Originally Posted by toddpedlar

Precisely. And this is the trouble with almost all tracts I've ever seen (which is why I never seek them out to hand out... of course whether tract-passing is a proper fulfillment of the Great Commission is a different story entirely), even those which are otherwise alright in their presentation. Why we feel as though we have to sell Christ with the line "God loves you" and "Christ died for you" I don't know.

"Christ died for you" is something, as Jay points out, that you simply cannot say at random to a person on the street. You just don't know that. "God loves you" is another thing that isn't appropriate to say - because even if it is true in ANY sense that God loves every person (he does HATE Esau, after all - that "loves less" interpretation of Romans 9 is simply WRONG) you don't know in a given case whether a person is loved with electing love by God. Yet when we proclaim to someone that "God loves you", electing, saving love is PRECISELY what the person hears us saying. We are in error when we say something that is true in one limited sense, but know the hearer hears in a way that MAY NOT be true. We are thus in danger of bearing false witness, and at best we are saying something misleading with "God loves you" just as much as we are by saying "Christ died for you".

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Todd