I Object! - [Proverbs 26:4-5]

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Well, let's open up in prayer. Father, we praise you this morning for the beauty and splendor of your creation, for all that surrounds us, for all that you have provided for us to enjoy.
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Lord, we thank you, especially this morning, for your sure word, for the revelation that it is of you and how you have caused us, your children, to delight in learning more about you.
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Father, I pray that you would bless our time this morning in Christ's name, amen. Well, I would like to invite you to open up your
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Bibles to Proverbs 26. Proverbs 26, and we're gonna look at verses four and five and what we're gonna do this morning, and I hope this will be a time of interactivity, of exchange, but I wanted to begin by looking at this couple of verses here, because for me, at least, when you first read this, and depending on the version you have, it can be either more or less confusing, but it's an interesting passage of scripture, and basically, the application is what
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I wanna look at this morning, but I wanna look at this passage and talk about it,
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Proverbs 26, verses four and five. Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you will also be like him.
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Answer a fool as his folly deserves, that he not be wise in his own eyes.
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So don't answer a fool, answer a fool. Are you confused?
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Does this seem like a contradiction? What are we supposed to do? Stop that man, don't stop him.
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One commentator says this, the admonitions seem contradictory, but when taken naturally, they reinforce one another.
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Initially, the exhortation, the command, forbids responding to a fool in kind, right?
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Do not answer a fool according to his folly. If you become like the fool, or if you argue with him at his own level, you are no better than the fool.
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The following adage, however, warns us to deal with the fool's folly, to rebut it, so that you can overcome his false sense of self -worth.
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The phrase wise in his own eyes means that the fool has a wrong view of himself.
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By dealing with his foolishness, you can cut this short. So here's the point, and the point of application for us this morning.
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We don't want to engage an unbeliever, and that's what a fool is.
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Fool is not someone who's stupid. They're someone who is holding down the truth in unrighteousness, as Romans one would say, someone who says, there is no
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God. That's the fool. This is a moral problem, not a problem of intelligence.
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That's Psalm 14, the fool said, there is no God. When we try to disprove his presupposition, what is a presupposition?
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It's where you start the argument from. It's your point of reference. It is your worldview, your paradigm, that which is foundational to how you see everything else.
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I hope that's clear. So when we're trying to disprove that, when we're trying to shatter, as it were, their worldview, what's going to happen?
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Resistance, they are going to object. Now, what do you suppose the most common, if we say, wait a minute, that's foolishness, and we bring the truth to bear, what are they gonna say?
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What is the most common response that you will ever hear when you say, you know what? Okay, exactly.
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Well, that's your truth. That's your opinion. I'm glad that works for you. Now, what's the underlying presupposition there?
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In other words, if somebody says, that's your truth, truth is relative, and I've said on many occasions,
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I always, that just boggles my mind because how many people are there in the world? 6 .2573
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billion, however many there are. That was one continuous number, in case you were wondering, and for purposes of the tape.
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If there are all that number of people in the world and everybody has their own truth, and those truths are contradictory, do we have a problem?
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Yeah, we have chaos. But getting back to this challenging worldview,
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Cornelius Van Til, who was quite a thinker and theologian when it came to apologetics, interacting with unbelievers, giving them the gospel, giving them a reason for the hope that is within us.
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He said this, I would not talk endlessly about facts without ever challenging the non -believers philosophy of facts.
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In other words, and here's the point, if we're going to answer, which is what we don't wanna do, but it's easy to do, get into answering a fool according to his folly.
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He says something that is outright ridiculous, and how do we know something is ridiculous? It's contrary to scripture, therefore it is outrageous, it's foolish, and what we wanna do is, in every situation, push them back to what?
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Push them back to scripture, and we do that by saying, and here's an example, someone says, you know,
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I don't believe in God. Well, there are two ways to go about that.
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Number one is you can point out what the Bible says, you know, the earth is the Lord's and all it contains,
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Psalm 24, one. There are many things that you can say to them, but you can also say something like this, how do you know that?
