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How to Lead
People to Christ: Part 1
The Content of
Our Message*
By Zane C. Hodges
The
title of my two-part article may lead you to expect a discussion on how to do
personal evangelism. Hopefully you will get some ideas about personal work from
these articles, but this is not my major objective. Instead I want to discuss
how grace theology should affect the way we present the gospel, whether to
individuals or to groups.
Nevertheless,
before I address my subject, let me say this. I do genuinely enjoy talking to
people about their eternal salvation. I have done so with many, many
individuals over the years.
A
close friend works with me in my office. When I first met him, he did not
understand the way of salvation. But over a period of years, after many
conversations on the subject, he became a believer. He understands that
salvation is absolutely free even though most of the people he knows do not.
The salvation of this friend is one of the most highly valued results of my
years of service to Christ. It is an immense joy to know that our friendship
will continue eternally in the
What
I am saying is this. I am a teacher by spiritual gift. But I enjoy doing the work
of an evangelist as much, or more, than I enjoy teaching. So as I talk today
about putting good theology into our soul-winning, I am talking about a most
important issue. And I also try hard to practice what I am preaching to you
today!
The
question I am raising is a simple one: Have we allowed solid grace theology to
properly affect the way we proclaim and share the gospel of our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ?
I
propose to address this question under two headings: (1) The content of our
message and (2) Our invitation to respond to it. I will consider the first of
these topics in this article, and the second, in Part 2.
I. The
Deserted Island Scenario
Let
me begin with a strange scenario. Try to imagine an unsaved person marooned on
a tiny, uninhabited island in the middle of the
On
that paper are the words of John 6:43-47. But the only readable portions are:
“Jesus therefore answered and said to them” (v 43) and “Most assuredly, I say
to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life” (v 47).
Now suppose
that our unsaved man somehow becomes convinced that this person called Jesus
can guarantee his eternal future, since He promises everlasting life. In other
words, he believes Jesus’ words in John 6:47. Is he saved?
I
suspect that there are some grace people who would say that this man is not
saved because he doesn’t know enough. For example, he doesn’t know that Jesus
died for his sins on the cross and rose again the third day. Needless to say,
there is a lot more he doesn’t know either, such as the doctrine of the
Trinity, the eternal Sonship of Jesus or the doctrine of the virgin birth.
But
why is he not saved if he believes
the promise of Jesus’ words? It is
precisely the ability of Jesus to guarantee eternal life that makes Him the
Christ in the Johannine sense of that term. Our Lord’s exchange with Martha in
John 11:25-27 demonstrates this clearly.
You
remember it, don’t you? “Jesus said to her, ‘I am the resurrection and the
life. He who believes in Me, though he
may die, he shall live. And whoever lives and believes in Me shall never die.
Do you believe this?’” (John 11:25-26). Her reply is a declaration that she
believes Him to be the Christ. Martha said, “Yes, Lord, I believe that You are
the Christ, the Son of God, who is to come into the world” (11:27).
Notice
here that to believe that Jesus is the Christ means to believe that He
guarantees resurrection and eternal life to every believer. But now let us look
at John 4. In that famous passage we have the Samaritans saying to the woman
who had encountered Jesus, “Now we believe, not because of what you said, for
we ourselves have heard Him and we know that this is indeed the Christ, the
Savior of the world” (John 4:42).
Observe
that the common denominator to both passages is the term “Christ.” On Martha’s
lips He is “the Christ, the Son of God,” and on the lips of the Samaritans He
is “the Christ, the Savior of the world.” This is not an accidental or
insignificant difference.
In
Jewish prophecy and theology the promised Christ was also the Son of God—that
is, He was to be a divine person. Recall the words of Isaiah: “For unto us a
Child is born, unto us a Son is given…and His name shall be called Wonderful,
Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (9:6-7). But in
Samaritan theology, the Messiah was thought of as a prophet and the woman at
the well is led to faith through our Lord’s prophetic ability to know her life.
Her words, “Sir, I perceive that you are a prophet” (4:19) are a first step in
the direction of recognizing Him as the Christ. There is no evidence that she
or the other Samaritans understood the deity of our Lord.
But
they did believe that he was the
Christ. And John tells us in his first epistle that “whoever believes that
Jesus is the Christ is born of God” (5:1)! A full theology of His person is not
necessary to salvation. If we believe that Jesus is the One who guarantees our
eternal destiny, we have believed all we absolutely have to believe in order to
be saved.
