SPEAKER_00: Here's just a pretty straightforward definition of apologetics for you.
SPEAKER_00: Apologetics is the defense of the Christian faith.
SPEAKER_00: If you have uh not familiar with that word, sometimes you'll think apologetics is apologizing for the Christian faith or something like that.
SPEAKER_00: No apologia, it's a defense, it's making an active defense of the Christian faith, defending it.
SPEAKER_00: Evangelism and apologetics are not the same thing.
SPEAKER_00: Evangelism is the explanation of the gospel, apologetics is the defense of the integrity of the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Evangelism and apologetics are friends, they're brothers even, but they're not uh twins.
SPEAKER_00: Evangelism is offensive, evangelism is taking the gospel into the world, and apologetics is defensive.
SPEAKER_00: Apologetics is responding to objections, defending attacks on the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Apologetics are a tool to be used by evangelists, but they're not the goal of evangelism.
SPEAKER_00: They're not the point of evangelism.
SPEAKER_00: And that's an important distinction because oftentimes in evangelism, you can get sidetracked into winning a stupid argument.
SPEAKER_00: You can get sidetracked into convincing somebody about a political argument or uh, you know, something in the international scene, or convincing somebody about Israel, or the timing of the rapture, or 10,000 other things that aren't the point of evangelism.
SPEAKER_00: Evangelism, remember how we defined it a couple weeks ago.
SPEAKER_00: Uh evangelism is the communication of the saving elements of the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: You measure the effectiveness of evangelism by the content delivered and the clarity with which it is delivered, uh, not by winning an argument.
SPEAKER_00: Apologetics is how you defend attacks on the gospel, but evangelism is the goal to bring the gospel forward so that people hear enough that they can be saved.
SPEAKER_00: In other words, the evangelist wants more than merely winning somebody over in an argument, the evangelist wants the person to come to faith in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: Now, apologetics are useful in evangelism, though.
SPEAKER_00: They're useful in evangelism because they are twofold.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, they're useful in evangelism because they give you uh confidence in evangelism.
SPEAKER_00: Uh sometimes in evangelism, people will give you uh objections to the gospel, uh, they will they will mock you or ridicule you or ignore you.
SPEAKER_00: And apologetics helps give you confidence in the face of that because it reminds you that what you believe is true.
SPEAKER_00: Even though people might mock it and reject it, you have truth on your side, so that encourages you.
SPEAKER_00: But apologetics also helps you in evangelism because there are the cases where somebody objects to the gospel and they have a sincere objection.
SPEAKER_00: Like their objection is actually what is keeping them from faith in Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And so, in that sense, apologetics is useful to overcome objections if they are real sincere objections.
SPEAKER_00: But my little disclaimer here is I think that many people's objections are less sincere than they let on.
SPEAKER_00: I remember when my friend uh Tommy was sharing the gospel with me, I had all kinds of objections that were just the dumbest objections you've ever heard.
SPEAKER_00: Uh and Tommy made a little list of them.
SPEAKER_00: Well, when I eventually came to Faith in Christ, Tommy had his list of objections I had given him, and he had found answers to them.
SPEAKER_00: Like he had talked to his youth pastor, and he had, you know, I don't know, looked up like 101 hard Bible verses or something, and like found like actual answers to my objections.
SPEAKER_00: But once I came to Faith in Christ, I didn't even, I wasn't concerned about those things anymore uh at all.
SPEAKER_00: Um So I do think that a uh some people's objections are less sincere than they let on.
SPEAKER_00: They're just excuses to justify their own uh sinful disbelief for a while.
SPEAKER_00: Anyway, the gist of apologetics is this.
SPEAKER_00: If you were to boil apologetics down uh to a nutshell, apologetics is this that God speaks the truth.
SPEAKER_00: Everyone knows the truth, but nonbelievers pretend that they don't.
SPEAKER_00: That's my little snarky definition of apologetics right there in a nutshell that God has spoken what the truth is.
SPEAKER_00: Everyone knows that what God says is true.
SPEAKER_00: They know it in their hearts, they know it in their consciences, they know it in their minds, and yet non-believers will often pretend that they don't in order to justify their own sinful lifestyle, their own rejection of the truth.
SPEAKER_00: Sometimes it's not even a sinful lifestyle they're after, as much as it is their intellectual pride, they sit in judgment over God, not the other way around.
SPEAKER_00: And if they were to grant that the Bible is true or that God does speak the truth, that would be a humbling experience because it would put an authority over the person.
SPEAKER_00: And this is described very clearly in the Bible in passages such as Romans 1, where Paul says, you know, what is true about God has been made plain to all people, so that all men everywhere are without excuse.
SPEAKER_00: What's been revealed about God from the beginning of time is evident that God is holy, that he is the creator.
SPEAKER_00: You can't get around those basic truths.
SPEAKER_00: There's not confusion about that.
SPEAKER_00: The world is here, you're standing on it, and it didn't just poof appear out of nowhere.
SPEAKER_00: Everyone knows that.
SPEAKER_00: Now people pretend they don't know that, and so they replace the cause of the earth, the source of the earth, with uh, you know, other excuses and science and other gods and false religions, passions, ignorance, whatever.
SPEAKER_00: But all of those things they replace it with are certainly less confident and less rational or reasonable than the idea that God created the earth.
SPEAKER_00: Probably the going majority opinion in the Western world, anyway, is you know, some form of the Big Bang theory, even if you wouldn't have somebody able to articulate it or explain or even use the concept of the Big Bang anymore.
SPEAKER_00: That's still probably the going theory in the world that all of the atoms in the world were so condensed into the tiniest point that they exploded and burst and are moving apart with some incredible rate of speed, but some of them conjugate together, uh drawn together through gravity and whatnot, and form into planets and solar systems and you know galaxies and all this stuff, and it's a completely unreasonable explanation.
SPEAKER_00: I think any rational person understands it's unreasonable.
SPEAKER_00: And yet it's all that they have.
SPEAKER_00: If they were to grant that the Bible is true, it would imply a moral uh superiority of the word of God over themselves, and it would be a humbling that most people are unwilling to do.
SPEAKER_00: And so Romans 1 goes on, if you're looking at Romans 1, it goes on from saying what's made clear about God is evident to all people.
SPEAKER_00: So without excuse, but what do people do with it?
SPEAKER_00: They suppress the truth, they replace the truth with a lie, and it becomes about worshiping creepy, crawly things, right?
