All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible 1995 Ed. (NASB95)

Most biblically-informed Christians would agree that one of the marks of a Spirit-filled believer is that he speaks to non-Christians about Jesus on a regular basis. After all, people talk about those things about which they’re most passionate, and if someone wants everyone to know about the most spectacular message in the world, then he’s going to tell it to others. Both of these conditions are supposed to be true of believers in Jesus, if they know that the message of salvation can do the same thing for others as it did for themselves.

So why is it that most believers in the western world would answer in the negative if they were asked if they share the gospel regularly? There are many reasons why believers neglect to explain the salvation in Christ to their unbelieving neighbors. We could point to distraction from work, fear of being disliked, fear of saying something wrong, or a false belief that they bear no responsibility in carrying the gospel to sinners. But I’d like to point to two character qualities that tend to be extremely weak in western Christians – the fear of God and delight in Christ’s love. After defining these virtues, I’ll show how they are inextricably linked, and then explain how you can cultivate them, so that they’ll motivate you to more willingly preach the gospel to the unbelievers in your life, and just be more like Jesus in general.

The Fear of God

According to the holy Scriptures, “the fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge” (Prov. 1:7a). In other words, you can’t even truly know reality until you fear the true God. And to fear Him is one of the most fitting responses of moral creatures to the Creator, since He is so different from everything, and He is the One who determines our eternal destinies. Thankfully, because of the revelation of God in His divine Son, we know that He is a gracious and compassionate God who is slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love. He demonstrated His love in that He sent His only Son to satisfy His wrath against sinners, and promises full pardon and peace to all who will trust in Him. Therefore, although a fear of His anger and justice may initially drive us to asking for His mercy through Jesus, we believers no longer fear Him because of His wrath, but because of His love and kindness.

How does this work, though? How can you fear someone whom you know will never do you any ultimate harm, but loves you as His child? In a way similar to how a child can fear his loving, kind, and caring father. We fear not God’s wrath, but His displeasure and chastisement. We, knowing that we are as dust compared to Him, and that we possess evil desires and affections within our minds, need to fear our God because of His perfect and infinite loving hatred of sin. Fear is that attitude that recognizes that if we fail to think and act properly, we’ll be doing something disgusting and repulsive to the God who controls our lives, and lives inside of us.

One of the things that fearing the Father causes us to do is to “acknowledge Him in all of your ways” (Prov. 3:6). Fearing God means that I’m regularly recognizing my place in this world with respect to God. Put simply, it’s to embrace the reality that Jesus is the One in control, and not me. And it’s also a recognition that I exist and live to serve His good purposes, and not the other way around. I am His creature, His servant, His child, and His slave. As such, everything I do is under His evaluation, and will either earn me a gracious reward at the end, or be burned up as worthless stubble. This is what it means to fear God in a nutshell, and it’s not manifested nearly enough by western believers. The proof of this is found in the fact that most of us live very sloppy, selfishly, and lazily. And many of our Bible-believing churches are infested with tolerated sins that aren’t confronted, nor repented of.

And quoting the words of The Pilgrim’s Progress author John Bunyan, I could say,

“There wanteth even in the hearts of God’s people a greater reverence of the Word of God than to this day appeareth among us, and this let me say, that want of reverence of the Word is the ground of all disorders that are in the heart, life, conversation, and in the Christian communion.” – The Works of John Bunyan, Volume II, page 233

This “reverence” he speaks of is a synonym for fear, and the Scriptures are clear that our response to our learning of God’s Word is directly proportional to our response to God Himself, since the Word is His speech to us. Thus, if we aren’t fearing God’s Word, then we aren’t fearing Him.

But what does fearing God have to do with sharing the gospel? Everything. Fearing God is one of the chief motivators for doing His will in loving obedience, since our fear is a loving fear. Thus, the more we fear God, the more we’ll obey Him. And He’s called us to “proclaim the excellencies of Him who called us out of darkness into His marvelous light,” as well as to “walk in wisdom toward outsiders, making the most of the opportunity” (1 Pet. 2:9; Col. 4:5). If we have an opportunity to announce the best news that sinners can hear, and we decide not to do it, then we’re allowing a needy, perishing image-bearer to go on in their ignorant and deceived path to destruction, when we have the only instrument that can save them. And depending on the circumstances, we just might be despising our neighbor if we withhold the glorious knowledge of our awesome Savior from them. A failure to boast in the Lord Jesus in the hearing of ignorant people is to demonstrate a low view of Jesus, and an uncaring heart toward our neighbor. If we would fear God in those situations, then we would want to speak of His greatness to people who don’t understand it.

There are a few more specific ways that fearing God can motivate us to preach the gospel. First, it provokes grief and disgust over people’s willful ignorance of God. One of the reasons that people are culpable for rebelling against God is that they deliberately ignore Him. Paul’s teaching in Romans 1:18-20 make this clear. People suppress God’s revelation in creation and conscience because they refuse to acknowledge Him. This is why “the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men” (Rom. 1:18). Therefore, we believers ought to fear God for unbelievers, since they are living under His wrath and anger. The thought of what God thinks of them ought to be enough to make us tremble, since He is angry at them for their rebellion. But a second reason that our fear of God should drive us to share the good news of Jesus with sinners is that He’s promised to chasten, or discipline, us if we fail to love our neighbor by preaching to them. On this point, please heed the warning of Proverbs:

“Deliver those who are being taken away to death, and those who are staggering to slaughter, Oh hold them back. If you say, ‘See, we did not know this,’ Does He not consider it who weighs the hearts? And does He not know it who keeps your soul? And will He not render to man according to his work?” — Prov. 24:11-12

Fearing our Father more will provoke us to have more compassion for perishing sinners. But our fear of God will only be as strong as our knowledge of Jesus’s love. This is the second virtue essential for regularly being eager to preach the Gospel.

