Evangelistic preaching is the proclamation of the gospel in the power of the Holy Spirit for the purpose of making disciples.
Certainly all Christian preaching must expect a response in both faith and action, whether the sermon is a declaration of the facts of personal redemption or the teaching of some great moral truth. But in a more specialized sense, evangelistic preaching refers to the immediate message of salvation, a message that carries with it the imperative that all people must repent and believe the Gospel.
Such preaching is not necessarily a special type of sermon or homily method; rather, it is a preaching that is distinguished by the call to commitment to the Son of God who loved us and gave himself for us.1
Preparing and delivering such a message is a holy task, and requires all the resources of mind and spirit. that God has given. Although the provisions for accomplishing the work are all of grace, this does not remove the responsibility of the preacher to observe the basic rules of effective sermon construction. With this in mind, the following nine principles strike me as the most crucial.
1. Pray to the end
The place to begin sermon preparation is on your knees. Here, in the renewal of our faith and our call, totally submitted to the Lordship of Christ, we are in a position to receive strength and wisdom for the message. It may be that before we can receive instructions on what to say to others, we have to listen to what God has to say about correcting some deficiencies in our own lives and confessing sin. Only when our vessel is clean are we fit for the Master’s use (2 Timothy 2:21).
With a heart in tune with God’s will, we can then project our thoughts to the people we will be speaking to, trying to be sensitive to their needs. A message that hits the mark must meet people where they are, both in their interests and attitudes toward the subject of the sermon, as well as in their feelings toward the preacher.
By knowing the nature of the audience, understanding where they are coming from, the evangelist can make the appeal more direct and meaningful in their situation.
As the burden of the message and its structure takes shape, it is prayed over and presented to God as an offering of devotion. There is a sense in which God is preached before anyone else. Only after the sermon has his approval can the evangelist be confident of proclaiming it to the people.
The spirit of prayer continues through the giving. It is this communication with heaven that makes the sermon “mighty in God to overthrow strongholds” (2 Corinthians 10:4). As Sidlow Baxter has said, “Men may disdain our appeals, reject our message, oppose our arguments, dispose of our persons — but they are powerless against our prayers.”2
Here is evangelism at its most basic. To paraphrase the words of Dr. Lewis Sperry Chafer, “winning souls is more a work of supplication for them than a service of supplication for them.”3
2. Lift up Jesus
The evangelistic message itself, whatever its style, will focus on Jesus Christ (I Corinthians 1:23; 2 Corinthians 4:5; Acts 5:42), “the fullness of the Godhead bodily& #8221; (Colossians 2:9).
He is the Gospel — “the Good News” incarnate, “the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). In Him all redemptive truth begins and ends. “There is no other Name under heaven given among men, by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12b). Unless people see it, no matter what else impresses them, they will not be drawn to God.
Apocalypse climaxes on the blood-red hill of Calvary. There, nearly two thousand years ago, Jesus bore our sins in his own body on the cross, suffering in our place, “the Just for the unjust, to bring us to God” (1 Peter 2:18). Although any interpretation of his sacrifice falls short of its full meaning, it is clear that Christ, by offering himself once for all, made a perfect and complete atonement for the sins of the world.
Here is the wonder of the Gospel. “God shows his love for us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Jesus paid it all. Nothing deserved! Nothing gained! In our utter helplessness, bankrupt of all natural goodness, He did for us what we could never do for ourselves.
His bodily resurrection and ascension to heaven forcefully draw attention to the cross. When someone who has the power to rise from the grave dies, we must honestly ask ourselves why he died in the first place. To this penetrating question, the evangelist declares: He died for you, and he rose again for your salvation (Romans 4: 24-25).
The whole message, then, revolves around what is done with Jesus (Acts 17: 31). Deeply aware of this, the evangelist must try to focus on the person and work of the Savior. It matters little what people think of the preacher; it all depends on what you believe about Christ.
That is why the measure of a sermon’s power is the degree to which it exalts the Lord and makes the audience aware of his claims on their lives. With this in mind, listening to people’s comments after a preaching service is very interesting. If they talk more about the preacher than about Jesus, the sermon may have missed the mark.