SPEAKER_00: Even in Romans 1, in a world without evolution, even in Romans 1, Paul identifies that they replace the creator with creation, and he specifically goes to reptiles.
SPEAKER_00: They, you know, they worship animals.
SPEAKER_00: Um they say, we came from animals, or they make idols of animals, and they elevate animals, and it becomes very odd and certainly not intellectually superior to any form of divine revelation.
SPEAKER_00: And the reason they do that, Paul is very clear in Romans 1.
SPEAKER_00: Romans 1 is not a politically correct chapter at all.
SPEAKER_00: He's very clear the reason they do that is their own sinful lusts.
SPEAKER_00: Intellectual pride, sexual lust.
SPEAKER_00: They desire to live a certain life and think a certain way, so they reject what is true about God and replace it with silly things, absurd things.
SPEAKER_00: Idols that can't see, they can't hear.
SPEAKER_00: As Jeremiah says, they make the idol and then say that the idol made them.
SPEAKER_00: It's logically absurd and little better than worshiping an old school statue of an alligator.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is the baseline of apologetics, that people reject God and come at him with different attacks.
SPEAKER_00: And in order to engage with these attacks, you need a couple more points about his apologetics.
SPEAKER_00: First, there's just a little statement of fact.
SPEAKER_00: All people use circular reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: How do I know that all people use circular reasoning?
SPEAKER_00: Because all people use circular reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: You tracking with me?
SPEAKER_00: Listen, it is a foolproof, airtight argument.
SPEAKER_00: There are no weak spots in that argument.
SPEAKER_00: It's a full circle.
SPEAKER_00: Whenever you make a statement of fact, it depends upon your statement of fact, the validity of that fact depends upon the knowledge you have to verify that fact, to state it as true.
SPEAKER_00: If I told you that the Dodgers are terrible, baseball team and squandered their playoff chances by, you know, their pitching choices or whatever, that would be a fair statement based upon my observation of them.
SPEAKER_00: I went into the game, I saw their base running catastrophes.
SPEAKER_00: I've seen how horrible they can play when they put their minds to playing terrible baseball.
SPEAKER_00: So if I were to tell you that, it's based upon my own personal observations of it.
SPEAKER_00: And my analysis of Dodgers baseball is only as good as my knowledge of it and my firsthand experience of it is.
SPEAKER_00: After all, it's something that by definition would have no witnesses at it.
SPEAKER_00: There's nobody there.
SPEAKER_00: If God exists outside of time, if he has infinite action, infinite light, infinite revelation, and exists outside of time and independent of time, and he makes time and he makes the universe, it is not possible that anybody would have any knowledge of that at all unless God reveals himself.
SPEAKER_00: There's no witnesses to creation.
SPEAKER_00: And so at that point, you are taking somebody else's word for it.
SPEAKER_00: And so your understanding of God as the creator is only as solid as the integrity of the person who reveals that God is the creator.
SPEAKER_00: And in this case, that's God.
SPEAKER_00: We believe that God is the creator of the universe because he says he is, and he's the only witness to it.
SPEAKER_00: God can't lie, and so we receive his word as truth.
SPEAKER_00: Now, of course, this becomes circular reasoning, but there's no logical alternative than circular reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: Every person has that kind of circular reasoning when it boils down to the most basic elements of life.
SPEAKER_00: Consider the agnostic.
SPEAKER_00: The agnostic says it's not possible to know if God created the heavens and the earth.
SPEAKER_00: Well, why not, Mr.
SPEAKER_00: Agnostic?
SPEAKER_00: Why isn't it possible to know?
SPEAKER_00: Because they have determined that it's not possible to know.
SPEAKER_00: So any knowledge to the contrary, anyone who says with certainty that God created the heavens and the earth is outside of their worldview because their worldview is contingent on it's not possible to have knowledge that confirms it.
SPEAKER_00: It's very circular reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: I know George Washington was our first president, as I mentioned, because everyone says he was.
SPEAKER_00: And it's just established through history, through the veracity of those that saw it and experienced, but in eternal matters, it hinges on having revelation of somebody who is there.
SPEAKER_00: If the Bible isn't true because I don't think it's true, I don't think it's true, that's therefore it's not true.
SPEAKER_00: That's the classic line of the agnostic or the atheist, the Bible isn't true because I don't think it's true, I don't think it's true, and that makes it not true.
SPEAKER_00: That is also circular reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: When you're dealing with eternal matters or matters of creation, you're going to be embracing circular reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: Here's another way of saying this.
SPEAKER_00: Absolute statements require absolute knowledge or an appeal to authority.
SPEAKER_00: Absolute statements demand or require absolute knowledge or some kind of appeal to authority, some kind of embracing of circular reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: Here's another very common example of this.
SPEAKER_00: There are those that claim there's no such thing as absolute truth because there's no such thing as absolute knowledge.
SPEAKER_00: And if you think about that for a few seconds, you realize that's a self-defeating claim, don't you?
SPEAKER_00: I reject the concept of absolute truth.
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
SPEAKER_00: Well, it's an absolute statement.
SPEAKER_00: That would be the declaration of absolute truth.
SPEAKER_00: It becomes circular reasoning, and that kind of circular reasoning has a logical contradiction at the core of it.
SPEAKER_00: In contrast, the Christian is able to make statements about God because we appeal to an absolute authority who does not contradict himself.
SPEAKER_00: So we say we believe that God created the heavens and the earth because God says he created the heavens and the earth, and every word of God is true.
SPEAKER_00: The scripture backs up what God says by testifying to the truthfulness of God and by describing the world in a way that corresponds to how it really is.
SPEAKER_00: So that gives us confidence to believe what the Bible says about the integrity and the truthfulness of God.
SPEAKER_00: The Christian can therefore make these kind of absolute statements about God being the creator, God being holy, because we have an absolute authority, namely the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: There are those that say, I reject circular reasoning, and your appeal to the Bible and saying the Bible is true because the Bible says it's true, is circular reasoning, just like I say the blue cookie monster made the universe, and I believe the blue cookie monster is the sovereign creator, my appeal to absolute authority is the same as yours.
SPEAKER_00: I've actually had somebody tell me that.
SPEAKER_00: And there's a big difference between the appeal to the blue cookie monster and the appeal to the written word of God.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, the blue cookie monster did not say he made the universe.
SPEAKER_00: Like you can't point to something that was written before the era of Sesame Street that has revelation from the big blue cookie monster.
