December 7, 2016 Show with Joe Carter on “How to Argue Like Jesus” AND “The NIV Lifehacks Bible”

Live from the historic parsonage of 19th century gospel minister

George Norcross in downtown Carlisle, Pennsylvania, it's Iron Sharpens Iron, a radio platform on which pastors,

Christian scholars and theologians address the burning issues facing the church and the world today.

Proverbs 27 verse 17 tells us, iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.

Matthew Henry said that in this passage, quote, we are cautioned to take heed whom we converse with and directed to have in view in conversation to make one another wiser and better.

It is our hope that this goal will be accomplished over the next hour and we hope to hear from you, the listener, with your own questions.

Now, here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon,

Cumberland County, Pennsylvania and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming.

This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron, wishing you all a happy Wednesday on this 7th day of December 2016, a day that will remain in infamy, the day that the

Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and which launched the United States having participation in World War II.

But that has nothing to do with the discussion that we're having today. Today we have for the very first time on our program

Joe Carter. I'm looking forward to this with bated breath. Joe Carter is editor at Culture 11 online magazine, senior editor for the

Gospel Coalition and a senior editor at the Acton Institute, a communication specialist for Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission for the

Southern Baptist Convention, and an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College.

He is the co -author of How to Argue Like Jesus, Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator, and the author of the

NIV Life Hacks Bible, Practical Tools for Successful Spiritual Habits.

Those two books are actually our topics for today on Iron Sharpens Iron, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you for the very first time to Iron Sharpens Iron, Joe Carter.

Well, thanks for having me on, Chris. And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question for Joe, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail dot com, chrisarnson at gmail dot com.

And before we even go into the subject at hand, tell us exactly what you do as a senior editor, well actually you're an editor for the

Gospel Coalition and a senior editor at the Acton Institute. Tell us about your role as an editor for the

Gospel Coalition. At the Gospel Coalition, I write two articles a week on our commission, several others, mostly focused on current events and how they relate to presenting the gospel in American context.

And tell us about the Acton Institute, where you're a senior editor. Is that named after Lord Acton, who famously said, power tends to corrupt, but absolute power corrupts absolutely?

That's right. At the Acton Institute, we focus on issues of personal liberty and economics and filter it through a

Christian worldview so that we kind of present economics and liberty from a

Christian perspective and try to promote that within the American government. Great.

And well, you're also a communications specialist for ethics and religious liberty commission for the

Southern Baptist Convention. Tell us something specifically about that. We work a lot on promoting ethics, not only within the

Southern Baptist Convention, but also throughout evangelicalism and promoting broader American culture. We try to promote ethical issues, religious liberty, promotion of religious liberty.

And my role there is I do a lot of writing for them, do some editing, and just kind of whatever needs to be done.

Great. And last but not least, you're an adjunct professor of journalism at Patrick Henry College. Is that the same

Patrick Henry College that is in Lynchburg, Virginia? It's in Personville, Virginia.

Did it start in Lynchburg, Virginia? No, it's always been in Personville.

I think you may be thinking of Liberty University. No, no, no. Well, let me give you an idea of where I'm coming from.

When I was in my early 20s, and I was a brand new Christian, I was dating a girl who was a graduate of Liberty University.

She was my very first Christian girlfriend, and she was a school teacher at Jerry Falwell's church where he pastored,

Thomas Road Baptist Church. And there was a professor there who took me -

I can't remember his name, but he took me on a tour of the building that he envisioned becoming

Patrick Henry College. And then I lost touch with him, and I don't know if it's the same college, or if they moved, or if they never wound up purchasing that building in Lynchburg, but maybe there's no connection.

But I clearly remember it being called Patrick Henry College. It could be, because I think they got the idea in the 80s.

Yes, that's when I was dating this young lady, my first Christian girlfriend.

Actually, they didn't launch the school until 2000, so it's only been around about 16 years now. Yeah, that's why

I said this was just a vision that this professor and some of his colleagues had. So that's interesting.

And before we even go into your books, How to Argue Like Jesus and the NIV Life Hacks Bible, I'd like to know something about your own personal testimony of salvation.

What kind of religious background you were raised in, if any, and what providential circumstances the

Lord used in your life to draw you to himself? Well, I was very fortunate. I grew up in a family of Christians.

I grew up in the church. I came to Christ when I was very young, so I was fortunate to know him all my life.

I've been very blessed to be able to work in a lot of places, being able to serve

Christ directly, and a lot of ministry opportunities. When I was younger, I wanted to be a minister, and I ended up kind of moving more into the writing side.

But I've been very fortunate that God has looked out for me from an early age and kind of kept me close to him throughout all these years.

And when did you realize that you wanted to become a writer and where you realized you had these gifts and so on?

Well, when I was in the Marines, I started writing a column for a small little newspaper in Texas, and that kind of got me interested in writing.

And after I got out of the Marines, I got a job at a Christian think tank and started working on some bioethical issues and started writing there.

And just kind of expanded from there. I started a long blog in 2003, Evangelical Outpost, and that kind of caught on and got a little bit of attention, helped me kind of hone the craft and kind of launched my career from there, from that little platform.

Great. Well, we have as our theme for the first hour, as I mentioned, your book,

How to Argue Like Jesus, Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator.

Obviously, a lot of people who look at that title, they may be startled to have the words argue and Jesus in the same title.

They may be wrongly thinking of Jesus saying something like, Peter, I told you a thousand times, put that net down and get over here.

But that has nothing to do with the kind of arguing you're talking about, right? No, we kind of have a very narrow view of argument nowadays.

We think of it as antagonistic, when really it's more about persuasion, persuasion, how to convince people through argument to see your side and view things your way.

And so this is obviously a valuable thing for all

Christians to learn because this art, because of the fact that if we are obeying

Christ himself, if we are obeying God, we are to be engaging others about our faith.

We are to be proclaiming the gospel. We are to be evangelizing. We are not to be hiding our faith and ashamed of our faith or be cowardice about it.

So if those things are true about our lives, we are certainly going to be engaged in conversations.

We're going to be hopefully trying to persuade people of the truth.

Now, obviously, I believe, I don't know if you're aware of this, but I'm a thoroughgoing five -point

Calvinist. But obviously, even though God is sovereign over all things, I still believe that he uses humans as means to bring the gospel to people.

So the power of persuasion is an important thing nonetheless. And so tell us about this

Christ who we are to be imitating to begin with. Tell us about Christ the communicator.

Well, we kind of often overlook because you're right, as a Calvinist, I kind of, we put a lot of emphasis on the role of the

Holy Spirit. We kind of tend to downplay our role in what

God has called us to be evangelism and apologetics. And when we look at Christ, we kind of tend to think, well, of course, everybody was drawn to him.

He was Jesus. We forget that we're looking at it from the other side of history. We're looking at it from seeing the fulfillment of Christ, his mission.

And we kind of overlooked that when he was talking to people, he had to persuade them just like we did. He had the same kind of problems convincing people.

We see that throughout the New Testament in the gospels where people just didn't believe him. He didn't buy his message.

He didn't persuade them. So we can look to him and see the kind of the same problems and the same opportunities that he had that we face today.

And we already have a listener in Slovenia who has a question.

Joe in Slovenia says, often we hear such statements like, if you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all.

Also, it is common to hear someone characterized as being unchristlike if they offer a stern argument with exacting clarity that is scripturally unapproving of others' behaviors or beliefs.

In light of that fact, the careful reading of the gospel reveals Jesus is speaking sternly to strangers, governing authorities, religious leaders, his own family, and disciples.

How did we get the all -too -common milquetoast image of Jesus? How did we arrive at the idea that Christians are only and exclusively to say nice, gentle, kind, and non -controversial things in order to be

Christlike? Thanks so very much for serving the body of Christ with sharpening edification.

Well, thank you very much, Joe, in Slovenia. That's actually an excellent question to start the ball rolling with this very conversation,

I think. That is, that's a really good question. And I think where we kind of diverged is, we twisted the idea of gospel love and love, a godly love for our neighbor.

And we, since probably the 19th century, we've had this kind of romantic notion of love. And romantic love is very kind, it's very gentle, it's very sweet.

And so we kind of get the two love mixed up, we get the two concepts mixed up, and we assume that if we're talking about Jesus' love, that he must be that kind of loving.

