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May 14, 2008

think about this

The Reformed faith provides the strongest and noblest motive for evangelism. Love for unworthy self and love for unlovely man are indeed worthy motives, but neither of these is the ultimate motive. The ultimate, hence the most compelling, motive must be for the altogether adorable God.

The Reformed faith presents the purest and most comprehensive message of evangelism. It emphasizes with unswerving consistency the Scriptural teaching of salvation by the grace of God. On that most significant score it is at complete odds with modernism, but is also surpasses Lutheranism, with its synergistic conception of salvation, and Arminianism, which makes God dependent on man in the personal appropriation of salvation. And it embraces ‘the whole counsel of God’ (Acts 20:27), the seemingly contradictory, yet to the mind of God perfectly harmonious, teachings of particular divine election and universal divine love included.

The Reformed faith proposes the highest aim for evangelism. It is not the salvation of souls. Nor is it the growth of Christ’s church. Nor yet is it the coming of Christ’s kingdom. All those aims of evangelism are important, even of inestimable importance. yet they are but means to the accomplishment of that end for which all things were brought into being and continue to exist, unto which God does all that He does, in which the whole of history will one day culminate, and on which the never-ending ages of eternity will be focused–the glory of God.

In short, the Reformed Christian, of all Christians, ought to be most zealous for evangelism. If he is truly–not just nominally–Reformed, he will be.”

- R.B. Kuiper, God-Centered Evangelism (Carlisle, PA: Banner of Truth, 2002), 184.

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