Engaging Conversations: A Faithful Approach to Evangelism

This game plan follows the instructions by Paul in Colossians chapter 4. You might want to write this verse down. Colossians 4 verse 5 and 6, and here's what Paul says there; he says, "Conduct yourselves with wisdom towards outsiders. Make the most of the opportunity." In other words, be smart, OK? "Let your speech always be with grace seasoned, as it were, with salt, so that you will know how to respond to each person." [00:01:47]

I think largely when we think of evangelism, we are focused on harvesting, and we're thinking about going for the gold and trying to get the harvest. And I'm just gonna tell you, and some of you have been around the block a few times on this, the easy pickings are a little bit slim nowadays. There's got to be a lot more of what Dr. Francis Schaeffer used to call "pre-evangelism," where we work with people a little bit, we're a little bit more patient, we take more time. [00:03:43]

I have a suspicion that most of us are probably gardeners and not necessarily harvesters. I'm 43 years a Christian, I want to tell you something. I'm a gardener. I'm not a harvester. I'm glad to be part of the team as someone who plants and tills and waters and weeds a little bit in different people's lives, knowing that I got a whole bunch of other teammates that are doing a little gardening at the same time to bring that person, any individual, to a point of harvest, and then God's going to sovereignly bring a harvester into their life. [00:04:45]

And I have a feeling we need a whole lot more gardeners than we need harvesters. That is because before there is a harvest, there is always a season of gardening. So, we need you. We need you off the bench, but what you don't have is you don't have a game plan. And that's what I wrote this book "Tactics" for. It's subtitled "A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions" to be able to put in place something that any person in this audience can follow regardless of your level of education, to get you involved in productive conversations with people, OK? [00:09:03]

But there is one tactic that is really the core of the game plan. That is the easiest tactic imaginable to stop a challenger in their tracks, to turn the tables, to get them thinking, and to keep you in the driver's seat of the conversation, and that's my goal with the tactical approach. Not to overwhelm people, not to manipulate people, not to get in fights with people. I don't want to get into fights with people. My basic rule is, if anybody gets mad I lose, right? [00:10:05]

The key to the Columbo tactic, and the key to our game plan, the key to fulfilling the promise I made to you a few moments ago is that the Christian goes on the offensive in an inoffensive way with carefully selected questions that advance the conversation. Let me say that again: the key to the tactic and the key to our game plan is that the Christian goes on the offensive in an inoffensive way with carefully selected questions to advance the conversation. [00:13:03]

So, what this means then is when you find yourself in a circumstance where you're encountering somebody on whom you want to have a spiritual impact. That's all you're thinking, I want to do some gardening. I hope the Lord will use me here. I don't know where that's going to go. I don't know if it's gardening or harvesting, we don't know that, do we? The Lord knows that. We might see it, but let's just say all we want to do is just try to put a stone in their shoe. [00:13:51]

The first step in your game plan, you want to solve the crime, Lieutenant Columbo? How are you going to find the killer? You've got to gather some information. We encounter somebody new, or maybe if it is not somebody new, maybe somebody we've been around for a while and banged heads with for a while, but we actually never spent much time to gather some information and listen to them to be able to know how to position ourselves further in a conversation. [00:14:33]

Now, I’m going to call this "reversing the burden of proof." Reversing the burden of proof. And I’ll say this quickly because I'm almost out of time. "The burden of proof," that phrase means the responsibility some person has to give reason. The responsibility some person has to give reasons. Now, who is it that has the responsibility to give reasons in any conversation? And the answer is, the person who makes the claim bears the burden. [00:19:30]

So, here's the rule here: "No more free rides." In the immortal words of Ricky Ricardo, "They got a lot of 'splainin to do." So, we want to get them to do some 'splainin, right? And so, we have a second question now. And the second question is, "Now, how did you come to that conclusion?" What are your reasons for that? Why do you think that's the way it is? You see, we're not just going to let them say, "I can explain that," and then tell a story. [00:20:34]

You will be amazed that if you just asked two questions, "What do you mean by that?" and "How did you come to that conclusion?" as you work it into the conversation. How many times people will come up with what I call "the Simon and Garfunkel response." Remember those two guys back in 1966 wrote that song called "The Sounds of Silence"? You ask them what they mean and why they believe, and a lot of times you're going to get silence because they've never thought about it. [00:21:49]

And I'm just going to tell you, you're going to be stunned at watching the Holy Spirit work even though you're only asking questions. And see, now I've fulfilled my promise to you. I promised that I'd give you a game plan that would allow you to converse with confidence in any situation. No matter how little you know or how articulate or aggressive or even obnoxious the other person happens to be, now you have it, two questions. [00:22:24]