He must be very nice, very gentle, very kind, not trying to offend anybody.

And so that's kind of seeped in, especially in the social gospel movement, that kind of seeped in where that's the

Jesus is a very, what we probably call now, a hippie Jesus, you know? Free love, just loves everybody, wants everybody to get along, and really just, it ignores the

Jesus we actually see in the scripture. And yes, Jesus was kind, but he could also be very harsh.

And I think the key is, what was the context? Jesus treated different people differently because of the context, and usually it was the people who knew the most that he treated harshly.

People he expected the most of, he was a lot more harsh, especially in his rhetoric, than he was for people who were unfamiliar with the

Jewish faith or had no real reason to really know him directly because they were unfamiliar with the scriptures.

And I think we kind of see the same thing. We should be more gentle with the unbelievers than we are with people who should know better, who call themselves

Christians and still disbelieve what the scripture says. Yeah, it seems that Jesus also used his harshest words towards religious leaders and was much more gentle in his approach towards people who were overtly involved in things that were scandalously wicked, like prostitutes and so on.

Yeah, Jesus understood that a lot of times people, that were actually engaged in these things, especially the prostitutes and the tax collectors, they knew they were wrong and they just needed to be called out on it.

And he didn't need to cram it down their throats because they knew they weren't wrong. With the religious leaders, on the other hand, they found ways to justify themselves.

They found ways to kind of twist scripture, twist essentially Jesus' own words, because Jesus is

God and it's his words in scripture. They were twisting his own words to justify their own sin.

And that's where we really see him get very upset and very harsh in his combination of them.

Yeah, and typically when we have Jesus engaging those who are more scandalously wicked, those who were involved in prostitution and so on, they were approaching him because they were having stirrings of a remorseful conscience or something.

And you have the woman at the well did not approach him. That was a providential meeting.

But you have the woman washing Peter's, Jesus' feet and drying them with her hair and so on.

And this was a scandalous thing for the Pharisees to see. But the Pharisees were, in contrast, standing in judgment against him.

So it was a different kind of encounter usually, correct? Yeah, the hardness of Jesus' rhetoric was almost always proportional to the hardness of a person's heart.

And because the Pharisees tend to have the hard hearts, his rhetoric was a lot harsher with him.

And he was a lot more brutal in his combination of them and calling them out and trying to point out, to kind of break through their exterior to get to their heart.

Because they kind of built up a defense mechanism or a self -defense mechanism where they could justify just about anything they did because they were the better people.

Right. And although he was obviously much more warm to Nicodemus, because Nicodemus was seeking him out in the darkness of night, he still rebuked

Nicodemus, basically saying he should know more than you are acting like. You know, you're a leader in Israel and you don't even know these things that I'm telling you.

So he was still somewhat insulting to Nicodemus.

Yeah, we do see that a lot, like on the road to Emmaus, where Jesus is often surprised how people twist the

Bible and how they just didn't see the Bible or didn't see the words clearly. So he often says, especially when people are scholars that should know what the

Scripture says, he often seems kind of a little harder on those people because I think his point is that the

Scripture is very clear, and we make it harder than it needs to be. We often add things to it unnecessarily to miss the message of Jesus.

And Joe from Slovenia has a follow -up question. He says, occasionally we hear someone objecting to developing spiritual disciplines like regular

Bible reading, prayer, meditation, fasting, as being legalistic. How should we view efforts of trying to develop godly habits and routines, and how do we avoid legalism and develop disciplines that promote spiritual growth and our relationship with God?

And I apologize, Joe, in Slovenia. I realize now I am jumping the gun because he intended me to read you that question during the second hour for our

Life Hacks discussion. So I guess we could leave that question for later for Joe in Slovenia.

But anyway, Joe, by the way, you have won a free copy of How to Argue Like Jesus, Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator by Joe Carter and John Coleman.

So keep your eye open in the mail for that. That's going to be shipped to you, compliments of our friends at Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com.

CVBBS .com. That's CV for Cumberland Valley, BBS for Bible Book Service .com. And we thank

Todd and Patty Jennings for their faithful sponsorship of Iron Sharpens Iron. Tell us about the emotional

Jesus. Well, there's three main areas of rhetoric in persuasion, and that's pathos to appeal to emotion, logos to appeal to reason, and ethos to appeal to character.

And a lot of times we see Jesus using pathos in surprising ways, because we think of pathos, we think of emotion as the tone of voice, how somebody says.

I think yesterday on your show you mentioned Jonathan Edwards. He had a very powerful sermon, but he had a very bland tone.

He just kind of read the term, you know, centers of the hands of angry God. He just kind of read the sermon very, very plainly and expected the words to carry meaning, and it worked.

But a lot of times in the way Jesus used emotion was in the structure of his sentences and the way he talked.

And a good example kind of from my own time is the Martin Luther King's, I Have a Dream speech. And the reason we're so moved by that speech now is because the repetition of the words,

I have a dream, Martin Luther King used that throughout the kind of build to a crescendo.

And Jesus kind of used the same techniques a lot of times. For example, in John 21, 18, in the old

King James Version, the words, verily, verily, which means truly, truly. He often repeats words like that in the

Sermon on the Mount, blessed are those, you know, blessed are the meat, blessed are the poor in spirit.

By repeating the terms like blessed are, truly, he kind of builds up a kind of momentum.

It builds up emotional appeal that we don't really notice, especially when we're reading it.

I think it's more powerful, I think, when people are first hearing it. But that kind of repetition of words has an emotional effect on us.

It makes us more likely to accept the message we're hearing. We have

Arnie in Perry County, Pennsylvania, who asks, do you think a lot of this image that we have of Jesus that you were speaking about earlier has come to us directly from Hollywood and the depictions of Jesus being somewhat of a sedated, somewhat effeminate, hippie -like person, and perhaps even from the greeting cards we read and send?

I think so. I think the way most, from most of history, the way people have got their impression of Jesus is directly from the

Gospels and directly from the words. And I think there's a reason why God warned us from, you know, from the very beginning not to make graven images or make images because images have a very different effect on us than words do.

And I think once we started painting pictures of Jesus, and, you know, he's always white.

He's got real soft, clear skin and very calm looking. And then that transferred over to the movies where all the movies where he's very calm usually, except, you know, when he's chasing out the money changers out of the temple.

Chasing out the money changers of the Pharisees. But that's kind of the impression we get of him. Instead of looking at his word and thinking, well, what was he really saying?

What was he really like when he was saying these words? Because also, when we read, we kind of read because the scripture doesn't have a lot of kind of stage directions.

He doesn't say, you know, he said this in a very loud tone. So we kind of have to read closely to kind of see what was the context?

What was he saying? How was he saying it? In the movies and images, we just kind of have a bland Jesus. It's all kind of just kind of one tone throughout.

And I think that kind of gives a false impression of what he was really like and the message he was really conveying. Yes. But this image of Jesus that has been common in perhaps the latter half of the 20th century and the 21st century of him being just a passive, sedate, harmless individual is not necessarily the way everyone viewed

Jesus before that. It seemed to me, from what I understand, that the pendulum was too far in the other direction in many cases, where you have some of the churches more toward a fundamentalist mindset that had a

Jesus that was all wrath and fury and condemnatory, etc.

And that's equally fallacious, isn't it? And that's a problem throughout history, is we always kind of swing one direction to the other without trying to see the

Jesus of law and grace, the Jesus that was harsh and soft, the Jesus that would save people and send people to hell.

I mean, we kind of want just one or the other. We want a Jesus that kind of fits in our mold. And it makes it real hard to see the real

Jesus. The only way we can see the real Jesus is to look in Scripture and look in the Gospels and look clearly at what he said, what he did, how he acted, and not try to put our spin on it to make us more comfortable with it.

Yeah, older folks who have left the church or abandoned religion altogether sometimes give the sad stories of the way that they viewed

Jesus growing up as kids. But today it would be very rare, I think, for a person to have been raised in an atmosphere like that.

Of course, there are churches that exist today that are off -balance or even cults that might have a very tainted view or warped view of Christ, but that do.

Not that they may, but they do. But we also have the

Roman Catholic Church that really needed Mary to be a mediator between the mediator and us, even though Jesus is supposed to be the one mediator between God and man.

