The Principles of Witnessing to a Friend

I will use the “Conversation with a Friend” in the preceding chapter to illustrate ten principles of evangelism. Most of these principles can be applied every time you speak with an unsaved friend. Proficiency in witnessing comes from learning these principles and thinking about how you can incorporate them into your own talks (i.e., practicing imaginary conversations between yourself and your friends).  The more you talk to yourself, the easier it gets!

Principle #1:
Become a friend
before you become a preacher.

Karl and I had been friends for a few weeks before I approached the subject of God. Some friendships open up faster than others. It usually depends on the freedom you feel to talk about spiritual things and on your friend’s openness. There is no rule or set time limit. Each relationship will be different. In any case, our unsaved friends should recognize that we want to be their friends because we accept them as they are.

This might take a few days or a few months, but it is important that our friends see us reaching out to them as people, not as numbers to be added to our church rolls. If we do not want our friends to reject us automatically when we talk to them about the Bible, then we need to have laid a good foundation of trust. This trust will make it difficult for them to drop us as a friend, even if they find that the Lord is a stumbling block to them.

This principle applies to your neighbors, relatives you see regularly, work colleagues, and fellow students with whom you attend classes. This principle obviously does not apply to people with whom you do not have regular contact, such as people on the bus or train, people you meet on holiday or business trips, and so on. Two other principles for short-term acquaintances will be covered in the next chapters.

Principle #2:
Do not condemn your friend

Through our Bible reading with Karl and Brigitta, Christine and I learned another very important lesson pertaining to friendship with unsaved people. Karl and his girlfriend had been brought up to honor their religion, but this meant simply the outward form of religion: that is, going to church, paying their church taxes, doing a good deed now and then, and not committing any major crimes against society. Their religion had nothing to do with either their philosophy of life or their private lives. How they chose to live morally did not matter, as long as they were not openly living in adultery. Fornication, however, was quite acceptable for a number of reasons.

First, everybody did it. Once a person moved away from home and either went to university or got a job, it was more or less expected that he or she would find a suitable partner with whom to live until they both determined that they were suited for one another. A trial period was not only the normal practice but also encouraged by many parents and priests. In their view, divorce was a major sin, but fornication, if done “in love,” was not.

Then, between three and five years later, they would get married. During this time they lived together before the wedding, they would have one or two children. The Austrian government paid them more social housing allowance to live together unmarried, and the woman was given a substantial sum if she had children out of wedlock. The social system assumed that a single mom need help from the government. Also, the two of them received child support from the government through their parents as long as they were “children” under the age of twenty-six, meaning “not married.” A couple would benefit financially by staying together but unmarried for a few years first.

Karl and his girlfriend fitted this normal pattern. When we first met, and I discovered the situation, I was shocked, but I tried not to express this shock. Instead, I began asking them questions, and I came to realize how “normal” they saw themselves.  I also began to see how “abnormal” my biblical views were as opposed to the social and religious norms.

At this point, I decided that I could not fight their whole immoral system all at once; I would have to handle it a step at a time. I asked myself how the Lord Jesus reached immoral, but “good, religious” people. I re-read the Gospel of John, and when I came to chapter 4, I had my answer. He made the Samaritan woman curious by first showing himself friendly to her, and then pointing out that He knew she was in a non-married relationship, and at that point He did not condemn her. The order of these approaches seemed important, so I decided to try it in our Bible study each week.

My whole emphasis centered on the person of Christ. During our first few sessions together, I must have asked the question a hundred times, “Who is this person, Jesus?”

When we came to John 1:29, I still did not point out their immoral lifestyle. I simply asked them the following questions.

“What is sin?”

They answered, “Everybody defines sin according to their own viewpoint.”

“Correct. Does God have a viewpoint of sin, and if He does, is His viewpoint different from the human viewpoint?”

They had never thought of that. They did not know.

“If God does have a viewpoint, should we consider His viewpoint more important than our own or anyone else’s?”

“Yes, that makes logical sense,” they concluded.

“Then there are two key questions with which we need to wrestle.  First, where can we find God’s viewpoint? Should we go to the government for God’s viewpoint?” Here we discussed politics, and it took a long time before they stopped laughing about equating politicians with God’s standards of righteousness.

“Should we go to church?” Now they became uneasy. They knew the churches were not always right, but they also knew that they had no way of evaluating the churches’ ideas, except by their own views and feelings.

“If the Bible is from God, wouldn’t it make sense to read it to find out God’s standard of right and wrong?”

