Reaching Outsiders with our Words
There is a popular saying attributed to St Francis of Assisi: ‘Preach the gospel; if necessary use words.’ In other words, just live out your faith. You don’t need to say anything—let your life speak for itself. It sounds very well, but in fact it’s nonsense. The gospel is news. You can’t communicate news effectively without words.
Of course we have to live upright lives (as we thought about in the previous article)—our lives will either reinforce or contradict our message—but the message must be communicated in words. The ‘outsiders’ Paul refers to in Colossians 4.5 (non-Christians who know nothing about Christianity) need to understand who Jesus is, why he came into the world and what it means to follow him.
In Colossians 4.6, Paul mentions three characteristics that must be true of our words: Let your speech always be gracious, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how you ought to answer each person.
Gracious
One of the most common criticisms outsiders have about Christians is that they often sound arrogant. Sadly it’s a well-deserved reputation in many cases. Whenever we share the gospel we should be deeply conscious that we are sinners saved by grace—beggars telling other beggars where they can find bread.
Or then there are Christians who only seem interested in winning arguments when they talk to outsiders. They love the cut and thrust of debate. But our aim in evangelism is not to win arguments but people. Just because a person’s beliefs are wrong doesn’t give us the right to trample over the person who holds them and treat them with disrespect. We need to remember that every person we speak to is someone made in the image of God and therefore has enormous worth and dignity. Outsiders are not opponents to be defeated but lost sheep to be gathered in.
The Lord Jesus shows us the way: when he saw the crowds he was filled with compassion. He came to seek and save lost, weary, burdened people—not to mow down the opposition. This perspective will help us when we talk to outsiders, no matter what their views may be. What they are saying may be abhorrent, but they themselves are still worthy of respect as human beings. How easy it is to treat a homosexual sinner differently from a heterosexual sinner, forgetting that all sexual sin is just one more manifestation of the most fundamental problem—our rebellion against God.
We need to remember Paul’s question in 1 Corinthians 4.7: What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it? Only the free grace of God makes us different from those outsiders we are seeking to reach. There is nothing in us that makes us superior in any way—left to ourselves we might have fallen even further than they have.
Seasoned with salt
I suspect this is the aspect of our evangelism that we are least good at. What do words ‘seasoned with salt’ sound like? There is a lot of discussion in the commentaries, but the most straightforward answer is probably correct. Food that hasn’t been seasoned with salt tastes bland and dull. It’s still nourishing, but without salt it is often unattractive and uninteresting. Salt adds pungency and brings out the distinctive flavour of the food.
In the same way our conversation about the gospel can be bland and dull. What we say may well be gracious and accurate, but we say it in such a way that it’s just not very interesting. There’s no salt, no flavour to it. Paul is saying that it’s not enough to say true things—we have to work at making it palatable. How do we do that?
Be clear and concise. The best way to make sure you’re clear and concise is to understand what you’re saying clearly yourself. Ask yourself, ‘If I had to explain the gospel message in two or three minutes right now to a non-Christian, could I do it without rambling?’ Do you have clear map in your mind of where you’re going? If you’re not clear in your head, you won’t be clear in your answer.
Don’t use jargon. A few years ago I received a letter from our local Council, inviting our church to send a representative to a Community Planning meeting for our area. The letter said, ‘These initial meetings will begin a process of establishing a Place Shaping Forum for each DEA (District Electoral Area)… Place Shaping Forum members will… work collaboratively with others to identify and design solutions to issues facing residents of their DEA within the framework of the Community Plan.’
Those organising the meeting were very disappointed with the turnout and spent some time asking they might encourage more people to come? My suggestion was to send letters without jargon! The purpose of the meeting was actually very important and valuable—it was all about making the place where we live better and improving services and care for people in the community. But that wasn’t at all obvious from the invitation letter!
As Christians we can fall into the same trap. One man’s plain speech is another man’s jargon. Someone asks you “What is a Christian?” You could say, “A Christian is someone elected by God’s sovereign decree in eternity, effectually called and regenerated by the Holy Spirit, reconciled to God and justified by trusting in the blood of the Lamb of God shed at Calvary.” That statement is gloriously true, but it doesn’t mean anything to an outsider. Seasoning our words with salt means making them jargon-free.
Spend time thinking of more interesting ways of explaining Biblical truth. This is especially important when it comes to answering the most common questions outsiders ask. Why does God allow suffering? Do all religions lead to God? How can a God of love send people to hell? Hasn’t science shown the Bible to be nonsense? Is Christianity homophobic? These issues, and others like them, are guaranteed to come up. If you haven’t been asked one of these questions already by an outsider, you will be. If we’re serious about sharing our faith, we will think hard about what to say ahead of time.
Be distinctively Christian. Salt brings out the distinctive flavour of food. Speech seasoned with salt will have a distinctively Christian flavour about it. How do you think the first Christians had conversations with outsiders about the gospel? Surely it was simply by having conversations with outsiders. Their lives and minds were so full of Jesus Christ that they probably couldn’t go more than a few sentences without saying something distinctively Christian. Whatever the topic, there will almost always be a bland, tasteless option—the sort of thing any unbeliever or Muslim or Hindu or atheist could say on the subject—and a distinctively Christian option that has savour and pungency.
Tailor-made
Paul says that the goal in speaking words seasoned with salt is so that you may know how you ought to answer each person. The words ‘each person’ are emphatic: we are to know how to answer each separate person—to treat them as individuals. Our answers need to take into account the individual needs, abilities and personalities of each outsider.
Don’t assume that every non-Christian thinks the same way about every issue. Christians don’t, so why would we assume that Muslims or Roman Catholics or atheists do? We should strive to find out the unique mixture of beliefs each unique individual has.
We will need to be very careful and sensitive when answering someone’s question about suffering, for example, speaking very differently to someone who has suffered terribly compared to someone who is just trying to be clever and trip us up. The Lord Jesus did this and we should follow his example.
We will take the outsider’s ability into account as well. We won’t use big words if we’re talking to ten-year-olds. We won’t talk to college students as though they are children. We won’t patronise elderly people.
The key to doing this well is listening carefully to what each person is actually saying. Randy Newman, who has written very helpfully on personal evangelism says, ‘Listening… might be the most useful tool we have in sharing the Good News. It might also be the most neglected.’ (Questioning Evangelism, p.240). It is a huge temptation to talk too much. That is partly because listening carefully is a lost art anyway. Have you noticed how few people are really good at listening in conversation. I’ve had ‘conversations’ with people who have talked non-stop about themselves the whole time! But if we don’t spend a fair bit of time listening to the person we’re talking to, chances are we’ll miss the target in our response.
Careful listening is also the best way to ensure we are heard when we speak. When people feel they’ve been heard, understood (not caricatured) and empathized with, they are much more open to listen to what we say. This is really nothing more than the Golden Rule of Jesus applied to evangelism: do to others what you wish they would do to you. (Matt 7.12)
So we must speak. And the words we speak are to be gracious, seasoned with salt and tailored to the individual we’re speaking to. But none of this will happen without love for Jesus Christ. Paul bases this exhortation on what he has said already about the Christian’s relationship to Christ in Colossians 3.1-2. If you love Jesus, you will be an effective personal evangelist because your heart will be set on things above—and that will be evident in your life and words. Let’s pray to be more like Peter and John in Acts 4.20: We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard.