James' Personal Faith & Testimony

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Don't be conformed to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Hi, and welcome to Renewed Mind.
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I'm your host, Romul Ghossein, and today we have with us Dr. James White, who will be discussing with us his personal faith and testimony.
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First of all, welcome to the show, James. Great to be with you. Thank you very much. Thank you for your time. Well, it's an honor to have the opportunity to address important things.
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Yes. Now, a lot of people are quite familiar with your books, some of the debates that you've done.
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You've done well over a hundred moderated debates, also a lot of the YouTube clips which you use to get back to or respond to people who make accusations, especially about Christianity, the true
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Christianity, but I think that there wouldn't be too many people that would know about how it all started.
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Can you please share with us when it was you first became a
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Christian and why you became a Christian? Well, the Lord was gracious to me at a very young age. I was raised in a
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Christian family, and it is a privilege to have that kind of upbringing. My first memories are of sermons, church services,
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Bible teaching. One of the first things I remember possessing was my little child's
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Bible and precious possessions. And so at a very young age, I remember recognizing the need of a
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Savior. My father told me years later that he explained it to me, and I asked him, as Jesus taking my spanking for me, as the concept of substitutionary atonement, which atonement was probably a large word for someone at my age at that point.
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But I truly do believe that at that young age that the Lord was gracious to me, that I was saved at that time,
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I was united with Christ. And even over the next number of years, I remember in fourth grade getting in trouble and being sent to the principal's office because I was passing out gospel tracts on the playground.
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And so I went to the principal's office and gave him a gospel tract, too, and he said that was okay,
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I could do that, as long as I didn't force anyone to take one. And I remember thinking, I was sort of a scrawny little kid at that age, how could
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I force anyone to take anything anyways? But so, you know, there was a time in my early teen years where I think
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I was a little more conformed to the world than I should have been, not as zealous as I should have been. But in the middle of my high school years, the
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Lord really grabbed hold of my heart. I at that time was, I wanted to go into the Air Force Academy.
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I wanted to go into military service. And since my eyes weren't all that good at that point in time, I knew
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I'd have to have really good grades. And so I was very focused on my schoolwork, I was a very good student.
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And the Lord sort of got hold of me at that time in my life, and I began memorizing the Word of God, began studying it for myself.
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Not just what you would do in Sunday school, but getting out and marking the
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Bible. I remember reading through Romans in my new Schofield reference Bible, I remember at that time, and just transferring the faith from being what
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I had heard from my parents, which is precious. There's a time when that has to become mine.
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And I just was consumed with the desire to know this God, and to know the Gospel, to know the
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Bible, that was the foundation. It very much wasn't a circumstantial thing, it wasn't a tragedy, a particular event that caused you to question eternity, but it was very much learning about the faith.
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That's the desire. I recognized that if I was going to be serious as a follower of Christ, that that required more than Sunday morning,
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Sunday night, and Wednesday. That it was a daily thing, it would require everything that I had.
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In fact, I played tennis for my high school tennis team, and I drove my fellow tennis players nuts because I would not swear on the court.
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And so if I'd miss a shot, the worst I could do was, oh my word.
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And finally I remember one day the number one player on the team just stopped and threw his racket down and said, what is your word?
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He just wanted me to be like everybody else, and I realized that that just couldn't be how a
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Christian would live. And so I became very serious, began memorizing the
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Word of God. I remember one summer, I was working six to midnight. I started working very early too, and I was working six to midnight, so I had all day to myself in a quiet home.
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And I would just walk up and down the hallway of our little house, memorizing the prologue of John and things like that.
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And so that's really led eventually to my feeling that the
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Lord would not have me to go into military service, but a different kind of military service. That's right.
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A spiritual battle, yes. A spiritual battle, though at that time, to be perfectly honest with you,
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I had no idea what apologetics was. I'd never heard of it. Defense of the faith, the only thing
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I knew was... However, before we get to that, do you find that Christianity is an intelligent religion, or is it a wish -washy type of religion?
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Well, there are people who call themselves Christians that are wishy -washy. There are people who call themselves
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Christians that never engage their minds, but the question is what does the Bible teach, and what kind of Christianity does the
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Bible produce? I think the text that you use is one of the key texts.
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Is a renewing of the mind means that there is a mind that is active.
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It's just that there is a complete paradigm change that is involved in renewing the mind.
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The mind is called, we are called to worship God with all of our being. We are to love
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God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength. That's the entirety of our being. And so serious
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Christianity, I love going to 1 Peter 3 .15, because it says to sanctify or treat as holy the
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Messiah as kurios, Lord, in your hearts. If you delve into that text, what it's saying is in the innermost part of your being, which includes your mind, your intellect, there is to be a treating of the
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Messiah as kurios, as the Lord of the Old Testament, as God himself, and this is to be in your heart.