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How do you know God doesn't exist? What's the answer to that? From them, how do they know
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God doesn't exist? Yeah, my philosophy teacher in college told me that, or I've never seen
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God, or, you know, there's no evidence to support the existence of God, however they wanna put it.
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And I'm gonna get to that, how could there be a Holocaust or Rwanda, you know, horrible things that happen in the world?
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And one commentator, Lane, says this, we now see the appropriate way to conduct a discussion with a fool, with someone who says there is no
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God. The apparent contradiction shows what a difficult and delicate matter this is. We have to avoid making ourselves look as foolish as him without coming to grief by letting him think he is really a wise guy, that's his word, not mine.
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So there is a way not to answer and a way to answer. Now, what would be a good example of a way not to answer?
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What kind of foolish statement, what sort of things do people say and we just kind of, we don't necessarily rebut it, we just engage in a conversation with them about it?
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Can you think of one? Okay, good.
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So they say, I think, I feel, and you know what? And then we start either validating that feeling, that opinion, or we start engaging with that feeling or opinion.
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We are then kind of in the mud with them, answering a fool according to his folly.
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And to argue, to allow him to, or to get into, onto the same platform with him, to stand there with him and to say, you know what?
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Your worldview may or may not be valid, but let's talk about it, is to actually answer a fool according to his folly and to really kind of argue at his level.
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Now, what does his folly deserve? What does the folly, the foolishness of a fool deserve?
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Louis, that's right.
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So Louis was saying, you know, what do we do? We go back to the Bible every single time, starting with Genesis.
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You know, in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. How do I know there's a Bible? You know, and I've said this on many occasions.
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If we go to make an existential case from the
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Bible for the existence of God, and we search the scriptures looking for the proof that God exists from the
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Bible, in other words, Paul, Peter, Moses, somebody to write, God exists, and here is the evidence of it.
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Well, the main evidence we would have is what? Creation.
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We would know that from Romans 1. Paul says, you know, what was evident from the beginning is evident by what's in creation.
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We also know that God exists because of our conscience, other things like that, but the Bible never says,
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I'm going to prove to you that God exists. It just presumes it. Moses doesn't write, you know, let me tell you about God and where he came from, and because he didn't come from anywhere, he always has been, he always is,
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I'll use the correct verb there. We want to reason with him, as Lewis said, from the
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Bible. And as Pastor Mike has said many times, you know, it's one note, but what else do we have?
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What are we going to do? You know, I will usher forth my faculties against your faculties, and we will argue into the dirt.
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Now, there are three levels of evidence that we can provide, and, you know, you'll say, well, evidence,
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I thought you didn't believe in evidence. I don't. Let me give you my evidence. Evidence number one, evidence of Scripture.
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In 1 Corinthians 15, in fact, why don't we turn to 1 Corinthians 15. 1
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Corinthians 15, verses three and four. First, the evidence of Scripture, and you've heard this on many occasions, but listen to it in a slightly different way this morning.
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For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins according to the
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Scriptures, and that he was buried, and that he was raised on the third day according to the
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Scriptures. So, what's the key here? Obviously, I told you, it's the evidence of Scriptures, and what is it, or evidence of Scripture, what does it say here?
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He died for our sins according to the Scriptures. He was buried, he was raised on the third day according to the
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Scriptures. So, it's not our opinion that we're presenting, it is
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Scripture. It is the evidence of God, it is the evidence that he has provided, it is the testimony of God.
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It's a historical fact. Christ died for our sins.
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He gave up his life. He was like a lamb led to the slaughter.
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He was buried and raised on the third day according to the Scriptures. Secondly, we have the evidence of the external world.
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Again, 1 Corinthians 15, verses five to seven. And then he appeared to Cephas, that's how we say it,
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I think it should be Cephas, but Cephas, then to, who's Cephas? Peter.
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Then to the 12. After that, he appeared to more than 500 brethren at one time, most of them remain until now, but some have fallen asleep.
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Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. What's Paul's point here? There are witnesses,
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I mean, think about this in terms of a trial. If we were trying to prove the existence of Christianity or the truth of it, what will we say?
