How can we effectively share the gospel? How can we help our friends and family understand that it matters? Jimmy Scroggins, Steve Wright, and Leslee Bennett share more in Turning Everyday Conversations Into Gospel Conversations. Check out an excerpt below.

The word gospel literally means good news. It is good news that broken people like us can be in relationship with a righteous, perfect, holy, and just God. The truth is that God has a design for every area of our lives—our families, marriages, money, sex life, work life, and just plain life. God designed us to be in relationship with Him. He defines real life as knowing Him (John 17:21), but we have all departed from that design and gone our own way. The Bible calls this sin. We are born with a sinful nature, and sin comes naturally to us. There is no one who gets it right all of the time. We’ve all sinned and fallen short of God’s perfect standard (Rom. 3:23).

This sin leaves us in brokenness. Brokenness is easy for most of us to understand. It looks like broken relationships, addiction, depression, discouragement, and shame. We all want out of brokenness, so we try to fix it. We medicate it with drugs or numb it with alcohol. We strive to be better people, hoping that somehow, some- way, our good will outweigh our bad. We look for ways to alleviate our pain. When we do that, we just get more and more broken. This feels like a bad thing, but in many ways it’s a good thing. It’s the way God gets our attention. When we feel broken on the inside and everything is messed up, we know something needs to change. The Bible’s word for change is repent.

Brokenness is what gets us ready to try God’s solution for change: repent and believe the gospel. The change we really need comes from Jesus. God sent Jesus to live a perfect life, to die the death we deserve, and to be raised to life again, proving He is who He said He is and can do what He says He can do. Jesus came to forgive our sins. When we repent and believe in Him, He gives us supernatural power to recover and pursue God’s design. Then Jesus sends us right back out into a broken world to tell other people how to find their way out of brokenness.

It doesn’t matter what tool we use to tell others this good news. The tool can’t save anybody; only the gospel can. What matters is that we include the essential information: Jesus died and was buried, and God raised Him from the dead. So whether we use the Four Spiritual Laws, the Roman Road, our own personal testimonies, or the 3 Circles, let’s remember to tell the whole gospel. We love the gospel, not the tools.

Learn more about telling the whole gospel story in Turning Everyday Conversations Into Gospel Conversations today!