The Reformation Resurgence

22/05/2026

Desperate for the Spirit Who is God

A reader wrote to me asking how a believer can become genuinely desperate for the Holy Spirit, and whether before answering that question I would address who the Holy Spirit actually is. The request was wise because the second question must be answered before the first one can be answered honestly. Most contemporary teaching on being hungry for the Spirit operates from a vague and often unbiblical picture of who the Spirit is, and once the picture is wrong the hunger gets directed toward experiences and feelings rather than toward the person who actually deserves it. So let me start with who the Holy Spirit is, and then move into what it means to be genuinely desperate for Him.

The Holy Spirit is fully God. He is not a force. He is not an influence. He is not an impersonal energy that emanates from God. He is the third person of the eternal Trinity, equal in essence and glory and authority with the Father and the Son, distinct in person from both, and worthy of the same worship and obedience we offer to the other two persons of the Godhead. When Peter confronted Ananias in Acts 5:3 and 4 about lying to the Holy Spirit, he said in the same breath that Ananias had not lied to men but to God. The Holy Spirit is identified directly as God in that confrontation. Lying to Him is lying to God because He is God.

He is described as the eternal Spirit in Hebrews 9:14, an attribute that belongs to God alone. He is omnipresent in Psalm 139:7 to 10. He is omniscient in 1 Corinthians 2:10 and 11 where Paul says the Spirit searches even the depths of God Himself. He was the agent of creation hovering over the waters in Genesis 1:2. He was the one who inspired every word of Scripture, with 2 Peter 1:21 telling us that no prophecy was a matter of human interpretation but that men moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God. Every word of the Bible we hold in our hands is the product of His work moving through human authors to produce a text that is fully divine in its origin while being fully human in its expression.

But the Holy Spirit is not the Father and He is not the Son. He is a distinct person within the one Godhead. At the baptism of Jesus in Matthew 3:16 and 17, all three persons of the Trinity are visibly present at the same moment. The Son is in the water. The Father is speaking from heaven. The Spirit descends like a dove. Three distinct persons, one God. The doctrine of the Trinity is not a contradiction. It is the careful preservation of what Scripture itself reveals. One God in three persons, each fully God, each personally distinct, each equally worthy of worship.

The personhood of the Holy Spirit is something the church has had to defend across the centuries because the natural mind tends to reduce Him to an abstraction. But Scripture refuses to let us do this. He speaks in Acts 13:2. He calls and commissions in the same passage. He is grieved in Ephesians 4:30. He can be lied to in Acts 5:3. He intercedes for us in Romans 8:26. He teaches us in John 14:26. He testifies of Christ in John 15:26. None of these are activities of a force or an impersonal influence. They are the activities of a person who thinks, speaks, decides, feels, and relates. He is not it. He is He. And the way Scripture consistently refers to Him with personal pronouns reinforces this rather than reducing Him to a thing.

This Holy Spirit indwells every believer permanently from the moment of conversion. This is one of the most staggering realities of the Christian life and one we rarely allow ourselves to feel properly. The same God who fills the heavens and the earth has taken up residence within every person who has been united to Christ by faith. "Or do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you whom you have from God and that you are not your own?" 1 Corinthians 6:19. The body of the believer is a temple. Not in metaphor only. In reality. The Spirit of the living God dwells inside the people He has saved, and this indwelling is permanent, sealed, and unbreakable. Ephesians 1:13 and 14.

Now to the question of what it means to be desperate for Him. The framing of the question matters because many contemporary teachings on being hungry for the Spirit have produced a chasing of experiences rather than a deepening of relationship with the person who already indwells the believer. The desperation we are called to is not the desperation to receive something we do not yet have. It is the desperation to walk more fully in step with the Spirit who has already taken residence in us, to experience the fullness of His ongoing work in our lives, to allow Him unhindered access to every part of our hearts so that He may produce in us what He alone can produce.

