You CAN Trust the Bible

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Well, we've come to the end of our lessons on the subject of apologetics and tonight we're going to be talking about defending the Bible.
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We've talked about defending the nature and existence of God.
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We've talked about defending the person and work of Christ.
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And tonight we're going to wrap up our study with this study of defending the Bible.
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And if you have your Bibles with you, I'd like for you to turn to 2 Timothy chapter 3 and go to verse 16.
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While you do that, I just want to make a couple of comments about our previous lessons.
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On the first night, I said that we are defending the hope that is within us.
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We talked about 1 Peter and where Peter said we are to always be ready to give a defense for the hope that is within us.
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What was the message that I wanted you to get out of that and what has been the message all week? Does anybody want to take a stab at it? First night, we said it and we've said it, even Brother Eric has repeated it every time.
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Yes? For apologetics? Yes.
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You cannot defend what you don't have.
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You cannot defend what you don't have.
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Peter says that we are to defend the hope that is within us.
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And if the hope is not within us, then we can't rightly defend something we don't possess.
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And so the most important thing that I hope all of you get out of this week is the reality that the hope of the Lord Jesus Christ is actually within you.
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That you have been born again by the power of the Spirit.
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That you have been drawn by the Father to faith in the Son by the power of the Spirit of God.
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That is the hope of everyone that is here.
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And more than giving you arguments and rationale for winning debates in the atmosphere of your social lives, we're more concerned that you actually have a true and genuine faith in the Lord Jesus Christ.
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And that's the most important thing any of us could ever hope for any of you.
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Now, on the second night we talked about the existence of God.
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We talked about objections to the existence of God.
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Can anybody remember what I said about that? That it's the easiest.
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Why? As far as apologetics go, it's the easiest.
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Why? You see it all around you.
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You see it all around you.
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That's right.
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That's true.
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But what else? There was something a little bit more.
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That's true and that's not wrong.
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But there was something a little bit more than just the fact that we see it all around us.
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Yes.
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Everyone knows.
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I mean, you're right.
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But the idea of people can say, I don't believe.
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But the Bible says they know God exists.
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He says He has made Himself known to them.
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Therefore, if they say they don't believe, they are in denial.
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They are not recognizing something that is patently obvious.
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As you said, it's all around them.
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And what have we said? We've said it's not that they don't know that God exists.
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They don't want God to exist.
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And let me give you an example.
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I meant to tell this on the first night or the second night, but it got away from me.
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So I said I would talk about it tonight.
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Several years ago, a friend of mine named Eric went to the Reason Rally in Washington, D.C.
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If you don't know what that is, that is a time where a group of atheists had a rally in D.C.
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It was called the Reason Rally.
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And they were trying to picket and make demonstrations about why America should give up faith in God.
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And it was called the Reason Rally.
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Well, Eric went there with a group of people and they filmed themselves having conversations with these atheists and agnostics.
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And they asked them a simple question.
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If it could be proved to you beyond a shadow of a doubt that God exists, would you worship Him? And almost every one of them interviewed said no.
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Even if I knew God exists, I would not worship Him.
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You see, it's not about the evidence.
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It's about the heart.
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They do not want to worship God.
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It's not about not having enough evidence.
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They have enough evidence.
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They do not want to worship God.
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They say it out of their own mouths.
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Now, the second or the third night, which was last night, we talked about Jesus, the person and work of Christ.
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We talked about His resurrection as the testimony to who He was.
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We talked about C.S.
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Lewis and how C.S.
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Lewis said that Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic or the Lord.
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And we are all faced with that confrontation.
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In fact, something else C.S.
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Lewis said, I wanted to bring this up tonight as well.
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He said Christianity is either the most important thing in the world or it's not important at all.
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It cannot be halfway important.
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It can't be somewhat important.
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If Jesus is who He said He was, it's the most important thing in the world.
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If He isn't who He said He was, then it's all a lie.
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But there's no way Jesus is...
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Anybody who tells you, well, Jesus is kind of okay, kind of important.
