SPEAKER_00: This podcast is a ministry of Grand Parkway Baptist Church, helping people know, enjoy, and glorify God.
SPEAKER_00: For more information about Grand Parkway, visit GrandProquay.org.
SPEAKER_05: Well, good evening.
SPEAKER_05: That was loud.
SPEAKER_05: Startled me.
SPEAKER_05: What about you?
SPEAKER_05: Well, I'm glad you're here.
SPEAKER_05: It's a a good night to be here.
SPEAKER_05: I think you're going to be really glad you came.
SPEAKER_05: I wanted to tell you a little bit about Mary Joe before she came up here.
SPEAKER_05: I was just reminding her my first uh knowledge of her was on the cover of Christianity Today.
SPEAKER_05: There were four or five sharp-looking women, and they were the called the unexpected defenders.
SPEAKER_05: So it was a whole incredible article about women apologists.
SPEAKER_05: And I got curious about her and looked and thought, holy cow, she lives in Houston.
SPEAKER_05: That's close.
SPEAKER_05: I live close to Houston.
SPEAKER_05: So was able to get in touch with her, and then she came and did our women's retreat, and it was an incredible time, and uh really honored to have her back.
SPEAKER_05: She is actually a former atheist from the Pacific Northwest, and now she's a defender of Christianity in Texas.
SPEAKER_05: So that's that's kind of a God thing.
SPEAKER_05: She's now an assistant professor at HBU.
SPEAKER_05: She's also an author.
SPEAKER_05: She's uh married and has a beautiful daughter we also got to meet, and we're really glad to have you tonight.
SPEAKER_05: So come on up and okay.
SPEAKER_01: Well, they said I'd get an hour and a half.
SPEAKER_01: That's a lot of time.
SPEAKER_01: Um I will have some time at the end for questions.
SPEAKER_01: And uh so if you if you're thinking of them and you want to write something down, that would be great.
SPEAKER_01: So you can uh ask me something there at the end.
SPEAKER_01: I I did bring with me two things I want to mention because when I get to the end of my talk, I'll forget.
SPEAKER_01: And that is um I have newsletter signups because I have a ministry called Confident Christianity, and every month I put out a little training in apologetics, and then you can see where I'm speaking, and you know, maybe if I'm speaking in Houston, you can come to that.
SPEAKER_01: Or you can see some of the apologetics conferences that I'm a part of.
SPEAKER_01: And so if you want to come see somebody else, you can come see them.
SPEAKER_01: Um so anyway, um, Confident Christianity's newsletter sign-up looks like this.
SPEAKER_01: And then I brought with me my HBU uh newsletter sign up as well as interest in the apologetics degree program.
SPEAKER_01: This sign-up sheet has to, if you if you put your name on here, you might without a check, that means, hey, I'm just interested in your newsletter, see what you guys are up to, what you apologists at HBU are doing.
SPEAKER_01: If you put the check, that means hey, I'm interested in that master's program.
SPEAKER_01: Because we have a master's of apologetics degree program that you could take either on campus with us or you can take fully online so you don't have to leave your home to do it.
SPEAKER_01: So these will be up here.
SPEAKER_01: I was told that I should put these up here.
SPEAKER_01: So at the end of our time together, you can come and sign on these if you would like to do so.
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: Well, as Marcy said, I used to be an atheist, and uh I just spent some time, uh, one of the uh one of my friends who was an apologist, he just uh passed away, Nabil Kreshi, and we were a bunch of us apologists were at his funeral.
SPEAKER_01: Later on, I was talking to two guys who also used to be atheists, and we were describing what our kind of atheism looked like.
SPEAKER_01: Well, what was your atheism?
SPEAKER_01: What was yours?
SPEAKER_01: And so mine was a little different in that I wasn't an angry atheist.
SPEAKER_01: You know, a lot of what we see on uh the news and social media is you see this sort of portrayal of hostility towards Christians.
SPEAKER_01: You see uh, you know, a hostility in the sense that they'll say things like that Christians aren't intellectual or you know, faith is when you have a lack of evidence or reason.
SPEAKER_01: You'll hear things like that that sound very hostile towards Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: I was not one of those.
SPEAKER_01: I was not a hostile toward, I wasn't hostile towards people of faith.
SPEAKER_01: I just didn't grow up in church, nor did I have a church background.
SPEAKER_01: I had no reason to believe in God.
SPEAKER_01: I had no reason to not believe in God, I just had nothing.
SPEAKER_01: Like I had no background in that.
SPEAKER_01: So um I kind of, I mean, my exposure to religion was what I got on TV and in the movies.
SPEAKER_01: So it was kind of, I thought religion was kind of weird, and it was maybe for people who um had maybe a fairly non-informed view, or or maybe that was for those people that needed it, but I didn't need that.
SPEAKER_01: So I'm not gonna go into the whole details of how I became a Christian, but I did uh become a Christian when I went off to college, and uh that's sort of busting that statistic there, you know, isn't it?
SPEAKER_01: We're worried about our kids going off to college and leaving the faith.
SPEAKER_01: And and I actually went off to college and became a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: I will tell you that I had a band director in high school who was a Christian, and he knew I was gonna go off to college to become a band director.
SPEAKER_01: I taught uh band in the public schools for eight years.
SPEAKER_01: And he, as I was graduating, he gave me a gift of a Bible.
SPEAKER_01: And so when you go off to college, you're gonna have hard questions.
SPEAKER_01: I hope you'll turn to this.
SPEAKER_01: So that set me on the path towards Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: I began reading the Bible and then became a Christian in college.
SPEAKER_01: Now, ever since I've become a Christian, I've struggled with a certain area of faith that we're gonna talk about tonight, and that is demonstrating the truth of Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: And it's I've noticed this is not just a problem for me, demonstrating the reality of God or the truth of Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: I've seen it's a problem within the church.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, this is such a problem in the church that it caused me to go through a time of doubt after becoming a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I saw what I what happened was I saw consistent patterns of behaviors uh in the church that were antithetical to the basic teachings of Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: Let me just give you an example of a place to start here.
SPEAKER_01: The Sermon on the Mount.
SPEAKER_01: Jesus told us, love your enemies, do good to those who persecute you, you know, do good to those who don't do good to you.
SPEAKER_01: But rather, what I was encountering on a regular basis in the church was a lot of gossip and pride and friendly fire within the body of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: I don't know why we call that friendly.
SPEAKER_01: It wasn't very friendly, but I guess that's the um military term, friendly fire within the body of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And I saw it from people in the pew to the children's workers, to the missionaries, to the pastors.
SPEAKER_01: It was everybody.
SPEAKER_01: There was nobody that wasn't engaging in this.
SPEAKER_01: And it's not that it was directed just at me, it was what I was observing within the body of Christ.
SPEAKER_01: You know, it was people, how they treated one another within the church.
SPEAKER_01: These Christians couldn't even love those who were part of the body of Christ, let alone love an enemy, you know, or do good to somebody who wasn't doing good to them.
SPEAKER_01: So this created in me a pattern of distrust.
SPEAKER_01: I began to distrust people in the church, my fellow Christians.
SPEAKER_01: And that led to distrusting Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: It first started with questioning, do these people really believe it?
SPEAKER_01: And then I started thinking, do I really believe it?
SPEAKER_01: What did I do back then when I became a Christian?
SPEAKER_01: What was that experience?
SPEAKER_01: Seemed like the people that I whom whom were surrounding me didn't seem to care much about demonstrating the truth of what they professed.
SPEAKER_01: But then, I don't know how I came to this, uh, but maybe it's just how I am.
SPEAKER_01: But I just I began to reason that, well, okay, just because people don't live like something's true doesn't mean it's not true.
SPEAKER_01: Uh that doesn't disprove the truth of it.
SPEAKER_01: And I could, I was telling myself, I I remember every time I go into the hospital to visit a doctor, you know, this this is a hospital, and and they would certainly tell me that smoking will kill me.
SPEAKER_01: You know, it's absolutely unhealthy for me.
SPEAKER_01: And yet, what do I always see when I go into the hospital?
SPEAKER_01: There's always doctors and nurses out there smoking, right?
SPEAKER_01: So always.
SPEAKER_01: So I'm sitting there like, yeah, I mean, that doesn't disprove the medical truth about smoking, uh, being a killer.
SPEAKER_01: So I'm sitting here thinking, you know, I could I could really argue that way and I could just leave it there, but really the scripture doesn't leave it there.
SPEAKER_01: The scripture tells us that our lives should demonstrate the reality of God.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, the scripture tells us that we should be a testimony to the truth of Jesus Christ as Savior.
SPEAKER_01: Uh in fact, in John 17, we see Jesus in the garden praying.
SPEAKER_01: And he's praying, this is right before he goes to his death, and he's praying for us.
SPEAKER_01: He prays a lot of prayers, but one of them is for us, starting in verse uh 20 and going on.
SPEAKER_01: And what is he praying there?
SPEAKER_01: He's praying that we will all be one, like he and the Father are one, that we'll show each other such great love that the world will know that he's God's son.
SPEAKER_01: This is what he's praying for us, that we we would be this great demonstration of the truth of who Jesus is.
SPEAKER_01: And they would see that by our unity, which is what I exactly what I wasn't seeing in the church.
SPEAKER_01: So the scripture tells us that this is what's gonna happen.
SPEAKER_01: We can cause people to stumble, we can cause doubt for people when we don't demonstrate the reality of God in our own lives.
SPEAKER_01: So tonight we're gonna cover this.
SPEAKER_01: We're gonna cover that Christians can demonstrate the reality of God in their lives, and we'll look at three practices towards doing so.
SPEAKER_01: Now, these obviously are not gonna be the only things that you can do, and it's not comprehensive, it's not gonna cover everything that there is, right, to demonstrate the reality of God.
SPEAKER_01: But it's gonna have that sort of apologetics bent to it since you are all here studying apologetics, which is so cool, by the way.
SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of you doing this.
SPEAKER_01: So I'm interested.
SPEAKER_01: Now I'm interested, and I won't ask you for calling it out, but now I gotta find out what Neil's been teaching you.
SPEAKER_01: Like, what have you covered so far?
SPEAKER_01: Uh he was really interested in this talk of mine, so I'm I'm interested to know what you've covered.
SPEAKER_01: All right, so we're gonna look at three practices tonight for demonstrating the reality of God in our lives, and that's to examine, engage, and entrust.
SPEAKER_01: All right, so what are we examining?
SPEAKER_01: Well, first we need to examine our beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: We have to examine our beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: And since they gave me so much time, I'm I'm blowing out each of these little these points into three other little mini points, so I'll be giving you those as well.
SPEAKER_01: So um, we're gonna be looking at responsibility and questions and truth and this practice of examining our beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: So a while ago on my I have a blog, Confident Christianity, and a while back uh an anonymous blogger said this to me.
SPEAKER_01: He said, You just believe in God because that's what you want to be true.
SPEAKER_01: You will find arguments and evidence in order to support what you already presuppose about God.
SPEAKER_01: If you would just spend the time to look into the arguments against God, you would come to realize he does not exist.
SPEAKER_01: All right, so basically, this commenter is suggesting that I'm not honest with my beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: However, from what I've shared with you, a little bit about my background, that's exactly what I was doing when I went through a time of doubt.
SPEAKER_01: I went through a time of raw introspection and I was looking for evidence to um honestly examine and evaluate my belief in God.
SPEAKER_01: And I had, I realized when I was going through that time of doubt that I had to be willing to hear the arguments on the other side.
SPEAKER_01: I had to be willing to give them a fair hearing and uh just to see if my beliefs have merit.
SPEAKER_01: So, in contrast to the gentleman's assumption, I had actually gone through a very painful time of peeling away presuppositions and straining to get beyond my own bias in an attempt to see the truth.
SPEAKER_01: And I will tell you guys, um, I'm writing on this right now, but um, I had come to a point where I didn't like the Christians.
SPEAKER_01: The way that they were treating each other and how they were professing to have this great redemption and forgive, this beautiful thing, and yet I saw how they acted on a daily basis, and I thought, I don't like these people.
SPEAKER_01: I don't actually want to be in church.
SPEAKER_01: So maybe if it's not true, I can have an excuse.
SPEAKER_01: Like if I can find the arguments that tell me it's not true, I'll have an excuse to walk away.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and what I also didn't tell you was that my husband was a pastor at the time.
SPEAKER_01: He was a worship and youth minister, so at least he wasn't the league guy.
SPEAKER_01: But uh anyway, so I sort of kept this all to myself.
SPEAKER_01: But I I was really going through a time where I was I was almost hoping that Christianity wasn't true, and I had to be, I had to give Christianity like I had to be careful of my bias against Christianity at that point and against Christians.
SPEAKER_01: So I really did struggle through looking at both sides to see um if the arguments were good on one side, better on one side or the other.
SPEAKER_01: Now, this gentleman's assumption, though it's a bit presumptuous to put this on somebody's blog you don't even know, um, it's it's actually as I think about it, it's not without some merit.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, there's a kernel of truth in here.
SPEAKER_01: You see, Christians, especially those who grew up in the church or in a culture of Christianity, may not have taken the time to really examine their own personal beliefs or discover the truthfulness of what they believe.
SPEAKER_01: They may never have been challenged to do so.
SPEAKER_01: I didn't come out of a culture of Christianity.
SPEAKER_01: Portland is very, Portland, Oregon's very different from Houston, Texas.
SPEAKER_01: I'm sure you realize that without me even going into detail.
SPEAKER_01: But uh, we don't have churches on every street corner, um, nor gas stations, nor Tex-Mex restaurants.
SPEAKER_01: But uh, it's a very different culture.
SPEAKER_01: And um yeah, it's just it's very different up there, and um, you don't come out of this culture of Christianity up there.
SPEAKER_01: So people up there tend to tend to know what it is, what what brought them into the faith, why do they believe this is true?
SPEAKER_01: But when I came to the South, I saw that a lot of people didn't have that.
SPEAKER_01: They just grew up in church and they trusted the authorities that had been in their life to teach them the truth.
SPEAKER_01: So over the years I've encountered people who they've told me stories about um how Christian leaders in their lives wouldn't even answer difficult questions about the faith.
SPEAKER_01: Or they would say in response that the person asking the question just didn't have enough faith.
SPEAKER_01: Like their response to whatever difficult question would be, well, you need more faith.
SPEAKER_01: And early in my ministry, I would get comments and questions from people in the church about the dangers of asking questions about belief.
SPEAKER_01: And so I began to wonder why are Christians avoiding this task?
SPEAKER_01: You know, why should we be worried about seeking truth?
SPEAKER_01: So let me share with you two reasons I discovered why Christians have a hard time with examining their beliefs, why they have a hard time with truth.
SPEAKER_01: The first reason is because truth is hard to find.
SPEAKER_01: It really is.
SPEAKER_01: Francis Bacon, who was considered he's considered the father of the scientific method, he's also a believer in God, he talked about the what he called the idols of the mind, the idols of the mind.
SPEAKER_01: And he said, we have a hard time finding truth because of the kinds of things that we are.
SPEAKER_01: Because we're human, our biases get in the way.
SPEAKER_01: Our experiences influence us, our upbringing, our cultures influence us, and it guides what we'll look at and what we won't.
SPEAKER_01: Uh he said, even the very words that we use cause problems for finding truth because our words are ill-defined.
SPEAKER_01: And then he said, and then we get into uh systems of thought, into uh philosophies and theologies that keep us uh from considering.
SPEAKER_01: We don't consider for ourselves what we believe, we just accept things because they're popular dogmas.
SPEAKER_01: So truth is hard to find.
SPEAKER_01: That's one reason I think Christians haven't really spent the time examining their beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: This is a tough endeavor.
SPEAKER_01: The other reason I think we have trouble is it's a matter of the will.
SPEAKER_01: Um, when we find truth, we're we're thrust into a choice of our will.
SPEAKER_01: The choice involves whether or not we're gonna follow the truth we found.
SPEAKER_01: And that also is not easy to do.
SPEAKER_01: I think it's one reason why many people have troubles with Christianity in general.
SPEAKER_01: As G.K.
SPEAKER_01: Chesterton said, the Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting.
SPEAKER_01: It has been found difficult and left untried.
SPEAKER_01: But that blog commenter seemed to suggest that honesty can be achieved easily.
SPEAKER_01: You know, you just need to spend some time looking at the truth.
SPEAKER_01: Just spend some time.
SPEAKER_01: But being honest with ourselves does not come easily.
SPEAKER_01: Um whether you're atheist, Christian, or whatever you believe, honesty with your deeply held convictions doesn't come easily.
SPEAKER_01: Admitting that we can be wrong is extremely difficult and many times painful.
SPEAKER_01: And it will be difficult and painful, especially when it comes to your deeply held beliefs and convictions or deeply held beliefs on hot topics in our culture.
SPEAKER_01: You know, this leads me to think whenever I see or hear the new atheist movement slogan, this one they ran a few years back on buses, there's probably no God.
SPEAKER_01: Now stop worrying and enjoy your life.
SPEAKER_01: I always want to answer these guys, yeah, it's just not that simplistic.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, it's just not that easy.
SPEAKER_01: This task of examining our own beliefs, we have to is hard.
SPEAKER_01: We have to get to the point of how do we get past our own biases?
SPEAKER_01: How do we get really honest with ourselves?
SPEAKER_01: And that's tough.
SPEAKER_01: So I'll I'll give you three ways that we can look at examining our beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: First of the first way we need to towards getting towards honesty here with our beliefs is we need to take personal responsibility with what we believe.
SPEAKER_01: Take personal responsibility for our beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: And this lines right up with the Apostle Paul.
SPEAKER_01: The Apostle Paul uh he he felt like we needed to grow up and become mature in our beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: And he his words show that we need responsibility for our views and beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: He admonishes us that to leave our childish thinking and to move on towards maturity.
SPEAKER_01: That we move on from that initial experience of salvation on to a more mature Christian life.
SPEAKER_01: 1 Corinthians 13, 11.
SPEAKER_01: When I was a child, I spoke like a child.
SPEAKER_01: I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child.
SPEAKER_01: When I became a man, I gave up childish ways.
SPEAKER_01: Ephesians 4, speaking to the church at Ephesus, he's just told them that they've been given all of these teachers and evangelists and the apostles, everything in the church.
SPEAKER_01: What's the purpose?
SPEAKER_01: Uh it's for growing us up in our knowledge of God.
SPEAKER_01: And then he says this, so that we may no longer be children, tossed to and fro by the waves and carried by every wind of doctrine, by human cunning, by craftiness and deceitful schemes, but rather speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into Him who is the head into Christ.
SPEAKER_01: Paul's commenting on the task that we all have before us to grow up in our beliefs, to examine our beliefs, to know what it is we believe, so we're not pushed around by anything that comes out of any pulpit across the world, or anything that comes out of the mouths of philosophers, right?
SPEAKER_01: Or out of social media.
SPEAKER_01: We have to grow up in what we know.
SPEAKER_01: So taking personal responsibility, deciding it is time that I understand why it is that I believe.
SPEAKER_01: So responsibility, then we need to ask questions in examining our beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: I like to, when I do uh another talk called Conversational Apologetics, I like to tell believers you're not asking other people enough questions about their beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: You really need to ask other people questions.
SPEAKER_01: Well, in this talk, those questions become internal.
SPEAKER_01: Christians, you're not asking yourself enough questions.
SPEAKER_01: You need to know what it is you believe and why you believe it.
SPEAKER_01: So we need to ask ourselves, why do I believe in God?
SPEAKER_01: What do I believe about God?
SPEAKER_01: Uh let me let me focus on those two at the moment.
SPEAKER_01: Why do I believe in God?
SPEAKER_01: Uh if you're gonna talk to people about belief and you want to demonstrate the reality of God in your life, you have to have some reason for believing in that reality, right?
SPEAKER_01: For believing that that's true.
SPEAKER_01: So we have to settle this for ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: For me, um, I have a two-part, I could give you a two-part testimony.
SPEAKER_01: One is the experience of God convicting me of my sin.
SPEAKER_01: That was a real experience that I had with God Himself, with the Holy Spirit drawing me to himself.
SPEAKER_01: That's my test, what we call my testimony when we talk as Christians, my life before Christ, you know, how he drew me to him, and then we'll talk maybe a little bit about my life after.
SPEAKER_01: So my testimony is I was convicted of my sin and drawn to Christ's salvation.
SPEAKER_01: But then I began to doubt.
SPEAKER_01: So the the next part of my testimony is I coupled that early experience with reasons to believe in God's existence based on what God's already given us.
SPEAKER_01: And I think this is pretty much your whole apologetic.
SPEAKER_01: Course is that you're looking at reasons to believe in God's existence and also to believe in Jesus as the Savior.
SPEAKER_01: So then I started coupling my early testimony with arguments like the moral law.
SPEAKER_01: How do I know what is good and evil?
SPEAKER_01: Because everybody has some kind of idea that there is good and evil.
SPEAKER_01: So where am I getting these ideas from?
SPEAKER_01: I coupled it with arguments from the evidence of the resurrection that the best explanation for the facts that we have is that Jesus rose from the dead.
SPEAKER_01: So I started coupling it with that, and now I have a two-part testimony on why I believe.
SPEAKER_01: So if somebody asks me, I might say, Well, I had a real experience with God.
SPEAKER_01: Or I might say, Well, because I believe the moral law argument.
SPEAKER_01: I believe we can't know good at all unless there is a God.
SPEAKER_01: So I have both.
SPEAKER_01: Then what do I believe?
SPEAKER_01: Now I got it.
SPEAKER_01: Not only do I need to know why I believe, I need to know what I believe.
SPEAKER_01: And that's your doctrines.
SPEAKER_01: Do you know the Christian doctrines?
SPEAKER_01: Do you know the nature of God, the nature of man, the nature of Christ?
SPEAKER_01: Right there, those three things separate us out from pretty much everybody else.
SPEAKER_01: These are the kinds of things we need to know.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, there's a video on YouTube of Oprah Winfrey.
SPEAKER_01: It's a, she's on a, I don't remember if it's her own talk show or if it was on the New Earth that she did, the religious service that she did, a religious study, whatever you want to call it.
SPEAKER_01: And she actually was talking about somebody said, Well, you used to be a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: What happened?
SPEAKER_01: You know, why'd you leave Christianity?
SPEAKER_01: And she said, Well, I was in a great Baptist church and we were listening to a great Baptist preacher, and he he was giving this sermon on God's jealousy.
SPEAKER_01: So I was sitting there thinking, wait, God's jealous of us?
SPEAKER_01: No, that can't be God.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, hold your horses right there, right?