SPEAKER_00: So you're making something up.
SPEAKER_00: There's a just a massive gulf of difference between the integrity of the Christian witness to the universe and people making something up.
SPEAKER_00: And that really is where most of the world is.
SPEAKER_00: Most of the world is at the level of making things up.
SPEAKER_00: In contrast, Christianity embraces circular reasoning because it is verified by the way the world actually is.
SPEAKER_00: Only Christian circular reasoning aligns with truth.
SPEAKER_00: Only Christian reasoning aligns with truth.
SPEAKER_00: Now other religions might make an appeal to some kind of circular reasoning, but it either doesn't correspond to reality or it's self-contradictory.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have an inherent cohesion to it.
SPEAKER_00: Some people say Christians use circular reasoning.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible is true because God says it's true, God says it's true in the Bible, therefore, that's circular reasoning, I reject it.
SPEAKER_00: But I want you to remember that everyone uses circular reasoning, even the agnostic.
SPEAKER_00: And so you're left when it comes to matters outside of human experience, like what happens when you die, or who created the universe, those kind of matters are going to require an appeal to authority.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody who knows what happened, who reveals what happened.
SPEAKER_00: And we're dealing with creation, the only one who knows what happens is God.
SPEAKER_00: And so it requires people to make an appeal to a God who reveals Himself.
SPEAKER_00: Now, this is something I I learned from Josh McDowell's More Than a Carpenter book, that as an early believer, young believer, I read it, and it it was so obvious, and it's so obvious now to me, but it blew my mind at the time.
SPEAKER_00: I thought that all religions had that kind of logical consistency to it.
SPEAKER_00: I thought that, you know, Islam and uh, you know, name a religion.
SPEAKER_00: I thought it had the same kind of logical consistency to it, and Christians had the same kind of book with their own logical consistency to it, and I happen to be a Christian because that's what I believe, and yes, it happened to be true, but as far as the logical inner workings, all the religions have the same kind of logical structure.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, I believe Christianity is true, and those other religions are false, but they make the same kind of moral claims and logical claims about the universe as Christianity does.
SPEAKER_00: That's what I that's what I thought when I got when I got saved.
SPEAKER_00: But no, when you start learning about other religions, you you realize there's not like a second choice to Christianity.
SPEAKER_00: There's not another religion out there that has a logically cohesive worldview, an appeal to authority from God who created the universe, who now reveals himself in time, pointing people back to himself, and that that revelation actually corresponds to the way the world works.
SPEAKER_00: There is not another religion like that at all.
SPEAKER_00: The other major world religions are logically contradictory.
SPEAKER_00: They maintain things at their core that just aren't true or that don't correspond to reality.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, I could give you examples of this.
SPEAKER_00: If you think about how Islam, what Islam hinges on, is that Muhammad went into the cave and he had visions that he was not allowed to write down, that he memorized, that it was downloaded into his mind in a trance, that he spoke them throughout his life, and that he wouldn't let anybody else write them down when he was alive, and then he died, and his followers then instantly wrote them down, and that becomes how the Quran was revealed.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's nonsense.
SPEAKER_00: That doesn't make any sense.
SPEAKER_00: You can't memorize the Quran and his lifespan like that from his own talkings and then write it down when he dies, and it was immoral to write it down because it was the words of God, but it stopped being immortal when he died.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't make any sense.
SPEAKER_00: Plus, there's a part about demons living in the upper nose.
SPEAKER_00: That's why you have to, you know, wash out your nose in the morning.
SPEAKER_00: Demons don't live in your upper nose.
SPEAKER_00: The Trinity is not Mary.
SPEAKER_00: Mary is not, you know, a person in the Trinity, like the Quran teaches.
SPEAKER_00: Like there's just basic things about it that are not true and logically contradictory, and not like incidental things.
SPEAKER_00: Not like tangential things.
SPEAKER_00: Like some people point to the Bible and say, this person has two names in the Bible, that's a contradiction, or was the robe that Jesus was robed in, was it scarlet or was it purple?
SPEAKER_00: Aha, contradiction.
SPEAKER_00: Like you did Judas hang himself, or did his bowels burst out?
SPEAKER_00: Which one, you know, and you know, when you're familiar with the Bible, you realize those aren't even contradictions, but even if they were, they are so tangential, and they're not, but even if they were, it's not getting to the essence of authority or what the Bible teaches.
SPEAKER_00: And yet other religions have these intrinsic contradictions that speak to the integrity of them at the core of their message, like the method of revelation in Islam or Mormonism, the story of how Mormonism received, you know, Joseph Smith received the golden plates and how they were translated through the veil, and you know, how the it's just, it doesn't make any sense.
SPEAKER_00: And it's not true.
SPEAKER_00: It's not true.
SPEAKER_00: And those are little little better than agnosticism or evolution or materialism.
SPEAKER_00: Those are other worldviews that have circular reasoning that are not logically coherent and end up falling apart upon even a modicum of curiosity or examination.
SPEAKER_00: In contrast, the Christian worldview alone speaks of a God who made the universe and revealed himself.
SPEAKER_00: The Christian worldview is not compatible with the deistic worldview.
SPEAKER_00: The deistic worldview being that God made the universe and stepped away and kind of let things unwind, like the clockmaker sets a clock.
SPEAKER_00: The Christian worldview is not compatible with that.
SPEAKER_00: At the heart of the Christian worldview is supernaturalism, that God is engaged with the world through revelation.
SPEAKER_00: The heart of the Christian worldview is the Trinity, that God is a self-revealing God, that he is internally revealing himself father to son and father and son to spirit, and that revelation comes forward into the world.
SPEAKER_00: And so it makes sense then that if God created the world, he immediately reveals himself to the world he created, which he does in the Bible, immediately speaking to Adam and Eve, immediately engaged in a relationship with them.
SPEAKER_00: Sin enters the world and mars that.
SPEAKER_00: God continually reaches into the world with judgment through the flood, for example, and through the Tower of Babel, and through grace, through calling Abraham and offering a sacrifice in the place of Isaac, and directs the whole narrative of the scripture towards the gospel in a logically cohesive and coherent way that contains moral declarations about the world, scientific declarations about the world that are intrinsically true and logically cohesive.
SPEAKER_00: Christianity alone is like.
SPEAKER_00: That.
SPEAKER_00: Now, you don't need to memorize what I just said as a speech.
SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you that just exactly what I meant earlier.