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No, there's no medium with Christ.
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It's all or nothing.
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It's absolutely all or nothing.
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And Jesus told us that with Him, it's all or nothing.
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We've got to give up the world and follow Him.
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So tonight we're going to come to the third objection.
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And that is the objection of the Scriptures.
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And I want to tag on to what I said last night.
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I said when it comes to the argument of Lewis, the trilemma, Jesus is either a liar, a lunatic or Lord.
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Some people balk at that.
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In fact, some of you may even at some point run into somebody who says that's not a good argument.
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That Lewis is making a false dilemma with his trilemma because we don't know what Jesus said.
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Therefore, we don't know if he's a liar, a lunatic or the Lord.
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That's the argument.
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But that is not an argument against Christ.
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That's an argument against the Scriptures.
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So tonight I'm going to show you that we actually do know what Jesus said.
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And we have that written in the Holy Bible.
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So let's read the text.
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We're going to read in 2 Timothy 3, verse 16.
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This is Paul's explanation about what the Bible is.
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Many of you have probably heard this, especially if you grew up in church.
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It's a pretty famous verse.
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Paul says this about Scripture.
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He says, all Scripture is, in some of your translations say inspired.
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Some of them say breathed out.
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We'll talk about in a minute what that means.
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But it says, all Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, equipped for every good work.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I pray now that as I seek to preach this text, but also to preach the reality of the truthfulness of Scripture, I pray that You would keep me from error.
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Lord, the Scripture is infallible, but I am a fallible man.
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So I pray that You would keep me from error as I preach.
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Keep me tied to the post of Your truth.
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And Lord, may Your Holy Spirit speak through me.
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May He go out into this place.
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May the Word of God be mixed with faith.
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May the young people who believe be encouraged in their faith.
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And may those who have not yet come to faith recognize their dilemma, that they must one day face the Lord Jesus Christ.
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Lord, let us bow the knee here as we will all bow the knee there.
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In Jesus' name we pray.
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Amen.
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So tonight we're going to talk about defending the Bible.
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And we're going to answer four questions.
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Now, I didn't write these questions on the board.
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I'm not going to worry about pulling the board over here now.
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But the four questions are, number one, what does the Bible claim to be? Number two, does the Bible we possess reliably transmit the original writings? That's an important question because that's one of the biggest arguments you will face, is that the Bible that you're holding doesn't reliably transmit what was originally written.
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Number three, were the original writings reliable as historical documents? And number four, why do we believe the Bible is what it claims to be? So that's four questions.
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There's a lot in there.
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And I'm going to try not to keep us to an hour and a half.
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I promise to keep it right at an hour and twenty.
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Just kidding.
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But I am going to go a little quick.
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Number one, what does the Bible claim to be? We just read it.
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It says all scripture is breathed out by God.
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The word there is theopneustos.
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It's the Greek word.
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It's a combination of two Greek words.
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Theos, which means God, and pneuma, which means air or breath or spirit.
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And when you put those two words together, which is actually something the Apostle Paul liked to do.
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He liked to make up compound words.
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And there are several words in the Bible that only occur once, and they don't occur in any other extant Greek literature.
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And what that is, is the Apostle Paul's creative way of making up a new word.
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And this word is a sort of a made up word.
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He takes the word theos, which means God.
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He takes the word pneuma, and he puts it together with theos, and it becomes theopneustos, which means God breathed.
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Now, some of your Bibles say inspired.
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Well, that is an older English word.
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We still use the word inspire today.
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But most of us think about the word inspire like this.
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We think of like if I look at a mountain, and I say, oh, that's inspirational.
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That inspires me.
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Or if I hear a song, like when I hear the young people sing, I say, that's inspiring.
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That's not what that word meant originally.
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It meant to have something's breath.
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You've heard of someone expiring.
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When they die, that means the breath goes out of them.
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So inspire means the breath goes into them.
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And so the idea of inspiration is that God has breathed into this text, that God has spoken, and his spoken word has been brought to us in this text.
