One time I was sharing the Gospel at a park near my house. We like to do this by handing out bottles of water and Gospel tracts and then striking up conversations with people by saying “there is a warning that comes with the water, when you drink it you will get thirsty again.” Normally this would stop people in their tracks to consider that warning and a conversation would follow. On one occasion I got to talking to a guy and when the subject of religion and eternal life came up he said that would take to long to discuss. I said, that my beliefs were simple enough to explain in one minute.
He said “go” and started looking at his watch – the second hand.
I then provided him the Gospel and was done before he reached one minute!
On other occasions we have used a transitional line with people because they seem to think they will live forever. They won’t want to talk about death because they think it will happen years from now and they will have plenty of time to prepare. So if we are at a train station we might say, “what if you got run over by the next train and you were dead, do you know where you’d go?” Sometimes even reminding them that the news report indicated that someone had died recently at that very train station helps.
Ray Comfort has sermon called Three Minutes to Live that goes into more detail on this approach.
This tract uses the three minutes to live and the clock to draw the persons attention and then presents the Gospel on the back such that it can be read in less than three minutes!
To read about some examples of using this tract you can see the As You Go BLOG posts about it.