Yet Mary being the mediator between Jesus and us because she was more gentle and merciful than even

Jesus. And it's amazing when you read some of the heretical prayers of some of the

Catholics that are lauded as saints where it's very clear that Mary is viewed as being the more kind and loving.

By the way, thank you Arnie in Perry County. Give us your full mailing address and we are going to send you as well a copy of How to Argue Like Jesus, Learning Persuasion from History's Greatest Communicator by Joe Carter and John Coleman, compliments of Crossway, the publishers of this book, and also compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, cvbbs .com,

who will be shipping this out to you, God willing, within a week or so. And tell us about Jesus the

Logician, and if you could define logician for our listeners who don't know what that means. Well, several years ago

I stumbled across an article by philosopher Dallas Willard who had an article called

Jesus the Logician, which talked about how Jesus used logic and reason in his arguments.

And that had a very profound effect on me. That's kind of what inspired the kind of start of this book, because Jesus was very clear and sharp in his thinking.

We kind of tend to forget that Jesus was probably one of the most, I believe he's the most brilliant person who ever lived, and that when he argued, it was very tightly logical and very carefully reasoned.

He didn't just kind of just appeal to authority all the time saying, you know, this is what

God, this is what Scripture says, therefore do it. He often makes some very careful arguments. Even when he was appealing to Scripture, he would make very careful arguments based on logic and reason.

And we have Jesus as shepherd, savior, teacher, and friend, if you could go through one of all those one by one.

So shepherd, savior, teacher, and friend? Yes. This is in the

Ethos chapter. Well, a shepherd is someone who looks after the sheep.

And since we're Jesus' sheep, it's somebody who looks after us, who cares for us, and is willing to give up our life for us.

And Ethos is appeal to character. Somebody who is willing to lay down their life for you and become your savior is somebody who you shouldn't naturally be drawn to.

You should care. It's hard not to care about somebody who cares that much about you.

But he's not only our shepherd, he's not only our savior, he's also our friend. He wants to to know us and to connect with us on a very personal, intimate level.

And that's something we kind of often miss. We need to tremble in God's sight.

We need to have that reverence for him. We also need to know that he loves us intimately and personally as a friend. He's not somebody distant.

He actually cares what we're going through. And just as we return to our friend or a husband or a wife to talk about what's going on in the day -to -day problems in our life,

Jesus wants to have that kind of connection with us. And I'm sorry, what was the last one? Savior, friend.

Sorry about that. I was looking at another question that just came in from a listener in North Carolina.

The one after that is, shepherd, savior, teacher, and friend.

Ah, teacher, yes. Yeah, and I think it's pretty important to keep that kind of that order too because Jesus is not only our friend, he's our teacher.

He's the one that shows how we should live and how we should respond to God and respond to him directly.

So we need to kind of make sure that when we see him as a friend, we need to understand we're not friends on the same level.

He is a higher authority than us. He is our teacher. He is our master. He's our savior in that even though we come to him, we come to him just like a child would to their father.

We can come to our father in friendship or come to our earthly father's friendship or earthly mother's friendship, but there's still that distance, that parental distance, and I think it's something we need to keep in mind with Jesus, that we come to him as a teacher and we're his servants.

We're not equals, but even if we are his friends. We have to get our first break right now and we will get to your question,

Pastor Sterling Banderwerker in Greensboro, North Carolina, right after our station break.

So be patient with us and we'll be addressing your question momentarily.

If anybody else would like to join us on the air with a question for Joe Carter, our email address is

ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence if you live outside of the

USA, and please only remain anonymous if it's about a personal and private matter.

And our email address again is ChrisArnzen at gmail .com. ChrisArnzen at gmail .com.

Don't go away. We'll be right back with Joe Carter after these messages from our sponsors. I'm Chris Arnzen, host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, and here's one of my favorite guests,

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By the way, I want to thank World Magazine. I got my latest issue of World Magazine today, and they actually shipped a whole bunch of them for me to give out to pastors that I know, and it was either intentional or just an amazing act of God's providence, but my full -page ad for Iron Sharpens Iron radio is in the perfect location in the current issue of World Magazine on page 18 because it's exactly where the subscription envelope that is inserted in the binding of the magazine is located.

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And if you've just tuned us in, our guest today is Joe Carter, and we are talking about his book,

How to Argue Like Jesus. The second hour, we're going to be talking about the NIV Life Hacks Bible.

If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker of Shepherds Fellowship in Greensboro, North Carolina, asks,

How do we know the proper apologetic methodology? And he goes through a list of four.

Depend on self's ability to reason from one proposition to another.

Depend upon one's ability to analyze proofs and use reason to decide. Depend upon the scripture's ability to reveal truth to us so we can know it for sure, or any other methodology.

I have a sneaky suspicion that Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker is a presuppositionalist, because of the third comment he made.

But if you could comment on Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker's questions, and if you want me to go through them one by one.

He starts off with, Should we depend on our own ability to reason from one proposition to another?

If we're talking about convincing people of certain truths, such as how we got the

Bible, I think that could be effective. I think once we start getting into the truth of scripture, that's not sufficient means of apologetics.

And so, I guess we're not supposed to be depending on our own ability to analyze proofs and use reason to decide?

I would say I'm kind of a soft presuppositionalist myself. One of the problems

I think with presuppositionalism is that we tend to overlook the role of common grace, that God has allowed us to see certain truths, not only in scripture, but in the world, and through reason we can discover these things.

And we can make certain arguments, such as the existence of God, I think, through just reason.

Maybe not reason alone, but we can go a long way with reason alone. But I think once we get into the depths of scripture and the depths of the truths of faith, such as salvation and there's

Jesus God, then it's harder for people who are outside our worldview, outside our presuppositional stance, to actually understand and be able to effectively see what we're arguing.

But then again, I think we've got to be careful not to limit how God can open people's hearts and minds.

I think we need to take the right approach, but I think ultimately apologetics is like evangelism.

We do the work, but it's ultimately God that decides if it's effective or not. Yes, and God always amazes me how he turns the light switch on in people's minds and hearts, sometimes when you least expect it.

And I've even heard testimonies of people that I know who became born -again

Christians in cults and then left those cults when they began to realize that the scriptures conflicted with what they were learning in those cults.

I know people who were saved in the Jehovah's Witness cult and in the Mormon cult, but obviously left those groups.

But God is an amazing God, and he finds his elect, and he draws them out of darkness, and he saves them.

And that's why I love the whole picture that we have in John chapter 10 of Jesus' sheep hearing his voice, and they know him, and they follow him.

And it's interesting that goats don't become sheep. Goats reject the gospel, and sheep are the ones who hear the gospel and follow it.

Well, thank you, Pastor Sterling Vanderwerker in Greensboro, North Carolina.

And we are going to be sending you a free copy of How to Argue Like Jesus, compliments of Crossway and compliments of Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service.

So thank you for providing your mailing address, and keep listening to Iron Sharpens Iron. Please keep spreading the word about our program in North Carolina.

We have a brand new listener, and by the way, while I'm enlarging his email because the text or the font is microscopic,

I'm going to repeat our email address. It's chrisarnson at gmail .com. chrisarnson at gmail .com.

If anybody would like to join those listeners who have already asked their questions, if you'd like to join them by asking your own, we look forward to hearing from you.

Our brand new listener, his name is Edwin, and I don't know where Edwin's from.

Perhaps you could send me another email, Edwin, with the city and state or country of your residence.

I would appreciate that. But he says, thank you for your ministry. My first encounter with you was when you interviewed

Summer White. I am newly reformed after having my faculty, I'm sorry, after having my faulty presuppositions challenged after hearing

Dr. James R. White take an exegetical look at Romans 9, and I began to read all of my

Bible in its context, and Summer White shared your show that interviewed her. I have sought out the links to listen to your show.

Thank you for your time, and I apologize, folks. I thought that our listener had a question for our guest today, but if you're listening,

Edwin, shoot us a question for our guest, Joe Carter, and we'll look forward to hearing from that.

But I still appreciate your kind words that you sent in here. One of the reasons why it's good to learn how

Jesus obviously, our Lord, God, Savior, and King, what methodology or manner that he used in the art of persuasion is because very often we learn from the wrong sources on how to interact with people, and obviously, you know, some of the more popular people on this planet are not necessarily those we should be imitating.