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In the book of 1 Peter, it tells us that holy men of God spoke as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit.
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That's the way I like to describe the process by which God gave us the Bible.
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God used men.
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So if anybody ever tells you the Bible was written by men, don't disagree with them.
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That's true.
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Paul wrote part of the Bible.
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David wrote part of the Bible.
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Moses wrote part of the Bible.
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Men did write the Bible.
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But these were holy men who were being carried along by the Holy Spirit.
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And the word I like to use is superintendent.
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The Holy Spirit was superintending their writing to ensure that what we received was what God intended.
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So, yes, it is the writing of David.
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But more importantly, it's the word of God written by David.
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Yes, it's the writing of Paul, but it's the word of God written by Paul.
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And when we talk about the word inspiration, we also have to take a step back and say what was inspired.
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Now, this is sort of a this is kind of seminary stuff here.
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So I don't want to I don't want to get too much where you guys get a little confused.
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I'm gonna go through this very quick.
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We talk about what was inspired.
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People will say, well, Paul was inspired to write.
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No, that's not right.
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Paul was not inspired.
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The text was inspired.
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Paul was used by God to write the text.
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But the text is God breathe, not Paul.
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That's an important reality.
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Also, the idea of what was inspired the copies or the originals.
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We would argue that the originals were inspired and the copies were providentially transmitted to us.
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So we have copies that have been providentially cared for down through the ages.
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And we have accurate representations of those copies.
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So if somebody says, well, you don't have the original Bible, all you have is a copy.
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Yes, we do.
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But we have copies that have been providentially preserved for us.
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So with that said, I want to go to the second question.
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We say, what is the Bible? It is the word of God.
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Well, how do we know that the Bible we have has been reliably transmitted to us? Over the years, the Bible has been accused of being altered, edited and corrupted.
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I remember one night I was sitting in a pizza hut back when you could actually sit in a pizza.
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I don't know if they have those eat in pizza huts anymore.
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But back then you could eat in pizza is best time ever.
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Good, good pizza and Coca-Cola.
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And it was great.
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You sit there and I was sitting across from a lady that my mom grew up with.
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She didn't go to church.
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She was not a Christian, but she decided to have a conversation with me about the Bible.
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During our conversation, she looked me in the face and she said, you know what I wish I had? I wish I had an original Bible before King James came along and took everything out.
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I did not have the strength to tell her how stupid that statement was.
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It wasn't within me to explain just how dumb.
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That is so dumb.
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That's like that's like Olympic level dumb.
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That's gold medal stupidity.
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But that is the type of thing that people will say about the Bible because they don't know.
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I remember one time we had a.
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Was that thing they do instead of Halloween? Not trunk or treat.
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Fall festival.
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That's right.
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Yeah, we sanctify everything.
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So we were having a fall festival.
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And we asked everybody not to dress in any costumes that would celebrate evil death or demonic things.
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You could come dress as Superman, right? The Superman's the best.
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You can come, but you couldn't dress as a devil or a diva.
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You couldn't dress as a devil or a diva.
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Wouldn't you know it? The night of the party.
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The night of this thing.
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We had hay bales and all kinds of stuff out there.
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Food and drink.
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Two girls from the neighborhood come.
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And they were dressed as devils.
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Had shorty shorts on with long red tails and big red ears.
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And they was devils.
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I'm sorry.
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It's the truth.
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Am I lying? If I'm lying, I'm dying.
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My wife was there.
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Because I was like, oh, what am I going to do now? They did not get the memo that they weren't supposed to dress like that.
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So anyway, I walk out to them.
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And I kind of catch them.
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And I wasn't going to tell them to go away.
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I knew these girls were from the neighborhood.
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They were lost.
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I wanted them there.
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But I wanted to share the gospel with them.
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So I said, can we sit and talk? I'll get you a drink.
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We'll sit down and talk.
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So we sat down on a bale of hay and we started talking.
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And almost immediately when I brought up the Bible with these two devils, is what is, one of them started saying, well, I can't believe the Bible.
