Another blog with good tips

EveryStudent.com has a new blog with great help for sharing your faith. I just read the first post and liked the creative and culturally relevant idea they are trying this summer in Chicago.

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.’”

The Four Circles

I hope you have the time to learn about The Four Circles from InterVarsity. The complete presentation of the Gospel and the cultural relevance of the presentation are fantastic! If you want to be challenged in your thinking of how we present the Gospel, I highly recommend these links:

A Christianity Today article explaining the concept behind The Four Circles.

How to present the Four Circles.

Video presentations of the Four Circles:
Part One
Part Two

James Choung’s blog, Tell It Slant , to get more information. (I particularly recommend his post on Napkin Sketching. Follow the links to see how corporations are using this effective communication technique – Dr. Bright used napkin sketching before the Four Spiritual Laws were available in printed form.)