Read and Grow

As Christians, we’re all aware of the Great Commission. When Jesus stood on that mountain top and said, “Go into all the world and make disciples.” Often that can feel like it’s easier said than done. If you want to share Jesus but it feels awkward and contrived, the first step is to understand that sharing Jesus needs to come from a place of relationship with Him. A relationship that’s honest and intimate.

Do you desire a closer relationship with God, but sometimes feel distant and disconnected?

Just like any relationship, nurturing your bond with God requires care, attention, and intentional practices. God has given many practices and rhythms to help you cultivate that relationship with Him. These practices are the heartbeat of the Christian faith and build a relationship with Jesus from which evangelism flows naturally.

Here are 5 practices that you can start today:

1. Read your Bible

The Bible is God’s love letter, instruction manual, and manifesto all in one. Its contents and teachings are God-breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16). In other words, the Bible is showing you the goodness of God, who He is and who you are to Him, and instructing you how to live a good life. So start reading the Bible today. If it seems daunting, just start with 15 minutes a day reading it and you’ll start feeling closer to God.

2. Pray

Prayer is how you communicate with God. You’re not bothering God when you pray; He loves it. It’s like a sweet aroma to Him (Psalm 141:2). And if you’re not sure what to say don’t worry, the Holy Spirit will intercede for you (Romans 8:26-27). As you read your Bible, include some time for prayer too. There are a bunch of different ways to pray: spoken prayers, journaling, praying the Psalms, praying for other people, silence and solitude, just to name a few.

3. Worship

Worship is more than just singing at church or a style of music on Spotify. Everything we do is designed to be worship to God. The way you treat strangers can be worship, the effort you put into your study or work can be worship, the way you love your family can be worship.

In the same way that God has given us music to worship Him (Psalm 33:1-4), He has given us our lives to worship Him (Romans 12:1). So, why not do both! Create a worship playlist for your morning commute or for your gym workout and choose songs which speak of God’s greatness. Also, endeavour to live your life in a way that pleases God. This will take time (a life-time, in fact), but you will feel closer to God, because it’s literally what He created you for.

4. Join a church community

Church is so dear to Jesus’s heart that He calls it His bride (Revelation 21:9-11). It is designed by God to help you–a community to support and encourage each other in the good way and in glorifying Jesus (Hebrews 10:24-25). Attending a church service is a great start but it’s when you get involved in the life of the church and in the community of fellow Christians that you begin to become more like Jesus. Find a healthy church, make deep friends and be involved in their lives. If you have trouble making friends (people can be cliquey sometimes) ask the pastor to help, or find a church where you connect easily.

5. Talk to people about Jesus

Jesus told His disciples to go out and share the story of Jesus to the whole world (Matthew 28:18-20). The foundation of growing your relationship with Jesus is cultivating obedience to Him. This means you’re a disciple of Jesus, and so you are called to share the Gospel with the world. This doesn’t mean you have to travel to a different country, but it may mean going into your neighbourhood, workplace or community.

If you’re feeling distant from God and want to go deeper with Him, start building these practices into your week; read your bible daily, pray daily, worship daily, join a church community, and talk to people about Jesus. And remember, take it easy. The best habits are built by the accumulation of small gains, so give yourself encouragement. And as you go, keep a prayerful outlook for opportunities to share Jesus. You’ll be surprised how they naturally come about.

Talking about Jesus can feel weird or uncomfortable. Maybe you struggle to find the right opportunities to share, or feel that you lack the necessary knowledge. Perhaps you don’t want to cause tension in your relationships or be perceived as “pushy”.

Life is increasingly feeling like a warzone of competing worldviews. This is an intimidating landscape to navigate when you’re attempting to share Jesus with people you care about. So what’s your gameplan? How do you go about sharing Jesus?

Here’s a simple 3 step approach to help set you up for sharing Jesus…

1. Pray — Be a Christian

The starting point for authentic evangelism is a current, honest and intimate relationship with Jesus. Think about it – if you don’t know Jesus well, it will feel weird and forced to share about Him. In any relationship, familiarity comes through communication, and life with Jesus is no different. Our modern idea of prayer can often be reduced to a one way conversation with God. But when it comes to being a disciple of Jesus, your prayer life needs to be more than that.

