Thank you for joining us on Desiring God Live. My name is David Mathis and we’re coming to you live from the Desiring God studio in the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Thank you for joining us this evening. Our guest is Randy Newman. He is author and veteran staffer for Campus Crusade. Randy is the author of the previous books Questioning Evangelism and Corner Conversations, and his new book is Bringing the Gospel Home: Witnessing to Family Members, Close Friends, and Others Who You Know Well.

Randy, thank you for joining us this evening.

It’s great to be with you. Thanks.

Randy has been with Campus Crusade now since 1980 and he is currently ministering in and near Washington DC. His wife is Pam and he has three sons.

We have about 90 minutes of conversation in front of us, God willing. Our plan is to begin with Randy, with his story in the first segment and in the second segment move to talk about the book more in particular. But you’ll see that especially in this case, the book and the author, Randy, are very much tied in together. So Randy, let’s begin with you and your story. In particular, include your family background and coming to faith, which is very much connected to the topic of the book.

I come from a Jewish background and so I didn’t grow up hearing much about Jesus at all or the gospel. When I was in high school, I started taking Judaism more seriously than the rest of my family. I was really digging for answers I think. In one particular year, I guess I was 15 years old and was on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. I decided that that year I was going to do all the requirements of that day so that I could get close to God. It’s the holiest day of the Jewish calendar, and you don’t eat and you don’t drive in a car and you pray lots of prayers and you go to synagogue.

I was walking home from synagogue at the end of the holiday and I didn’t feel close to God. I thought, “What did I do wrong? What did I miss? What did I forget?” And I looked down and I saw that I was wearing dress shoes, because I was wearing my suit, and you wear dress shoes with your suit. Then I remembered there was this obscure teaching by the rabbis, not in Scripture, that you’re not supposed to wear leather shoes on Yom Kippur. And I thought, “That’s why God seems distant. I wore the wrong shoes.” And then I thought, “That’s crazy. That is the most ridiculous thing. There’s got to be some other way to know God.”

That started a lot of puzzling and wrestling for me. Soon after that I met a group of friends my age who were Christians who talked about knowing God in a personal way. It was so attractive to me and so different. They really did know God in a personal way. They prayed about everything. They prayed in English, which I thought was really different. I thought you had to pray to God in Hebrew. I remember one time riding on a church bus going to the beach and someone stood up and said, “Let’s pray.” And they said, “Lord, please help nobody get badly sunburned.” I thought, “What? Either these people are crazy or they really do know God.”

That started for me real wrestling and back and forth and a lot of dialogues, which I think for me set the idea that the way you engage about faith is not just one person presenting something, but it’s a conversation. It’s a back and forth rabbinic dialogue. But it wasn’t until years later when I was a sophomore at college at Temple University that I really started wrestling with things because a friend of mine had died in this very tragic accident. So I started reading the Gospel of Matthew. I read C. S. Lewis’s Mere Christianity, and I read books that talked about Judaism and Christianity fitting together. And for me it was the realization that the Messiah has come and that Isaiah did predict a suffering servant and that they really fit together. They weren’t these two alien faiths, but rather one that was woven together.

Your family is Jewish and remains Jewish as you become a Christian. What difficulty did that bring about in the year subsequent to your conversion?

Well, by the way, just to mess things up, I still think of myself as Jewish — a Jewish Christian. Well, yeah, telling my family wasn’t exactly fun. In fact, I chickened out and I didn’t tell them for a while. Then I finally told my parents over the telephone, which is wimpy instead of face-to-face. And my parents responded in a very liberal, open-minded way. They said, “Well, if this makes you happy, that’s fine. Just don’t shave your head, don’t run away to a commune in Colorado, and don’t try to change the world.” Those are the three things they said. I am often amused that I now work with an organization that has conferences every other summer in Colorado and it’s under a banner of “Come help change the world.” But I’ve never shaved my head and we’ve never been told that that’s a thing to do. But this whole interaction with my family became quite a long and at times dicey process and that did have a lot of influence in my writing the book.

You begin the book with the story about your interaction with your mother and her coming to faith. I was riveted right away after opening the book after hearing that account. Could you give us a little bit of that story that brought you into this family witnessing context?

Well, you should know, I tried witnessing to my family in many ways, all of which were very direct and blunt. I said, “Here, let me send you things. Let me tell you things.” I sent them a copy of the Bible, a copy of the Jesus film. I even sent my parents not only the Jesus film, which is the Gospel of Luke set in film, I sent my parents two copies, one in English and one in Hebrew. Even though my parents don’t speak a word of Hebrew, I just thought they would be impressed. And it didn’t impress them. Nothing seemed to work for well over a decade. And then I think to be honest, I actually gave up. I think I had given up hope that anything could possibly get through.

Then one time I was talking to my mother on the telephone. My mother had told me about a funeral that she had just gone to, and I knew the person who died. I knew this person to be a very angry, bitter, atheist, skeptic. He would make fun of people of faith. So my mother said to me on the phone at one point, “Well, at least now he’s in a better place.” I started thinking, “I don’t think so.” And I started collecting Bible verses that I could put together as a really powerful sermon of telling my mother, “Oh no, he’s not in a better place. Let me tell you how bad that place is.” But for once, rather than preaching a sermon, I chose instead to just ask questions because, well, I think that the straightforward approach hadn’t worked, and I had been doing some study of the way Jesus asked questions. After she said, “At least now he’s in a better place,” I said, “Well, mom, how do you know that?” Well, actually at first there was a long pause and she said nothing. And eventually she said, “Well, how do I know what?” I said, “How do you know he is in a better place?”

My mother’s religious beliefs at that point were, everybody goes to a better place no matter what religion, no matter what people think or whatever, everybody goes to heaven. So when I said, how do you know that? It really shook her up and it made her wrestle with, “Well, how do I know this?” And after a very uncomfortable, painful pause — uncomfortable for both of us, by the way, as I have not found anything about evangelism to be comfortable even in 30 plus years of ministry — I said to my mother, “How do you know that?” Eventually she said, “I guess I don’t know that.” And that was a pivotal moment in both her wrestling with things and also in my understanding about how to do evangelism. Sometimes maybe asking a question is better than making a statement. And sometimes allowing something to go unsettled and uncomfortable is the way to go. Because my mother was very uncomfortable at that point in the phone call, and I was too. The phone call ended without much resolution and there was even some tension I think between us.