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And so it orders your priorities in such a way that if you're doing this every single day, it will result in a change in your life and behavior so that people will see that you have a hope within you.
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Because it's interesting that text says, so that you'd be ready to give an answer to everyone who asks you of the hope, not anybody you approach on the street, but anyone who asks you for the hope that's within you.
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Why would they ask you about the hope that's within you unless because of the way you've behaved, because of the way you speak, because of the way you respond to tragedy and difficulty.
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You demonstrate there's something different about you. However, a lot of people would say, well, how does faith fit into the question or the equation?
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We know through the Scripture, the substance of things hopeful, the evidence of things unseen, right?
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So how do you combine faith with using your mind to worship and know this true
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God? Because a lot of people will turn around and say things such as, look, God is asking you to commit intellectual suicide, leave your brains outside on the door, and believe me, whatever
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I say, how do you explain that to someone? It's amazing not only how many atheists and those who oppose the
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Christian faith misdefine faith, but how many Christians let them get away with it. The faith of the
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Bible always has a clear and distinct object, and that object may be beyond the human intellectual capacity to grasp in its fullness.
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For example, I cannot really fully understand how God is eternal. When you think about God existing outside the realm of time,
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I'm a time -bound creature. So the teaching is there. This is something that is difficult. It's there, but I cannot necessarily grasp that.
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And so it's not that it is against rationality or against my mind.
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It may be beyond it, but all that means is it calls for the fullness of my mind to even get to as far as I can in understanding
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God's revelation. But faith is never turning off the mind. It is accepting
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God's promises and accounting them as true, and then ordering my world in light of His promises and His truth.
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So the idea that faith is opposed to the mind, there's nothing like that to account in Scripture at all.
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And that's what you've found personally in your life. That's what you've found. To this day, now after all these years,
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I continue to have to put forth the absolute best effort that I can intellectually to continue making progress.
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You never get to take a vacation in the Christian faith. There's no retirement in the Christian faith. Can you fully comprehend the
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Bible? No. You cannot exhaust it? No. You cannot exhaust it. The more...
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I've just been preaching through the book of Hebrews, for example, because I do regular preaching at my church. And that has been one of the most challenging, difficult things
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I have ever done, not only just on a linguistic basis, historical basis, but to see the harmony and fit all the themes together.
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I don't think that any man has ever come close to plumbing the depth of God's revelation.
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I just don't think we live long enough to get to that point. Yes. And so now we've learned a little bit about how you were saved, how you became a believer.
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You said that when you did grow up, it was never a question of rebellion, but there was somewhat some apathy in your life.
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But quite quickly, God took a hold of your life and said, you've got to get serious. And so that's when you started to engage in Scripture and you started to learn more and delve deeper into the
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Scriptures. And you were quite surprised as to how much knowledge is in there.
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I mean, if He's a great God and if He created everything, then really there's quite a lot of wisdom there.
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And it is beyond us. It really is. But can we now move on to the ministry, Alpha and Omega Ministries?
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What's that about? Where's the name from? I love whenever I travel outside the United States, where the name becomes
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Omega and Zeds and all those other things that you have when you leave the
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United States. But Alpha and Omega Ministries is a Christian apologetics organization, which means that we give a reasoned defense to the
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Christian faith. That does not mean we give a rationalistic defense, but we give a consistent reasoned biblical defense to the
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Christian faith. Not to every possible objection, because I'm concerned about some apologists that really do try to address every subject there is to address.
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I just don't know that in this life you can learn that much to do so in a meaningful fashion. But initially, the first thing that we were focused upon, because I was married at a very young age,
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I was 19 and my wife was 18, was Mormonism. Two Mormon missionaries came by and visited my sister -in -law.
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She asked me to come over and talk to them. Elders Reed and Reese, they have no idea what they started. I mean, they have no idea what they started.
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But we met on a Monday and a Thursday. Between those two meetings, I read two or three books on Mormonism, and I was challenged at the end of that time.
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Now ironically, the message I left them with is still the message I would leave with a Mormon missionary to this day.
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And that was, I looked at them and said, I have a God who does not change, and someday you'll need to know
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Him, and I hope you'd be willing to come see me at that time when you do. And though I know a thousand times more about Mormonism today than I did then, that's still the message
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I would leave. So I was very thankful for that opportunity, but it challenged me. And I went and I read everything that I could find from Christians on the subject of Mormonism.
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There's some great stuff out there. There's also some not -so -great stuff out there. You have to be discerning. And I kept seeing certain resources cited, and no one walked up to me and said, this is how you do apologetics.
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There wasn't anybody that was someone I could follow, a guru or something that could train me. You didn't go to school and was trained up in these things?
