Sharing Your Faith - Lesson 3

By Stafford North

Be Ready to Share Your Faith (2)

Background Information for the Teacher

Objectives:

  1. The student can list six factors which should be right as we prepare to teach someone about Jesus.
  2. The student can describe different methods of teaching those who are outside of Christ.
  3. The student can tell where the focus of all evangelistic work should be and how to keep that focus as the center.
  4. The student can list seven personal qualities the one sharing his/her faith should seek to demonstrate.

Preparation:

  1. Have copies of the quiz.
  2. Have copies of the review sheet.
  3. Have pens and Bibles for those who will need them.
  4. Be ready to use visuals—board, overhead, PowerPoint

Theme:

Being right in six key factors in evangelism will help us to be good at sharing our faith: the right motivation, the right involvement, the right person, the right methods, the right focus, and the right attitudes. Two lessons on these topics will help students to improve their understanding in these areas and move them toward having all of these.

Lesson Plan for Conducting the Class

Introduction: (about 15 minutes)

  1. Call the roll and welcome visitors.
  2. Make any necessary announcements.
  3. Have some young man lead a song such as I Love to Tell the Story or Let the Beauty of Jesus Be Seen in Me.
  4. Have some young man lead a prayer and ask that he include a request that God will help us in the class to reach out to our special friends and bring them to the gospel.
  5. Give the brief quiz over the lesson from last time. Let the students check their answers and grade their papers: 15 points each for the three items in No. 1 (right motivation, right conversation, and right contacts) and 20 points each for two right answers in No. 2. (To grade No. 2, just ask them to check whether they got none or one or two items from last week’s lesson and to score themselves accordingly. Give 5 points for a check on 3 and 10 points for a check on 4. You might ask the class for a show of hands on how many have picked a person and how many have tried conversational evangelism. Keep doing all you can to encourage this. Report the class average this to the class at the end of the class session today.
  6. Do a little more role-playing with conversational evangelism. Ask two students to carry on a conversation for two minutes and see how one of them is able to work something about the church, the class, or the Bible into the conversation. Encourage students to keep on doing this everyday.
  7. Remind the students you are now starting the second lesson on the six factors you need to have right in teaching someone about Jesus and that you covered the first three last week. You have reviewed these when you graded the test above. Now you are ready to start with the fourth.
  8. Ask the class to mention some of the possible benefits from our being better prepared to share our faith.
  9. Hand out the Review/Notes sheets so they can write on them during this lesson. Help them to be filling in the blanks as you go through the lesson.

Learning Experiences: (about 25 minutes)

