Our sinful flesh, even with a thorough grasp of sound doctrine, can cause us to fail to evangelize. We might maintain a strong stance against hyper-Calvinism and be committed doctrinally to urgency about making disciples and still find ourselves apathetic and passive in evangelism.

A trap is something you fall into because you don’t realize it’s there. Theological traps are errors in thinking about God and His ways that creep in and steal away our motivation for evangelism. These aberrant thoughts affect our emotions, zap our confidence, and often hold us back from faithful verbal evangelism.
Being the sinners that we are, our flesh easily falls into such traps. Outside of intervening grace, we tend to avoid sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Biblical evangelism is a supernatural event springing from grace. Our flesh is diametrically opposed to it because we are proud and selfish. That is why consistent evangelism as a lifestyle is such a battle for most of us. Evaluation of our evangelism—what we do and what we fail to do—is therefore a healthy exercise.
Great commission-centric living requires a continual renewal of our minds. How we think about God, others, and life in general, must be regularly recalibrated: “Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind” (Romans 12:21). As we consider together some of the theological traps that easily ensnare, let’s be honest with ourselves before God. Are we presently struggling in the quagmire of one or more of the following four traps?
Relegating our Responsibility to God’s Sovereignty
If we have a biblically healthy view of God’s sovereignty in salvation, we must admit the negative tendencies about evangelism that come with it. Our sinful flesh is prone to reason that if God is in control and election is real, then God will certainly save the elect so ultimately it’s not really up to us anyway. This kind of thinking can cause us to stray away from urgency in evangelism. This is why some people who are passionate about evangelism tend to reject strong views of God’s sovereignty in salvation.
A view of God’s sovereignty that allows or encourages apathy in evangelism is not sound doctrine. God’s Word leaves the relationship between God’s sovereignty and the will of man a mystery that cannot be fully understood.2 In passages that strongly declare God’s sovereignty, verses that declare man’s responsibility are often close by (see John 6:41-71).
Our sinful flesh, even with a thorough grasp of sound doctrine, can cause us to fail to evangelize. We might maintain a strong stance against hyper-Calvinism and be committed doctrinally to urgency about making disciples and still find ourselves apathetic and passive in evangelism.
Diminishing a Woman’s Responsibility for Evangelism
Bible-believing Christians must emphasize male leadership because God does. To fail to do so is to be unfaithful to God’s Word.
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The question “Who am I?” has thrust itself to the forefront of my attention at three periods of my own life.
Period One
When I left high school, a Christian teacher gave me a farewell present of Die­trich Bonhoeffer’s famous book The Cost of Discipleship. Among the additional pieces it included was his poignant poem “Who Am I?” It is deeply self-reflective, probing, and honest: Is he really the person whom others admire for his poise and dignity when he himself experiences hidden struggles?
Am I then really that which other men tell of?Or am I only what I myself know of myself?Restless and longing and sick, like a bird in a cage,Struggling for breath, as though hands were compressingMy throat, yearning for colours, for flowers, for the voices of birds,thirsting for words of kindness, for neighbourliness,tossing in expectation of great events,powerlessly trembling for friends at an infinite distance. . . .
There is something honestly biblical and Christian about such self-probing. The Apostle Paul knew this contrast between the internal and external realities of life. Bonhoeffer’s final resolution is, like Paul’s (1 Cor. 4:1–5), altogether healthy: “Whoever I am, Thou knowest O God, I am thine.”
Period Two
I encountered the same words “Who am I?” a couple of decades later, in the discovery that they were the most commonly used title for poems written by high-school students. The question was not so much self-consistency but the quest for maturity. There was nothing surprising about this—nor necessarily unhealthy. The teenage years are times of personal growth in self-knowledge: What are my gifts and aspirations? What kind of character am I becoming? What do I want to do with my life? What, and who, will be really important to me? All these are questions that our experiences invite us to ask, think through, and answer. They are part of the process of healthy maturation.
