How to Share Christ with Someone (Part 3 of 4)

The Bible is clear about our condition.

We are lost and desperate. The Bible is also clear that there is only one Savior, Jesus Christ. That's why all of us as Christians are called and should feel compelled to share the Gospel with others. Today on Truth for Life, Alistair Begg takes us through the details of how we share our faith, including key points that must be included, regardless of our personal style or methodology. The six important guidelines in proceeding to present the claims of Jesus Christ—and we were talking expressly about that, with the background that we had come to understand in the framework of an opportunity to provide a concise and clear statement of the Gospel.

We said these, among other things, were important as guidelines. Strategy number one was be natural. Be dreadfully aware of any strange change in the tone of voice or in the vocabulary.

It does not set forward the purposes of God if all of a sudden we change personae as soon as we begin to move into a presentation of the Gospel. Be natural. Secondly, we said, be listening. Be listening. God has given us two ears and one mouth that we might hear more and say less, and if we learn to listen, we will be better able to speak. Otherwise, we may be giving answers to questions that people are not asking. Thirdly, be vulnerable. The preparedness to open our lives to people engenders the possibility that they may in turn open the door of their lives to us in expressing what represents genuine need for them.

And we mentioned that there may well be a number of friends whom we have who would be very keen for a chance to talk concerning the Lord Jesus, but somehow they just can't get close to us because we have built walls, a fortress deep and mighty that none may penetrate, quoting, of course, Paul Simon. So be vulnerable. Fourthly, be brave.

Bravery is a constituent part of sharing your faith. If you chicken out at the crucial moment, you'll never do it. You'll never sell vacuum cleaners. You'll never sell anything if, when it comes to the moment that the lady says, Give me the bottom line.

What are you on about? You'll lose it at that point. And when we come to the point where somebody says, Could you please just cut through it and explain to me the nature of the Gospel?

You'll need to be brave to launch in. Fifthly, be imaginative. Be imaginative. That is in the way in which we establish common ground and the way in which we endeavor to communicate with people. A canned approach will not necessarily help us unless we're able to take the contents of a can, as it were, and clothe it imaginatively for the circumstances which we face. And then, sixthly, we said it was going to be important to be direct. To be direct.

Recognizing that if we say we have no methodology, that is, in actual fact, a methodology in and of itself. And our notion of directness emerged from what we had been reading in John chapter 4, where Jesus addresses the lady directly over the whole question of her moral life and her relationship with these various men. He did it directly, he did it sensitively, and he did it in a way which was actually life transforming.

Now, we turn over the sheet, and we come to the statement—a clear and concise statement—of the good news may be given by using a number of different approaches. For example, I want to illustrate this evening, in a circumstance that happened to me, to recognize with you what we've been discovering all the way along, that God is sovereign in the way in which he deals in the affairs of our lives and in the affairs of those with whom we may share the gospel. It's years ago now, I think it's 74, and I have the privilege of coming to spend the time with this American family in Philadelphia, a girl that I was keenly interested in at the time, and I had to chase her across the Atlantic. And anyway, there I was, and I had arrived to spend some time.

I was going to work as a waiter in a restaurant, play a lot of tennis and swim a lot, and hopefully better my claim to the hand of this lady. And when I arrived, I was confronted with a number of situations, including the fact that my mother-in-law informed me that there was a young man that I should be witnessing to. And I said, well, thank you very much for the pointer.

I filed it away in the back of my mind and said I'd get around to it some time. I don't think that was a tremendously helpful reaction, and so she considered the possibility of engineering some situations in which I might be imaginative, be natural, be listening, be bold, etc. And I was one of the most reluctant prophets you could ever have met. Well, undaunted by the unwilling spirit presented to her in her future son-in-law, she arranged an encounter between myself and this young man, telling me that he was interested, or that Jehovah's Witnesses were interested in him, and so she had taken it upon herself to invite him over on an afternoon at two in the afternoon, I seem to recall. And at two in the afternoon, I would meet with this young man, and she had secured Walter Martin's tape from the kingdom of the cults on the Jehovah's Witnesses, and she thought it would be an excellent idea if I sat down with him and played this tape to him.

