This is important because one reason Christians struggle to evangelize is that we forget that God is out ahead of us. We think we’re alone. We think that people’s response depends on us and our presentation. But as A.W. Pink points out, “When God calls any of his people to go to a place, they may rest assured that he has fully provided for them in his foredetermined purpose.”¹ God’s servant Elijah, for example, went to the brook Cherith with God’s promise: “You shall drink from the brook, and I have commanded the ravens to feed you there” (1 Kings 17:4). He went to the widow of Zarephath with God’s promise, “Behold, I have commanded a widow there to feed you” (1 Kings 17:9). It’s the same in the New Testament; in Acts 18:9–10, God tells the Apostle Paul, “Do not be afraid, but go on speaking and do not be silent, for I am with you, and no one will attack you to harm you, for I have many in this city who are my people.”

God is ahead of us: this is a liberating truth for Christians in the great privilege of sharing the gospel. God has already been at work. You don’t know how God will use your witness in a person’s life. It may be at the beginning of God’s work, the planting of seed. It might be at the end of God’s work—the harvest. It might be during God’s work—the watering. But God gives the growth; He gets the glory. We see this very clearly in 1 Corinthians 3:5–9:

What then is Apollos? What is Paul? Servants through whom you believed, as the Lord assigned to each. I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the growth. So neither he who plants nor he who waters is anything, but only God who gives the growth. He who plants and he who waters are one, and each will receive his wages according to his labor. For we are God’s fellow workers. You are God’s field, God’s building.

Every stage matters. This means that what you are doing is important and that its effectiveness belongs to the Lord.

Jesus declared in John 10:27–28 that people’s response of faith to His Word is rooted in His first making people His own. He said: “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand” (John 10:27–28). While “Calvinism” unfortunately gets dismissed by many Christians as being deterministic and anti-evangelism, you can’t get around the logic of Jesus’s statement: something makes a person Jesus’ sheep before they believe. The theological term for this is election.

Adolf Schlatter, who managed to hold influential scholarly posts in Germany and produce massively popular devotional material as an evangelical in the days when theological liberalism was taking hold, put it this way in his landmark biblical-theological study Faith in the New Testament: “Faith is preceded by an original relationship to God, which reaches its active conclusion and fruitful result in faith.”²