Evangelism - The Gospel In Your Life
February 6, 2022 Sunday Evening Study

We studied last week the biblical process for being saved which, in a nutshell, is understanding our condition and need for salvation, a personal invitation to accept forgiveness and the lordship of Christ, and the promises that come with being saved. In the weeks approaching last week, we talked about putting together your own witness - your own story of saving grace. We talked about how you can properly engage conversations and break down barriers - exposing cracks in another’s belief system. The whole point of all the conversation and pre-evangelism is to get to the point where you can share.

Tonight we talk about the marriage of the gospel message with our own story. Believe it or not, you do not have to have a harrowing story of drug abuse or prostitution or grand larceny to have an engaging story - your story is engaging because it is personal, and it is presented in a way in which people can identify with you. Understanding the gospel truth, and even believing it is not enough to be saved - a person must accept it - live it - choose it, and that’s where your experience comes in. 

When a person goes through a conversion experience, there are two components to that experience - repentance and faith. Faith entails placing our full trust in Christ for everything - this is not just believing what the Bible says - it is placing our dependence upon him for our needs, for our support, and for our salvation. It is trusting in His direction - His instructions - and that entails obedience to His will. Let me be clear - this is not to say that our obedience saves us, but our saving faith must include obedience if we are really trusting His will.

Yet with this faith comes repentance. We don’t get to just say we are sorry and be saved from the bondage of sin. Repentance is a heartfelt sorrow for sin, a renouncing of it, and a sincere commitment to forsake it and walk in obedience to Christ. These two things - faith and repentance - must both be present to be saved, to truly accept Christ. Peter says it in Acts 2 after Pentecost, when those who have been moved by the Spirit ask what they must do - “Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins.” Acts 2:37-38

The authors of the New Testament understood so well that genuine repentance and genuine faith had to go together that they often mentioned repentance or faith alone as the means to salvation with the understanding that the other be included, because turning from sins in a genuine way is impossible without a genuine turning to God.

So when we are in the process of evangelism, the idea is to help lead a person to repentance and faith. As we all well know, presentation of the facts as we know them is not going to convince everybody - in fact it will convince very few in our skeptical post-modern society. These facts - the truth of the gospel, they become real to other people when they are shown in our lives. So now we tell your gospel story - the gospel and your life.

If we are to focus on repentance, this is where your story begins. No matter where any of us come from, we all begin lost to sin. For some, that state of being lost appears to be much deeper, much more serious, much darker than others. And this leads us to the lie that our story is not exciting enough to make a difference in the lives of another. The fact of the matter is that whether you are the ex-mafia hitman I spoke of a few weeks ago or whether you accepted Christ when you were 6 years old - you have lived this life in a way that will identify with other people. For that matter, my most effective testimony was not my conversion - it was after I was saved and needed to be brought back to Christ.

So we begin by framing what lostness - life without Christ - means in your life. Maybe you have never had much of a dark valley period in your life, and that is not bad. I can guarantee you have experienced the pain of seeing someone you love go through that period. I can guarantee you have had to place your trust in Christ to handle something that every part of you wanted to avoid, to flee from, to ignore. Your story needs to show the stark difference between a life bound by sin and a life abundant in Christ. It begins with sin, and it requires that you get personal.

Every time we deal with tragedy, difficulty, heartbreak, stress, sadness - anything, it adds to our story. These things which grow our character become the very things that help us to relate to the brokenness of our unsaved loved onesWhen someone tells me their story of domestic violence - I have no experience in that area. But I do understand betrayal, I understand the feeling that no place and no person is safe. I am not there to solve their specific problem, but to show them how Christ solved mine.

Repentance is a hard sell. Sin is fun, sin is gratifying. Sin makes us feel good much of the time. People do not want to leave their sin - this is how addiction starts. Even when the cost outweighs the payoff - it’s too late, at least in our minds. We need to share the pain and destruction that sin has wrought in our lives and those of our loved ones so that we can show the glory of the salvation that comes with repentance and faith.

Yet even as we share the death of sin in our lives - the scars and the trail of tears that sin has left in our past, we have to balance that with the change that comes with faith and repentance. We need to show the fulfillment of forgiveness, the community of the body of Christ - the benefits of adoption into Christ’s family. In fact, we are going to spend a couple weeks here discussing that very thing - being members of God’s family.

Our lives are the perfect example of redemption. Once we were dead to sin, now we are alive in Christ. We can quote that verse to people, or we can display its meaning by telling of our own brokenness and the way God lifted us from that when we left the sin behind and placed our trust in Jesus to save us - to handle our problems going forward. 

Keep this in mind - we discussed this in the beginning of this course. There is a way in which you can relate to the person with whom you are speaking. You may have discovered that through conversations, though you may not. A person knows when someone is being personal and genuine with them by sharing stories about themselves - especially if they are stories that do not paint you in the best light. That vulnerability you display by sharing extends a trust to them that they may not experience anywhere else, and will automatically begin to cause them to trust as well. The more real you get with someone, the more real they will get with you.

Perhaps the most famous gospel song of all times tells this story - Amazing grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me. I once was lost but now am found - was blind but now I see. That is a story - a story of a person who, without the truth of the gospel of grace, would not be who they are now writing those words. Positive change in one person’s life means that similar change is possible in someone else’s - weight loss companies bank off of that very idea - that’s why they show before and after photos. The before photos are not flattering, and the person always looks defeated. But the after photo is like a completely different person - that is how we tell our story.

Our job as evangelists is clear - we are to live as reflections of Christ’s image. That means that our evangelical efforts are in every part of our lives. We talk with people, going in with the understanding that all of us need Jesus, and we work to that end by connecting with people so that we can share - the gospel call wrapped up in our own story. In this way we proclaim, we witness, and we make His name famous.

This is a worthy job that does far more in this life than we realize.

Isaiah 61:1-3 reads “The Spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me to bring good news to the poor; he has sent me to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to those who are bound; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn; to grant to those who mourn in Zion— to give them a beautiful headdress instead of ashes, the oil of gladness instead of mourning, the garment of praise instead of a faint spirit; that they may be called oaks of righteousness, the planting of the Lord, that he may be glorified.”