But it started her wrestling and thinking. At age 71, my mother bought her first computer and taught herself how to use the computer and how to send email. And she started sending me lots and lots of email, and she sent me an email one day that said, “I think I’m going to read the New Testament.” And I thought, “Can I frame this email?” Jewish mothers don’t often say that, David. So I said, “Well, mom, let me know how it goes.” And she would ask questions about things that she was reading in the New Testament. She would ask, “Why did Jesus say this? Why did people hate Jesus so much?”

Instead of answering her questions, I chose to answer her questions with questions, which is a very Jewish thing to do, but it’s also a very engaging thing. So she would write, “Why did Jesus claim this?” And I’d say, “Why do you think he said that?” And she would say, “Why do people hate him so much?” I would say, “Why do you think people hate him so much?” I think it bothered her a whole lot. But it started for my mother really wrestling with the gospel. She sent me another email a little while later, “I’m beginning to think like you do that, that Jesus is the Messiah.” And I wrote back, “Would you say he’s YOUR,” all in capitals, “Messiah?” She wrote back, “Not yet.”

But very soon after that my mother gave her life to Jesus the Messiah. I have this picture on my computer of my mother at age 75 being baptized by my brother, by the way, but that’s another story.

And this is a long process. This wasn’t overnight. You talked about this critical conversation where you ask a question rather than giving the sermon at that moment. And this happened over a long period of time.

Well, the whole process from when I became a Christian to when she did is at least 20 years. But that pretty active, engaging back and forth dialogue was at least five years. And that was a very common theme that I saw in talking to people in preparation for the book on witnessing to family. It’s a longer process than we’d like. It needs to be, in a lot of people’s cases, because they have a long way to go in understanding and overcoming emotional barriers. So we need to have a strategy or a plan that considers that maybe this is going to be a five to 10 to 20 or longer year process, rather than a one shot presentation and our relatives will say, “That’s brilliant. Why did you ever tell me this before four?” It may be a longer deal.

And your mother today, she’s in her 80s, is that right?

Yes, but you shouldn’t talk about women’s age. Don’t you know that, David? You don’t say that. She’s watching this and she’s embarrassed now. Yes, my mom’s in her 80s and my parents belonged to a Messianic Jewish congregation that they go to quite regularly and they love the Lord.

You mentioned your brother, and that he was the one that baptized your mother. How was it that your brother came to faith?

We’re just getting the whole family out here. My younger brother, he’s six years younger than I am. He was a pretty wild, crazy drunk kid through high school and in college. He really didn’t want much to do with spiritual things. And when I became a Christian, he really wanted to stay at a distance. So every invitation I had for him to come visit me in college or afterwards, he said, “No, no, no.” And eventually he agreed to come visit, but he made sure that he did politics through my parents, “Just tell Randy that I’ll go visit, but he better not talk about religion.”

We had a whole weekend together and I made sure that I didn’t talk about religion, I talked about all sorts of other things, about girls, about sports. We went to a hockey game together. And I think that that was an important step in our relationship for me to let him know that I’m willing to see other aspects of life. My life is not just this one aspect of things. So he’s come to faith and he’s been a pastor now and a missionary. We joke about how far the Lord has taken both of us.

A couple more family touchpoints here before we get into the content of the book and the second segment. You also talk in the book about your brother-in-law, Bruce, and about your son, John, and the lessons that you learned for family ministry through engagement with those. Would you tell us about the story with Bruce and the lessons learned there?

If I can just say, you mentioned I wrote this book Questioning Evangelism, and that opened up a lot of opportunities for me to teach at churches and student groups about evangelism. After a while, I started hearing during the question and answer time, the question that always came up was about family. People would raise their hand and I could almost script it out. People would say, “Oh, Randy, thanks, this is helpful, but what do I tell my father? He’s an atheist. Or my sister, she’s on drugs, or my brother, he’s gay,” or whatever. And the list was always wracked with deep, emotional, painful stuff.

So I started wrestling and looking to see what else was written on it and asking people what they had found. And then I started thinking about different things that had gone on in my family. I had seen my 75-year-old Jewish mother come to faith. We had seen my wife’s brother come out of a homosexual background. I saw my younger brother come out of a pretty crazy drunken life and come to faith. I started looking at this, and the Lord has really done some amazing stories.

Bruce’s story is that he grew up in a family that was nominal going to church, but probably not hearing the gospel and not hearing a born-again message. But I think he made some kind of decision about faith in high school. He went away to college and got involved with a Christian fellowship, but the whole time he was wrestling with the fact that he was attracted to men and not to women. And for a long time in college, it was this tension of, “I’m a Christian, but I’m gay.”

He really tried to make it, he tried to make the homosexual urges disappear and they just didn’t. After he graduated from college, he said, “This Christianity stuff just doesn’t work.” And he walked away from it and got headlong into the gay life for at least 10 years. But that lifestyle really was far from satisfying. And when he finally came out to my wife and myself, we didn’t tell him what he expected. He either expected hatred and condemnation, or, “Well, hey, that’s okay. We have gay friends too.” Instead, we said that we really loved him and we cared about him and we wanted the very best for him, but we feared that a homosexual life wouldn’t be good. It’s not normal and healthy. He probably just thought we were crazy. And he distanced himself from us for quite a while. But then a little while later, maybe it was even over a year when another relationship ended and failed, we started interacting and talking.

I sent him a copy of Joe Dallas’s book, Desires in Conflict. And he said that that really struck a chord, that really began for him to think about things in a different way. And that was a very long and lengthy process, but he’s left that lifestyle. He’s found God doing a dramatic work and change in his life. He’s married to a woman now and they have a daughter. He’s really seen a dramatic change. The gospel is that powerful. It was some of those kinds of stories that made me want to collect them and put them in a book to offer people hope.

Here’s one more before we take a five-minute break here — your son, John. You write about John and the lessons that you learned as a father and your relationship with him and the difficult years he had. Tell us about that.

Our son John got messed up on drugs in high school, and by the time my wife and I found out about it had really taken over his life quite a bit. We chose to send him away to one of those highly structured boarding schools for troubled teens. I think it was in that chapter of our lives that I started really grasping the graciousness of the gospel. When I started meeting other parents whose kids were just as messed up as mine and I would think terribly condemning thoughts about these other parents.

