This pastoral passage was originally written for LRBC for September 1st 2024

One of the difficulties that many Christians might feel about evangelism is not knowing how to say what we want to share. For a start, the gospel presumes that there is a problem in the relationship between God and humanity. Setting aside the matter of belief or unbelief in the existence of God, we might struggle to know how to describe the problem, or what might be the best way to explain it to the person we want to evangelize. 

A book that my wife and I have been looking at has a helpful chapter that presents a range of different metaphors that the Bible uses that can help us here. There are several charts which we found thought provoking even though they weren’t telling us anything we didn’t know already. One of them outlines metaphors for God together with corresponding descriptions of sin and how humans would rightly respond to God thus understood. This is the table:*

God	Sin or Sinful State	Correct Response
Creator	Idolatry	Worship
King	Rebellion	Repentance and submission
Holy	Impurity	Purity
Judge	Transgression	Righteousness
Savior	Self-righteousness	Calling on his name
Father	Broken relationship	Becoming a child of God
Groom	Unfaithfulness	Faithfulness
Shepherd	Wandering	Following

This does not bring the work of Christ crucified and resurrected into the picture, but that isn’t needed for the author’s purposes at this point in the book—he gets to that a little later. The author gives the following brief and basic suggestion from the nature of God as holy: “God is a holy God. But all of us are impure; we are not as good as we should be. So we deserve to be separated from God forever. But if we call on Jesus to save us, Jesus will wash away our sins and make us clean. Now we can come near to God.”

Let this be food for thought. For those of us who want to think about evangelism, I hope this is a helpful and thought-provoking snippet that stirs us towards participation in this vital but neglected task.

*The chart is drawn from Sam Chan’s Evangelism in a Skeptical World: How to Make the Unbelievable News about Jesus More Believable (2018), from the chapter “How to Craft a Gospel Presentation,” p. 69.

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