Years
ago, as a student at Dallas Theological Seminary, I washed dishes in the dining
hall to pay for my meals. Often after I had finished this chore I hung around
and talked theology with another student who swept up the kitchen every night.
One night this student made a statement to me that I have never forgotten. He
said something like this, “I know that I trusted Christ for salvation before I
realized that Jesus was the Son of God.” I was surprised because I had never
heard anyone say this before.
But
I did not quarrel with that statement then, nor would I quarrel with it now. It
is the name of Jesus that brings salvation whenever anyone believes in that
name as his or her sure hope of eternal well-being. We are not saved by
believing a series of theological propositions, however true and important they
may be. We are saved by believing in Jesus.
That’s
why the man on the deserted island can get saved with only the barest minimum
of information. When he believes John 6:47 he is believing in Jesus as the
Christ.
II. What
about the Cross?
But
what about the cross of Christ? Is it not essential for a man to know about
that in order to be saved?
This
leads to a question about the eleven apostles who believed in Jesus before He
died. Did they understand the cross or the significance of His death? Did they
understand the necessity of His resurrection? Of course they did not, as John
20:9 makes perfectly clear.
You
recall that text. In recounting how the unnamed disciple came to believe that
Jesus had risen, it is said of Peter and of himself that “as yet they did not
know the Scripture that He must rise again from the dead.” The eleven disciples
had believed in Jesus long before they understood that He must die for their
sins and rise again. As Peter says so emphatically in John 6:68-69, “Lord to
whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. Also we have come to
believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God.”
The
disciples of Jesus were saved without knowledge of the death and resurrection
of their Master. However, some people today would say, “But it’s different now
that the cross is behind us. Now we have to believe in that as well.” Do we?
Where does this idea come from? Certainly not from the Gospel of John.
Let
us think a moment. The events described in John’s Gospel occurred before the
cross. But the entire book was written afterward. In my view, it was written
before 70 AD, but if we prefer a later date in the 80s, my point will be even
more forceful. At the time of writing, the cross was years ago, and if belief
in the work of the cross was by then necessary for salvation, John definitely
gives us the wrong impression by stressing the way the cross dumbfounded even
His most intimate disciples.
Let
me put it to you this way. The Gospel of John is the only book in our New
Testament canon that explicitly declares its purpose to be evangelistic. Of course,
I am thinking of the famous theme statement found in John 20:30-31, where we
read: “And truly Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples,
which are not written in this book; but these are written that you may believe
that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life
in His name.”
This
statement does not affirm the necessity of believing in our Lord’s
substitutionary atonement. If by the time of the writing of John’s Gospel, it
was actually necessary to believe this, then it would have been not only
simple, but essential, to say so.
Inasmuch as
the key figures in John’s narrative did
believe in Jesus before they understood His atoning death and resurrection, it
would have been even more essential for John to state that the content of faith
had changed. But of course he does not do this. The simple fact is that the
whole Fourth Gospel is designed to show that its readers can get saved in the
same way as the people who got saved in John’s narrative. To say anything other
than this is to accept a fallacy. It is to mistakenly suppose that the Fourth
Gospel presents the terms of salvation incompletely and inadequately. I
sincerely hope no grace person would want to be stuck with a position like
that.
Let me repeat.
Neither explicitly nor implicitly does the Gospel of John teach that a person
must understand the cross to be saved. It just does not teach this. If we say
that it does, we are reading something into the text and not reading something
out of it!
What
is my point? That we should not preach the cross of Christ to men? Not at all.
I will make it emphatically clear a little later on that I think we should.
Instead, I am arguing that we need to focus on the core issue in bringing men
and women to faith and eternal life. What is that core issue?
Very
simply it is this: We want people to believe that Jesus guarantees their
eternal destiny. Of course, we would like them to believe a lot more than this,
but this at least must be believed. Our failure to clearly define our goal in
evangelism can have a negative or impeding effect on our efforts to lead people
to simple faith in Christ.
III. Adding
to the Gospel
Most
of us deplore the efforts made by Lordship people to add provisos to the
message of faith in Christ. According to them, true faith has not occurred if
it is not accompanied by surrender or by a commitment to live for God. We
rightly reject such ideas.
But
in our own circles, there is a tendency to add theological information to our
message of faith. Some people even regard belief in the virgin birth as
essential to salvation, and in the absence of such belief they would not admit
that a person is saved. They do this despite the fact that the Gospel of John
makes no effort to present this doctrine. In fact, in John 1:45, Philip
announces to Nathaniel that he has found the Messiah and he refers to Him as
“Jesus of Nazareth, the son of Joseph.” John never bothers to set the record
straight, since in any case Jesus was legally Joseph’s son. But no doubt Philip
thought of Jesus as the naturally born son of Joseph and Mary.