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Because it has been changed so many times.
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It's been edited and re-edited.
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And it's just like the old telephone game.
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You know the old telephone game? Where like if I whisper something to Brock and he whispers it to you and you whisper it to her.
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And it goes all the way around the room.
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And by the time it gets back up here to Ms.
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Jolene, Jolene.
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Sorry.
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Once it gets back up to Ms.
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Jolene, it's going to be totally different than what I whispered to Brock.
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And that was her vision of what the Bible was.
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That it just sort of came about.
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And then over time it's been added to and subtracted from and plus minus and here and there.
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And that was the idea she had of the Bible.
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And I had to explain to her, as right as that may sound, it just ain't so.
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The Bible we possess today has been amazingly preserved from the original writings to the point that even Bart Ehrman, who is the leading critic of the Bible on the popular level.
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He writes books opposing what the Bible says.
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And he is a New York Times best-selling author multiple times over.
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Even he says this.
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I'm going to quote him directly.
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The New Testament is preserved in far more manuscripts than any other book from antiquity.
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There are, for example, fewer than 700 copies of Homer's Iliad, fewer than 350 copies of the plays of Euripides, and only one copy of the six books of the Annals of Tacitus.
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That is nowhere near what we have in the Bible.
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I want to show you this over here.
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I'm holding my phone because I'm recording.
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So forgive me if it looks like I'm not texting.
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I promise.
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So this is the...
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It's been up for 30 minutes.
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All right.
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So when we talk about the subject of ancient writings, you have to understand that there's different times of ancient literature.
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Okay? Because we could say, you know, I'm ancient.
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I'm over 40.
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But we start talking about 500 years ago during the Reformation.
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That's pretty old.
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We start talking about 1,000 years ago.
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That's the Middle Ages.
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That's pretty old.
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But when we start talking about ancient literature, we typically are talking about the time of Christ right around 2,000 years ago.
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And if you look up here, these are the writings that come out of that time period.
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We've got Homer's Iliad, which was written about 900 years before Christ.
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We have Plato's writings, which were about 427 to 345 years before Christ.
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Aristotle, about the same.
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Caesar, of course, writes during the time of Christ, 100 to 44 B.C.
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Tacitus and his annals, right around 56 to 120.
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Herodotus, this was 485 B.C.
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And the living history of Rome, 59 B.C.
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to A.D.
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17.
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Now, the earliest copies of these that we have, this one here, the earliest copy, 400 B.C., that's 500 years after it was written.
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That's the earliest copy we have.
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It's 500 years later.
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This one, 1,200 years later.
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This one's 1,400 years later.
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1,000, 900, 600, 400.
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Now, that means from the time it was written to the earliest copy that we have, we are looking at anywhere from 500 to 1,500 year difference.
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Now, on top of that, the amount of copies we have is ridiculously small.
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The biggest one we have is for Homer.
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Homer's Iliad, we have 643 copies.
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Sounds like a lot.
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We go down to Plato, seven.
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You've heard of the writings of Plato, right? Your school talks about Plato.
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This is a big deal.
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We have seven copies.
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And those copies are 1,200 years after it was written.
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40 copies, 10 copies, 3 copies, 75 copies, 27 copies.
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Now we get to the New Testament, and it doesn't even come close.
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The New Testament was written 2,000 years ago, between the year, I would say, 48.
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This says 50, and I think they were done being written by around 70, but we'll give it to 100 just in case I'm wrong, and I could be.
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But if they were written between 50 and 100, we have portions of those writings that go all the way back to the earliest part of the second century.
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I was going to pull it up, but I'm not going to take the time.
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We've got P52, P66, all these papyri's that actually go back to this time period.
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We have entire manuscripts that go back to this time period, and we have entire New Testaments that date into the 300s.
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Very different from these.
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And the amount of manuscripts, 5,800 Greek manuscripts, 10,000 Latin manuscripts, 9,800 Syriac.
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These are copies of the original.
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9,800 Syriac, Coptic, etc., and 36,000 patristic quotations.
