Evangelism: God’s Part, Our Part

I want to begin by reading this quote by Spurgeon, which you’ll find on your outline. I thought it was such a great quote. He said, “If I were utterly selfish, and had no care for anything but my own happiness, I would choose, if I might, under God, to be a soul-winner”—a kind of old-fashioned term—

for never did I know perfect, overflowing, unutterable happiness of the purest and most ennobling order till I first heard of one who had sought and found a Saviour through my means. … No young mother ever [so] rejoiced … over her first-born child, no warrior was so exultant over a hard-won victory.[1]

And if ever you have had the privilege of being a link in a chain that has led to the conversion of a friend or of a neighbor, then you will be able to identify to some measure with Spurgeon’s sentiment there. And if you have never had that joy and are longing for it, then I can assure you that as we walk out in obedience to God’s Word, and as he moves by his Spirit, and as he gives to us that privilege, then many of us will come to concur with Spurgeon’s sentiment here.

And so, what we want to do is simply move through this, dealing with each part as it comes along and acknowledging, first of all, from last time—you ought to be able to fill it in anyway—that evangelism is supremely God’s work in people, in which he enlists human cooperation. In the same way as God created ex nihilo, out of nothing, and made light shine into darkness, so he could have chosen to work a re-creation in that way. He could have made people his own by an act of divine fiat, without any human cooperation in it at all. But he has decided that that’s not the way he’s going to work—that just as he came in the person of Jesus, now that Jesus has gone back into heaven, he has chosen to make himself, the invisible God, visible to a world that doesn’t know him by means of the lives and lifestyle of those who have been transformed by the power of the Spirit. So that while we recognize that God saves and God alone saves, he doesn’t do so in isolation from us. While we recognize that God has ordained men and women to salvation, as Paul tells us, we recognize that he has also ordained the means whereby they come to salvation, thereby enlisting us in that process.

What God Alone Can Do

And so, right at the very beginning in understanding what it means for us to be involved in evangelism, we need to recognize that in fulfilling our responsibilities in being obedient to the Great Commission, we need to be clear as to what God alone can do and what we therefore cannot do. Okay? If only God can do certain things, then ipso facto, it follows that we can’t do them. And if we don’t know that we can’t do them, we might be tempted to go out and try and do them. And if we go out and try and do what only God can do, then we’re going to be wasting a tremendous amount of energy, and God is going to be really disappointed that we didn’t pay attention to the theology that he gave us and that we started off charging and barging around the universe, zealous for good deeds, to be commended for our concern, and yet at the same time failing to understand the implications of a wrong theology. So let’s look, then, at the things that God alone can do.

Evangelism is supremely God’s work in people, in which he enlists human cooperation.

First of all, conviction of sin is the work of God the Holy Spirit. One of the questions that people often ask when they’re talking about witnessing to their friends is this: they say, “You know, I was talking to George,” or “I was talking to Brenda,” or whoever it was, “and I was telling them about the gospel, and I mentioned this whole aspect of sin, and they said, ‘Oh yeah, I know there is sin in the world, but I just don’t have any. I know there are sinners, but I just don’t happen to be one of them.’ And,” says the individual, “when they said that to me, I felt pressed to try and convince them about the fact that they were sinful. And so I began to launch into all their faults and inconsistencies and everything else, and they didn’t seem to want to listen to me when I got to the good news part.” Surprise, surprise!

That is why Jesus says—John 16:8—concerning the Holy Spirit, he says, “I[’m] going [to go] away. Unless I go away, the Counselor will not come to you; but if I go, I will send him to you. [And] when he,” the Spirit, “comes, he,” the Spirit of God, the third member of the Trinity, “will convict the world of guilt in regard to sin and righteousness and judgment: in regard to sin, because men do not believe in me.” It’s interesting that the ultimate sin is the sin of unbelief. Not to believe in God is sin! Now, the natural man doesn’t expect that nor accept it. However, that’s what it says: “in regard to righteousness, because I am going to the Father, … and in regard to judgment, because the prince of this world now stands condemned.”[2] So God alone can bring conviction of sin.

God alone can give repentance to men. How in the world is an unrepentant, upright, dignified, well-meaning member of society who works in your office or lives on your street ever going to get down on his knees and acknowledge that he’s a helpless, hopeless sinner before God, unless God grants repentance?

