Spiritual Transition from Etymology

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October 2, 2019

One of the most difficult things for people when witnessing is the transition from the natural to the spiritual. This is a game we created to help sharpen those skills. This is a fun game to people with adults or youth groups. To play the game, you call out a person and name something for them to transition from and they have to transition from that to either a spiritual conversation or the gospel.

00:00: Let's go. So this is the point in our live class, those who watch the
00:05: Striving for Eternity Academy live Monday nights 8 o 'clock at strivingforeternity .org.
00:11: You go to the academy, watch live, you get to give me something to transition to the gospel. This actually, tonight
00:17: I was given it a couple seconds earlier and it's actually a tougher one. But the thing is that you get to give me something you think
00:24: I just can't possibly transition to the gospel. And so tonight I have to transition from etymology.
00:33: So let me first define that since some engineers in the room here didn't know what it was.
00:38: Etymology is the origin of words, the study of the origin of words. Why is etymology important?
00:46: Well because sometimes certain words have meanings that get lost over time, they change over time.
00:53: And so we have to sometimes understand where words came from. Sometimes when we understand the etymology, the origin of a word, we understand its meaning a little bit better because some words change over time, some words changes.
01:08: Well okay, words change within generations. I mean I remember when cool meant cold, this was not even a word and some of you are going what's this?
01:20: Yeah because this was something that was like old school. You know bad is good, cat was a good thing, a dog was a good thing, sometimes it's a bad thing.
01:30: So words change their meanings. One of the things we have to do is understand the origin and the way the words change through history.
01:37: For example, let me give you a couple. The word gay, FDR was called a gay man.
01:43: Well it doesn't mean he was a homosexual but the word changed. In its original meaning gay meant happy.
01:49: He was a very happy individual. So we have a change of a word that if you read something that is before that change of the word, you're not going to understand the meaning.
02:00: You're going to think wait a minute, was FDR homosexual? No the word changed. Let me give you another, unicorn.
02:07: What is the etymology on the word unicorn? Single corn, one corn really.
02:15: It is the name pre like 1900s, 1800s, it was the name for a single horned rhinoceros.
02:24: It's changed to have the idea of a meaning of a horn that sticks out of a horse and it's not a real creature.
02:37: And this causes some people to have an issue. Why? Because some people go well wait a minute, wait a minute. We look at a unicorn and a unicorn is in the
02:45: Bible and unicorns don't exist. The Bible is full of fairy tales. Have you ever thought that? I mean have you ever thought that the
02:52: Bible is just a book of fairy tales? Well you know what when you look at what the word meant when the
02:57: King James Bible was translated, unicorn was actually a word of a real animal, a single horned rhinoceros.
03:04: So they had two types of rhinoceros, unicorns and binicorns. A binicorn was a double horned rhinoceros.
03:13: So you see sometimes we have our culture saying things about the Bible that just aren't true. You know some other things that the
03:19: Bible says that are true that many people don't want to believe is that you and I, all people, we're all sinners.
03:25: We violate God's law and it's appointed unto man once to die and then a judgment. We're going to live after death but we're going to face a judgment.
03:33: But God made a way of escape that we can escape that eternal punishment of sin.
03:40: The things we do that break God's law and that is that God himself came to earth, paid the fine that we can be set free.
03:47: We can have the righteousness of Almighty God. But what we have to do is turn from trusting our good works, turn from trusting our good nature because we don't have one and trust alone in what
03:59: God did on the cross, Jesus Christ, when he died for our sins. We turn from ourselves, turn to Christ and we can have eternal life.
04:08: That's how I would transition from the term etymology to the gospel. How would you go about doing it?