If God chooses, why open your mouth?

Greetings,

Last week I wrote that God chooses, and that every man is still responsible for what he does with the gospel. If you held both of those at once, the next question arrives on its own. If God has already chosen who will be saved, why should I open my mouth? He’ll save them with or without me.

Some men follow that to its end and stop. If God does the choosing, evangelism is God’s business. I’ll pray, I’ll live quietly, and leave the rest to Him. Nobody says it in those words, but plenty of men live it.

Most of us land somewhere more respectable. We’d never say God doesn’t need us. We say our life is our witness. Work hard, keep your word, love your wife, be the kind of man people notice. Let the life do the talking.

Scripture doesn’t let either version stand.

Paul asks three questions in a row, and the logic runs one way. A man cannot call on a Christ he hasn’t believed in. He cannot believe in a Christ he has never heard of. And he cannot hear unless someone speaks. Two verses later Paul puts it without the questions: “faith comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”

Nobody has ever heard a life.

Your neighbour can watch you for twenty years and learn that you’re a decent man. He cannot learn from your conduct that Christ died for sinners and rose on the third day. That takes words, and the words have to come out of someone’s mouth.

I know this because I can count the mouths. I wrote last week that I grew up hearing the gospel and turned it down for years. But hearing it was never an accident. My father preached the gospel to me. When I wouldn’t listen to him, he kept putting me in rooms where I’d hear it from someone else. Teachers. Pastors. Preachers on the car radio while we drove. My parents made sure I was in a strong local church every week and in the Bible every day, whether I wanted to be or not. For years I resisted all of it. But God had chosen to draw me to Himself, and these were the means He used. Not a feeling that came out of nowhere. People, opening their mouths, over and over, until I heard.

That is how God’s choosing reaches a man. Not around other people. Through them.

Paul knew this in Corinth. He was afraid, and he had reason to be. He had been run out of Thessalonica and Berea, laughed at in Athens, and now the synagogue in Corinth had turned on him. Then God spoke.

Look at the reason God gives. Keep speaking, because I have many people in this city. They are already His. They don’t know it yet. And the way they will find out is that Paul keeps opening his mouth. God’s choosing is not Paul’s excuse to stop. It is God’s reason for Paul to continue.

Paul understood it that way. Years later, in chains, he wrote to Timothy: “I endure everything for the sake of the elect, that they also may obtain the salvation that is in Christ Jesus, with eternal glory.” He suffered for the elect. Not because their salvation was in doubt, but because they still had to hear, and he was the one sent to tell them.

Nobody has “elect” stamped on his forehead. You cannot look at the man across the street and know whether God has chosen him. So you can’t aim. You can only speak, to everyone, and let God sort out who was His all along. That is what Jesus commanded: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” Not the likely ones. All of them.

This is not a job for men with titles. Paul tells the Ephesians that Christ gave pastors and teachers “to equip the saints for the work of ministry.” The work belongs to the whole body. The pastor’s job is to equip you for it, not to do it in your place.

I have treated the gospel as a specialist’s job more often than I’d like to admit. A man can read enough, study enough, and pray enough, and still not have spoken to his neighbour this year. Preparation is good. It can also become the place we hide.

Peter gives the balance: “always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you; yet do it with gentleness and respect.” That is a command to prepare. Learn how to turn an ordinary conversation toward Christ. Learn people, not religions. The Muslim neighbour, the atheist colleague and the Jewish friend each need you to listen before you speak.

Measure your preparation by one thing: did you speak this week?

Then there is the moment when you’re standing in front of someone and your mind goes blank. Jesus told his disciples not to be anxious beforehand about how or what they would speak, because what they need will be given in that hour. Then he says: “For it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.” That promise is for the hard moment. It is not a licence to skip the preparation. Preparation teaches you to recognise the opening. The Spirit is what makes the words land.

Paul told the Corinthians that his preaching did not rest on polished wisdom, but on the Spirit’s power (1 Corinthians 2:1–5). Your sentences will be clumsy. The Spirit doesn’t need them to be good. He uses them to convict.

I still have to pray the same prayer most days: God, show me the openings I keep walking past, and give me the nerve to walk through them. I’d rather be honest about that than pretend I’ve mastered it.

God is still doing this. Right now He is gathering His people in places where saying the name of Jesus can cost a man his family, his job, or his life, and men are saying it anyway. Whatever is keeping your mouth shut in your own neighbourhood is probably not that. It’s the fear of an awkward conversation.

So live the life. Keep your word, love your wife, work hard. Men should see it. But don’t tell yourself that’s the gospel. The gospel is news, and news has to be told. Somewhere near you may be a man God has already chosen, and he is waiting on a mouth. It might be yours.

Who is the man God has put in front of you, and what has kept you from telling him?

Grace and peace,
Seun

If this one landed, No. 39 goes further — seunadeyemi.ca/reflections/39-if-god-chooses-can-a-man-blame-him