SPEAKER_01: I wanted to stop and reply, but it was just a video.
SPEAKER_01: So God doesn't have human jealousy Oprah, right?
SPEAKER_01: So as you're sitting there thinking, what, God's jealous of me, she's probably acquitting God's jealousy to something like she might feel.
SPEAKER_01: Like, hey, I really like your watch.
SPEAKER_01: I'd like to have that.
SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm kind of jealous of your job, or I'm kind of jealous of your vacation or your family.
SPEAKER_01: That is not God's jealousy, right?
SPEAKER_01: God holds all of his attributes perfectly and perfectly together.
SPEAKER_01: So while he's jealous, he's jealous for the perfect creation that he made, and he's perfectly loving and just and merciful.
SPEAKER_01: You have to put that all together.
SPEAKER_01: You can't just rip one out and say, What he's jealous of me.
SPEAKER_01: I find this to be the case with so many people who have said that they've left the Christian faith.
SPEAKER_01: It's based on a misunderstanding of basic Christian doctrine.
SPEAKER_01: They don't know the God they left.
SPEAKER_01: They've got some different unorthodox view of God.
SPEAKER_01: A lot of times I find myself saying, Well, uh, they'll say, I they'll come talking to me online or something like that, and they'll say, Hey, uh, I don't believe in a God who is, and then they'll list something.
SPEAKER_01: And I look at the list and I reply back, Well, I don't believe in that God either, so we're good.
SPEAKER_01: We can start from there.
SPEAKER_01: Why don't we start with who I actually believe?
SPEAKER_01: We'll discuss that and you can let me know.
SPEAKER_01: But we need to know what we believe, right?
SPEAKER_01: I think this is causing a lot of problems for us in the Christian faith.
SPEAKER_01: And it's and it's one of the reasons I think people are willing to walk away so easily, because they don't know what they're walking away from.
SPEAKER_01: And then the last question we really need to focus on ourselves is how do I know what I believe about God?
SPEAKER_01: Where am I getting this from?
SPEAKER_01: I sound like I'm slamming preachers and I feel bad about that, but I'm not.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not slamming them.
SPEAKER_01: I just, when somebody gets up here like myself or a preacher or whoever and they talk, you should check it out.
SPEAKER_01: You should see if it matches up with what the scriptures say.
SPEAKER_01: This is actually something that Paul credited the Bereans with in Acts 17.
SPEAKER_01: He said they're a more noble character because they aren't just taking anything anybody tells them.
SPEAKER_01: They go check it out for themselves and see if that's true.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: That's we have to do this.
SPEAKER_01: This is part of um examining our own beliefs and demonstrating that we really believe this is true.
SPEAKER_01: How do you know that?
SPEAKER_01: Um, how do you trust the Bible?
SPEAKER_01: Why do you say the Bible is reliable?
SPEAKER_01: Have you looked at those arguments?
SPEAKER_01: Uh, if you believe it's reliable, well then how did you get that knowledge?
SPEAKER_01: Was it because somebody told you, well, maybe they're trustworthy?
SPEAKER_01: And you could say, yeah, I got this on a trustworthy testimony.
SPEAKER_01: We can't discredit that totally, but remember that if somebody presses back on you and says, hey, but that's just your pastor, you know, you can you should be able to say, Oh, what yeah, but here's what, you know, here's what the Bible has.
SPEAKER_01: Here's our reliability issues, here's where we can say, we know the Bible's reliable, and here's what the scholars have been saying.
SPEAKER_01: Now, you probably don't have that on hand, but you should be willing to do that with somebody if they question.
SPEAKER_01: You know, why should I trust your one guy?
SPEAKER_01: Well, you're not trusting my one guy, you're actually trusting thousands of years of scholarly work.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so how do I know what I believe about God?
SPEAKER_01: That's important in examining our uh beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: And then truth is the last area.
SPEAKER_01: We are called to be lovers of truth.
SPEAKER_01: That's actually what the Bible tells us to do.
SPEAKER_01: That we have to love it, delight in it.
SPEAKER_01: So, 1 Corinthians 13, 6.
SPEAKER_01: I love 1 Corinthians 13, I've been using it, but we like to focus on the love is patient, love is kind, love does not envy, you know.
SPEAKER_01: We have all those nice ones, but you gotta keep going down to verse 6 where it says love does not delight in evil or rejoice with evil, but delights in the truth.
SPEAKER_01: Well, I can tell you most of the time, I don't delight in the truth.
SPEAKER_01: Think about that.
SPEAKER_01: When you get in a fight with your spouse, do you delight in the truth?
SPEAKER_01: Especially when your spouse is pointing something out about you.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: You tend to you tend to start rationalizing your behavior instead of accepting, well, maybe this is true about me.
SPEAKER_01: You know, maybe I need to look at that.
SPEAKER_01: We're not typically those who delight in the truth, and there it is, God telling us to delight in the truth.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, Jesus, when talking to Pilate, and and he's asking Jesus about his kingdom, Jesus actually says his people are those who are of the truth.
SPEAKER_01: They are those who hear his voice, the people of the truth.
SPEAKER_01: Hear my voice and obey.
SPEAKER_01: They obey him, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's a that's a big burden for us to bear.
SPEAKER_01: We have to be serious about being people of the truth.
SPEAKER_01: And that's the first area we need to delight in, the truth of is our own beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: Do we know what it is we believe and why we believe it?
SPEAKER_01: So if you've never been in a part of a study on essential Christian doctrines, I feel, I really feel like I'm preaching at the choir.
SPEAKER_01: You're in an apologetics class, right?
SPEAKER_01: So I mean, you're in here, you're studying how you know what you believe and how uh and why and what.
SPEAKER_01: But if you've never done doctrines, if you've never just straight up studied your doctrines, I would recommend that as well.
SPEAKER_01: That's really important.
SPEAKER_01: Um, couple of resources for you is uh A.
SPEAKER_01: W.
SPEAKER_01: Tozer.
SPEAKER_01: He wrote The Knowledge of the Holy, which is a small book that just walks through God's attributes.
SPEAKER_01: Uh really great book.
SPEAKER_01: Great place to start.
SPEAKER_01: Or Paul Little.
SPEAKER_01: Paul Little wrote a book called Know What You Believe.
SPEAKER_01: He also wrote Know Why You Believe.
SPEAKER_01: So these are these are smaller works that you can get into.
SPEAKER_01: I I typically admonish my audiences that we, you know, just like we used to have encyclopedias in the home where you, you know, if your kid had a question, they could go to the encyclopedia.
SPEAKER_01: We should have theology books in our home, like a systematic theology book where we can reference it when we have a question.
SPEAKER_01: We have the uh we have a couple of them, but one of them is the Wayne Grudom book, and it's about like that big.
SPEAKER_01: It's not something you sit down and just read, unless you're taking a selfie for, you know, coffee, reading the systematic theology book, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's but other than that, we keep it in the house as a reference book.
SPEAKER_01: So when my daughter in high school would have questions from her friends who were atheists, you know, would ask, well, how can we say God's good?
SPEAKER_01: You know, look at all the evil in the world.
SPEAKER_01: There's a chapter on the goodness of God in the systematic theology book.
SPEAKER_01: You can go, look, has all the scriptures there for why we say it that.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this is an important thing.
SPEAKER_01: All right, and now that I've said that, I'll quote uh C.S.
SPEAKER_01: Lewis, who says, in mere Christianity, he says, if once you've accepted Christianity, then some of its main doctrines shall be deliberately held before your mind for some time every day.
SPEAKER_01: He says we have to be continually reminded of what we believe.
SPEAKER_01: Why?
SPEAKER_01: Because neither this belief nor any other will automatically remain alive in the mind.
SPEAKER_01: And then he starts, he questions, he says, if you I if you look at a hundred people who felt fall away or have fallen away from the faith, how many of them do you think would have been honestly reasoned out of it by argument?
SPEAKER_01: He says, Don't most people just simply fall away?
SPEAKER_01: And they do.
SPEAKER_01: That's what they do.
SPEAKER_01: They simply fall away.
SPEAKER_01: Or they haven't learned about God's jealousy inside of his other attributes.
SPEAKER_01: But I don't want us to get overwhelmed because it sounds very overwhelming from this standpoint and probably from yours as well.
SPEAKER_01: So let me recommend some places to go.
SPEAKER_01: If you haven't read The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel, that's a great book.
SPEAKER_01: Uh there's a movie out, right?
SPEAKER_01: If you haven't seen the movie, I'd highly recommend it.
SPEAKER_01: That is actually a very well-done movie.
SPEAKER_01: So, The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel.
SPEAKER_01: This was the book that I went to when I was having doubt.
SPEAKER_01: It's actually the second book I went to.
SPEAKER_01: The first book I went to was Norm Geisler's Christian Apologetics.
SPEAKER_01: And I was trying to read that in the fall as a band director who was working 70-hour work weeks.
SPEAKER_01: And I got a little ways in there, and after I had to look up a whole bunch of words, I was like, all right, nobody got time for that.
SPEAKER_01: So I went to The Case for Christ.
SPEAKER_01: And that helped me start out.
SPEAKER_01: I would highly recommend something like that.
SPEAKER_01: Grab that book, discuss it with your friends, get a couple people reading it, meet up, discuss it with your friends, or just read it for yourself.
SPEAKER_01: And find what was the most impacting argument for God's existence to you.
SPEAKER_01: And marinate on that one.
SPEAKER_01: Find the scripture that goes with it and just think on that one.
SPEAKER_01: Like I said, for me, the moral law that we can't know good.
SPEAKER_01: There's no good without God, without a transcendent, objective morality, a place to put that.
SPEAKER_01: So for me, it was that.
SPEAKER_01: What is it for you?
SPEAKER_01: Figure that out.
SPEAKER_01: But we need to take this effort seriously so we can give a thoughtful testimony to the truth to those who are embattled with conflicting messages in our confusing culture.
SPEAKER_01: So Christians can demonstrate the reality of God in their lives through examining their own beliefs, which as I've emphasized is tough.
SPEAKER_01: That's a tough endeavor.
SPEAKER_01: It's a lifelong endeavor, but we should start somewhere.
SPEAKER_01: And then we can demonstrate the reality of God by engaging with others.
SPEAKER_01: So what we need to do is we need to engage with others in ways that respectfully and meaningfully demonstrate the reality of God.
SPEAKER_01: So again, we'll look at three.
SPEAKER_01: I'm in the threes tonight.
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna get threes all over the place.
SPEAKER_01: So let's look at three ways to do so.
SPEAKER_01: Listen, learn, and lower.
SPEAKER_01: So what do we mean by listen?
SPEAKER_01: Well, first of all, we need to listen, we need to hear what other people have to say.
SPEAKER_01: Far from simply listening to give them a turn to talk, we have to actually try to understand what other people are saying.
SPEAKER_01: This is such an important concept that Dietrich Bonhoeffer called it a ministry, the ministry of listening.
SPEAKER_01: And he described it as this he said, so often Christians think that their only service is always to have to offer something when they're together with other people.
SPEAKER_01: They forget that listening can be a greater service than speaking.
SPEAKER_01: Many people seek a sympathetic ear and do not find it among the Christians because these Christians are talking when they should be listening.
SPEAKER_01: See, listening to others is part of loving and respecting another human being.
SPEAKER_01: Listening shows that shows respect.
SPEAKER_01: Listening shows respect in that it's a visible demonstration of the reality that God has made all men in his image.
SPEAKER_01: And that he gave them the gift of rationality, just like you and I have.
SPEAKER_01: As we listen to another man's point of view, we acknowledge their gift of reasoning and therefore the respect that they too have been made with that in that image of God.
SPEAKER_01: And it should it also shows love through the visible demonstration of how we value their views, we value their life, we value who they are.
SPEAKER_01: But further, Scripture admonishes us to listen to others for our own sake.
SPEAKER_01: We listen to others to demonstrate the reality of God as we are engaging with them, but we also do it for our own sake.
SPEAKER_01: We listen to others for our own sake.
SPEAKER_01: Proverbs 18, 1 through 2 says, Whoever isolates himself seeks his own desire, he breaks out against all sound judgment.
SPEAKER_01: A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion.
SPEAKER_01: Proverbs 18, 13 says, if one gives an answer before he hears, and the hearing implies understanding there, it is his folly and shame.
SPEAKER_01: It's folly and shame for us.
SPEAKER_01: And we demonstrate that we don't really believe in the value of all human beings when we don't listen and we don't give people a hearing.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: So by the first way that we can demonstrate the reality of God in a meaningful and respectful way is to actually, and engaging with others is to actually listen to them.
SPEAKER_01: The second way is to learn with them.
SPEAKER_01: Learn with people.
SPEAKER_01: Always.
SPEAKER_01: Because we are all human, we have, we all have questions about the world in which we live.
SPEAKER_01: As C.S.
SPEAKER_01: Lewis states, oh we're back to Lewis again.
SPEAKER_01: As C.S.
SPEAKER_01: Lewis states, we where we have a common question, we have a friend.
SPEAKER_01: We need not agree on the answer.
SPEAKER_01: See, questions about the hard issues of life can be a point of learning together rather than a point of hard division.
SPEAKER_01: And when we were willing to explore those common questions with others, that again shows that respect for them as a human being made in the image of God, that you really believed that about them.
SPEAKER_01: So Paul used, even Paul, Paul used the commonality of religious belief when speaking to those in Athens at the Areopagus, you can see this in Acts 17, but starting in verse 22, he says, Men of Athens, I see that you are extremely religious in every respect.
SPEAKER_01: And he's looking out at Athens, all these idols, all these altars to unknown, the altar to the unknown gods there, right?
SPEAKER_01: But instead of saying, Wow, you guys don't have it, I'm gonna give you the gospel, I'm gonna tell you the way it is.
SPEAKER_01: He takes what's there, the common question of uh religion, what do we believe?
SPEAKER_01: How do we know it's true?
SPEAKER_01: And he starts there.
SPEAKER_01: I see in every way that you are extremely religious, or that you're extremely religious in every aspect.
SPEAKER_01: And then he goes on, if you keep reading past verse 22, he goes on to use their own philosophy based in their own pagan poetry.
SPEAKER_01: It's right there in your scriptures, Acts 17, 28, quoting pagan poetry, in order to make a common uh common, in order to make a statement on commonality with them, which is that we are God's offspring.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: So why are you therefore creating idols with your own hands when you're the very children of God?
SPEAKER_01: You're creating these false images and worshiping them.
SPEAKER_01: But even your own philosophers have said that we are God's offspring.
SPEAKER_01: So he's using their own philosophy, their own poetry in order to connect with them and make a point.
SPEAKER_01: So in engaging with others, we can demonstrate that reality to God by listening to people, to truly hear what they have to say, and by learning with them rather than dividing us, bringing us back together as God's creation, right?
SPEAKER_01: Journeying with them.
SPEAKER_01: And then a third way to respectfully and meaningfully demonstrate the reality of God by engaging with others is to lower ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: We need humility and humbleness.
SPEAKER_01: We need to take a correct view of our situation on the earth.
SPEAKER_01: You see, Christians too often think that they must have, or that they do have all the answers.
SPEAKER_01: And that's funny to me because we are consistently taught that the doctrine of the sin nature.
SPEAKER_01: So there seems to be some kind of disconnect in our minds, and it seems to be something like this.
SPEAKER_01: I'm a fallen human being who is prone to corruption, yet I believe I am usually right in all my thoughts and reasoning.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: I keep seeing this.
SPEAKER_01: I have met so many Christians that can't take constructive criticism.
SPEAKER_01: They won't take constructive criticism.
SPEAKER_01: This is a bad testimony, guys.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, by the way, guys is y'all.
SPEAKER_01: This is a bad testimony, y'all.
SPEAKER_01: It's a bad testimony to the truth of Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Because it is not possible for any of us to have all the answers.
SPEAKER_01: We are not God, right?
SPEAKER_01: We can't have a God view of the universe.
SPEAKER_01: So you probably don't expect other people to have all the answers.
SPEAKER_01: Yes, stop expecting it of yourself or stop pretending like you do have all the answers.
SPEAKER_01: Because we know we don't.
SPEAKER_01: It lacks integrity to pretend that we've got it all figured out.
SPEAKER_01: And it actually may damage the testimony that we give to the righteous and holy God of the universe when we engage in trying to have all the answers.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, as Jeremiah 10 tells us, that He is the true God and His words and knowledge are true, and He is the final standard of truth.
SPEAKER_01: Not us, not our words.
SPEAKER_01: And I can tell you right now, I'm very glad that that's true because I've given enough talks to know that I say weird things at times.
SPEAKER_01: And I've spoken one-on-one with enough people to know that sometimes when I want to have this beautiful, glorious gospel presentation, I say idiotic things instead.
SPEAKER_01: And somehow God still uses me.
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm not the final standard of truth, right?
SPEAKER_01: It's not my words that are always, always true.
SPEAKER_01: I mess up.
SPEAKER_01: So I tell people that.
SPEAKER_01: You know what?
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes I mess up, I make mistakes.
SPEAKER_01: Because, and I'm glad that I do, because God is the final standard of truth.
SPEAKER_01: He is, his words and knowledge are true, and he's the final standard of truth.
SPEAKER_01: But that can also, if you have this attitude, if you think I have to have all the answers, if you if you're one of those people that can't admit that you're wrong ever, then that may keep you from engaging with others.
SPEAKER_01: That may keep you from discussing uh the issue of God with others.
SPEAKER_01: When you put all the burden on yourself to have all the answers, just look at the great thinkers throughout time and history.
SPEAKER_01: Look at the great writers.
SPEAKER_01: They they were willing to admit they didn't have it all figured out.
unknown: Right?
SPEAKER_01: So why would we?
SPEAKER_01: Why would we think we do?
SPEAKER_01: In fact, Socrates said something along the lines of the more that he knows, the more he knows he doesn't know.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: That's his famous line.
SPEAKER_01: More he discovers, the less he knows.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, we are all on a lifelong journey of learning together with all of God's creation.
SPEAKER_01: And that's what needs to become prevalent in our engagement with others so that they can see the reality of God in us, that we really do value them.
SPEAKER_01: We really do value them for who they are, where they're at.
SPEAKER_01: And that's why we are engaging with them.
SPEAKER_01: Further, when when I was uh open and honest about belief in God with myself, about what I believed, why I believed it, and not trying to have all the answers, but doing what I was commanded to do, spreading truth in life, then I became more confident in talking to people about my beliefs.
SPEAKER_01: I became more open with others.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, I stopped, I stopped worrying about am I shoving my beliefs on other people?
SPEAKER_01: And instead of seeing it that way, what I started seeing was I began to wonder about their views.
SPEAKER_01: Why do they believe what they do?
SPEAKER_01: How did they get to this point in their life where they're saying they're an atheist or they're a Muslim or they're a Hindu?
SPEAKER_01: So as I became, as I got more honest with my own beliefs and started looking through why I believed, it had the residual effect of opening me up to conversation with others.
SPEAKER_01: And that conversation became more natural.
SPEAKER_01: Because our dis our natural discussion will come when our faith is natural to us.
SPEAKER_01: We know what it is we believe, why we believe it, and how we know that's true.
SPEAKER_01: Alright, so in engaging with others, we need to remember to listen, learn, and to lower ourselves to demonstrate the reality of God.
SPEAKER_01: Alright, so the last one here.
SPEAKER_01: The last practice, bless you, the last practice on entrust uh on uh demonstrating the reality of God in our lives is to entrust the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: And we'll start here with 1 Peter 3, 15 through 16.
SPEAKER_01: So the context of this passage is that Peter is talking to a group of persecuted Christians.
SPEAKER_01: And there's various speculations that it's the persecution of Nero, so it's really bad.
SPEAKER_01: If that's the case, it's really bad.
SPEAKER_01: Um there's other speculation that maybe it's just uh maybe it's a feeling, it's a persecution like what we go through, where it's um, you know, you might be verbally criticized or it's looked down upon to be a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: So it might keep you from getting a job opportunity or something like that.
SPEAKER_01: So there's various speculations on what this persecution is, but in the middle of this persecution, Peter is telling the Christians uh to not fear what mankind fears.
SPEAKER_01: And in fact, he says here in verse, starting in verse 15, he says, But in your hearts, well back up just a little bit into 14, have no fear of them nor be troubled, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for the reason of the hope that is in you.
SPEAKER_01: Yet do this with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that when you are slandered, those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame.
SPEAKER_01: So this is a great passage on apologetics.
SPEAKER_01: You may have already heard it in the class, the first Peter 3.15 passage.
SPEAKER_01: Always be prepared to give a defense.
SPEAKER_01: The word defense meaning apologia, it's apologia, which means that you should always be ready to give a case for the reason of your faith, for what you believe.
SPEAKER_01: But notice what's all around this is that we're to do this with gentleness and respect and to keep a good conscience, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's what's all around this passage on being ready to give a defense.
SPEAKER_01: So we need to note some things here.
SPEAKER_01: We're not only called to give the reasons for why we believe in God and in Jesus as the Savior, but we're also called to do so in a manner that also testifies to the reality of God.
SPEAKER_01: We're called to do so in a manner that testifies to the reality of God.
SPEAKER_01: We're called to demonstrate that unconditional, radical love of which Jesus spoke in the Sermon on the Mount that we began with, that Sermon on the Mount passage of loving your enemies and doing good to those who hate you, blessing those who curse you, and praying for those who abuse you.
SPEAKER_01: That's that Luke 6 passage you're seeing up there.
SPEAKER_01: So we're called to demonstrate that.
SPEAKER_01: And that's, while that's a beautiful and a noble concept, not to mention an overt command by the Lord Jesus, it's just not that easy.
SPEAKER_01: This is not that easy.
SPEAKER_01: Loving people when they revile you and heap insults upon you because of your belief in Jesus Christ takes practice, experience, and discipline.
SPEAKER_01: The Christian philosopher Dallas Willard comments on why it's difficult to reason with some people.
SPEAKER_01: You know, a typical reaction, he didn't say this, but a typical reaction when someone calls you a brainwashed idiot is a defensive stance.
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: Your heart rate goes up and your face becomes flush and your mind becomes ready to protect itself at all cost.
SPEAKER_01: And Dallas Willard commenting on this says that why it's difficult to reason with some people is because their very mind has been taken over by one or more feelings, and the mind is being made to defend and serve those feelings at all cost.
SPEAKER_01: So we're missing the opportunity to make our case because we're defending ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: We're getting caught up in our emotion.
SPEAKER_01: He further says of our emotions that our feelings live on the front row of our lives like unruly children clamoring for attention.