SPEAKER_00: I hope that encourages you and gives you confidence in evangelism, but also allows you when somebody responds to you by saying you're appealing to the Bible, I don't receive the Bible as an authority.
SPEAKER_00: Well, frankly, it doesn't matter if somebody receives the Bible as an authority or not.
SPEAKER_00: It is an authority because it is God's word about how he made the universe.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why, if you remember a few weeks ago, I said in evangelism, it is so important to use the scriptures.
SPEAKER_00: When you're sharing the gospel with somebody, that you're drawing what you're communicating from the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says that God made the world.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says that God offers Jesus as a Savior.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible says you can have your sins forgiven and that you're showing them where.
SPEAKER_00: This is the word of God, and it has a power to it.
SPEAKER_00: If someone refuses to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, point out to them in the Bible where it says that he is the Messiah.
SPEAKER_00: And that makes the person wrestle with the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: Now, part of apologetics is recognizing that salvation is impossible without a supernatural work on the human heart.
SPEAKER_00: This lets us know that we can't argue anyone into belief.
SPEAKER_00: You can't give somebody a convincing enough argument to get somebody to be saved, and that's a good thing, because if you argued somebody into salvation, then somebody more intellectually refined than you are could come tomorrow and argue them right back out of it again.
SPEAKER_00: So you never want to be put in a situation where the smartest person wins.
SPEAKER_00: That's not a good, that's not how Christianity advances.
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't advance to the arguments of the smartest person.
SPEAKER_00: Even the Apostle Paul says, I'm lowering myself, I'm preaching foolishness to people.
SPEAKER_00: It's the wisdom of God, but people perceive it as foolishness.
SPEAKER_00: That's why the gospel goes forward, not with the PhDs, not with the university professors.
SPEAKER_00: The gospel goes forward with the poor and the uneducated, not because they're naive.
SPEAKER_00: Remember what Romans 1 says?
SPEAKER_00: The gospel goes forward with the poor and the uneducated, not because they're dumb.
SPEAKER_00: No, no.
SPEAKER_00: Because they are too smart to be academic dumb.
SPEAKER_00: They're too smart to believe the lies of evolution, the lies of the some of the lies that define our worldviews, you have to get a PhD in gender studies to believe.
SPEAKER_00: You know, a normal person doesn't believe that kind of nonsense.
SPEAKER_00: You have to be way too educated to fall for lies like that.
SPEAKER_00: And so the gospel goes forward, just as the foolishness of the world.
SPEAKER_00: It goes forward.
SPEAKER_00: The world calls it foolishness, but it is indeed the wisdom of God.
SPEAKER_00: That's why evangelism, the more simple evangelism is the better.
SPEAKER_00: When you're evangelizing, you're just trying to convey the content of the gospel to people.
SPEAKER_00: But one more point on this that I hope is helpful to you.
SPEAKER_00: As you're evangelizing, remember the unbelief is a moral issue.
SPEAKER_00: The unbelief is a moral issue.
SPEAKER_00: A person who refuses to believe the gospel, that is a moral issue on them.
SPEAKER_00: That is sin.
SPEAKER_00: It's sin not to love the Lord your God with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength.
SPEAKER_00: It is sin to refuse to believe the written and revealed word of God.
SPEAKER_00: It's not a sin of ignorance.
SPEAKER_00: It's a willful act of sin.
SPEAKER_00: The language in Romans 1, they suppress the truth with unrighteousness.
SPEAKER_00: It's not an intellectual issue.
SPEAKER_00: When somebody says, I would believe if I just saw more evidence, that's just not true.
SPEAKER_00: It's not true.
SPEAKER_00: No amount of evidence reasons somebody into heaven.
SPEAKER_00: It's an issue of moral culpability.
SPEAKER_00: And so when some people think of apologetics, they think of evidences, things like dinosaur footprints and human footprints together in a stream bed in Texas, or things like geology that support a worldwide flood, or you know, things like the holes in carbon dating and whatnot, and all those have their place.
SPEAKER_00: I'm glad for all those.
SPEAKER_00: I'm glad for creation arguments, and I'm glad for dinosaur and people footprints in the same floodplain.
SPEAKER_00: When you go to the Grand Canyon, it's hilarious.
SPEAKER_00: It's actually funny.
SPEAKER_00: When you're walking around the Grand Canyon to read like the evolutionist arguments, like you have little placards in the ground, you're at 400 million years ago, you're at 500 million years ago, 350 million years ago.
SPEAKER_00: It's just comical.
SPEAKER_00: Like you can't walk on that without laughing a little bit.
SPEAKER_00: This is what the world believes.
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of funny.
SPEAKER_00: Like that little foot was 50 million years right there.
SPEAKER_00: And you're looking across the canyon, you're seeing like trees through all the layers of the stuff.
SPEAKER_00: And you're going, I have, I'm not buying the evolutionary argument.
SPEAKER_00: Like it's not passing the six-year-old smell test right here.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's true.
SPEAKER_00: That's not going to reason anybody in to heaven.
SPEAKER_00: And so I'm glad for creation science, and I'm glad for people that taught me to laugh at the Grand Canyon and all that.
SPEAKER_00: I'm glad for it.
SPEAKER_00: But that's a different topic than evangelism.
SPEAKER_00: And that's because unbelief is a moral issue, so there's a limited usefulness of evidences.
SPEAKER_00: There's a limited usefulness in evidences.
SPEAKER_00: Instead, the evangelist is supposed to call people to faith because God commands them to believe.
SPEAKER_00: The agnostic is doubting God, and in reality, they're calling God a liar.
SPEAKER_00: The person who says, I don't think the Bible is true, is that loggerheads with God because God says his word is truth.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says he is the way, the truth, and life.
SPEAKER_00: Jesus says man doesn't live on bread alone, but in every word that comes from the mouth of God, Jesus refers to the Bible as God's word and says that it's required for life to believe it.
SPEAKER_00: So the person who says, I don't know if that's true, is being obstinate towards God.
SPEAKER_00: Not that that means that they should be open to mockery, but it does mean that in evangelism you recognize it is a moral issue, not an intellectual issue.
SPEAKER_00: And that's why I do think it's important to expose false presuppositions in evangelism, to tell the person to repent of their unbelief.
SPEAKER_00: Explain to the agnostic how doubting God is in reality calling him a liar, but to do that in a winsome and non-mocking way.
SPEAKER_00: The issue with evidences is that by calling someone to come to faith in Jesus based upon evidences, you're treating like the person like they're the judge.
SPEAKER_00: C.S.
SPEAKER_00: Lewis makes this point wonderfully well in The Abolition of Man that when you appeal to somebody with evidences, you're not challenging them to get out of the judge box, to get out of the jury box and get on the defendant stand.
SPEAKER_00: You know, the issue with non-believers is that they're the defendant and they think they're the judge.
SPEAKER_00: They're sitting and judging what is true in the world.
SPEAKER_00: They need to get out of that position and get underneath the authority of God and his word.
SPEAKER_00: That's why an appeal to evidence can have, can backfire on you.
SPEAKER_00: If you're evangelizing and you're overly relying on evidences and carbon dating and you know, dinosaur fossils and whatnot, you're still elevating the person and their ration and their reason and making them the judge.
SPEAKER_00: Like you're, here's all the evidences would you consider and weigh what you find true.
SPEAKER_00: Again, there's a little bit of a place for that, obviously.
SPEAKER_00: It's a person has to come to faith themselves.
SPEAKER_00: There's there's a little bit of a place for that.
SPEAKER_00: When you read C.S.
SPEAKER_00: Lewis' own testimony, he's very aware of that.
SPEAKER_00: Like it took it took a lot of evidence to get him to come to the place of conversion.
SPEAKER_00: But once he was converted, he realized the limited usefulness of those evidences, didn't he?
SPEAKER_00: He realized that it's more about having faith in God than it is about being intellectually persuaded because ultimately you need to come out of the judge's box, out of the jury box, and into the defendant's chair.
SPEAKER_00: It's you who's on trial, not God.
SPEAKER_00: Well, with all that said, let me encourage you in your evangelism to direct people to put their faith in God because the Bible commands them to.
SPEAKER_00: Now, what do you do when they refuse to?
SPEAKER_00: What do you do when they refuse to believe God?
SPEAKER_00: And here's a little outline for you on how to handle rejection, how to handle the rejection, what to do when the message of the Bible of your evangelism is rejected.
SPEAKER_00: First of all, I would say don't argue with the person.
SPEAKER_00: Don't argue.
SPEAKER_00: As we read a few weeks ago in Matthew 7, you don't keep casting your pearls before swine, you don't give what is holy to the dogs.
SPEAKER_00: When a person rejects the gospel message, you can move on.
SPEAKER_00: This proverb says, you argue with the fool.
SPEAKER_00: Uh nobody knows the difference.
SPEAKER_00: It's the old streetcar, you know, subway analogy in New York City.
SPEAKER_00: Uh somebody comes up and starts a crazy argument with you, and by the time the argument is over, all the people on the train that were there when it started are gone.
SPEAKER_00: Everybody else thinks you're the crazy person.
SPEAKER_00: You understand that, right?
SPEAKER_00: When you argue with a non-believer, it's impossible to tell who is the crazy one.
SPEAKER_00: So don't argue.
SPEAKER_00: Um, you don't argue with a blind man about what you see.
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of a foolish argument.
SPEAKER_00: You do tell people to repent, but you don't need to argue with them.
SPEAKER_00: You don't take their rejection personally.
SPEAKER_00: They're not rejecting you, they're rejecting God.
SPEAKER_00: You remember Samuel?
SPEAKER_00: Uh when Samuel was so mad, when Israel fired Samuel as the prophet, he was so mad.
SPEAKER_00: And God said, Why are you mad, Samuel?
SPEAKER_00: It's not you they fired, it's me they fired.
SPEAKER_00: When somebody rejects your evangelism, you understand that it's God they're rejecting, not you.
SPEAKER_00: Thirdly, continue to pray for their repentance.
SPEAKER_00: Continue to pray for their repentance.
SPEAKER_00: Of course, it's important you pray before you evangelize.
SPEAKER_00: It was on the outline last week, it should be important that you pray after you evangelize.
SPEAKER_00: The person rejects you, pray for them.
SPEAKER_00: You pray for their repentance, and even tell the person, you know, I'll continue to pray for you.
SPEAKER_00: I've even had somebody tell me, I said, I'll continue to pray for your repentance, and they'll give me another prayer request or two, also.
SPEAKER_00: Like, oh, can you also pray for my job?
SPEAKER_00: Can you also pray for my grandmother?
SPEAKER_00: I'm like, okay.
SPEAKER_00: To be clear, I'm gonna be praying to the God that you're rejecting, that he would hear my prayer and answer you favorably.
unknown: Yes.
SPEAKER_00: Alright.
SPEAKER_00: I'll do that.
SPEAKER_00: Um continue to pray for the repentance.
SPEAKER_00: And who knows?
SPEAKER_00: The Lord does answer prayer.
SPEAKER_00: Prayer is heard.
SPEAKER_00: God does intervene.
SPEAKER_00: Even when you're rejected, you pray the Lord, and the Lord may intervene in the future.
SPEAKER_00: And then finally end with a warning.
SPEAKER_00: End with a warning.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you've made some strong statements against what I showed you from Scripture.
SPEAKER_00: I want you to know that what I showed you is the only way you can be forgiven of your sin.
SPEAKER_00: Or let me leave you with this thought.
SPEAKER_00: Where will you spend eternity?
SPEAKER_00: So to walk you through just very briefly, a kind of like an overview of this.
SPEAKER_00: If I'm talking to somebody that just said, you know, they're gonna quit their job and take this other job, I might ask them why are they making that choice?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's better opportunities for my family, what's a better opportunity for your family?
SPEAKER_00: Oh, it's a better neighborhood, it's it's better this, it's better that.
SPEAKER_00: I'm gonna listen to their answer.
SPEAKER_00: And we talked about this last week.
SPEAKER_00: I'm trying to identify what's motivating their thinking.
SPEAKER_00: What's motivating their thinking?
SPEAKER_00: They say, oh, the most important thing for me is family.
SPEAKER_00: All right, that's a great opening for me to say, you know, it's it's really good that you love your family that much.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's that's noble because a lot of people don't love their family that much, right?
SPEAKER_00: A lot of people don't.
SPEAKER_00: A lot of people live for themselves, not their family.
SPEAKER_00: It's very good you love your family that much.
SPEAKER_00: But the Bible says that something different should be the most important thing in your life.
SPEAKER_00: Do you mind if I tell you what that is?
SPEAKER_00: And if they allow me to keep going, I say, first of all, you have got to start with God created the universe.