Agreed.

“There is a second question, however. What if we read the Bible and discover that we don’t agree with God’s viewpoint? What if we discover that we, according to God’s viewpoint, are living in sin?”

I did not tell them they were living in sin. I did not say, “In my opinion you are living in sin.” My opinion would have been worthless at this time. Their whole culture spoke against “my” opinion, and there was absolutely no reason why they should accept my opinion, compared with everything they had been raised to believe.

After we finished John chapter 4, then I could say, “The Bible teaches that it is sin for a man and a woman to live together and not be married.” I still did not tell them my own opinion. At one point, they attacked me about this view, and I simply said that they would have to argue with Jesus about that. I did not write the Bible, and I did not tell Jesus what He had to accept as right and wrong. Then I asked them, “Do you have the right to tell Jesus what is right and wrong? If He is really God, as he claimed and demonstrated, doesn’t He have the right to tell us how to live? I’m not going to tell you how to live! I’m not God. But what about Jesus? Is He God or isn’t He?”

I have related this conversation to illustrate an important aspect of the friendship principle. When you start a friendship with someone who does not know the Lord, do not overreact to their sin. Do not condemn them on the spot for their immoral lifestyle. Let the Holy Spirit do that through their reading of God’s Word.  If you condemn them, you will be labeled a prude, and your friends will probably stop listening to you. It could spell the end of your verbal evangelism.

Some of our friends have stopped reading the Bible with us after the Holy Spirit convicted them of the sin in their lives. Although we were sad to see this reaction, we do not believe that we have chased them off. We have come to expect some people to reject the conviction of the Holy Spirit. We keep the door of friendship open to them. We have not rejected them. They have stopped wanting to spend time with us.

Remember, the Lord Jesus could never have reached humankind if He had demanded from us a moral lifestyle before we were allowed to come to Him for forgiveness.  He accepted people as they were, and then showed them the way to heaven. 

If we have been brought up in a very moral climate, we might find spending time with immoral people difficult. We might feel that we will somehow be contaminated by them.

We must keep two things separate in our thinking: the sinner and the sin. The Lord Jesus loved the former and hated the latter.

We must accept our friends as they are before they will be willing to accept our message. Accept them as the Lord accepted us, and let the Holy Spirit, through reading the Bible, condemn their sin.

Within a year, Karl and Brigitta began to see that if they wanted to consider themselves true Christians, real repentance required that they give up their immoral lifestyle by either separating or getting married.  They chose to get married and eventually became strong leaders in a local church.


Principle #3:
Take time to get to know them and use their felt needs as conversation–starters.

When I first met Karl, I learned as much about him as possible by asking him questions about himself. I wanted to discover as much about his personal life and his views on things.

This principle usually takes more time to carry out, because friendship takes time to build, and people do not usually open up quickly.

Some might be suffering from loneliness and others from an emptiness and lack of purpose in their lives. Someone might be struggling with a great lack of self-control in some moral area. Whatever area it is, the Bible has a remedy for their problem. Different needs require both different approaches and different answers. Everyone needs the Lord as his or her Savior, but the road to that decision will be different for each person.

Principle #4:
Make other curious.

Through my conversations with Karl on various topics, I had begun to understand his analytical way of looking at things. Therefore I said, “I know God,” because I knew he would want to know exactly what I meant. He thought that I was very arrogant, but this only spurred his curiosity more.

Curiosity can be sparked with a question or with a statement that your friend cannot understand. I will give further examples of conversation starters in a following chapter.

If you have trouble starting a conversation about the Bible, God or religion, then provoke others to start the conversation. Be different! It doesn’t have to be something wild, such as tattooing Jesus pictures on your forehead or breaking into a coughing fit when your friend lights a cigarette and then announcing that you don’t smoke because you’re a Christian. As I said in Chapter 4, reading your Bible in public is a natural way to make people curious.

Principle #5:
Ask questions.

Use this fifth principle to find out things about your unsaved friends in the initial stages of friendship and to make them curious about the gospel later. Start practicing now to ask different types of questions.

Ask questions that cause a person to doubt his own views: “Where did you get your information? Are you sure you know what you are talking about?”

Ask questions that place their morals in doubt: Why should I live like everyone else? Why can’t I be faithful to one partner all my life? Why should I take drugs, just because everyone else does? Why should I cheat on tests or steal at work just because it’s so often done? Don’t I have the right to choose my own standards by which to live? Why should conformity to everyone else be important to me?