The contrast between being filled with the Spirit and walking in step with the Spirit is important here. Ephesians 5:18 commands believers to be filled with the Spirit. The verb is in the present continuous tense, indicating an ongoing reality rather than a one time event. We are to be being filled, continuously, as a way of life rather than as a single experience to be sought once and then assumed to be permanent. Galatians 5:25 says, "If we live by the Spirit let us also walk by the Spirit." Walking implies steady ongoing movement. The Christian life is a daily walking, step by step, in dependence on the Spirit who indwells us, allowing Him to direct, convict, comfort, and shape us as we go.

What does genuine desperation for the Spirit look like in practice? It looks like a settled hunger for what only He can produce in us. The fruit of the Spirit in Galatians 5:22 and 23 is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control. These are the qualities a desperate believer hungers for. Not the spectacular gifts. Not the dramatic experiences. The fruit. The slow, sustained, character forming work of the Spirit producing in us the very character of Christ over the course of our lives. The believer who is genuinely desperate for the Spirit is the believer who looks at their own impatience and longs for the Spirit's patience to be produced in them, who looks at their own selfishness and longs for the Spirit's love to displace it, who looks at their own anxiety and longs for the Spirit's peace to settle them.

Desperation for the Spirit also looks like hunger for the Word of God. The Spirit and the Word are not in competition. The Spirit is the one who inspired the Word and who works most powerfully through the Word in the life of the believer. "The sword of the Spirit which is the word of God" Ephesians 6:17. The Spirit's sword is the Word. When we open our Bibles with hunger and attention, we are positioning ourselves to receive the Spirit's most consistent ministry to His people. The believer who is desperate for the Spirit will be desperate for the Word, because the Spirit speaks through what He has already inspired rather than producing new revelations that compete with Scripture for authority in our lives. Psalm 119:103 says, "How sweet are Your words to my taste yes sweeter than honey to my mouth." That sweetness is the experience of the Spirit ministering through the Word to the soul that has been opened to receive it.

Desperation for the Spirit looks like sustained prayer. Jesus said in Luke 11:13, "If you then being evil know how to give good gifts to your children how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?" The Father gives the Spirit to those who ask. This is not a contradiction of the truth that the Spirit already indwells believers. It is the invitation to ask for the ongoing experience of His fullness, the daily filling, the moment by moment empowering for whatever the day requires. The believer who is desperate for the Spirit is the believer who is asking the Father continuously for more of what the Spirit produces in them, and the Father who is generous beyond imagining responds to such asking with the very thing being asked for.

Desperation for the Spirit looks like the deliberate removal of what grieves Him. Ephesians 4:30 says, "Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption." The Spirit can be grieved by sin in the life of the believer. He does not leave us when we sin because the sealing is permanent, but His fellowship with us is hindered by sin that we refuse to confess and forsake. The believer who is genuinely desperate for the Spirit will be quick to repent of sin, quick to bring confessed sin to the Lord, quick to remove from their lives whatever they know is hindering the fellowship with the Spirit who indwells them. 1 Thessalonians 5:19 commands us to not quench the Spirit. The quenching happens when we resist His promptings, ignore His convictions, and treat His ongoing ministry in our lives as optional rather than essential.

Desperation for the Spirit also looks like a refusal to settle for counterfeit substitutes. The contemporary religious environment is full of teaching that promises spectacular experiences of the Spirit while delivering manufactured emotion and manipulated atmosphere. The genuinely desperate believer will not be satisfied with these counterfeits because the genuine Spirit is producing something deeper than excitement. He is producing Christlikeness. He is producing genuine assurance that we are children of God. Romans 8:16. He is producing the deep settled peace that comes from knowing our standing in Christ is secure regardless of what our circumstances feel like. He is producing the quiet certainty that the same God who began the good work in us will perfect it until the day of Christ Jesus. These realities are infinitely more substantial than any manufactured experience, and the believer who has tasted them will not exchange them for the lesser substitutes the contemporary religious culture is constantly offering.

There is one more dimension of desperation for the Spirit that needs to be named because it is rarely talked about. The Spirit's primary work in glorifying Christ. Jesus said in John 16:14, "He will glorify Me for He will take of Mine and will disclose it to you." The Spirit's central ministry is to make Christ visible and precious to us. He takes what belongs to Christ and discloses it to the believer, drawing our attention to the Saviour rather than to Himself. A believer who is genuinely desperate for the Spirit will therefore find themselves increasingly desperate for Christ. The hunger will be directed not toward experiences of the Spirit considered abstractly, but toward fresh apprehensions of who Christ is and what He has done. When the Spirit is doing His genuine work in us, Christ becomes more central, more beautiful, more sufficient, more essential to us than He was the day before. That is the surest test of whether what we are experiencing is the genuine work of the Spirit or a counterfeit that has hijacked His name.

So how do we become desperate for the Spirit who is God? We start by understanding who He actually is. He is not a force to be tapped into. He is a person to be loved, reverenced, obeyed, and adored. He is the third person of the Trinity, fully God, dwelling within every believer permanently. We then position ourselves in the means He uses to do His work. The Word read daily. Prayer offered continuously. Sin confessed quickly and forsaken sincerely. Fellowship with the people of God maintained faithfully. The ordinary disciplines of the Christian life are the very channels through which the extraordinary work of the Spirit takes place in the believer who is hungry for what He is producing.

And we ask. We keep asking. We ask the Father for more of the Spirit. We ask Him to produce in us the character of Christ. We ask Him to make us useful in the kingdom. We ask Him to free us from the patterns of the flesh that still cling to us. We ask Him to teach us, to guide us, to comfort us, to convict us, to make Christ increasingly precious to us. The asking is not a one time event. It is the daily orientation of a heart that has come to recognise that everything good in the Christian life is the work of the Spirit, and the believer who lives without conscious dependence on Him is the believer who is missing the very substance of what walking with God actually is.

May we become a generation of believers who are genuinely desperate for the Spirit who is God. Not for experiences. Not for spectacle. Not for the counterfeits that crowd the contemporary religious scene. For Him. For His ongoing work. For the Christ He makes visible to us. For the holiness He produces in us. For the assurance He gives us. For the fellowship with the Father and the Son that He alone makes possible in this present age. He is in us. May we walk with Him every day He gives us. And may the same Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead complete in us what He began when He first opened our eyes and gave us the faith we did not know how to ask for. To the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be all glory now and forever.

He, who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Jeremiah Knight

The Reformation Resurgence

22/05/2026

In Christian theology, the concept of human freedom is not absolute but constrained within God's sovereign limits. While humans have the ability to make choices, these choices are not without boundaries. The misconception that God's sovereignty is limited by human freedom fundamentally misunderstands the relationship between divine sovereignty and human will. True theological understanding recognizes that God's sovereignty is comprehensive and unchallenged by human decisions.

This is illustrated through the doctrine of concurrence, which asserts that God's will operates in harmony with human decisions without nullifying them. For instance, Joseph's brothers acted out of their own volition when they sold him into slavery, yet this was also part of God's sovereign plan. Such examples highlight that while humans can act freely within the scope of their desires, their freedom does not surpass God's ultimate authority or purposes.
Moreover, the notion that humans have the autonomous power to choose salvation independently of divine influence is flawed.

Without God’s intervention to change a heart, a person would never choose righteousness due to their inherent sinful nature. Therefore, the belief that one can freely choose salvation without divine enablement fails to recognize the profound need for God's initiating grace in the process of salvation.

21/05/2026

I have started something new on YouTube.

This first song is called You Have Been My Song. It is a Psalm inspired worship song of thanksgiving to the Lord for who He is and what He has done.

The lyrics came from my heart through the language of the Psalms. The music was created with AI assistance under my direction, with a gentle Indian Carnatic inspired sound and flute led arrangement. I wanted it to be quiet, worshipful, and soothing, not for entertainment, but to help the heart pause and remember the mercy and faithfulness of God.