SPEAKER_00: He is the holy creator.
SPEAKER_00: The scripture says he made it.
SPEAKER_00: If you go back to Genesis 1:1, there was nothing, and God made the universe by speaking it.
SPEAKER_00: God, Romans 1 says, is holy, he made all things.
SPEAKER_00: And I'll walk through that little outline that I gave you a few days ago.
SPEAKER_00: I'll talk about how God made people.
SPEAKER_00: He made us.
SPEAKER_00: Because he made us, he owns us, and yet people sinned.
SPEAKER_00: All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
SPEAKER_00: Sin is loving something that isn't God.
SPEAKER_00: Sin is pursuing your own ends and putting yourself before God.
SPEAKER_00: When you think that you're the most important thing or your family is more important than God is, that's actually sin.
SPEAKER_00: But fortunately, God has made a way to overcome sin by taking the penalty for sin and placing it on Christ.
SPEAKER_00: So that Jesus, who is God in human flesh, and I'll explain the third point on that card, who Christ is.
SPEAKER_00: Getting to the fourth point, how should you respond to this?
SPEAKER_00: And I'll talk about the only way you can have your sins forgiven is by confessing your sin, repenting from your sin, and putting your faith in God, specifically in Christ who died on the cross and rose from the grave.
SPEAKER_00: That is not just adding something to your life, like that's changing your life.
SPEAKER_00: It's saying, I was wrong about how I was living, and now I want to live according to what the Word of God says, which is a massive thing to say, a massive change in your life.
SPEAKER_00: Do you understand what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_00: And the person says, yes, I understand, but I reject it.
SPEAKER_00: No, I don't believe it because the Bible is filled with lies or whatever they say.
SPEAKER_00: Then I might try to engage with one of those, I might say, could you give me an example of one of those lies?
SPEAKER_00: And usually people aren't good at that part.
SPEAKER_00: You know, oh, it's in there somewhere, it's in the book of Hezekiah, I know it.
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, they don't know.
SPEAKER_00: That's not a real objection.
SPEAKER_00: Um sometimes I might have a real objection, sometimes, and we'll get to a few specific objections in a second.
SPEAKER_00: And you might engage with one of those two, one or two of those objections, but ultimately you're gonna end by saying, you know, this is a moral issue.
SPEAKER_00: You know what the Bible says, and God calls you to believe it, and I'll pray for you.
SPEAKER_00: I'll pray for you.
SPEAKER_00: But you know that the Bible says there's no way for salvation apart from Christ.
SPEAKER_00: And then a final point about this is that time happens.
SPEAKER_00: You know, time exists, time is a thing.
SPEAKER_00: So the person says, I don't believe the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: All right.
SPEAKER_00: It's not over for you.
SPEAKER_00: Like for you personally, the evangelists, it's not over.
SPEAKER_00: You go your separate ways.
SPEAKER_00: That person will remain your coworker, that family member will remain in your family, and it is amazing how often time happens.
SPEAKER_00: Trials come into life, cancer comes into life, death comes into life, getting fired comes into life, moving comes into life, stuff happens in life that reopens their heart to the truth.
SPEAKER_00: So many times people have rejected the gospel only for a year or two later to have something tragic happen in their life and they go back out to the one person that spoke the truth to them.
SPEAKER_00: This is so common.
SPEAKER_00: There's so many stories now with the LGBTQ movement about this, where you know, somebody embraces the transgender movement and somebody embraces them, and everybody uses all the right pronouns for them and everything, and then five or six years later, their life falls apart, they realize how everything they're living for is a lie, and who do they go looking for?
SPEAKER_00: They remember one person eight years ago didn't treat me like everybody else.
SPEAKER_00: One person told me this day would come.
SPEAKER_00: And they oftentimes remember that.
SPEAKER_00: There's so many stories coming out now that are like that.
SPEAKER_00: That's not just true of the transgender movement, that's true with every category of sin.
SPEAKER_00: You know, you don't want to be living with your girlfriend, bad things will happen, it's just not the way God designed life, you know, whatever.
SPEAKER_00: Forget you, fella.
SPEAKER_00: And then years later, they remember the one person who warned them, and they come back.
SPEAKER_00: So remember, time happens.
SPEAKER_00: Now I want to talk briefly, just in the last few minutes, about some specific objections that somebody might bring up.
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, I made this presentation so long ago, and I went and relooked through my the most common objections I received in evangelism 10, 12 years ago, and I don't think any of them are still common objections today.
SPEAKER_00: Like back when I made this presentation, my my list of things here were like, you know, what is absolute truth kind of objections?
SPEAKER_00: Or even the one I was saying this morning, what about how did all the animals fit in the ark?
SPEAKER_00: That was something I heard so often doing college evangelism with George Mason.
SPEAKER_00: People had, I mean, at uh C Sun in Los Angeles, people had serious problems with the animals and the arc ratio, and how could all the animals board in a certain number of days?
SPEAKER_00: And oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_00: Um but I haven't heard that objection in so long.
SPEAKER_00: I don't even hear the absolute truth thing anymore, or relativism, like what's true for you.
SPEAKER_00: It used to be a very common objection.
SPEAKER_00: What's true for you might not be true for me, and blah, blah, blah.
SPEAKER_00: I think that was, you know, a 10-year-ago thing.
SPEAKER_00: Now it seems to be more objections are uh, these kind of objections are just um different.
SPEAKER_00: And I'll talk about what I think now are the most common objections I run into.
SPEAKER_00: But before I get to the specific ones, in dealing with all objections, let me encourage you to actually think through a thoughtful answer and not make something up and not be defensive.
SPEAKER_00: If you don't know the answer, just save the person.
SPEAKER_00: You know, I don't know that.
SPEAKER_00: I haven't really thought about that.
SPEAKER_00: Let me look into it and get back to you.
SPEAKER_00: Because guess what you just did?
SPEAKER_00: You just guaranteed yourself round two.
SPEAKER_00: Like, I'm gonna come back to you with an actual answer about this.
SPEAKER_00: Somebody says I have a contradiction in the Bible.
SPEAKER_00: What about this?
SPEAKER_00: And you've never seen that contradiction before ever.
SPEAKER_00: And you look at it for the first time, you're like, whoa, that looks like a contradiction.
SPEAKER_00: I don't have a good answer.
SPEAKER_00: You know what?
SPEAKER_00: Let me look into that and get back to you.