Period Three
But when the question “Who am I?” is asked today, although the words remain the same, the tone and the nuance have changed dramatically. By and large, the question today is not one of mature self-examination or an expression of personal growth but a question of self-invention. Frequently it has become genderized and sexualized. Now the refrains sung by the siren voices of the world sing to young sailors beginning their journey on the sea of life are:
You can be anything you want; you alone choose your identity.
While you alone must choose, we will tell you what your choices are and define the field of discussion—although, of course, you can choose to be and self-identity as you please; there is total self-autonomy.
And fundamental in your choice is the question of your decision about the gender and sexuality you will choose for yourself. That will almost entirely define you and dominate your thinking.
And among other things, we are informing you, dogmatically, that answering this question will involve your considering the possibility that you have been born in the wrong body.
In addition, by way of warning, be aware that to regard our parameters as misguided or erroneous or, worse, to deny their validity is to commit sin. It is a transgressing of our norms that we will seek to silence. Breaching them will require your re-education by our people and expose you to marginalization and perhaps complete exclusion.
While it is not yet said quite so universally and boldly, our societies have been moving in the direction of silencing the biblical view of human nature. We need to understand that inevitably when there is no place for God in our thoughts, a right understanding of man as made in His image will also be rejected. Nietzsche-like, would-be thought leaders implicitly cry out, “If there is a god, how can I bear not to be that god?” and—in fulfillment of Romans 1:32—will urge others to share their distortions to make them seem “normal” and eventually normative. (“Equality” was never the goal.)

“Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever,” says the Westminster Shorter Catechism. But which doctrine describes how He brings us into a relationship so that we might enjoy Him? Justification by God’s grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone.
This marvelous centerground of the biblical gospel proves the all-sufficiency of Christ the only Savior. Through it, God is glorified as utterly merciful and good, as both supremely holy and compassionate—and therefore people can find their comfort and delight in Him. Through this doctrine, even struggling believers can know a firm standing before God, gleefully knowing Him as their “Abba, Father,” confident that He is powerful to save and to keep us to the uttermost.
Comfort and Joy
To grasp this, consider how differently Roman Catholic and Reformation theologies think of our assurance of salvation. Can a believer know he is saved?
On the side of the Reformation, the Puritan Richard Sibbes argued that without such assurance, we simply cannot live Christian lives as God would have us. God, he said, wants us to be thankful, cheerful, rejoicing, and strong in faith, but we will be none of these things unless we are sure that God and Christ are ours for good.
There be many duties and dispositions that God requires which we can not be in without assurance of salvation on good grounds. What is that? God bids us be thankful in all things. How can I know that, unless I know God is mine and Christ is mine? . . . God enjoineth us to rejoice. “Rejoice, and again I say, rejoice,” Philip, iv. 4. Can a man rejoice that his name is written in heaven, and not know his name is written there? . . . Alas! how can I perform cheerful service to God, when I doubt whether he be my God and Father or no? . . . God requires a disposition in us that we should be full of encouragements, and strong in the Lord; and that we should be courageous for his cause in withstanding his enemies and our enemies. How can there be courage in resisting our corruptions, Satan’s temptations? How can there be courage in suffering persecution and crosses in the world, if there be not some particular interest we have in Christ and in God?
Yet the very confidence that Sibbes upheld as a Christian privilege was damned by Roman Catholic theology as the sin of presumption. It was precisely one of the charges made against Joan of Arc at her trial in 1431. There, the judges proclaimed:
This woman sins when she says she is as certain of being received into Paradise as if she were already a partaker of . . . glory, seeing that on this earthly journey no pilgrim knows if he is worthy of glory or of punishment, which the sovereign judge alone can tell.
That judgment made complete sense within the logic of the Roman Catholic system: if we can enter heaven only because we have (by God’s enabling grace) become personally worthy of it, of course nobody can be sure. By that line of reasoning, I can only have as much confidence in heaven as I have confidence in my own sinlessness.