We met another mother of a son involved with this school who was a witch. We were at one of these conferences. It was one of the first conferences we went to. They had conferences for parents to help parents reconnect with their kids. So I was sitting in this hotel ballroom with probably 200 parents, and I was looking around the room thinking, these are terrible parents. These are horrible parents. Their kids are on drugs. It’s amazing how self-righteousness and pride can blind us. At one of the breaks, I was talking to this woman who’s a witch, and her son was in a gang and he wanted to quit the gang, but if you quit the gang, they kill you. So she took him away to this school, but she’s telling us about witchcraft and she’s wearing crystal earrings and his black lipstick and dyed hair, and she has a strange satanic looking pendant around her neck. At one point she takes a drag on her cigarette and she’s got this ring on with a pentagram, a symbol of satanic worship. And I’m thinking, “I’m three feet away from a satanic witch.” I don’t know if I was praying, “Lord protect me,” or something.

I had these two thoughts that crisscrossed in my mind. One was, “Well, no wonder your son’s so messed up lady. I mean, you’re a satanic witch. What do you expect?” And then the other thought was, “Well, Randy, what are you doing here?” And there was this very breaking moment for me.These seminars we went to, they told you you had to go back to your hotel room every night and write pages and pages and pages in a journal to process. I started processing, thinking, “Well, what would make a person attracted to witchcraft? Well, it promises power, it promises control, it makes you feel superior to other people.” And I started thinking this is bad. This is sin. It’s idolatry. It needs the gospel. Then I started writing about myself, what could make me so attracted to judgmentalism? And I thought, well, it promises power, it promises control, it makes you feel better than other people. It’s the exact situation.

I thought, that doesn’t justify it. It’s bad, it’s sin, it’s evil, it’s idolatry. It needs the cross. It needs the gospel. And it hit me more powerfully than I had remembered. That’s what I have. That’s what I have in the gospel, is forgiveness for that level of sin. It’s so bad that nothing short of the death of the Son of God could pay for that sin or that sin. They’re both in need of something as extreme as the cross. That changed me and is changing me. And that changed my relationship with John. That changed the way I started interacting with him. He came back from that school. He didn’t want anything to do with our silly religion or anything to do with our faith.

I said, “I’ve got to find a way to communicate love to him. I don’t think he’s ever felt love.” I think parents all feel love toward their kids, but they don’t always communicate it in a way that the children, especially teenage boys, realize it and feel it. So I tell a story in the book about how I thought, “Well, where can I find common ground with my son John?” Seinfeld. He loved Seinfeld. I should watch Seinfeld with him. And by the way, I wasn’t a big Seinfeld fan and I probably ranted and preached several sermons against the decline of Western civilization as evidenced in this show about nothing. Maybe I just needed to laugh at the parts that he laughs at and laugh at the parts that really are funny because there are quite a bit of funny parts there and show my son that I’m willing to enter into his world. And that began a different relationship between us.

As you turn to the topic of family in the book, you talk about two idols that lurk nearby, and how being aware of those can help orient us in our evangelism and in bringing the gospel home. Describe those for us.

I try to do some reflection on what the Scriptures teach about the family, and it makes sense that the family would be a place of attack, that the devil would go after the family, because of how God makes the family such a high priority. It’s a high priority on God’s agenda. So it would make sense that it would be a high priority on the devil’s agenda. There’s a number of different attacks that he goes after family. Sometimes he attacks the family and just makes people only interested in themselves as individuals, and they downplay the importance of family. So individualism is idolized. In other cultures and other families, the family is so ultimate that it’s a higher priority than God, and both of these are distortions of what God had in mind when he created the family. The family is a source of stability and strength and love and intimacy. I mean, there’s tons of things that the Scriptures talk about. So the devil wants to distort it.

Some people wrestle with their family because they can never live up to the demands. Because the demands are impossible and it’s making family into God. And that can never work. Or on the other hand, it’s so downplaying the importance of family. So those create tensions. I think the whole arena of when a Christian is in a family, the emotions are charged, the allegiances are conflicted, the stakes are higher. So this just adds more difficulty to a topic that’s already difficult. Evangelism I think is difficult for most people.

So what would you say to someone who says, “I’m in a family with nonbelievers. I want them to come to Jesus and I’m not an evangelist.” How would you help someone like that?

Well, don’t be surprised that it’s difficult and don’t wait until it feels easy or normal or natural because it probably won’t. But God uses non-evangelists all the time. He uses evangelists, which is probably three percent of the total Christian world. He uses non-evangelists who simply proclaim what they know and ask God to help them live out the gospel in their lives and to try to see how the gospel permeates all areas of life, not just this one question of, “How do I go to heaven?”

One thing you do in the Bringing the Gospel Home book, as well as Questioning Evangelism is to help break down some of our misconceptions about what evangelism is. We may have a certain concept in mind. In particular, in the life of Jesus, you’ve observed that he goes about things perhaps different than we would expect.

Yeah. I think we would all like the one surefire method that always works with every person. And sometimes I think people advertise a method that they found and then talk about it as if it will always work with all people. But when you read through the Gospels and you look at the way Jesus interacts with people, he interacts with people in different ways. He talks to the woman at the well differently than he talks to Nicodemus and differently than the Jewish leaders. Every single time it’s different. The message is the same, but the approach and the starting point is different. So that’s one thing.

The other is, I think a lot of Christians have this idea that what I need is a foolproof argument, and so I need to come up with a foolproof argument. So I think of every possible question that they could ask and know every possible answer for everything. And I think for most people, that’ll drive you crazy. It’s just too difficult, it’s too complex. So instead what I want to say to people is listen really, really carefully. Ask questions, answer questions with questions, and see where God takes the conversation. Keep trying to push it, but not necessarily with a prescribed script because I just don’t think that that’s the way it works.

I think a lot of people have this idea that if they just got the right training or the right tools or the right arguments, it would be easy or it would be comfortable. And again, I just think for the vast majority of Christians, it’s never easy and it’s not comfortable. I work with an evangelistic organization and for I’d say at least the first 10 years of my life on staff with Campus Crusade, I thought at some point it was going to become easy and natural, and it just never did. And then it was liberating for me to think, that’s okay. Maybe I should do evangelism even if it’s uncomfortable.

So I love the fact that Paul told Timothy, who we know was very timid and shy, “Do the work of an evangelist.” Implication: That’s probably not your primary gift, but you can do it even though you’re timid and shy and your stomach gets upset.

And not only is evangelism difficult for most of us, but you mentioned that it’s going to be typically more emotionally charged in the family.

