When I go to Sunday School tomorrow morning, we will be studying a lesson entitled “Rescue the Perishing.” We are Christians, we want to rescue the people around us who are perishing in sin, but there is a problem: most of those people are not aware that they need to be rescued, have no awareness of the peril of sin. What then?

That brought to mind the title of a book by Tom Skinner, fist published 50 years ago. I have borrowed that book title to use as the title of this blog post. Skinner’s point was that we need to understand a person’s needs before we can begin to show how Christ is the answer to those needs.

Dale Carnegie said something similar, though he wasn’t thinking in terms of sharing the Gospel: “You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.” The key take-away for me as a Christian is that evangelism is not about me. Neither is it about the Church or the doctrine, though both are vitally important. Our foremost objective is to be interested in other people, to share the love of Christ and to show the need and benefit of having a personal relationship with Him.

That brings to mind another quotation, this one said by Blaise Pascal almost 400 years ago: “We can make an idol of the truth itself, for truth without love is not God, but only His image.”

I am coming to the realisation that sharing the Good News is not a complicated thing, requiring special skills and training. It is simply a matter of loving my neighbour as myself, being interested in him, listening without responding with pat answers, and above all, avoiding anything that might be taken to be smugness.

Here is one more quotation from Blaise Pascal: “People despise the Christian religion. They hate it, and they are afraid it might be true. The remedy for this is to first show that it is not contrary to reason, that it is worthy of reverence and respect. Then show that it is attractive, making good people wish that it were true. Then show that it really is true. It is worthy of reverence because it really understands the human condition. It is attractive because it promises true goodness.”