From the TeachingtheWord Bible Knowledgebase

Part 16 (final) of a series. Read part 15.

We must remember that God does not answer all of a sinner's objections and questions the day that person comes to faith in Christ. We have the Apostle Paul himself as an example.

In our last article we began to answer this question: How should a Bible-believing Christian witness to a Mormon? We saw that Scripture gives us four governing factors for our witness to Mormons, which are, in fact, God's governing factors for all Gospel witness:

1. All human beings apart from Jesus Christ are in the same lost condition. The condition of the Mormon apart from Jesus Christ is essentially the same as the condition of any other lost sinner.

2. Just as man has not changed, God has not changed. He is still the same holy God He has always been, and His righteous requirements are the same as they have always been. A Mormon is under the same condemnation before the same holy God because of his unbelief.

3. The Gospel has not changed. A Mormon needs to hear and to respond to the preaching of the same Gospel as every other lost sinner.

4. Regeneration by the Holy Spirit is absolutely necessary in order for a person to be saved. That work of regeneration is the same for a Mormon as it is for any other unbeliever.

In our last article we addressed the first three factors in some detail. We now turn to factor number four.

The Dangers of Easy Believism

The truth of the necessity of regeneration by the Holy Spirit in order for a person to be truly saved is widely neglected (and even ridiculed) in the nominally Evangelical church today. One of the tragic results has been widespread acceptance of the deception of "decisional regeneration" - the false idea that someone can simply come forward in a church service, pray a certain formula prayer, and this means that the individual is saved.

Another name for decisional regeneration is easy believism. The work of God the Holy Spirit is completely missing from this picture. This approach to evangelism reduces what is mistakenly called Gospel preaching to something that much more resembles a sales pitch to get someone to buy an automobile than it does the preaching of the one true Gospel.

We know by experience that a great many of the people who respond to that kind of preaching are not responding to a work of the Holy Spirit, because after they are supposedly saved there is no change in their thinking or living. There is no evidence of a work of the Spirit.

Scripture is abundantly clear that a renewed mind, a changed heart, a sanctified life, are the sure evidences of saving faith. It is just as clear in saying that the absence of such a change in the individual clearly demonstrates that regeneration has not taken place, that there is not present in that individual new life in Jesus Christ because of the indwelling of God the Holy Spirit.

Just because you might be able to convince a Mormon to pray a certain prayer does not mean that that individual has experienced the new birth.

You Cannot Argue Anyone Into Heaven

But there has been another, opposite, result of the neglect of the Biblical truth of the necessity of the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit. This problem manifests itself in the practice of what is wrongly called apologetics in the church today.

Much of what is called apologetics today is based on a wrong assumption - that we must answer all of an individual's objections to Biblical truth in order to bring a person to Christ. According to this view, we must answer all of an individual's objections to the declared truths of the Word of God. We must, by our own arguments, break down an individual's resistance to the Gospel. We must - to put it in the case of the Mormon - refute all of the false teachings of Mormonism, and by our own efforts turn an individual's heart and mind against his deeply held Mormon beliefs, in order for that person to be saved. In others words, we must argue a person into Heaven.

We are foolish to think we can do that. This is not the way God works. Look at the example of the Apostle Paul in Acts chapter nine. This man who was "breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord" according to Acts 9:1, and was on his way to Damascus to further persecute the Christians, is confronted directly by the Lord Jesus Christ.

And what does our Lord say to this man Saul? What does God say to this "Hebrew of the Hebrews"? Jesus says, from the throne room of Heaven, "It is hard for you to kick against the goads" (Acts 9:5). What this makes clear to us is the fact that there was a work of God going on within this man Saul who became the Apostle Paul. "It is hard for you to kick against the goads," Jesus says. It is hard for you to resist the work that I, God, have been doing in your heart. This work of God was now coming to its climax on the road to Damascus.

And so Saul the devout Jew, Saul the enemy of the true church of Christ, was saved from his sins on the road to Damascus - not because he had all of his objections dealt with, but because he confessed with his mouth that the authentic Jesus Christ is God in Heaven, that He is Lord of all, that it is God alone who saves, and he said "Lord, what do you want me to do?"

And so the Lord sent Saul the new convert to a believer named Ananias in the city of Damascus. Ananias was one of the Christians who had been the object of Saul's persecution. And so he was fearful, and at first he questioned what God was doing. But God said to Ananias, "he [Saul] is a chosen vessel of Mine to bear My name..." (Acts 9:15).

Every individual who is ever saved from his sins is a chosen vessel of God to bear witness for Christ. That is true of the Mormon convert as much as it is of the Jewish convert, the Muslim convert, or the Roman Catholic convert.

