Skip to main content

Two Questions

…that every Christian must be able to answer.  What are these two questions?  A Christian must be able to tell people how they were saved.  If someone seeking God asks a Christian how they were saved, there needs to be a truthful, sort answer for that question.  Second, a Christian must be able to tell anyone else how they may be saved.  So if someone seeking God asks a Christian how they might be saved, the Christian must have a truthful, short answer.

There is a one word description of each of these answer is known as the gospel.  Gospel literally means good news.  Evangelism means sharing or telling good news.  The one difference between telling how I was saved and telling how you may be saved is that I may include the events of my salvation, which would turn my story into a testimony.  A testimony contains the gospel and how a single individual came to accept it.  All testimonies are different, yet the gospel remains the same.

It is imperative for every Christian to know the gospel, and to be able to verbalize it in words, either orally or in an email or text.  The gospel is information and it needs to get from one person to another.

What is the gospel?  Here are the bullet points
  • God has a standard of believe and behavior (summarized in the Ten Commandments)
  • I have broken every one multiple times.  I have sinned.  I am broken, evil, desperately wicked and totally depraved.  Nothing is good in me. (The Bad News)
  • Therefore, I am under judgement of God and he will punish me for all eternity in hell.
  • However, God loves the world and sent his Son (The Good News)
  • His death on the cross paid my price and if I believe in his work on the cross and accept it and make him Lord over my life (repent of my unbelief) He will place his righteous on me
  • I will then be fully accepted by God and live in eternity with him


All of that needs to be expressed by every Christian, using whatever words are natural, when the opportunity arises.  It is generally understood that if there is a self-righteous person, they need to be lost before they can be saved, which is the point of the bad news.  If someone is aware of their sin, then they only need the good news.

A Christian must be able to tell a story of how they learned of the gospel and accepted it and the Christian must be able to lead an unbeliever through these steps of belief to become saved.  Generally people try and keep their testimony under 2 minutes.  The shorter the better.  People need to be able to tell the good news in under 30 seconds.

There is nothing, and I mean nothing more important than getting people saved.  When we are all in eternity, the only two things that will transfer from this life to the next are 1) our relationship with Jesus; and 2) people we shared the gospel with and who believed.  That is it.  So let’s fill up heaven with people by sharing the gospel.  Learn it, know it, speak it and share it.  Time is short, Jesus Christ is coming back soon and when Jesus touches down, all opportunity ceases.  So let us work while it is still day for the night is coming when no one can work.



Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Remembering the Franklin Day Planner

This week I have been rereading Hyrum Smith's book "The 10 Natural Laws of Productivity and Happiness." This book was written in the late 1980s and I remember reading it for the first time when I was working at Seagate Technologies, after my time in the Air Force. The core tool talked about in the book is the Franklin Day Planner . I remembering having one such planner, long before smart phones and Palm devices. Mine was a leather bound loose-leaf binder with calendar and note pages in it. I kept my daily tasks list and appointments in that binder, which became a record of my work history at Seagate and beyond. The Day Planner binders, pages and supplies were sold at a store called Franklin Quest , which was located at Valco Mall in Sunnyvale. At that time, I was a computer programmer. I was able to keep a record of all request for software, who made the request and when and what the requirements were. It seemed that I was the only one keeping a record of this b...

Thoughts on the Gap theory

The Bible is a closed book.  When God was done writing the Old Testament, he stopped until Matthew.  When he wrote Revelation, he stopped.  There are warnings in the Bible about adding or subtracting words from the Bible. Deuteronomy 4:2 & 12:32 and Revelation 22:18 are the three most specific.  The idea throughout the Bible is that this book is inspired Scripture and people have no right or authority to add to them or take away. This is why the Gap theory is so strange.  People probably feel it would be too obvious to add 16 extra chapters to Romans or Ephesians, so they try and sneak some extra stuff into Genesis.  That is the Gap Theory. The Gap Theory says that there is a space of time between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1:2.  The space that some people insert is a couple of hundred years all the way up to billions of years.  The most popular use for the Gap Theory is to put the entire evolutionary process between Genesis 1:1 and Genesis 1...

What do I preach?

I preach the Word of God.  The style I use is called expositional exegetical .  I draw the meaning out of the Scripture and explain it.  I believe this is the only approved type of preaching.  To preach events out of the newspaper or the latest psychology fad does nothing to edify the saints or glorify God and certainly it does not contain the power to save. The context for my preaching is that I preach through books of the Bible.  Most recently I have been preaching through the gospel of John.  I started in John 1:1 and last Sunday I preached through John 21:15-17.  Charles Spurgeon preached through the entire Bible, but did not take the verses in order.  He bounced around, and got through the entire Bible. One of the most popular styles of preaching in large churches or churches that want to be large is a style called “topical.”  Traditionally topical preaching takes a topic that is from the news or something that the pastor is reading....