- 00:07
- In your, how many years of apologetics are you dealing with Muslims?
- 00:13
- And then I want to ask you, there's a lot of youngsters that are drawn to apologetics because it's a fight.
- 00:20
- And you've mentioned earlier that it's not in everybody's temperament, in actual fact, to effectively participate in debates.
- 00:27
- That's true. Do you want to comment a little bit to that and also speak to the youngsters that are coming up? And let me just say, they never had a theological interest in the
- 00:34
- Bible, but now predominantly it's to find arguments in the text. So they go to the scriptures. They basically have the temperament of,
- 00:41
- I need to find an answer for everything. Even in the devotion and didactic, it's all about picking the right responses and having the right say.
- 00:50
- What would you say to youngsters like that? Because we've got quite a few, to be very honest with you. Yeah, yeah, we do. So Islam has been the last major subject that I've addressed.
- 01:02
- My first debate was in 1990, so we're coming up on 30 years as far as the debates go.
- 01:13
- And the ministry had begun about seven years prior to that, so we're coming up on 40 years of ministry.
- 01:18
- But honestly, not everyone is called to do this kind of work.
- 01:25
- And I normally tell people who come up to me after a debate and go, I want to get into apologetics.
- 01:31
- I say, if there's anything else you can do, you need to do it. Because you don't see all the preparation.
- 01:39
- You don't see all the other stuff that goes into it. And not everyone is. For me, when
- 01:45
- I'm attacked, I just become all the more calm. I figure the person's losing the debate right now by the way they're behaving.
- 01:52
- So a lot of people do not react that way and respond that way.
- 01:58
- They just go toe to toe. And so those are some of the things you have to look at yourself.
- 02:05
- You may not even be able to honestly analyze yourself. You might want to ask a mature, older person to analyze you as to whether you have the gifts to be able to engage in that type of stuff.
- 02:17
- But I was talking to someone after a debate just last week, and they were struggling with some of these issues.
- 02:24
- And what I said was, for me, the greatest thing that has helped me keep my balance over the years has been the fact that I've always been a churchman.
- 02:34
- I've always been involved with the church. I've been preaching and teaching, and you can't preach every sermon as a primer on apologetics.
- 02:46
- You have to deal with the word and what it really says, and not everything that the word says is about apologetics.
- 02:52
- And so being involved with the church, teaching wide varieties of different types of people has kept me grounded.
- 03:01
- And I really think for apologists, that's vitally important. Sadly, apologists are not well known for being churchmen.
- 03:09
- They tend to be lone wolves, off on their own, doing their own thing. I think that's massively destructive to them.
- 03:16
- I can think of lots of former apologists that are atheists today because they burned out and they didn't have the right motivations.
- 03:25
- And so, yeah, being in the church is, I think, the most important thing, and being involved in doing ministry that isn't involving yelling and screaming at somebody, or always answering a question, or always answering an objection.
