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The Beginnings of the Four Spiritual Laws

For many years, Campus Crusade for Christ has held evangelism training conferences all over the world to teach Christians how to share their faith. During these meetings, we ask those who participate in the training to help us list everything they feel a person should know before he or she can make an intelligent decision for Christ. Usually twenty-five to fifty different suggestions are made, all of which are written on a chalkboard. The list usually includes the following, along with many others:

God loves us
People are sinful
People are lost
God loved us so much that He gave His Son
Christ died for our sins
Christ rose from the dead
Christ wants to come into every life
We must repent of our sins
We must be born again
We must receive Jesus Christ
To as many as receive Jesus, God gives the right to become His children
We are saved by grace through faith

After all the suggestions are exhausted, we ask each participant to read with us a gospel presentation called the Four Spiritual Laws and to help us eliminate every point listed on the chalkboard that relates to Law One. These points are then erased from the board. Following the same procedure, we continue to Law Two, Three and Four. At this point, the chalkboard is always clean, confirming that the distilled essence of the gospel is contained in the Four Spiritual Laws booklet.

The content of the Four Spiritual Laws began to crystallize in my thinking during Campus Crusade for Christ staff training in 1956, when our staff numbered less than fifty. One of the speakers that year was a Christian layman who was an outstanding sales consultant. He emphasized that to be successful in sales, a person must develop a clear, simple, understandable presentation that can be used over and over again. But he warned us that when a salesman becomes weary of making the same presentation and develops “presentation fatigue,” he often changes the presentation and inevitably loses effectiveness.

The speaker then compared the witnessing Christian to the secular salesperson. “To be effective in communicating our faith in Christ,” he stressed, “you must develop a simple, understandable, reasonable presentation of the gospel that you can share with everyone. The better and more often you communicate this simple presentation, the more fruitful you will be in your witness for Christ.”

He illustrated his remarks by telling of several well-known Christians who had their own special presentations. Then he zeroed in on me by saying, “Bill Bright thinks he has a special message for each of the different groups of students, prisoners and lay people with whom he works. Although I have never heard him speak, I would be willing to wager that he has only one message for everyone. Basically, he tells them all the same thing.”

To say that I objected to such a suggestion is to put it mildly. The longer he spoke, the more irritated I became. I resented the suggestion that I or anyone else who truly desired to serve the Lord was not led of the Spirit to speak with originality to each individual according to that person’s particular needs. Furthermore, I resented him using me as an example before the rest of the staff.

But when it was all over and I was licking my wounds, the most serious of which was my bruised ego, I reflected on exactly what I did share with various people. That afternoon I wrote down my basic presentation, and to my amazement, I discovered my friend had been right. Without realizing it, I had been sharing the same message, with some variation, with everyone. What I wrote that afternoon and later polished I called God’s Plan for Your Life. It was a twenty-minute presentation of the claims of Christ - who He is, why He came and how a person can know Him personally.

I asked each staff member to memorize it, and we all began to use it in our personal witnessing. The next year, as we concentrated on sharing this simple message in dependence on the Holy Spirit, our ministry was multiplied a hundredfold.

God’s Plan was our first written “how-to” material - that is, material that explains simply and specifically how an individual can arrive at a desired goal, and also how he or she can, in turn, help others arrive at the same goal. The “how-to” approach is one of the most needed and most powerful approaches to the Christian life and witness. We found that most nonbelievers do not need to be convinced that they should become Christians; they simply need to be shown how to become a Christian.

Although God’s Plan was extremely effective, we felt the need for a shorter version. So I prepared a condensed outline, complete with Scripture verses and diagrams, and each member of the staff memorized it. As more and more people became involved in our training program, it became apparent that we needed to make the presentation available in printed form. As a result, the Four Spiritual Laws booklet was born.

We don’t claim that the Four Spiritual Laws message is the only way to introduce others to Christ, but we do know that millions of men and women have received Christ through the direct, simple presentation of the gospel contained in this booklet. According to our estimate, more than 1.5 billion copies have been distributed in all the major languages of the world.

Many stories have come to my attention of the effectiveness of the Four Spiritual Laws. For example, a senior pastor whose church had sent him to our headquarters for training was very excited about using the Four Spiritual Laws. He went back to share his enthusiasm with his church and with his assistant minister. The assistant was not impressed by the booklet. He disliked tracts, and this looked like just another tract. He tossed it on his desk, not even bothering to read it.

A few days later, a city official came by to inspect the church facilities. As she finished her inspection and was about to leave, it suddenly occurred to the assistant minister that he had not talked to her about Christ. He looked around quickly, and the only thing he saw was the Four Spiritual Laws booklet, which he had earlier tossed aside in disgust. He gave it to her, saying, “Read this,” meaning that she should read it when she got home.

She misunderstood, however, and began to read it aloud in his presence. She read every word, and by the time she got to Law Four, tears were streaming down her cheeks. When she came to the prayer, she prayed aloud, inviting Christ to be her Lord and Savior. By this time, the assistant minister was so impressed that he came to our national headquarters to learn how he could be a more effective witness for Christ through training and the use of the Four Spiritual Laws.

Another heartwarming experience demonstrates the effectiveness of the booklet. A man who was not a Christian was known as the town skeptic in his hometown because he never responded in a positive way to the many Christians who witnessed to him personally.

A Christian friend who felt especially concerned for his salvation obtained a Four Spiritual Laws booklet. This friend then decided to call on the skeptic and read it to him. As he finished reading, he asked, “Does this make sense?”

The skeptic replied, “Yes, it does.”

“Is there anything that would keep you from receiving Christ?”

“No,” he said.

The two men then knelt together and prayed, and the “skeptic” invited Christ into his life as his Savior and Lord.

When they arose, the friend was rejoicing with the man, who then stunned him with this question: “Is this what you and all the other Christians have been trying to tell me for years?”

“Yes.”

“Well,” continued this new brother in Christ, “why didn’t you tell me? Any man would be a fool not to receive Christ if he really understood what is involved.”

The gospel as contained in the Four Spiritual Laws booklet had cut right through the barrier of skepticism and indifference so that this man received the Lord Jesus.

  Part 3 - How to use the Four Spiritual Laws