Dr. Randy Newman explores words and images used in the New Testament to describe the gospel. Discover the richness of the good news of Jesus which includes: salvation, forgiveness, reconciliation, redemption, adoption, atonement, and more. Learn how you can share the gospel with others using words and images that resonate and connect with diverse audiences and needs.

Recommended Resources:

• • Unlikely Converts by Randy Newman
  • Motivations to Appeal to in Our Hearers When We Preach for Conversion by D.A. Carson

Transcript

Welcome to Questions That Matter, a podcast of the C.S. Lewis Institute. I’m your host, Randy Newman. Today, it’s just me in the studio, talking about evangelism and apologetics, and as I mentioned, I believe this is the second one that I’m doing that’s just solo about evangelism and apologetics. We’d love to hear from you to find out, are these stand-alone, Randy-Newman-alone podcasts helpful for you as we think about apologetics and evangelism.

Many of us have learned how to communicate the gospel, and we’ve learned a concise way of expressing the gospel, and usually we focus in on sin and forgiveness and that Jesus’ death on the cross provided substitutionary atonement, forgiveness for sins, and this is absolutely crucial. This is absolutely nonnegotiable, and so every gospel presentation must include that. That is an emphasis in scripture that we can’t deviate from. And, if you do a little bit of reading about church history, you find that, many times in the history of the church, people have deviated from that. They got away from substitutionary atonement. They wanted to say, “Oh, let’s not talk about all that blood,” and that has been terribly harmful, and they lost the gospel.

So we must never get away from that. But, at the same time, as you read through the New Testament, you do find that there are all these other words and images for the gospel. So surely there’s propitiation, substitutionary atonement. But there’s also salvation, being saved out of a kind of captivity or a kind of enslavement. And then there’s a word like reconciliation. Two parties that once were together and have now become alienated, and now, by the work of the gospel, they have been brought back together. It’s a relational term, reconciliation. And then you’ll find the word redemption, which is much more of an economic term, not a relational term, but somebody being bought out of slavery and being brought back into the kind of being or experience that they were created to have. And then you have a word like adoption, someone who’s not a member of a family being brought into a family. And now, God is your Father, whereas, back with propitiation, it was God was both your judge and the one who provided atonement for you. Or then you have a word like eternal life, living forever in heaven.

And there’s all these different words, and what they tell us is that this gospel message is rich and full and multifaceted, and we should be overjoyed with that, because we know that we, as human beings, as people, we are multifaceted. I am an individual person, but I’m also in a family, and I’m also in a society and a culture. I’m a person who is a physical being. I eat food. I need to sleep. I’m an emotional being. I sing songs. I look at beautiful flowers. And we, as multifaceted creatures have been created by a God who wants us to experience all of that, and so He brought about a salvation that connects with all of our being.

Now, where this goes to in evangelism is we can talk about the gospel in a wide variety of ways to connect with people on different levels. Or maybe a better way to say it is different people start at a different starting point. People start to start wondering about the gospel at various different places. And so we can bring them to the cross with a variety of starting places.

Some of you are getting nervous, perhaps, that I'm just ranting and not thinking about this in scripture, but think about the difference between the way Jesus spoke to Nicodemus in John chapter 3. It was a kind of an intellectual, philosophical, or conceptual concept about being born again, and it was a theological discussion about how he, as a teacher of the Jews, should know this. This shouldn't be surprising to him. It should fit with what he understood from the Hebrew scriptures that God wanted a person to be born again, remade, recreated, regenerated.

But then the very next chapter in John chapter 4, Jesus talks to the woman at the well. She was not a religious Jewish woman. She was a Samaritan, and Jesus spoke to her about things on a much more emotional or relational level. He started talking to her about water and thirst. And isn’t it frustrating that we keep getting thirsty, and wouldn't it be wonderful if there was a kind of water that when you drank it, you were never thirsty again. And then He talked to her about her husband. “Go call your husband,” and she said, “I don't have a husband.” And He says, “You’re right. You’ve had five husbands, and the man you're living with now is not your husband.” So it was a relational, moral, sexual discussion, rather than an intellectual, theological, philosophical one. And we look at how Paul preached in different ways to a Jewish synagogue in Acts 13 or a very philosophical secular place like Athens in Acts 17 or a very pagan Greek-god-worshiping place like Lystra and Derbe in Acts 14.

So we just need to talk to people and see where are they? What are their starting points? What are their tension points that the gospel can release that tension? Some people do indeed feel guilty about things they've done. And the message of forgiveness for sins is just the most wonderful thing they could ever hear. But some people don't, and that's not the starting point for them. For some people, it’s not about things they’ve done. It's about who they are. They feel ashamed of who they are. And shame is different than guilt, and so the gospel message of adoption, of being brought into a family could be the starting point for that person, and for some people, life just doesn't make any sense and it just seems sort of absurd and meaningless, and the gospel makes sense of reality. It’s a message of eternal life and of a God who is sovereign and in control and is working through history, through time to bring all things to fruition.

I'm very excited to tell you about a new resource we’re working on at the C.S. Lewis Institute. It's going to be a series of relatively short articles that answer challenging questions to the Christian faith, so less than a thousand words, which is like the front and back of one piece of paper, maybe even less than that. Of questions like, “Why does a good God allow evil and suffering?” and, “Isn’t Jesus just like all the other religious people?” and, “Aren’t all religions the same?” and the questions that people are likely to ask us if we get into some really good, deep conversations with them. And it's going to be a growing resource. There'll be a new topic and piece of paper, basically, for you to read and share with nonbelievers. So check it out. If it's not already, it will be at cslewisinstitute.org/resources-category/challengingquestions. Or, if that's just crazy, go to cslewisinstitute.org and search for questions. I sure hope that'll help. Thanks.