When the apostles go out in the birth of the church—Acts 5:31—and Peter is proclaiming the responsibility that he has to obey God rather than men, after they’ve been given a whacking and were going to get another one, he says, “We must obey God rather than men!”[3] And then in Acts 5:30 he says, “The God of our fathers raised Jesus from the dead—whom you had killed by hanging him on a tree. God exalted him to his own right hand as Prince and Savior that,” or in order that, “he might give repentance and forgiveness of sins to Israel.” It’s a great word!

The Jewish people, of whom Peter was a part, recognized that they’d been involved in an event that was far and beyond their understanding. Peter doesn’t mince his words concerning their responsibility, and yet at the same time, he says that this has all been in the purposes of God so that he might grant repentance. And the other references in Acts that I’ve given you there underscore the same thing.

Only God, thirdly, can draw men and women to Jesus Christ. Isn’t that what we discovered in John chapter 6? Jesus says, “[And] no one can come to me unless the Father … draws [them].”[4]

One of the lovely things about these last two weeks is that God has given confirmations of what we’re doing just in quiet but in super ways. For example, two Sundays ago, when I was mentioning the whole approach that we wanted to take concerning scatter to evangelize, and friendship evangelism with our friends, and then seeing our friends come to faith in Christ, and then bringing them into the Foundations of the Faith program—the kind of Christianity 101, so that they could get off to a good start—I’d no sooner finished saying that than a lady ran up to me at the end and she said, “I thought that my friend told you that I was coming!” And I said, “Why is that?” She said, “Because what you said happened to me this week. My friend led me to faith in Jesus Christ. I said, ‘What do I do now?’ She said, ‘You come to the Chapel.’ I said, ‘Will I understand it?’ She said, ‘You go in Foundations of the Faith.’” And she said, “What you said, happened to me!” And I said, “Hey, that’s great!”

And then, as we’ve had the privilege of sharing and I’ve had the opportunity of observing the friendship evangelism of others, there was a lady came at the end of last Sunday evening to say to me what she reinforced again this morning: that “the things that you were teaching today have happened in my life, and I have accepted this week Jesus Christ as my personal Savior.” And that was directly as a result of your willingness to go out and acknowledge the fact that only God can draw men and women to Jesus Christ.

Also, God alone can reveal Jesus. We can say all the things that we understand in our Bibles about Jesus, but how in the world is a person ever, deep in their inner man, inner woman, going to come to an acknowledgment of Christ? Two Corinthians 4:6, Paul says, “For God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness’…” In other words, when he created the world, God said, “Let’s turn the lights on.” And he turned the lights on! And so there was day and there was night.[5] Paul says the same God who turned the lights on, in terms of the natural order, has turned the lights on in the spiritual order: he “made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God”—where?—“in the face of [Jesus] Christ.”

Now, this, you see, is very, very important. Because we’ll meet people from time to time who say, “Oh, well, I went up on a mountain, and I met God,” or “I can just know God just as easily if I go away in a cave somewhere and contemplate for a while and look down at my ankles.” Well, there’s no question that they may be able to ponder the fact that they were created with dignity as made in the image of God. There is no question that they may look up into the heavens and say, “This was made by someone beyond myself.” But they will never come to saving understanding of God until God turns the lights on concerning Jesus. Until Jesus flashes up on the screen of the heart a man or a woman, no salvation can take place. They may be nudged closer to the kingdom, they may be moved from atheism to agnosticism, they may embrace a notion of religion, but they will not know what Paul is talking about here—2 Corinthians 4:6, the turning on of the lights—unless God by his Spirit reveals Jesus.

Only God can draw men and women to Jesus Christ.

And then, fifthly, it is God’s unique prerogative to bring about the new birth. That was what we saw last time—we needn’t go back to it—concerning Nicodemus, who was a bright man, very well-versed in his Judaistic background, concerned that somehow or another he didn’t have all the pieces in the jigsaw puzzle. And he comes to Jesus, and Jesus says to him, “You know, you need to be born again.”[6] And, of course, Nicodemus, who was pretty bright but slightly obtuse in part, said, “Well, surely I can’t enter a second time into my mother’s womb and be born.” Jesus must have said, you know, “No, cloth-ears. I mean, listen to what I’m saying here. Don’t be ridiculous, for goodness’ sake.” I’m sure he wouldn’t say that. Only a bad person like me would say that. But he said, “No, we’re not talking physical. We’re talking spiritual.”