3. Use the Scriptures
The preaching that leads people to the Savior responds to the spirit and letter of the God-inspired scriptures. The written word in the Book reveals Christ, the Living Word (John 20:21). It is the means by which the mind is enlightened (2 Timothy 3:16), faith is kindled (Romans 10:16) and the heart is recreated according to God’s purpose (1 Peter 1:23; 2 Peter 1: 4). ; John 17:17). For this reason, the redemptive power of any sermon is directly related to how one uses the unchanging, inerrant, transforming Word of God.
This Book is the “Sword of the Spirit” in the hand of the preacher (Ephesians 6:17). It gives authority to the message. Without their sure testimony, the sermon would be little more than a statement of human experience.
Of course, the preacher must back up the message with a clear personal testimony; but the ultimate authority for what is preached must be the written Word. Experience can only be trusted when it agrees with the inspired Scriptures.
Thus, the evangelist is commissioned simply to “preach the Word” (2 Timothy 4:2). As ambassador of the King of heaven, he is not called to validate the message, nor to speculate or discuss conflicting opinions on the subject. God has spoken, and the message imbued with this conviction is an uncompromising declaration: “Thus saith the Lord!”
Such preaching needs no defense or explanation. The Spirit of God who gave the Word will bear witness to its truthfulness (1 John 5:6; 2 Peter 1:21), and will not allow it to return to Him empty (Isaiah 55:11).
This is exemplified in the preaching of Billy Graham. However, there was a time in his early ministry when this confidence was lacking, and he had to duel with doubts about the integrity of the Bible. The fight came to a head one night in 1949, when he was alone in the mountains of California, he knelt before the open Bible and said:
Here and now, by faith, I accept the Bible as Your Word. I take it all. I take it without reservation. Where there are things I cannot understand, I will reserve judgment until I receive more light. If this pleases you, give me authority as I proclaim your Word, and by that authority convict me of sin and convert sinners to the Savior.”4
Within weeks the Los Angeles Crusade began. There his preaching began to manifest a new power, as he stopped trying to prove Scripture and simply declared the truth. Over and over, he heard himself say, “The Bible says….”
To use his words: “I felt as if I was simply a voice through which the Holy Spirit was speaking.”5
It was a new discovery for the young evangelist. He discovered that people were not especially interested in his ideas, nor were they attracted to moving oratory. They were hungry to “hear what God had to say through his Holy Word.”6
This is a lesson that every preacher must learn. And until it is reflected in our sermons, there is not much that we say to generate faith in the hearts of the listeners.
4. Dig up sin
Under the purifying light of the Word of God, the evangelist’s message makes people face themselves before the cross. He removes the cloak of self-righteousness (John 15:22), showing the deception of sin.
The claim to live independently of God is seen for what it is — the creature actually despising the will of the Creator, worshiping his own works as a false god (Romans 1:25). The ultimate expression of it comes in the defiant rejection of Jesus Christ, the promised Messiah. “He came to his own, and his own received him not” (John 1:11).
Knowing, then, the terror of the Lord, the evangelist wounds the heart of sin. Urging at one moment the greatness of the rebel’s guilt and at another the imminence of his fate, he seeks to awaken human conscience. The horror of sin becomes vivid. Although all the various types of sin cannot be covered in one sermon, at least the basic theme of unbelief and disobedience can be revealed, perhaps with some specific applications to the local situation.
There should never be any confusion about whom the evangelist is addressing. He is not the sin in theory, but the sinner in practice that he is talking about.
In fact, it might well seem to the sinner that the preacher has been following him all week, noting every wrong action and thought. While, of course, considerations of propriety and good sense must be taken into account, a sermon must get under a person’s skin and cause him to writhe under conviction of sin.
A message that does not deal with this cause of all human suffering, individually and collectively, is irrelevant to human need. Although the tragedy of the rebellion and its result may be bad news, still the Gospel shines, because God judges to save. One thing is for sure: if people don’t recognize their problem, they won’t want the remedy.
5. Stay to the Point
The evangelistic sermon is based on a course of convincing reason. Despite the fashion for irrational thinking among some existentialist ministers, consistency remains a mark of truth, and a Gospel sermon should reflect this character.
For this to happen, the objective of the message must be perfectly clear. The preacher must ask himself: what do I want to convey? Then try to visualize the expected response.
Unless the evangelist knows what he is addressing, it is almost certain that no one else will…