You need to know His voice to respond to opportunities to share the gospel and navigate conversations. You need to be familiar with Him to know how to call out lies that dress up as Him. You need to be familiar with Him to talk about Him to all kinds of people, and to respond any time, any place to questions about Him.

2. Connect — Be a friend

It may be stating the obvious, but you can’t share Jesus if you don’t have meaningful relationships – or at least a connection point – with non-Christians. There’s no judgment here – it’s just a good question to ask. Many of us are passionate about our faith and open to sharing Jesus, but because of our passion, we’re serving at church and running small groups or organising events and before you know it we’re stuck in a Christian bubble with no friends outside of church.

So if you’re looking for a way to share Jesus, find non-Christians in your everyday life. Focus on where you are already personally connected and start by intentionally growing natural friendships with these people.

3. Respond — Be a messenger

When you’re filled with the Holy Spirit through prayer, and connecting well with the people in your world, you’ll start to see natural opportunities to share Jesus. The Holy Spirit is already working in the hearts of people around you. Staying connected to Him and responding to what he asks you to do takes the pressure off of you.

It might look like being ready to pray with someone, telling your story, explaining the gospel, or inviting people to church. You might get asked why you’re different, or a conversation might suddenly turn towards topics like God and faith. Perhaps you’ll see someone that needs help, or the Holy Spirit will challenge you to do or say something. It could be anything! Participating in someone’s journey towards Jesus is a super exciting way to live.

If you’re struggling to make a start sharing your faith, begin with these simple steps. Build an authentic, honest relationship with Jesus, meaningful connections with non-Christians, and a prayerful willingness to respond to the voice of the Holy Spirit.

Some people just have a knack for talking about Jesus. It just seems to come so easily for them but, to be honest, for the rest of us it can be a little bit disheartening. Be encouraged, here’s some ideas about how to share Jesus if you can’t seem to find the right words.

Think about this. Every one of us is surrounded by a particular culture. It might not be easy to notice at first, but the values, language, attitudes, and shared experiences within a people group or location determine a culture, and this shapes the way we view the world. When missionaries go into a foreign culture, they will spend a lot of time observing and understanding the culture and language first. Paul did this in Athens, when he started a conversation about Jesus by pointing out the altar ‘To an unknown god’, introducing Jesus as the God who could be known. (Acts 17:23)

Here’s the big idea: sharing Jesus begins by observing the culture around you and looking for ways to reflect his nature back to that culture.

Make a habit of observation. Look for concepts and language within culture that encapsulate the core characteristics of Jesus; love, mercy, hope, redemption, salvation, and sacrifice. For example, it’s easy to find movies which have a ‘Jesus figure’ —someone who gives up their life for the sake of others. Take time to observe your culture and see how you might use cultural language and ideas to point towards Jesus.

In his famous Sermon on the Mount, Jesus tells His followers (that’s you) that they are to be ‘salt of the earth’. You put salt on food to bring out the flavour and make it taste better. In The Message paraphrase of the Bible, Eugene Peterson puts it this way:

Let me tell you why you are here. You’re here to be salt-seasoning that brings out the God-flavors of this earth. …Here’s another way to put it: You’re here to be light, bringing out the God-colors in the world. God is not a secret to be kept. We’re going public with this, as public as a city on a hill.‍
Matthew 5:13-14

Live your life on display. Not in a way that draws attention to you, but in a way that draws attention to the goodness of God. You might want to start sharing your faith on social media, record a video testimony of how God has been good to you. Be transparent with your friends of how God has answered your prayers or how He has spoken to you personally.

Jesus also tells his followers to be a light on a hill. The amazing thing about light is that darkness has no power over it. Light will always penetrate through and overwhelm the darkness if it is given a chance to shine. The very fact that we can see starlight from millions of light-years away is proof of this. The same is true for the light that you shine.

Let the goodness and power of God shine through you like a light on the top of a hill. Let the fruit of the Spirit be seen in your life; love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control. People will see it and some will ask what’s different about you. Being salt and light naturally sets up opportunities to talk about Jesus.

It’s crunch time. You’ve been sharing Jesus with a friend. They’re really interested and they want to know more about what following Jesus means for them. You know it’s time to share the Gospel. But how do you summarise the Gospel? How do you tell it in a way that’s more helpful than confusing? There’s no script and you don’t want to mess it up.

