Someone you love has written off Jesus, and the conversations have started to feel like reruns. They raise the same objection, you give the same answer, and both of you leave a little more certain the other side is not listening. The question here is how to keep reaching that person without giving up and without turning every visit into a debate. The habits this guide trains are simple to name: check your own life first, listen past the first objection, and commit to staying present for years rather than for one conversation.
The material comes from a message Lisa Fields, the founder and president of Jude 3 Project, preached from the closing verses of Jude. You can work through it alone over a month or with a group in one long session or two shorter ones. Keep a notebook or a notes app open. The exercises only work if you write some of it down.
Before you read anything, write down where you stopped
Think of one person you have quietly stopped expecting to come back to faith. You do not need to say who it is, even in a group. Initials are enough.
Now write two short things. First, the last thing that person said about God, church or Jesus, as close to their actual words as you can remember. Second, what you concluded from it. Maybe you concluded they are angry, or done, or that nothing you say will matter. Write that conclusion as a plain sentence.
Set the page aside. You will come back to it at the end and test whether the conclusion still holds.
Read Jude’s instructions slowly
Jude is a single chapter written to a church troubled by false teachers. Verse 3 calls believers to contend for the faith. Lisa Fields admits she first pictured contending as a boxing match, two sides trading blows. The end of the letter describes something else: believers building themselves up in the faith, keeping themselves in God’s love, and reaching into a fire to pull people out. Read it out loud, and read it twice.
“But ye, beloved, building up yourselves on your most holy faith, praying in the Holy Ghost, Keep yourselves in the love of God, looking for the mercy of our Lord Jesus Christ unto eternal life. And of some have compassion, making a difference: And others save with fear, pulling them out of the fire; hating even the garment spotted by the flesh.” (Jude 1:20-23)
A note on the wording. The KJV phrase “making a difference” in Jude 1:22 is hard for modern readers. Many modern translations render the line as a call to be merciful to those who doubt, which is the version Lisa Fields read when she preached it. Translations differ here partly because the ancient copies of these verses differ in their wording. That affects what you see on the page: the KJV reads most naturally as describing two groups of people, while the version Lisa Fields read names three, with a separate instruction to show mercy mixed with fear. Keep both in front of you as you answer the questions below.
Now do some close observation before drawing any lesson. Answer these on paper:
- What do the instructions to the believer in verses 20-21 have to do with the instructions about other people in verses 22-23? Could the second half be carried out without the first?
- How many kinds of people does Jude seem to have in view in the KJV, and how many in the reading with three groups? What response does each group receive?
- Find the word “fire.” What does the image suggest about how close the rescuer has to get?
- Is there any category of person Jude tells the church to stop trying to reach?
Lisa Fields reads the order of the passage as deliberate. Her summary: “The first step to contending for the faith is not what you communicate to the world, it’s how you live.” She calls the self-examination mirror ministry, and she ties it to the objection she hears most often from people who leave, that Christians are hypocrites. If the distance between what we say and how we live helped push someone away, a better argument from the same person will not repair it. Compare her reading with your own answer to the first question above. Do you see the connection she sees, or a different one?
She also reads Jude’s call to mercy through Jude’s own history. Following the common view that this Jude was a brother of Jesus, she points to John 7:5: “For neither did his brethren believe in him.” Her reading is that the man urging mercy toward doubters had once been one. That is an interpretation rather than something the letter states, but it fits, and it leads to her point: “it’s easier to be merciful when you struggle with doubt yourself.”
What Lisa Fields adds: the first objection is rarely the real one
The idea that most shapes a long conversation is her claim about how objections work. Lisa Fields has learned that “people’s first objection is not usually their real objection.” Her image is a fruit tree: “oftentimes we’re arguing about the fruit when we haven’t actually got to the root.” Pull fruit off a tree and it grows back. Answer the surface question and a new one appears the next week.
Two of her examples show the pattern. A friend leaving the faith sat with her in a restaurant for four hours. They covered science and faith, hell, and much more. She sensed she should stop answering and just listen. By the end, his real issue was that he wanted to sleep with his girlfriend without feeling guilty. Arguing every point, she says, would have kept them from ever reaching it.
A young man from a mentoring program in Jacksonville, the first in his family headed to college, was about to walk away because every image of Jesus and the biblical figures he had seen was white. He asked her whether his skin color was a product of the Fall. On the surface that is a question about Genesis. Underneath, she says, he was asking whether his life had value.
From conversations like these she proposes seven pain points that often sit beneath doubt: personhood, power, protection, provision, peace, purpose and pleasure. Treat that list as what it is, one teacher’s map drawn from years of these talks. It is useful for listening. It is not a diagnosis you get to hand someone. Her own claim is careful: “I believe when you listen to people long enough, you’ll get to their core concern, and usually it has to do with their pain.” Usually is the honest word there.