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We could go to this passage right here, and what have we already seen? We've seen historical evidence, we've seen actually what we would call basically scientific evidence.
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Look, Jesus died, was buried and raised on the third day.
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That's pretty good evidence. And then we have more than 500 witnesses that he was resurrected from the dead.
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That's pretty good evidence. I mean, imagine sitting in a trial, you're on the jury, and it's a murder trial, and they have all the evidence about how the murder was committed and everything else, and then they bring forth 500 eyewitnesses.
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That would be pretty convicting. You go, enough, after the first, what, 230, you're done.
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The judge would be taking a nap. So we have the evidence of Scripture, the evidence of the external word, or external world, and then finally we have the evidence of personal experience.
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First Corinthians 15, verse eight. And last of all, when he's talking about Jesus appearing after the resurrection, he says, last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared to me also.
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So we have the historical record of how he was raised from the dead.
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We have the historical record about how he appeared to more than 500 eyewitnesses. And then we have Paul's personal testimony where he says, look, all those people saw him, and I did too.
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That's pretty good evidence. You know, I love the example of Paul, because there are those who say that Christianity is something that you are brainwashed to believe.
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Paul was not brainwashed to believe Christianity. In fact, he was quite the opposite. He didn't want anything to do with it.
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He persecuted the church tirelessly until Christ appealed to his inner reasoning.
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No, he appeared to him on the road to Emmaus, or road to Damascus, thank you, wrong road.
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Took a left when I should have made a right. But it happens if you take too many
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Dunkin' Donuts turns. Anyway, road to Damascus, appeared to him, and he said what?
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Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me, the church? All merged into one person, but the point is he appeared to Paul personally.
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So again, we have all this evidence, and we can bring it forth from scripture.
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Now, what are some examples of objections against the existence of God, which is, by the way, foolishness, right?
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Psalm 14, the fool has said in his heart, there is no God. Talked about that a few weeks ago. One evidence is the problem of evil.
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Blanchard says this in his book, Does God Believe in Atheists? Here are the arguments that atheists will often make.
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Evil and suffering exist in the world. Would you agree or disagree with that?
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True. Number two, if God were omnipotent, all powerful, he would be able to prevent these things.
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It's true. Number three, if God were wholly good,
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W -H -O -L -L -Y, good, specifically, if he were a God of love, he would want to prevent these things from happening, evil and suffering.
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True or false? You know,
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I would even give him that. If you think that all God is, is a God of love, okay?
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Number four, if there were an omnipotent and a wholly good God, then evil and suffering would have no place in the world.
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Number five, therefore, there is no such being as an omnipotent and wholly good
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God. Now, are there flaws with this?
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Well, I think I've pointed out one inadvertently. Absolutely, I would say that, you know, to say that God is love is true.
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To say that God is love and that's all God is, not true. But let's think about this.
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If God does not exist, let's take the atheist worldview for just a moment and let's just follow it to its logical conclusion.
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If God does not exist, then do we have transcendent, meaning above all objective values of good and evil?
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No, no, we don't. But, I mean, the whole position they put forth, what?
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Is that evil does exist, so how do we judge what is evil and what is not evil? What standard do we apply?
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And this is part of the essence of this. Don't answer a fool according to his folly. He says that God does not exist, and yet he says evil does exist.
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Well, there can't be that. You can't have evil and not have God. That's inherently contradiction, an inherent contradiction.
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So if we say that, and the unbeliever has said this, if the unbeliever says that evil does exist, then what's he actually saying?
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God exists. In other words, even an atheist worldview suggests or is based on the idea of God.
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He says evil exists, but he can't objectify evil, he can't quantify evil, why? Because there is no evil unless God does exist.
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There is no objective standard for right and wrong. Now, what about suffering?
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We talked about the Holocaust was mentioned. Situations, I mean, there is pain and suffering across the globe.
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Why does it exist? Okay, because man is inherently sinful.
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It's what the Bible says. You know, I have to, sometimes when you interact with people who are professing atheists, and by the way,
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I like to say, I don't always say, but professing atheists, because the
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Bible doesn't really allow for atheists, and one of the reasons I love the title,
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Does God Believe in Atheists, is because the answer is no. There are no atheists, there are just people who are,
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I'll just say what it is, they're lying every time they say it. They are holding down the truth, they are denying the truth every time they say,
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I don't believe in God, because they know God exists, they're just suppressing that truth and unrighteousness.
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But why is there suffering in the world? It's because man is sinful, and you know, why is there sin in the world? I was talking with somebody about this the other day, why is there sin in the world?
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Why is there evil in the world? Why does it exist? Charlie, it was you, wasn't it?
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Charlie said, it exists so that we'll understand that there are things opposing antithetical to God, the exact opposite of God.
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In fact, Charlie, I think, called it ungodness. Why will there always be ungodness existing, even after Christ returns, everything is judged, and sin is done away with, and cast into hell and everything else, why will there still be, there won't be sin per se, but there'll still be ungodness, there'll be this non -God existence, why?
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Because there has to be a place, we call it hell, the Bible calls it hell, for God to exhibit all of his attributes.
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The most glorious, wonderful thing that God can do is not just to exhibit his love, it is also to exhibit his wrath, his justice, every single one of his attributes to do that, to do less than that, would be wrong of God, and God always does what is right.
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Sin exists, not on accident, but sin exists that God might make manifest all of his attributes.
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Now, does this appease the unbeliever? I doubt it, I doubt it.
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Here's another objection, and basically what
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I wanna do is deal with objections, so if we have other ones at the end of class, I'd certainly welcome handling those, if we have any objections from any of you, like to handle those, but second, very frequent one is, how could a loving
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God send anyone to hell, especially those who have not heard the gospel? And you know, even believers struggle with this.
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How can God send anybody to hell? And so, you know, some have proposed, well, you know what, after you die, you don't go to hell, you just kind of cease to exist, you are annihilated.
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And then there are some cultists who say, you know what, God is so loving that he basically won't allow anybody to go to hell, there'll just be lesser degrees of heaven for you.
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But what do you say to an unbeliever who says this to you? And that's a great point, you just keep going back,
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I don't think I could say that enough, you just keep going back to the Bible, you know, God isn't love, love, love,
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God is holy, holy, holy, God is love, but that's not all God is. And what would
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I say to an unbeliever who says, you know, I can't believe in a God who would send, you know, people to hell, even people who, you know, have never heard the gospel, and I'm like, well, that's not the issue.
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You know, here's what an unbeliever tries to do. An unbeliever says, you know what, I really don't want the attention on me and my sin,
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I would rather downgrade God, I'd rather talk smack about God, I'd rather point the finger at Him, because you know what, if there is a
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God, He's not doing what's right. So, we can sit here and we can say, well, you know what, actually
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God is very loving, and He doesn't want people to go to hell, but they go to hell because they just choose not to believe, and God really can't do much about that, or I could say, you know what, the issue isn't the people who've never heard the gospel, the issue is you.
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What are you going to do? You stand before God condemned, sinful, bound for hell, you need to receive
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Christ, I need to give Him the gospel, I don't need to explain to Him, oh no, you've got it all wrong, you don't understand, yeah,
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God is wrathful, but He's only wrathful against, you know, some people. Charlie, that's right, and he said,
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Charlie said that, you know, God is the only being in the universe for whom self -glorification is not arrogance, because it is right, it is good for God to display all of His attributes, to make a show of Himself, I don't remember exactly how
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Piper says it, but I mean, His glory demands the fullest possible revelation of His attributes, it is right and good for God to display
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Himself fully, yes. That's right, and that's right, and people will be condemned for not obeying what they already know about God, and how do we know that?
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Because the Bible tells us that in Romans 1, chapter 18, chapter 18,
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Romans chapter 1, verse 18 to 20, for the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth and unrighteousness, because that which is known about God is evident within them, for God made it evident to them, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, people are not ignorant about God, they choose not to worship
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Him. They may not have heard the gospel, but it wouldn't matter if they did, they are so enthralled with worshiping the creation, with worshiping themselves, with pleasing themselves, that they choose to sin.
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Yes, Dan, that's right.
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And I was going to go back to that, but this is a fun place to go back to it.
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If you're dealing with somebody who's really sharp, ultimately what they'll say is, and what Dan was saying, we wanna drive them back to their starting point, presupposition to their worldview, and we wanna get them to admit that basically what they are saying is nothing more than their opinion.
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Okay, so again, it's that idea of 6 .5, 4, 3, 7, 2, you know, billion truths in the world.
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And, you know, because what will happen is if you're dealing with somebody really sharp, they will turn to you at one point and say, well, you know what, you keep quoting the
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Bible, what makes you believe that the Bible's truth? And I say, what's that?
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The Bible claims to be true. And so they say, well, that's circular reasoning. And so what do
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I say to them? So isn't yours, I would never say that to them.
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Steve, that's right.
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I mean, it all comes out of this. They have circular reasoning and their circular reasoning is an enclosed system.
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There's no outside air. I mean, it is all about them and, you know, their mental faculties.
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And our, in other words, is subjective. And that's why we can have 6 .2, 4, 3, 7, 2, billion truths because everybody has their own opinion.
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I don't believe, I do not believe what is my opinion. I believe what
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God has said. And so the difference is that I may not even, there may be some things, well, let me back up here a little bit.
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I believe everything in the Bible. Some things might be more difficult for me to understand than others, but I believe what the
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Bible says. So when I go to an unbeliever and I say, this is the truth and here it is in the
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Bible, I don't have to wonder. I don't have to have my own opinion. My own opinions are immaterial.
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And when I say, you know, I believe this because then it's my opinion. Well, I have just done what this proverb says not to do.
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I've just said, you know what? I'm going to debate opinions with you. I don't wanna debate opinions with you.
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I have objective truth. You have your subjective opinion. And I am going to use the truth like a battering ram against your opinion until you see that there is a transcendent
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God who is one day going to judge you for your foolish opinion. Charlie.
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Yeah. And you definitely want to bring about, we can discuss it in a number of ways.
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You want them to understand the bad news. You want them to understand that they violated God's law.
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You want them to understand all that. You want them to get that they're sinners and usually that's not too hard.
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Daniel, did you have something? Yeah. So how do you deal with somebody who says, well, you know, the
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Bible is okay for you, but, you know, I have objective truth. It's called the Quran or the
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Book of Mormon or church teaching and tradition or fill in the blank.
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How do you handle that sort of thing? Peggy. Well, and I think that's right.
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We constantly want to go back and give them the Bible because, you know, for example, I remember, and I've mentioned this guy a few times, there was a gentleman
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I work with who said he was a born again Christian, started meeting with Mormon missionaries. And this is why
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I always kind of, when people say they're going to have the missionaries over, I kind of cringe a little bit, but he converted to Mormonism and then he became a real zealous Mormon.
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I mean, he was running all over the place at work, you know, trying to get people to be Mormons and, you know,
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God and his providence put him in the kitchen, which was the one place in the entire facility that was basically filled with Christians and they eventually beat him down.
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Not physically, but, and he left the Mormon church, but I remember being out in the gym with him one day and he looked at me knowing that I was a former
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Mormon. And he says, you know, Steve, isn't it great that we have a prophet, you know, who talks to God and, you know, does all this stuff for us.
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And I just looked at him and I said, isn't it great that we have a
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God who has provided us his word so that we can know him and so that we can know what is objective and true and right and his word never changes.
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And, you know, he didn't respond to it. I mean, there's a time and a place for everything. So, I mean, what we want to do is present the truth and we can't get into, well, because I remember asking him later, you know,
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I said, would it make any difference to you if I could show you that, you know, Joseph Smith received the revelation about plural marriage after he had already taken his second wife?
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Would it make any difference to you? I mean, I just kind of went through this whole list of, you know, problems. And he said, no, none of those things would matter to me.
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And I'm going, I know that. And he said, well, none of them would matter because I had a burning in my bosom.
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And, you know, I mean, there are subjective things that you just can't argue with. You can't argue with irrationality.
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You have to present the truth. That's true.
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Well, that's true.
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And I mean, always, that really is a key point, getting them to grasp that there is ultimately only one truth.
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Only one of us can be right. We can't be, you know, all be right. Right, right.
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No, it's not the same God at all. And I'm gonna make mention of that a little bit later this morning in the regular service.
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But here's another objection. If God would show himself to me,
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I would believe in him. Pat says, the
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Pharisees saw Jesus healing blind people and they didn't believe in him. Right? I mean,
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I have a list of verses here. You know, if you basically, if you walk all through John 6 and 7,
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I mean, even John 7, 5, for even his brothers were believing in him.
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No, not even his brothers were believing in him. And all these disciples, all the miracle of the feeding of the multitudes and the fact that they saw all these signs and all this stuff, the healings.
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What do they say? This certainly is the prophet. Others were saying, this is the
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Christ. Others were saying the Christ won't come from Galilee, will he, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
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All these things. They saw the miracles and they still did not believe. Why? Because their foolish hearts were darkened,
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Alice says. That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Did you have something else back there? Yes. That's right.
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That's right. Excellent point.
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And only one rose from the dead, Buddha, still dead. Muhammad's still dead and counting.
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And it's interesting too, because Islam, Mormonism, both founded by people who said that an angel told them what to write.
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I mean, there are any number of things, but the main thing is, and I once had a Muslim, it was interesting, this guy was a debt trustee in the jail.
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And he said, he was talking about what he was going to do when he got out. And it wasn't very God honoring, to put it mildly.
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And I just said, well, I asked him for his reasoning behind that.
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And he told me, and then I said, I said, well, how does that work exactly? How can you do that?
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And so anyway, just engaging him in conversation. Eventually we got to Jesus Christ.
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And that's where you always wanna lead the conversation is to Christ. And he said, well, you know,
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Jesus never said he was God in the flesh. He never said he was the son of God.
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And I'm going, well, that's interesting. So we started going to all the places where he said he was the son of God. And well, he never said he was
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God. And then, you know, you go to John 8, John 10, where they're getting ready to kill him. Why? Because they understood that he was making himself out to be
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God. So it's always important, no matter what they say, you know, well, that's very interesting.
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I understand that you believe in the Quran, which is okay from this standpoint, because that means at least they understand that Jesus existed.
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So then it becomes, well, who is Jesus to you? How are you gonna support that? And do you know what the
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Bible says about Jesus? You can find ways, and that's part of my point here this morning. We can find ways to introduce the gospel, the truth about Christ in almost any conversation, if that is our objective.
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If that is our objective, we can do that. How about this objection?
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Christianity is irrational. It takes a leap of faith. Ever heard that one,
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Louis? Okay, and where did it come from?
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Okay, that's right. Well, and you know, to even, yeah,
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I mean, to even get back to the word irrational, is
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Christianity irrational? No. Think even
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Romans 10, 17. So faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.
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Now, what is the word of Christ? Is the word of Christ irrational, meandering, or is it objective truth?
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Is it information that we have to believe? Faith comes from hearing, and hearing by the word of Christ.
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We hear the gospel. We hear the truth about Jesus. We believe that there is information that we have to take in.
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You can't be a Christian just by saying, you know, you don't wake up never having heard the gospel and say,
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I think I want to be a Christian. That would be irrational. That would be a leap of faith, of Kierkegaardian proportions.
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Any other objections that you hear that you want to mention?
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Yes, Carol. That's right.
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I would totally agree with that, in the sense that if you can prove something, it is not faith in that, what does
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Hebrews 11 say? That faith is the evidence of things not seen.
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In other words, we can't bring forth Jesus and say, here he is.
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What we can do is present the truth from scripture, and it's the Holy Spirit who convicts, as someone else who said.
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Now, let me give you some additional evangelism pointers, kind of based on Proverbs 24, or 26, 45.
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I don't know why I want to keep saying 24, but do not argue with an unbeliever. Don't argue with him.
