How to Share the Gospel with Different People

By: Scott Shifferd, Jr.

If you have started a conversation with someone about the gospel, you may be wondering what you need to teach. This is my perspective of how to evangelize biblically:

1. Tell the gospel of Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection with evidence (Acts 2:22–36; 13:26–41; 1 Cor 15:1–11).
2. Connect how Jesus’s death and resurrection is the power to receive eternal life (Acts 4:2; 17:18, 32; 23:6; 24:15; Rom 6:5; 8:11; 1 Cor 6:14).
3. Share how one must obey the gospel by death to sin, burial in baptism, and rising to new life (Luke 9:23–26; Rom 6:1–7; Col 2:12–13; 1 Pet 3:21).
4. After baptism, lead new Christians to follow Christ with devotion in the church fellowship that Jesus started (Matt 28:19–20; Acts 2:42; Heb 10:24–25).

Those whom Christians need to teach are not usually going to have the Bible as their authority for living. If someone is not familiar with God and Christ, then one should first speak of God and help them to perceive the world with a biblical view of God from good sense. The apostle Paul addressed the Athenians in Acts 17. Paul described and defended the identity of God using good sense and observations. Today, most Christians can easily present God in a simple, basic, and reasonable way.

Paul explained how a person should think about God by revealing how one should obviously not view God. Paul noted the Athenians’ “unknown God,” and he built observable facts to fill in the gaps of misconceptions about God. Paul revealed that God who made the world neither dwells in temples nor needs the service of human hands (Acts 17:24–25). God also created humanity and determined the nations and dwellings of man to seek out God (17:26–27). Furthermore, Paul observed that people ought not to think God is like any image or artwork formed by humanity’s imagination (17:29).

Lastly, Paul turned these observations about God to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Paul revealed that God no longer overlooks such ignorance about God, but now God has fixed a day to judge the world righteously by a man whom He resurrected from the dead (Acts 17:30–31). Paul brought the message back to Jesus Christ and the resurrection (17:32). For today’s Christian, revealing God is a powerful tool to open the door to share the gospel to all worldviews.