Seeker Insensitive Evangelism
“No one seeks for God… No one does good, not even one” (Romans 3:11b, 12). It seems to me that many of us find these bible verses hard to believe. How can this possibly be true when there is evidence all around us to the contrary? My devout Muslim friend prays five times a day. My sceptical atheist friend “wishes he had my faith”. And he’s a good bloke: he works hard, loves his wife and kids, and gives to charity sometimes. My Roman Catholic friend believes in God, goes to church at Christmas and Easter, and basically tries to live by Christian values. So what are we to make of all these seekers and do-gooders we see around us?
One tempting answer might be to suggest a sort of ‘third way to live’. Very often I find, in evangelism, that having explained “Two Ways to Live” to someone, at the end, they do feel sort of stuck in the middle. They don’t identify with the rebels on the one hand, but they’re definitely not submitting to King Jesus on the other. So they want to identify as somewhere in the middle. They want a third way for people who are not hostile to God, and might even believe in him, and most importantly are basically trying to be good.
But the bible’s answer is that such a third way does not exist. And that the problem with humanity is not just that we don’t do enough good things, but that outside of Christ we don’t do anything truly good. Throughout Paul’s letter to the Romans he teaches what has come to be known as the doctrine of Total Depravity – the fact that every aspect of humanity is corrupted by sin. We are filled with all manner of wickedness and evil (1:28-32). In Adam we are all slaves to sin (5:12). There is no part of us that is free from sin’s grasp. We are hostile to God in our minds and we cannot please him (8:7-8). We sin in our thoughts, in our feelings, in our words and in our actions. Without faith, we cannot do anything but sin.
Jesus himself taught the same thing when he told a bunch of devout religious people that “everyone who practices sin is a slave to sin” (John 8:34). These people believed in God, and the God of the bible at that, even apparently believing in Jesus (v.31). But Jesus said to them, “You are of your father the devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires.” In other words, all people, no matter how religious or theistic or moral they may be, are in fact totally depraved – completely enslaved to sin, and living as children of the devil.
This does not mean that every person is always doing as much evil as they possibly could be. In God’s grace he restrains our sinful natures. He uses things like governments and the threat of punishment, peer pressure and the desire to be liked, lack of opportunity, laziness, self-righteousness, lack of ability, as well as other things, to stop us from sliding deeper and deeper into darkness and horror. The bible does not flatter us. The fact that self-interest and lack of intelligence etc. is what keeps us from murdering each other does not say something beautiful about the human spirit! The doctrine of Total Depravity reminds us that it is only by God’s restraining grace that we do not descend into anarchy and self-destruction immediately. It does not have anything to do with our innate moral backbone, or some flicker of goodness that has been preserved within us. Given the right circumstances, there is literally nothing we would draw the line at, no depravity to which we would not stoop. But for the grace of God go I… and all of us.
As difficult as this may be for us to swallow, the bible’s assessment of humanity’s self-proclaimed seekers is that they are not, in the end, sincere. They are self-deceived hypocrites. They ‘search’ for the truth as it were with T-Rex hands – never actually hoping to grasp it. In their hearts they suppress the truth about God that is plain from creation (Rom. 1:18-32). Always learning, they never arrive at a knowledge of the truth because they never want to arrive (2 Tim. 3:7). Back in John 8, Jesus says, “Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word.” (v.43). People hear what they want to hear and accumulate teachers to suit their own desires (2 Tim. 4:3). As a friend of mine once remarked, “In the music industry, it’s cool to be searching for God, but it’s not cool to have found him.” This is true in every industry. No one seeks for God, but lots of people like to think that they are and want to look like they are.
Take, for instance, the Athenians Paul addresses in Acts 17. As Luke sets the scene, he tells us that the city was full of idols (v.16) and that the “the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there would spend their time in nothing except telling or hearing something new.” (v.21). In other words, they were very religious (v.22), and they were ‘always learning’. But there is a big difference between entertaining new ideas and actually engaging with them. Paul sees this difference clearly. He was not impressed by their religiosity or complimentary about their great learning. Just the opposite, he was deeply troubled by their idolatry (v.16) and proceeded to tell them that the one god they were ignorant of was the one God they should actually be worshipping (v.23)!
Paul says, the God who created everything, determined the exact times and places each person should live in order that people might seek him and find him (v.27a). This verse does not imply that anyone does seek God. Rather, Paul is establishing that people are culpable for their ignorance of God because God has made it so easy for us to find him. If we were to seek him, we would find him immediately! Because “He is actually not far from each one of us.” (v.27b). In other words, our ignorance has come about not for lack of evidence, or the inaccessibility of the truth, but because we keep ignoring the evidence so that we can ignore the truth.
This has many implications for our Christian lives and for evangelism. First, it completely undercuts any cause for pride or boasting. None of us were ‘seekers’ or more spiritually open or sensitive or upright than our neighbours before God called us. We were not saved by our intelligence, or our ability to sift through the apologetic evidence. But for God’s gracious intervention we would still be running headlong away from him.
Secondly, in our evangelism, we must be black and white. There are only two ways to live. Godcommandsall people everywhere to do a complete 180 (Acts 17:30, 1 Thess. 1:9). There is no way to God that doesn’t involve humbly admitting your total depravity. The winsome evangelist who insists on stroking egos by crediting people as ‘reasonable seekers’ is only obscuring the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. The recent trend in some quarters to try and make the gospel sound reasonable to hostile minds is doomed to fail. We do not want our message to sound plausible to people who are perishing. If it does, then we must not be preaching the cross, because Paul says that the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing (1 Cor. 1:18). Instead, in total reliance upon the power of God, we must tell our friends, not just to add some Christian wisdom, or ‘spirituality’ to an otherwise good life but to turn away from their wickedness completely. If we are doing evangelism properly, it will sound attractive to those who are being saved, but to those who are committed to a worldly worldview it will sound ridiculous and offensive (2 Cor. 2:16). In the end, we have to decide if what we really want is to entertain/pacify the goats, or call the sheep (John 10:27)!