The Master Communicator

Sometimes I get letters from children who watch Harvest at Home. I’m so glad when I get letters like that because I want kids to understand the gospel too. They may not understand everything that I’m saying, but they might hear a joke or illustration that resonates with them.

As we’re sharing the gospel, we want to connect with people and bring the Good News to them in an understandable way. That means avoiding what I call Christianese, the verbiage we use that doesn’t make sense to nonbelievers.

Jesus was the master communicator. Yes, He was God walking among us. And yes, He was the Savior of the world, the Messiah. But He also was the greatest evangelist of all time. He modeled how to engage people with the message of the gospel.

The Bible says of Jesus, “And the common people heard Him gladly” (Mark 12:37 NKJV). This simply means that Jesus never spoke over anyone’s head. When He communicated, people understood Him.

We, too, need to communicate the Good News of Jesus Christ in a language that people understand. Sometimes we take that which is so incredible and beautiful and make it unnecessarily complex. Even worse, we make it boring.

We need to connect with the people we are talking to and remember the objective is not to win the debate but to win the soul.

You might be surprised to hear this from a preacher, but everything doesn’t have to be a sermon. Sometimes we just need to be a friend and make that initial connection. And sometimes we need to discover something called tact, the intuitive knowledge of saying the right thing at the right time.

Howard W. Newton said, “Tact is the knack of making a point without making an enemy.” If we want to evangelize Jesus-style, then we need to do the same.