Ask questions that have no “good” answer: “What’s wrong with reading the Bible?” The key to asking the right questions is to think about which ones you want to ask before the situation arises.

Principle #6:
Do not defend yourself

This principle is one of the hardest to learn. It goes against our very nature and can only be carried out if we think through possible conversations with our friends beforehand.

As we saw in John 2 and 3, Jesus never defended himself. He aggressively attacked the Pharisees’ false presuppositions, and He was not very polite about it. He dealt more kindly with those who came to him seeking. The belligerent people received a different kind of treatment.

When Karl asked if I was becoming religious, my initial reaction would have been to run from his attack or to defend my Bible reading. My feelings told me to put my Bible away and tell him, no, I wasn’t becoming religious, and then change the subject as quickly as possible. Or I might have felt as though I could somehow defend “being religious” (whatever that meant).

We have to remember that the believer can admit that he does not know everything and that he makes mistakes. This does not mean that the Bible is wrong or that Jesus will stop being God or that seekers will automatically reject God because of our failures.

With Karl, I overcame my initial reaction to defend myself by following principle number five: I asked him a question. If he had said, “Have you had this problem long?” I would have still gotten the point: He is attacking my reading the Bible. My response? A question: “What problem?”  Now he has to explain his question, and the sting has been removed from his question.

I could have asked him questions that put him on the defensive and made him see that he had no answer to my question: “Why shouldn’t I be religious? Aren’t you? Why not? What does God think about your not being religious?” In any case, I have avoided defending myself.

When people ask you for a reason for the hope that is within you (1 Peter 3:15), either give it to them or tell them you will gladly read the Bible with them so that they can find the answer to their questions for themselves. Then perhaps they can obtain the same hope. If they attack you, however, do not defend yourself. Instead ask them a question! It is difficult to think up questions on the spot, and it is no fun to be caught speechless by an accusation. Therefore, plan some questions you can ask. You won’t be able to come up with just the right questions every time, but the more you plan for different possibilities, the more you will improve.

PRINCIPLE #7:
Do not try to prove the Bible is true or that your viewpoints are right.

At first, Karl did not believe that the Bible was inspired by God. The believer knows that the Bible is not just any religious book. Hebrews 4:12 makes it clear that the Word of God changes lives, not by placing people in a religious system or under a set of religious rules or by making them wear a religious mask. It changes men and women from the inside out. The power to change lives comes from the Word, not from our commentary on it. We simply need to get them to read it for themselves and let the Lord do the convicting.

Hebrews 11:6 also tells us that if people desire to be accepted by God and to please Him, they must believe that God exists and that He rewards those who come to Him. This is a prerequisite, not a final step in the journey to God.

What most people overlook is that belief or unbelief do not alter the facts. If we are told there will be an earthquake tomorrow where we are living, and we choose to disbelieve this information, our disbelief will not stop the earthquake from happening. We could possibly die as a consequence of our unbelief.  If, on the other hand, we believe there will be an earthquake tomorrow, but there are no facts or indications of a future quake, then we can believe as hard as we want without causing an earthquake.  Belief without facts is blindness; ignoring the facts is stupid.

If the Bible is not God’s Word, then our viewpoints aren’t worth the air we use to express our beliefs. If the Bible is what it claims, then this world’s unbelief will not change the fact of the Bible’s truthfulness. Even if we could prove the Bible to be true, most people would still reject it.

Most people will try to put you on the spot and get themselves off the hook by demanding that you prove something. “Prove that God exists! Prove that the Bible is true!” Don't try to prove anything. Jesus never tried to prove God’s existence or that the Bible was true. He assumed it.

I once asked a fellow to prove to me that God was not looking over this fellow’s shoulder and laughing at his reasons for claiming that God did not exist. Then I asked him if God might not be angry at being rejected by my atheist friend. Note principle number five: Ask questions.

If an unbeliever states that most people do not believe the Bible, I would agree with him and then ask him if the majority is always right? This question has led to some interesting conversations about politics. (In one year, during the 1880s, the French changed governments seven times. Each time, the majority ruled. If the majority was always right, they sure changed their mind a lot!)

In line with this thinking, I often ask the person, “On whose side would you rather be: all of humankind’s combined or God’s?” I do not usually receive an answer.

If my friend seems to have honest questions about the validity or trustworthiness of the Bible, I direct him to F. F. Bruce’s book, New Testament Documents, Are They Reliable?[1] or Josh McDowell’s, Evidence That Demands a Verdict.[2] These questions are very important, and if he really wants answers, he will read these books.

