Spiritual Transition Game

Talk to people all the time who say, I'm just looking for an opportunity to share the gospel. A lot of times people have a hard time starting conversations and what we've done is come up with a game you can play with your friends to help you do what for some people is really hard and that's transition from the natural to the spiritual.

So we call this the spiritual transition game. It's a game we play in with our youth group. Give you a quick for instance of what what it looks like and then we're gonna play. Last night a couple of guys were open-air preaching and they said that there's some people that were decided they'd take these stink bombs and throw it right in front of the open-air preachers and my immediate thought I would if I was up there preaching and someone did that my immediate thought would be and this is exactly what our sin looks like and smells like by God.

You become effective at that, you become as good as my first pastor. We had a problem with fruit bats in the church that we rented and a fruit bat in the middle of the sermon started doing circles. What did every single person do?

He took the fruit bat and immediately turned it into the illustration that from what he was just speaking on. After the service I had people come up to me and say, did you release that fruit bat? It was just too coincidental that it just happened at that time.

No, he turned it and he gained everyone's attention back that way. So the way we play this is Dave is gonna give me something to do. He's gonna, the way we play it is we usually play in a group and we'll say Andrew and you got a choice of one of two things.

He's either gonna tell me I have a spiritual conversation to start or a gospel conversation and then he's gonna give me an object. Now we've done very weird things. His wife has given me things like artichoke hearts, okay.

I've had to do it off of a guy's goatee, quantum physics. You feel silly doing it when you start but when you start doing it regularly, well you end up realizing you can transition any conversation into a spiritual one.

Turning Ordinary Objects into Gospel Conversation Starters

Witnessing conversation, pizza box. A pizza box in a witnessing conversation. Is there food, is there any pizza in there or is it empty? Yes, someone's carrying it on the boardwalk. I have a thing where, see, my son has food allergies.

He cannot eat anything with wheat and we really don't get to eat pizza very often. Actually whenever I take my daughter out, it's kind of like our thing because we both like pizza and we can't eat it any other time.

And so when I think of like pizza, you know, I get that aroma. You ever have that where you just, you know, and if you can't eat pizza regularly, you really, you smell it and it's like, oh. And I see you walking with that pizza box, it's just giving me that aroma like, oh.

The Aroma of Salvation and the Need for a Spiritual Transition

But you know, there's something that's actually a sweeter aroma than that. A sweet aroma is, God says, that a sweet aroma is when a believer, a person becomes a believer in Jesus Christ, it becomes a sweet.

Do you know what you must do to have that sweet aroma before the angels, before the God Almighty that created you? That was probably a poor one. Man, that was good.