There is no barrier to saving faith whether one is Jew or Gentile, slave or free—one need only repent and believe in Christ’s finished work. Opportunities to have such gospel-focused discussions abound today. The only question is whether Christians will seize these opportunities even when the societal cost comes with potentially harsh retribution.

How can you turn an everyday conversation with your unbelieving friends into a gospel-centered discussion? Christians know that evangelism is an important part of following Jesus, despite many not feeling like “called evangelists” (Eph. 4:11). Some have created lists of “bridge questions” to direct such conversations toward the gospel. Yet, I personally struggle to use such bridge questions without it appearing forced and unnatural. If a bridge question seems unnatural to me, it will probably seem unnatural to my unbelieving friend or acquaintance.
Enter the early chapters of Genesis.
Since Genesis 1–11 provides so much of the foundation for why everyday life is the way it is, this material is uniquely suited to reach the unbeliever. When truly presented as God’s revealed Word, the explanations contained in those chapters help unbelievers begin to understand why the Bible and its claims have any impact on their lives.
In that light, here are five simple examples that use material from the early chapters of Genesis to generate evangelistic opportunities in your everyday life. Not every one of these examples leads immediately to a full gospel presentation, but at the very least they expose people to humanity’s greatest problem. The hope is for these conversations to serve as starting points for future, fuller conversations.[1]
1. The Origin and Purpose of Work
Do you work with unbelievers? If so, you know that people routinely complain about their work. Work has become such a hated concept in western culture that we are bombarded by tantalizing prospects of “early retirement” and delusions of making a living by methods that require little to no work.
Here’s one highly practical conversation starter: the next time you hear a co-worker complain about his job, you can ask him: “Do you know why we have to work?” followed up with, “Can I share with you what the Bible says about work?” If he doesn’t shut you down right away, you can explain:
Work is something God gave the first human, Adam, to do. Adam worked even while the world was still in its perfect state, with no sin, no effects of sin, and with his daily needs provided for (Gen. 2:15–16). But after Adam and Eve sinned, one consequence was that God cursed the ground, after which work became painful toil necessary to have enough food to survive (Gen. 3:17–19).
Work is actually a gift from God, and because of the curse, which will not be lifted until Christ restores all things (Rev. 22:3), most people will have to work to obtain food by the sweat of their face for most of their lives.[2]
2. Clothing and Nudity
Clothing is another area where you can turn a normal conversation into an evangelistic one. Whenever the topic turns to clothing, you can ask your friend if he understands why we wear clothing. Now, if you live in North Dakota as I do, most of the year we wear clothing so we don’t freeze to death! But even in northern climates the weather can get hot during part of the year, and so from a purely evolutionary perspective, clothing should be seen as optional.
But Genesis 2:25 and all of chapter 3 explain why people went from originally walking around naked to eventually wearing clothing: to hide their shame before God and each other because of their sin (vv. 7–12). And their own contrived fig-leaf garments weren’t enough. God had to kill an animal and clothe them with its hide to demonstrate that their own efforts to deal with their shame were not good enough; God had to solve the problem himself (Gen. 3:21). This information can propel you directly into a discussion of the bad news: the requirement of shed blood for the forgiveness of sins (Heb. 9:22), and from there into a discussion of the good news that Jesus shed His own blood for the forgiveness of sins and the covering of shame for people like you and me (Heb. 9:14).
3. Holidays
One outstanding way to reach especially children in our still somewhat Christianized culture is to ask them if they’ve ever celebrated Christmas or Easter.
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We do not profess a religion that despises the body. Christ speaks of us as his body, a body that spans the globe and extends through time. To disdain our flesh is to neglect the Incarnation and our membership in this historical communal body.

