Question
First, I appreciate your ministry and the stand you take for free salvation. I may not agree with all of your positions, but I appreciate that you are willing to take and support this position which is becoming increasingly marginalized in religious circles today. Now, having read a few of the books/articles you offer regarding the so-called Roman’s Road of presenting the plan of salvation, I’m curious how you present the “plan” of salvation to an earnest seeker. By that, I’m asking for scriptures and accompanying narrative. Thanks for considering my question.
Answer
Thanks for the question. As we read the Gospel of John, we see that Jesus didn’t really have a set pattern of doing evangelism, but there are some big themes that He repeated. Namely, 1) Jesus would talk about Himself; 2) He would invite the person to believe in Him; 3) He would tell them that by believing, they would have eternal life (John 3:14-16, 36; 5:24; 6:47; 11:25-26).
That’s the core of any evangelistic message, and we would start with that.
Let me repeat that for emphasis. We would start by telling someone the promise of life—no other preparation necessary. And once the conversation started, we’d see how it went from there.
After presenting the message of life, the person could ask many different questions, such as: Who is Jesus? How can He offer me eternal life? What’s eternal life? Why do I need it? Why should I trust what the Bible says? What is sin? Why should I think I’m a sinner? And so on.
We would try to answer those follow-up questions as they came up and allow the evangelistic conversation to proceed organically.
But here’s the thing. We would constantly come back to the “core” message, i.e., inviting the person to believe in Jesus for eternal life.
In short, we don’t really have a specific technique for evangelizing, such as the Romans Road. But we do have a specific core content.
Off the top of my head, here are some recent articles we published on evangelism (see here and here and here and here). Hope this helps!