Sure. Boy, family is where our patience is the shortest. Every encounter with family comes with, for some of us, decades of history. And not all of it is happy. Because there are no families where everything is always happy. A whole lot of examples that we hear about evangelism are in the one shot conversations usually on airplanes, by the way. I think that’s where all evangelism takes place high up close to heaven. So you have this one conversation with this one person, and then you never see them again. But with family, you’re sitting around Thanksgiving dinner and it’s the 20th or 50th Thanksgiving dinner, and you’re still remembering that time that this uncle spilled the gravy on you. I mean, it’s just loaded with tough emotions. So it requires, I think, even more prayerfulness, more preaching the gospel to yourself so that the grace of the gospel amazes you that it came to you, and that changes the very tone and inflection of the way you articulate it.

When we approach family without being amazed by grace, there’s this tendency to come across as the self-righteous older brother.

I have no idea what you’re talking about David . . . Yeah. And isn’t it interesting that when Jesus told that story, he told it about brothers. And he decided to tell that story in Luke 15 about a father who had two sons. I mean, the reason he was telling that was because he was trying to convict the Pharisees of their self-righteousness. You remember, before that story happens, the prompt of the telling of that story is they were feeling superior, they were looking down their noses at Jesus because he associates with sinners. So Jesus decides to tell a story to convict them of their self-righteousness. But he does it in the context of a family of two brothers, which is very interesting. And one brother, that’s the brother that we like to focus on, goes and messes up his life and he ends up with pigs and he comes back and he repents and oh, there’s much rejoicing. And we want to end the story there. That’s the one we want. The music is blaring in a major key. And yay, he’s home. Break out the fatted calf. Let’s have this party.

But the story continues. And we should have known it was going to continue because he started by saying, “A father had two sons.” And it’s this self-righteous one who thinks he never does anything wrong. Isn’t it interesting what he says to the father? He says, “Look, all these years I’ve worked for you and I’ve never disobeyed you.” As a father, it’s hard to read that story and not think about having two sons, and thinking one never disobeyed.

So anyway, so yes, the self-righteousness, it’s more likely to raise its ugly head within the family and it’s more likely to do more damage. So a big part, I think, of Bringing the Gospel Home is preaching the gospel to ourselves and so that we are amazed. We were dead, it says in Ephesians 2. It wasn’t just that we were uninformed or stupid or I don’t know, wandering. Ephesians 2 says that we were dead in our trespasses and sins, and God raised us from the dead. And Paul wrote Ephesians to amaze us with how great the gospel is, how amazing it is.

Chapter two is where you focus on grace. It’s a remarkable chapter. Something I found very helpful is that you told a possible story about someone in Saul’s family before he was Paul the Apostle. Let me read that section briefly:

Realistically, there could have been some cousin of the Apostle Paul sitting around some prayer meeting centuries ago telling his fellow believers, “Hey, would you guys pray for my cousin Saul? I can’t think of anyone more lost. He hunts down followers of the way and arrests them. Just last week, he was the guy who stood guard over the clothes of the people who killed our brother Stephen.” All this leads me to say that the process of witnessing to family needs to begin in our hearts. For us to have fruitful outreach in our family, we need a wellspring of grace flowing from within. This chapter seeks to jumpstart that process by stimulating your amazement at the wonder of grace.

And that’s the work you described as beginning in our hearts. I found that that emphasis very helpful and perhaps surprising in a book on evangelism, sadly. You expect to get in, find techniques, find the different practices, and find out how to say the message. To hear again and again, the experience of grace for me, the Christian first, is so significant. And that process continues in the sharing of grace with those in the family.

I think the Christian Church in America went through a long period where the emphasis in evangelism was, “We need to convince people that it’s true.” So we marshaled arguments and we talked about apologetics, and I’m all in favor of apologetics. But we talked about the message of the gospel, I think almost entirely in that category of, “Let’s convince him that it’s true. Let’s show him the evidence for the resurrection. Let’s pull out the copies of the Dead Sea Scrolls and show them the authenticity of the Bible. And if we could just convince people that it’s true, they’ll believe it.”

We do need to do that. But we also need to show them that it’s good. There needs to be a sense where people hear it and they’re struck by, “Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I should probably think about this more. It sounds like it is true. It sounds like those events of Jesus turning water into wine and those kinds of miracles, yeah, that probably did happen.” But it should also strike people with this sense of, “Really? It’s that good? It can set people free? It can change people? I could be forgiven of this and this and this and this? That sounds too good to be true.”

So I think we need a whole vocabulary and flavor of communicating the gospel in a way that people feel, “Tell me more.” It’s not, “Convince me more,” but, “Why do you like it so much?” And that, I think, has been missing, and I think that that’s an element of the gospel that needs to work its way more and more in evangelism with anybody, but I think especially with family.

The goodness of the gospel is something we convey when we’re actually sensing and experiencing that goodness. So you talk about not just mustering up the courage, but instead, soaking in grace in preparing and motivating yourself to bring the gospel to members in your family.

You read through the New Testament and it seems as if that there is a default mode in the heart of every Christian to forget the gospel. I mean, think about the book of Galatians. The whole theme is, “How could you guys forget this?” And yet they had. And then you think about the places in Colossians three and Romans six, where Paul exhorts Christians dwell on these things, think about these things, and meditate on these things. And the implication is because if you don’t, you’ll probably forget. And you’ll probably forget how amazing it is and how good and how gracious it is, and it’ll dwindle to just be a set of propositions that you need to believe intellectually.

And this is not just in the New Testament. In Deuteronomy eight, there’s that long caution to the nation of Israel. Don’t forget, when you get out and you start enjoying life and you start getting fat and full, don’t forget and don’t take credit for it yourself. So that’s I think, the default mode of every human heart, to fall back on, “Yeah, we did this. I came to this faith because I’m so smart that I thought it through and it made sense to me and I realized I couldn’t argue against it.” The gospel has truthfulness to it, but it also has graciousness and goodness.

So you talk about preaching the gospel to ourselves, but also you talk about this on page 58, “We need to preach the doctrine of common grace to ourselves.” Describe how to preach common grace, and first of all, what is common grace? And what does it mean to preach common grace to ourselves? Why is that helpful?

Well, common grace is God’s goodness shed on all people, not just believers. He sends the rain to fall on the just and the unjust. Rain is a way of making the crops grow and providing for you. So he provides food and good relationships and joy. I did a study of the book of Acts, and I looked at the way Paul preached the gospel in a number of different places. And like a lot of people, I saw this stark contrast from Acts 13 and Acts 17. In Acts 13, Paul preached the gospel in a Jewish synagogue to a Jewish audience who already knew the Scriptures. They believed in God. And Paul just starts with, “Here’s how God worked in the nation of Israel.” Then the contrast is Acts 17. Paul is preaching in Athens to a group of secularized philosophers who don’t believe in God, who don’t believe in the value or the priority of the Scriptures. So he starts in a much more philosophical way. But in between those two, in Acts 14, when Paul is in Lystra, there’s this very different preaching. It’s different from both the others.

