One thing that’s also helpful to me is
to realize that, contrary to popular opinion, there is not a formula to
evangelism found in the New Testament. Several times in the Gospels we see
various people who come to Jesus and ask point blank, “What must I do to be
saved?” One of the most shocking things is that Jesus never gives the answer
that all of us have been trained
to give. Not once. Jesus never says,
“Confess your sins, believe in me and repeat this prayer after me.”
What we see is that Jesus gave a
different answer to this question every single time. He never gave the same
answer twice. It’s as if Jesus goes out of His way to demonstrate to us that
evangelism needs to be done in cooperation with the Holy Spirit, being
sensitive to the specific heart of the one person we are speaking to, and not
applying the cookie cutter approach to preaching the Gospel.
Let’s look briefly at the various
answers Jesus gives to those who approached Him asking about what must be done
to inherit eternal life and see what we can learn from Him. To Zaccheus Jesus
simply acknowledges him in the crowd, invites himself to dinner and when
Zaccheus repents of skimming from the taxes he’s collected, Jesus proclaims that
salvation has come to
his household. In the case of the Rich
Young Ruler, Jesus commands him to sell everything he has, give it to the poor
and become a disciple under Jesus. The man refuses and is allowed to walk away,
seemingly unconverted.
Nicodemus, a Pharisee, is told he must
be born a second time. This confuses him and Jesus does little to explain what
He means, leaving the teacher of the Law to work it out on his own time. The
Woman at the Well is boldly confronted with the promiscuous lifestyle she’s
been living and yet never feels offended or condemned by Jesus throughout the
conversation. Finally, the thief on the cross is converted and welcomed into
Paradise simply for realizing that Jesus was the promised Messiah. His only
part in the process seems to be the amazing good fortune of being crucified for
his crimes on the same day as the Son of God.
Many other examples of salvation in
the New Testament reflect this same lack of pattern and tailormade response to
the Gospel message. How does your personal conversion experience
compare to these found in the New
Testament? Do you see a common pattern in your own story? When I look at this
amazing variety of conversion experiences in Scripture it really puzzles
me as to why we’ve made evangelism so
predictable and uninteresting. What’s more, our focus on evangelism seems to be
in asking whether or not someone knows if they would go to heaven if they were
to die tonight? If anything, it seems the basic questions beings asked by Jesus
and His disciples dealt with what one would do if they knew for a fact that
they’d be alive tomorrow. The real question seems to be, “If you were alive
tomorrow, who would you follow and how would you live your life?”