I teach in a great books program at an Evangelical university. Almost all students in the program are born-and-bred Christians of the nondenominational variety. A number of them have been both thoroughly churched and educated through Christian schools or homeschooling curricula. Yet an overwhelming majority of these students do not believe in a bodily resurrection. While they trust in an afterlife of eternal bliss with God, most of them assume this will be disembodied bliss, in which the soul is finally free of its “meat suit” (a term they fondly use).
I first caught wind of this striking divergence from Christian orthodoxy in class last year, when we encountered Stoic visions of the afterlife. Cicero, for one, describes the body as a prison from which the immortal soul is mercifully freed upon death, whereas Seneca views the body as “nothing more or less than a fetter on my freedom,” one eventually “dissolved” when the soul is set loose. These conceptions were quite attractive to the students.
Resistance to the idea of a physical resurrection struck them as perfectly logical. “It doesn’t feel right to say there’s a human body in heaven, when the body is tied so closely to sin,” said one student. In all, fewer than ten of my forty students affirmed the orthodox teaching that we will ultimately have a body in our glorified, heavenly form. None of them realizes that these beliefs are unorthodox; this is not willful doctrinal error. This is an absence of knowledge about the foundational tenets of historical, creedal Christianity.
At some point in my Evangelical upbringing, I came across a timeline of world history. The timeline started with Adam and Eve, then moved through significant events recounted in the Old Testament, with a few extra-biblical highlights from elsewhere in the world spliced in here and there. The fulcrum of the timeline was the birth of Christ, followed by details from his life and ministry, then post-Resurrection events from the Book of Acts. All these episodes were demarcated by bright colors, with neat lines stretching upward into the margins, connecting each sliver of color to a corresponding label. After Paul’s ministry, however, this busy rainbow of history dissolved into a dull purple rectangle spanning fourteen centuries, labeled simply “the Dark Ages.”
This is an apt illustration of all too many young Christians’ sense of Christian history. The world after the New Testament is blank and uneventful. Even the Reformation is an obscure blip. They are not self-consciously Protestant, but merely “nondenominational.” Their Christian identity is unmoored from any tradition or notion of Christianity through time.
My students are a microcosm of what I see as a growing trend in contemporary Evangelicalism. Without a guiding connection to orthodoxy, young Evangelicals are developing heterodox sensibilities that are at odds with a Christian understanding of personhood. The body is associated with sin, the soul with holiness. Moreover, this sense of the body, especially under the alias flesh, tends to be hypersexualized.
Nowhere is this more pronounced than in the Evangelical emphasis on purity, a word that has become synonymous with bodily virginity. Despite the biblical usage of purity as holiness in a broader, holistic sense, including but not limited to sexual matters, the word “purity” has become narrowly sexualized. It is not a virtue to be continually cultivated, but a default physical state that can be permanently lost.
In Evangelical vernacular, “sins of the flesh” denote specifically sexual sins, and these are the evils that dominate the theological imaginations of young, unmarried Evangelicals, far more than idolatry, say, or greed. I can remember one particularly vivid illustration from my Evangelical youth, when I was asked to imagine myself on my wedding day, in a pristine white dress—and then asked to picture a bright red handprint anywhere that a man has touched me. This image of a bloodied bride, of flesh corrupted by flesh, seared into my imagination a picture of the body, rather than the soul, as the source and site of sin.
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Many children feel their parent’s divorce is one of the most devastating events in their life, an event that damages their own self-perception and hinders their ability to form and maintain healthy relationships.

Last week, The Cut profiled nine women about “the Moment They Knew Their Marriage Was Over,” noting, “as painful as it may be” sometimes divorce is “exactly what you have to do.” It’s true that the marriage challenges adults face are often weighty. But what both The Cut and our culture largely ignore is the life-long cost divorce inflicts on children, preferring to believe that what children want most is “happy” parents rather than parents who work to stay married.
In reality, many children feel their parent’s divorce is one of the most devastating events in their life, an event that damages their own self-perception and hinders their ability to form and maintain healthy relationships. The Federalist spoke with nine children, whose names have been changed, about their lives in the moments and years following their parents’ announcement that their marriage was over.
My mother told me she was divorcing my father when I was 17 years old. My brother had already gone to college, so I was alone. My first reaction was “I just want the fighting to stop.” I thought the divorce would bring relief, I had no idea what the impact of the dissolution of our family would bring.
Both parents went on with their lives, and I was left alone to figure things out on my own. Our house was sold, I went off to college, and felt devastated I had no family or home to go back to anymore.
I couldn’t reconcile the fact that half of me is mom, half of me is dad, and if they hate each other, how can they possibly love me completely, as they can see the other person they hate in me? I felt unlovable and completely abandoned. My relationships have always failed because I was waiting for the “shoe to drop,” convincing myself no one can love me and no one wants to be around me for too long.—Samantha, 59, customer service, Michigan
When I was 11 years old, I came home from Vacation Bible School, and my mother told me she was moving out and divorcing my dad. She knew that I was aware of her affairs. I felt dirty, like I was guilty by association. It made me incredibly insecure when anyone said I looked like her/reminded them of her. It alienated me from that side of my family.—Ava, 23, secretary, Minnesota
I was 5 years old when my parents got divorced. To be honest, I don’t recall a moment they sat my sister and I down and told us. We just remember Dad being gone for months at a time before he came back into town and I started my visitation.
A court system chose the days of the week I’d see my dad, and the days of each week I’d see my mom. I remember feeling unstable and confused. As I packed my belongings in a bag for a weekend with Dad I didn’t understand why my sisters weren’t coming. That’s when I found out they both had a different dad. My dad had raised them for most of their lives, and suddenly it was as if they weren’t a part of him anymore.
Deep grief filled my little body as I mourned not having access to my dad Monday to Friday. I cried myself to sleep Friday to Sunday when I couldn’t have access to my mom. I had separation anxiety from my mom, so one time my dad sent the cops to pick me up when I didn’t want to go.
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