So the young man, who was at that time pumping gas at the Philadelphia airport, and today flies 737s for US Air, proceeded to show up as per his instructions. We sat down, she brought the tape recorder, we sat on the patio, we plugged it in the outside wall socket, and I breathed a sigh inside and said, here we go. Let's just go. Fine. Let's get it over with, and let's get on with life. So we plugged the tape in, and the two of us sat in total silence, listening to Walter Martin ream through the book of Revelation on the doctrine of the Trinity and the kingdom of the cults. It goes on for about 45 minutes.

Some of you will have listened to it, I know. And finally, he came to a halt, and we switched the tape recorder off. I turned to the fellow, and I said, Well, what do you think about that? And without a word of a lie, he said, his immediate reaction was, I think that I need to receive Jesus Christ as my personal Savior. You can't tell how mad I was. I mean, things were not going according to plan at all.

I didn't want to give anybody the luxury of finding this out. And we sat there and prayed a simple prayer, and Michael Bautier committed his life to Jesus Christ. Not as a result of a clever presentation, not as a result of a willing servant, as a result of the prayers of someone else and others, and the hand of God upon his life. And some morning when you're flying up and down the East Coast, and someone comes on and says, This is Captain Bautier, you can shout out, Hey, I heard about you.

And you can run forward to the door, and they'll chain you down. But I use that as an introduction tonight, because what I'm about to say is about methodology, and I want dreadfully to underscore the fact that when we are least expecting it, least planning on it, least ready for it, least willing to do it, God may choose to intervene and surprise us despite ourselves. We are not the key. He simply gives us the privilege of being a part of what he chooses to do. Now, to these possible examples, and that incidentally was an example of a different kind, but let me give to you two fourfold statements of how we might go about presenting the gospel. Now, in doing so, I'm encouraged to continue with this, because somebody came to me after the last time, and they said, I'm looking forward to you going on with this, because up until this day, although I am a Christian and have sought to share my faith, all I'm ever able to do is say, I can only tell you what happened to me. And, said the individual, the response of my friends and neighbors largely is, Oh, that's very interesting.

And somehow, said the individual, I can't seem to penetrate beyond that at all. I share my faith. They reply, Oh, I'm interested to hear that you're into that. I'm not into that.

You're into that. End of conversation. And the question of the individual was, how do we cut through that and share with people in such a way that they might realize that this is not some kind of existential trip that we're sharing, but is actually the truth of the gospel of Jesus Christ? Well, these are certainly not foolproof methodologies, but here is the first of a fourfold outline that we might use, and we're jumping into it where we left last time. Beginning, first of all, by addressing the human condition. The human condition. That is, starting from where we are. Perhaps in the conversation acknowledging the front page of the newspaper, or the recent magazine that we found lying around, or if it's in the doctor's waiting room, jumping and launching off what we've seen before us, and saying to the individual, you know, look at the circumstances, those of loneliness and fear, of greed, of hate.

Listen to the songs of our generation of rebellion and of disillusionment. Look at the evidences around us of fractured families, of teenage destruction, of childcare abuse, and of cruelty. And then to say, what do you think is a viable explanation of our human condition?

Why do you think we're in the circumstances we are? Now, that may yield a number of reactions, and it's important for us to listen to what the people say. Not to be ready to jump onto our next point where we can go, aha, good, but not the answer I was looking for, boom, but rather genuinely listening, and perhaps spending some time interacting on the basis of that individual's analysis.

Recognizing that they are more than likely very honest in their response, and probably not superficial at all. So we would move from a question of condition, and then say, well, you know, it's difficult, isn't it, just to find a diagnosis, and diagnosis is the second heading. But the Bible, we might say, provides a diagnosis for the human condition. We must beware of clichés, but you've already identified one of mine, which is simply this, that the heart of the human problem is the problem of the human heart.

