We Must Do More Than “Tell People About Jesus”

by Stuart DiNenno


I sometimes see Christians on social media saying things like “we need to invite our neighbors over for dinner to tell them about Jesus.”

This is all fine and dandy but what is often misunderstood is that people are not likely to be converted if all we do is “tell them about Jesus.” We must also tell our neighbors the unpleasant realities about themselves. If they are going to be saved they must be thoroughly convicted of their own evil, they must know that they are under the wrath of God for their sin and made aware of the eternal consequences for it, they must comprehend that their innate depravity makes their condition hopeless without the grace of God, and they must understand that they will be condemned if they do not repent of their sins and their disdain of the truth, and turn to God in faith. It is unlikely that anyone will truly cry out to God for mercy if he has not grasped these truths, which must be understood before one can see the need for the remedy: the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ through which we have peace and reconciliation with God.

Now some might claim that everything delineated above is implied in the words “tell them about Jesus” but the reality is that the aforementioned truths are almost never communicated even in formal preaching, let alone in an informal setting around a dinner table, and if they are not, then it is likely that the only thing accomplished through conversations about Jesus with a neighbor is either a rejection of Christianity out of failure to see a need for it or, worse yet, a false conversion to a counterfeit form of Christianity that does not require repentance, which may outwardly make a religious and church attending man out of the neighbor while inwardly he has been made “twofold more the child of hell” than he was before he knew anything about the Bible.

“Knowledge without repentance will be but a torch to light men to hell.”

—  Thomas Watson