SPEAKER_00: And then actually look into it and get back to them.
SPEAKER_00: It's always helpful to say, I don't know, but I'll find out and get back to you.
SPEAKER_00: Um remember how Paul ended his exchange with Agrippa, you know.
SPEAKER_00: Agrippa, I wish you would become a Christian.
SPEAKER_00: And Agrippa says, All right, let's get together again and talk about it, which of course he never actually does.
SPEAKER_00: But I think as I make the list of the most common objections today that I hear, I think number one has got to be homosexuality.
SPEAKER_00: That people just reject Christianity because Christianity is against homosexuality, and that's just wrong.
SPEAKER_00: Uh how dare you be against the way God quote made people.
SPEAKER_00: Um and so I can't believe in Christianity because you say homosexuality is a sin, and yet it's not up to people who they love and who they're attracted to.
SPEAKER_00: I've heard that objection more in the last few years than probably any other objection.
SPEAKER_00: How do you respond to that objection?
SPEAKER_00: Like if that's a sincere objection somebody has, um I would respond by saying, you know, God made genders.
SPEAKER_00: Creation testifies to that is something that's very clear early in the Bible that God made men and women, the marriage was designed to be between men and women.
SPEAKER_00: I would go to Genesis 2 and I would look at the account there, I would read it with the person, I would go to Matthew 19, I would grant that sin mars the world, sin mars creation, but I would say it's just so important in Christianity that insisting that sin is to be commended or celebrated is harmful to society.
SPEAKER_00: You're getting to a bigger picture here.
SPEAKER_00: That when somebody says, when somebody grants God didn't design the world this way.
SPEAKER_00: You read Genesis 2, it's very clear God did not design the world with homosexuality in it.
SPEAKER_00: It's a result of the sin and a result of fall.
SPEAKER_00: To celebrate that or embrace that is to embrace the very thing that put Jesus on the cross.
SPEAKER_00: I would also say it's dangerous for a person to make their identity something that God says is sin, when they're more than sin.
SPEAKER_00: If you start to identify yourself with a certain sin, say that's who I am, that's very dangerous because God made you more than any sin in your life.
SPEAKER_00: You're certainly more than your sexual desires.
SPEAKER_00: 1 Corinthians 6, verses 9 through 11.
SPEAKER_00: Don't you know the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God?
SPEAKER_00: Don't be deceived, neither will the sexually immoral adulterers, idolaters, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor gritty, or drunkards, revilers, swinders, inherit the kingdom of God.
SPEAKER_00: I love that passage because it puts homosexuality by name in a long list of other sins.
SPEAKER_00: When you read it in a list of sins like that, it helps you say, you know, it's just, it's another sin.
SPEAKER_00: It's exactly what Scripture offers you forgiveness from and calls you to repent from.
SPEAKER_00: God made us so he can certainly define us.
SPEAKER_00: We can't define ourselves no matter how much our sinful desires want us to.
SPEAKER_00: Another common objection I hear is evolution, that Christianity is against evolution, but don't you know that scientists are united in evolution?
SPEAKER_00: I think in that sense, COVID is very helpful for evangelism, because we had it drilled into our head that the science says, the science says, science is right, and you just had like in a little window of time that science is a big fat liar.
SPEAKER_00: Whoever science is, that guy lies a lot.
SPEAKER_00: And non-Christians get that now.
SPEAKER_00: Non-Christians get it.
SPEAKER_00: Now, where I think maybe five years ago they didn't necessarily get that.
SPEAKER_00: But evolution, the common objection in the Bible, I would say, doesn't describe evolution.
SPEAKER_00: You can go to six days of creation, it is an essential part of what the scripture describes.
SPEAKER_00: But I think you know, your typical non-Christian that I've interacted with doesn't even have a logical distinction between macroevolution and microevolution.
SPEAKER_00: I I remember somebody sharing the gospel early on in my Christian faith, and somebody coming back to me about you know a study of moths in London that changed colors when the smog you know got worse, the moths changed from green to brown, and when they fixed the factories, the moths went back to green, and they're like, uh, so Christianity can't be true.
SPEAKER_00: What?
SPEAKER_00: The moth thing's pretty cool though, isn't it?
SPEAKER_00: Like, I love the moth.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, God made moths that can change colors so the birds don't get them.
SPEAKER_00: That's not that's not macro evolution.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, sure, I'm fine with moths changing colors.
SPEAKER_00: That's not an objection to the gospel, my goodness.
SPEAKER_00: Like, if that's what is keeping you from faith, come on, embrace the moths.
SPEAKER_00: Let's go.
SPEAKER_00: You know, so so think critically about what it is the actual objection is so that you don't find yourself arguing about different breeds of dogs.
SPEAKER_00: Yes, there's different breeds of dogs, most of them are worthless.
SPEAKER_00: Who cares?
SPEAKER_00: It shouldn't keep you from the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: You know, and I would point out too evolution has led to racism.
SPEAKER_00: Evolution is the source of racism, it's the fountain of racism in many ways.
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure there was racism, you know, prejudice against people's color of their skin back before the advent of evolution, but evolution just did to racism what the Industrial Revolution did to making shoes.
SPEAKER_00: I mean, it just starts cranking it out.
SPEAKER_00: And it gives it a worldview to embrace it and go along with it.
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's a powerful thing to say today, because today evolution, of course, is uh is largely accepted and racism largely shunned, to show the connection between the two, I think is helpful.
SPEAKER_00: And then a lot of other objections boil down to politics.
SPEAKER_00: You know, I can't be a Christian.
SPEAKER_00: I had somebody tell me that this past summer, I can't possibly be a Christian because Christians voted for Donald Trump.
SPEAKER_00: So there, like that's the Trump card.
SPEAKER_00: You guys voted for Trump, therefore I'm out.
SPEAKER_00: I don't know what your religion is, but if that guy's in, I'm gone.
SPEAKER_00: Um and so I think it's helpful to tell a person, you know, politics come and go.
SPEAKER_00: You know, my what I'm explaining to you about the gospel, I'm not gonna get into an argument with taxation policy, okay, or foreign policy, or you know, the embassy in Jerusalem is better than Tel Aviv.
SPEAKER_00: Like, I mean that might be true, but it's kind of a dumb argument to get in with a non-believer.
SPEAKER_00: You know what I'm saying?