I
have also just finished pointing out that the disciples who did believe in
Jesus did not understand the significance or necessity of His death and
resurrection, according to John 20:9. And this was true despite the fact that
John the Baptist announced Him as “the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of
the world” (1:29). If we require an understanding of these truths before faith
in Christ can be valid, we are obviously requiring more than the Gospel of John
does.
Let
me say this: All forms of the gospel that require greater content to faith in
Christ than the Gospel of John requires, are flawed. Evangelism based on such
premises will also be flawed, because we will be tempted to test professions of
faith in terms of the doctrines we think must be believed. Instead we should be
focusing on whether an individual believes that Jesus has given him eternal
life.
Evangelism,
therefore, is intended to bring men and women to the place where they believe
that Jesus guarantees their eternal destiny. If a person does this and we
insist on more than that, we will be guilty of seeking to invalidate the simple
exercise of faith that really does bring salvation.
Even
in the grace movement, we are sorely tempted to make the gospel more
complicated than God makes it. We can hardly bring ourselves to believe that a
man who is largely ignorant of evangelical theology, yet genuinely trusts
Christ for his eternal well-being, is truly saved. We have every reason to be
embarrassed by this tendency on our part.
According
to the apostle Paul, God is “the justifier of the one who has faith in Jesus”
(Rom 3:26). Moreover it will be “at the name of Jesus” that “every knee shall
bow and every tongue shall confess” (Phil 2:10). The name of Jesus therefore is
a mighty and exalted name, compared to which all other names in our age or in
any other age are inferior and weak. No one has ever trusted in that name for
his or her eternal well-being who has not been saved by doing so. And this is
true no matter how little they might have known about the One whom that name
represents.
I
think we need a renewed emphasis on the power of Jesus’ name. As Peter declares
in Acts 4:12, “Nor is there salvation in any other, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by
which we must be saved.” If there is one salient fact about the proclamation of
the gospel in this present age, it is that God saves all those, but only those,
who believe in this name for eternal salvation.
Another
way of saying this is that the name of Jesus is the one and only way to God.
“No one comes to the Father, except through” Him (John 14:6). Naturally this
eliminates the idea that a pagan person who has never heard the name of Jesus
can be saved by believing in something like the light of creation. Therefore,
that is why we must always have missionaries and witnesses to the saving power
of Jesus’ name. Without the name of Jesus there is no salvation for anyone
anywhere in our world.
But
the flip side of the coin is this: Everyone who believes in that name for
eternal salvation is saved, regardless of the blank spots or the flaws in their
theology in other respects. Another way of saying the same thing is this: No
one has ever trusted that name and been disappointed.
In
other words, God does not say to people, “You trusted my Son’s name, but you
didn’t believe in His virgin birth, or His substitutionary atonement, or His
bodily resurrection, so your faith is not valid.” We say that, but God’s Word does not.
Suppose
I am in some deep financial trouble and a stranger named Sam, let us say, tells
me he will get me out of my trouble if I will just trust him to do it. Perhaps
Sam strikes me as a reliable and honest type person and I am convinced that he
can and will do what he says. So I leave the matter in his hands and sure
enough, he comes through and saves me from my financial problem with a generous
infusion of cash. Did I believe in him? Sure.
But
suppose after trusting him, I find out that he is a corporate CEO and a
multi-millionaire. Would he later come back to me and say, well you didn’t know
enough about me when you trusted me, so I’m afraid I can’t help you? Our deal
is cancelled.
I
hope you think this illustration would be an absurd way for this CEO to act. If
he invites my faith and I give it to him, why should he deny the reality of
that faith on the basis of my ignorance about his vast resources? On the other hand, is it not true that
knowing these things up front would make it a whole lot easier to trust him to
help me in the first place? I will say more about this in a moment.
Suffice
it to say, however, that Jesus never fails anyone who trusts Him for
everlasting salvation. No one on earth will ever possess more than a
rudimentary understanding of our Savior’s person and work. But if I know I can
believe on Him for salvation, and I do, He is too great to fail me. It is this
conviction that ought to arm us for the work of sharing the gospel with people.
In the
final analysis, therefore, salvation is the result of believing in Jesus to
provide it. Salvation is not the result of assenting to a detailed creed.
