Nothing you or I could ever say or do—apart from the Holy Spirit’s regenerating work—will ever cause a person who is dead spiritually to be born again. Sorry to burst your evangelistic bubble, but it’s the truth.
As a genuine believer, your role in this world is to proclaim the biblical gospel of repentance toward God and faith in Jesus Christ (c.f. Acts 20:17-38). Your objective in ministry is to grow in your relationship with God and make others into disciples of Jesus Christ.
In other words, you’ve been called to live for Christ—not convert souls.
Commenting on this very subject, pastor Mark Dever wrote, “According to the Bible, converting people is not in our power. And evangelism may not be defined in terms of results but only in terms of faithfulness to the message preached.”
It’s not your responsibility to ultimately determine whether a person’s name is written down in the Lamb’s Book of Life or not, though the quality of a person’s lifestyle will help you make a reasonable judgment as to whether or not it is. We certainly need to “test” and “examine” ourselves to see if we “are in the faith” (c.f. 2 Cor. 13:5), but that is something we assess and judge internally in ourselves, not in others.
To put it another way, you are a fruit inspector and not a fruit Creator.
You’re not responsible for anyone’s salvation, much less their eternal damnation. That verdict is left up to God’s sovereign mercy and the sinner’s own responsibility. It is for this blessed reason that Jesus instructed the church to “make disciples” and not to “convert souls.”
Giving his take on the subject, sixteenth century French reformer John Calvin wrote, “rebels, when they reject the salvation offered to them, draw down upon themselves severer punishment, and not only are involved in the general destruction of mankind, but bear the guilt of their own ingratitude.”
It’s critical that you understand this. Don’t miss this point.
Great Commission Discipleship removes the spotlight from shining upon what you can’t see or perceive (spiritual conversion) and illuminates what you can see and assess (external actions pointing toward legitimate discipleship). And that, indeed, is a blessing in itself. You will never save anyone—God does. You will never send anyone to hell—God does, due to the sinner’s own unrepentant heart (c.f. 2 Corinthians 7:10).
Beloved, it’s not your responsibility to regenerate the souls of this planet’s walking dead!
“We don’t fail in our evangelism,” said Mark Dever, “if we faithfully tell the gospel to someone who is not converted; we fail only if we don’t faithfully tell the gospel at all. Evangelism itself isn’t converting people; it’s telling them that they need to be converted and telling them how they can be.”
But don’t make the mistake of assuming for even a moment that you have no role, whatsoever, in the process of salvation. In His sovereignty God has established both the end of salvation as well as the means. Great Commission Discipleship has its purpose. You are the means that God uses to herald the saving gospel of repentant faith in Jesus Christ alone. Without the cooperation of radical Christians like you from around the globe, anyone who got saved would have to be so through miraculous intervention, kind of like what Jesus did with the apostle Paul on the road to Damascus. But divine intervention isn’t what Christ had in mind for Great Commission Discipleship. He chose, instead, to use passionate laborers like you.
A hammer is nothing but lazy steel and wood. It can’t supply the necessary thrust to wield itself, let alone affect anything around it. Yet when swung by the omnipotent arm of the master Carpenter, it will certainly influence the nail!
I like what author Randy Newman had to say about the matter. He wrote, “Not only do the minds of nonbelievers need to be persuaded, but also their knees need to buckle.” That’s a great picture of Great Commission Discipleship. Knees buckle when God regenerates a soul.
Have your knees ever buckled like that?
Like this piece, Charles. We’re told all the time about getting others saved, and setting numbers for a week’s time or a year’s time. When a pastor once asked me if I was “saving lives” with the ministry God had given me, immediately I felt the pressure to perform and produce numbers for him. That was until God reminded me that He had not given that power to me, or anyone else here on earth. What a relief. So I gently reminded him of that and he apologized.