There was a time when you were born, physically. You didn’t have anything to do with it. You didn’t create it. You didn’t engineer it. You didn’t ask for it. You had no part in it. All of a sudden, boop! Out you came. Somebody smacked your bottom, you started screaming, and you’ve been screaming ever since, to one degree or another. And so, he says, in the exact same way, in your spiritual birth, God brings it about. He reveals Jesus. He draws you to him. He is the one who creates the new birth. John 1:12: to all who believed, “to all who received him”—we noted it this morning—“he gave the right to become [the] children of God—children born”—notice this—“not of natural descent, nor of [a] human decision [nor of] a husband’s will, but born of God.”

Let me ask you this: Are you prepared to have a salvation that has any other origin than God himself? If you are the originator of your salvation, you can presumably be the exterminator and the concluder of your salvation. And those who live their lives believing that salvation is something that they did of their own initiative when one day they got smart are the same people who, if you press them, have got no conviction that they will stay the course or one day go to heaven. Because they believe they started it, and they’ve a sneaking suspicion that having started it, maybe they’ll stop it sometime.

But when you and I survey the panorama of grace and faith and realize, as this individual said to me this morning: “When I began to look at my life over the last twenty-four months, I realized that no individual could have engineered this scenario of events. No one person could have put together all of this. Surely, it must have been God at work in my life.” Now, that’s an amazing testimony! That’s not the testimony of the natural man. That’s not the average man in the street. That is the verbal testimony of somebody who has recognized God’s priority and initiative in their lives.

Now, here’s the point, loved ones. This takes a lot of monkeys off our backs in personal evangelism straight off, doesn’t it? ’Cause if we think that tomorrow morning we’re going to have to go out, sweat and perspire amongst our friends and neighbors to convict them of sin, to bring them to repentance, to draw them to Christ, to reveal Jesus, and to make sure they’re born again, we got a high hill to climb. But when we realize that that is what God alone can do and therefore what we cannot do, then we can bow our knees tonight before we go to bed and say, “God, we’ve got a big day tomorrow. And frankly, you’ve got a bigger one than me. But I’m going to go and be what you want me to be, and I’m going to trust that you will do what God, you alone, can do.” When we realize these things, far from it preventing us in evangelistic zeal, it actually creates evangelistic zeal—if you think it through.

Our Preparation for the Work

Okay, that’s God’s part. What about our part? We must be clear as to what God requires of us in two ways.

First of all, by way of preparation for the work. And these studies on Sunday nights are about preparation for the work. And what we’re going to run through now is fairly straightforward and yet very important.

If we’re going to be prepared for the work of evangelism our life needs to be open to God—my life needs to be open to God—and cleansing sought for all known sin. There are some surgeons here tonight, I think, and they would testify to the fact that it’s not a real clever move for them to use dirty instruments. In fact, they just will not use them. And if they were to call for the staff sister, or whatever the lady’s called here in America, who is overseeing the operation and the one who bangs those things into their hands… I saw it on TV: they smack it in there. “Don’t fiddle with it. Don’t put it in like a fish,” I heard the surgeon saying. “Put it in my hand.” If the lady puts in his hand and it’s dirty, he’s going to put it right back in her hand.

And God is not in the business of using dirty instruments to do his work. That’s what 2 Timothy 2:20 is about. It’s actually a different analogy than the operating room. It’s the analogy of a house that has all kinds of implements in it—articles of gold and silver and some of wood or clay. In other words, good dishes, very good dishes, not so good dishes, and dreadful dishes. And depending on who’s coming round, we’ll decide which ones we’re going to use. And, says Paul, “if a man cleanses himself from [dirty deeds], he will be an instrument for noble purposes, made holy, useful to the Master and prepared [for] any good work.”[7]

It’s just a silly notion, loved ones, that we are going to be vitally used of God if we’re living dirty lives—if there’s known sin in our lives, if there’s areas of our lives (I’m talking known sin now), habitual activities, areas that are unconsecrated to God, departments that are beyond his influence that we are holding on to, that we’re sneaking away in a corner with. We can’t go one step beyond repentance in relation to that before ever we can be used in the way that God intends. David understood that. That’s what Psalm 51 is about.

