3 Ways to Prepare for Gospel Conversations

Last night at APEX we kicked off God Questions. These questions carry such relevance for today because we live in such a pluralistic society where ‘all roads lead to God’. To claim you have the pulse on absolute truth in our culture is like saying The Pittsburgh Stealers are a ‘wrong’ football team or Starbucks coffee is demonic.

When it comes to evangelism isn’t it so much easier to be quiet – to keep your faith to yourself? We talk about ‘friendship evangelism’ but somehow never quite get to the ‘evangelism’ part.

The truth is that Christianity stands alone because of the person of Jesus Christ. While other religions show the path to ‘salvation’ or ‘enlightenment’ through good works, Jesus claims to be the Way of salvation. No one else has ever claimed that.

Here are 3 Ways to Prepare for Gospel Conversations that I shared last night:

• LEARN – many Christians don’t know what they believe and why they believe it. Make sure you are ever deepening your knowledge of what your life is built upon so you can answer those who have questions.
• LOVE – Is your passion for Jesus contagious? Is there deep feeling or merely facts? Nothing rubs off on others more than passion.
• LISTEN – too often we’ve viewed evangelism as the “Jesus is coming back in 5 minutes, I need to get you saved so please sign this card so that I can feel good about myself” approach. It’s a huge turn off to people of different faiths if you don’t listen and hear their heart before you speak about yours. See everyone you come in contact with as ‘interesting’ and get to know them for who they are. This will open their hearts to your message because you are friendly and they feel you care about them and they can trust you.

I’ll add another one that doesn’t start with an ‘L’. Pray. Trust the Holy Spirit to do supernatural things through you. Don’t just think about it. Go.

DS