When Karl said I must be a weirdo, I laughed. Why? Two reasons: The conversation was going well, but getting warm, so I needed to lighten it up. I was not bothered by his insinuation that there might be something wrong with my brain. Maybe there is! Don’t take yourself too seriously, and don’t take your friends’ negative comments too personally. Again, defensiveness (remember principle six!) will bring the discussion to a halt, and that defeats our purpose.

[1] F. F. Bruce, New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity, 1964).

[2] Josh McDowell, Evidence That Demands a Verdict (San Bernardino, Calif.: Here’s Life, 1990).

Principle #8:
Show or friends that they’re thinking could be wrong.

I asked Karl once, “Is it possible that you could be wrong? No one is perfect. No one thinks correctly about everything all the time. And yet, each of us believes, or wants to believe, that our views on everything are correct, or we would change our views. Maybe the Bible is from God, and you’ve been thinking wrongly about it all along.”

Let them know that you could be wrong, too; therefore, you are open to having your own ideas challenged. When they react negatively toward the Bible, ask them the question, “What is different about the Bible, as compared with other religious literature? If there is no difference, why do you have a negative attitude toward it?”

This principle is present in all of the conversations. To win people to Christ, we must show them that they have a wrong viewpoint about God and themselves. Before they will recognize their sin for what it is, and thereby desire salvation from it, they must admit one simple fact – their thinking has been wrong. Use questions to point this out. Do not say to your friends, “Boy, are you stupid! That’s one of the most idiotic statements I have ever heard!” These comments are door-closers.

The first goal of witnessing deals directly with this principle. Read 2 Corinthians 10:3-5 and Jeremiah 1:10. We are in the business of destroying wrong thought patterns. Look again at chapter 3. Our friends need to begin questioning their own viewpoints. “How do I know I’m right?”

A major area of wrong thinking for our unsaved friends concerns their viewpoint of the Bible. I asked Karl if he had read the New Testament. This is a critical question. He had negative feelings about reading the Bible, but he was not aware that he did not feel this way about other religious books. If the Bible was just another religious book, why did he react so negatively against my reading it?

Most people do not realize that their negative attitudes toward the Bible are not based on direct, first-hand experience. An important step along the road to getting your friend to read the Bible with you is to point out to him that he might not really know what the Bible teaches. A lack of facts leads to wrong thinking, especially if he has not read it himself.

Theology and theologians may need to be discussed, too. I expressed my thoughts on theologians to make Karl ask the question, “Can I really trust what they say about the Bible? My friend claims that he can understand the Bible, and he doesn’t sound like a theologian. Maybe I can understand it without a ‘religious’ person explaining it to me. Maybe not all of it at once, but surely as much as my friend.”

If you have studied theology, the answer to Karl’s question, “Have you studied theology?” could be, “Why do I need theology to read the Bible?” Remember, always try to answer questions with questions. My own theology degree could be a great stumbling block to unbelievers, and I really do believe that it is completely unnecessary for understanding the Bible. If you’ve studied some theology and are trying to reach the unsaved, you may need to un-learn your theological jargon and learn to speak like a “normal person.”

Karl also thought that he was being intellectually consistent in his thinking, but few unsaved people are. In destroying Karl’s argument about being intellectual, I attacked what Karl felt was his strong point – a logical and scholarly mind. I accused him of not living up to his own standard of measurement as a student. If he chose to reject me, the question would forever nag at him: “How can I claim to be a scientific thinker and reject a book I have not even taken the trouble to examine?”

Most people confuse religion with the Bible, and because they do, they reject the Bible along with all of their bad religious experiences. Karl reacted this way when I mentioned the Bible. Therefore, I spent some time pointing out his lack of logical thinking in this area. My agreeing with him in his attitude toward religion accomplished two things. It showed him not only that we were not far apart in our thinking but also that he did not fully understand my way of thinking yet. It helped to make him more curious.

Another point to make concerning the difference between religion and relationship can be seen in church history. There is no use denying that “religion” has been the cause of many of the world’s problems. A large percentage of the crimes against society throughout the centuries have been committed in the name of religion. The Crusades and the Inquisition in the Middle Ages were carried out in the name of Christ. The followers of Islam have murdered thousands of people in the name of Allah. In John 16:1-3, Jesus says that anyone who kills a believer in the name of God does not know the real, living God. Jesus condemned the organized religions of his day. Your friend may be baffled to discover that you find “religion” as distasteful as he does.  It will help to make him curious.