If we’re going to be prepared for the work of evangelism, our life needs to be open to God.

Secondly, if we’re going to be rightfully prepared, we must be living in the fullness of the Spirit. Ephesians 5:18: “Be filled with the Spirit.” Acts 8:1. Actually, that should be Acts 1:8, I’m sure, but we could look up Acts 8:1 and see what that is. Want to do that? I don’t know what Acts 8:1 is, but it might be right. No, it’s Acts 1:8. That’s fine. Jesus said, “I don’t want you to go anywhere except the Holy Spirit comes upon you.”[8] And that may seem a very straightforward thing, and yet it’s awfully important. There’s a lot of Christians running around, again, with the perspiration running down their face, trying to do everything in their own strength. A bit like somebody trying to cut their grass with a power mower, and nobody told them they had an engine. As they come around the final bend and their legs are buckling underneath them and their faces are bright red, somebody reaches forward and pulls the cord. And the guy who’s been pushing around goes, “What’s that?” The person says, “That’s the engine.” Say, “Oh, I didn’t know I had an engine.” “No, that’s clear. If you’d known you had an engine, you wouldn’t be in the condition that you’re in.”

I don’t want to demean or denigrate the role of the Holy Spirit, comparing him to an engine. But here, do you know that God doesn’t call us to activity without providing us with the power necessary to do the job? Do you know that God knows how fearful we are to speak out for him? And that’s why he gives us his power. That’s why Paul says to Timothy, “God did[n’t] give us a spirit of timidity, but … of power, [and] of love and of self-[control].”[9] That’s why he said, “Don’t go charging into Jerusalem. Not yet. Wait here till the Holy Spirit comes on you, then go into Jerusalem.”

So the preparation that needs to be done, and the preparation that needs to be done in a church family, is simply this: first of all, confession of our sin and our need of God and a cry to God for cleansing. Secondly, a cry to God that he would pour out the fullness of his Spirit upon his people in a dramatic, self-evident way. It’s all part of the preparation. Thirdly, that there would be within us an awareness of our own dependence upon the Lord Jesus for salvation. In other words, that we don’t forget that, as the song says, “In my need Jesus found me, put his strong arm[s] around me,” lifted me up, and “brought me … into the shelter of his fold,”[10]

lest we go out smug, self-satisfied, opinionated. Instead, as we said this morning, going out like beggars who found a stash of food behind a McDonald’s, and they’re running around going to find their other beggar friends, saying, “Hey, you know, you ought to come down to McDonald’s. There’s a pile of stuff there.”

There needs, fourthly, to be a humble recognition of God’s power. Let’s just look at that reference, ’cause I’ve forgotten myself what it is. First Corinthians 3:7: “So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God, who makes things grow.” It’s a great verse. I’m surprised I forgot it. It’s an important verse! Lest any of us become big shots. That’s the point. Lest we become experts too quickly. I remember somebody gave me a book just when I was married—actually, on my honeymoon. It was Letters to Philip. And they wrote inside of it, “Read this book quick, before you become an expert.” It was about how to live in harmony with your wife. So there needs to be an humble recognition of what God alone can do.

We must, number five, know the Scriptures. You see, when evangelism kicks into our brains as the raison d’être of life—i.e., that God is seeking worshippers that his name might be glorified. He longs for people to be added the throng of those who worship him. And so he has enlisted us, that we might be a part of the chain that brings people to himself, so that they in turn might worship. Then when that begins to register in my mind, then all of a sudden, everything else fits into place. That’s why I’m reading my Bible. I’m not reading my Bible because I get points for reading my Bible. I’m learning the Scriptures, because I need to know the Scriptures so that I might share the Scriptures with people who don’t know the Scriptures.

And one of the most embarrassing things for us, especially those of us who’ve been a Christian for some time, is our ignorance of the Bible. We make these grandiose statements about it, and someone asks us a simple question, and we’re dreadfully embarrassed. And we have to say, “I’m sorry, it’s in here somewhere, but I don’t know where it is.” Now, I don’t mean to chide you in relation to that. I just acknowledged that—forgot what 1 Corinthians 3:7 was myself. We’re all in the position together. But when we read our Bibles each day, there needs to be a reading with a desire to know and to learn and to understand and then to communicate.

And we must also, sixthly, understand the human predicament without Christ. Now, some of us are better able to do that experientially, because we came to faith in Jesus Christ at a later stage in our lives, and we remember what a horrible mess we were. Those of us who were converted far younger in our days haven’t had such a…

In other words, volume one of our lives was a smaller volume than volume two. Some of you have had a bigger volume one. And so, when you think about the human predicament without Jesus, you just think back a few years to the mess you were in, to the condition of your life, to the way you used to go into the office, when you drove in the car, when you spoke with your wife at home, and so on. And so you mustn’t forget that your friends and your neighbors are in that exact position—that, as Jesus says, as describes them in Matthew 9:36: that he saw the people as “sheep without a shepherd”; that he looked out, and he just saw them as a mass, an amorphous mass of people who were helpless and hopeless, who were going nowhere, encapsulated in Lennon and McCartney’s “Eleanor Rigby” as good as any song, certainly in the last while.

Look at all the lonely people!
Where do they all come from? …
Where do they all belong?

Father McKenzie,
Writing the words of a sermon that no one [can] hear;
No one comes near.[11]

Why should they come near? Dull sermons, dull church, dull everything. So we need lively church, Spirit-filled people, knowledgeable Bible people, going out to break the mythology of the reality of Jesus in a world that needs to know him.

The human predicament tonight without Christ is absolutely awesome, isn’t it? I was just saying in the prayer time… I mean, just take the Plain Dealer for a week and look at it. I mean, just take the movie page.

Let me say a word to you, young people here, just for a moment about these movies. (Couple of guys just sat up to listen now.) Let me tell you something: the Bible makes perfectly plain that when we take garbage in, we will spew garbage out. The lesson from Bundy, before he died, was what? “I read filth all my days. Don’t let anybody tell you that there is no correlation between the trash that I absorbed and the sin that I committed. I know now,” says Bundy, “it’s so.” And you young folks are going to be out there with your moms, you’re going to be telling them you’re going to this movie, and it’s not that movie, it’s another movie, and everything else. I’m going to tell you, you will put things on the computer screen of your brain that you may never be able to remove before the day you die. I know, ’cause I put stuff there that I wish I could remove. And sometimes, in the strangest circumstances, in the most bizarre moments, back it comes, boom! Full, vivid Technicolor. ’Course, I was smart when I was seventeen: “Ah, don’t be daft! Those things don’t matter. They can’t affect you.” They’re still around. The human predicament tonight is so real and so awesome that we need young folks with an alternate lifestyle. And so, when we engage in the task of speaking with our friends, we need to do so with sincerity of heart.

You know, one of the things that people are always asking when you go and speak to them about anything—whether you’re trying to sell them encyclopedias or whatever it is—this is what I’m asking: question number one is, “Is this guy for real?” And if we go out to witness to people in the way that gives them the notion that somebody gave us a quota—like “Injins” (I mean Indians) from the old cowboy movies, right? And the guy goes out, and he has all those, what, hanging from his belt? Scalps. “Hey, look at this.” There is an approach to personal evangelism that’s just like that. There are Bible schools in America that cultivate it: “If you don’t fill your quota before Friday…” Maybe they’ve forgotten what God alone can do and what we can do.

So don’t think in those terms. The key thing is sincerity of heart. You see somebody thirsty? Give them a drink of water. You see them unhappy? Give them a word of encouragement. See them in need? Help them. See they fell off their donkey? Give them a ride on your donkey. “I don’t have a donkey.” Well, neither do I! So? All right?

Our Cooperation in the Work

We must be clear as to what God requires of us by way of cooperation in this work. Not only preparation but cooperation. Here we go. Although the work of conversion is essentially God the Holy Spirit’s work, he calls us… (What did I write down here? Oh yeah.) He calls us to work with him in achieving it.

Are you going to tell me that obstetricians produce babies? They may walk around like they do, but they don’t! Half the time, it’s the little nurse that does more than the obstetrician. (Sorry, guys. Sorry.) All right? But the obstetrician has to go to bed at night and recognize God produced the baby. I may have had the thrill of saying, “Mrs. Jones, it’s a girl!” But that’s all I did. Right? And that’s our part in salvation, ultimately: that when we’ve lived our lives and sung our song and played the melody of the transformed life by the power of the Spirit and somebody comes to faith in Jesus Christ, we didn’t do it. God did it, and he gave us the joyful privilege of being around in the labor ward to see it happen. That’s fantastic! We may plant, we may water, but only God makes it grow. So, the work of conversion is his, but we get a part in it with him.