He speaks to religious people. They were religious, but they’re religious in a pagan way, not in a Jewish way. These people were pretty weird. They bowed down and worshiped Paul and Barnabas. And so Paul says, “No, no, don’t do that. We’re just men like you. Turn from your wicked ways. Turn from the idols.” And then Paul says to these people — unsaved, pagan, crazy people — “God has given a witness. He has not left himself without a witness, but he provides food and rain and crops and joy in your hearts.” He says this to unsaved people. And that struck me. He’s saying that these people have joy. And at first my thought was, well, they can’t have joy. They don’t know Jesus. But actually, non-Christians can know joy. They just may not know where it’s coming from, or they may not acknowledge the true source of that joy.

So for me, that just started a whole lot of thinking of, “What would it be like if we did more joy-based apologetics or joy-based evangelism, rather than misery-based evangelism?” Now, I do think there’s a place for misery-based evangelism because Jesus told the woman at the, well, “Aren’t you thirsty? And the water you’re drinking is not going to make you satisfied. And the men you’ve had as husbands that didn’t work out.” So there is a place for misery-based apologetics or misery-based evangelism.

But there’s a whole lot of people, and I think a whole lot of relatives of Christians, who feel happy. The Christians are trying to tell their relatives, “You’re miserable, aren’t you?” And the relatives are saying, “No, not really.” And they’re saying, “Well, isn’t there an emptiness inside of you?” And they say, “No, not that much.” We say, “Well, I mean, aren’t you unhappy?” And they’re thinking, “Well, I’m getting that way, if you keep talking to me. You keep preaching this message and I’m going to be really unhappy with you, but not with life.” So I think there’s a need for a joy-based evangelism.

I think family may be one of the best places to do that because families — not all families unfortunately — have had a number of those kinds of joyful experiences. They have had some good Thanksgiving dinners and weddings and parties and get togethers. So there’s the need now for the Christian to say, “Let’s talk about this. When family works well, why is it such a joy? Why is it such a blessing? Why do even people who don’t know God still like family and celebrations and good food and all of that?”

And at the end of that chapter on grace, you have this exhortation, you said, “Let’s use the pronouns, we and us far more than you.” What were you getting at with that statement?

Well, it’s easy to fall into a me versus you mindset with evangelism. We think, “I know Jesus, you don’t. I have eternal life, you don’t.” But that doesn’t always draw people in and attract people to the cross. So I want to say, let’s talk about us. Let’s talk about ourselves. Isn’t it amazing how we all need forgiveness for some things? Isn’t it great that we’re all created in the image of God? Now, I’m not saying to soft pedal the gospel and to not talk about sin, but the starting point I think can be more of common grace, common ground. What do we have in common?

By the way, the other aspect of that is that I think we want to talk about a tension that everybody experiences. There’s this tension that I’m drawn to goodness and holiness and righteousness. I want to do what is right. I’m outraged by injustice. And yet, I’m guilty of injustice and hatred and anger and condemnation. Within the same heart is something that is drawn to God and something that wants to rebel against him. There is something that wants to value beauty and love and grace, and something that wants to make myself my own God. So if we can talk about the tension that we experience, and that’s a common experience that all people have, then we can point to the gospel and how that can set us free.

A related thing in seeing the common ground and celebrating common grace, preaching that to ourselves, is this idea of telling it slant. You talk about telling it slant on page 67. You say, “If your family has a long history of negativity and sarcasm, the intermediate step of speaking positively about a good meal or a great film may pave the way for blinding talk of God’s grace and mercy.” Tell us about “telling it slant.”

I think very often we want to attack or declare the gospel in this very straight and blunt way. God loves you. You are sinful. You are separated. You need Jesus. A lot of times, people have heard that from us and they’ve rejected it. So we think, well, if I just keep telling it to them again and again and again, it’ll eventually get through. Well, sometimes that works, but very often it pushes people away. So I think sometimes coming at it indirectly is the way to go about it. Tell people about the goodness about life and the goodness about relationships or, “Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a contentment so it didn’t matter how much money we made? Or there are people who even though they’re handicapped and they’re in a wheelchair their whole life have found joy.” So we come at it in this indirect “tell it slant” kind of way. I’m taking that from the Emily Dickinson poem. She says that if we tell it slant, people can receive it. If we tell it to them directly all the time, it will blind people. It’s too overwhelming.

There are cultures — and the Jewish culture is one of them — who don’t like to overstate things in a positive gushing way. And so when someone is overly positive in gushing, it just seems weird and it seems off-putting rather than compelling.

So it may not just be an issue of lack of courage to tell it straight. There may be a strategy in it and looking for a place to tell it straight, and also looking for places to supplement that and “telling it slant.”

Yeah. I think we have this idea that the bold thing is to tell it boldly. In fact, if you can tell it with that tone of voice, that’s even better. It’s firm gestures and maybe even getting angry or something. But well, that’s one expression of boldness. But for some families and some relationships, it may take a lot more boldness to ask a question and then just to shut up and let them talk. Just broach a subject and let people know that you’d be willing to talk about it. And then to back off. There’s different kinds of boldness.

One thing you mentioned as well is if we think of the gospel in four parts — creation, fall, redemption, consummation — we tend to really focus in on the fall redemption part, and often broadening out our focus to include the creation and consummation parts can be very helpful. In particular, you say, when we’re in a conversation and people ask for our reasons behind what we’re saying, that we not only default to say, “Well, the Bible tells it this way, and it’s where the Scriptures have it.” But there’s a logical consistency in the gospel that we need to go there in our minds, in our defenses, in our conversations, and not just answer with the slogan, “the Bible says that.”

Well, there were several times while I was writing the book that I felt that, “Oh man, am I getting too theological here?” I like theology. I like reading it. I like wrestling with it. And I know that a lot of people don’t. So I just feared, am I making this book too intellectual or too theological? I would quite often go running and show it to my wife. She values theology too. But I would say, “Is this too theological?” She would say, “No, no, this is good.” I think a deep reservoir of theological understanding of where the gospel fits will actually help us proclaim it in a more winsome and compelling way. So yes, that four category gospel, I think very often Christians only think of those two middle chapters. We think about the fall — we’re sinful, we’re separated from God — and the consummation because we need Jesus. We don’t think about how that can be consummated in remaking us as individuals and remaking the whole entire world, I think, to a certain extent. But maybe more applicable and evangelism is to think about the common ground that we have in a created world as created beings, created in the image of God.

