Sunday, December 28, 2008

Wrong Evangelism Fails to Start with Doctrine

The trouble with all false evangelism is that it does not start with doctrine, it does not start by realizing man's condition. All fleshly, carnal, man-made evangelism is the result of inadequate understanding of what the apostle teaches us in the first ten verses of this second chapter of Ephesians. If you and I but realized that every man who is yet a sinner is absolutely dominated by 'the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that now worketh in the children of disobedience', if we only understood that he is really a child of wrath and dead in trespasses and sins, we would realize that only one power can deal with such an individual, and that is the power of God, the power of the Holy Ghost. And so we would put our confidence, not in man-made organizations, but in the power of God, in the prayer that holds on to God and asks for revival and a descent of the Spirit. We would realize that nothing else can do it.
We can change men superficially, we can win men to our side and to our party, we can persuade them to join a church, but we can never raise the spiritually dead; God alone can do that. The realization of these truths would of necessity determine and control all our evangelism.
(Martin Llyod Jones)

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