For I determined to know nothing among you except Jesus Christ, and Him crucified.¹

The message we share with spiritually lost people is simple – it is Jesus.

The central issue in evangelism is that people must be brought to a decision concerning Jesus Christ. Who was He? Why did He give His life? And what does His sacrifice on the cross mean for each of us personally?

Our message must be clear and simple. The primary focus of our message to nonbelievers and new believers alike must be Jesus.

After the outpouring of the Holy Spirit on the Day of Pentecost, the first Christians boldly and clearly witnessed about Jesus, as He promised they would.

In Acts 4, Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, spoke boldly about Jesus: “There is salvation in no one else; for there is no other name under heaven that has been given among men by which we must be saved.”

Missionary Bernhard Johnson saw more than 1.8 million people come forward to receive Christ in evangelistic outreaches in Brazil. I once asked him, “What about your preaching do you believe accounts for the great numbers who respond in your services?”

He replied, “I always exalt Jesus Christ.”

W.W. Simpson, one of the earliest Assemblies of God missionaries to China, said it well, that our message “is the simple preaching of the real Jesus as revealed in the Gospels…showing how He really took our place on the cross and became our sin and thus put away our sins forever as proved by His rising from the dead.”

Traditionally, the Gospel of John has been the most distributed book of the Bible. No single verse of Scripture is better known than John 3:16. For many decades, John’s Gospel has been widely distributed. Because of its extensive use, many assume it to be the most appropriate book of the Bible for evangelism. But many directly involved in missions and evangelism prefer the use of Mark’s Gospel for nonbelievers, for a variety of reasons.

Mark traveled extensively both with the apostles Paul and Peter. He was influenced first by the lucid and powerful doctrinal teaching of Paul and then, after Paul’s death, by Peter’s first-hand accounts of Jesus’ life and teaching. We know from early church historians that Mark wrote what he learned from Peter’s preaching about Jesus. Irenaeus wrote in A.D. 175, “Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, also transmitted to us in writing the things preached by Peter.”

Mark wrote his account of Christ’s life during a time of great persecution under the Roman emperor, Nero. Many Christians in Rome were living in underground caves, hiding for their lives. During that time, anyone who confessed that Jesus Christ was the Son of God could be tortured and put to death by the cruelest of methods.

Mark’s Gospel was intended to comfort the early Christians during the hardest time the Church had experienced. Mark’s words strengthened Christians and encouraged them to be faithful to Jesus at a time when the Christian life meant either the catacombs or the arena.

In a call to discipleship, Jesus demanded a radical surrender of life: “If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for My sake and the gospel’s will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and forfeit his soul?”²

Like the first Christians, we live in hard times. The world is in crisis. But the life of Christ is good news for our hard times too. Mark’s Gospel was not only good news in the year A.D. 64, it is good news for today.

Randy Hurst, Commissioner of Evangelism

¹1 Corinthians 2:2 (NASB)

²Mark 8:34-36 (NASB)