Telling people how to be reconciled to God through faith in Jesus is an act of love, though it is not always taken that way (and sometimes, we don’t do it that way). It is like leading a person in a burning building to the fire exit. It is one beggar who found bread showing another beggar where to find bread. The point is not to bug people; the point is to share what we have found and hope that you will want it, too.

The Bible calls the message of salvation through faith in Jesus (for what He did on the cross in dying to pay the penalty for our sins) “the gospel.” It’s a word that means “good news,” and when we share it, we are just trying to spread that good news (though, sometimes, we fail in our delivery and it doesn’t always come across as good news). But despite our sometime-frailty as deliverers of this message, the intention is not to corral you into some movement or anything like that. It is simply that we have received God’s gift of salvation (which is accessed only through believing on Jesus Christ), and we want others to have that gift, too. After all, according to the Bible, the alternative to God’s gift is God’s judgment, and that will be an eternal, unpleasant situation (Revelation 21:8).

There is one other reason we share the gospel: it is God’s calling upon those who have believed in Jesus. As the Bible passage above says, God has entrusted to believers the message of reconciliation (i.e., of being made right with God), and so we are ambassadors for Christ, with God making His appeal to unbelievers through us. And so, to echo the passage above, I implore you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God. Christ became sin for you so that you might become the righteousness of God in Him. Seeing that become a reality in your life requires an act of faith on your part (John 3:16). It requires you to believe.