Four Different Approaches

For the past few weeks, we have been talking about missions and evangelism.

You’ve heard about some of the things the church has been doing during the past year or so to reach out to the community with the love of Christ.

You’ve heard about the Great Commission, Jesus’ command that His followers go into all the world and make disciples.

You’ve heard about Philip the Evangelist, who was taken by the Holy Spirit from a fruitful ministry in Samaria to go and share the gospel with an Ethiopian eunuch.

You’ve heard two versions of the end of the story from the Gospel of Mark about the women who visited Jesus’ empty tomb and were told by an angel to go and let others know that Jesus had risen from the dead, just as He had said He would.

And you’ve heard how Christians are called to live in the tension of frustration with the world’s brokenness and the hope — the confident assurance — that Jesus will one day make all things new.

We are called to be people who work in the power of the Holy Spirit to fix the broken things, while yet proclaiming our great hope to a world that desperately needs it.

Each one of those messages has included some version — whether short or long — of the gospel message.

I’ve done that for two reasons: First, I never know who is going to be here from one week to the next, and I do not know with certainty the spiritual situation of any of you who are here.

It might be that someone who is here today is hearing the gospel for the first time ever. Or it might be that someone who has been in church all their life finally gets it — finally finds their heart softened — and is led by that message to a saving faith in Jesus Christ.

The second reason I have been so intentional about sharing gospel messages — especially in this series on missions and evangelism — is that I have wanted you who already are followers of Christ to hear the great variety of ways we have to share the good news.

There is no one formula for sharing the good news of Jesus Christ, and, in fact, what I’m going to argue today is that a formulaic approach to sharing the gospel is probably the worst way to go about doing it.

But there are some key points that every gospel presentation should include, so let me cover them now.

We are all sinners. Every one of us was made in God’s image, which means we were made to be like Him. He is perfect and holy and righteous and loving. But we are broken and profane and hurtful and selfish. We might not be as bad as we could possibly be, but our selfishness — our self-centeredness and self-absorption and self-gratification — bleed into everything we do and say. And even when we do good things, we tend to have personal agendas, whether consciously or unconsciously. And in all these things, we fall short of being the people God made us to be.

There is a price that must be paid for our sins against God. The Bible tells us that price is death. Now, everybody dies, and that’s how we know that sin still reigns in this world. If there were no sin, there would be no death. But when the Bible talks about death, it’s not just talking about physical death. It’s also talking about what I’ll call spiritual death. That’s separation from the God who made us all to be in fellowship with Him. He is perfect and holy, and sinners have no standing before Him. So we are all spiritually dead in relation to God.

There is nothing any one of us can do to redeem ourselves. The Bible tells us we are slaves to sin. We serve sin, whether we acknowledge it or not. And the cost of just one sin — and all of us have committed far more than just one sin — is far greater than anything we could ever repay. We can never buy our way out of our enslavement to sin with any amount of good deeds. We are, therefore, stuck in our enslavement. We have a problem that we cannot solve on our own.

But God loves us so much that, from before the beginning of the world, He had a plan to redeem us — to pay for our release Himself in the person of His unique and eternal Son, Jesus Christ. Jesus came to earth, miraculously born of a virgin, and lived a life free of sin. And then He died on a cross, taking upon Himself the sins of the world and their punishment — physical and spiritual death — so that we who believe in Him could be redeemed. We could be rescued from our enslavement to sin, and we could be delivered from the penalty of spiritual death and receive the gift of eternal life — everlasting life the way it was meant to be in perfect fellowship with God. The innocent died for the guilty. Jesus lived a perfectly righteous life on our behalf, and then He died on our behalf.

God’s promise that you can have eternal life can be yours. It can be yours if you put your faith in God’s Son, Jesus, as your only way of being reconciled to God — if you will admit that you are a sinner, believe in Jesus, and follow Him in faith.

That’s it. That’s the gospel message in about 500 words, about four minutes of talking. And much of that was explanation. In fact, it could be boiled down to much less.

But most of you have been in church for a long time. Most of you have heard this message so many times and in so many ways that you should be able to tell it in your own words in your sleep by now.

So why haven’t you done so? Why is it that when I started this series and suggested that some of you don’t share the gospel because you’re afraid you don’t know what to say, I looked around and saw heads nodding up and down around the room?

Most of you know the gospel message, but I imagine that some of you are afraid to share it because you think you have to do it in a certain way.

As I said, I think that having a boilerplate gospel presentation to give to whomever you come across is actually the least effective way to do it.

Each one of us has been uniquely designed by God with unique talents, personalities, temperaments, and backgrounds, and every person we meet has their own unique talents, personalities, temperaments, and backgrounds.

