Friday, October 10, 2008

Witnessing to the feminist baby boomer

Step # 4: Share the Gospel

"Come now, and let us reason together," Says the Lord,
"Though your sins are like scarlet, They shall be as white as snow;
Though they are red like crimson, They shall be as wool.

--Isaiah 1:18

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ,
for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes,
for the Jew first and also for the Greek.

--Romans 1:16

It has become fairly easy for me to bring up the things of God with just about any lost person, and to wonder aloud over the amazing truths of the Bible. I find it much more difficult to share the Gospel with him or her, because I’m in effect confronting him with the only choice that matters in this life: heaven or hell.

Yet tell him we must, if we want to obey our Lord. And we can’t put it off indefinitely; we don’t know that we’ll ever see him again (something that has become abundantly clear to me over eight nears of visiting residents of a nearby nursing home).

I’ve taken James Kennedy’s “Evangelism Explosion” class at church, and have studied the Way of the Master techniques taught by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron (www.wayofthemaster.com) -- they’re each excellent for specific situations. In essence I try to convey these facts:
  • We’re all sinners, having spent our lives rebelling against a perfectly holy and perfectly just God and deserving death – which means eternal punishment in hell.
  • Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for our sins.
  • Eternal life is a free gift of God; we don’t deserve it and we can’t earn it.
  • To receive this gift, we must repent (turn from our sins) and trust in His sacrifice to have covered our sins – in short, to rest assured that “Jesus paid it all.”

What if we fail to share the gospel with someone? Well, I suppose the Lord will send in someone else to do this all-important job … and then we can explain to Him later why we found it so difficult to talk about His supreme sacrifice, why we thought there was anything more important than bringing Him what one preacher so poignantly called “the reward of His suffering.”

Witnessing to the feminist baby boomer

Step 3: Draw the conclusions

Sanctify them by Your truth. Your word is truth.

--John 17:17

During my personal journey to Jesus Christ, I found myself amassing an amazing amount of scientific, historical and prophetic evidence pointing to the Bible’s accuracy. But I was so busy looking at the details that it took me ages to sit back and survey the big picture.

Which is too bad, because once I did, I came to the most stunning conclusions of my life – to wit:
  • The Bible is true from first word to last.
  • It is the word of the God who created the entire universe and everything in it, and He was perfectly capable of giving us a “life manual” that was, at least in its original manuscripts, entirely accurate. Infallible, in fact.
  • I can trust what He said about Himself, about us, and about where we came from, what we’re doing here and where we’re going.

I might have come to these conclusions weeks or even months earlier had someone presented me these claims as something to challenge or prove. So I suggest sharing them with anyone we’re witnessing to – especially if it’s a feminist baby boomer who has been well-schooled to believe the opposite.