There is the temptation for some to minimize our part in evangelism. In their zeal to glorify God by acknowledging his sovereignty in grace, and by refusing to imagine that their own services are indispensable to him, they are tempted to lose sight of the church's responsibility to evangelize...
Perhaps the classic instance of this way of thinking was provided two centuries ago by the chairman of the ministers' fraternal at which William Carey mooted the founding of a missionary society. "Sit down, young man," said the old warrior; "when God is pleased to convert the heathen, He will do it without your aid, or mine!" The idea of taking the initiative in going out to find men of all nations for Christ struck him as improper and, indeed, presumptuous.
Now think twice before you condemn that old man. He was not entirely without understanding. He had at least grasped that it is God who saves, and that he saves according to his own purpose, and does not take orders from man in the matter. He had grasped too that we must never suppose that without our help God would be helpless. He had, in other words, learned to take the sovereignty of God perfectly seriously. His mistake was that he was not taking the church's evangelistic responsibility with equal seriousness. He was forgetting that God's way of saving men is to send out his servants to tell them the gospel, and that the church has been charged to go into all the world for that very purpose. But this is something that we must not forget. -J.I. Packer (Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God Pgs. 40-41)
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