A simple way to share the gospel meaningfully, is to memorise these 4 words: position, problem, provision, part

Each word describes an important section of the gospel message and is partnered with questions to help start the conversation and simple ideas to give you helpful language to unpack each section.

POSITION: Love is God’s position towards us

God is love and He is the creator of all things. As an outflow of His abundant love, He created the universe, the world, and all things in it. Because God is love, He loves every human being and His desire is to be in relationship with the people He created. For us, his people, relationship with God means life, wholeness, fulfilment, and living in harmony with others.

Question: What do you think love is?

God is love. God doesn’t just show love as an action. He is love. God loves all of His creation.

“Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love.”
– 1 John 4:7–8

God’s love is unconditional. This is not a love that must be earned or achieved, it’s given unconditionally.

“For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life”
– John 3:16

PROBLEM: Sin is our problem

God created man and woman to live in relationship with Him and each other, however, when humanity sinned, our sin cut off our relationship with God. Now every person has a spiritual heart problem, this is what we call sin. Sin is any choice we make that goes against God’s design for our life and these choices fundamentally break our relationship with God.

Question: What do you think sin is?

Sin is an “own way” attitude. Sin isn’t just bad things we do, it’s a fundamental attitude that makes choices against God’s design for our life.

“We all like sheep have gone astray, each of us has turned his own way.”
– Isaiah 53:6

Question: What are the consequences of sin?

Sin separates us from God. Making choices that go against God’s design for our lives break our relationship with him. No one can earn their way back to God with good deeds because we are all sinners. Sin cuts us off from God, our source of life, so sin is the reason that we all eventually die.

“Your sins have cut you off from God.”
– Isaiah 59:2

PROVISION: Jesus is God’s provision

God wanted to restore relationship with him so he made a way for that to work. Jesus entered into the world. He is God, so He lived the perfect life we could not live and died the death we deserved. He lay dead in a tomb for three days, and on that third day, he rose again proving He was God and that his sacrifice was acceptable.

Question: Who do you think Jesus is?

Jesus is God. Jesus is God in human form. He lived a perfect life and did not sin.

“Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”
– John 14:9

Question: Why did Jesus have to die?

Jesus died as our substitute. The consequence of sin is death. However, Jesus died on the cross in our place, cancelling humanity’s debt of sin.

“But God demonstrates His love for us in this; while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”
– Romans 5:8

PART: Turn and trust is our part

Believing in Jesus means turning from sin and trusting in Jesus as your Lord and Saviour. The Bible calls this repentance and faith. You can’t just say the words or go through the motions, God knows your heart. You can do this by praying to God.

Question: What do you think it means to follow Jesus?

Our response is to turn away from our sins. This is repentance. When we own our brokenness and turn away from our sin to Jesus, he forgives us.

“Here I am, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone opens the door, I will come in.“

– Revelation 3:20

Our response is also to trust that Jesus is God and defeated death for us. This is faith. We can trust Jesus because he loves us unconditionally, which he demonstrated by dying in our place. When we trust that Jesus is God and that he defeated death for us, his undefeatable life now lives in us.

“…if you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord', and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.“
– Romans 10:9

If your friend wants to make the decision to follow Jesus, you can help them by giving them the words to say. Try a prayer like this (get them to repeat the sentences after you):

Dear God. I know you love me. I’m sorry for my sin and that I have gone my own way. Thank you for your son Jesus who died on the cross for my sins and rose again. Today I turn from my sin and trust in Jesus alone. Amen.

Reinforce to them that these are not magic words, they’re an expression of the heart and that God sees their honest heart.

This framework is designed to help you articulate the gospel message. Don’t feel the pressure to share it all at once. In fact, it would be rare that you would do that in one go. More often it’s a helpful structure to keep in mind to help you diagnose what your friends might need to hear. For example, do they need to understand more about who God is? Or perhaps a helpful definition of the nature of sin. Often sharing Jesus doesn’t come down to one conversation where you explain the whole gospel. It can be helpful to gradually explain it over time, based on the needs and questions of your friend.

Spend time over a week committing these 4 words and the related questions, ideas and verses to memory so that you feel prepared to articulate the gospel story with meaning and clarity next time you have an opportunity to share it.