About 20 years ago, I decided to start asking people if they were Christians whenever I had the opportunity in normal conversations. This went well for a few months, and I enjoyed hearing a few encouraging testimonies from fellow believers. On the rare occasions when someone denied being a Christian, I tried to share the gospel with them. I soon found out they were non-Christians by choice, not by ignorance. Nevertheless, I thought I had a good system going. I wasn’t seeing any salvations, but I was finding many believers.
Then someone flipped my apple cart.
I was returning some DVDs to Blockbuster when I asked the young lady at the counter if she was a Christian. She said she was, and so were her two children. She couldn’t have been more than 20, so I asked a follow-up question: “How old are your children?”
“They’re 22 months and 6 months. We all love Jesus.”
Now I had a dozen questions racing through my mind, but other customers were lining up behind me.
As I drove home, my mind swirled with follow-up questions:
• I believe your children are in a state of innocence, but how do they believe in Christ?
• What do you think a Christian really is?
• How can a baby in diapers repent and believe?
• Let’s talk about the new birth, sin, repentance, faith and sanctification.
All my arguments began to overwhelm me. She doesn’t know the first thing about biblical salvation.
That Blockbuster conversation opened my eyes to a real problem with my evangelistic conversation starter. Most of the people I spoke with who claimed to be Christians never showed any real understanding of their profession. The answers were often along these lines: “Oh yes! Love me some Jesus!” or “Yes sir, and my grandmother was a Pentecostal preacher.” These aren’t deep confessions of faith, but I wasn’t asking for that. They were simply saying they knew about Jesus and believed in Him.
As time went by and our conversations multiplied, I discovered there wasn’t much evidence behind these shallow claims. The Lord Jesus described these souls in His parable of the Sower. Most of them had a “sprout” story, but that’s where their testimony ended, without fruit. On a few occasions, I asked, “How has faith in Christ changed your life?” only to hear stuttering word salads that made little sense.
Twenty years ago in the Bible Belt South, nearly every adult had some church background. Somebody took them to church, they made a profession of faith as a kid, and they probably got baptized at some point along the way. Most of them had godly influences in their family growing up — if not their parents, then their grandparents. They may not have been religious, but they knew enough to speak Christianese.
Now, let us consider the children these adults have raised over the last 30 years or so. This generation lacks the church upbringing of their parents. For many of them, the only Christian examples they ever knew didn’t look anything like a biblical Christian. Without family pressure, this generation is honest in their views of church and religion. Void of any real Christian influence, many of them have easily adopted the atheism or agnosticism of their teachers and friends.
These experiences have led me to ask a different set of questions now:
• “What do you think about God?
• Is He real, and can we know Him?”
If they answer, “No, He’s not real,” I shift the conversation to creation. This is because even atheistic evolutionists have to admit they can’t explain how life began. They have theories of evolution, but nothing for the origin of life. I steer the conversation toward intelligent design. We must acknowledge that there is a God before we can account for our sin and trust Christ as our Savior.
If they say, “Yes, God is real,” I ask, “Where did you get your information from?” The answers can be all over the board — conscience, books, the Bible, experience or just a feeling. From here, I appeal to the Bible as a time-tested source of truth. Once I establish the Bible as our authority, I begin laying out the plan of salvation from it.
No, I haven’t seen thousands come to faith, nor do I claim to have the perfect evangelistic method. But I am convinced that the questions posed to me as a kid in the 70s and 80s are not even understood by today’s kids. How can they believe they would go to Heaven if they died tonight, when they’ve been taught that Heaven is a fairytale? For many, God is nothing more than a myth created to comfort weak-minded people. They are not ready to bow and recite a sinner’s prayer. They don’t believe in prayer because they don’t believe God exists.
Please don’t misunderstand me. Man’s problem is still sin, Jesus still saves sinners and the good news still needs to be told again and again. But in a society that increasingly denies the existence of God, is largely ignorant of biblical salvation and lacks living examples of Christian witness, we need to probe a little deeper these days. Let’s back up and establish the authority of God and His Word before we offer our own Christianese word salad. Then let us share the gospel message with the confidence that the Holy Spirit is still changing hearts, opening deaf ears and blinded eyes, and convincing lost sinners that Christ is Lord.
