Category Archives: Gospel

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God Goes to the Absolute Extreme for the Lost

Understanding Jesus from the perspective of the Father’s love can really inform the way you abide in Him, serve others, and pray. The Gospel of John tells the story of the relationship between the Heavenly Father and his Son Jesus and their indescribable love for you and for me. It is a story about Jesus Christ’s extravagant and extreme love for the lost. I challenge you as a leader to ponder this truth and consider how it may change you by fully embracing it.

the father goes to an absolute extreme for the lost

The Greatest Opener of All Time

"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was in the beginning with God.  All things were made through him, and without him was not any thing made that was made.  In him was life, and the life was the light of men.  The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:1-5)
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How to Tell the Gospel Story

Let me ask a question. When was the last time you told someone the story of Jesus Christ? Can you remember?

how to share the gospel story

Photo by eberhard grossgasteiger on Unsplash

A disciple’s desire is to joyfully spread the good news of Jesus with others. Yet many followers of Jesus struggle to share the gospel story on a regular basis. Why? Since the gospel has the power to restore people to a right relationship with God, it encounters the most spiritual resistance of any story. Satan wants to stamp it out before we share it with other people. But as disciples of Jesus, we have no excuse to keep God’s good news to ourselves. We must push past the enemy’s resistance and our own inhibitions so we can proclaim the good news even more boldly to a world that’s literally dying to hear.

 

In this post, I’ll offer 3 strategies to help you spread the gospel story with confidence.

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3 Kinds of Stories that Leaders Should Tell

One of the best ways to reach people is through storytelling. Storytelling softens people’s hearts and makes space for transformation. In the last post, we talked about the why behind storytelling. Youth leaders tell stories because Jesus told stories, people remember stories, and creation is a story. But which stories should leaders tell? There are three kinds of storytelling leaders should learn: The Gospel story, symbolic stories, and life stories.

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Time to Get Creative! Share the Gospel (Orange Zone)

Imagine traveling to a place where you did not speak the language spoken there. What would you do to communicate so that you could be understood correctly? How would you connect with people? What strategies would you use to learn? You would not be able to simply speak your known language and expect people to understand you. This scenario would require you to
get creative!
Sharing the Gospel can be like cross-cultural travel into someone else’s life. Young people who are curious about Jesus, but do not know Him yet may not be able to fully understand the miraculous work on the cross in the language that Christians are used to. Youth leaders must be creative in communicating the Gospel in a way that young people can connect to and understand.
orange zone - creatively share the gospel
The orange zone of Full Spectrum Youth Ministry is representative of proclaiming the Gospel to those who are curious about following Jesus. Orange is in the middle of the color spectrum and this color symbolizes creativity. To inspire some creativity, let’s look at some ways Jesus communicated with others.
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3 Leadership Qualities that Help You Leave a Lasting Impact

Leadership qualities like being humble, hopeful and vocal leave a lasting impact. Before you read any further, take one minute and think about 3-5 memories from your life that deeply shaped you to be who you are today. What were they? When did they happen?

adolescent student ministry

This probably won’t surprise you, but recent adolescent research affirms:

Nearly everyone recalls adolescence more powerfully than any other stage of life (Age of Opportunity by Laurence Steinberg).

Why is that true about adolescence (ages 13-25 or so)? One of the reasons people have so many shaping memories from adolescence is that the brain’s last period of heightened malleability is during adolescence (Steinberg, 10). Because this is the last window of opportunity for the brain to be so radically shaped, we tend to remember things that we experienced from that stage of life. Here’s how you can make sure to leave a lasting impact in the lives of the students you are investing in…

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15 Ways to Help Students Find Peace they are Longing for through the Gospel…

As a youthworker or parent, to give hope and solace to teenagers, we need to tell them how to find peace. The world has questions. The Bible has answers. Students, ages 13-25 in particular are beginning to shift from a totally concrete view of the world to a more abstract perspective.

bible outdoors

This means that adolescence is a time where we begin to process our environment and relationships by asking lots of questions. Most of these questions go unspoken, but they are there if you dig for them.

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5 Trends in Youth Ministry & How to Navigate the Perfect Storm

Five trends in youth ministry point to a perfect storm on the horizon

youth ministry trends

The trends I’m referring to are:

1. Youth culture is more fragmented than ever before. (Why? Because families are breaking down, young people are more fragile, broken, and have greater needs.)

2. You need more youth leaders today to reach fewer young people.

3. Volunteerism is decreasing.

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ARE YOU TRYING TO LIVE UP TO IMPOSSIBLE STANDARDS? BE FREE!

photo by Thomas HainesI have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. I do not set aside the grace of God, for if righteousness could be gained through the law, Christ died for nothing! -Galatians 2:20-21

Our faith muscles are strengthened as we meditate on the grace of God, not on his impossible standards.

Can you imagine ever saying to someone that “Christ died for nothing!”? Yet the Apostle Paul says that in our actions and in our beliefs we may as well be saying that out loud. That is really convicting. I think leaders in particular sometimes get baited by performance, goals and expectations put on them and fall into this trap of trying to live up to impossible standards.

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Good News: You are Loved. Jesus & the Gospel Proves It.

fly fishing with Jesus

The good news of Jesus Christ is that you are loved.

But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” –Romans 5:8

Jesus loves us not because we are these incredibly loveable fur balls who deserve his love. He loves us in a much deeper profound way than that. Jesus knows we are made from dust. He knows that we can’t possibly fathom how great and worthy he is of our awe and worship. He understands that we were all born of the seed of Adam which means in our own strength we have no chance of ever being completely pure. He knows how broken and frail we are even though we put on all sorts of prideful masks and crutches of victimization. And in the midst of all of that, when he was on the cross, paving a path for us sinners to cross over from death to life, he cried out to the Father in our defense:

Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. –Luke 23:34

WE NEED DAILY REMINDERS WE ARE LOVED

Most of us need daily reminders that we are loved so much. Without Gospel reminders we become jaded, cowardly, judgmental, and self-protective. And when we sway from feeling loved our ability to reflect the Light of Jesus’ love to others dims and dims and dims…

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If Jesus isn’t Who He said He was, the World has No Hope | 10 Reasons

I recently had the privilege of sharing the Gospel with a young man in a foreign country who grew up in a family that taught that the way to God is only through believing the message of a different book than the Bible. After sharing the Gospel with him for a couple of hours I pleaded with him to take my Bible and read the story of Jesus for himself to see how different his story is from this other religious book.

Jesus brings hope

Although he listened intently to everything that I told him about Jesus and seemed to want to believe it… he would not accept my Bible because he said that his father would disown him or kill him if he came home with it. This is where my mind went: