Living on the Edge

Chip Ingram: Have you ever heard of a soleplate before? In the construction world, it's a small but essential piece of wood that sits on top of a home's foundation. Without it, you couldn't build the floors or the walls above. Today, we're going to learn about the vital little step that can connect our friends and family to the anchoring power of the gospel. You're not going to want to miss today's message.

Dave Druey: I'm Dave Druey, and this is Living on the Edge. Today, Chip Ingram welcomes back guest teacher and friend, Aaron Pierce. Aaron leads a global ministry called Steiger International, spending decades reaching secular, non-religious young people all over the world with the gospel. Today, Aaron shows us how to move a conversation from small talk to something spiritual. The same conversations you already have every day about work, family, or life in general, hold way more spiritual potential than most of us ever realize. Now, here's Aaron with today's message titled, "Softening Hearts with Spiritual Conversations."

Aaron Pierce: Today, we're going to get into the idea of how to start a spiritual conversation as the first step towards introducing people to Jesus. So, the question then is, what is a spiritual conversation? What is the difference between a spiritual conversation and a gospel conversation?

A gospel conversation is the biblical narrative of creation, fall, and redemption that is centered around the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. That's a gospel conversation. That's the gospel message. A spiritual conversation, on the other hand, is presuppositional, which means that it addresses the underlying assumptions that the gospel is built on.

The key to effective communication is that we need to know our audience's assumptions so that when I communicate, I'm either challenging or building on their assumptions. So, let's watch this video as an example, and then we'll dig into how that looks and how we apply that in our lives. So, take a look.

Time is a strange thing. We measure it. We savor it. Most of the time, we waste it. Sometimes it goes by slowly, but more often than not, it flies by. I think of my own life. Every day I wake up, drink coffee, have meetings, chase my son, sleep, repeat. I'll have the thought, "Oh, it's Monday," and suddenly, it's Monday again.

But then there are those things that make time stop, like when someone you love dies. Though we know death is a part of life, it's always such a shock when it happens. But why? Why does death shock us? I think it's because, deep down, we don't believe that life should end. We feel like we should go on forever.

Death feels like a defect, so we work furiously to fix it. But despite all of our creams and pills and surgeries and fears, we can't seem to stop the decay. Maybe this deep longing isn't about our bodies and this life. Maybe it's about what comes next.

Every tribe and every nation throughout history has conceived of a life beyond this world, beyond our bodies and time, a place where we will go on forever. Maybe this is a myth or wishful thinking, or perhaps it points to something that binds us all together. Maybe we dream of a world beyond time because we were never meant to die.

That video right there, that's not the gospel. That's not the gospel. But what that does is it gets at some assumptions and it connects with people at a place where I can begin to have conversations that build the foundations for the gospel. Because a lot of people, they struggle with the idea of death. They struggle with the idea of what is next. And so this is something that allows you to engage in a conversation that opens the way for the gospel.

This is actually part of a new tool that we have called "Spiritual Conversations for the Non-Religious." That's actually the first video in a series of spiritual conversations that you can go through with someone. It's like a small group for non-Christians and you watch a video and then you have a series of questions that you answer.

People are skeptical, but they're also open to spirituality. Like, that's the cultural moment that we're in. And often, Christians fail to realize that when they share the gospel, we are drawing on assumptions that secular people do not hold to be true. And so that's why we're not able to connect.

For example, consider the classic model of the four spiritual laws, which is a kind of a classic model of evangelism. Now, let me be clear. This is true. This is gospel truth. Number one, God loves you and offers a wonderful plan for your life. Number two, all of us sin and our sin has separated us from God. Number three, Jesus Christ is God's only provision for our sin. Through Him, we can know and experience God's love and plan for our lives. And four, we must individually receive Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord, and then we can know and experience God's love and plan for our lives. That is the four spiritual laws.

But the key here is that this makes a number of critical assumptions. Embedded into that is assumptions about the existence of a relational God, that there's an objective moral framework, or that there's a transcendent purpose for your life. All these assumptions are built into the communication of the four spiritual laws, but none of these assumptions are universally accepted in a post-Christian culture.

The purpose of a spiritual conversation, therefore, is to set the foundations that we can build the message of the cross on and that we can remove maybe some intellectual barriers and move from the secular to the spiritual. There are really three types of conversations that you have when you engage someone. It's a friendship conversation, it's a spiritual conversation, and then a gospel conversation.

The purpose of a friendship conversation is to build that deep relational connection and the trust to speak. The purpose of the gospel conversation is to introduce people to Jesus and the message of the cross. It used to be appropriate in the past to go from friendship to gospel. Today, we've got to contextualize it by going through spiritual conversations. That's the bridge that we've got to go through to go from a friendship to the gospel.

Sometimes people reject that because in the name of God's sovereignty and being unashamed, they say, "I'm just going to preach the gospel and however it lands, that's on them." I would challenge us that we should not pit our dependence on God and His sovereignty against our attempts to be understood. It's not one or the other.

So, how do we then start these spiritual conversations? I'm going to go through some key principles in doing that. The first thing we have to understand is that we're not actually doing intellectual apologetic work. This is actually first and foremost a spiritual issue and we require the supernatural work of the Holy Spirit for it to be effective.

The reason is because 2 Corinthians 4:4 says the god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers. It's a spiritual blindness issue. And so we're dealing with a culture and a generation that is spiritually deceived. To give you an example, last year we were doing outreach. What we did was a barbecue. We had music, we had games on the lawn, and it was a summer, warm summer day on a Saturday.

Lots of people were around and I was sitting there and I was just asking, "Lord, give me one good conversation. Would You lead me to one person that I can have a really good gospel conversation with?" I was praying and waiting and just expecting that the Lord was going to give me that person at the right moment.

As I was sitting there and waiting and praying, a couple that had rented one of those rentable scooters, the two of them were on one of them, and they were scootering by and then they stopped right in front of our spot to see what we were doing. I saw them and I was like, "That's them. Those are the ones that I need to talk to." I felt that sense and so I waited and then came up to them and began to engage them and talk to them and say, "Hey, come on, come in," and invited them to hang out with us.

It was a guy and a girl and their names were Cat and Ryan. I remember looking at the girl and having this sense from the Spirit like, ask her if she wants to sing. I know nothing about this girl. And so I said, "Hey, are you a singer? You should go up on our stage and sing."

She was like, "I am! I am a singer." And I had this sense from the Lord like what she needed, this girl, is to be seen. Like she felt invisible. We talked about how people are so lonely and there's filtered reality and no one really sees you. I felt like what she needed was to be seen.

I was like, "Come on, come on stage!" And we rallied our whole crew to watch her and she sang some songs and we were like her biggest fan and she was just beaming because she was noticed. She was seen. Then they came off the stage and we sat down and talked and we ended up engaging in deep conversations and they ended up staying with us. It was early in the night when they arrived. They ended up staying with us the entire night.

Just stayed with us the whole night and at the end we did a Bible study. They stayed through that and in the end Cat prayed to receive Jesus. Just because God gave me the word that she wanted to be seen and that she was a singer. I had no knowledge of that. And it's not some weird thing. It's just the sense that we serve a supernatural God who's pursuing His children and He wants to give you more than natural discernment.

Dave Druey: You're listening to Living on the Edge with guest teacher Aaron Pierce. We'll get back to the message in just a moment. But first, have you checked out the Living on the Edge YouTube channel? It's not just audio. It's a chance to actually sit down and watch Chip teach on his own schedule of series covering marriage, parenting, leadership, and more. New videos post every week, so there's always something fresh waiting for you. If you learn better by watching or you just want to put a face to the voice, search "Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram" on YouTube and hit subscribe. Now back to today's lesson.

Aaron Pierce: I don't know about you, but I don't want to rely just on my human efforts. That's not good enough. I need something beyond to soften the hearts of these people. And so when I saw that with Cat and the incredible things that God did, it reminds us how much we are dependent on the power of the Holy Spirit to open people's eyes and open our eyes to what's going on in their reality.

So, that's the first principle here is we depend on the power of the Holy Spirit. The second thing is we want to be really wise about our communication and we want to avoid certain pitfalls. For example, humans, we think in categories. It's the way that we think. And so we categorize things, we organize things, and when we engage people, we put people in boxes. It's just how we do it and part of that is because it's easier. It's quicker, it's more efficient. We can take- we don't have to- our brains can just simplify things that way.

So we tend to put things in boxes. And so as we're engaging with people in spiritual conversations, there are three boxes you want to avoid being put into because what happens is it's a barrier. That when you get put in that box, it's a barrier for you to speak truth. The boxes are personal, religious, and political.

Let me explain that a little bit. In our secular culture, many people, including Christians, believe that faith is purely a private matter and that we- that it should not be discussed publicly, that it's something that you don't want to push on other people and it's something that is really between you and whatever God you might have. And so that's a lot of the belief.

As a result, many people are very hesitant to engage in discussions about spirituality because they put it in the personal box. So your goal in this case is to challenge that box by taking the spiritual conversations out of the realm of the private and connecting it to everyday reality, everyday things and the implications it has on everyday reality. The fact that what you believe about these big spiritual things actually impact your life. They actually impact daily things about the way you live your life. So you want to take it out of the box of personal by connecting it to the daily things that we do.

The second thing is we want to take it out of the box of the religious. In a post-Christian culture, most people have had some engagement with the church. Either growing up in it or they've just been aware of it somehow, some way. Most people have had some connection to the church and so, unfortunately, for many people they have a misconception of what the church is. For some people, the church has been equated with hypocrisy, with corruption and control.

Sometimes it's as simple as saying, "I'm not talking about institution." Again, we talked about one of the key assumptions of our culture today is that people have become suspicious of institutional religion. So sometimes we just need to say, "I'm not talking about that." Or when you're engaging someone, you're not approaching them as a member of a church. You're just a person who follows Jesus.

You want to get it out of the box of religion and sometimes that's about the words we use. Sometimes we use very religious words that will immediately put you in a religious box. So the question is how can we have spiritual conversations without using overly religious language, which is something you need to practice.

Then so many people sadly interpret Jesus through the lens of a political box and a political party. And so they interpret what you're saying when it's in the political box through a political lens. So again, we're trying to stay out of these three boxes that people will naturally bring to the conversation. If you're able to do that, you're going to have a much more productive conversation than if you get stuck in one of these three.

All right, so with that said, the next key principle is to recognize that pretty much everything has spiritual implications. Like everything that we do and that we talk about has spiritual implication and that as skilled missionaries to our culture, we need to be in tune and skilled at drawing those conversations out in a natural way. And that these are often very important things about us and our goal is to move from the secular and the superficial to the spiritual. How to move our friendships and our conversations from the superficial to the spiritual.

Again, recognizing that- I'm just going to list a number of things here. These are just a handful of very general topics that have spiritual implications and that are part of daily life. So when people discuss morality or purpose, the purpose of their- what do they do, their job, right? Or their identity, which is a big one today. Or love and family, work, beauty, hope, dreams, sickness, loss. All of these things, which are universal in terms of connecting with people, have spiritual implications.

A lot of times when you're engaging in spiritual conversation, it's about asking questions that tease out the spiritual implications. You don't have to tell them. You can just ask the question. Like, are there universal human rights? Or where does human value come from? Why is it that humans are valuable? Why do we believe that? Or in the issue of purpose, what makes life worth living? Like why do you- what do you get up for?

And you ask this question because everyone believes this. But isn't life more than just survival? Isn't it more than just pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain, getting old and dying? Isn't there something more than that?

So a lot of these things are things that we interact in on a daily level with people as we build those friendships. Remember, the context here is we are developing authentic friendships with people and that gives us the ability to ask harder questions or get deeper about these things. That doesn't necessarily mean I'm going straight to Jesus and the message of the cross. That is our goal, but I am now challenging the underlying assumption. I'm getting people to think about why they believe what they believe or to even begin to see the incoherence and the inconsistency of what they believe without putting them on the spot.

When I ask a question about human value, that's much different than saying why are you pro-choice. You know what I mean? Like, think about the context. I just asked essentially the same question but in a very different context and very different- much more receptive to actually progress and productivity in a conversation. So again, the goal here is that we need to become good missionaries by knowing how to tease out, to ask good questions that bring out spiritual conversations in everyday life.

