Bible Study Evangelism
The second part of that is to really drive home the fact that God is wise and God is sovereign. I taught my children when they were little, if you ever read anything in the Bible that is hard for you and you might say to yourself, This doesn’t seem right or This seems like maybe it should be a different way, God is right about everything. Anytime you disagree with God, the change needs to happen in your heart. You ask God, “Help me understand why this is in your word. Help me understand what I need to understand so that I can agree with you, because I know that you’re right about everything and you’re way wiser than I am. So change my heart.”
If I’m talking with a non-Christian, I want to show them from the Gospels that Jesus loves us, that Jesus is true, that Jesus is wise, that Jesus is God. If they can trust him, they will trust him for every page of Scripture. All the hard parts of Scripture, even the parts you don’t understand, you will be able to accept them and wrestle with the Lord on those, because you know that he’s wise and he never lies.
That’s probably the more important thing, because even if you answer the question on one hard passage, what happens when you get to the next one? We have to trust that God isn’t lying to us. Everything in the Word is inspired and authoritative and good for us. We just need to allow the Lord to change our hearts.
How do you build the bridge from getting to know your neighbor to helping them to study the Bible?
In my book, I describe something called bridges to the gospel. It’s funny you use the word bridge because that’s exactly what you need. You need to have a couple of bridges in your tool belt. I have a few that are kind of like my favorites, my go-tos. The easiest one in the book is prayer. Just ask the person, “can I pray for you? My husband and I are gonna be praying tonight. My family’s gonna be praying tonight. Is there anything we can pray for you for?”
Most people will offer something. They might not divulge deep personal struggles, but they might just say, “You know, my mom has been in the hospital. Will you pray for my mom?” And that’s an open door. The next time you talk with that person, you can ask, “How is your mom? I prayed for your mom.” You can have further conversation. You can use that at a restaurant or even at the grocery store. You can say, “I’m just gonna be praying tonight. Is there anything I could pray for you for?”
Another bridge that I love to use because I live in Austin, [Texas, and] a lot of people in Austin have tattoos. So we use something called the tattoo bridge. If I see my waiter or waitress has a large tattoo on their arm, I might say, “Hey, is there a story behind that tattoo?” And my goodness, if you have the time, those people will often share the story behind the tattoo, and more often than not, there is a painful story behind that tattoo. There’s some kind of struggle, someone passed away, some kind of hurt. And that’s again an opportunity for you for you to open up conversation and start to move into more discussions about the struggles that people have.
I really think it’s all about asking questions, talking less, and listening more to find out where in this person is there some kind of struggle, some kind of pain, some kind of question that you can answer in Christ. How can you point them to Christ as the solution for whatever the problem may be?