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Don't answer a fool according to his folly. Don't get down in the mud with him and, you know, banter back and forth about, you know,
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Muhammad or Joseph Smith or Krishna or whoever, whoever the
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God du jour is. That's God, small G. We just don't do that.
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I don't even like to get into arguments about, you know, well, you know, the Bible is filled with contradictions.
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And then, you know, you say, typically, fine, you know, show me a few, and they don't have any, but they go to the internet and look them up and they post a list.
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And then, I've told this before, but I loved it. A guy posted a list and I posted a list of answers because I searched and I found somebody who'd answered all the alleged contradictions.
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So it was just like, he goes, well, that's not fair. You looked it up. And I go, well, that's not fair. You looked it up, you know. I'm not gonna,
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I didn't waste any more time than you did. Google can be a wonderful thing. So don't argue with an unbeliever.
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Secondly, do not take rejection personally. It can be hard, especially when you're dealing with friends and family.
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We can think, it just, it hurts. I want them to believe.
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And, you know, it's not some kind of personal insult. It is an insult against the God of the universe, which is more important, but their whole life is one of rebellion and rejection of Christ.
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It's not against you. It's against God that they sin when they do these things. I would also say, just be patient with people, thinking about God's own long suffering and patience with you and pray for them.
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Pray that God would intercede on their behalf. Charlie. Yeah, we talked about suffering, but I didn't mention the idea that Christianity has been responsible for so many evil things.
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You know, we often hear about the Crusades and the Inquisition, stuff like that. I think I read somewhere that, you know, fewer people died at the
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Inquisition. Not that I'm saying the Inquisition was a good thing, but the Inquisition, by the way, was that held by Protestants?
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I don't think so. The Inquisition, I think fewer people died during the
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Inquisition than, you know, probably a typical mass on Sunday. I mean, it was not some great big bloodbath, but I don't want to defend the
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Catholic Church. And, you know, I tell people all the time, you listen, if you want to talk about the Crusades, you want to talk about the
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Inquisition, I would rightfully tell you that Christianity had nothing to do with those events.
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Zero. People who followed Christ had nothing to do with that. They might've had t -shirts on, you know, that said, we are
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Christians. Actually, I guess they probably had armor, but, you know, it just doesn't matter.
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People can say whatever they want. Now, I have a couple of questions for you. When was the last time you preached the gospel or shared the gospel with an unbeliever?
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When was the last time you did that? And the second question is, do you know the gospel well enough to preach it?
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If someone asks you, you know, if you're sitting next to somebody on a plane and they said, oh,
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I see you're reading the Bible. I guess you're a Christian. Hey, can you tell me how I can go to heaven?
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What do you do? You go, oh, you don't know, but I think I have one of Pastor Mike's business cards.
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You know, here's our church website. You can look it up. It's our job.
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Not me and Dave and Louis and Pradeep and Mike. All of us are to be out there praying for these opportunities, looking for these opportunities.
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And when we get into a situation where somebody is giving us some kind of metaphysical opinion, oh,
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I just, I love to throw that word out there. Metaphysical, meaning bigger than normally what we think about.
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A huge idea about creation, about God, about spiritual things. Challenge them on it.
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Push them back to what their worldview is. Get them to admit that their opinion, if they're not a
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Christian, their opinion is based on themselves, on their opinion, on what they would like things to be like.
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And then introduce them to the real world. Give them the Bible. Give them the truth.
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Show them who Jesus Christ is and see if the Holy Spirit won't use that to bring them to Christ, to bring them to salvation.
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Let's pray. Father, we thank you for your word.
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We, in this brief time, are just thankful for the interaction.
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Lord, would you just use your word this morning to just convict us of our need to be faithful, to preach
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Christ, Him crucified, to those we come in contact with, to not engage the unsaved at their own level.
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But to bring the truth to bear on their singular problem, which is their rejection of you. Father, would you just allow us this week to come into contact with unbelievers who need
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Christ? And would you give us the boldness and the love for them and the love for you to preach the truth?