If you take the Great Commission seriously and regularly share your faith with others, there will be times when you wish the conversation had gone differently—or not happened at all. Maybe emotions flared in one or both parties. Perhaps the other person challenged you with questions that left you stumped or embarrassed. There are several ways these conversations can get derailed; sometimes it’s entirely out of your control.
We shouldn’t aim to avoid difficult conversations if they’re unsuccessful. If we make that the goal, we’ll walk away thinking, “Well, I’m just not good at this. I should leave it to people better equipped to share their faith.” Instead, we should press in and learn from those conversations when they don’t go well.
When we can do that, we become better at sharing our faith and are less likely to get rattled when things don’t go according to plan.
Here are three things to remember when you’ve had a tough faith conversation.
1. You’re challenging someone’s worldview
If you’ve been a Christian for a while, it’s easy to forget that what seems obvious to you isn’t obvious to someone else. And it’s not simply that they don’t know; it’s that they’re blind to the information (2 Corinthians 4:4).
You’re not simply asking them to take your word on Jesus’ love; you’re challenging their perspective on things like the existence of God, sin and judgment. You’re asking them to suspend their prejudices and rethink positions they are already confident about.
If their immediate response to the gospel is positive, it’s because the Holy Spirit has prepared the way, and you’re likely reaping where someone else has sown difficult discussions.
But we need to enter these discussions realizing that we’re asking a lot from our listeners, and their immediate response might not be entirely positive. This will help us be pleasantly surprised when things go well but not emotionally devastated when they don’t.
2. Their immediate response isn’t the end of the story
The path to Jesus looks a little different for everyone. Some people will hear the gospel once, a light will come on, and they’ll believe. But a lot of people won’t have that experience. They might need to wrestle with it before they can follow Him.
We can’t know where someone is in their journey when we share the gospel with them. We could be early in the process, and they might respond defensively because they’re scared of the implications. We don’t know. The best thing we can do is choose not to take it personally.
The Lord has asked us to be messengers. How someone receives His message isn’t our responsibility, and it’s not personal—even if it feels like it is. We might walk away feeling like the conversation was a disaster and find out years from now that it was an integral part of them choosing to walk with Jesus.
3. We learn more from the hard conversations
It would be fantastic if every conversation about our faith were easy and fruitful, but it’s not. And that’s actually a good thing. Navigating challenging conversations helps us in two fundamental ways:
- We learn to be less afraid and more comfortable with difficult conversations.
- We learn to navigate these discussions better.
If we’re open to the process, we can learn much more from these tough exchanges than from the easy ones. After a difficult dialogue, we want to ask ourselves questions like:
- Can I pinpoint the moment and reason this conversation started to go sideways?
- Is there anything I could have done differently? (It may have been out of your hands.)
- Is there something I could know to be better prepared next time?
- Can this person and I try this conversation again later?
As followers of Jesus, we can think of the Great Commission as our job. We want to take advantage of opportunities to learn, grow and be better prepared.
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