For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. --Romans 1:16
It has become fairly easy for me to bring up the things of God with just about any lost person, and to wonder aloud over the amazing truths of the Bible. I find it much more difficult to share the Gospel with him or her, because I’m in effect confronting him with the only choice that matters in this life: heaven or hell.
Yet tell him we must, if we want to obey the Lord. And we can’t put it off indefinitely; we don’t know that we’ll ever see him again (something that has become abundantly clear to me over 13 years of visiting nursing home residents).
I’ve taken James Kennedy’s Evangelism Explosion class at church, and have studied the Way of the Master techniques taught by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron -- they’re each excellent for specific situations. But whatever the specific approach, we need to convey the basics:
- We’re all sinners, having spent our lives rebelling against a perfectly holy and perfectly just God and deserving death – which means eternal punishment in hell.
- Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins.
- Eternal life is a free gift of God; we don’t deserve it and we can’t earn it.
- To receive this gift, we must repent (turn from our sins) and trust in His sacrifice to have covered our sins – in short, to rest assured that “Jesus paid it all.”
What if we fail to share the gospel with someone? Well, I suppose the Lord will send in someone else to do this all-important job … and then we can explain to Him later why we found it so difficult to talk about His supreme sacrifice, why we thought there was anything more important than bringing Him what one preacher so poignantly called "the reward of His suffering.”