  1. As a background for the lesson today, let’s look at the results of a survey by George Barna about what teens are looking for in a church. Complete these on your review sheet. The top five things are: (a) friendliness to visitors, (b) how people seem to care about each other, (c) the quality of the sermon preached, (d) theological teachings of the church, (e) how much the church is helping people. Q: What do we learn from this list about what we can do to reach our friends?
  2. Look on your review sheet at the first three principles. Now that we have narrowed our special interest to one or two people, the fourth factor we need to use is the right approach. Visual: Right Approach. How shall we build their interest and begin to teach them? We will discuss four methods from which to choose to help those in whom we have a special interest to move toward Jesus.
  3. Here are four specific ways we can be working with those we are seeking to reach.
    1. Use our class. Visual: Our Class. Q: What could we do to make our class a place to which you would like to invite your friends and which would help them want to come back? Think about the list we just saw. (All to be friendly, show care for each other, provide good Bible studies about what we believe, let people know about the help the church gives to its members and to others.) Ask the class to role play about a visitor coming to class. Let everyone act out the scene just before class starts. Appoint a student who can “carry it off” to act like a visitor. Ask him/her to go outside the door for a moment. While he/she is in the hall, tell the class the first time you do this everybody will do it wrong—not be friendly, ignore the visitor, or say foolish things to him/her. Then do it again and have everyone act as we would hope we would when a visitor comes. Caution the students to keep some sense of realism about this. Don’t spend more than two or three minutes on each of these exercises. After it is over, quickly summarize how to treat a visitor to class whether they come alone or with a student. So let’s invite our friends to our class and make it a good experience for them.
    2. Use Our Activities. Visual: Our Activities. We have youth activities to which we could invite friends—a devotional, a recreational event, a retreat, a service project, or maybe even an informal time when a few friends are getting together or going somewhere together. Invite your special friends to come along. Let them get to know some who are in the class. That will help them be more likely to come to a class meeting. Talk about something coming up soon where the students could try this.
    3. Use a Home Bible Study. Visual: Home Bible Study. Ask different people to read the following passages: Acts 20:20-21; Acts 18:24-26. Note the home Bible studies. (If your group is not already doing this, you could start a home Bible study. Some student could invite the group to his/her house for a Bible study, bring in someone who would be good to teach it, get a core of class members who would come, and all could invite friends to come. Have some refreshments and make it a good time of fellowship as well as good study.) Ask the class, if they are not already doing this, if they would be willing to work in this direction. You could then appoint a group to develop the plan. (A brief outline for a home Bible study plan on Matthew is on my Website at www.oc.edu/faculty/stafford.north. Or, you may wish to study a book from the Bible or some of the lessons from this class.)
    4. Use Individual Bible Studies. Visual: Individual Bible Studies. (Teacher—if your congregation does not have such teaching aids as those mentioned below on hand for members to use, speak to the proper person about getting them so your class will have them available. Then you can show them to the class as you tell them about it. If you can’t do that in this lesson, then do it in a later one as you review some of these points.) Q: Can you think of an individual study in the New Testament? (Jesus and the woman at the well, Philip and the Ethiopian, Ananias and Paul, and others.) After your special friends have been to class, to some of our activities and maybe have been in a home Bible class, you will want to visit with them personally about what they need to know. Here are four possible approaches for this:
  4. Teach them some of the lessons that we will start with next week in this class.
  5. Use a video such as the Visualized Bible Study by Jule Miller. These five videos are each about 45 minutes long and cover the following topics: 1- The Patriarchal Age, 2-The Mosaic Age, 3-The Christian Age, 4-The Church, and 5-The History of the Church. Each has a workbook with it which the student can use after he/she has seen the tape to review the contents. (Gospel Services, Inc., P.O. Box 262302, Houston, TX 77207.) Another video series is called “One Story” and is done by Robert Oglesby. It is shot on location in the Holy Land. (RKO Video, 16 Bunker Hill, Richardson, TX 75080.)
  6. Use a set of lessons which the special friend can do on his own and which you can then go over with him/her. These are called correspondence courses. A good one to use this way would be the set by John Hurt (P.O.Box 126, Smyrna, TN
  7. I also have one available you can download free from my Website— www.oc.edu/faculty/stafford.north.)
  8. Just let the special friend ask questions and you answer them or say you will find the answers and then do so or ask help from someone at church.
  9. Ask for help on the individual teaching from someone at church—the preacher, an elder, a youth director, or someone else.
  10. The fifth factor in effective evangelism is the keep the right focus and that right focus, of course, is Jesus. Visual: Right Focus—Jesus. Have someone read John 20:31. Q: Why did John write his gospel? (So people would believe in Jesus.) Have someone read Acts 8:35. Q: What was the focus of Philip’s teaching to the Ethiopian? (Jesus) Have someone read Acts 8:12. Q: What were the two main themes of Philip’s preaching to the Samaritans? (The good news about the kingdom and the name of Jesus Christ.) So however we approach those with whom we want to share the gospel, our focus should be to help them know Jesus, that He loves them, that He died for them, that He can still help them do what is right. The best starting point in our talks with many people will be the life Jesus lived and the death He died.
  11. The sixth factor in sharing our faith well is the right attitude. Visual: Right Attitude. How we approach people will play a big part in how they respond. We can quickly turn them off or we can help them open up. In this lesson we will mention five personal qualities we need to have as we share our faith.
    1. Be humble. We must never appear to think we know all the answers or to be arrogant or to appear to put ourselves up and everybody else down.
    2. Be open. Whatever another person may say about us or about his beliefs or behavior, we must not be judgmental and condemning. That is what Jesus meant in Matt. 6:1 when he said not to judge or to be judgmental. Do not be quick to condemn others either for their beliefs or for what they have done. Let them feel you are a special friend they can share anything with because you will treat their views with respect and fairness.
    3. Be a good listener. We must not monopolize the conversation but, rather, must let the other person do much of the talking, especially early on in the study. Let them share with us where they are spiritually before we begin to share with them some scriptures. Look at the other person’s face when they talk and really listen to what they say.
    4. Be empathetic. Put yourself in their place. Say often, “I understand.” Your special friend may have some problems or some disappointments to share. Listen and show you care.
    5. Be generous. It will always cost something to reach out to someone else. It will take some time and it might take a little money to entertain them occasionally. It will even take a generous spirit to extend your friendship to someone else when you may already have plenty of friends. Remember Jesus’ generosity to you and repay Him by being generous to your special friends.