SPEAKER_01: That sounds like you've been to a lot of church, right?
SPEAKER_01: If we want to be effective at demonstrating the reality of God in a meaningful way, we have to practice conversation.
SPEAKER_01: We have to experience engagement with others, and we have to discipline ourselves to trust God.
SPEAKER_01: We've got to discipline ourselves to trust God.
SPEAKER_01: So now I've said the word discipline, and I'm referencing the common disciplines of the Christian faith, the disciplines of the spiritual life.
SPEAKER_01: Professor Timothy Muhlhof notes that Christ himself cultivated disciplines or habits of engaging God that would allow Christ to engage the crowds with a sense of renewal.
SPEAKER_01: He says that it's not about adopting a series of techniques, but rather about engaging in a lifestyle of pursuing God and his resources.
SPEAKER_01: That's not what apologetics class is about.
SPEAKER_01: It should point you to your towards your need for God.
SPEAKER_01: This is the real deal, right?
SPEAKER_01: Apologetics makes arguments on the existence of God, so it should be pointing you to the fact that this is a reality.
SPEAKER_01: There's a spiritual reality.
SPEAKER_01: You need the food that God has to give you.
SPEAKER_01: You don't just need the earthly food.
SPEAKER_01: You need something else in your life in order to be an effective human being, right?
SPEAKER_01: You need the food of which Jesus spoke of when he said, I have food of which you do not know.
SPEAKER_01: That's the food of God.
SPEAKER_01: That's God pouring back into you.
SPEAKER_01: Author Ken Sandy in the book The Peacemaker said that we cannot consistently weave the gospel into our conversations with others until the gospel is deeply woven into our own hearts.
SPEAKER_01: I believe that this is a major life-changing point that Christians are glossing over.
SPEAKER_01: That effective conversations with others, effective evangelism, effective testimony giving, effective apologetics all comes from a life that itself is deeply rooted and affected by God.
SPEAKER_01: That's where it comes from.
SPEAKER_01: And he's conveying what Jesus is saying in Luke 6.
SPEAKER_01: If we just keep going, like we started with Luke 6, the Sermon on the Mount, love your enemies, but it Jesus is following this whole line and he gets to verse 45.
SPEAKER_01: Well, it wasn't verse 45 for him.
SPEAKER_01: He gets on, he keeps going, and as we get to verse 45, we read the good person out of the good treasure of his heart produces good, and the evil person out of his evil treasure produces evil, for out of the abundance of the heart his mouth speaks.
SPEAKER_01: We've got to be pouring into our lives.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, we've got to let God pour into our lives if we want to have true, effective conversations, true, effective apologetics conversations.
SPEAKER_01: Otherwise, we're gonna find ourselves getting defensive, we're gonna find ourselves not rightly viewing what the purpose of this conversation is, right?
SPEAKER_01: It's to lead others to Christ.
SPEAKER_01: It's to share truth, it's to share love, goodness.
SPEAKER_01: So the common Christian disciplines require an investment.
SPEAKER_01: They require an investment.
SPEAKER_01: We have to invest quality time.
SPEAKER_01: It seems that most people understand this concept when it comes to money, the ROI, right?
SPEAKER_01: Return on investment.
SPEAKER_01: So, but they they tend to not quite understand that same principle when it comes to faith.
SPEAKER_01: You see, if you put no money into an investment account, it makes no interest.
SPEAKER_01: If you put no time into your faith account, you don't make any interest.
SPEAKER_01: But we're not just simply spending time, right?
SPEAKER_01: Uh I this the difference for me about quality time versus just spending time is the difference between a person who's just checking off a list, oh, I did that today.
SPEAKER_01: Like I read my Bible today.
SPEAKER_01: Yay me.
SPEAKER_01: And the person who is seeking God, because they're trying to build that relationship, they're trying to allow God to pour into their life so they have anything to offer back out.
SPEAKER_01: We need to make quality investments.
SPEAKER_01: So, what do I mean?
SPEAKER_01: Here's where those traditional Christian disciplines take effect the discipline of prayer, of confession, right?
SPEAKER_01: Discipline of study, meditating on God's word, not just skimming over to get through passages, but meditating.
SPEAKER_01: What is he trying to tell you?
SPEAKER_01: He left you this, he left you this letter.
SPEAKER_01: What is he trying to get to you?
SPEAKER_01: So, not just for you, but so that it can affect you, so then you can bring that back out to others.
SPEAKER_01: Meditation, uh, worship, building you back up in worship, service, acts of service.
SPEAKER_01: And then the one that Baptists don't like, fasting.
SPEAKER_01: We're good at the other side of that.
SPEAKER_01: We're good at the other side.
SPEAKER_01: But I mentioned fasting because it's the one that I struggle with, uh, because I have medical issues that are related to dietary restrictions.
SPEAKER_01: So for me to fast is truly saying, God, I trust you with my flesh.
SPEAKER_01: Like I trust you with what I think I need to sustain my very life.
SPEAKER_01: That's what fasting is.
SPEAKER_01: You're learning to trust God.
SPEAKER_01: That's what you're doing when you fast.
SPEAKER_01: You're saying, I know that you you can take care of this because you made it.
SPEAKER_01: So that's a big deal, right?
SPEAKER_01: Fasting is a big one for us.
SPEAKER_01: So I poke, I'm a Baptist.
SPEAKER_01: That's why I poke fun at my brethren.
SPEAKER_01: All right, so fasting, silence in God's presence.
SPEAKER_01: You live in a noisy world.
SPEAKER_01: You need to get some silence in your life.
SPEAKER_01: So God can minister to you.
SPEAKER_01: Be alone with God, solitude.
SPEAKER_01: That's hard.
SPEAKER_01: I know it's hard, especially for those of you who have a house full of kids that never leave you alone.
SPEAKER_01: We gotta find these times.
SPEAKER_01: We can see it in Jesus' life.
SPEAKER_01: He pulled away from the crowds, he pulled away and let God build him back up.
SPEAKER_01: And then he goes back out and does amazing things, right?
SPEAKER_01: These are this is just a short list of the disciplines, but we gotta get these in our lives.
SPEAKER_01: This is what will empower you and embolden you as you gain your arguments.
SPEAKER_01: These disciplines go together with your arguments to empower you to talk to people.
SPEAKER_01: It builds you up.
SPEAKER_01: Because the world's just gonna keep tearing you down.
SPEAKER_01: They're never gonna build you up.
SPEAKER_01: If you're looking for affirmation outside the, you know, outside of God, even in here, I told you, I Christians tear each other down.
SPEAKER_01: You need to get your affirmation from God.
SPEAKER_01: You need to spend time alone with Him.
SPEAKER_01: That's what gives you the strength and the power and the boldness to stand in this culture and say, Yeah, I'm a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: What of it?
SPEAKER_01: I'm a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: Let's talk about that.
SPEAKER_01: You can be one too.
SPEAKER_01: We're not going to see much difference in our lives from the lives of those around us if we do not invest in our faith.
SPEAKER_01: Nor should we expect to.
SPEAKER_01: Going back to Paul in Ephesians 4, in that same passage, he said, You should no longer walk as the Gentiles walk in the futility of their thoughts.
SPEAKER_01: They are darkened in their understanding.
SPEAKER_01: They're excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them and because of the hardness of their hearts.
SPEAKER_01: They became callous and gave themselves over to promiscuity for the practice of every kind of impurity with a desire for more and more.
SPEAKER_01: That can keep you from having an effective witness to people when your desire is for more and more.
SPEAKER_01: You're a discontent people who don't know your God.
SPEAKER_01: That'll keep you from having good conversations with people because you don't have any radar on for others.
SPEAKER_01: You're seeking to fulfill yourself all the time.
SPEAKER_01: We've got to spend our time.
SPEAKER_01: We have to be different.
SPEAKER_01: We cannot exist as the world exists and expect that we're gonna be able to have great impact on the world.
SPEAKER_01: We have to look different.
SPEAKER_01: Our lives have to look different.
SPEAKER_01: It's it can't look like the average American dream, it has to be something notably different about us.
SPEAKER_01: A powerful apologetic is one that comes from an overall life immersed in the preparation of the mind and body for the purpose of engaging the world.
SPEAKER_01: We can't think that we're gonna be able to do good to those who persecute us or respond with gentleness and respect if we consistently live that life that's no different from the world around us.
SPEAKER_01: Rather, we have to live a life of constant practice in trusting the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: That's what those disciplines were to do.
SPEAKER_01: They were to throw you out of your comfort zone, make you do something different, so that you learn to trust God with your life.
SPEAKER_01: You give up some of your control and give it over to God.
SPEAKER_01: So we have to live a life of constant practice in trusting the Lord.
SPEAKER_01: Practice in the sense of living it out.
SPEAKER_01: Like a doctor has a medical practice, he's not just, he doesn't just have knowledge, he uses it in his daily life.
SPEAKER_01: We have to entrust God with the daily things, the small things, the easy things, in order to get excellence in handling the unusual things and the big things and the very difficult things.
SPEAKER_01: So in trust the Lord, we've got to look at our total investment into our own lives to see if we are indeed building up a treasure of goodness in our hearts, something that will pour out of us, something that will overflow onto the people around us.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so tonight we looked at three practices of demonstrating the reality of God.
SPEAKER_01: And that one was to examine your beliefs, two was to engage with others, three was to entrust the Lord, build back into your life, really trust him and see what he does with you.
SPEAKER_01: You see, we're gonna live out what we truly believe.
SPEAKER_01: And this is one of the one of the things I've noticed in the apologetics realm is we tend to just focus on the knowledge.
SPEAKER_01: We just give you knowledge.
SPEAKER_01: Well, if you just tell people this, they're gonna come to Jesus, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because they're gonna have the moral law argument.
SPEAKER_01: No, they need to see it as well, right?
SPEAKER_01: I think a lot of kids leave the church not just because they don't have answers, right?
SPEAKER_01: And they go off to college and some atheist professor tears them apart.
SPEAKER_01: I think they don't have answers and they're not seeing disciples of Christ modeled in the home or in the church.
SPEAKER_01: And that is a twofold punch against Christianity, and it's a hard-hitting one.
SPEAKER_01: So it doesn't take much for an atheist philosophy teacher to tear them up when they haven't seen the reality of God demonstrated in the church and in their own home lives.
SPEAKER_01: And then they couple that with hard questions they don't have answers to, and yeah, of course they're leaving.
SPEAKER_01: We need both.
SPEAKER_01: Um, you're gonna live out what you truly believe.
SPEAKER_01: So whatever's become a part of your daily patterns and habits.
SPEAKER_01: If you if you daily talk about God, then you start living that out.
SPEAKER_01: You're gonna start understanding that you can't, you can't just think, oh, here's church, here's my life.
SPEAKER_01: You can't have the sacred secular split, right?
SPEAKER_01: There's no such thing.
SPEAKER_01: You're always giving a testimony to either the truthfulness or the falsity of God.
SPEAKER_01: Your life is always giving a testimony about what it is that you believe.
SPEAKER_01: Not just when it's comfortable, not just when you feel like maybe having a conversation, but always you are constantly giving a testimony to the truthfulness of Jesus Christ, and others will notice.
SPEAKER_01: All right, so I've taken my uh hour to talk to you, and so now I'm gonna take some of your questions for the next half hour because I think we go to eight, right?