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What that means is the early church fathers quoted the Bible as they were commenting on the Bible, and you can take the writings of the early church fathers and reconstruct the entire New Testament from their commentaries alone.
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So anybody who tells you that what we have does not accurately represent the original, you tell them there's a Greek word for that, and what is it? Baloney.
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Baloney, that's right.
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It's baloney.
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It's just not true.
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See, these are the facts.
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What we have is the most well-attested work of antiquity by far.
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Nothing else comes close.
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Nothing else can touch what we have.
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Not even close.
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So them two devils was wrong.
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I told them that what I said to them was because they were like, well, you don't know what the original said.
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I said, I got the original Greek in my office.
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You want me to read it to you? And she goes, you can do that? I said, yeah.
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You want to go inside and read? Well, no.
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No, because you don't want the truth.
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You want to argue.
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You don't want to know the truth.
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You want to argue.
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And you want to argue with bad arguments.
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At least if you're going to argue, bring something worth it because that telephone game stuff, that just don't work.
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It just ain't so.
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Number three.
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So we know we have something that represents accurately the originals.
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Now the next question.
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I'm almost out of breath.
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By the way, y'all may not know this.
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I have to have surgery next Tuesday.
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I have a 10 millimeter kidney stone inside my body.
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So if you're wondering why sometimes I have to stop and take a breath or my left hand is on my side while I'm teaching, it's usually because it's hurting.
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My little brother, by the way, y'all can pray about this.
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He had the exact same surgery yesterday because we both have genetic issues.
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My mom, bless her soul, gave us bad kidneys.
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And now he's in the hospital.
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He has sepsis.
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So pray for my brother.
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The surgery didn't go well and I got to have the exact same surgery in a week.
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So I'm a little concerned.
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Didn't mean to bring that up.
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Just on my heart thinking about him right now.
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All right, so let's go to number three.
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Were the original writings reliable? Because all this doesn't matter if the originals weren't true.
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Because all this is is proof about the copies.
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And we have much proof that tells us that the copies we have accurately represent the originals.
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Now, were the originals true? That question goes a little deeper because that goes to the heart of the men who wrote them.
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Many of those who wrote the Bible were writing at a time when they were not only living for what they were writing, but they were willing to die for what was being written.
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And that is one of the reasons why we can have great confidence that this is true.
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I want to give you a quote from Votie Bauckham.
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Votie Bauckham is a pastor that I like.
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You guys have probably heard of him.
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And this is what he says about the Bible.
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He says, The Bible is a reliable collection of historical documents written by eyewitnesses during the lifetime of other eyewitnesses.
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They report supernatural events that took place in the fulfillment of specific prophecies, and they claim that their writings were divine rather than human in nature.
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Now, that's a long quote, but notice what he's saying.
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He is saying this.
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He's saying the Bible wasn't just written by some dude in a cave.
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By the way, if you want that, go look at Islam, because that's what you get with the Koran.
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It wasn't just written by some really good storyteller who was good at lying to people, because that's what you get if you go to Mormonism and you read the Book of Mormon.
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It was written over 1,500 years by over 40 different authors in three different languages spanning multiple continents.
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And it has a singular message that goes from the beginning to the end that stays consistent throughout.
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It is the most amazing book in history, and it is reliable.
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In fact, I want to give you a quote.
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One of my favorite books of the Bible, I love them all, but one of my favorite is the Gospel of Luke.
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When I was doing my doctoral work in seminary, I did my dissertation on the Gospel of Luke.
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I wrote a commentary on the first four chapters of Luke.
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And so I was very interested in learning more about Luke and about the history and the historical nature of the book.
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People say, what's your favorite Gospel? Most people love John.
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I love Luke, because Luke is a history book.
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In fact, it's longer than the rest of the Gospels.
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Luke wrote more of the New Testament than anybody else, because Luke wrote Luke and Acts, and if you add up the Greek words in Luke and Acts, it's more than Paul wrote.