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No, even though at that time I was in Bible college, but apologetics, no, that's just not really something that was discussed.
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And so it just struck me, and I'm so thankful to the Lord that at this young age it struck me.
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I saw these sources, and I said, you know what? I need to read what these people are saying directly.
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I can't just read what Christians are saying. I need to go to the original sources. And if anything has marked
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Alpha and Omega Ministries and what I've done over the past almost 30 years now, it has been that we try to show respect for the people we are talking to by going to their sources, by accurately representing even the people we disagree with.
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I think as Christians this is vital. If we follow Him who is the truth, then we need to be preeminently truthful in our representation of others.
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And when I said there are some books out there that aren't so good, sometimes people get carried away and they may have what they think is a positive reason for doing so, but sometimes there's misrepresentations of falsehoods, and people might say, well, it's a misrepresentation of falsehood.
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Who cares? Look, you have to remember, I don't care what religious group you're dealing with, there are very intelligent people involved in any of these religious groups.
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And if you go for the lowest common denominator, if you go for the cheap argumentation that might get you by with most people, once you run into that really sharp person, now you're in trouble.
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Now you're in danger. And as I started studying Mormonism, I just started gathering all these books up and reading all this material.
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And my poor dear wife, she has the patience of Job, she really does.
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We're making nothing, at 19 years of age, who makes lots of money?
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And I'm a college student, so I've got costs and stuff, and I'm coming home with these books and one day
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I came home on my motorcycle and I had what's called the Journal of Discourses.
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It's the Journal of Discourses. It's 26 volumes plus index that you just have to have to study
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Mormonism's history. And it costs like $69 .99, which back then was $69 .99,
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that was like a third of our entire income for two weeks or something like that. But she's always been patient, and I'm very thankful for her patience over all these years.
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But I just dove into it, and for a while I sort of felt lost because there's so much information. But as we started going and witnessing to Mormons, it was that interaction, it was listening to them, interacting with them, that not only helped me understand their theology, but really started to help me to understand why it was that I needed to be focused upon the central things in the
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Christian faith as well. And why we believe what we believe, essentially. Because a lot of the times we do take things for granted, and our knowledge of something might be quite shallow, and it's not really until you get an opposing view do you realize how much more there is to be able to learn about that subject.
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Now many of our viewers, really this is perhaps the first time they hear about Christianity.
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This is the first time they hear about Christ, faith, being able to use your mind that God wants us to love
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Him with all our heart and soul and mind and strength. For someone that does not know anything about God, they don't know anything about the
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Bible, what would you say to them? Well, you know, the reality is the
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Bible says that we all do know about the God that exists. But it's what we're doing with that knowledge that is the issue.
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That is, Paul said in Romans chapter 1 that all people know that the true God exists and we should be thankful to Him and that we should honor
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Him. But we engage in activities to try to put that to the side, to try to help us to, in essence, hide ourselves from the responsibilities we have before God.
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And so I think, honestly, as we look around the world, as we look inside our own bodies and see the complexity, as we look outside and see life and the complexity of life, as we look at the beauty of creation, we know
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God exists. The question is, are we in relationship with Him? And what about that thing called sin?
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And when someone says, oh, I don't believe in sin, yeah, well, watch even the smallest child when they try to take someone else's possession and then they look around, where did that come from?
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No one had to teach them to do that. That's the image of God within us. That's that consciousness that God has placed within us.
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How do we deal with that? How do we bring about peace between ourselves and the
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Holy God? That's really what the entire Christian message is all about, is what God has done, not what we do, but what
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God has done to bring about peace with Himself. And it's all focused in this one man,
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Jesus Christ, and the fact that He lived, the fact that He taught, the fact that He raised the dead, the fact that He gave
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His own life and rose again on the third day and will return to judge the living and the dead.
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I truly believe that everything I do 2 ,000 years later needs to be done in light of what
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He accomplished in His life and in His death, burial, and resurrection. Is He worth spending your life on?
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I mean, this is what you've been doing through your ministry. Is He worth doing that? If He was not who
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I believe Him to be, He couldn't be. It'd be a waste of time. If He was the
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Jesus that most people are comfortable with, there wouldn't be any reason for Christianity. What do you mean, comfortable with?
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People are comfortable with a Jesus in a manger, a little baby, or the
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Jesus who's holding the little lamb. But the
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Jesus of the Bible is scary in the sense that He's so much more than that.
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We're really saying the Creator Himself entered into His own creation. That's an amazing thing to say.
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He is King of kings and Lord of lords, Creator of all things. Every breath I take, every beat of my heart comes from His hand.
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I can't be neutral about Him. If He is truly the only way to peace with God, then the call of the gospel, yes, it is a loving invitation, but it is also a divine command.