Salvation does not even require an understanding of how it was provided for or
made possible. All it requires is that the sinner understand the sufficiency of
the name of Jesus to guarantee the eternal well-being of every believer. Thank
God, salvation is so wonderfully simple!
IV.
Preaching the Cross
In
the light of what we have just said, should we preach the cross of Christ? The
answer to that is emphatically yes. And the most obvious reason for doing so is
that this is what Paul and the other Apostles did.
According
to Paul’s own statement, when he came to Corinth to preach, he was “determined
not to know anything among [them] except Jesus Christ and Him crucified” (1 Cor
2:2). Later in the epistle, Paul describes his gospel as one that declared
“that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was
buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures”
(15:3).
I
need hardly tell you, do I, that the Greek word for “gospel” (euangelion) as well as the word for “preach the gospel” (euangelizo„) are both words found frequently in Paul. Peter also
uses these words a total of 4 times in his first epistle. Luke uses the verb
many times in Luke and Acts, the noun twice in Acts. Matthew and Mark have both
words.
Are
you ready for this? John never uses either word in his gospel. Why? Because, as
I have already suggested, John makes the Person of Jesus, not a set of
doctrines, the object of the faith that brings eternal life. Fundamentally he
is trying to get people to believe in Jesus for their eternal salvation.
But
this is precisely where preaching the cross becomes so important. Why should
men trust Christ for eternal life? The gospel gives us the wonderful answer.
They should do so because Jesus has bought their salvation at the cost of His
own precious blood. And God has placed His seal on the work of the cross by
raising Jesus from the dead. As Paul states: He “was delivered up because of
our offenses, and was raised because of our justification” (Rom 4:25).
The
preaching of the cross greatly facilitates the process of bringing men to faith
in God’s Son.
V. Dealing
with Souls
This
brings us to the bedrock issue of leading people to Christ. After all, that’s
the title of this article and I mean by it just what the title says. We need to
lead men to Christ! Winning souls is
a matter of leading people to a Person to whom they may safely entrust their
eternal destiny. We are not leading them to a message, but to Jesus Christ as the object of their faith.
But
more often than not, we have difficulty leading them to Christ, unless we lead them through
the full gospel message. The gospel message is normally the avenue through
which men and women come to understand why they can trust completely in the
Savior. To be sure, trust in Christ can
occur without a knowledge of the cross, but more often than not it doesn’t.
The message of the cross clarifies God’s way of salvation.
On
a very practical level, when I am dealing with an unsaved person, I find that
if I simply tell him he only needs to believe in Christ, this usually doesn’t
make sense to him. Why should it be so easy? Why are not works required? To the
unregenerate American mind, it doesn’t sound reasonable.
So
I find it not only useful, but indeed essential, to explain that the Lord Jesus
Christ bought our way to heaven by paying for all our sins. In recent years I
have liked to emphasize that He paid for all the sins we would ever commit from
the day of our birth to the day of our death. This serves to stress the
completeness of the payment He made. It is usually only in the light of so
perfect a payment that people can come to see the reasonableness of a salvation
that is absolutely free.
I
say to people, “Jesus paid it all” and there is nothing left for you to do or
to pay. All you have to do is believe in Him for the free gift of everlasting
life.
One
of my favorite illustrations goes like this: If a friend bought you a Rolls
Royce and paid for it in full and offered it to you as a free gift, wouldn’t he
be hurt, or even insulted, if you insisted on paying for it yourself? In the
same way, if we try to do or pay something to go to heaven, even though Jesus
paid it all, aren’t we insulting His great sacrifice and treating it as if it
were not enough?
Most
unsaved people can understand that point, even if they don’t believe its true.
The Savior’s work on the cross thus becomes a powerful argument that He should
be trusted for eternal life.
And
apart from the cross, for most modern Americans, the offer of salvation by
faith alone in Christ alone, just doesn’t compute. Even after hearing it, it
still may not compute. But by offering the truth of the gospel to people, we
give the Holy Spirit something to work with in their hearts. And in the final
analysis, it is only the Spirit of God who can sweep away the blindness of the
human heart so that the glorious light of the gospel of Christ may shine into
unsaved hearts.
Nevertheless,
let it never be forgotten: If anyone has faith in Jesus as the One who secures
his or her eternal destiny, that person is born of God. Jesus has never yet
failed anyone who trusted in His name for eternal salvation. And He never will.
*Part 2 of this article will appear
in the Spring 2001 issue of the