inconsistencies and we're all wrong about some stuff. If we knew what it was, we would repent of it and we would embrace, you know, the other team's view. But thank God that it isn't our grasp of theological truth that saves us.

It is Christ. And even those things can be a distraction that have to be repented of. But let's move now into this issue of experience and how that can be a distraction. It's a thing in our culture. And it is, I hear about it secondhand.

But people who have grown up in the SBC and in non-denominational areas of kind of our cultural religion, you were telling me earlier about a song, you know, if you were saved on a Monday, stand up. If you were saved on a Tuesday, stand up.

TJ was telling me earlier that he's heard it from the pulpit. If you don't know the date and time that you were saved, you're not saved. Now, of course, I guess you could just come on down and get it done right then and then you would know the date and the time.

So, but what that that is, I don't see that in the scriptures. And Samuel seems to be warning against that.

Yeah. Again, we don't want to react against, you know, and swing like a pendulum. We want to follow Christ. We want to follow scripture right through the middle of all the bad ideas and all the nudges the enemy gives us, you know, in our inconsistency.

So God works in the heart, in the soul. Regeneration is that penetrating work of the Holy Spirit. And that's why the thoughts and the desires and the choices change. He doesn't, you know, He doesn't start by just giving us a bunch of facts and giving us a bunch of rules.

And eventually all of that works itself down into the into the core of my being. And it actually somehow cleanses that. But actually, no, there's a new nature, a new birth and that affects. But because of that being so wonderful and true and real, I think the enemy really has attacked that.

And in our culture, yeah, that's become the thing people hope in. So again, a gift is turned and misused and has become dangerous. So the fruit of God's work is placed at the foundation of the house. If you think of a house, the foundation of the Christian house is the is the life and death of Jesus Christ for us are His righteousness, active and passive obedience.

And the walls that are built on that, that that's what comes out of it. So faith and repentance and the walls start to get covered, covered in paint and pictures. And that's the acts of love and submission and the deeds of righteousness that flow from a new life.

But if you took a picture frame off the wall and you said, you know, I think we're going to we're going to build another house right next to this. Here's what we're going to do, though. We're going to take all the pictures and all the books and decorations out of this room.

We're going to put it as the foundation. We're going to build a house on on picture frames. You know, it would be a terrible idea. So experiences are good. We appreciate it when God gives them to us and they're legitimate expressions of God's work.

But they are never given to us as the source of our righteousness. And so trying to pinpoint the day in time, it's probably a sign that you think if I could know exactly when an experience happened, that experience is my righteousness.

So I've got to make sure I've got that. But but, you know, on the other hand, people that say to me and many people have said this, well, I've just always been a Christian. Right. Well, I never am concerned, really.

That they know the day and time, but I think as the Lord grows them, they will be able to look back and say, look, I can't give you the day and time. But I know this at this point in my life, I live for me.

It was all about John. It was the most self-worshipping, blind, hardened heart. And in this period of my life, God did something. And now, even though I'm still pretty disappointing in my eyes, I have been brought from darkness to light and I'm not where I was before.

Yeah, we don't want to deny that regeneration is a thing because that we've lost it in our culture. We've lost it even in even in reformed culture. I don't mean just in the, you know, in the sort of cultural religion of the Mid-South.

You can know the truths about it and never see it happen. And just stop looking for it. So we don't want to deny that a man must be born again. But when we I think one of the reasons that Samuel Walker is warning against this as a as a potential distraction, and this is one of the most helpful things I actually have learned from you in guiding people and counseling with people, when people say, you know, when I was eight, you know, and I walked the aisle, I don't know, there was a period in high school when I got really serious.

I don't know if that was maybe when I got saved. But now, you know, I'm 20 and 30. I'm I'm just, you know, I'm living the Christian life. I'm here. I'm growing so much. I'm sitting under this ministry in the word.

I don't know if maybe I'm just now saved. And the advice that I give them is, look, don't maybe the Lord will make that clear to you at some point. But don't bother yourself with that question right now.

Ask yourself this question, because this question is all that matters. Who is Christ to you? Is he precious? Is he precious now? And if so, well, then you can be adequately comforted that you've come to know him and that this work has taken place.

And so don't don't waste time wondering about the time and the date. Just ask yourself, is there a reality? Have I come to a person? We don't come to a set of doctrines. We don't come to a time and a date or something written in the back of our Bible.

We don't come to a prayer. We come to a person. And do we know him and love him? Are we walking with him? I think that's what we have to sum this up with, because we've run out of time.

Closing Exhortation and Supporter Information

Yeah. Yeah.

Thanks for listening. We're going to come back on our next episode and begin to look at faith. How is faith described? We've been warned against some substitutes for faith. But now what is it? And there are seven descriptions that we are only going to be able to get started.

So we'll at least start on the first.

Yeah, we will.

But this is a this has been a really fun discussion about these things and helpful. I think might be a better word than fun. But I look forward to continuing to go on with it. So be sure to look for the Supporter Appreciation Podcast this week.

We record those as a tangible way to say thank you to those of you who have come alongside Mediagratia to help us with the work that we do financially with a monthly donation. You can find out how to do that at Mediagratia .org or in English, TheMeansOfGrace .org.

That'll forward you right to our website at Mediagratia .org. Look for the donate link. There'll be a way for you to sign up there and you'll be given access to the Supporter Appreciation episodes as well as a good bit of behind the scenes material from conferences and filming trips that we go on.

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Thanks again for listening and we'll see you next week.