Five Steps in Evangelism

I got this entire sermon from evangelist Jim Wilson's book Taking Men Alive. But the content is just so good, so life-changing, that I want to proclaim it to you tonight. You see, most of us have no idea how to do evangelism because we are looking at the whole enchilada and thinking "That is a big enchilada." Perhaps you think back to your own conversion, and the years of preparation and the baby steps that led up to it, and then the years of follow-up work as you continue to pursue Jesus, and you think "How on earth am I going to communicate all of that in a three-minute conversation, or even a thirty-minute conversation?" The answer, of course, is that you're not. And therefore, we tend to want to give up before we've even started because we have such an exalted concept of what the Christian life is. That concept is correct; getting saved really is something the size of your whole life, something that takes a lifetime to understand, internalize, and live out. But my point today is that, armed with this playbook from Jesus, you will be able to focus on a manageable-size step of the process. You will be able to evaluate where the person you're talking to is at, and by the grace of God say something that represents progress in the right direction. Don't think that you have to complete all the steps in one conversation. Working on a piece of the process, taking even a portion of one step, is the goal. Jesus, in this verse, tells us how to evangelize.