I've been thinking about this from a number of different sources that have helped me think about this. One is an article by Don Carson, where he studied all of the different kinds of ways people preached the gospel in the gospels and the book of Acts. And what he saw was that there were at least eight different motivations that speakers like Peter or Paul or Jesus appealed to, motivations for people to seriously consider the gospel.

In some cases, there was a fear of judgment, and the speaker was talking about, “You need to turn from or sin because God will judge you.” But then in other situations it was more of a burden of guilt, and like I just mentioned, sometimes it was about being alleviated from shame. Or sometimes it's the need for future grace, a kind of grace that culminates where the world is going and where I'm going or where individual people are going. Sometimes it was the attractiveness of truth. And sometimes it was the despairing sense of need, of being separated from God. And sometimes the theme was about grace. And sometimes it was about love. And sometimes it was about desire. And so we need to know the gospel so well and with such full orbedness—I know that's not a real word—that we can connect with people at different places and different starting points.

Let me bring this to a close and just share one story with you: Many of you know that I did a research project of interviewing forty college students who had become Christians within the last two years. And I wrote it up—well, I wrote it up as a doctoral dissertation, which if you're struggling with insomnia, I can send you a copy, and it will put you to sleep. But I wrote it up in a book that I hope is more… you can stay awake for, called Unlikely Converts. And I tell this story in that book:

One of the students that I interviewed was a young woman. She had become a Christian, and she started telling me her story about how it was that she became a Christian. When she was in high school, her guidance counselor told her that she should really get involved with a lot of extracurricular activities, because just her grades alone were not good enough to get into the kinds of colleges that she wanted to apply to. So she joined the soccer team and the cheer-leading squad and the chess club and I don't member, but so many different activities. And it worked. She got into her first choice of the college she wanted to go to.

And then she got away to college, and in her first semester, she thought, “Someday I’m going to have to be applying for a job, and I'm going to need a resume. I should probably apply or join a whole bunch of different extracurricular activities here, at college.” So she joined this club and that club and this team and this sport and this intramural squad, and oh my goodness! And her schedule just got packed, and she was exhausted. And a friend invited her to a Christian group on campus, and she thought, “Well, that would probably look good on the resume. Sure. I'll go. Let me join that.”

And so she goes to this meeting. She had not been raised in any kind of a churchgoing family. She said she didn't remember ever going to church. Maybe once when she was really young, a friend invited her to church, so she went with the friend. So this is a whole brand new thing, going to a religious, Christian organization on campus. And she just remembers thinking it was really weird. It was long. They sang for a long time. It was just very foreign to her. And she really didn't remember much. Somebody spoke, gave a message, probably spoke for thirty minutes, but she didn't remember who it was or what the person even spoke about.

She said, “The only thing I remember from that meeting was, at the very end of the meeting, they were making announcements about things going on on campus. And someone got up and was advertising for people joining a Bible study, and there was going to be a sign-up sheet in the back that you could sign up to if you wanted to be in a Bible study. And this person who was getting up to make the announcement, she read a verse from the Gospel of Matthew that said, ‘Come to me, all who are weary and heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’ And the person making the announcement was saying that sometimes we just need a rest from our studies and our campus activities and just go and study the Bible and be with other Christians.”

And all she remembers, this woman who was talking to me, was hearing the word rest. And she thought, “Rest? You can rest? There's a possibility of rest? I've got to find out about this.” So she signed up to go to this Bible study. And she heard the gospel. And she heard week after week after week, a study of, I think it was the gospel of John, about Jesus reaching out to people. And she became a Christian because the power of scripture and the power of the gospel message connected with her, and in particular that Jesus, by having completed the work of atonement, sat down at the right hand of God, and he sat down so that we could rest. We didn't have to strive to perform, and that was her route from unbelief to belief. It was through Jesus as the one providing rest.

As she was telling me this story, she mentioned a couple of times about her mother and how her mother responded when she became a Christian. Her mother was really very happy, even though her mother was not a Christian. But toward the end of our conversation, I said, “Now you've mentioned your mother several times, but you've never mentioned anything about your father. How did he respond to your becoming a Christian?” And all of a sudden her face kind of turned down, and she got a little bit softer in her speaking, and she said, “Oh, I don't really know my father that well. I think I was only about three or four years old when he left our family, and I didn't hear from him too much. I probably haven't heard anything from him in about three or four years. And I remember thinking, “Oh my goodness! No wonder she was trying to build a resume and build a list of accomplishments, to try to connect with a parent who had gone away. And what good, good news the gospel is for someone who needs to be adopted into a new family, a family that has a Father, a Heavenly Father Who will not disappoint and will not ever leave or abandon.”

So I share that story because the gospel is good news for a whole lot of people in a whole wide variety of ways. And we need to be adept at telling people that it's a message of forgiveness and reconciliation and redemption and adoption and eternal life and salvation and so many other things.

So I hope that this is encouraging for you and that it might spark, start, or continue some conversations with some of the non-Christians that God has placed around you. I'll bring this to a close now and hope that all of our resources at the C.S. Lewis Institute help you grow and thrive and love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, strength, and mind.

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