I'll take as an example Joel Osteen. Joel Osteen, whenever I have seen him, without exception, on a major television program that is no doubt being viewed by millions of people and many millions more after that when it winds up on YouTube, he does not want to say anything that will make his interviewer uncomfortable or feel insulted in any way, but that is not what

Jesus did. Jesus was not Jesus, and should not we be more concerned over the never -dying souls of men and women than we are over their feelings?

Well, you're exactly right, and I think that's why even before we try to persuade, we need to understand why we're trying to persuade people, and to do that, we need to understand what the human condition is.

What does God say about us, and what are we trying to communicate? And in the book, we talk about more than just evangelism or apologetics, and persuasion can be, you know, persuading your kids to do the right thing or persuading them to make the right decisions, and this shows that there's a broad range of persuasion, but in everything, before we start trying to persuade, we need to understand what

Jesus wants us to do, how Jesus wants us to act, what Jesus wants to convince others of, and I think you're exactly right with Joel.

He's a great example. He cares more about how his message is portrayed. Now, he's portrayed sending the message, and he doesn't know what the importance of the message is.

He's supposed to be conveying, which is, of course, the gospel. Yes, I remember years ago hearing a phrase to be leery of evangelists that are more concerned over yours than they are over you, and what they were speaking of,

I believe, or this individual was speaking of, was they were more concerned over your contributions to their ministry, what you have to offer them and give them, than they are over whether or not you are going to heaven or hell for eternity, and that obviously is a very key factor in the what are you, when you're evangelizing and when you're interacting with people, what is your motive?

Are you trying to win a friend? Are you trying to, perhaps on the other end of the spectrum, are you trying to prove something about yourself?

Are you trying to prove that you're brilliant? Are you trying to prove that you are a master at the art of persuasion and all that kind of thing?

And those are obviously horrible motives. We are to be more concerned over the ones we're talking to more so than what they have to offer us or the way that we are to feel about ourselves, correct?

Right, and that's a motive has a big impact on how we are persuading, but we also, one of the key, the three factors of persuasion is ethos and it's your persuasion of character.

So we have to have a solid character to begin with, and usually that's one of the reasons we're not persuasive is because our character, what we're saying doesn't match up to what we're conveying.

We can't persuade people that we're a person of love and Jesus loves us and we should be more loving if we're horrible, mean, nasty people on the inside and people realize that because they see us interact with others.

So I think the motive is very important, but character is even probably even more important than that because if we have the right character, we will have the right motives and we will be able to persuade more in a way that Jesus intended us to.

Now, what do you mean by spreading and sustaining the message in your book? Well, once you have a message that you want to convey, whether it's for most

Christians, for example, the gospel, there's ways to create that message so that it spreads to others.

And when we look at Jesus, he's a prime example of this, where Jesus started out, he had a band of 12 men and, you know, some others on the outside kind of hangers on, but it was mostly these 12 people that he discipled, that he gave the message to, taught him how to spread the message.

And from there, it grew into a worldwide, global movement that still carries on today.

So once we have a persuasive message, once we know how to persuade people individually, we need to learn how to kind of train the trainers, how to spread that message to others.

Maybe this is something pastors do to their congregations or somebody in a small group leader does to their people.

Even something a parent does to a child. It's how do you take what you know and your persuasive ability to not only persuade somebody else, but persuade them in a way where they can carry that message and spread it further.

Now, in some of your rhetoric rules of thumb, you list, first off, your basic message should contain good news, if you could comment on that.

Well, one of the things that people,

I mean, we're so inundated with messages today, and almost all of them are negative. We need something to kind of grasp onto that gives us a reason for hope and a reason for optimism.

And of course, obviously, that's why the most important message in the world, the gospel, is the good news. That's the most important thing.

But even if there's other things, if we want to be persuasive, it usually helps to start with something that's not so hard.

Obviously, when you're talking about the gospel, you tell people they're sinners and you explain to them that concept.

But if you're just carrying another message that's not necessarily related to evangelism, try to focus on the positive.

Try to focus on something that will make people's life, that will improve it, rather than just kind of being negative and talking down to them and tell them how bad the world is.

Try to have some kind of positive, good news aspect to your message.

And then you go on from there to start with your audience's needs. Yeah, this is one thing that we kind of...

It's easiest for us, especially pastors and elders and people who are using teaching, to kind of come up with your idea of what you want to say and just use the same message to everybody and convey it the exact same way to everybody.

And then what happens is we get somebody who's not familiar with our language, or maybe they're young kids and they don't understand our vocabulary, and they get tripped up.

And we get tripped up because we haven't crafted the message for different audiences.

And I think once we figure out what does the audience need, what do they need from us, what do they need to hear from us directly, it's a lot easier for us to persuade them in a way that's effective.

Because otherwise, we kind of get wrapped up in, well, what do we need to say rather than what do they need to hear?

Because while everybody needs to hear the gospel, everybody needs to hear the good news is used, not everybody needs to start with the same things.

Some people already know their centers, so you don't need to spend 30 minutes telling them why they're going to hell. They know they're going to hell.

They need the good news. They need something to hold on to. They need a life preserver. Then there's some people who think that there's no such thing as heaven or hell.

They don't need the good news because there's no bad news. And so by listening to what your audience needs rather than just what you want to say, you can really get to the heart of the matter and actually be more persuasive and more effective in reaching them.

Yeah, that's one of the deficiencies and fallacies, to put it even more accurately, of the modern -day gospel that is prevalent today is that the good news of the gospel is no big deal because if you are not telling people that without Christ and without trusting in his finished work on the cross, you are going to be damned for eternity.

If people have no concept of that, then being saved, quote -unquote, is no big deal.

What am I being saved from anyway? I like the way I am. Why do I need to be born again?

I like the way I was born the first time. You know, people, the gospel, at the risk of picking on Joel Osteen, the risk of insulting many of those listening as well, is that there is nothing amazing about the grace that is being preached today.

Am I right? That's exactly right. I mean, I remember several years ago, probably 2006 or 2007, before President Obama took office, he did an interview and somebody asked him, what is your definition of sin?

And his definition of sin was being out of alignment with his own values. So if, you know...

Can you read that again? Can you say that again? I'm sorry. He said his definition of sin was being out of a line with his own values.

It wasn't about being out of line with God's values, being out of line with his values. And so that's a lot.

I think that's very prevalent in America today. We think that, you know, we need

God because we can be a little bit better people. We're already good people, but we need to be a little bit better people. And by having

God in our life, it'll bring us some comfort in times of sorrow. You know, if we're depressed, it'll kind of pick us up.

But, you know, there's no need for salvation because there's no heaven. There's no hell. There may be heaven, but there's no hell.

And so that's the... When that kind of message took root and has been so ingrained in American culture, it's very hard for people to explain to people why you need salvation when, you know, the very concept of hell is just too foreign to them.

It's just unbelievable for them to even imagine that a good and loving God would send anybody to hell. Yeah. And it's interesting that in the entire book of Acts, the word love isn't mentioned.

And I'm not saying that we shouldn't mention love or declare the love of God and talk frequently about the love of God, but it seems that there is a warped understanding of God's love that is promoted by many

Christians. And if you just gush with all kinds of syrupy, sweet phrases about how much

God loves you, like you're talking to a child, God loves you so much, He loves you so much.

People are going to think, well, if God loves me and His love for me is an eternal love and He loves me so much,

I really don't have anything to worry about, do I? The way that people broad brush the word love and apply it equally to everybody, isn't that also dangerous?

That's very dangerous. And I think that's probably one of the reasons why I think a lot of people, like for myself, for example, when you become the faith to as children, it's easier to grasp in certain aspects, because as a child, you're told often that you're bad and that your behavior is bad.

And you look around, you see other people doing bad things, you have a good, solid grasp on badness and evil.

And so when you kind of have an understanding, an innate understanding of sin, it just kind of gets beat out of you as you grow up that, no, we're not, yeah, you may do things bad, but you're not a bad person and that you're not an evil person.

And that basically we're all good. And so people come to faith later in life, it's kind of hard to them to realize, yeah,

I really am in need of salvation. I really am bad. I'm out of alignment with God's values.

