The goodness of God leads you to repentance. Romans 2:4 (NKJV)
Recently I walked through a park where a man was reading Bible scripture over a loud speaker. I sat in that park for a while and I really wanted to unplug his speaker because every verse he read was about hell.
No one in the crowd talked to this man. He had set himself up in a high traffic area of the park, but not one person stopped to ask him a question. In fact, they all went out of their way to walk around him.
I’m so tired of this kind of approach because it negatively influences people who don’t know Jesus. Because some seem to think you have to slap the sin out of others to get them to serve Jesus, many people tend to think that all Christians are judgmental.
Meanwhile, Jesus never used guilt and shame to reach anyone. He didn’t sit Zacchaeus the tax collector down to berate him for his dishonesty. He didn’t look at the woman caught in adultery with disgust. He accepted them as they were, and that unconditional love and acceptance proved so powerfully attractive that they turned their lives around immediately as soon as they experienced it.
The best way isn’t to make them feel bad about themselves. There’s a much better way to reach people: attract them. After all, that’s what Jesus did!
You can follow Jesus’ example. By loving, accepting and forgiving people as they are, you can give them a taste of what God is really like. When you reach out to people this way, you give them a new, refreshing look at Christianity—a Spirit Contemporary look—and you inspire them to pursue Jesus as the love of their life.