Because a person can think wrongly, and because there are so many false religions that lead away from the one true God, I believe that a person should be, in his very nature, skeptical. This surprises many of my unsaved friends, because they expect me to be “brainless,” blindly believing what I’ve been taught to believe. True Christianity is not anti-intellectual. Tell your friend, “You need to use your brain, not your feelings, when you read the Bible.” The apostle Paul, with his tremendous education as a Pharisee, is an excellent example of this fact.

Throughout the conversation, I did not accuse Karl in an unfriendly way. In the course of our discussion, I remained courteous but confident in my line of reasoning. One of my last comments to Karl was that the Bible was interesting. By then, I knew he probably would not ask “why” the Bible is interesting, but he would most certainly wonder what I meant.

Although there are more areas, these are the main ones with which you might have to deal in revealing to your friend his wrong thinking: a negative attitude toward the Bible but not toward other religious books, rejection of the Bible without having read it, trust in theologians who might be wrong, double intellectual (or emotional!) standards, and confusion of religion with relationship.

How does one go about showing an unsaved friend that his thinking is wrong? In Chapter 3, we told of a man who owns a piece of land on which an old house stands. It would be difficult for him to build a second house on the land with the first house still standing. He would have to remove the old house first.

What is the fastest way to bring down an old house? Simple. Take out a few of the foundation stones, and the house will collapse. We don’t need to use a cannon or a machine gun approach on our friends. We just need to find a person’s foundation stones and, with a few unsettling questions, remove them.

Principle #9:
Do not answer all your friend’s questions, and do not give him answers.

Stated another way, do not become the authority figure, the one with the right belief. Make the Bible central.

Throughout our time of talking about God, religion, the Bible, and reading the New Testament together, I refrained from answering most of Karl’s questions. He got angry a couple of times, but I kept insisting that what I believed was not important. If there was a heaven, my beliefs would not get him into it. He would have to find his own answers.

Make your friend come up with his own answers from the text itself. This principle applies both now and when you start reading the Bible together. It is vitally important that you establish the Bible as the final authority. Your opinion of the Bible does not matter. We will see this in action in the commentary section of this book.

I let Karl know that I did not consider myself infallible. I wanted him to see me as I am – just human, like himself. I can make mistakes, but I’m not afraid to admit it. I will always have something to learn from him, even when I see things correctly and he doesn’t. And whether I am right or wrong will make no difference in his relationship with the living God. That all depends on whether his thinking is right or wrong.

At the same time, I challenged his claim that there is no God. I forced him to question his own “infallibility.” His views were based on his limited experience. He had never met a real Christian nor read the Bible seriously. He, like most people, never questioned his presuppositions and automatically assumed that his views on everything were correct. I had to deal with Karl’s non-thinking attitudes at the outset.

Principle #10:
Ask your unsaved friend
if he would like to read the Bible with you.

Finally, principles one through nine should lead you to the ultimate goal of getting your unsaved friend to read the Bible with you. The Lord Jesus placed the highest priority on God’s Word, commanding the Sadducees to spend more time studying the Scriptures (John 5:39).

If he says no, ask him why not, and continue the conversation. If his “no!” is final, keep the door of friendship open to him but find someone else to ask to read John’s Gospel with you. The key is perseverance. Don’t give up!

Do It!

Think back on a couple of previous witnessing experiences.  Answer the following questions.

1.  Had I been praying for my friend before I witnessed to him? Did the person I witnessed to believe that I was his friend? Did I get too personal too quickly? Was I close enough to him to know his needs? Did I show him acceptance before talking about his sin? Can I start over with this person? (“I’m sorry, friend. I didn’t mean to hurt you with what I said.”)

2.  Did I make him curious, or did I unload the whole gospel at once?  How could I have improved my approach?

3.  Did I ask questions, or did I tell him the answers? Did he know and understand the questions behind my answers?

4.  When he came back with his own questions, did I admit my failings, or did I defend myself? Did I try to meet his demands by proving something? Can I go back to him and say, “Friend, could we read the Bible together and then talk about proving things?”

5.  Was I able to point out his wrong thinking without condemning him personally?

6.  Did I try to answer all of his questions? If so, did he reject my answers because they were “my” answers?

7.  Could I go to him now and ask him if he would like to read the Bible with me? If he says “no”, can I ask why not, and then use the principles in this chapter to help him change his mind?

8.  If all else fails, can I ask another friend to read the Bible with me?

SHOP

Privacy Policy