WHAT IS THE POINT?
What should be the supreme goal of the believer towards unbelievers? Isn’t for them to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth that can set them free and become white-hot worshipers? But regrettably, many people have relegated evangelism down to a sinner’s prayer. People have good intentions and want people to be saved, but what does it mean to be saved? How is one saved? Many respond to the altar call to surrender their lives, but many leave unchanged, because either no one gave clear instructions on how to be saved and fully surrendered, or they are unaware of the biblical protocol on how people are saved.
The point of evangelism is not to get someone to simply pray a prayer, but to get them filled with the Holy Spirit. How we approach sinners to be saved will greatly determine the trajectory of the repentant person’s life. These questions got me do some research and eventually discovered David Pawson’s series on the Normal Christian Birth.
He said that we need to give new believers a proper start in life. (The way we begin is so important.) We must use New Testament language, this leads to New Testament thinking. Text out of context becomes a pretext for our own thinking. When we lose Biblical language, we lose Biblical power. So if we turned to the text to find out how people are truly saved, we discover that:
The Gospels were too early (Jewish/Christian transition period)
Epistles and Revelation too late (written to Christians who were already born again)
The Book of Acts clearly articulates how people were born again (In particular chapters 8 & 19)
The Four steps of the Born Again Experienced laid out in the Book of Acts revealed this clear pattern:
1. Repent of your sins towards God.
2. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ.
3. Be Baptised in Water.
4. Receive the Holy Spirit.
(The Normal Christian Birth - "RBBR")
All four steps were Anticipated in the Gospels (by John the Baptist and Jesus), Assumed in the Epistles and Revelation, but clearly Articulated in Acts.
Not limited to Evangelism, but if we had a Presence-centered approach, inviting the manifest presence of God through the Holy Spirit in our families, communities and ministries, we would see the types of results they saw in the Book of Acts. If we did what the apostles did, we would get their results. Our ultimate pursuit in evangelism, ministry, community, should be for people to encounter and be filled with the Holy Spirit. The book will continue to shed light to the fact that it is the Holy Spirit, who birthed the church and brought about the kind of power and zeal in the disciples in the midst of setbacks, pushback and persecution. If we want people to be set free from demonic oppression, sinful bondage and fleshly desires, we need the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit in everything that we do.