The reason why good things feel good to all people, believers or not believers, is because we’re all created by a good God. The reason why art and music move us so much is because those are acts of creation and they reflect the fact that God is a creative God. The fact that visual art moves us is because God who created the world made it such a beautiful place. Why did he create flowers? And why is there such a diversity of flowers? And why are there amazing colors? Because he’s a creative God. So in that category of creation is a whole lot of common ground that we can find for conversation. I think the devil has also done a good job of spoiling that category, and it devolves into only conversations and arguments about creation vs. evolution. It’s as if he’s trying to take away that category because he knows how powerful that category is.

There’s a time and place for debates about creation and evolution, but I think we need to see that category as much broader. Let’s look at what it means to be created in the image of God? What does it mean that God is a communicating God and that we are communicating people and we like words? Why does poetry grab us? Why is it that when someone is a really good speaker and they say something and just a certain way, we don’t just say, “Boy, that was a good point.” We also say, “Wasn’t that great the way he said it? Wasn’t that an interesting play on words.” Why is it that sometimes when we’re reading books, we reread certain lines? We say, “Oh, that’s good. That’s good.” It’s because God is a verbal God. He’s revealed himself to us verbally. He’s made us verbal. And so those are the kinds of things that I think we should try to have conversations with people about, and then point them to him.

C. S. Lewis has this great quote about the blessings that come from God. He says, “We look back up the sunbeam to the sun.” So I think that’s what we need to do. They see the sunbeam in their life of a good relationship, a good meal, a beautiful symphony, a great song, and we say, “Look where it comes from.”

For the Christian, there’s a wholeness to reality. The God who has redeemed us in Jesus is the God who has created us and everything. The God of creation and the God of redemption are integrated, you would say. You like to call yourself an integrationist. Explain what you mean by that. This book does have the character of this integrating — integrating real life with gospel conversations.

I don’t know how to say it any differently. It’s just beautiful the way God has made an integrated whole world that all points to his glory. Psalm 19:1 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God.” I love the way Psalm 8 says that the creation is the work of God’s fingers. There’s all this evidence of a good, loving, gracious, redemption-oriented God. So I think trying to point out that integration of all of God’s creation is really worth thinking about, celebrating, worshiping, and pointing people to.

Is this the thing you have in mind when you talk about showing how the gospel illuminates all areas of life? That’s the thing you’re after?

Yeah. Right.

Another one, on page 93 says, “We need to demonstrate how the gospel relates to all areas of life. And this takes some prior reflection.”

People have said to me, “Okay, listen, if you could just sum up your book in a nutshell, in a few short words, what would that be?” That’s one of the worst things anybody should ever say to an author, because I wrote all those words. I think you should read all of them. I mean, if I could reduce it to just three things, you wouldn’t read the book. So at the risk of scaring people away from reading the book, I found three common threads of people’s stories: time, love, and comprehensiveness.

We’ve already talked about time. I think witnessing the family takes a lot of time, and we shouldn’t assume that it’ll just be a short thing. Now, sometimes it’s short. And that’s not to say that God can’t work very quickly, it’s just that it seems that most often he does choose to work more slowly.

We’ve talked about expressing love. I told this story about expressing love to my son, John, who by the way has come to faith and is doing great by the way.

But then the comprehensiveness of our faith is another thing. I think that a lot of us think of the gospel in a very truncated way. It’s a message that if you believe it, you’ll go to heaven. Yes, it is certainly that, but it has such comprehensiveness that it affects all areas of life. So I think that that’s a recurring theme throughout the book. I want to try to share stories where people had the opportunity to talk to family about the gospel by not starting with the gospel, but by talking about marriage, relationships, kids, fun sports, or a million topics. The reason why it takes preparation is I think we need to think of, “Okay, so what is the gospel reason why that particular issue is different in my life? How, aa Christian, do I look at marriage that’s different from the way a non-Christian would look at it? What is it about the gospel that sheds light on pleasure or whatever the topic?”

Paul says in Colossians one, “All things are in, through, and for Jesus.” The connections are there. Maybe we haven’t done the work to see the connections yet to then draw this out. A practical thing I found helpful in your book was on page 85, you say, “If you don’t already have some concise things to say about the resurrection, you should do some homework and make that part of your apologetics tool bag.” Can I ask, what things do you have in mind? Are there any tools you’d like to carry in your bag that maybe have helped some of us in talking about the resurrection in particular?

Well, so earlier I said the gospel is true, and we need to emphasize that. It’s also good, but we do need to know some of these things. So I think it’s helpful to have at your fingertips things about apologetics. For example, what was it like for the Roman government to put a guard outside the tomb? What was that like? Well, that was not just a couple of guys. I mean, that was a pretty serious thing for the Roman Guard to try to protect the tomb. What does it mean that there were eyewitnesses of over 500? It says that in 1 Corinthians 15. So that takes away the argument that, “Well, maybe just a few people hallucinated or people made it up.” What does it mean that the body was wrapped in spices and cloth and whatever? I mean, so that takes away the idea, “Well, maybe Jesus really wasn’t dead. Maybe he just fell asleep.” So there’s some standard arguments. I mean, I think Josh McDowell and quite a few different people have written apologetics materials that would be good for us to know and be able to articulate about the resurrection, and about why we believe the Bible.

A lot of people will say, “Well, the Bible is just a bunch of made up tales.” Well, there are too many precise details in the gospel accounts for them to be made up. The stories in the Scriptures do not read mythology. They read history. And then there are all sorts of details that are totally unnecessary for stories. I think Tim Keller brings this out a number of times. Why are we told that Jesus was asleep in the boat on a cushion? Why even mention the cushion? There are these kinds of details that the only reason you would mention them is if you’re really trying to describe something that really happened. So I think we do need to be skilled apologists.

The great thing about today is there’s a wealth of material. These are not obscure things that are difficult to find. You can find some good articles and some good materials to be able to answer common apologetic questions.

Maybe we can focus on a few practical bullet points that I found pretty helpful here. You said, “Many people told me their best conversations occurred in a car where both people faced forward rather than toward each other. Perhaps the indirect eye contact posed less of a threat.”