It's really cool because when you do this, man, you can have amazing conversations. One really cool example recently, we have a team in Houston that was out doing a prayer walk in kind of a secular part of the city and they end up connecting. It was really cool because they end up through a series of conversations end up being led to essentially what was like this secret rave club. And it was this really intense club. They had to go through all these back doors to get there and it's packed with people. Very- not a Christian place and they were there.

This guy, Roger, this middle-aged suburban dad guy was there and he's feeling very out of place. He's like, "What am I doing here?" And so they decided to split up in groups and go talk to people. They were talking and then all of a sudden this one girl, who's kind of like this very charismatic, outgoing girl walks up to their group and is like, "Hey, what are you guys doing here? You guys are kind of interesting." She starts to talk to them and then she said, "You know, what are you- like what are you really- I want to know you guys. What are you good at?" Which is a very interesting question for her to ask.

They're all asking these questions and then Roger is thinking, what am I going to say to this girl? It gets to him and he says, "Well, you know what? I guess I'm good at being a dad. I love- I love being with my kids, my boys." And the girl just was floored. Boom. Just stopped her right in her tracks. Tears in her eyes. After a moment of pause, all of a sudden she just gives Roger a huge hug and she's like, "We don't have a lot of those around here."

Then Allison, one of the girls there, ended up taking her aside and just having a deep, powerful conversation, praying with her. But it was a father's love. It's spiritual- that has spiritual implications. So many people long for that kind of love. And so the reality is that spiritual things are all around us. He didn't say anything about Jesus and the cross, but he spoke a truth that connected in her heart and opened her to the ultimate truth. And so again, that's the idea of the spiritual implications.

Dave Druey: You're listening to Living on the Edge with guest teacher Aaron Pierce and the message titled, "Softening Hearts with Spiritual Conversations." If you ever miss one of these daily messages, just catch up online at livingontheedge.org.

To go along with today's message, we have a special resource available: the "Not Beyond Reach" participant guide. It's a 10-week video-based study covering how to start spiritual conversations, navigate politics, sexuality, and science, and share the message of the cross with grace. Each session includes a viewing guide, discussion questions, a weekly application, and group exercises like prayer and roleplay. Go online and get the special guide at a discounted price today at livingontheedge.org/offers.

Somewhere today, someone you love is one honest conversation away from softening towards Jesus. Teaching like Aaron's is what equips ordinary believers to have that conversation well. This ministry keeps reaching homes like yours only because listeners decide again and again that it's worth supporting. Wherever you're listening from, you can easily donate right now by going online to livingontheedge.org or call our team and give over the phone by dialing 888-333-6003. Or simply send your gift by mail to Living on the Edge, P.O. Box 3007, Suwanee, Georgia, 30024. Well, now here's Chip Ingram with our guest teacher, Aaron Pierce.

Chip Ingram: Aaron, as we wrap up today's program, I want to loop back to something you said today. You said the purpose of spiritual conversation is to lay the foundation for the gospel to sit on. Now for some, that may sound wrong or you know, we should lead with the gospel. So talk a little more about why spiritual conversations are critical.

Aaron Pierce: Spiritual conversations are critical because we need to recognize that we live in a post-Christian culture. Post-Christian means that usually people have had some interaction with the church. They have some knowledge, often misunderstood or twisted, but some knowledge of the Bible and church. Because of that, it creates communication challenges.

So the idea of a spiritual conversation is to address the underlying assumptions on which the cross is communicated and it's also about removing some of the barriers that obscure the cross so that the message is actually understood. I'll give you an example. Today in our culture, we live in a time when many people have a relativistic view of morality. Many believe that morality is essentially a social construct.

Of course, that stands in the way of the gospel truth because the gospel says no, there is a moral absolute and that God is the source of that moral absolute and that none of us are able to live up to that standard. We're all sinful and we fall short and that is why we need a Savior. So we can use a spiritual conversation to begin to challenge that narrative.

Of course, if you have a relationship that's broken in your family, it's hard to challenge assumptions or to speak truth like this until you've built trust. And so if there are broken relationships, the first thing you've got to do is repair that. Repair the relationship, build the trust again, and then gently over time begin to challenge these assumptions through these spiritual conversations.

Dave Druey: Join guest teacher Aaron Pierce when he continues our lesson on how to soften hearts with spiritual conversations next time on Living on the Edge. Today's program is produced and sponsored by Living on the Edge.