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@eitan I wrote a reply, but I wasn’t logged in when I posted it, so I lost it. 😛

I’ll try to summarize what I said.

• It’s true people don’t like sermons or debates, so those generally don’t belong in fiction either. 😉 I can think of some examples with sermons or religious debates in fiction that actually felt totally natural, but it definitely takes a skilled writer and the right situation to pull it off. The #1 rule for success is, when you’re writing a moral or religious discussion, don’t focus (you can think about it a tiny bit though) on trying to reach the reader, focus on how the characters are feeling, how they’d most naturally respond. Also, don’t make one person the obvious winner. The story itself should show the truth you want to share. Debates can serve to “set the scene” for your message, but the message itself comes from the plot and character arcs.
• Some people aren’t big on sharing the gospel in fiction since they think that’s automatically preachy. I think that’s a generalization, though it’s almost always true. It’s not so hard to present the gospel if your readers already know it and you can basically just reference it, but if you have to explain everything from the ground up…that’s a lot of explaining to do. It’s hard to show and not tell, which means you’ll end up sounding preachy. You’d probably have to use one of those “debates without a clear winner” that sets up what the gospel is, but doesn’t pitch it to the reader. The plot and character arcs would have to do that.
• Also, I don’t believe explicitly sharing the gospel is the only way to glorify God through storytelling. Stories remind people of the gospel. It can allude to the gospel in ways that will create a culture that will understand the gospel easily when it is shared with them. It can dissatisfy readers with their humanist approach to life. And the list goes on. Lots of stories, more or less explicitly Christian do these things. You can even write a story that just brightens someone’s day or reenergizes them. I generally aim for more, but those aren’t bad goals.
• If you think of yourself as a preacher first, artist second…be very, very careful. I get that you “can” write a not-very-artistic story and God can use the message to change someone’s life, but seriously, unless you love writing, study it, and own it, you don’t know what you’re dealing with. It would be like a non-plumber trying to wire a house or a non-coder trying to fix complex JavaScript.