A fair test: does all this listening let the truth slide?
Before practicing, test the idea against its strongest objection. Patient listening can turn into silence. Someone could use “I’m just being present” as cover for never saying anything that costs them. Jude himself does not sound soft. In Jude 1:23 he tells believers to save some “with fear” and to hate the garment stained by the flesh.
Lisa Fields does not answer that worry by dropping truth. She describes the problem as truth with no follow-through: “we love to just tell people the truth, but we don’t wanna walk with them through the process.” Her alternative holds both together: “It’s always communicating truth in love, but it’s also about your commitment to their process.”
Write one true thing you believe your person needs to hear eventually. Then write what you think would happen if you said it tomorrow with no relationship around it. Then write what it might take for the same sentence to be heard as care instead of rejection. The point is not to delay truth forever. It is to notice that the same words can pull someone from the fire or push them further in, and that Lisa Fields locates the difference in how you love and treat the person.
There is another side to the test. Her seminary professor once met her crisis over the problem of evil with two words, me too. It helped because he was still following Jesus while admitting he did not understand. If you have doubts of your own, honesty about them is not a failure of witness. As she puts it, “you don’t have to have the answer to walk with Jesus.” Ask yourself whether you have been hiding your own questions from the person you are trying to reach, and why.
The practice: a month of staying close
This practice runs about four weeks and centers on the person you named at the start. Adjust the pace to the relationship you actually have; a monthly phone call is a real relationship too.
Week one: the mirror
Use the questions Lisa Fields asks of herself. Do I know what I believe? Have I searched the Scriptures myself? Have I faced my own doubts and frustrations? Do I have a prayer life? Pick the one where your honest answer is weakest and do one specific thing about it this week, such as reading John 6 in one sitting or setting ten minutes each morning to pray. Pray for your person by name every day, with no script for what you hope will happen.
Week two: one question, then quiet
In your next ordinary conversation, ask one honest, open question about their view of faith or church, if the moment allows it. Do not force a conversation that is not there. Then do the hard part: do not correct, clarify doctrine or defend the church. If you feel the pull to answer, ask a follow-up instead. Afterward, write down what they said in their own words.
Week three: look under the surface
Read your notes from week two beside the page you wrote at the start. Ask which of the seven pain points, if any, might be in play. Write your guess as a question, not a verdict, and write down what would show your guess was wrong. You may find no clear answer. That is a reason to keep listening, not to decide.
Week four: set a long rhythm
Lisa Fields describes her commitment this way: “I’m not here just for a night. I’m here for a lifetime.” She imagines that something said today might make sense years later, when someone else speaks into the person’s life. Turn that into a plan you could keep for a year. Decide how often you will check in, and how, with no agenda attached. Decide how you will keep praying for them. Put it in your calendar.
For groups working through this together
Guard privacy from the start. Ask people to use initials or a role (“my cousin,” “a coworker”) instead of names, and make clear that no one has to describe their person at all. Some of these relationships carry deep grief.
The week-two practice works well as a rehearsal. Pair people up. One partner voices a common objection in their own words. The other may only ask questions for three minutes, with no answers or corrections. Then switch. Afterward, ask each pair what it felt like to hold back, and what they learned that an answer would have covered up. A group meeting twice can start the month-long practice between sessions and compare notes the second time.
Questions for discussion
- How would you describe the relationship between the believer’s own life in Jude 1:20-21 and the rescue in verses 22-23? Does Lisa Fields’s mirror ministry match what you see in the text?
- Think about an objection you have heard more than once from someone you love. What might be the root under that fruit, and how confident are you in your guess?
- When has someone listened to you long enough to reach what was really bothering you? What did they do, or not do, that made it possible?
- Where is the line, for you, between patient listening and avoiding a hard truth? How would you know if you had crossed it?
- Lisa Fields found a professor’s honest me too more helpful than an answer. When might admitting your own struggle help someone, and when might it not?
- What makes a long-haul commitment hard to keep with this particular person, and what would make it more sustainable?
Return to the first page
Take out what you wrote at the beginning: their last words about faith, and your conclusion. Read it again after the month of practice.
Does the conclusion still describe what you know? You may have learned something about what sits underneath their words. You may also have learned nothing new, and that is honest too. Nothing in Jude or in this message promises that a person will return on your timeline. What the passage does not offer is any category of people beyond rescue, and Lisa Fields states the ground for that directly: “there’s no hopeless situation with Jesus.”
Rewrite your sentence if it needs rewriting. Then keep the calendar reminder you set in week four.