We live in a noisy world, and many songs today stir the emotions without feeding the soul. My desire with this channel is simple. To create Christ centred worship and Scripture shaped songs that lead us back to the Lord, not to ourselves.

Please listen when you have a quiet moment. If the song blesses you, subscribe to the channel, share it with someone who needs encouragement, and help this reach more hearts.

You Have Been My Song
Psalm Inspired Worship

Jeremiah Knight

The Reformation Resurgence

“You Have Been My Song” is a Psalm inspired worship song of thanksgiving to the Lord for who He is and what He has done.This song is a quiet offering of prai...

21/05/2026

Loving the Enemies

A reader wrote to me with a question she described as deeply personal, asking how she could possibly obey the command of Christ to love her enemies and pray for those who persecute her in the context of what she sees happening with Islamic ideology in her country and others. She was honest about not feeling any love for Muslims or for those who carry out terrorist violence in the name of their religion, and she wanted to know whether there is ever a time when the command does not apply. The honesty of the question deserves an honest answer rather than a polite deflection, because she is wrestling with something many believers wrestle with privately without ever saying it aloud, and the answer matters for how we live the Christian life in the world we actually inhabit rather than the world we wish we inhabited.

Let me begin by addressing the framing of the question itself, because the framing is where the answer begins. The reader described her enemy as Muslims as a category, identifying them with a particular ideology and the violence that some who hold that ideology commit. This framing is understandable given what we see in the news, but it is not the framing Scripture would have us use, and changing the framing is the first step toward being able to obey the command of Christ honestly.

Scripture does not present the human condition as a contest between us, the good people, and them, the bad people. It presents the human condition as universal rebellion against God in which every human being is by nature a rebel before His holiness and stands under His just condemnation until grace intervenes. "There is none righteous not even one; there is none who understands there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside together they have become useless; there is none who does good there is not even one" Romans 3:10 to 12. None. The wickedness we see in the worst expressions of any false religion is not a foreign category of evil that exists in others while we ourselves are basically good. It is the same human evil that exists in us by nature, simply expressed in different forms. The Muslim terrorist and the comfortable Western secularist are both image bearers of God in rebellion against the God who made them, and the only thing that separates the genuine believer from either of them is the sovereign grace of God that opened our eyes when we deserved no such opening.

This is not a Muslim problem in its essence. It is a human problem. Islam is one expression of fallen humanity's organised rebellion against the truth of God, but it is not the only one. The atheism that animates much of Western academia is another. The materialism that consumes large portions of comfortable Western culture is another. The nominal Christianity that occupies pews on Sunday and lives indistinguishably from the world the rest of the week is another. Every false religion and every false ideology and every form of comfortable godlessness is a different shape of the same underlying problem, which is that human beings by nature do not want the God of Scripture and will organise their lives around any substitute they can find rather than submit to Him. The terrorism that horrifies us is the visible and violent expression of the same underlying rebellion that takes quieter forms in the cultures we consider less threatening, and reducing the problem to a particular religion misses the deeper diagnosis that Scripture itself provides.

Once we have this framing in place, the command of Christ becomes possible to obey in a way it could not be possible while we held the framing the question began with. Jesus said, "But I say to you love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous" Matthew 5:44 and 45. The reason He gives for the command is grounded in the character of God Himself, who shows common kindness even to those who hate Him. The believer who has received the kindness of God when they were themselves an enemy of God is being called to extend the same kindness toward those who are currently in the position we ourselves once occupied. We were not less hostile to God before our conversion than the Muslim is now. We were not more deserving of His grace than the terrorist is now. The grace that reached us reached us in our rebellion, and the same grace is what we are being called to extend toward others who are in their rebellion.

Paul makes this explicit in Romans 5:10. "For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God through the death of His Son much more having been reconciled we shall be saved by His life." While we were enemies. Not while we were neutral parties waiting for a good offer. While we were genuine enemies, hostile to God in our minds and our actions, the love of God moved toward us in Christ and brought us into reconciliation we did not deserve and could not have earned. The believer who has absorbed this reality cannot then withhold the same kind of love from people who are currently doing toward God what we ourselves used to do, because the only thing that ended our hostility was grace, and grace is precisely what we are being called to extend toward those still living in the rebellion we once lived in ourselves.

Now to the harder part of the question. What about feelings? The reader said honestly that she does not feel love for Muslims or for terrorists. This honesty is important and it deserves an honest response rather than a moralistic dismissal. The command to love our enemies is not primarily a command to feel warmly toward them. It is a command to act toward them in the way love acts regardless of what we feel. The biblical word for love that Jesus uses in this command is agape, which describes a settled commitment to the genuine good of another person rather than a warm emotion that wells up spontaneously. We can obey this command before we feel anything resembling affection, and in many cases the feelings will follow the actions rather than precede them.

What does this love actually look like in practice? It looks like praying for the salvation of Muslims and for the conversion of terrorists rather than for their destruction. Paul prayed for the Jews who were persecuting the church and even wished himself accursed for their sake. Romans 9:3 and 10:1. The God who saved Saul of Tarsus, a man who had been hunting Christians to imprison and kill them, is the same God who is entirely capable of saving the most violent jihadist or the most committed atheist. Saul became Paul. The most aggressive enemy of the early church became the apostle to the Gentiles. If God could reach him in his violence, He can reach others in theirs, and the prayer of every believer should include the petition that He would do exactly that.

Loving our enemies also looks like refusing to dehumanise them in our speech and our thoughts. They are made in the image of God just as we are. Their souls are immortal just as ours are. Their eternal destinies are at stake just as ours were before grace intervened. The casual contempt with which Christians sometimes speak of Muslims as a category is itself a violation of the command Christ gave us. We are not better than them by nature. We are not more deserving than them. We have simply received grace that they have not yet received, and the appropriate response to that distinction is humility rather than contempt.

Loving our enemies also includes speaking the gospel to them when the opportunity arises. The greatest gift we can give to anyone, including those we naturally fear or oppose, is the gospel that calls them out of the darkness they are currently in into the light of Christ. Many Muslims have come to genuine faith in Christ through the patient witness of believers who refused to write them off and who shared the gospel with them despite the cultural pressure to consider them enemies beyond reach. The God who reached us in our rebellion is reaching them in theirs, and we are part of how He does it when we are willing to extend the gospel toward people we would naturally avoid.

None of this requires us to be naive about the threat that any organised hostility to the gospel represents. Scripture does not call us to pretend that violence is not violence or that evil ideology is not evil. We can name what is wrong while still loving the people caught in it. We can support the just protection of innocent life while still praying for the souls of those who would destroy that life. We can warn against false religion while still recognising that the people inside the false religion are people Christ died to save when they are brought to faith. The love of Christ for sinners did not eliminate His warnings against sin. He warned more sharply than anyone else in Scripture and He also loved more deeply than anyone else in Scripture. Both can be present at the same time, and both must be present in any believer who is genuinely following the example He set.

What about the persecutors specifically? Stephen, the first Christian martyr, was stoned to death by a crowd that included Saul of Tarsus. His last recorded words before he died were, "Lord do not hold this sin against them" Acts 7:60. He prayed for the very people who were killing him. He prayed that their sin would not be charged against them. And one of those people, the young man at whose feet they laid their coats, was the very man whom God would save and turn into the apostle who would write half the New Testament. The connection between Stephen's prayer and Paul's conversion is not stated in the text but it is impossible to read the two events side by side without wondering if Stephen's prayer was one of the means God used to bring Paul to himself. The prayer for the persecutor was not weakness. It was the deepest form of strength Stephen could exercise, and it may have been used by God to produce one of the most significant conversions in the history of the church.

So, the answer to the question, that the command does apply, even now, even in the context you described, and obeying it does not require you to feel love you currently do not feel. It requires you to act in love regardless of the feelings, to pray for the salvation of those you naturally fear, to refuse to dehumanise them in your speech or your thoughts, to recognise that the only thing that separates you from them is the grace that reached you when you were no more deserving than they are, and to trust that the same God who reached you is entirely capable of reaching them through means including the prayers and the witness of His people.