SPEAKER_01: Nobody's piecing out on me and getting pizza right now.
SPEAKER_01: We're all staying.
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so let me uh as as you're formulating your question, I'll tell you uh what I've written that you can that you have access to.
SPEAKER_01: So living in truth is um it was kind of the follow-up to why do you believe that?
SPEAKER_01: And I'm not sure.
SPEAKER_01: You guys may some of you may have done why do you believe that here at the church.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, okay, maybe the women's ministry did it.
SPEAKER_01: So I was that intro that why do you believe that is an introduction to having conversations, and it sort of introduces you to apologetics along the way, but it's it's a Bible study you can do alone or with others.
SPEAKER_01: Living in truth was the follow-up because so many people were like, ah, I loved Why Do You Believe That, but we want to go deeper.
SPEAKER_01: Give me arguments, give me like the problem of evil, and how do I know that science isn't the only way to know truth?
SPEAKER_01: So living in truth goes in deeper into that.
SPEAKER_01: And living in truth covers more of the balance of having arguments and having a life demonstrating the reality of God.
SPEAKER_01: And then I've contributed to apologetics collections, those two at the bottom there, where every chapter is a different chapter on something arguing for the existence of God.
SPEAKER_01: In those books, I write on one of my specialties, which is Jesus is not a pagan God.
SPEAKER_01: He's not like Osiris, Horus, or Mithras.
SPEAKER_01: That's a popular argument today.
SPEAKER_01: And then the top right-hand corner is Defending the Faith, Apologetics, and Women's Ministry.
SPEAKER_01: And that was a book where I was really calling women in the church to get involved with the life of the mind and the reasoning for why that's important today.
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: So now it's your turn to ask me questions.
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: How do I start a spiritual conversation or anybody?
SPEAKER_01: There's a difference.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so this looks different in different scenarios.
SPEAKER_01: She's asking me to start, how do you start a spiritual conversation?
SPEAKER_01: I I I'm gonna just be up front with y'all.
SPEAKER_01: I'm an introvert.
SPEAKER_01: I'm a little bit like Jonah, you know, God tells me to go one way and I'm off going the other way.
SPEAKER_01: Like, uh-uh.
SPEAKER_01: So um, for me, God sort of puts people right in my face that say things to me like, oh, that's an interesting book.
SPEAKER_01: What are you reading?
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, oh, people are talking to me.
SPEAKER_01: And so and so then I start to kick into gear, like, oh, this is uh the divine conspiracy, and you know, and I'll say something.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it makes sense, sometimes what I say doesn't make sense, and then I let the Holy Spirit guide.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes people say, like, oh, you're a Christian.
SPEAKER_01: Whoa, all right, and then I what are you?
SPEAKER_01: And then I start up like that.
SPEAKER_01: Sometimes it's um I just see a woman that um is she looks beautiful, and so I'll tell her, I really like what you're wearing, I really think you look well put together today, and then she starts talking to me.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, oh, thank you.
SPEAKER_01: I've had such a bad day.
SPEAKER_01: Why don't you tell me about that?
SPEAKER_01: And then we start talking, um, which can lead to conversation like, well, do you have a church?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, are you going somewhere where maybe they can take care of this?
SPEAKER_01: No, I'm not going to church.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, well, do you have a church background or are you a believer?
SPEAKER_01: That's literally how I get into conversation.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not, I'm not a uh track tot and um, you know, hey, do you know Jesus person?
SPEAKER_01: Unless we as a church are out doing street evangelism.
SPEAKER_01: And then I'll do street evangelism.
SPEAKER_01: And I throw questions out like, do you know Jesus?
SPEAKER_01: When you who do you think Jesus is?
SPEAKER_01: Things like that.
SPEAKER_01: But my natural everyday, how do I get into spiritual conversations is just because I'm I try to tell myself, I don't care if you're an introvert, look around and see who's looking back and talk to that person.
SPEAKER_01: Because typically what I see that's happening is the Holy Spirit's working on them just like he was in my life when I was an atheist.
SPEAKER_01: And and they will talk to me and we'll get to that point.
SPEAKER_01: Um, it took practice to know how to move.
SPEAKER_01: I move people pretty much when I'm talking to them, if they get heated on an issue or if they want to talk about a hot topic, I can always use, well, how do you know it's good?
SPEAKER_01: And that leads me to a conversation about knowing God and then what God did about evil in the world, which is Jesus Christ dying on a cross and raising from the dead to redeem the good creation, which had gone a horribly awry.
SPEAKER_01: So I don't have like a formula for you.
SPEAKER_01: I just I can tell you that I just try to be alert, I try to look around, I say things to people that maybe they wouldn't normally get from others because everybody else is too busy trying to get out of the shopping line or whatever.
SPEAKER_01: We just talk to people, we just care about them, and then we see where that conversation goes.
SPEAKER_01: That's how I do it.
SPEAKER_01: Um, there are plenty of like um share Jesus without fear, there's the Ray Comforts, um, he's got the the way that the way of the Master.
SPEAKER_01: There are plenty of those out there.
SPEAKER_01: But for me, I I'm just very natural.
SPEAKER_01: I I just talk to people right where they're at with what they're doing and what I'm observing.
SPEAKER_01: And sure enough, the Holy Spirit uses that.
SPEAKER_01: So I don't is that does that help at all?
SPEAKER_01: It's not a r it's not a one, two, three.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: Let's do the Muslim first.
SPEAKER_01: Uh typically Muslims love to talk about religion, so ask them what they believe.
SPEAKER_01: So what do you believe about Allah?
SPEAKER_01: Or what do you believe?
SPEAKER_01: Why do you think Muhammad's a prophet of God?
SPEAKER_01: That's something I've used.
SPEAKER_01: Tell me about that.
SPEAKER_01: Tell me about Muhammad as a prophet versus Jesus.
SPEAKER_01: Like what's the difference?
SPEAKER_01: Have them explain that.
SPEAKER_01: And then start talking to them about that, what you see as Jesus, you know, the difference.
SPEAKER_01: Um so I don't have any problem talking to Muslims about faith because they will talk to me about religion.
SPEAKER_01: You have to get a really, really secular, westernized, cultural-only Muslim for them to be uncomfortable with that.
SPEAKER_01: Then the other person, the I don't know if they're saved, um, that one's tough.
SPEAKER_01: Because you don't want to be like, hey, uh, do you really know Jesus?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, when was that?
SPEAKER_01: Can you tell me when specifically you came to know Jesus?
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm not seeing any fruit.
SPEAKER_01: That's pretty harsh, right?
SPEAKER_01: So with that person, you know, you're gonna have to navigate that one.
SPEAKER_01: I I I would actually have to know who this person is and have talked to them.
SPEAKER_01: And then I would just start talking to them about their beliefs and why they think it's true.
SPEAKER_01: You know, well, how you know, why do you believe in God?
SPEAKER_01: What what made you, you know, what was that turning point that brought you around to belief?
SPEAKER_01: Just have them hash it out for you.
SPEAKER_01: I think that'll be very enlightening.
SPEAKER_01: I just totally trashed that poor person, whoever they were.
SPEAKER_01: All right, so what else have you got?
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, same row.
SPEAKER_01: Great, all right.
SPEAKER_01: I don't think they can hear you in the back, no.
SPEAKER_01: So far, we've got every we're at a table.
SPEAKER_01: There's two guys that are atheists and they are homosexuals.
SPEAKER_01: There's one person we're not sure if they're believer or not, they're sort of agnostic.
SPEAKER_01: And one of the uh guys who's an atheist brings up some random statement about Jesus dying on the cross in a snarky way.
SPEAKER_01: All right, keep going.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so she laughs and tells him it takes more faith to believe in evolution and and that we just poofed here than it does to be a Christian, believe in creation.
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: So then the next day we were like, Okay, okay.
SPEAKER_01: So the next day they were like, Why why didn't we back up our belief?
SPEAKER_01: What's going on?
SPEAKER_01: So you want me to help you with this scenario?
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: What can we have done?
SPEAKER_01: Ah, yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So um, first of all, it's okay to beat yourself up a little bit, but you gotta move on because I've said stupid things and not been in tune.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, you're just human.
SPEAKER_01: Those things happen.
SPEAKER_01: But I think these things happen to give you sort of a all right, yellow light, right?
SPEAKER_01: Here it's about to turn red.
SPEAKER_01: Pay attention.
SPEAKER_01: So I think sometimes that that we get these um situations to help you realize that you do need to be on top of the year game, right?
SPEAKER_01: So if you fail, that's fine.
SPEAKER_01: Just learn from it.
SPEAKER_01: So um, yeah, I I have a lot of friends that are snarky and they're super snarky.
SPEAKER_01: Um, so they'll say things like that just to get me.
SPEAKER_01: So I've learned over the years to have fun with it and say things like, Oh, so we're talking Christianity now.
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: So what do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_01: So Jesus, the the statement was Jesus, uh, you know, there's this whole issue or some post online that Jesus didn't die on the cross and that, you know, he didn't really forgive us of our sins, or he didn't die for our sins, or something like that.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, because he came back alive.
SPEAKER_01: So he's not dead, so he had to stay dead in order to forgive our sins.
SPEAKER_01: Horrible doctor.
SPEAKER_01: You see what I mean?
SPEAKER_01: These are people that have exposed a little bit of Christianity and have no idea what they're talking about.
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: So um, anyway, so that that's when I would say, well, what do you mean by that?
SPEAKER_01: Like what what's your and then I would follow that with a where are you getting that from?
SPEAKER_01: Because a lot of times it's coming from the mouths of actors or celebrities or some Huffington Post editorialist who has no background in religious studies or anything.
SPEAKER_01: So you just gotta like, where are you getting that from?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, that was fabulous because they opened the door.
SPEAKER_01: Like, I love it when people make snarky comments about Christianity because it's not like, well, you brought it up, so let's go there.
SPEAKER_01: You know, so what do you what do you think?
SPEAKER_01: Do you think that that's true?
SPEAKER_01: About um how would that work out?
SPEAKER_01: Like, why would you think that because Jesus rose from the dead, that nullifies his uh actions of you know, forgiveness of sins?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, make them explain it.
SPEAKER_01: Right, you know your belief, right?
SPEAKER_01: So you make them explain it, and then after they explain it, you say to them, Okay, so where are you getting that from?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, great.
SPEAKER_01: Here, let me take you to the actual Bible, the source text for Christianity, right?
SPEAKER_01: There is one source for Christianity, you guys realize this.
SPEAKER_01: We don't have like, we're not going over here and over there.
SPEAKER_01: There's a Bible here.
SPEAKER_01: This is it.
SPEAKER_01: This is where we get all the knowledge, right?
SPEAKER_01: So, I mean, we have general revelation, but when it comes to stuff like this, you go right into the gospels and you go into Paul's letters, and then you say, Okay, so I mean, hey, actually, the source for Christianity is the Bible, so we should probably use that and then tell them what it says, right?
SPEAKER_01: Then they may never ask you again.
SPEAKER_01: They may never bring it up again, but you can bring it up.
SPEAKER_01: So had that, had that whole Jesus didn't rise from or Jesus didn't forgive our sins thing workout.
SPEAKER_01: You know, just having fun, like, so had that work out for you.
SPEAKER_01: You can throw it back at them.
SPEAKER_01: And I you don't need to be like rude or mean, it's just they brought it up, they're being snarky, have fun, right?