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Luke has more written in the New, and if he wrote Hebrews, which I actually think he did too, he's by far the highest amount written in the New Testament.
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Yes? What about Psalms? He didn't write Psalms, that was David.
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Psalms is the Old Testament.
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So David and some other men wrote the Psalms.
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I know, but you were saying that Luke wrote the most? In the New Testament.
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That was a good catch though.
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Yeah, if I said Bible, I meant to say New Testament.
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All right, so we've got the Gospel of Luke.
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Luke is a historian, and there was a man who was named William Mitchell Ramsey.
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He was an Oxford University professor, and he accepted the idea that the Bible was filled with error.
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So he set out in his lifetime to prove that it was in error.
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However, as he began to research the ancient literature on the ground in Turkey, which is what Asia Minor was called, it forced him to recognize that Acts was an accurate report written in the first century, dig after dig after dig, spanning 15 years, accumulated evidence supporting Luke's accounts, none of them detracted from him.
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Overwhelmed by his findings, William Mitchell Ramsey ended up becoming a Christian.
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When he first sought out to disprove the Bible, he ended up becoming a Christian, and this is what he says in the opening of his book.
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His book is called St.
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Paul the Traveler, and he wrote this.
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Our hypothesis is that Acts was written by a great historian.
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That's Luke.
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A writer who set himself to record the facts as they occurred.
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A strong partisan indeed, but raised above partiality by his perfect confidence that he had only to describe the facts as they occurred in order to make the truth of Christianity and the honor of the Apostle Paul apparent.
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So he says, what Luke wrote was the facts, and every time I put my shovel in the ground and kick up a new piece of archaeological evidence, it simply went ahead and proved over and over and over that what Luke said was true.
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And I'm only talking about one writer here.
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The whole Bible is that way, but Luke specifically, because he gives us more historic information about Jesus and the early church than any other writer.
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And he was 100% accurate.
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So, I want to move now to question number four.
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We have asked the questions.
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We have said, what does the Bible claim to be? It claims to be the Word of God written by the men of God.
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Is the Bible we hold reliable to the original? Yes, it is.
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Is the original reliable to history? Yes, it is.
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But now I want to ask a very, I would say, a more important question.
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The Bible makes a great claim for itself.
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It claims to be the Word of God.
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Why do we believe that it is what it claims to be? And there's all kinds of reasons why, but I want to tell you which one I think is the most important.
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The Bible itself, and I like this phrase, this actually comes from a scholar named Michael Kruger.
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He wrote some books on the canon of Scripture.
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He's one of my heroes.
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I think Michael Kruger is a genius.
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But he said this.
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He says, the Bible is self-authenticating.
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What does that mean? It means that it bears witness to itself of its authenticity.
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The very content of the Bible is proof of what it claims to be.
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John Murray said this.
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He said, if the heavens declare the glory of God, which we talked about on night two.
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He said, if the heavens declare the glory of God and therefore bear witness to the Divine Creator, the Scriptures, as God's handiwork, must also bear the imprints of His authorship.
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And it does.
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There is beauty, excellency, power, efficacy, unity, and harmony, which marks the whole of Scripture.
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As I said, 40 different authors, 1500 years, three different languages.
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You couldn't take 40 people, you couldn't take 40 Republicans and get them to agree for more than 30 minutes.
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But these were 40 people of different socioeconomic backgrounds.
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You had men who lived in palaces and men who lived on fishing boats who wrote the Bible.
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You had men who spoke high Greek and you had men who spoke very simple Greek.
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You had kings and you had shepherds.
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And all of them wrote and were used by God.
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This is why I often tell people if they're having trouble believing the Bible, just read it.
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Just read it.
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Are there going to be parts that are hard to understand? Yeah, I wouldn't recommend you starting in Leviticus or Song of Solomon.
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That might kind of throw you off a little.
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But you'll get there.
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But maybe start somewhere in the Gospel of John.
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You know what the Gospel of John is written for? You know what it says it was written for? These things have I written that you may believe in the Son of God.
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That's what it was written for.