I think I stumbled on it with the conversation that I had with someone. It was someone that I had tried to talk to a number of times and nothing worked. And then oddly one time we were driving in a car and it dawned on me, “I’m getting further in this conversation than I’ve ever gotten before.” I just started reflecting about it. And then I started asking people. And sure enough, people would say, “Yeah, you’re right.” I’ve heard quite a few parents say they have the best conversations with their teenage daughters and sons when they’re in the car facing this way. Because when you’re facing a teenager eye to eye, they say, “Mom, dad, what’s your problem? Why are you so intense?” So I think that that’s true with everybody. There’s something a little less threatening driving in a car. There are these little seemingly insignificant things, but they make a very big difference in our level of communication.

In the first book I wrote on Questioning Evangelism, I have a whole chapter about listening because I found that listening is something that almost everybody thinks they’re good at, and almost everybody needs a whole lot of help in. I think it’s just a whole lot harder than most of us think. So I try to give tips about how to listen more carefully. And I do some workshops sometimes with churches, and I have people practice this. When I first tell people what we’re going to do, they all give me this look of, “This seems so silly, it’s ridiculous.” And then they try it and it’s really quite difficult. I say to people, “I want you to pair up. And one person talks and the other person only asks questions. They’re not allowed to jump in with their side of the story. They’re not allowed to say, ‘Me too.’” They’re allowed to say, ‘Oh yeah, let me top your story.’ Just ask questions. And you keep the focus totally on that one person.”

It’s amazing how difficult that is because we want to hijack the conversation around and talk about our story. And we always want to top them. They’ll say, “Oh, I saw this two car accident.” We say, “Oh yeah? Well, I once saw a four car accident.” They say, “It took me three hours to get to work once.” We say, “It took me eight hours.” We always have a story to beat somebody else’s. But it’s amazing how listening and keeping the conversation in their corner will then open them to, “Well, so tell me, what is it that you believe?” Because you paid them respect and you showed them that their life was worth listening to. So I try to weave in those practical ideas there.

In addition to the challenge to listen more and ask more questions, you say, “Pray more fervently while proclaiming more gently.” That was helpful and I think characteristic of the book and of the familial context. One last thing here before some concluding questions. You mentioned the alphabet chart, which I find very helpful. Would you explain to us the alphabet chart and what’s in mind?

People have told me this is very helpful. Imagine it’s right here in front of us. There’s a line with the alphabet on it. Here’s A and here’s Z. And let’s say this is a spectrum of unbelief by a non-believer. Z is a person who’s very close to believing, they’re about to cross over from Z to the next A to Z scale of a Christian who grows. Z is very, very close to a decision. A is the most hardened, angry atheist you can imagine. And everybody who’s a non-believer fits somewhere on here. A lot of us, I think, have been trained to do evangelism or think in terms of evangelism, of moving people from T to Z. And we’ve learned how to start conversations with things like, “If you were to die tonight, how sure we you be that you’d go to heaven,” or, “If you were to die tonight and stand before God, and he were to say to you, ‘Why should I let you into heaven?’ what would you say?”

Okay, well, that question is a great question for someone who’s at letter T. But the trouble is it assumes all sorts of common beliefs that someone may not have. It assumes they believe in God and it assumes they believe in heaven. It assumes that this God is a personal God who could ask them a question. I mean, there’s all sorts of assumptions wrapped in that. I think 50 years ago you could ask that question, and most people in our culture already were at letter T. So you’d ask them and you’d say a few things and you’d show them a diagram. And here’s why Jesus died for your sins. They already believe in the concept of sin. So that works, T, U, V, W, X, Y, Z.

But there’s a ton of people in our culture — and I think our whole society is drifting this way — that if you asked, “If you were to die tonight, how sure are you that you’d go to heaven?” They would say, “I don’t even believe in heaven.” Or if we say, “If you were to die and God were to say, ‘Why should I let you into heaven,’ what would you say?” They’d say, “I don’t even know if I believe in God, but if I did, I don’t think he’s the God who would ask me a question. And what difference would that make?” And there’s all sorts of things that need to happen from letter D before we can start asking a T question.

A lot of the people I talk to are frustrated. They had shared the gospel with their family as if the starting point was letter T and they asked a question or they showed a booklet or they drew a diagram and they thought for sure the person was going to say yes. And in fact, they said, “I don’t know, it doesn’t mean much to me at all.” So maybe what we need are a whole bunch of different kinds of strategies at different points on the spectrum.

So I like to ask a question that I think is good for much further on this side: “Do you ever think much about spiritual things?” Or you can ask, “Do you like to read books? What books do you read? Who are your favorite authors? What’s your favorite television show? Why do you like it? What’s your favorite movie?” And you find out what things move people.

You may ask a question over here, “Do you ever think much about spiritual things?” and they may tell you, they may say, “Oh yeah, I think about it all the time. In fact, somebody gave me a Bible. I’ve been reading it and it’s beginning to make a lot of sense to me.” Oh, well, they’re at letter Y. So okay, let me show you this chart or this four point outline or a booklet. But if you say, “Do you ever think much about spiritual things?” And they say, “No, not really. I’m just not interested.” Or, “No, and don’t ever bring it up.” Well, I need to find out what conversations I can have down here with the hope of moving people this way. So that A to Z scale I think is helpful because I think more and more people are at a different starting point than letter T. They’re way over on this side of the spectrum

And it’s all the more in the family context where we’re viewing things from a long perspective, and maybe we would see a family member move from D to M to S to W and to Z over the course of a long period of time.

With family, I think there’s also a little bit of a built-in resistance. If they’re here, they’re more likely to move from D to E by talking to a total stranger than talking to you, their brother or relative. And so all the more reason we need to be willing to move incrementally and gradually. For some people, I think they’re stuck here. They’ve been here for so long it’s as if their feet are in concrete. And maybe we need to just try to budge them a little bit from here to here. And once they move, then there’s movement. Then they may move pretty far and pretty quickly, once we get them. But if we try to take them from letter D to Z all in one conversation, it may just make them more resistant and hardened. So I think the incremental thing is something that’s worth brainstorming a lot of different approaches.

We’ve talked about a lot of different things, practicals, different tools, different perspectives. Would there be a main encouragement that you would want to give someone, perhaps most of us who are deeply concerned about unbelievers in our family?

