In our desire to see our pre-believing friends and family come into relationship with Jesus, we have set the stage by affirming our love relationship with our Lord. It is impossible to be motivated to draw others to Jesus if we are not totally convinced that he is the most important part of our life and eternity. This heart for Jesus leads us to asking God to give us a broken heart for lost people. As he does, we identify three to five people who need Jesus and plead with God for their salvation. Every day we ask God to soften their hearts toward the Gospel message, to encourage and empower us to be ready to share the truth when we have the opportunity and to protect us from damaging our effectiveness by allowing compromise into our lives.
These are not steps that have a completion date, but an ongoing practice of the disciple making process. God will then open the door for us to have a spiritually significant conversation with those for whom we have been praying. One method of doing this is to follow the F.I.R.E. acronym we discussed last week. Over time, this will lead us to an opportunity to Explore some faith-based question with people.
It is here that we need to call on God’s Spirit for courage and wisdom. As has been discussed many times in the past, one cannot truly come to repentance by faith in Jesus until they clearly recognize they are eternally lost without him. It is our role to gently, in love, get people to a place of recognizing their sin and accepting that they can do nothing on their own to deal with their sin. “Evangelism Explosion”, an evangelistic program, uses two questions to start this conversation. They are, “Do you know for certain, if you died today, you would spend eternity in heaven?” The second is, “If you were to die today and stand before Jesus and he were to ask you, ‘Why should I let you into heaven?’ what would you say?” Although they are direct, they are asked in a relationship of care and trust that has been built over time. Also, they are asked knowing that we have the correct answers to offer. We will discuss this more in our next post.
A second method of building an understanding of the need for salvation is adapted from Go Tell Ministries that I referenced last week. It begins with a similarly challenging question. “Have you ever done anything that has gone against the expectations of God’s holiness? In other words, have you ever sinned?” Most people will agree that they have in some way. If they profess sinlessness, ask if they have every misled someone of told a lie. Ask if they have ever allowed an impure through to linger in their minds, etc. This leads to a discussion that God’s eternity is only for those who are spiritually perfect. If we have imperfection in our lives, we are already disqualified.
Next post we will discuss how to bring immediate hope out of what could be a very discouraging conversation. As uncomfortable as the truth of the consequences of our inability to please God on our own can be, it does lead to an understanding of the sufficiency of Christ. It is vital that before we go down the road of the questions and discussion above, two things have taken place. First, we have relationally earned the right to ask hard questions. And secondly, we are sensitive to the leading of God’s Holy Spirit that the time is right. Having said this, Satan will try to convince us that these two expectations have not been met and we will never get to the point of challenging those we love with the Gospel. We need to listen carefully to God’s Spirit.