SPEAKER_00: Like, let's zoom out a little bit and say, I'm I'm presenting a worldview to you that is transcendent and predates the United States of America, predates the Republican Party, predates the Democratic Party, predates the Constitution.
SPEAKER_00: I'm going old school here, back to creation and the way God made the world.
SPEAKER_00: Like, let's engage with it on that level.
SPEAKER_00: Political issues are controversial and they are complicated, and I don't need to have them all figured out.
SPEAKER_00: In Acts 25 and 26, Paul respected the government, even those who were throwing him in jail.
SPEAKER_00: And so I can too.
SPEAKER_00: I can respect the government from both political parties, that's fine.
SPEAKER_00: But that's not what I'm concerned about.
SPEAKER_00: I'm concerned about your soul and how you respond to the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: Slavery, a common objection people give all the time.
SPEAKER_00: I can't believe in Christianity because the Bible has slavery in it, and therefore, we know slavery is bad, therefore Christianity is bad.
SPEAKER_00: This often gets paired with homosexuality.
SPEAKER_00: The Bible rejects homosexuality and embraces slavery.
SPEAKER_00: We know that slavery is bad, therefore homosexuality is good.
SPEAKER_00: There's all kinds of logical fallacies in there.
SPEAKER_00: I don't get wrapped up in them, but I do often take people to passages like Exodus 21, verse 16, or Exodus 24.
SPEAKER_00: We looked at that this morning.
SPEAKER_00: Whoever steals a man and sells him and found a possession of him should be put to death.
SPEAKER_00: 1 Timothy 1, verse 10, very easy verse to go to.
SPEAKER_00: Uh, that man stealers have no place in the kingdom of God.
SPEAKER_00: I think people are surprised.
SPEAKER_00: People who say the Bible embraces slavery got that from some, you know, pagan ninth grade history teacher.
SPEAKER_00: They don't actually know what the Bible says about slavery.
SPEAKER_00: People say the Bible has errors.
SPEAKER_00: I can't believe in Christianity because the Bible has errors in it.
SPEAKER_00: That one's easy.
SPEAKER_00: Can you show me one?
SPEAKER_00: Probably not, is the answer.
SPEAKER_00: And then a lot of other objections just boil down to theodicy.
SPEAKER_00: Why do bad things happen to good people?
SPEAKER_00: They don't necessarily phrase it like that, but I can't believe in God because my grandmother, who is the best person I ever knew, was hit by a drunk driver.
SPEAKER_00: I can't believe in God because, you know, all the children who die in the world.
SPEAKER_00: I can't believe in God because of crime, or I can't believe in God because of this or that.
SPEAKER_00: And it all boils down to the same fundamental objection.
SPEAKER_00: If God is so good and powerful, why can't He stop evil?
SPEAKER_00: And that's a hard one to engage with because you're usually engaging with somebody who is suffering at the hands of evil or is grieving at the hands of evil, and so you don't want to be dismissive of their grief or of how the fruit of sin in their life.
SPEAKER_00: And so I do think it is helpful to say that what you're identifying as evil or unjust, which is death in the world, is the very thing that the gospel overcomes.
SPEAKER_00: Your grandmother's the best person ever, and you're so sad that she died or was hit by a drunk driver.
SPEAKER_00: You know, that that's death.
SPEAKER_00: Death is in the world because of sin, and the way that God deals with sin is by offering you forgiveness from it.
SPEAKER_00: That same sin is in your own heart, and you try to connect back to the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: I have a few other objections on here that I'm gonna skip through.
SPEAKER_00: Uh my favorite though is I don't, I hear what you're saying about the gospel.
SPEAKER_00: I don't believe in it, though, because I don't believe in God.
SPEAKER_00: It's my favorite one.
SPEAKER_00: I always respond the same way.
SPEAKER_00: Your problem is that you don't believe in God, your problem is that you hate God.
SPEAKER_00: And that's usually so surprising to the person that they laugh and then take a second and they want to get into a little bit of an argument with me about if they really don't hate God, that they don't believe in, whether or not they hate him or not.
SPEAKER_00: And they usually end up, you know, kind of confessing they do have in their mind some concept of God that they believe in.
SPEAKER_00: You want to challenge the unsaved person's reason for denying God's existence by directing them back to the word and saying, you know, God reveals himself.
SPEAKER_00: The very concept of right and wrong in the world points to the existence of God who can designate something as right and wrong that people are then bound to.
SPEAKER_00: If you reject God, you reject the ability to say it's wrong for somebody to steal your wallet, it's wrong for somebody to break into your house or punch you in the face.
SPEAKER_00: Like, why is that wrong?
SPEAKER_00: It can only be wrong with some kind of fixed, absolute lawgiver who reveals what is true and false into the world.
SPEAKER_00: Um I think that's probably sufficient.
SPEAKER_00: I have some other ones in here, but I think that's probably sufficient for tonight.
SPEAKER_00: The point with all these objections is that you hear them, process them in your mind, direct people back to the Word of God.
SPEAKER_00: And if you think it's a secondary objection, like if I'm sharing the gospel to somebody and they interrupt with an objection, I'll usually say, Why don't you hold on to that?
SPEAKER_00: Let's get back to it at the end.
SPEAKER_00: And by the time you finish explaining the gospel, usually those objections have drifted away.
SPEAKER_00: It'd be sad to get sidetracked on some kind of secondary objection, uh limiting your ability to convey the full gospel that you're trying to convey in evangelism.
SPEAKER_00: Your goal is to fully communicate the gospel as much as you can and the time that you have in a way that gives the person enough information to believe and be saved.
SPEAKER_00: I hope this encourages you to do just that.
SPEAKER_00: God, we're thankful for these helps in evangelism.
SPEAKER_00: I pray, I really do pray for this congregation to pray that you'd give people the ability to live these out, to engage in fruitful evangelism this very week.
SPEAKER_00: Pray for opportunities to evangelize and grace and wisdom to know how to proceed in them.
SPEAKER_00: We ask this in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_00: Amen.
SPEAKER_00: And now for a parting word for Pastor Jesse Johnson.
SPEAKER_00: Thanks for joining us.
SPEAKER_00: If you're in the Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: area, I would love to see you at Emanuel Bible Church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information on our church or our current service times, go to iBC.church.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about the Master Seminary and their Washington, D.C.
SPEAKER_00: location, go to TMS.edu.
SPEAKER_00: I hope this resource has been a blessing to you and it helps you seek the Lord daily, serve others around you, and share the gospel with boldness.