Our pastor went on to say, “In the analogy, Jesus has a piece of paper too. He has his name at the top and underneath are all the sins that he committed. His paper, of course, would be blank because he lived a sinless life. At the cross, Jesus exchanged his paper with ours. He crossed out our name from our paper with all our sins listed and wrote his name in our place.  And he took that paper to the cross where God poured his wrath out on Jesus for us. In exchange, Jesus put our name at the top of his perfect paper. So now when God looks at us, he sees Christ’s sinless record”.

For years, even decades, I was scared to share the gospel.

I learned the Four Spiritual Laws, the ABCs of faith and even carried around the Two Ways to Live booklets , but I was still afraid that when I explained the gospel in conversation, I’d miss something critical. Or that I’d string together the Scriptures I knew without making sense. But mostly I was afraid that I’d be asked a question that I couldn’t answer.

I remember talking to a non-Christian friend who asked me to explain the gospel. Nervously, I flew through everything I knew, saying something like this, “God is holy and just and righteous (Is 5:16) and created the world for himself, that everything would honor and glorify him (Rev 4:11). Yet we went our own way, sinning against God and each other (Is 53:6; Rom 3:23) so we couldn’t have a relationship with him, either on this earth or in heaven. But God wanted to reconcile with us and so he sent his son Jesus to lead a sinless life and then die on a cross in our place (Rom 5:8-10), so that we could have eternal life with him (Rom 6:23). Our part is to believe and repent (Acts 3:19) and God will save us (Rom 10:9-11).” I paused to take a breath. “Does that make sense?”

She shook her head. “No. It doesn’t make sense. And I don’t believe or understand the Bible, so I don’t want you to give me Bible verses to explain it.  But can you explain how Christ’s death makes up for what I’ve done wrong? How does that work?”

[Editor’s note: This article is incomplete. The source for this document was originally published on the author’s blog, however, the link (URL) to the original article is unavailable and has been removed.]