God Doesn't Answer All of a Sinner's Objections On Day One

But for the purposes of the question we are addressing - How should a Bible-believing Christian witness to a Mormon? - we need to consider something else about the case of the Apostle Paul which is also the case of everyone who ever believes on the Lord Jesus Christ and is saved.

The newly regenerated Saul was not saved because he had all his questions answered. He was not saved because he had all of his objections dealt with. He was not saved because he as yet understood all of the great truths that he would communicate to the church under Divine inspiration in his epistles. He was saved because he bowed the knee to Christ.

Did he yet understand the great truth of justification by faith alone that he sets before us in Romans? Did he yet fully understand the great truth of the threefold work of the persons of the Trinity to bring about the salvation of sinners, as the Apostle Paul later gives it to us under Divine inspiration in Ephesians chapter one?

Did he as yet understand that the law of the Old Testament ordinances had been entirely done away with because Jesus Christ had come? Did he yet understand the great truth that we find Paul giving to us in Ephesians chapter two, that God had made one body in Christ out of both Jew and Gentile, that God had broken down the wall of separation between them?

Of course not. Saul the new convert did not as yet understand all of these things. Christ was going to personally teach him those truths, and so much more, when He took Paul into Arabia for three years. But that - and indeed, learning that would continue to deepen and widen until Paul's dying day, but would even then be knowledge only "in part" (1 Corinthians 13:12) - was yet to come.

The Truth of How a Person Comes to Christ

And here is the point: The situation is the same for a Mormon today as it was for the man named Saul two thousand years ago. A Mormon who comes to saving faith in Jesus Christ by the regenerating work of the Holy Spirit is not going to have all his questions and objections answered on day one, or on day two, or in year one, or in year two - or even in an entire lifetime.

But because God the Holy Spirit has regenerated and now indwells that individual, according to First Corinthians chapter two he is no longer a natural man who cannot receive the things of the Spirit of God because they are foolishness to him. He is now a spiritual man, a Spirit-indwelled man, who can begin to comprehend spiritual things.

The point of all of this is that we need to present the same Gospel message of salvation by God's grace alone, through faith alone, in the atoning work of Christ alone, apart from any works of our own. That is what we are called to do. But the work of changing the heart of the sinner is the work of God the Holy Spirit. We need to ask God to do that work. We need to ask God to be gracious to use our feeble witness in order to bring the souls of Mormons to the place where they will have the same new birth in Christ that we have experienced.

Now is that to say that we do not address the problems of the falsehoods of Mormonism in our witness to Mormons? Not at all. But that is not where our emphasis needs to be. Our emphasis needs to be on the Gospel message. Our emphasis needs to be upon a recognition that God the Holy Spirit must work in the heart of the individual with whom we are dealing.

One of the most convicting things we can do is to say to a Mormon, "I am praying for you. I am praying that you will come to the light, that you will be saved."

You will also find that many people who have become baptized members of the Mormon church do not understand the teachings of that church. That is just as true for the Mormon as it often is, for example, for the new Roman Catholic convert or even for someone who has been raised a Roman Catholic. Often they do not understand the vast extent of the falsehoods of their present religion.

But the way to deal with those things, in every case, with every individual, is from Scripture alone. This is something that we always must do. In my office library there over four linear feet of books written by the successive presidents of the Mormon church. They have been useful to me in understanding the depth of Mormonism's pagan darkness, and in understanding how much these men were "deceiving, and being deceived" (2 Timothy 3:13). But their words are not the issue. We must make Scriptural truth the issue. Not our opinions, not their opinions, not personalities, not traditions, but Scriptural truth.

Recently a friend of this ministry who is an evangelist among Mormons in Utah told me of a man to whom he had witnessed who came to saving faith in Christ. The man told him that one day he was reading the literature of his cult, and also reading the Bible, and it was, as the man put it, "like a light went on. I realized that the Bible is the truth, and I realized that the religion I had held onto for so long is a lie."

This is what we must pray for as we have opportunities to witness to Mormons. It is the Word of God, Hebrews chapter 4 tells us, that "is alive and powerful, and sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing even to the dividing asunder of soul and spirit, and of joints and marrow, and is a discerner" - in the original language a critic - "of the thoughts and intents of the heart." God the Holy Spirit uses the Word that He has written to "convict the world of sin and of righteousness and of judgment" (John 16:8).

And so, how should a Bible-believing Christian witness to a Mormon? In the same way that we should witness to any other individual who is lost in sin and in need of cleansing by the blood of Christ. Rely on God's Word. Rely on God the Holy Spirit. And see what marvelous things He will do.

So shall My Word be that goes forth from My mouth; it shall not return to Me void [i.e., without effect], but it shall accomplish what I please, and it shall prosper in the thing for which I sent it. (Isaiah 55:11)

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