Applications: (about 5 minutes)

  1. Sing “I Gave My Life for Thee,” and think about the words.
  2. Ask everyone to look at the statements on the last page of the Review/Notes sheet and respond to them.

Assignment: (about 1 minute)

  1. Study the review sheet and be ready for the brief quiz at the start of the next class.
  2. Do something with your special friend(s) that will help move them toward a greater interest in Christ and His church. Next week’s study would be a great class to bring a visitor to. Try to bring your special friend(s).
  3. Keep practicing conversational evangelism.

Evaluation: (next class meeting)

  1. Give the quiz at the start of the next class meeting.
  2. Keep asking the students about their special friends and about congregational evangelism. Let them share some of their experiences.

REVIEW/NOTES

Sharing Your Faith

Lesson 3

  1. Complete these sentences to show the results of the survey George Barna took among teens about they are looking for in a church.
    1. Teens want to see _________________ to _______________.
    2. Teens want to see how people seem to _______ about ______________.
    3. Teens want to hear a good quality _____________.
    4. Teens want to know about the theological _____________ of the _________.
    5. Teens want to know how much this church is _________________________.
  2. The first three factors for effective evangelism we studied are: (the quiz next week will ask you to name all six.)
    1. The Right Motivation
    2. The Right Involvement
    3. The Right Person
  3. The fourth factor is the right ______________
    1. Use our ____________.
    2. Use our ______________.
    3. Use a ________ __________ _____________. Who are some in the Bible who used home Bible studies:
    4. Use _______________ Bible Studies. Who are some in the Bible who used individual Bible studies. What are four approaches to individual study we might use?
  4. Lessons we will soon study ___________________.
  5. __________________.
  6. A set of ___________.
  7. Answering our friend’s ______________.
  8. Ask for someone else to help us _____________.
  9. The fifth factor in effective evangelism is the right _________________.
    1. This means we must keep the focus on _______________.
    2. Who wrote his gospel with this focus?
    3. When speaking to whom did Philip do this? 1. 2.
  10. The sixth factor in effective evangelism is the right _________________.
    1. Be ___________.
    2. Be __________.
    3. Be a good ________________.
    4. Be _____________.
    5. Be _____________.

Please hand in this sheet with your name on it. Name: I am willing to make these commitments:

  1. ___ I will try to mention Jesus, the church, our youth activities, and/or the Bible more often in my daily conversations.
  2. ___ I have chosen one or more special friends to whom I will give some special attention about spiritual things—inviting them to class, church, special youth events, and other things I might be able to do. Put below the name of your special friend(s):
  3. ___ I would be willing to serve on a committee to develop a plan for our youth to become more evangelistic.

QUIZ 3

Sharing Your Faith

  1. Fill in below the names of the six factors in effective evangelism:
    1. The Right ________________
    2. The Right _________________
    3. The Right ________________
    4. The Right _________________
    5. The Right ________________
    6. The Right ________________
    7. _
  2. What are two ways we can reach out to our special friends?
  3. The Right Focus means we keep __________ in the center.
  4. Name three right attitudes we need to have when we work with others.

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