The feelings will follow. Not always immediately, not always completely, but over time as you practice the obedience the Lord has commanded. The God who produced in you the love you have for the Christians around you can produce in you a real concern for the souls of those you currently see as enemies, and the producing of that concern is part of how He completes His work in you. "We love because He first loved us" 1 John 4:19. The love we extend is always downstream from the love we received, and the love we received was extended to us while we were enemies. We can extend it to others in their hostility because the pattern is built into the gospel itself.

May the God who saved us when we did not deserve it teach us to love those who are currently in the position we once occupied. May He give us courage to pray for their salvation rather than their destruction. And may He use the patient love of His people to reach souls that human strategy could never have reached, the same way He used the prayer of a dying martyr to set the stage for the conversion of the man who would become the apostle to the Gentiles.

He, who has ears to hear, let him her.

Jeremiah Knight

The Reformation Resurgence

21/05/2026

The World in Conflict and Distress — John MacArthur preached on October 21, 2007

20/05/2026

Evangelism

A reader wrote to me asking whether I had ever addressed the subject of evangelism directly. What it is. What it is not. How a believer should share the gospel with unbelievers. The question is one of the most important questions any Christian can ask because the answer determines whether the people around us hear the actual gospel or some softer substitute that the contemporary church has been quietly distributing for decades while imagining itself to be faithfully witnessing.

Let me begin with what evangelism actually is. Evangelism is the proclamation of the gospel to those who have not yet believed it, with the prayerful expectation that God will use the proclamation to bring some of them to genuine faith in Christ. That definition contains everything that matters and nothing that does not. Notice what is in it. Proclamation. The gospel. Those who have not yet believed. Prayerful expectation. The work of God in the result. Each of these elements is essential and removing any of them collapses the activity into something other than evangelism even when it still calls itself by that name.

The gospel itself is what makes evangelism, evangelism. Without the gospel, the activity becomes something else, something perhaps useful but not what Scripture calls evangelism. The gospel is the announcement of who Christ is and what He has done. It includes the holiness of God, the sinfulness of humanity, the substitutionary death of Christ for sinners, His bodily resurrection on the third day, His present reign at the right hand of the Father, and the call to repent and believe in Him as the only way to be saved. Paul summarises this in 1 Corinthians 15:3 and 4. "For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures and that He was buried and that He was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures." That is the irreducible core. Christ died for sins. He was buried. He was raised. Anything that calls itself the gospel must contain these elements or it is preaching a different gospel.

This is where contemporary evangelism has gone significantly wrong. Much of what passes for sharing the gospel in modern evangelical culture is not actually the gospel at all. It is a softened therapeutic message about God's love and personal purpose and the better life that awaits anyone who chooses to follow Jesus. The cross is mentioned briefly if at all. The wrath of God against sin is omitted. The call to genuine repentance is replaced with a request to make a decision or accept Christ into the heart. The substance of what Christ actually accomplished is replaced with the benefits the hearer is being invited to receive. And the people who respond to this softened message often come away believing they have become Christians without ever having encountered the real gospel.

The real gospel is offensive before it is comforting. Paul says it is foolishness to those who are perishing and a stumbling block to many. "But we preach Christ crucified to Jews a stumbling block and to Gentiles foolishness but to those who are the called both Jews and Greeks Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God" 1 Corinthians 1:23 and 24. The message that saves is the message that offends, and softening the offence does not make the message more effective. It makes it ineffective by removing the very content that the Spirit uses to produce conviction in the heart of the hearer. Evangelism that has been edited for cultural palatability is not evangelism. It is the distribution of religious sentiment that may produce nominal converts but does not produce genuine disciples.

Now to the question of how evangelism actually works in relation to the sovereignty of God and human responsibility. This is the place where many believers either become paralysed or become arrogant, and both errors come from misunderstanding how these two realities operate together.