SPEAKER_01: And then while you're having fun, you're getting out doctrine, you're getting out a good conversation, and you don't have to do it feeling intimidated.
SPEAKER_01: And it's fine that you laugh because it was a silly statement.
SPEAKER_01: What do you do with people who do not believe the Bible is inspired by the word of God?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so what do you do with people who don't believe the Bible's inspired the word of God?
SPEAKER_01: So, first of all, if they're quoting something like that, that Jesus um about Jesus dying for our sins, they're getting that from the Bible, so they're using it as the source.
SPEAKER_01: So you get to use it too.
SPEAKER_01: All right, if they're using it, then you say, well, since you're sourcing that in the Bible, I'm gonna use it as well, right?
SPEAKER_01: But if they don't, um, that's fine because I don't usually start with the Bible with people who don't believe the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: I usually start with um, like I was mentioning earlier, the moral law.
SPEAKER_01: Uh I direct people, when I'm in conversation with people, I notice that in our culture, people lace their language with things like should and ought all the time.
SPEAKER_01: That's not fair.
SPEAKER_01: They should do this.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, when they lace their language with shoulds, ots, fair, justice, any of those terms, they're implying a standard of goodness.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, game on.
SPEAKER_01: Because if there's a standard of goodness, you gotta tell me where you're getting that from.
SPEAKER_01: And they're not implying there's a standard of goodness that changes throughout time and history.
SPEAKER_01: That's not what they mean when they say, like, you know, she should have, she should have lived longer, or you know, that wasn't fair.
SPEAKER_01: They're not implying a standard that changes.
SPEAKER_01: They're saying there's something they think is always fair or always good.
SPEAKER_01: So then I move that to where are you getting that from?
SPEAKER_01: How do you know what's good?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, um, well, everybody knows what's good.
SPEAKER_01: You know, your parents teach you that.
SPEAKER_01: Well, how'd your parents find out what's good?
SPEAKER_01: Where's that coming from?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I want to back them up into finding that standard.
SPEAKER_01: Well, it sounds to me like you need a standard for this.
SPEAKER_01: Like you're implying that there's a way things should be, and that what you're currently experiencing is not the way that they should be.
SPEAKER_01: Hey, guess what that lines up with?
SPEAKER_01: That's the Christian view of creation.
SPEAKER_01: That what God originally made was good, perfectly good.
SPEAKER_01: Um, so is our gift of free will, and we use free will to do very bad things.
SPEAKER_01: We brought a curse upon our own creation.
SPEAKER_01: And all of creation, curse sounds very spiritual.
SPEAKER_01: It's just everything's being destroyed through the evil that's here, right?
SPEAKER_01: So there's something that God did about that.
SPEAKER_01: He redeemed his creation.
SPEAKER_01: This is how I talk to people about it.
SPEAKER_01: Uh pretty much every human being is going to get to a should, ought.
SPEAKER_01: That's not fair, that's not just, that's not right.
SPEAKER_01: Uh, and so they're using a standard of goodness without telling you where that standard's coming from.
SPEAKER_01: You can always use that to point back to God.
SPEAKER_01: And that does not, you don't have to go to the scripture yet.
SPEAKER_01: Now you do have to go to the scripture for the story of what God did about it, right?
SPEAKER_01: But we can start with how do we know there's God?
SPEAKER_01: Well, is there such a thing as good?
SPEAKER_01: And where are you getting that from?
SPEAKER_01: So I start there, right, with the people who don't trust the Bible.
SPEAKER_01: I didn't repeat her question.
SPEAKER_01: Where do you start with people who don't use the Bible as a reliable source of information?
SPEAKER_01: Okay, what else have you got?
SPEAKER_01: You only have 10 more minutes, so you better make them good fast.
SPEAKER_01: Oh yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So it's the hypocrisy, the the argument from hypocrisy.
SPEAKER_01: I don't go to uh church because Christians are a bunch of hypocrites.
SPEAKER_01: And they're using that as an excuse also for not being Christian or just not going to church?
SPEAKER_01: I'm so both.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: Right.
SPEAKER_01: So I always say, um, well, that's that's interesting because um have you ever have you ever said that you were gonna do something and you didn't do it?
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, this sounds like great comfort, but anyway, have you ever said you're gonna do something and you didn't do it?
SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah, okay, well then you're a hypocrite.
SPEAKER_01: I've taken, I've I said I would never drink diet soda in my life.
SPEAKER_01: Like when I was like, you know, 20 in college and knew everything.
SPEAKER_01: I was like, I will never drink diet soda.
SPEAKER_01: I don't understand why what people would ever do that.
SPEAKER_01: And then I got older and that all that sugar started to put weight on me, and so I started drinking diet soda.
SPEAKER_01: I'm a total hypocrite.
SPEAKER_01: It has nothing to do with religion.
SPEAKER_01: Hypocrites are is a huge hypocrisy is a human problem.
SPEAKER_01: And all humans are hypocrites.
SPEAKER_01: We all say or believe things that we don't act upon.
SPEAKER_01: Um, we also have the problem of reverse hypocrisy, like we have atheists out there that believe there's no transcendent good, and yet they'll do benevolent things.
SPEAKER_01: That's hypocrisy.
SPEAKER_01: Sorry, it was a pot, it was sort of a pot shot, but sort of not, right?
SPEAKER_01: Why would you ever do anything altruistic for anybody if you believe fit of the survival, you know, or survival of the fittest?
SPEAKER_01: Why would you ever you're you're being a hypocrite.
SPEAKER_01: You should do what's best for you at all times, always, because you only get this life and then you're just dust.
SPEAKER_01: So nothing else matters.
SPEAKER_01: And yet they'll do benevolent acts for others, they'll take care of other people, which is not part of that whole survival of the fittest.
SPEAKER_01: That's a dog eat dog situation.
SPEAKER_01: So I turn the hiboc hypocrisy thing around on them.
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, all people are hypocrites, totally.
SPEAKER_01: Some of us go to church, okay.
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, I got one way back there.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: So did you all hear that?
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: So um, yeah, this one, it's, you know, again, it's I don't have a one, two, three.
SPEAKER_01: It's gonna look different for the situations that you're in.
SPEAKER_01: But generally, with a person, when you get to the why do you believe that, I would be paid attention to what it is they're saying.
SPEAKER_01: Um, what are they saying?
SPEAKER_01: Why do they believe?
SPEAKER_01: Uh I I'll just throw them out there, but why do they believe that Joseph Smith was, you know, like a prophet and that he restored the church?
SPEAKER_01: Why do they believe that Jesus uh and God themselves weren't able to witness to their own church accurately?
SPEAKER_01: So they needed to get Joseph Smith in on it.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, so I would be asking questions about that, like listening to what they're saying about those things and then questioning those things.
SPEAKER_01: So are you telling me that God and Jesus weren't able to establish um, you know, that with authority the truthfulness of the scriptures, so they needed to get somebody else to come along, you know, a couple centuries later and do this.
SPEAKER_01: Um I would ask questions like that.
SPEAKER_01: If that sounds too aggressive to you, you might say things like, Well, okay, well, you know, we do have some big differences here, so maybe we can explore the differences uh between what we believe.
SPEAKER_01: And uh, you know, we we can look here at what orthodox Christianity says.
SPEAKER_01: So, you know, mere Christianity, what what we all go back to, whether we're Catholic, Protestant, or whatever denomination we are, we could all go back to the Nicene Creed and say these are the things that we all believe, and this is where you're getting away from that.
SPEAKER_01: Um, this is where what you're telling me actually doesn't match up with that.
SPEAKER_01: So, can you talk to me about the difference there?
SPEAKER_01: You know, that's what I would say things like that.
SPEAKER_01: Like, this is what I'm seeing, and here's what I'm hearing.
SPEAKER_01: First of all, am I accurately representing your view?
SPEAKER_01: We don't want to not accurately represent their view because that's an untruth, right?
SPEAKER_01: So that's false testimony, you know, breaking a commandment.
SPEAKER_01: Um, so we want to ask them that, but then we want to say, okay, here's what I believe.
SPEAKER_01: These look different to me.
SPEAKER_01: Talk to me about that, about the differences, right?
SPEAKER_01: And let them explain them to you and then show them where they are different.
SPEAKER_01: Um, that's gonna take practice.
SPEAKER_01: That's not something you just like, da-da, I've got it, you know, unless you have a little note card you want to pull out and go, okay, hold on.
SPEAKER_01: Which gets kind of weird, but um, you could do it.
SPEAKER_01: And I tell people, I'm not doing it right now just because I forgot.
SPEAKER_01: I usually have a little notepad that when people are asking me questions, I write down the question and I might take a note or two like to remind myself.
SPEAKER_01: And I'll tell the person I'm talking to, okay, I'm just making a note for myself because I'm forgetful.
SPEAKER_01: So here's the things I'm writing the things down that I wanted to ask you.
SPEAKER_01: So um, or if you bring, say, hey, I'd like to bring you a list of things that I am interested in about what you believe, and I I want to hear why you believe these things.
SPEAKER_01: So I'm gonna give that to you, and then we're gonna meet up again so you have time to prepare because I don't want to catch you off guard, and then uh we could talk about them.
SPEAKER_01: So just try to make it comfortable for them, right?
SPEAKER_01: Like you do unto others what you want done unto you.
SPEAKER_01: So if somebody was gonna ask you about your Christianity, you'd want them to be able, you'd want to be able to be prepared.
SPEAKER_01: So just you know, give them some time.
SPEAKER_01: There's some ideas.
SPEAKER_01: I mean, I just usually mine is practice.
SPEAKER_01: I I learn to listen for what the per what are they actually saying?
SPEAKER_01: Because most of the time Christians aren't catching what people are actually saying because we're getting defensive, or those emotions are rallying up and those are getting in the way of your hearing.
SPEAKER_01: So you don't you don't find those little points where you can actually go, oh, I know something about that.
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna talk about that, right?
SPEAKER_01: Instead, you're you're getting to the point where you're getting defensive, especially when it's family, right?
SPEAKER_01: When it's family, it's really hard because we all get defensive because we know everybody's everything.
SPEAKER_01: So that's that's where you gotta keep your cool and show them something different.
SPEAKER_01: Is that helpful at all?
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: Um, oh wait, the guy in the back, and then I'll come up here.
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
SPEAKER_01: Guy, gentlemen, sir.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: Um this is a this is a really tough one because of the fact that um, and I will tell this to anybody who asks me of this, that Christians, people who have professed to be Christians or, you know, profess to be of a Christian church, have been hateful towards homosexuals.
SPEAKER_01: They have marginalized.
SPEAKER_01: Not only homosexuals, they've marginalized African Americans, right?
SPEAKER_01: They've been racist, uh, not just towards African Americans, but towards Hispanics.
SPEAKER_01: So this is a problem.
SPEAKER_01: So you can't throw a blind eye to the fact that people who are using the label Christian have acted that way.
SPEAKER_01: Um, but I would, in having said that, I would say, where is this coming from?
SPEAKER_01: Right?
SPEAKER_01: Because we can't use the general Christians are all haters towards homosexuals.
SPEAKER_01: You need to give me your source.
SPEAKER_01: Do you have some stats on that?
SPEAKER_01: Are there a whole bunch of Christian crimes related to homosexuality where Christians are actually committing, you know, hate acts against homosexuals?
SPEAKER_01: What's the stats on this?
SPEAKER_01: Because I'm hearing a dogma.
