The Roman Road

Many Christians are familiar with The Roman Road, which explains what God had done for us and how we can have forgiveness freely through Christ using verses from Romans.

The verses are
Romans 3:23
Romans 6: 23
Romans 5: 8
Romans 10: 9 – 13

I present it here for you to use if you wish,as a narrative, quoting Romans 3: 21 – 24, Romans 6: 22 – 23, Romans 5: 6 – 8, and Romans 1): 4 – 13 from The Message version of The Bible:

“But in our time something new has been added. What Moses and the prophets witnessed to all those years has happened. The God-setting-things-right that we read about has become Jesus-setting-things-right for us. And not only for us, but for everyone who believes in him. . . Since we’ve compiled this long and sorry record as sinners . . . and proved that we are utterly incapable of living the glorious lives God wills for us, God did it for us. Out of sheer generosity he put us in right standing with himself. A pure gift. He got us out of the mess we’re in and restored us to where he always wanted us to be. And he did it by means of Jesus Christ. . .

“But now that you’ve found you don’t have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God’s gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master. . .

“Christ arrives right on time to make this happen. He didn’t, and doesn’t, wait for us to get ready. He presented himself for this sacrificial death when we were far too weak and rebellious to do anything to get ourselves ready. And even if we hadn’t been so weak, we wouldn’t have known what to do anyway. We can understand someone dying for a person worth dying for, and we can understand how someone good and noble could inspire us to selfless sacrifice. But God put his love on the line for us by offering his Son in sacrificial death while we were of no use whatever to him. . .

“The earlier revelation was intended simply to get us ready for the Messiah, who then puts everything right for those who trust him to do it. Moses wrote that anyone who insists on using the law code to live right before God soon discovers it’s not so easy—every detail of life regulated by fine print! But trusting God to shape the right living in us is a different story— no precarious climb up to heaven to recruit the Messiah, no dangerous descent into hell to rescue the Messiah. So what exactly was Moses saying?

The word that saves is right here,
as near as the tongue in your mouth,
as close as the heart in your chest.

It’s the word of faith that welcomes God to go to work and set things right for us. This is the core of our preaching. Say the welcoming word to God—‘Jesus is my Master’—embracing, body and soul, God’s work of doing in us what he did in raising Jesus from the dead. That’s it. You’re not ‘doing’ anything; you’re simply calling out to God, trusting him to do it for you. That’s salvation. With your whole being you embrace God setting things right, and then you say it, right out loud: ‘God has set everything right between him and me!’

“Scripture reassures us, ‘No one who trusts God like this—heart and soul—will ever regret it.’ It’s exactly the same no matter what a person’s religious background may be: the same God for all of us, acting the same incredibly generous way to everyone who calls out for help. ‘Everyone who calls, “Help, God!” gets help.’”

What I Keep in My Purse

The clerk watched me rummaging through my purse. I had already paid and should have been walking away. I was pawing through more than seven varieties of tracts trying to find the right one. The minute this took to do was agonizingly long.

This is awkward, I thought, as I finally handed her a little green booklet. I went home and removed some of the tracts. (Read more of this story.)

The basic booklets I keep with me are also different colors and, therefore, easy to identify and pull out.

I have:
green Would You Like To Know God Personally,
blue Satisfied? (The Holy Spirit booklet),
cream/green Beginning Your Journey of Significance (new Four Laws for women),
cream/purple Living a Life of Significance? (new Holy Spirit booklet for women),
yellow The Four Laws in Spanish, and
black The Passage.

I use the green and blue booklets because I think the question on the cover would draw the person in to read the tract. Also, several times when I used to have the original yellow English Four Spiritual Laws in my purse, I would discover in the checkout line that all my booklets were in Spanish! However, God can use that situation, too!

In 2007, I also started carrying the Who is He? mini-CD for giving to twenty-something guys and for giving to internationals since the mini-CD presents the Gospel in more than thirty languages. Check out the content of this powerful tool. (An entire English Bible, apologetic books, and more).

Another tract I have added recently is 4 Laws – Discovering God in Chinese Characters. This tract explains how to know Jesus by explaining the etymological roots of Chinese characters. The message of salvation found in Genesis is revealed in these characters.

Read real-life stories about sharing tracts with the people you meet.

Rapid Deployment Kits for the Military

Campus Crusade for Christ’s Military Ministry has many resources you can use for reaching men and women in the military and their families. Be sure to visit their website to discover more than I have time to mention here.

To highlight a few, the Military Ministry sends:
Chaplain’s Boxes with books and videos
20, 000 New Testaments and Bibles in Rapid Deployment Kits every month.

If Properly Led is a great leadership conference held in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

You might also enjoy reading my story about sending DVDs to my cousin serving in Baghdad.