The sovereignty of God in evangelism means that the result of every gospel conversation is in God's hands, not ours. The person we speak to will believe only if God has chosen to open their heart. "But as many as received Him to them He gave the right to become children of God even to those who believe in His name who were born not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man but of God" John 1:12 and 13. Born of God. The new birth that produces faith is the work of God, not the result of our persuasive skill or our perfect presentation of the gospel. We cannot save anyone. We cannot convince anyone. We cannot manufacture the response we are praying to see. The result of evangelism belongs entirely to the God who alone can give life to dead souls.

This should free us from the burden of feeling responsible for outcomes we were never designed to produce. Paul says it clearly. "I planted Apollos watered but God was causing the growth. So then neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything but God who causes the growth" 1 Corinthians 3:6 and 7. The planting is ours. The watering is ours. The growth belongs to God. The evangelist who has not yet absorbed this distinction will either burn out from the impossible weight of trying to produce conversions or become proud when conversions seem to happen, attributing to themselves what only God could have accomplished. Both errors are common and both are corrected by the simple recognition that God alone gives the growth.

The human responsibility side of evangelism is equally clear. We are commanded to speak. The sovereignty of God in salvation does not eliminate our responsibility to proclaim the gospel. It is the framework within which our proclamation operates. "How then will they call on Him in whom they have not believed? How will they believe in Him whom they have not heard? And how will they hear without a preacher?" Romans 10:14. The preaching is the means God has chosen to bring His elect to faith. The fact that He has determined who will be saved does not eliminate the means by which He saves them. He saves them through the proclamation of the gospel by people like us who are commanded to speak whether or not we know what the result will be.

This produces a beautiful balance in the genuine evangelist. We speak with urgency because the message is urgent. We speak with humility because the result is not ours to produce. We speak with confidence because we know the gospel itself is the power of God for salvation, not our delivery of it. "For I am not ashamed of the gospel for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes" Romans 1:16. The power is in the message, not in the messenger. Our task is to be faithful with the message. The power that the message carries is the power of God Himself, and that power does not depend on the eloquence or skill of the one delivering it.

What does this mean practically for how a believer should evangelise? Several things. First, learn the gospel. Know it deeply enough that you can articulate it clearly. The contemporary church has produced generations of Christians who cannot explain the gospel coherently even though they have heard it preached for years. This is a failure that needs to be corrected at the level of personal study and reflection. Open your Bible. Read Romans 1 through 5. Read 1 Corinthians 15. Read Ephesians 2. Understand what the gospel actually is so you can communicate it to someone else.

Second, pray for the people in your life who are not yet believers. The prayer is not optional. The same God who saves through the gospel works through the prayers of His people to prepare the hearts that the gospel will eventually reach. Paul prayed unceasingly for his unbelieving kinsmen. Romans 10:1. We should pray with the same urgency for those we love who are still outside of Christ. Pray for their salvation by name. Pray that God would open their hearts as He opened Lydia's heart in Acts 16:14. Pray that He would give you opportunities to share the gospel with them and the words to say when those opportunities come. The praying is part of the evangelism and it precedes the speaking and accompanies it throughout.

Third, speak when the opportunity arises. Do not wait for the perfect moment. There is no perfect moment. There are only ordinary moments in which we either speak or remain silent, and the people around us are dying and going to eternity without Christ while we wait for circumstances we are not going to get. "Preach the word; be ready in season and out of season; reprove rebuke exhort with great patience and instruction" 2 Timothy 4:2. In season and out of season. When it is convenient and when it is not. The urgency of the eternal stakes overrides our preference for comfortable timing.

Fourth, speak with the actual content of the gospel rather than with vague spiritual language. Do not tell people that God has a wonderful plan for their life. Tell them they are sinners who have offended a holy God and stand under His just condemnation. Tell them Christ came and lived the life they could not live and died the death they deserved to die. Tell them He rose from the dead and now offers forgiveness and eternal life to everyone who repents and believes in Him. Tell them the kingdom is at hand and they must respond. This is the content that the Spirit uses to produce conviction. The softer messages produce softer responses that often do not last.