Comprehending Christ’s Love

If you briefly read the New Testament, it’s overwhelmingly obvious that one of its main messages is that Jesus loves people, and especially those that believe in Him for salvation. From the simplest understanding of the gospel, believers know that Jesus has loved them with an incomprehensible love. For we know that we deserved the exact opposite of His kindness, and yet He gladly suffered the spiritual and eternal consequences for our rebellion against Him. And His condescension, suffering, and providence for our eternal redemption will never be fully known for all of eternity. This makes the Lord’s love for we believers one of the ultimate motivations for all our deeds of worship and obedience.

Paul says as much in 2 Corinthians 5:14-15, writing,

“For the love of Christ controls us, having concluded this, that one died for all, therefore all died; and He died for all, so that they who live might no longer live for themselves, but for Him who died and rose again on their behalf.”

He says this in the context of explaining the driving forces behind his missionary efforts. The chief one here is “the love of Christ,” which is not only His love for Paul, but His love for all “who live” because He died for them. This is Jesus’s love for all believers. Yet Paul clearly doesn’t leave himself out. In Galatians 2:20, he recounts himself as saying,

“’. . . and the life which I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave Himself up for me.”

Paul was so zealous, passionate, and committed to telling people about Jesus’s love in the Gospel because he was so amazed and enamored by it. And this is part of what explains his main prayer for the saints in Ephesus. This prayer is found at the end of the third chapter, and is the climax of his doctrinal section of the letter. And this should be the prayer for all believers, as it holds the key to being fully devoted to pleasing the Lord, and being like Him:

“. . . that He would grant you . . . to be strengthened with power through His Spirit in the inner man, so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; and that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled up to all the fullness of God.” – Eph. 3:16-19

Do you see why understanding and appreciating Christ’s love for you and people is so crucial? First, because this comprehension is a fruit of Him not simply living, but dwelling in our hearts. This term he uses refers to someone making their home somewhere, so that they’re happy. That’s what the Lord wants for us – that we would be in agreement with Him about what to think and how to live, and that we’d rejoice in our experience of His presence within our hearts. It’s only then that we’ll be able to search out the aspects of Jesus’s love of which we’re yet ignorant. And what will result when we comprehend the unknowable nature of Jesus’s love? We’ll “be filled up to all the fullness of God,” or experience all knowable blessings of God’s presence and power. Surely this will move us to preaching the Gospel to unbelievers!

But to discuss the logical arguments to evangelize from increasingly understanding Jesus’s love in a deeper way, let’s look at a few. First, knowing Jesus’s love shows you that He loves the worst sinners. After all, Paul himself was one of the most passionate enemies of the Lord and His people in the beginning of the church. This is why he calls himself the “foremost” sinner when glorying in the Lord’s calling of him for salvation and service in 1 Timothy. In this section, he says that one of the reasons the Lord chose him to be an apostle was so that he would be “an example for those who would believe in Him for eternal life” (1 Tim. 1:16). In other words, Jesus often accomplishes the most visible manifestations of His grace when He lovingly saves the most unlovable people, as Paul was.

The second way that Jesus’s love gives us a strong reason to preach the gospel is that He not only loves sinners, but He gets joy from saving people. And the only way He saves people is through the preaching of the gospel. Paul famously writes, “So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17). If we want to bring joy and happiness to our Lord, then we ought to use the opportunities He gives us to share His saving message.

Thirdly, our knowledge of Jesus’s love for us personally ought to move us to tell of His love to those who have never heard of it. If we truly know that Jesus has, and does, love us, then we should often be struck with awe and amazement at this glorious truth. As it did for Paul, this knowledge ought to be one of the chief motivators for our living. But more particularly, the Lord’s love should be one of the top obsessions of our hearts. If this is the case, then we’ll naturally want to speak of Jesus to those who don’t believe in Him. It’s just like any other subject of thought – you are usually most inclined to talk about that which most occupies your thinking. And if we are regularly learning about and remembering the Lord’s love for us and the world, then we’ll be impelled to describe it. As the hymn writer puts it – “redeeming love has been my theme, and shall be til I die”.

Finally, let’s think about how knowing Christ’s love affects our fear of God. It can only be true that we fear God because we’ve embraced and experienced Jesus’s saving love for us. A God that only hates us and threatens to destroy us for our offenses provokes fear of course, but a God that would be destroyed in our stead ought to give us more fear. Such a love as this that our Creator has displayed is a weight of incomprehensible glory that can throw us to the ground in reverence and awe, if we truly appreciate it. And knowing that this God has done this to become our Father gives us all the more reason to fear Him. Thus, the more we comprehend Jesus’s love, the more we’ll fear Him and God. Likewise, the more often we fear God, the more we’ll be able to comprehend of Christ’s love for us. And a heart full of the fear of God, along with a mind filled with thoughts of Jesus’s sacrificial love, is the most powerful human instrument God has to spread the glad tidings of peace with God through Christ to a foolish, ignorant, and deceived world of sinners. Are you growing in your knowledge of Jesus’s love and your fear of God? If you want to be a better evangelizer, then you must.