I'm out of alignment with what God wants. If I don't do something, if I don't change, even after, if I don't change and obey

Him and obey all His commandments, then I can't go to heaven. And so it's, that kind of message is very hard to convey to adults in America, because we're just so wrapped up in ourselves and thinking, you know, how many times have you heard, well, he's basically a good person?

You hear about everybody and everybody thinks that about themselves. So when they hear that God doesn't view us that way, that God doesn't think you're basically a good person, it's very hard for people to wrap their minds around that.

How could that be? God's good and loving. I'm good and loving. Why can't we just, there's kind of an equality there between us and God, because we're good.

He's good. So He'll accept me as I am. Edwin has written back.

He is from Columbia, South Carolina, and he actually has a question for you this time,

Joe. He says, as I have been reading my Bible, I think

I don't like the words of Christ in red. Should we highlight what Jesus said or take a step back to see the message of the

Bible and how it points to Christ? Secondarily, when we persuade, should we speak figuratively like Christ did with parables or simply just the gospel?

I'm curious why our listener doesn't like the words of Christ. I think what he means is he doesn't like them being separated from the black type by putting them in red.

I understand now. It's not that he doesn't like the words of Christ in red.

He doesn't like the words of Christ being printed in red ink, unlike the rest of the text.

Okay. Do you have any comment about that? Yeah, I'm actually, I'm with him on that.

I can kind of understand why that became a popular thing to do. It made it easier to search in your

Bible. You can see at a glance when Jesus is speaking. But it kind of, it removes the idea that Jesus is speaking throughout

Scripture. Jesus is found throughout Scripture. He's God. All the words in Scripture are His.

So it kind of makes it separate what Jesus says and what God says as if they're two different things.

And that has actually led to what's called the red letter movement by Tony Campolo and Shane Claiborne and some of these liberal evangelicals, who think that, well, what we should focus on is what

Jesus says. The words in red, the red letters, rather than the rest of Scripture, that's a little harsher. And, you know, there's more that talks about sin and wrath, things that, you know, let's just focus on what

Jesus says. And of course, it's the nice Jesus. It's always the, they forget the letters in red that are a little harsher.

I completely agree that we don't need to set up a false dichotomy between what

Jesus says directly and what he says throughout the rest of Scripture. Right. Especially if you're abusing the fact that the letters of, the words of Christ are separated in that way.

I don't think it's necessarily innately wrong to, just so you, while you're reading, you can see the words of Jesus stand out from the rest of the text just for reading purposes.

But they are no more important than the rest of the Bible, because it's all

God -breathed. Exactly. And he also says, when we persuade, should we speak figuratively like Christ did with parables or simply just the gospel?

I guess that would, wouldn't that be dependent on the situation? Definitely. And I mentioned a lot of places in the book about how to use imagery to convey to people.

Because we do this all the time. We just, parables are just essentially extended metaphors. And we use metaphors all the time.

We use them so frequently we don't even notice them. They become cliches like, a life is a highway.

That's a metaphor. A parable is just an extended version of that. So when we convey to people, especially people who are unfamiliar with the gospel, that we're not, we can't take for granted that people kind of have a

Christian understanding as they did maybe a hundred years ago. So we're free to create parables and imagery and metaphors as long as they're not conflicting with what scripture says.

We kind of convey to people to help them understand and to bring them, of course, we always need to go back to the gospel and show them the words directly, but we can explain it in a way that uses imagery and metaphor and similes and other things like that.

Because that's the way God designed us to understand. We understand a lot through metaphor. And we are going to a station break.

Edwin, if you give us your full mailing address in Columbia, South Carolina, not only have you won

How to Argue Like Jesus by Joe Carter and John Coleman, but since you're a first time listener, you have also won a brand new

New American Standard Bible on top of that, which we give every day to our first time questioners that we've never heard from before.

And so you are getting a double blessing there. And we thank not only Crossway for their kind gift of How to Argue Like Jesus, but also we thank the publishers of the

New American Standard Bible for supplying us with these gorgeous Bibles for our first time listeners with embossed crosses on the cover.

Really a gorgeous edition of this version of the scriptures. So we need your full mailing address,

Edwin, and send it off to you right away. And hopefully, God willing, you'll get both the book and the

Bible in about a week. But we're going to a break right now. If you would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. And please don't forget to give us your first name, city and state and country of residence when you write in.

We'll be right back with Joe Carter after these messages. So don't go away. Chris Arnson here and I can't wait to head down to Atlanta, Georgia.

And here's my friend Dr. James White to tell you why. Hi, I'm James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

I hope you join me at the G3 conference hosted by Pastor Josh Bice and Praise Mill Baptist Church at the

Georgia International Convention Center in Atlanta, January 19th through the 21st in celebration of the 500th anniversary of the

Protestant Reformation. I'll be joined by Paul Washer, Steve Lawson, D .A. Carson, Vody Balcom, Conrad M.

Bayway, Phil Johnson, Rosaria Butterfield, Todd Friel, and a host of other speakers who are dedicated to the pillars of what

G3 stands for, gospel, grace, and glory. For more details, go to g3conference .com.

That's g3conference .com. Thanks, James. Make sure you greet me at the

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Welcome back. We are having a wonderful interview, a fascinating interview today with Joe Carter, and we have been discussing how to argue like Jesus, and we're going to be moving on momentarily to a discussion of the

NIV Life Hacks Bible, but before we do so, I do want to just ask a couple more questions about the

How to Argue Like Jesus book. One of the things you tell us to do is to communicate with confidence, if you could explain further.

I think, especially when communicating the gospel and communicating the message of Christ, is when we're new believers, we have a lot of enthusiasm, but we don't have a lot of knowledge, and so we get tripped up a lot easily, or we say things that aren't really true.

So I think the confidence we should have should come from a solid grounding in Scripture and knowing what

Jesus says and how to convey that message. I think it's great to have a lot of techniques, like I try to put in my book, for how to persuade, but if you don't know what you're saying or if you're not accurate in the message you're conveying, you're just going to spread a false message or give a false impression of a message.

So confidence should come from actually having a solid grounding in it, but once you have that, you should be able to speak confidently because you should speak from what you know.

You shouldn't try to persuade people about something you're not convinced of yourself. So once you're convinced yourself, you should be able to communicate in a confident manner, and so that people feel like, well, they can trust you in your message.

And this is something we all need to learn, I think, more often.

Know when to speak and when to be silent, if you could comment further. This is a big thing, especially on apologetics.

I don't know how many hours I've wasted on apologetics websites arguing with atheists who are never going to trust in Christ, never even going to concede a minor point on an argument.

And those are times when you just don't throw your pearls to the horsewine. It's easier to just be silent and move on to something more productive instead of just kind of getting wrapped up in that thinking that, well, if I just keep arguing, eventually

I'm going to win them over. And sometimes we just need to know that the best thing we can say is not say anything at all.

Sometimes, you know, just like Jesus did. He didn't try to convince everyone, or He didn't chase people down and try to say, well, no, you really need to understand my message.

It's between life or death. He said what needed to be said and when

He needed to be silent, for example, when He was saying for Pontius Pilate, He was silent. And we need to learn that kind of discernment for ourselves.

And that kind of goes hand in hand with your admonition to listen. Right. And this kind of goes back to knowing the audience too and knowing the audience's needs.

That too often, we only listen so that we can respond. We want to hear just enough so that we can say, okay,

I know what you're trying to say. I want to quickly respond with my response. Instead of saying, what are they trying to say?

What is the heart behind what they're trying to say? What is the need behind the need that they're talking about?

Because once we know the need behind the need, once we listen clearly and effectively, we can actually be more persuasive because we can know with confidence how to convey the message and how to say it in a way that's going to be really effective.

I think too often when we hear people weren't convinced by our message, we blame the listener when the whole time they've been telling us essentially they don't understand, not in so many words, but they don't understand that they don't agree.

And we didn't hear that because we were too busy talking and not spend enough time listening. And also with listening, that very often involves asking questions so that the person we're communicating with has a chance to speak here.

Yeah, I think they, especially when we talk about apologetics and evangelism, I think questions are probably more important than anything else, almost anything else we say.

Because once you ask enough questions, you can figure out whether somebody's really interested in hearing more.