SPEAKER_01: I'm starting to hear a dogma.
SPEAKER_01: You know, and I could reverse that.
SPEAKER_01: I could say that homosexuals are just hateful towards Christians.
SPEAKER_01: And so why would anybody ever become a homosexual?
SPEAKER_01: They're a bunch of haters.
SPEAKER_01: Um, so, but you need to have source for this.
SPEAKER_01: So you need to tell them that while you are saying that has been a problem in our history, I know that it's been prevalent, but I need to know what you're talking about specifically here.
SPEAKER_01: Are you talking about Westboro Baptist?
SPEAKER_01: Is that what you're talking about?
SPEAKER_01: That one church that does that is because we need something, some substance to go on, because, and here's the reason why, I think if you look at the span of Christianity over the vastness of its 2,000 years, you're gonna find that Christians aren't the haters.
SPEAKER_01: Christians are spreading uh human rights, they're building hospitals, they're educating, they're they've made a lot of mistakes and bad ones.
SPEAKER_01: But they're also the spreaders of truth and education and mercy and love.
SPEAKER_01: They're going into places, they're going into places people won't go into because of leprosy or whatever, and they're serving the lepers, right?
SPEAKER_01: They're serving the people that other societies have said deserve what they're getting because they're in the lowest caste, because they did something in a former life that's causing them to have this problem.
SPEAKER_01: Christians rush in there and serve those people.
SPEAKER_01: They were noted for their love by the Romans.
SPEAKER_01: In fact, it was such a problem that one of the Roman emperors had to, he had to start up a pro a welfare program because all his sick and needy were turning, they're converting to Christianity because the Christians are taking care of them.
SPEAKER_01: So that has been our overarching story of love.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and why?
SPEAKER_01: Because we can go to our scripture and show them exactly where we are to consider others better than ourselves, right?
SPEAKER_01: Paul's teaching.
SPEAKER_01: Um, we can show them exactly where you know Jesus prays that we be one in love and unity.
SPEAKER_01: We can show them all of these passages where we're not allowed to be hateful.
SPEAKER_01: Love your enemies, do good to those who persecute you.
SPEAKER_01: If you do good to those who do good to you, what good is that?
SPEAKER_01: I mean, he says exactly that.
SPEAKER_01: And in our culture, it's because tolerance is becoming doing good to those who only do good to you, or think like you, or act like you.
SPEAKER_01: Christians are commanded to love those who do not think like us, do not act like us, and do not share our values.
SPEAKER_01: So, where are you getting this from?
SPEAKER_01: That's I would want to source that and make the person think through that because it it has happened, yes, but where is this person getting it?
SPEAKER_01: From was that helpful to you?
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: And then we have a gentleman up here, and this I think is our last one.
SPEAKER_01: Okay.
SPEAKER_01: So how do you recognize yourself when you get when the diff the feelings are rising up, that defensiveness or anger or whatever it is?
SPEAKER_01: And so how do you deal with that in yourself?
SPEAKER_01: But then also how do you recognize it in others and help them to see that it's rising up in them?
SPEAKER_01: All right.
SPEAKER_01: So the first one in myself, I still, when somebody calls me um uh a moron, an ignorant backwoods, um, whatever, there's a whole bunch of colorful ad homnums they use with me.
SPEAKER_01: My heart rate still goes up because they're attacking me, right?
SPEAKER_01: I'm human.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not a robot.
SPEAKER_01: I can't just go, oh, okay, that was just a bunch of ad homnum out.
SPEAKER_01: Um I'm human, so I'll have that initial response.
SPEAKER_01: But what I do is I say, wait a second, look for the argument.
SPEAKER_01: Okay, look for the what their reasoning is, look for that.
SPEAKER_01: And that's training.
SPEAKER_01: That's that's why I say you have to practice.
SPEAKER_01: That's why I say you need a life that's invested in the disciplines.
SPEAKER_01: Because when you spend time with God, you start to realize that these little attacks start looking like you're back in fifth grade and you're getting called names on the playground because you spent your whole day or at least part of your day soaking in the creator of the universe.
SPEAKER_01: So when one of these little humans over here starts calling you names or attacking you, it doesn't look that big after you've spent time with the being that can create stars, right?
SPEAKER_01: So that's how I deal with it.
SPEAKER_01: Um, it's it's sort of a practice and discipline.
SPEAKER_01: Um, but it's a lot of practice, I'll tell you that.
SPEAKER_01: The other person, we can't really say, look at you, you're getting all upset, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because they're gonna I made the mistake when I was young and apologetics.
SPEAKER_01: I went onto a site, um, I went onto an ex-Christian website, and I read the arguments that were going on there, and it was a lot of emotional arguments.
SPEAKER_01: Christians treated them badly, Christians are really mean, they're hateful, they won't answer their questions.
SPEAKER_01: So I made the comment like, okay, I came on here expecting to find like some arguments I could look at against Christianity as for why you left it.
SPEAKER_01: But all I'm seeing is like this is kind of like a self-help, like we're just emoting here.
SPEAKER_01: And wow, that was pretty arrogant on my part.
SPEAKER_01: But I was immediately attacked.
SPEAKER_01: What are you doing here?
SPEAKER_01: Get off of our website, you know.
SPEAKER_01: Like within 30 seconds, the webmaster is booting me off.
SPEAKER_01: Rightfully so, because I was being a jerk.
SPEAKER_01: Um, so it's very, it's very hard.
SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you what I do.
SPEAKER_01: When somebody else is getting upset, I'll say, um, hey, I hope I I didn't mean to offend you.
SPEAKER_01: I I'm not trying to um upset you.
SPEAKER_01: Uh I really, I really am trying to understand your point of view.
SPEAKER_01: Uh so if you can help me out, if you can help me, I don't think I'm understanding you.
SPEAKER_01: Remember, we got to think of others as better than ourselves.
SPEAKER_01: So please help me understand where you come from and help me understand your argument.
SPEAKER_01: If they're getting ugly, let's say you're not, they're not just normal defensiveness, right?
SPEAKER_01: If they're starting to get ugly with me and call me Jain's and and try to subvert my arguments by just, you know, trying to show that I'm uh an idiot or whatever, then I will say, all right, what's the point?
SPEAKER_01: What's your goal here in this conversation?
SPEAKER_01: What's the goal?
SPEAKER_01: What are you trying to do?
SPEAKER_01: Because I mean, I won't say this to him, but my goal is to get to truth.
SPEAKER_01: I want to see who's got truth, right?
SPEAKER_01: That's the goal.
SPEAKER_01: I want to share truth.
SPEAKER_01: And uh and I want to share that with the person in front of me.
SPEAKER_01: Most of the time when I ask that question, people will say, I'm trying to show how ignorant Christians are, or something like that.
SPEAKER_01: And I'm like, oh, okay, well, that's not a conversation I'm interested in.
SPEAKER_01: So thank you very much.
SPEAKER_01: But those are the those are the kinds of things that I I do.
SPEAKER_01: It's hard when somebody's defenses go up.
SPEAKER_01: You may, that may be it.
SPEAKER_01: You may have lost your chance.
SPEAKER_01: Um, it may be a learning experience for the next time.
SPEAKER_01: And you and that's when, folks, we got to trust the Holy Spirit, right?
SPEAKER_01: Because we don't do the saving.
SPEAKER_01: That's the act of the Holy Spirit, that's the work of the Holy Spirit.
SPEAKER_01: He saves.
SPEAKER_01: We're we're commanded to spread the light and be light and show love, demonstrate the reality of God, but hold the Holy Spirit's the one that does the work.
SPEAKER_01: Praise God for that, right?
SPEAKER_01: Yes.
SPEAKER_01: All right, so thank you so much.
SPEAKER_01: Um, I'm going to pray with you before you go.
SPEAKER_01: And if you need to get in contact with me, uh that's how you do it.
SPEAKER_01: Again, if you would like my monthly newsletter, I actually don't have pens up here.
SPEAKER_01: What was I thinking?
SPEAKER_01: I guess I was thinking you would use your finger or something and it would magically appear.
SPEAKER_01: So I think Marcy's now looking for pens.
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I'll leave these up here.
SPEAKER_01: This is the HBU one if you're interested in our apologetics degree program, which is awesome.
SPEAKER_01: Lots of great professors there.
SPEAKER_01: And then um that's my newsletter.
SPEAKER_01: So I'll leave those up here, but let me pray with you guys.
SPEAKER_01: And then, Marcy, if you do you have a few words you need.
SPEAKER_01: Oh, I'm I'm dismissing?
SPEAKER_01: All right, okay.
SPEAKER_01: All right, so let's pray.
SPEAKER_01: Lord Creator, the author of life, the giver of truth, and we worship you for who you are.
SPEAKER_01: We praise you for what you have done.
SPEAKER_01: And I thank you for all of these that have come tonight.
SPEAKER_01: Because I know, Father, just like you've shown in my life, we never receive knowledge and information without some kind of purpose.
SPEAKER_01: You intend to use this, you intend to use this class and to use these your servants to be light in this world.
SPEAKER_01: And so, Father, I pray for them.
SPEAKER_01: I pray that you would embolden them, you would remind them of who they are.
SPEAKER_01: You would remind them that you have intentionally and purposefully created them.
SPEAKER_01: They are not an accident of the cosmos, but you had them in mind.
SPEAKER_01: Father, give them strength and courage as they feel the pressures of a culture that's accepting them less and less, that they would stand firmly, naturally, and boldly on your word, just by being a Christian wherever they go.
SPEAKER_01: Father, I thank you for them.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you that they have given of their time, their most valuable and precious commodity, their time to be here to listen to your word.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for that, Father.
SPEAKER_01: I pray blessings for them, for the fact that they have given to you.
SPEAKER_01: And Father, I pray that you will use this knowledge in conversations, you will use it in their lives so that they can be a great testimony to you, Father.
SPEAKER_01: That they can show this dying world life.
SPEAKER_01: They can show them what life looks like in a world that only knows death.
SPEAKER_01: Not true life, not true goodness, not the way it was supposed to be.
SPEAKER_01: Father, use them and use them mightily.
SPEAKER_01: Everywhere they go, from the smallest task, from just going home tonight, all the way through the big things, like when they lose a friend, or when somebody's diagnosed with cancer, or when they suffer.
SPEAKER_01: Use them in everything, Father, so that life is a constant testimony.
SPEAKER_01: I thank you for tonight, for the time that you've given us.
SPEAKER_01: I thank you for the ability to come together and to worship you corporately.
SPEAKER_01: That is a gift, Father, that not every believer has had over time in history.
SPEAKER_01: So I thank you for that.
SPEAKER_01: But, Father, most of all, I thank you for what you did through Jesus Christ.
SPEAKER_01: That what you made was good, your creation was good, and you told us that.
SPEAKER_01: And then you showed us that by redeeming it.
SPEAKER_01: That when we messed up the good creation, when we chose to do what was evil, you sent your son to pay the penalty for us, to die on that cross, and then to defeat the consequence of our evil through rising from the dead.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you, Father.
SPEAKER_01: We don't know what to say in response to that.
SPEAKER_01: I'm not even sure there are words to express gratitude for that.
SPEAKER_01: But we thank you, we praise you, and we worship you for what you have done for us.
SPEAKER_01: Father, we give you all the glory, the honor, and the praise in Jesus' name.
SPEAKER_01: Amen.
SPEAKER_01: Thank you.