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Those have to be kept together. Because of that, He is worthy of every person's life.
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It is a high calling to be called a servant of Jesus Christ, to follow Him, to give your life in service to Him.
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It's the highest calling you can have. But He has to be who the Bible says He really was for that to make any sense.
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If He was just an itinerant preacher from Galilee and nothing more, how could He have relevance to my life today?
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He may have said some good things, how to treat your neighbor or something like that, but if He wasn't who the Bible says
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He was, there's no reason to live one's life in that way. So then I would ask, what makes you a Christian? Wearing a crucifix, going to a church, my father's a pastor,
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I know a minister. What makes me a Christian? You use the word relationship. What do you mean by that?
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Well, you know, when you talk about what it means to be a Christian, it's not merely something you say with your mouth.
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Yes, there is a confession of faith in Christ, but to truly be a Christian is to live your life in such a way that you are, first of all, following Christ.
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He is Lord of your life. That is, if Christ says, this is the way of life, this is the way of light, you want to follow
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Him. You don't say, well, you know, I want to be a Christian, but I want to live my life my way and I really don't care what
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Christ would have me do. That's not the attitude of a Christian. Why would I follow Him? Because I recognize that He is the source of eternal life.
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Because He has given Himself in my place, He's taken the wrath of God due to my sin upon Himself, then
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I've been bought with a price and therefore I'm no longer my own. I do not have right over my own life.
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He is Lord. He is King. That's at least a concept that still has some meaning in your society, it doesn't have any in ours because we kicked
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Him out a long time ago, but it's a biblical concept. There is a right that He has over my life and therefore
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I desire, because He changes my heart, to follow after Him. And of course I also recognize that now
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He's the source of life. Every time I walk away from Him, I'm walking away from life. What silliness there is in that, yet how often
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I do it. So a Christian is a person, is not a person who's wearing something or who did something way in the past that has no impact upon my life today.
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A Christian, in fact it's interesting if I could use it in this way, in the Gospel of John, in the original language when
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John talks about a person who believes in Jesus, he uses a form of language that it's present tense.
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It's ongoing. It's not, I did this once and now I just go and live my life.
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There is an ongoing, constantly believing, looking to Jesus as the source of my life, the source of my strength.
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And the only way that I can do that is because He's changed me. If that was up to me to do all the time,
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I would fail. I would never make it. But because God is about changing my life and saving a people for His own glory, it's
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God's work within my heart that accomplishes all of that. And that's what He does. He is in the business of changing lives and changing people.
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He is a wonderful God. And if you have not experienced or been subjected to this
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God that we're discussing with you, we hope and we pray that you would open up the Scriptures.
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If you want to learn about who this God is, there is no better source than delving in the
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Book of Life, the manual which God has left for every single person. Would you say that, a lot of times when you talk to people about Christianity, you'll say, well,
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I don't like to go to this church or that church or whatever. But that's not really what we're talking about essentially.
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It's really going to His book. Would you say that that is the source, the only source of understanding who
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God is? Well, Jesus Himself said, Sanctify them in thy truth, thy word is truth. And so if you look at Jesus and how
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Jesus honored the Scriptures and saw the Scriptures as God speaking, He even said to men, have you not read what
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God spoke to you saying? Not have you not heard what God spoke, it's have you not read.
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Normally you'd say, have you not read what was written to you? But it was, have you not read what God spoke to you?
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For Jesus, for the Apostle Paul, Scriptures are God speaking. And so we can, if Jesus could trust them and He rose from the dead, then we can trust them.
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And so that is the source that we go to. And when we read what the Scriptures teach us, they introduce us to this
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Jesus who is the source of all of our life. Yes. And there's so much there, isn't there?
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I mean, you've been studying this for a number of decades and you haven't been able to exhaust the
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Scriptures. Even in the original languages. No. Yes. No. Even in the original. And so if you have a taste, and we hope that we've been able to create somewhat a taste.
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And that's what the Scriptures say, I believe the psalmist says, taste and see that the Lord is good.
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And it's not until we truly taste will we see that He is good.
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And He is a wonderful God. So thank you very, once again, for your time.
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Thank you for being able to come and share some of your insights with us. It's great to be with you. It's always an honor to talk about the
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Lord Jesus. To our viewers, we hope and pray that you've been able to find this episode challenging and also engaging.
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We just want you to really open yourself up to the reality of Jesus. He is a real person.
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He is a person that exists. And He is someone who is the judge over your life. If you have not considered this before, there will come a time where even if you don't have time for Him now, you will meet
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Him. And you will have to answer to Him according to what He taught in the
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Bible. Please stay tuned for the very next episode of Renewed Mind. And until then, may