And sometimes you just need to ask them directly. For example, when you're a young person interested in apologetics, when they're talking to somebody, trying to convince somebody, they'll eventually stumble upon something that they don't know the answer to.

And the best thing they can say is, I don't know the answer, but I'll get back to you. Are you interested in learning more?

And most of them, people say, well, no, they're not. You know, don't waste your time because they're just not interested. But if you just kind of data dump and just not listening to what they're trying to say and not really hearing, you're just going to waste your time.

You're wasting their time. They have no interest. They're just ready to move on. So listening and asking questions, really trying to get to hear what the other person's saying is probably more important often than what we're trying to say.

And you admonish us to, when appropriate, stand up to authority, if you could comment on that.

I think when we talk about authority, I think we need to look at what authority we're talking about directly.

Not necessarily, I mean, I'm talking about the authority, say, in our own churches where we have biblical solid elders or pastors who know the

Word of God and are communicating effectively. I think we need to be able to stand up to the Joel Holsteins and need to be able to stand up to people and challenge those kind of, not challenge them directly.

We're not going to go, you know, try to get on Joel Holstein's Facebook wall and try to challenge him, but try to challenge the message they are saying to people who are hearing that message and are being drawn to it.

And I think we have to do that carefully. I think we need to be more empathetic to understand why people are drawn to these kind of things and not just assume that, you know, we need to smack them away and get them away from that as quickly as possible because it's leading to destruction.

I think we need to first understand why they're drawn to that message so we can counter it more effectively. And I was just about to attribute this to Joel Holstein, don't bend core principles or standards to gather disciples, but I'm not 100 % sure that he's bending anything because he might not share our principles or standards to begin with.

He may be actually teaching what he believes, not that that makes it any better, but you say you admonish us to not to bend core principles or standards to gather disciples, if you could comment.

Well, Joel Holstein's probably an extreme example, but we kind of, a lot of us kind of do the same thing just in a lesser format.

For example, we don't want to talk about hell to secular people because it seems weird. We don't want to talk about the reality of Satan because it just seems kind of weird.

So we kind of, it's not that we don't believe it, it's just we're not going to talk about it to people because we want to convince them first.

And then once they're in the fold a couple of years down the road, we'll bring that kind of stuff up. We don't want to embarrass them by talking about this stuff.

And what happens is, again, like we were talking about earlier with hell, people don't get the message because they don't understand what do

I need to be saved from if there's no hell. So by refusing to talk about those things or refusing to talk about them in a way that stands for truth, we kind of lose a listener and we become less effective and less persuasive.

People really, we should have a bait and switch theology. People should know right up front what is being asked of them and they're called to come and die.

They're not called just to kind of add something new to their life on Sunday. They need to know that the message we're sending them or the message we're trying to persuade them with is one where it's going to be asking a lot of them.

It's going to ask for them a total change. And we don't need to downplay that just to get them in and thinking, well, they'll learn that down the road.

That needs to be something up front. And so we don't need to compromise on our principles in spreading our message.

We need to be up front about everything. If they ask us what our views on gay marriage are, we need to be able to tell them.

If it turns them away, let God deal with that. Let God deal with their heart.

All we have to do is speak the truth and speak it in love and do it as effectively and persuasively as possible. Yeah. I don't know if my dear friend,

Dr. James R. White of Alpha Omega Ministries coined this phrase, but I've heard him repeat it at any rate.

He has said, what you win people with is what you win them to.

So if you are giving some kind of a watered down message that is filled with half -truths and perhaps even falsehoods, when they begin to follow what you have evangelized or preached or spoken about, you're not leading them to Christ.

You're leading to this inadequate fallacy that you've created. And I've heard other people say, if you hang sacks of goat food out your church windows, you're going to attract goats to the church.

And your congregation is going to be filled with goats that are not transformed human beings.

These are not true believers. These are just people taking up space because they enjoy your music and perhaps enjoy your uplifting self -help messages or whatever it is that's being proclaimed.

You have any comment on that? Yeah, that's right. We see a lot of hammering a lot of times about when people leave the church.

Like, why do young people leave the church? What's the problem? And I think the truth is a lot more people should be leaving the church, because if they really knew what we believed and what we really taught, they would be running for the doors.

But we're scared to lose them, so we kind of downplay it. We don't talk about it. We don't bring it up on Sundays.

And I think that's essentially a way of lying to them. It's a way of trying to keep them and hoping they come to maturity before they find out what we're really about.

And like you said, we're not attracting sheep. We're attracting goats. We're attracting people who don't really believe. And we're not doing them any favors, and we're not doing the church any favors, just by keeping them around and having them believe things that are false, that are against the gospel.

And you would manage us to create a sense of urgency, if you could explain. Well, any message that we express through the gospel, but any message that we want to persuade, there must be a reason for it.

I mean, it must be some kind of urgency behind it. Otherwise, why waste your time? And so, we need to learn how to convey, especially in a church context, we need to learn how to communicate in a way that says, you need to respond to this.

You need to reject it, or you need to accept it, but you can't be empathetic to it. And that goes for just about any message that needs to be...that

requires a persuasive response. And I think too often, we kind of just kind of have a lackluster, well, we'll talk about, we'll bring it up at one meeting and maybe six months down the road,

I'll kind of add something to it. I think we need to be more of pushing our message a little farther, a little faster, and so that people can respond quicker and decide if they want to respond.

Now, why is Mark chapter 6, verse 4 so important when

Jesus says, a prophet is without honor except in his hometown and among his relatives and in his own household?

Um, well, sometimes what we think we're going to be persuasive is a place where we're not.

We may think that because of our learning, that we should have a platform in our church, or we should have a platform in our denomination.

And sometimes we don't find that. We don't find that our message is felt there.

We're not being persuasive there. And so, the question is, God is using,

God wants to use us. Why don't we go to where he wants to use us rather than where we assume that we need to be?

Jesus didn't waste his time, you know, trying to convince the Pharisees who weren't buying his message.

He moved on to other towns and moved on and found somebody who were wanting to hear it. So, we shouldn't waste a whole lot of time if people are rejecting our message or rejecting the way we're presenting our message.

Move on to someone and move on to people who do want to hear it. Well, that sounds like it's a dovetail into your admonition not to cast your pearls before a swine in Matthew 7 and 6.

That's exactly right. I think that's, especially those of us who are interested in apologetics, it's very hard for us to realize that there, usually almost nothing comes of arguments with atheists or trying to get into extended debates about evolution or issues like that.

Because they're not going to change any minds, we're not going to change them, they're not going to change our minds. We're essentially wasting time that could be better used actually edifying people and persuading those who are persuadable.

Sometimes we just need to be able to cut our losses and move on and go on to the next person. Now, I'm assuming what you mean by that is that in our face -to -face, one -on -one times of informal interaction with the lost, we shouldn't get bogged down on talking about evolution and things.

But I'm assuming that you would think that it's completely appropriate, if not at times very powerful, to perhaps invite a lost person to a

Bible conference that is teaching creation and exposing the myth of evolution and that kind of thing.

Oh, absolutely. I should make clear that mostly what I'm talking about is our non -face -to -face interactions.

If somebody is willing to give you time to sit there in their presence, you have a better chance of being persuadable.

You're more likely to persuade them than you do people who are online who don't know you, who maybe only know you by an email address or username, and you're debating them in a comment section.

You're trying to convince Mark from Iowa that evolution is wrong, and you don't know

Mark. He doesn't know you. You don't know what knowledge each of you have, so it's just kind of a waste of time to get into unhelpful debates when you could be getting face -to -face and actually trying to convince people who actually have an interest in being persuaded.

Now, what do you mean by, praise those who do well, express disappointment in those who disappoint you?

I think this is, it kind of goes back to, how should

I say this? As a Calvinist, I often find that there are a lot of non -Calvinists who will say, hey, you're doing a, they like the work

Calvinists are doing, but they don't want to praise them for fear that people will assume that they're buying into everything, that they're approving of Reformed theology by praising the

Calvinists. And we should be able to praise people when they're doing good. We should be able to praise people who are preaching the gospel faithfully, even if they don't necessarily align 100 % with our theology or 100 % with our denominational background.

And on the other hand, we should be able to criticize those who do align with us. We shouldn't have this fear just because somebody has a great reputation.

