Evangelism – Showing You Care

You can know the Bible from cover-to-cover, you can have good doctrine, and still not be effective at evangelism. While having the facts about God and Christ are important there won’t be anyone to talk to about them if people don’t know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you care. Before people hear about Christ they need to see him living in you. When they experience Christ in us they will be more open to hearing what Christ has to say as well.

That doesn’t mean we plaster fake smiles on our faces and plan service projects with the sole intent of adding another number to our baptism count for the year. It means that we love and care for whole people who have a variety of needs: physical, social, emotional, mental, and spiritual. If we love and serve others as Jesus did, even if they never become a Christian we should still rejoice that we were able to live out the second greatest commandment, to love our neighbor as ourself. We tend to give a priority to spiritual needs often to the neglect of all the others. Notice that Christ didn’t do that. He didn’t go around telling all the blind people, “your sins are forgiven.” No. He healed them and met needs that we often see as secondary. The old saying goes, people don’t care how much you know unless they know how much you care. Evangelism is not meant to be an ego buster for the church. It is meant to rescue the perishing.

Showing you care goes beyond getting an audience. It is also important as you are talking to someone about Christ. It is self-defeating to have a conversation about Christ in “attack mode” or an us versus them mentality. People often feel attacked when they feel like you have a wrote script or series of questions as they get lectured by page after page of notes with no chance for a dialogue. Let us show people we care because we are living lives that are Christ like. Jesus had crowds of people to talk to about God because people could see he was different and cared more for them than any of the religious leaders did. Let our model for evangelism be Jesus. Jesus knew evangelism started by showing his love for people.