The connection between the harvest principles and dirty/messy work of evangelism
The essential harvest principles discussed by McRaney [1] and Wheeler and Earley [2] in this week’s assignments are as follows:
- You plow through prayer
- You fertilize the ground through service.
- You plant the seed of the gospel by sharing Jesus.
- God gives the increase.
- We grow as we walk with lost people.
- Harvest happens when people surrender to God as the Holy Spirit guides them.
- Multiplication happens as the process is repeated.
As McRaney says, “planting, watering, weeding, and then waiting for the harvest. Our role in working toward the harvest involves all these facets.”
How do the harvest principles connect with the idea of getting our hands dirty and sweaty like tending to yard work?
Both the yard work and the farming metaphor used by Paul in the New Testament are about growing things. As Jesus taught us in the parable of the sower (Matthew 13), the gospel, like the grass of the field or the grains and crops of the farm, can be viewed as coming in seed form. The evangelist scatters the seed of the gospel. A diligent evangelist soon discovers that he/she is not alone in planting seeds of the gospel. Sometimes, he/she stumbles on a person whose heart and mind already has the seed of the gospel planted. If we consider actually being born again as the harvest, then this seed is not quite there yet but in the mind of this lost person, the seed may have begun to germinate and is trying to push its way through a dry an arid soil. The appropriate response will be to water the seed or somehow give it new strength. It could be by doing things like service that make the idea of a good God who cares even more real in the life of the unbeliever. It could also be by explaining the gospel from a different angle and refreshing the mind of the unbeliever.
Spiritual warfare and the dirty work of evangelism
As indicated by the material we read this week on spiritual warfare, it is to be expected that the process of leading someone to Christ should be messy. Without evangelizing, the Christian journey is already a journey through a battlefield. We are targets because Satan wants to hurt God, our Father, but cannot do so directly. When we become engaged in advancing our Father’s cause and try to take people out of Satan’s camp, the fury of his ambition is turned against us and often against those who want to leave his camp.
Satan has created an environment where even talking about faith is considered taboo in many circles especially in schools and workplaces where people spend most of their lives. To add to that, Satan and his demons get involved and work to prevent someone from being led to Christ. In Matthew 23:18-22, we see that Satan does several things to prevent people from getting the gospel. First, “he comes and snatches what was sown in the heart” of some people. Second, the devil makes the heart of some people like rocky ground so the word cannot prosper there. He also sends trouble and persecution so that if any word wants to take root it could not. Third, in other hearts, he creates thorns that choke the seed. He makes people so worried about many things—the lust of the flesh, lust of the eye, and pride of life—that the word of God is choked to death by those concerns.
In addition to all that, he frustrates the understanding of those who are trying to receive the gospel and get saved. That is why prayer is so crucial in evangelism. As S.D. Gordon and many other saints have said, “Prayer strikes the winning blow; service is simply picking up the pieces.” [3] That is true of evangelism. Without prayer, the sheer force of the devil’s opposition, the number of strongholds, the deception, and the fear that he has besieged the minds and hearts of unbelievers with would be insurmountable by any human effort and persuasion. We do not stand a chance without prayer.
My own conversion and the dirty work of evangelism
My conversion was slow. I grew up in a family that went to church on Easter and Christmas but then also offered animal sacrifices and went to mediums and witch doctors for protection. I gave myself to Christ after attending a Pentecostal church in Houston for a few months. An evangelist preached and I went to the altar and gave my life to Christ. Obviously, I still went through the stages described by the harvest principles.
If a car steps into a pothole and you are standing nearby with your white shirt, it messes you up and you cannot forget that experience. But if the car drove there and there was no one nearby and it still stepped into that pothole, does it still make a mess? Yes, it splashes all the same but there is no one there to mess up. I think because my process was very slow and took years and no one was directly engaging me, it was not so messy as far as someone being there to bear the mess.
What I am sure of is that Satan did not like it. When I gave my life to Christ, my mother cried for weeks and was very dejected because she thought I would abandon her. Since then, there has been spiritual warfare and conflicts within my family and it has been made clear that if I was like everyone else, there would not be much trouble. That diminishes my gospel influence in my own hometown because I am not accepted there as a prophet. But I am believing that through prayer, God will change that.
The Role of the Holy Spirit in evangelism
God, first through Christ and now through the Holy Spirit, is the author and finisher of our faith. It is the work of the Holy Spirit that convicts a person of sin, draws him/her to Christ, illuminates the word that is spoken, and regenerates the heart of the sinner giving them the new birth. The Holy Spirit then seals the believer for the day of redemption, gives gifts to the believer, serves to confirm to the believer that he/she is a child of God, and lives within the believer. The Holy Spirit also helps the proclaimer of the gospel. He leads and enables the proclaimer, empowers him/her, gives boldness, and helps him/her pray with prayers that words cannot even express. Without the Holy Spirit, salvation could not happen. McRaney is right when he says, “We are not alone in evangelism. Salvation began as a desire in the heart of God and resulted in God’s taking the initiative on that desire. He acted on behalf of His people in the Old Testament, through the life of Christ as seen in the New Testament, and through the Holy Spirit when Christ left the earth.”
The Holy Spirit helps both the proclaimer and the hearer of the gospel before and after the proclamation and the listening.
McRaney chapter 2 clarifies several things about our role in evangelism which will make it easier for us to pray and walk alongside unbelievers as the Holy Spirit works to bring them to Christ. The harvest principles help clarify our role. Defining success as, for example, as “simply sharing Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit and leaving the results to God” makes it easy for us to focus on assisting people with their misconceptions/misperceptions without trying to manipulate them or sell anything to them. Engel’s scale (by James Engel) depicts conversion as a process. This also helps us know that it is not a one-time event and we do not have to close the deal in one encounter. We can relax and focus on helping them clear up any misconceptions. The content on single encounter vs. multiple encounter evangelism, the six different styles of evangelism described by Bill Hybels and Mark Mittelberg in Becoming a Contagious Christian, and what our role in evangelism is (and what it is not) also helps to that purpose as well as. The practical experience I am getting in this course as I share Christ with people is also helping me practice how to address people’s misconceptions or misperceptions of the gospel.
Bibliography
[1] Will McRaney, Jr. The Art of Personal Evangelism. Nashville: B&H Academic, 2003. Lifeway. Chapter 1 & 2.
[2] Earley, David and David Wheeler. Everyday Series: Evangelism. Nashville: B&H Publishing Group, 2016. Chapter 11.
[3] https://wisechristians.com/prayerquotes/