If they're teaching wrong or they need to be called out on it, we need to call them out on it. I think, you know, there's a lot of talk nowadays about the celebrity culture and evangelicalism.

And I think that is a problem. There is a problem when we're afraid to call out big -name pastors because we like them or because they normally do good work.

We need to be able to be faithful to the message of God and say, brother, you're wrong on this, or sister, you need to change your position.

I think we need to say that more effectively because if we don't, it can cause people to drift in directions that they don't need to be going.

I think one of the problems we've had in the past 20 years is a kind of a liberal drift in evangelicalism because we didn't want to call people out when they didn't teach about hell.

And we didn't call people out when they had kind of a looser sexual ethics or preaching love without repentance and things like that.

Now, one of the things that seems to sadly be the mantra of a great portion of modern evangelicalism is that we shouldn't be dividing over things that they would consider to be nitpicking, secondary tertiary issues, and unfortunately many evangelicals would put on that list of non -essentials the gospel, salvation is by grace alone through faith alone in Christ alone to the glory of God alone.

They would put on that list things like the trinity, the things that are pillars of the faith.

But what do you mean by don't fear division? Exactly that.

We don't want to be divided over secondary issues, so we can have important debates about baptism, for example, but even those shouldn't divide us.

But we shouldn't fear being divided over things where the scripture's clear. For example, sexual ethics.

The scripture's clear on homosexuality and it's clear on adultery and it's clear on fornication. We can't downplay that because we're afraid how people are going to react.

We have to tell them the truth because their souls are on the line. They literally can go to hell if they don't know and they actually believe that, yes, it's fine to be

Christian and believe this. Those are the times we do need to be divided. We do need to separate ourselves from people such as Joel's team who are teaching false gospel or who are teaching prosperity gospel that's not what

Jesus taught. So we don't need to be fearful about causing division where there already is division.

It's just more of a recognition of the division that's already there. You can't have a false gospel and a true gospel in the same bucket.

So one's going to delude the other, so you have to toss the false stuff out. And what do you mean by words matter?

Um, let's see. I think we kind of talked about earlier about how imagery and the images that got developed kind of changed

America's perception of what Jesus was like, and I think that's where we need to recognize that we need to focus on the words of the gospel, for example, um, the way

Jesus said things, what he said, because he said those for a reason. It wasn't just kind of a willy -nilly just kind of choosing things carelessly.

He had a reason for the metaphors he used. He had a reason for the parables he spoke.

And so we want to be effective. We need to make sure that we're using the same words. We may be able to contextualize them for an audience who doesn't understand necessarily the same background as we do, but we need to recognize that the words we use to convey shape the message and shape people's understanding.

And we have a listener in Kinross, Scotland, Murray, who asks, should we ever presuppose someone has a fear of God even professing

Christians? In other words, I'm assuming he means should we take that for granted that they do when perhaps they don't?

Um, I would say that we should assume they have a knowledge of God, a basic knowledge of God.

I'm not sure a fear of God, a fear of God implies kind of a recognition of that knowledge that I think a lot of people don't have.

Fear of God implies there's a kind of awe and worship there. And I think

Scripture's more clear on there's more of a kind of a basic knowledge thing, a non -deniability. We can't deny

God exists. We can pretend we do, but then deep down we know it. And I think we can latch on to that, but I think we've got to be careful about assuming that there's a fear of God, that people have a natural awe and worship of God, because most people have a natural awe and worship of themselves.

Amen. And we are going to be going to our final break and continuing the last half hour of our program with a discussion on the

NIV Life Hacks Bible. And if you'd like to join us on the air, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we are coming right back after these messages with Joe Carter.

Lynnbrook Baptist Church on 225 Earl Avenue in Lynnbrook, Long Island, is teaching God's timeless truths in the 21st century.

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Hi, I'm Pastor Bob Walderman and I invite you to come and join us here at Lynnbrook Baptist Church and see all that a church can be.

Call Lynnbrook Baptist at 516 -599 -9402. That's 516 -599 -9402 or visit lynnbrookbaptist .org.

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Hi, I'm Pastor Bill Shishko, inviting you to tune in to a visit to the pastor's study every

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live streaming globally, so we hope you start listening regularly to that new program.

If you just tuned us in for the last 90 minutes, and the next half hour to come, our guest today is

Joe Carter. We were discussing how to argue like Jesus, and now we are entering into the part of the discussion where we want to talk about the

NIV Life Hacks Bible, and if you have any questions, our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com,

chrisarnson at gmail .com. If you could explain that very interesting title, Life Hacks Bible.

Well, Life Hack is anything, a tip, a skill, a shortcut, advice that helps you do something more effectively and efficiently.

So this Bible is kind of a steady guide to kind of help you incorporate spiritual disciplines and spiritual practices in your life in a way that helps develop your spiritual formation.

Well, I hope I hear one day about you being involved in the NASB Life Hacks Bible since they sponsor my show.

The publishers of the NASB, that is. Well, you go through some major areas.

You have tips for making wise decisions. You have steps for interpreting the Bible. You have questions for recognizing intentional sins, and you have tips for finding time to pray.

If we could start with making wise decisions. Well, there's a lot of ways to make a wise decision, but I think it's more about incorporating a practice in our life to help us make wise decisions.

I think too often we kind of wait until a decision pops up, and then we kind of have just a natural response to it, rather than having a process of turning to Scripture and knowing what

Scripture says about the issue before we're called on you to make decisions. And that's kind of what this kind of book is about, is to kind of develop yourself in a way that when things happen, you're already prepared for them.

You're not reacting. You're proactively engaging with God's Word in a way that prepares you for whatever

He brings your way. And I'll go back to a question that I jumped the gun on in the first hour of the program that was intended for this discussion.

Joe in Slovenia, he asks, Occasionally we hear someone objecting to developing spiritual disciplines like regular

Bible reading, prayer, meditation, fasting, as being legalistic. How should we view efforts of trying to develop godly habits and routines?

How do we avoid legalism and develop disciplines that promote spiritual growth and our relationship with God?

That's a really good question, and it's one a lot of people have, especially when we talk about spiritual discipline. First thing,

I think we need to clarify what legalism is. Now, the Bible doesn't have a specific word for legalism, but the concept is kind of taught throughout.

Legalism is an attempt to gain favor with God or impress upon our fellow man by doing something without regard to our condition of our hearts.

There's basically kind of three types of legalism. The first is those who believe they can do something to earn

God's favor or obtain salvation. This is kind of a typical idea of legalism, but it's not very popular today.

We don't see a lot of people that, like the Pharisees, they get upset when you use healing on the

Sabbath because they think that by doing that, you're going against what

God wants. So because we don't think about that, and we think that's only part of legalism, we think, well, we can be legalists.

Because another way we can be legalists is that when we submit to man -made commandments that are

God's law, and we saw a lot of this, especially in the fundamentalist movement, things like not playing cards or not going to movies, and it was kind of obeying things that God didn't say you couldn't play cards,

He didn't say you couldn't go to movies. We kind of put those on the same realm as God's commands, and that's kind of the main kind of legalism that most people think of nowadays when they think of legalism.

And then there's a third type. It's kind of a pseudo -legalism that treats Christians living as little more than obedience to God's Word.

And if that's what we do, if that's what their purpose of spiritual formation is, is we're just kind of going through the motions, then that's the wrong way to approach spiritual formation.

That's the wrong way to approach spiritual disciplines. But it's not legalism to simply obey

God. It's not legalism to obey God's commandments to read His Word or to pray or to serve others.

That's not legalism at all. That's simply obedience. And I think that's one of the problems is out of a fear of legalism, we simply do not obey what

God says we should be doing. And what about taking a little different spin on Joe from Slovenia's question about those who are fearful of being overly disciplined because they don't want their faith to become stale, routine, rehearsed.

And of course, you have even preachers that take that to such an extreme.

They ridiculously, some of them will say they don't even prepare for sermons. They let the spirit move them.

And that usually means that they're just babbling nonsense from a pulpit. But if you could comment on that, because obviously there is a danger that exists of becoming rehearsed, stale, etc.

But how do you become organized and develop routines and disciplines without that happening?

Yeah, there certainly is a different danger in that. But I think the problem in America at least today is in the other extreme.