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The Gospel of John is a gospel tract.
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Sometimes when our church is out handing out tracts, sometimes we just hand out Gospels of John, just the book.
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And say, read this and believe on the one whose name is Jesus.
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There is sheer power, beauty, and grandeur in the Scriptures.
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And that is proof that there is more than just human authors at work.
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Now I want to say one last thing.
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Some of you may question not the authenticity of the Bible, not even the source of the Bible.
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You may say, yes, the Bible was given to us by God, but I have a hard time believing that it says anything that's really relevant to me.
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In fact, one of the most difficult things I think for people and why they're more likely to pick up their iPhone than they are to pick up their Bible is because they think there's something in that iPhone that's going to be more important than what's in that Bible.
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Or that's going to be more relevant than what's in that Bible.
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How many of you ever heard of Herman Melville? What did he do? Anybody know? What did he do? What did he write? He did write Moby Dick.
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Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick.
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He also wrote a book called Redburn.
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And in that book, it was about a young man who desired to go and visit his father's hometown of Liverpool.
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And his father had given him a map of Liverpool.
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When he got to his father's homeland, he tried using the map to find his way through Liverpool, and he realized that the map was so old it had become obsolete.
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The buildings that were on the map had been torn down and replaced with other buildings.
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The street names had changed.
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And to him, the map had become irrelevant.
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Well, Herman Melville wrote that story as an analogy for the Bible because he believed that the Bible was irrelevant to us.
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He says it was written too long ago and by people too far away to have any relevance to us.
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But I want to share with you tonight something so important.
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Melville was a great author, but he was also wrong.
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The Bible's opponents say the Bible is a dead book written by dead men.
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But the Bible says it is the word of the living God.
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And it itself is living and active and sharper than any two-edged sword.
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And it never becomes irrelevant.
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One of the most frustrating things I hear from preachers is I've got to figure out how to make this Bible relevant.
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No, you don't.
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And this is for the preachers in the room.
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All we've got to do is preach the Word.
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In season and out of season.
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Preach the Word.
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Because the Bible answers questions that no one else can and no one else will.
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Your science teacher will not tell you who you really are.
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Your science teacher cannot tell you what's the reason for your existence.
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Your psychiatrist can't tell you what happens when you die.
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But the Bible can tell you all of those things.
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It can tell you who you are, what you are, and what you will face when you step out of this world and into eternity.
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Moreover, it will tell you who you will face.
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And you will face the Lord Jesus Christ.
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The Bible says every knee will bow and every tongue will confess that Jesus is Lord to the glory of God the Father.
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Every knee will bow.
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People spend fortunes finding gurus, self-help, pop psychologists to make up answers that only the Bible can answer.
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So don't think for a moment that this book is irrelevant.
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If it is what it claims to be, and it is, then it is the most important thing in the world.
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Like I said earlier, and quoting again C.S.
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Lewis, it is either the most important thing in the world or it's not important at all.
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Don't go away from here this weekend or this week thinking it's only moderately important and I'll get to it later.
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No, this is the most important thing in the world and we must face it now.
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Not one of us knows for certain that we're going to get to face it again tomorrow.
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Let us all have ears to hear and hearts to believe.
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Let's pray.
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Father, I thank You for Your Word.
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I thank You for Your truth.
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I thank You, Lord, that You have given us a Word not only that we can believe, but Lord, that we can stand upon when the world comes with its waves of objections.
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And Lord, we mustn't give up our footing.
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We mustn't give up our foundation.
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Let us stand upon the Word of God and believe on what it says.
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Lord, I pray for these young people.
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I pray, Lord, that they would recognize who they are before You.
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The Word of God tells us that we are sinners and that we need a Savior and that there is only one Savior.
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There's only one name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved and that is the name of the Lord Jesus Christ.
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So, Lord, I pray that every one of us, every one in this room, would know Christ and make Him known.
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Lord, that we would truly be able to give a defense for the hope that is within us.
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And I pray this in Jesus' name.
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Amen.