1/6/14 Allen about 50
How do
you share the Gospel with someone who has had “no religion”? Someone who hasn’t heard of the Garden of
Eden and whose only knowledge of the Ten Commandments is from the movie and who
doesn’t know what “sin” is? In this
video I talk with an Asian man whose western name is Allen. He grew up in Vietnam with nominally Buddhist
parents and moved by himself to the United States at 15 and has had no
religious involvement ever since. He
says that when his wife of 27 years was dying of cancer, they agreed that she would
try to contact himself or their children after she died. Since he hasn’t heard from her in a year and
a half, he is concluding that there is no spiritual existence after death. Despite his lack of experience with religion,
talking with Allen was very different than, say, talking with someone who has
no religion because of a hard heart.
Allen doesn’t know about Christianity because no one has taken the time
to tell him, and he doesn’t know where to start on his own. From the outside, he views it like the other
major religions – that one must be good in this life to earn a better afterlife. He welcomes my attempt to explain basic Christianity
to him. Where to start? Some would say we must start with Jesus, but
I start much further back, in the Garden of Eden. I do this because Allen needs to know that,
despite his lack of religious background, he still has a general God-given
knowledge of right and wrong, and a general knowledge of a Creator to whom he
is accountable. I take him through a
few of the Ten Commandments to help him see his own guilt and need for
forgiveness, and then I start explaining how God in Jesus has paid the high
cost of that forgiveness. I leave Allen with more info and my contact info. I understand all this is probably quite
overwhelming for him, given the newness of what I was telling him and some
language difficulties, but it’s not too overwhelming for the Holy Spirit! {Video
at http://youtu.be/q8E0xxPO37o
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