Page 76 - Discipleship Ministries Student E-Book

9.3 Sharing your faith with the Lost.

To be able to share the Gospel with someone, you must first open the conversation to
spiritual things. There are a variety of ways you can bring the subject of your
conversation to introduce the Gospel.

Lifeway Press has published a short pamphlet entitled, Share Jesus without Fear. They
suggest opening the conversation with five questions:

1. Do you have any kind of spiritual belief?
2. To you, who is Jesus?
3. Do you believe there are a heaven and a hell?
4. If you died right now, where would you go?
5. If what you believe were not true, would you want to know it?

Based on the response of party, they suggest that if a person says, “Yes” to the last question, open your
Bible and proceed with the Gospel presentation. If the person responds with a “no” answer, then do
nothing, and move on in your conversation.

Navigators International suggests you start your conversation by sharing your testimony. They call it,
“Telling His Story by Telling Yours.” This may be effective in some cases, but it has been this author’s
experience that the Mormons have a testimony of how the church changed their lives, and the
Jehovah’s Witnesses will claim that the Kingdom Hall changed their lives. And some people are very
happy with the way their lives are going, and really don’t care to alter their course. So, this approach
may not be as effective as others.

God can give you a variety of ways to open a conversation about spiritual things. It could come from a
holiday, such as Christmas or Easter, asking the person why the holiday is significant. It could come from
a death in their family, talking about life after death. If you ask God, He will give you multiple
opportunities to begin to share the Gospel with the lost!

Living Waters Ministry has published a short tract which begins with the question, “Are you a good
person?” When asked, most people will respond with, “I hope so” or “I think so”, or “I try to be.” From
this one question, you can then take the person into our first important aspect of the Gospel.

1. You have sinned against God. In sharing the Gospel with a lost person, the first and foremost topic
is sin, for unless the person knows he has sinned against the Creator, he has no real need for a Savior
from sin. And he will certainly not repent from that sin and turn to Jesus Christ as his Savior! So, the
first aspect of sharing the Gospel is to begin talking about personal sin.

Sin is rebellion against God. It is disobedience in doing things God has commanded us not to do, or in
not doing the things He has commanded us to do. It is doing the opposite of what God declares. Every
person is totally guilty of disobedience. So our first task is to bring the person to an admission that they
are a sinner in rebellion against God.

Living Waters Ministry takes a good approach to this step. In Galatians 3: 24-25, the Bible says that the
“law is a schoolmaster to bring us to Christ.” (KJV)

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