The Heart of Evangelism

Sorry it's been a while.
I've been thinking a lot lately about evangelism, especially when seen from a Biblical perspective, ie. believing that salvation is all God's work. It seems to me that when I talk to people who believe this, it is used either in ignorance or as an excuse. By that I mean that people say that we don't need to think to hard on our evangelistic strategies because 'God does the saving'. This idea embraces God's sovereignty (right on!), however it stops short. It forgets that God not only orchestrates the ends, ie. the salvation of an individual, but He also ordains the means. And that means is us, the Church. We have been given the opportunity to be part of God's redemptive plan--an amazing thing! Faith comes by hearing (see Romans 10:17), and God has chosen to use us, the 'low and despised in the world' (see 1 Cor. 1:28) to be the messenger for the message He created. Faith unto salvation is a gift, given from God alone, and we have no part in creating faith. However, we have the gospel, which God uses to save, and our job is to declare it as accurately and fully as we can. Therefore, I would say that the details of what our evangelism is is indeed important, because what we say is important. We can't save anybody. God saves. Thus our goal is evangelism can't be to save people, because that is something outside of our control. What should our goal be, then? I would say it is to be faithful to God and His Word. To proclaim and magnify Him as He has revealed Himself in scripture. Now obviously this is a large undertaking, and won't generally be done in one sitting. My point, however, is that what we say in the time when we are first able to legitimately show Christ is important. In that time when we can share the gospel we should preach repentance and remission of sin, as Jesus commanded us to preach in His name (see Luke 24:47). We proclaim unashamedly man's separation from God, his state of sin and God's hatred of it, and then we proclaim the hope and the joy found in the cross, where God pours out His wrath on the Son to atone for the sins of the lost and draw them to Himself. That is the heart of the gospel; that is the heart of evangelism.