I may not say that to somebody every time, but I want to get to it every time. And so that when we talk about the Bible's diagnosis, we want to have our Bibles open before us, and we want to be able to turn people to verses in our Bibles. Some of you learned the Roman road, and some of you haven't a clue what it is. But essentially, all that it was was a number of verses in the book of Romans that would help us to explain to people what the situation is concerning the human cognition and God's diagnosis of it. And we might go into Romans chapter 1 and explain that God's wrath is being revealed from heaven, verse 18, against all the godlessness and wickedness of men.

That, of course, may get us into an amazing conversation at that point, and we should be ready for it. But where we want to head is to Romans chapter 3 and verse 23. And open our New Testaments and show the individuals, especially if we can sit side by side, show them these words. For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.

All have sinned. That removes it from the realm of me and you into the realm of all. And we then are able to say, the diagnosis which Scripture gives for the human condition is not ultimately about economics.

It's not ultimately about politics, because we might be on a university campus somewhere, dealing with somebody who is into who knows what. It's not ultimately about religion, because we may be dealing with somebody who's into Zen Buddhism or whatever it might be. But it is ultimately about the fact that the Bible says sin is the essence of our human problem. What is sin? Sin is missing the mark. God has set a standard, and we don't hit the bullseye. Sin is parking on God's double yellow lines. There are things he said that we should leave alone, and we've decided just to engage in them.

There are things that he said that we might do, and we've decided not to bother with them. And sin is also blotting the page of our lives. And we were able to say to the person, you know, I think if we're honest, our human experience confirms what the Bible teaches. And it would be an interesting day if you found yourself talking to someone who indicated that they had never sinned.

And of course, it wouldn't be too difficult to get them to, and then of course you would be able to speak on the basis of the sin that they had just most recently committed. But the diagnosis is this, that man's alienation from God is the root of the human tragedy. Now, we would want to go on then to turn from Romans 3.23 to Romans 6.23, still under diagnosis, and point out to our friends that sin brings consequences.

Romans 6.23, for the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord. And we might explain way back in what we discovered in Genesis 3 in the Garden of Eden that God had spoken to Adam and Eve and had told them, You mustn't eat of the tree of the knowledge of good or evil, for the day that you eat of that tree you will surely die. And we'll say to them, But Adam and Eve didn't instantaneously die, at least not physically.

But what entered into the world was spiritual death. And so we would explain on the basis of Scripture that men and women, like you and like me, the Bible diagnoses as dead men. Now, obviously, and all through this, but I want just as an aside to clarify it, we recognize that only God can bring about conviction of sin. And we've seen that in our earlier studies. And that conviction of sin is far more than merely an acknowledgment that sin exists. People may be prepared to acknowledge the existence of sin without ever themselves being convicted of their own condition.

So the condition is as agreed upon. The diagnosis brings us to sin. Thirdly, we might speak about the remedy. What is the remedy?

Is there an answer to this? And again, we would take our Bibles and we would turn them to an Old Testament picture. We might say to the individual, I don't know if you ever have read the Old Testament prophets, some of the stuff is really hard to understand, but every so often there's something in it that just hits you right between the eyes. Let me share one of these hit-you-between-the-eyes verses. And then we turn them to Isaiah 53 verse 6.

And we would say, Look, this is a pictorial explanation of our human condition, of the diagnosis we've just agreed upon. This is what it says, We all like sheep have gone astray. Each of us has turned to his own way, and the LORD has laid on him the iniquity of us all.

If the person is alert and is interested and is following the conversation, they're going to almost inevitably say, And who is he? Who is the him? You're going to answer, Well, I'm glad you asked, because the he is Jesus. I wonder, have you ever thought about Jesus? Well, isn't he just a prophet?

Isn't he just one along a line on a continuum of religious leaders, depending on their level of ability? What are we going to do? Well, we're going to open our Bibles. We're going to say, You know what? You remember the Christmas stories?