Our friendship needs to embrace those who don’t embrace our values.

Our responsibility, then—and we read this, and we’re not going to camp on it—is to make known the Word of God. How can we make known the Word of God if we don’t know the Word of God? Therefore, we need to know the Word of God. That takes us back.

And what are we going to urge upon men? I mean, are we just going to stand around and say, “Oh well, oh well. You know, I learned that God does everything, and I’m not really very important. I’m just in the labor ward.” No, this is what we’re going to do. You’ll check the references when you go home.

We should urge men to seek God. Okay? Urge them to do so. Say to our friends, “Hey, have you read John’s Gospel?”

We should urge men to repent. We can’t make them repent; only God can grant repentance. We’ve understood that. Nevertheless, we should tell them, “You know what? You need to turn around, buddy. You’re going in the wrong direction. I once went the same direction. I want to urge you to turn around.”

We should urge them to be converted. Years ago, I remember when they changed from coal gas to natural gas in Britain, and they had all these plugs for being converted to natural gas and all kinds of advertisements on TV that said, “Have you been converted?” And people used to come round our houses and urge us to be converted. And it was one of the greatest evangelistic opportunities for the church in a long, long time. See, the guy came to the door and said, “Have you been converted?” And we said, “Well, uh, which one are you talking about?” And he said, “Natural gas.” And we said, “Well, I’ll talk to you about that if you talk to me about another kind.” He said, “What’s that?” And I said, “Have you ever been converted to faith in Jesus Christ?” It was a good time. Good time. Okay?

And to believe on the Lord Jesus. Okay? Just in case we think that in terms of what we have a privilege of doing is kind of nothing, leaning against the wall, let’s just drive this home.

In doing this, we must be willing to display genuine friendship, which will often be costly. Okay? Again, you know, if we are not genuinely friendly to people and we give them the kind of scalp notion, then it’s no surprise if they tune us out. And our friendship needs to embrace those who don’t embrace our values. “If you love those who love you what reward is that?”[12] said Jesus. We’re supposed to be in the world but not of the world. I hope we all have non-Christian friends, and a good number of them. I hope we all are in some context during the week, in an environment, where, in the context of friendship, we have the opportunity to give an answer for the reason for the hope that is within us.[13] And we need to cultivate those friendships, recognizing that they will often cost us. And we are to be ready to do this work anytime and anywhere.

Let me finish up with this final statement: the implications of these truths are far-reaching, and they ought to at least instill in us a renewed sense of dependence upon God and an increased confidence in God—so, dependence upon God, confidence in God—which will be demonstrated largely in our prayers.

Now, when you finish up here, you’ve come full circle from the prayer time, right? Now we know why we have a prayer time. That’s the great, burning longing of Paul’s heart. Romans 10: “I would that all Israel would be saved.”[14] He said, “The whole driving compassion of my life is the salvation of those who, like me, have come from the root of David.” And so, because of that, depending upon God, confident that God can do what he alone can do, he cries out to him in believing prayer.

So, I hope that is helpful to us: that there is a part which God alone can do; therefore, we ought not to try to do it. But the fact that God has a part which is not ours does not negate the part which is ours. And therefore, we need to do what we must and not try and do what we needn’t.

[1] Charles H. Spurgeon, The Soul-Winner; or, How to Lead Sinners to the Saviour (New York: Revell, 1895), 231.

[2] John 16:7–11 (NIV 1984).

[3] Acts 5:29 (NIV 1984).

[4] John 6:44 (NIV 1984).

[5] See Genesis 1:3–5.

[6] John 3:3 (paraphrased).

[7] 2 Timothy 2:21 (NIV 1984).

[8] Acts 1:8 (paraphrased)

[9] 2 Timothy 1:7 (NIV 1984).

[10] Gordon C. Brattle, “In My Need Jesus Found Me” (1978).

[11] John Lennon and Paul McCartney, “Eleanor Rigby” (1966).

[12] Matthew 5:46; Luke 6:32 (paraphrased).

[13] See 1 Peter 3:15.

[14] Romans 10:1 (paraphrased).