Effective Evangelism | Avoid This Mistake!

Tip number five. For some questions, you have to avoid yes or no. Now, this is actually important. I said this was not in order of importance. This one's important, okay? There are some questions that a challenger to the Christian faith will ask you, and it's completely off on the wrong foot.

It's actually misleading if you answer the question yes or no. Let me give you an example. You're saying, if I don't believe in Jesus, I'm going to hell. To simply say yes is to not address the fundamental assumption that's at play that's false.

And so this is how I liken things. When you get a challenge, any challenge to the Christian faith, because Christianity is true, there is something wrong with it. It's like a cake, okay? I'm Polynesian.

I'm always hungry. I'm hungry right now. And so every, almost every one of my analogies in the classroom are food related. You should look at challenges as like a layered cake, okay? On the top of it, it's got the food, the edible stuff, the icing.

Underneath it, there is an assumption that is embedded in the cake. Your job is to identify the assumption, because if you just deal with the surface layer, you're not going to get to the root of the issue.

And you're actually, your answer is going to mislead the person who's asking the question. Can anybody identify the assumption in this challenge? You're saying, if I don't believe in Jesus, I'm going to hell.

Can anybody see that? What is the assumption that they're making that's false? Yes. Okay. So that's, that's pretty close. This is, and this is where I'm going. And this is what I want you to see in this.

Thank you. What's your name? Andrew. Thank you, Andrew. This is what I want you to see. Oh, okay. Yeah. Andrew. Sure. Yeah. All right. This is the assumption I want you to see. What sends people to hell is not that they didn't say magic words.

Okay. Listen to the challenge again. You're saying, if I don't believe in Jesus, I'm going to hell. That's not what sends people to hell. What sends people to hell? Anybody? Sin. Sin sends people to hell.

To say yes, makes the challenger think that it's down to a list of like magic phrases that you have to say or not say, and you're in trouble or you're not in trouble. That's not it at all. You have to identify the assumption.

The best way to do that is to ask a clarification question. What do you mean by this? What do you, what does that mean exactly? What does that mean? If I don't believe in Jesus, I'm going to hell. Do you understand what the Bible says actually sends people to hell?

You with me? Here's another one. You're saying God's going to punish me for being gay, to simply say, yeah, is just going to miss an opportunity. There is an assumption at play that's false. And the assumption is God punishes people for who they are.

The Bible Teaches Judgment for What People Do, Not for Identity Categories

Listen to me. If you do a close read of the scripture, God does not punish people for who they are. God punishes people for what they do. There is a distinction, okay? And I will even add something, and if you want to follow up, because I can't really, I got to move on.

If you want to follow up on this on Q &A, I'd love to unpack this. Sexual orientation is an invention that came out only a couple of hundred years ago by Sigmund Freud and his colleagues. Did you know that?

Heterosexuality, homosexuality, this is something that started to come into play in public discourse only a couple of hundred years ago. Before that, there was no such thing. The way that the Bible and the way that all of humanity has treated sexuality is as they have categorized it as behavior, not your identity, behavior, not your orientation, behavior.

It's what you do. So we have to be very, very careful, because today that's not what the culture tells us. It's completely different, and it's anachronistic to try to bring that and then smash it onto the Bible, which is very old, and it's God's divine word.

Asking Clarifying Questions Instead of Accepting False Assumptions

So bear that in mind. You're saying God's going to punish me for being gay? What do you mean by that? Where did you read that in the scripture? Maybe we can talk about what the.