Sure you do. You've heard them so many times. And you'll turn with them. And you'll say, You know what? For example, in Matthew's Gospel, in chapter 1 and verse 21, we read these words concerning Jesus, that Mary will give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus because he will save his people from their sins.

We've said things are messed up. We've said the Bible says the problem is sin, that it's a disease that we can't shake, that we need somebody to shake it for us. The Old Testament prophets said that there was one who would come who could do just that, and here we discover in Matthew's Gospel that the very name Jesus means Savior of our sins.

So in other words, for us to begin to think of Jesus simply as a good man or a hero or a kind of religious leader, somebody that ranks up there with some of the others, Gandhi and the likes, is an interesting notion, but it doesn't follow the biblical record. And then we might go on from there and direct them from Christmas to Easter. Say, You probably know the Easter story as well. Do you remember that cry of Jesus from the cross?

And we turn to it. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? Another person might say, No, I don't remember the cry.

You're going to have to tell them about it. They might say, Yeah, I do remember that. I never understood it. What was going on there anyway? Why was Jesus shouting like that? And you're going to say, I'm glad you asked. Because he was shouting like that, because in that moment, he was bearing the penalty for your sin and for mine. The hell that we deserve, the judgment that we might face, the condemnation that is upon our lives, Jesus Christ bore when he died upon the cross. By this time, the people are going to be saying, You know, you are bringing some strange teachings to my ears. You're going to say, Well, wait a minute, I just got another one for you.

Let me give you the fourth. Because not only do we have a human condition that is in need of explanation, not only does the Bible give us a diagnosis of the problem, namely sin, not only does the Bible say, But there is a remedy in Jesus. But the Bible also says that in order for us to grasp this in its fullness, we must personally respond to God's offer to us in Jesus Christ.

In other words, that his solution is not mechanical, nor is it impersonal. That forgiveness is not conferred upon us automatically. But quite straightforwardly, there are steps involved in coming to have our sin forgiven.

Let me tell you what they are. Number one, you need to admit that in God's sight you are a helpless sinner. Secondly, we must believe that Jesus Christ died on the cross to be the very Savior that we've just admitted that we need. And thirdly, I must accept by faith the forgiveness and cleansing that his death has made available to me.

You're listening to Alistair Begg on Truth for Life. We'll hear more about what needs to be included as we share our faith tomorrow. I hope this study on evangelism is motivating you to be proactive. I hope you have intentionally identified a friend or a neighbor or a co-worker, maybe even a family member, with whom you want to have a deeper conversation about Jesus. And to help you with that, we want to encourage you to request a copy of a book called Before You Share Your Faith. Today is the last day for you to request this book.

This was specifically selected to go along with our current series. In addition, to the instruction you've received from Alistair, this book provides five suggestions that can help you lay out a plan for sharing your faith. Request your copy of Before You Share Your Faith today when you donate to support the teaching ministry of Truth for Life. That's at truthforlife.org slash donate, or you can call us at 888-588-7884. Now, another helpful tool for you to have on hand as you talk to others about your faith is a pamphlet that explains God's plan of salvation.

It's called The Story. This is a great, easy-to-read booklet. It's a perfect icebreaker to share with a friend or a neighbor as an introduction to the Gospel. The booklets come in packs of 10 for just $5, or if you have a large group in mind, there's a 20-pack for $10 so that you can be ready to share the Gospel whenever the opportunity presents itself. Look for the booklets called The Story, along with other helpful resources when you go to truthforlife.org slash evangelism. By the way, there's an animated version of the booklet that you can share with others for free. You'll find that video on our website at truthforlife.org slash the story.

I'm Bob Lapine. Becoming a Christian is not supposed to be easy. In fact, tomorrow Alistair teaches us that we need to be sure people count the cost of following Jesus. The Bible teaching of Alistair Begg is furnished by Truth for Life, where the Learning is for Living.