Andrew Fuller closes his famous work, written in response to the hyper-calvinism of his day, The Gospel Worthy of All Acceptation, with some pages of what he calls ‘Concluding Reflections’, the last of which is: ‘a judgment of our duty, as ministers of the word, in dealing with the unconverted’. Fuller is very clear about what the preacher is to say to the unbeliever. As the gospel is preached, the sinner is to be called to immediate repentance. It is the duty of the gospel preacher to require those who hear him to turn from their sins and trust savingly in Jesus Christ, and to do so without delay and without waiting for the fulfilment of any conditions or the reception of any experience or further revelation or instruction.
Fuller’s reflections speak to us today, in our evangelistic preaching. I want to list seven principles of evangelism which can be gleaned from Fuller’s arguments in his treatise. I will mention the first six fairly briefly, with just a few comments as to how some of them apply to us particularly, in my view. I will spend just a little longer on the final point, which I believe to be of especial importance for our evangelism today.
1. Be clear that there is a duty to repent and trust in Christ, not simply an opportunity. I fear that, as evangelicals, we may have fallen into the bad habit of simply leaving our hearers with a straight, neutral choice, between following Christ and continuing as they are, as if we were simply offering them a better way of life or a more spiritual lifestyle, if that is what they want – but if not, then that’s fine too. Fuller causes us to see that the offer of the gospel is not a neutral choice, with an option either way, but a divine command to all – ‘God now commands all men everywhere to repent’ (Acts 17:30). We need perhaps to ask ourselves whether our evangelistic preaching lacks the note of command that we see in the preaching in the New Testament.
2. The gospel call comes to all without discrimination: we have no need to try to work out who might be elect, or in whom the Spirit of God may be at work. The call of the gospel comes to all, regardless of race, language, colour, etc. I think we know this well and are conscious of the need sometimes to spell this out – though I do wonder whether we have the same strength of conviction when it comes to questions of social or economic class.
3. We are to call on sinners to trust in Christ; we point them to Christ as the saviour of sinners; we do not tell them to believe that Christ died for them in particular, or to believe that their sins are forgiven, but to believe on Christ so that their sins might be forgiven. In my experience, it is a common mistake by believers and unbelievers to think that conversion involves a belief that Christ died for me in particular. Fuller argues cogently that this is not the case – Christ died for sinners, says the Scripture, and that is what we are to believe – I am a sinner, and so I come to the saviour of sinners for the salvation that he freely offers to all sinners and I throw myself upon him.
4. Every sinner has a warrant to come to Christ repenting of their sin, that warrant being Christ himself and the gospel call. Unbelievers are to look outward to Christ, the saviour from sin, not inward to themselves. We point them to Christ and to his work of saving sinners.
5. We are to exhort, urge, persuade and plead, not simply to state and explain, following the examples that we see in the Scriptures (Peter: ‘And with many other words he testified and exhorted them’, Acts 2:40). I think we need to take this to heart and consider how much exhortation, pleading and urging we do in our evangelism.
6. We are to call sinners to true, saving repentance and faith, not merely to a reformation of particular sins or conformity with outward morality. I think we are probably well aware of this and generally avoid this error.
7. We are to call sinners to an immediate repentance (and faith). The command to repent and believe, argued Fuller, is unconditional and unequivocal. It is therefore to be obeyed immediately and failure to do so merely compounds sin in the hearer. Thus the preacher must call his hearers to immediate repentance. As Fuller puts it, using capital letters for emphasis: ‘it is the duty of ministers not only to exhort their carnal auditors to believe in Jesus Christ for the salvation of their souls; but it is at our peril to exhort them to any thing short of it, or which does not involve or imply it’. He fears that ministers ‘have sunk into such a compromising way of dealing with the unconverted as to have well nigh lost the spirit of the primitive preachers’. Why are our hearers not ‘pricked in the heart’ or ‘cut to the heart’ as were those of Peter and Paul? How is it that ‘sinners of every description can sit so quietly as they do, year after year, in our places of worship?’ asks Fuller.
Fuller presses on us the example of New Testament preachers. He writes: ‘Christ and his apostles, without any hesitation, called on sinners to “repent, and believe the gospel;” but we, considering them as poor, impotent, and depraved creatures, have been disposed to drop this part of the Christian ministry.’ We may exhort them, he says, to ‘behaving decently in society, reading the Scriptures, and attending the means of grace’. But, without exhortation to immediate repentance, the only effect is ‘that hearers of this description sit at ease in our congregations’. We may thus give them the impression that ‘all that is required of them is to “lie in the way, and to wait the Lord’s time”’. Thus they feel no guilt over their reponse to the message preached, for they believe themselves to have complied with it.
Some, continues Fuller, urge sinners simply to pray for the Spirit to enable them to repent and believe, but this is the same fault. Peter urged Simon in Acts 8 to repent. John Owen, wrote Fuller, asserted that preachers must not stop at conviction of sins, which on its own will lead simply to outward change and hypocrisy, but drive their hearers to see their state and condition of utter sinfulness. Nor are we to think that we have to lay the ground with the law, conviction of sin, etc., before we can bring the gospel – it is good to do that, but it is never the wrong time to bring the gospel.
What about us? We may not face precisely the same challenges as did Fuller. We do, I trust, have something to say to the unconverted. But what do we say? Are we content to preach that all are sinners, expound the work of Christ and explain how that deals with sin, exhort our hearers to read the scriptures, attend on preaching regularly and pray, without actually challenging them and calling on them, there and then, to turn from sin and put their trust in the only Saviour of sinners for salvation? Is it possible that, though rejecting the unbiblical teachings of the hyper-calvinist, we have nevertheless a distorted understanding of the doctrines of grace that wrongly holds us back from making a plain and unqualified call to sinners to come to Christ now? Have we forgotten how the New Testament instructs to ‘exhort one another every day’ (Heb. 3:13), that ‘now is the favourable time, behold, now is the day of salvation’ (2 Cor. 6:2)? Then let Andrew Fuller persuade us to a more biblical approach and lead us to exhort sinners now to turn to Christ for eternal life.