Who are you?

This question could transform your evangelism. It’s not a question of what to say or how to say it. It’s not a piercing question to ask your non-Christian friends. It’s a question to ask yourself:
Who am I?

Fundamentally, if we’re Christians, you and I are adopted children of God:

“The Spirit you received does not make you slaves, so that you live in fear again; rather, the Spirit you received brought about your adoption to sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’ … we are heirs—heirs of God and co-heirs with Christ.” (Romans 8 v 15, 17)

Now this is remarkable, not least because it is utterly undeserved. We are people who find that: “I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing” (7 v 19). God knows who we are and what we are like, and yet he says: I still love you and I will sort out your mess, and I will treat you like my child, like my Son, Jesus. That is God’s grace—his undeserved and lavish kindness. He takes a wretch like me and he loves me as his child.

Brothel to bride
Let me take you back to spring 2011. In the UK, it was Royal Wedding time; Prince William, second in line to the throne, was about to get married. You and I know that William had found a bride, Kate Middleton, at his university. But imagine that he’d gone about finding his wife rather differently. Imagine that the day before his wedding, he’d gone down to Soho, and gone into one of the brothels there, and found a woman who had sold herself into prostitution because she wanted the money, and who was now living in a filthy, sleazy bedsit, and he’d taken her by the hand and got down on one knee and said: I want to marry you, and I won’t take no for an answer.

Imagine that he’d set the date, given her a choice of any wedding dress she wanted, and then when the big day arrived he had taken her to Westminster Abbey, and said: She’s my wife. She’s part of the royal family now. She will inherit all that I will inherit. Treat her as what she is—royalty.

That would, of course, never happen. Except that it has. It has happened to every Christian. The Bible says that we are adopted children of God, with Jesus as our Brother; and that we are the bride of God, with Jesus as our Bridegroom. He really has come and plucked us out of our dirty, sleazy, desperate sinfulness, and cleaned us up and married us and brought us into the divine royal family.

For the Christian, “there is now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus” (8 v 1). Our Brother Jesus has taken all our sin and dealt with it. We have the utter security of knowing that we will not be condemned. For the Christian, “God works for the good of those who love him … to be conformed to the image of his Son” (8 v 28-29). God is changing us, working in us to enable us to resist sin and become more and more like our Brother Jesus. And for the Christian, “our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us” (8 v 18). There will be a day when we are in our Father’s home, in our Father’s arms, and sin and suffering will be past.

The amazing truth is this: when the Creator God looks at you, he sees his child. He sees someone whom he loves, whom he is delighted with, whom he will do anything for. God has given you, and is giving you, and will give you, all that is his Son’s. Today, there is nothing you can do, and nothing that can happen to you, that will separate you from God’s love or stop you from getting home (v 38-39).

Our problem is that, often, what we know in our heads doesn’t make it to our hearts; but it’s so important that we don’t simply understand God’s grace, but that we also live and breathe it.

What this means for your evangelism
Now, how does grasping God’s grace make a difference to you in your evangelism? It means that we know that, as the Australian evangelist John Chapman put it: “Whether you accept or reject me does not make me more or less valuable”.

When we know we are children of God, we don’t fear the rejection of others—we’re loved by our Creator! We don’t fear their mockery—the Maker of the cosmos thinks well of us! We don’t fear their withholding of a favour or a promotion or anything else—we’re heading to glory in heaven.

A Christian knows that in Christ we have all we need, and cannot lose any of it; and so, rather than being driven by the need for approval or love from others, we’re free to love them by sharing the gospel with them.

We need to know that the opinion of our family, friends and workmates is not what gives us value. We need to believe that we are deeply loved children of God. If we believe this, we’ll cross the painline, risk the rejection of others and tell them about Jesus.

This is an edited extract from Rico Tice's new book Honest Evangelism: How to talk about Jesus even when it's tough.