Getting Personal When Talking About Jesus

Stop waiting for the perfect moment. Souls are perishing now, so now is the moment.​​​​​

In sharing Jesus with others, we are far more likely to succeed if we first take the time to craft our own message. Later, we will have more to say about prayer and the sacraments in the life of the person who wants to talk with others about Jesus. But, here, at the beginning, we need to be clear that—although we are always open to the possibility that we will be aided in our evangelizing by miracles, surprising movements of the Spirit, or powerful mystical experiences—we should not expect such things to do our work for us. If God has called us to share news of his Son, we should prepare: just as we would for a job interview, a first date, or a work presentation.

The first essential step in preparation is to know fluently each element of the four-part gospel 

1.    God is the creator who loves us.
2.    We have all sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.
3.    Jesus has come to open heaven to us and restore us to the family of God.
4.    We must respond by doing what he has called us to do, accepting him and living the life of faith.

The second essential thing is that we craft our own, personal message for presenting the gospel, suiting it to a world full of people who are in many different spiritual conditions.

In 1975, on the tenth anniversary of the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI released the letter Evangelii Nuntiandi, in which he asked Catholics to take up with renewed vigor the great work of bringing the gospel to all people. Even today, many decades after Vatican II’s conclusion, people ask just what that council was for. Why did all the world’s bishops gather to do something that, in the whole history of the Church, had only been done twenty times before? Pope Paul’s answer was simple: “To make the Church of the twentieth century ever better fitted for proclaiming the gospel to the people of the twentieth century.”

And if the whole Church needed and still needs to be better fitted for the task of sharing Jesus, then each of its members—each of us—must also be better fitted.

The pope ardently desired his fellow Catholics to get out and proclaim the gospel in the modern world, and he suggested many ways to marshal modern communications, charitable efforts, schools, and families to the task. But he stressed most insistently the need for personal evangelization.

“In the long run,” he asked, “is there any other way of handing on the gospel than by transmitting to another person one’s personal experience of faith? It must not happen that the pressing need to proclaim the good news to the multitudes should cause us to forget this form of proclamation whereby an individual’s personal conscience is reached and touched by an entirely unique word that he receives from someone else."

Ask yourself: What is the “entirely unique word” you might share with another person? Consider that what makes this communication unique is that it is shared between real people. It reflects your own experience, and it is shaped especially for the person you are speaking with.

What in your life, your story, and your own relationship with God can you draw on to communicate Jesus to others? And how might you express that story so that it responds to the needs of the other person? 

How to Talk About Jesus with Anyone stands alone as the go-to resource when it comes to learning about how you can share your Faith with...anyone.