Why would you expect that the way you talk to others about Jesus would be the same way that I do? Why would we expect that the way we should talk about Jesus would be the same from one person we meet to the next?

People don’t want to hear a rehearsed speech. People want you to connect with them and show them that YOU hear THEM before you launch into your pitch. People want to be seen as people and not projects, people and not boxes to be checked.

Usually — not all the time, but usually — this means getting to know them a bit first, listening more than you speak, finding out what makes them unique, taking the time to get to know what’s going on in their lives.

And each of you is uniquely qualified to do these things. Each of you is wired uniquely, and the differences among us actually give us MORE opportunities to share the gospel.

In November, Annette and I will have been married for 20 years. Clearly, this is a woman who needs your prayers.

Anybody who has been married for more than 24 hours can tell you that marriage offers you constant opportunities to learn things about your spouse and about yourself.

In fact, one of the purposes of Christian marriage is for two people joined in matrimony and in Christ to help one another become more like Jesus. And, truth be told, sometimes this is a painful process.

One thing it took me a very long time to understand about Annette and myself is that we tend to look at things from opposite sides.

If there are two ways to do something, you can almost be guaranteed that we will be apt to do that thing in two different ways.

Nowhere is this more clear than in a car in a parking lot.

I’ll be thinking, “Hey, let me find a spot where that I can drive through and position her door closest to where we are going.”

Meanwhile, she’s asking, “Why did you pass that spot? Why don’t you just park there?” She wants to get parked and get into the store or whatever; I want to park in a particular way that I think serves her.

Who’s right? Who’s wrong?

Neither of us, of course. We just do things differently.

It took me a long time to understand that we approach problems differently and to recognize that we can both be right in our approaches, and the truth is that we still get frustrated with one another sometimes.

Each of us still has a tendency to think that our way is the right way. But, as we have grown closer to one another and as we have endeavored to become more like Jesus, most of the arguments over this sort of thing have subsided.

In the same vein, the apostles Peter and Paul were two very different people, and they had two very different approaches to sharing the gospel.

Peter was direct. He was bold. He got to the point. This is what you might expect from someone who had spent his life as a fisherman.

Paul often took an intellectual approach that grew out of his long education under the Rabbi Gamaliel. He reasoned from the Scriptures and crafted long, complex arguments to prove that Jesus is the promised Messiah.

Which was the right approach? Well, they were both right. The approaches they used fit them, and they fit the people they were talking to.

Let me give you a few other examples from Scripture.

Remember the man who had been blind from birth that Jesus healed? Jesus spat on the ground, made some clay from the spittle, rubbed it onto the man’s eyes, and told him to go and wash in the pool of Siloam.

When the man had been healed, the Pharisees asked how this had happened. The man didn’t know much theology, but he knew his personal testimony. So he said, “One thing I know; once I was blind and now I see.”

Your testimony as a Christian can be a powerful witnessing tool.

Most of you have heard my testimony, and I’m not going to take the time to share it all here today, but it’s the story of a broken man on the way to a broken marriage, a man whom God pulled from the mirey clay and set his feet upon a rock.

It’s a story of a guy who looked everywhere for real meaning in life and couldn’t find it anywhere until he discovered it in Jesus.

Maybe you have a similar story. Maybe your story is different. I hope it is.

Perhaps you were raised in the church and made the decision to follow Jesus early in life. Perhaps it’s the story of someone who has a lifetime of experience with God’s faithfulness.

That’s a powerful story to tell, and it’s a story that might resonate with all the people who have discovered that they can’t have faith in anything or anybody, because everybody has proved unfaithful.

Be ready to tell your story. Ask people about their stories, and listen to them as they tell you, and you may well find that there’s something in your own story that will resonate with them, something that points them to the hope you have in the midst of your frustration with the world’s brokenness.

Then, there’s the example of the Samaritan woman. She met Jesus at the well, and in the midst of a theological debate with Him, He told her something He could only have known by His divine power.

Dropping her jug at the well, she ran back into the town, shouting, “Come and see this man who told me everything I ever did!”

She had an invitational approach. She invited others to come and see Jesus and experience His divine wisdom and love.

Can you invite someone to come and meet Jesus? Can you invite someone to come to church with you? Promise to take them to breakfast beforehand or to lunch afterward. You’d be amazed how often people will say “yes” to such an offer.

In all my time as a lost and broken man, my grandmother never stopped praying for me. And in all that time, she never stopped inviting me to join her at church.

And she was instrumental in my finally coming to faith. As I saw her godliness, as I saw her peace and hope, and as I heard the gospel, seeds were planted that one day bore the fruit of my salvation.

Then, there’s the example of Matthew, the tax collector, one of Jesus’ 12 disciples.

Jesus found Matthew sitting in his tax booth, and He said, “Follow me,” and Matthew left everything behind to do just that.

And then, he gave a big banquet and invited all his tax-collector friends to join him for the banquet at his house so they could meet Jesus, too.

Matthew had a relational or interpersonal approach to sharing the gospel. He relied on the friendships and relationships he had with these men to give him the opportunity to share Jesus. This was friendship evangelism.

Notice that Matthew didn’t just invite people off the street whom he didn’t know. He chose people with whom he’d already built relationships — people whose stories he knew and people who knew his own story.

If you are a Christian, your friends and family are some of the most fertile ground for sharing the gospel.

And then there’s the service approach, which we see in the story of a woman named Dorcas.

We hear about Dorcas in the Book of Acts, and what Luke writes about her is that she made clothes for the widows and helped the poor in her town of Joppa.

Luke wrote that she did many abundant good deeds and showed kindness to many, all in the name of Jesus, and the widows of her town wept in mourning for her when she died.

But Peter brought her back to life. It was a great miracle that attested to the power of Jesus’ name, but my point here today is that Dorcas was known throughout that community for being one who served others in the name of the Lord.

I think it’s likely that she also told people her testimony — that she shared her salvation story with them. I think she probably took a relational approach to sharing Jesus with friends and family and with the people for whom she made clothes. I think she probably invited people to come and learn more about Jesus.

But what Luke concentrates on is her service. She served the Lord by serving others, and she made sure they knew she did it all in the name of Jesus.

This is the very heart of what this church has been doing through its Missions and Evangelism outreach.

Whether we’re making muffins for the fire department or packing treat bags for teachers or handing out food for Thanksgiving dinners or providing an outdoor movie and dinner for Spanish-speaking residents of Suffolk, we make sure that the people we are serving know that we are doing all this in the name of Jesus and for His glory. We make sure that they know we are loving them, because Jesus loves them and because He loves us.

I don’t know which approach to sharing the gospel will be the best fit for you. Each of you is wired differently, and each person you meet might require a different approach.

You might find that at some point you will use all of these approaches. That’s been my own experience.

But what I do know is this: Throughout Scripture, we see people who have been transformed by the good news of a savior who offers them eternal life, and they respond by sharing that good news with someone else.

There is no place in Scripture where we see someone saved by God’s grace, through faith in Jesus, who then keeps that blessing to himself or herself.

Each of us who has followed Jesus in faith has been called to be Philip the Evangelist to someone. Each of us has been called to be the blind man who was healed to someone. Each of us has been called to be the Samaritan woman to someone. Each of us has been called to be Matthew to someone. Each of us has been called to be Dorcas to someone.

Which of those approaches to sharing the gospel was the right one? They all were. Now, which one is the right approach for you?

Now, before we pray, I want to call attention to something that some of you may have noticed about today’s sermon.

I did something today that I have never done and something that I may never do again, but I did it intentionally.

You may have noticed that I didn’t quote a single verse of Scripture to you today. It was an uncomfortable thing for me to do as a minister of the Word of God.

But I did this intentionally, because I wanted to answer the final fear that I suspect some of you might have about sharing the gospel — the fear of not quoting Scripture well or of not knowing the right verse for the occasion.

Everything that I’ve said today has its basis in Scripture, but I didn’t need my Bible or a bunch of memorized verses to tell you the gospel or to talk about how to share the gospel.

If you know the gospel — and most of you should know it by now — then you know what you need to know to tell people about Jesus. If you know what He did for you, that’s all you need to tell them your testimony.

Of course, you’d want to follow up with Scripture if they express interest in knowing more, and I’d never want to leave someone who had expressed that interest without showing them that I had not simply made all this up.

I’d want to get together with them and open up a Bible and show them the plan of salvation or at least bring them to a church where I knew they would hear it.

Understand that I am by no means minimizing the importance of the Bible. It’s God’s word, and it’s special and holy, and it should be something that we value greatly — something whose value we demonstrate by spending regular time studying it.

But you don’t have to have your Bible with you to tell someone about the Savior who died for their sins. You don’t have to have your Bible with you to tell someone about the Jesus who saved you and who can do the same for them.

What you must have is a willingness to obey Him when He says, “Go and tell others.”

What you must have is a compassion for the lost that makes you hurt in the knowledge that they will never know the peace, the joy, and the hope that you have in Christ.

Go and tell someone. Go and tell.