Fifth, do not manipulate. The contemporary church has developed an entire toolkit of manipulative techniques designed to produce conversions. Emotional music. Repeated altar calls. Pressure tactics. The decision card. The sinner's prayer recited at a moment of high emotional intensity. None of these techniques produces genuine conversion. They produce nominal converts who often fall away because they were never genuinely born again in the first place. Paul refused to use manipulative techniques. "We have renounced the things hidden because of shame not walking in craftiness or adulterating the word of God but by the manifestation of truth commending ourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God" 2 Corinthians 4:2. The manifestation of truth. That is what we are called to. The Spirit will do His work through the truth proclaimed honestly. He does not need our manipulative supplements and they often actually hinder His work by producing false conversions that confuse the person and damage the church.

Sixth, do not measure success by the immediate response. The seed planted today may not bear fruit for years. The conversation that seemed unfruitful may have been one of many conversations God is using to draw the person to Himself over a long period of time. Our task is faithfulness. The fruit is God's. "Let us not lose heart in doing good for in due time we will reap if we do not grow weary" Galatians 6:9. Due time is God's time, not ours. He knows when to bring each of His elect to faith. Our part is to keep speaking and keep praying and keep loving and keep trusting that He is at work in ways we cannot always see.

Seventh, live a life that does not contradict your message. The gospel you share is undermined by a life that shows no evidence of having been transformed by it. Peter says, "Keep your behavior excellent among the Gentiles so that in the thing in which they slander you as evildoers they may because of your good deeds as they observe them glorify God in the day of visitation" 1 Peter 2:12. The behaviour is part of the witness. The lived gospel either commends or contradicts the spoken gospel, and the people we speak to are watching the consistency between the two more carefully than we usually realise.

This brings us to one final clarification that needs to be said. The sovereignty of God in salvation does not produce passive evangelists. It produces bold ones. The believer who genuinely understands that God has elected from before the foundation of the world to save a people for Himself, that the elect will infallibly come to faith through the means God has appointed including the preaching of the gospel, and that the result of every gospel conversation is in God's hands rather than the evangelist's, will speak with the kind of fearless freedom that produces actual conversions. Paul preached in cities where preaching the gospel could cost him his life because he believed God had people in those cities who would be saved through his preaching. "Do not be afraid any longer but go on speaking and do not be silent; for I am with you and no man will attack you in order to harm you for I have many people in this city" Acts 18:9 and 10. I have many people in this city. The promise of God's elect being present in the city was what gave Paul the courage to keep preaching. The sovereignty was the fuel for the boldness, not an excuse for silence.

If you have absorbed any version of Christianity that says the doctrine of election makes evangelism unnecessary or unimportant, you have absorbed something that is not in the Bible. Every great evangelist in the history of the church has believed in the sovereignty of God in salvation. Whitefield. Edwards. Spurgeon. Carey. Brainerd. Judson. Each of them held the doctrines of grace and gave their lives to evangelism precisely because of them, not in spite of them. The God who has elected a people to save is the God who works through the gospel preached by His people to bring them to Himself. Our task is to be faithful with the means. His task is to give the growth. The combination is the only framework that produces sustained evangelism that does not burn out under pressure or collapse into manipulation or give up when results are slow.

So go and speak. Pray and speak. Love and speak. Study the gospel until you can give it clearly and then give it to anyone the Lord places in your path. Trust the sovereignty of the God who works through the means He has chosen. And remember that you are not responsible for the response. You are responsible for the proclamation. The God who saves will save His own through the faithful witness of His people, and one day we will stand among them in the presence of the One who purchased every one of them with His own blood. May we be found faithful with what He has given us to do, and may the people around us hear the actual gospel from us before they hear it too late from anyone else.

He, who has ears to hear, let him hear.

Jeremiah Knight

The Reformation Resurgence