I’ll share an idea and a story. The danger of books on evangelism, and mine are included, is that it can sound like it’s all up to us. It can sound like it is a totally human endeavor — “Say this. Don’t say this. Ask this question. Remember this. Here’s a diagram.” So it becomes this totally naturalistic thing almost, as if you were selling a product. Evangelism does include the human side. It does. There’s far too many places in the Scriptures that talk about that reality. In Colossians 4, it says, “Let your speech be seasoned with salt and let it be full of grace.” That must mean that there’s a way to do it wrong. There must be a way to do it without salt and without grace. He says, “Conduct yourself with wisdom toward outsiders.” So there must be wise ways and there must be stupid ways. So there is the human component, but there is also the divine component. There is God raising people from the dead, opening up blind eyes, and drawing people to himself. Jesus said, “No one comes to me unless the Father draws him” (John 6:44).

So there is a supernatural component and a natural component. I don’t think it’s worth trying to figure out how those two fit together. I think that’ll just give you a headache. I just think that both are real and both are important. So I want to do the best job I can of thinking through, “How do I say this? What question should I ask?” I want to listen carefully. I want to ask, “Do you mean this?” But then there’s the supernatural component. So that’s why I said to pray more fervently and proclaim more gently. It’s both. And so we want to be gentle about it. But I find it to be tremendously liberating to think that, okay, there’s a supernatural component here, and that means there’s at least two miracles that have to happen in every evangelistic conversation to bear fruit.

On their side, it says they’re dead. No one comes to the father unless the father draws them. Okay, so a miracle has to happen in their life. They’re dead and they need to be made alive. But there’s a miracle that has to happen in my life too. Jesus said, “Apart from me, you can do nothing” (John 15:5). So there’s nothing I can say, there’s nothing I can think of, and there’s no illustration I can tell that doesn’t require something absolutely miraculous to happen. So a miracle has to happen from my side and from their side. Well, if that doesn’t motivate you to pray I don’t know what will. So we need to pray more and more and more and be diligent about prayer. And all those tools that you read about in prayer books about keeping a journal and keeping lists and bringing those before the Lord regularly, that’s a very important part of the process.

Here’s a story that I think is one of my favorites. Again, I interviewed a bunch of people and I talked to people. I wrote a whole chapter that I titled “Eternity”, and it’s really about people at the end of their lives and what’s going to happen for all eternity. I think I make it clear that people need to believe in Christ in order to have eternal life. But it was amazing to me how many stories I heard about people whose parents and grandparents came to faith at a very late stage of life. I think a lot of us fall into this thought, “Oh, it’s just too late. It’s just too late. They’re 70 years old, they’re 80 years old. They’re just never going to turn around. They’ve been resistant for 70 or 80 years.” Number one, I think people realize they’re coming to the end of their earthly life, so they start wrestling with some things. But more importantly, the gospel is powerful. It can break through 70 and 80 year old hardness.

One woman was telling me about how she became a Christian in high school. She was 16 years old, and she started witnessing to her father and nothing made a difference. Nothing. This was for 40 years or something. He was now in his 80s. He was in a retirement home. His wife had died. He was all alone. He was a recluse. He never came out of his apartment except for to drive a quarter of a mile to the grocery store, and nothing ever worked.

Then someone in the retirement home started inviting him to church. Now, this woman who’s telling me the story, said, “I had sent him books. I sent him all sorts of stuff, nothing ever worked.” These friends started inviting him to church, and he said, “No, no, I don’t do that. My two daughters are religious, but I’m not.” And well, they kept bugging him. And finally on Easter, he thought, “Well, Easter, that’s the day you’re supposed to go to church. I mean, sure, I’ll go.” He goes to church and he hears a gospel message. And he gave his life to the Lord. He called his daughter and here’s what he said to her, after 50 years of witnessing, “You never told me he rose from the dead.” She said, “Randy, I was just too overjoyed to correct him, but I had told him plenty of times about the resurrection. I’d sent him whole books about the resurrection.” There’s something mysterious, miraculous, and supernatural that’s beyond our understanding and our comprehension. And when we enter into evangelism, we’re entering into the realm of the miraculous, which I think should make us bolder and more humble at the same time, if that makes any sense.

That’s good. What encouragement would you have for a parent who’s going through the situation you’ve been through with your son, John? I don’t know if there’d be a particular word for a parent with an unbelieving child. Maybe they grew up in a Christian home and the parent has a heart for their child to come back to the faith.

Well, the thing that I kept coming back to when we walked through our saga with John was the promise and the Psalms that the Lord is near to the broken-hearted. I don’t think I ever knew what the word “broken-hearted” was until we had a son who was so rebellious and so far away, and that kept giving me hope. The Lord is near to the broken-hearted. I would cry out to the Lord, “Help me to experience this truth. Your word says it’s true. I believe it’s true. You wouldn’t have said it if it wasn’t true, but I need to experience it.”

I think the Lord really met me in that. And he met me even in the worst of the broken-heartedness. It wasn’t in a time when things started getting better, but in the very darkest. There was this sense of thinning, “I can walk through this no matter how it turns out, because the Lord is near, the Lord is with me. His love for me is not dependent on circumstances. It does not ebb and flow. It is established by the finished and firm and completed work of the gospel of the cross. And that was a place that I clung to.

I think we can find sustenance and strength and life in that that hopefully starts spilling over in the way we start talking to people. And so we interact with unsaved relatives, they’re not hearing a message of, “I’m smart, I figure this out. I’m righteous and I’m good. I’m not messed up like you.” But instead they’re hearing, “I’m a recipient of the mysterious grace of God, and it’s just so wonderful. I can’t believe it.”

Randy, one of the notes you begin with and then sound again at the end is the note of hope. You say on page 14 that your purpose in the book is to offer hope. And then on page 214, you say, “My highest priority in writing this book was to encourage hope for Christians as they witness to their families.” That theme of hope is very important for you. Would you pray as we conclude here for that hope? That’s something said here, one of these stories, one of the principles or practicals we’ve talked about, and in particular the Scriptures that were written for our hope, would bring about such hope for our watchers this evening.

I’d love to. It’d be a great privilege.

Our Father and our God, we rejoice in the hope that we have in your Son, our Savior. It’s a hope that doesn’t disappoint. It’s a hope that is not fluctuating because of our performance. It’s a hope that’s solid and sure. And I pray for the people who are watching and hearing this, that you would offer them hope, even for the hardest situations that they face — the relative that has been rebellious the longest, or the most extreme. I pray for the people who are hurting in deep even unspeakably deep ways that the hope of the gospel would give them hope and joy and would have them renew their efforts to talk to loved ones who don’t know you. We ask that you would indeed be near to the broken-hearted, and we ask that you would do the miracles we’ve been asking for, and that we’d be amazed by them. We ask that they wouldn’t just be an answer to prayer, but they would be a stimulus for worship. For we pray this in the Messiah’s name, amen.