It's kind of like, you know, if we had to get up and run a marathon and we haven't even ran a mile yet, we're not prepared for that because we haven't even taken the necessary steps to even build up to that.

And I think we should train for the faith. Just like Paul said, just like wrestlers train, as we train our bodies, we have to take small steps to kind of build up to it.

And then we also have to have the discernment of knowing, am I overdoing it? And that goes back to the legalism part, the kind of pseudo -legalism.

Am I doing this because it's become an ingrained habit, or am I doing this because I really want to become more like God?

Am I reading Scripture every day because I really want to find out what God's Word is, or am I doing it so I can make a little checkmark on my calendar saying

I did it this day? And I think that kind of goes back to the heart. These disciplines,

I think, are very helpful. I think they can really transform your spiritual life. But your heart motive matters more than the practice.

If the heart's not in the right place, if you're not doing it for to become more like Christ, then it's all for no reason.

There's no purpose behind it. You discussed, as I mentioned earlier, steps for interpreting the

Bible. Do you think that one of the major problems with people developing erroneous or even heretical theology is because they don't recognize the background in which the authors in Scripture, the background that they were writing from and in, they don't know the context.

They're reading it through the eyes of a 20th or 21st century individual and not really grasping the intent of the authors.

Being a Calvinist, for instance, I believe that much of the argumentation by our

Arminian brethren when they see that Jesus loves all and wants everyone to be saved and died for and on and on is that they fail to recognize that to Jewish ears, the fact that the gospel was going out to all the

Gentile nations was a shocking new reality that they were experiencing because the

Jews were an exclusive group. So the words all and everyone and so on had a different import then.

But if you could explain, if you could comment on what I just said about the reason why people very often wrongly interpret

Scripture even to the point of developing heretical understandings. I think that's a good question.

I think one of the big problems is as Protestants, we're taught that the Bible is clear and that individual

Christians can read the Bible and understand it for themselves. And that's true, but it requires there's some background.

It's like saying every Christian can read the Bible. Well, that's true if every Christian can read. To read the

Bible, you first need to read. You have to have a basic understanding of reading and grammar and all that kind of stuff to understand it.

The Bible is the same way. You need to understand the types of literature, the genres of literature. Poetry is different from history.

The Gospels are different from a Pauline letter. You need to understand what the genre is, how to read that genre.

You need to know the context of it. What was Paul saying in these churches? What was going on in these churches when

Paul was talking to them? So you really need to have at least a basic level of that knowledge before you can really start to interpret

Scripture in a way that kind of keeps you on the right road.

And that's why I talk a lot throughout the study of the Bible about how to look at different parts of Scripture, how to read them, the importance of relying on solid biblical commentaries of people who know what they're talking about, that are trustworthy, godly people who have gone before us and put in some study and put in the work, and kind of help us and hold our hands as we walk through Scripture.

Because even though we can read it for ourselves, we're reading in a community. We're not individuals.

God didn't just hand our Bible to me or to you. He handed it to us as a church, as a community, and we should read it as a community.

And I think by reading in this community, it helps us kind of prevent some of these errors that I think we see a lot in the church.

And what would you think are some of the most serious errors in the church today that come about as a result of wrongly interpreting the

Bible? Well, I think there's two problems that we have with the

Scriptures today that kind of cause a lot of the problems we're seeing. The first is not seeing Jesus in all of Scripture.

I think that if we taught people, because I cover this a lot in the book because I think it's so important, that if we taught people that Jesus is on every page of Scripture, almost every page of Scripture, the book is about Him.

It's not about us. It's to us, but it's about Him. If we have that context and we see that, it kind of helps us prevent from stumbling into some grave errors that, well, the

Bible is to me, about me, and I can read it in a way that kind of makes it more about me.

And the second faulty step is, we talked about earlier in the previous hour about kind of red -letter

Christianity, that what Jesus said is what's important, but when Paul speaks, well, he doesn't have the same authority as Jesus.

Or, you know, the Law of Moses, well, that's outdated. That was an old testimony. We've got the new testimony. We don't need that.

So by not recognizing that all Scripture is God -breathed, by not recognizing that all Scripture is from Jesus, we kind of pick and choose what we want to hear, and it makes it a lot easier to come up with heretical views or views contrary to the

Gospel, such as, you know, views on sexual ethics that are completely out of step with what

God wants. So by having those two firmly in place, seeing

Jesus in Scripture and recognizing that it's about Him and all Scripture is from Him, it makes it easier to kind of avoid these problems.

We have Harrison in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, who wants to know,

How important do you think it is for the average Christian to learn Hebrew and Greek?

Is this just an unnecessary intrusion into our already hectic schedules when there are already brilliant scholars who have learned and mastered these languages?

Well, let me confess right up front, I don't speak Hebrew or Greek. I don't read Hebrew or Greek. I'm not a scholar in that way.

I think I've heard some pastors say it's very helpful for them in their study of the

Word, and a lot of people say it's not necessary. And I think it's less necessary, I think, today than it is in previous times, because we have such access to things and because we can...

I think even if you read, even if somebody's been to seminary and they've had one semester or two of Greek, they are still going to be relying on tools.

A Greek lexicon or things like that produced by other scholars that most of us can, even without access to seminary training, can use.

So I think we have enough tools in place now that it's become a lot less necessary than it was, say, 200 years ago when most pastors didn't have, you know, maybe had one or two commentaries that they could take with them.

Now we have an abundance of resources, and if we need to know exactly what it says in Greek, we can have somebody.

So I think it's become less explicit of the layman. I think maybe pastors, there's a lot of reason maybe they need to still do it, but I think for most of us, it's not that necessary.

And thank you, Harrison and Mechanicsburg. Please give us your full address so we can get you a free copy of the

NIV Life Hacks Bible, compliments of our publishers of this

Bible, Zondervan, and also compliments of the

Cumberland Valley Bible Book Service, CVBBS .com. We'll be shipping that out to you.

And by the way, thank you very much again, Joe in Slovenia, for providing us with an

American mailing address where your daughter lives to ship those books and the

Bible that you've won. It makes it much less expensive for CVBBS to ship those out.

Really appreciate that very much. And, well, one of the other things that you deal with in depth in this book, by the way, this is a massive, this is a very large book.

We have over 1 ,500 pages in this

NIV Life Hacks Bible. But one of the things that you deal with is recognizing intentional sins.

Yeah, I think we should make a distinction between intentional sins and unintentional sins.

Now, not that one's worse than the other one's, you know, excusable. It's that a lot of times we know we're going to sin and we still do it anyway.

Sometimes it's because we just haven't developed habits to avoid temptation. And I think that's where kind of habit formation comes into play.

That if we develop ways to, if we know that we say a young man has a habit of looking at pornography and he's fallen into sexual sins by looking at pornography, what are the habits that he can set up to prevent himself from getting in those kinds of situations?

How can he set up structures in his life to avoid those intentional sins rather than, say, the unintentional sins that just kind of pop up when we react?

Intentional sins tend to be those that are a structural part of our life that we do because we want to.

They're not just something we react to. We go and seek them out. So I think by setting up certain practices and certain habits, we can avoid those throughout our life.

And we have RJ in White Plains, New York, who wants to know,

I understand that you have written this book with the use of the

NIV, the New International Version. I love the NIV and the

NASB and the New King James, but I do have friends who are

King James -only -ists. What is the best way to get them to realize that they are really bordering on heretical understandings of what the

Word of God is? That may be too long of a question to answer in eight minutes, but I can personally recommend the

King James -only controversy by Dr. James R. White that you could get from cvbbs .com,

cvbbs .com, which clearly refutes King James -only -ism in a loving spirit because Dr.

White has a great reverence for the King James Bible. But if you could comment. Yeah, I think that's a great point.

I think most people who are open -minded, if they go into it and actually look at the controversy and look at both sides of the argument, they will see that King James -only arguments are very weak.

And one of the best reasons why we should look to other translations is because we just have more resources now.

We have better access to transcripts or manuscripts of the New Testament, we have better access to scholarly resources about the understanding of the

Greek that weren't around in the 1600s. There was nothing particularly special about the scholars at the time the

King James Bible was written. They were great godly men, but they don't have the last word on this.

I think translation is an ongoing thing, and also because our language is different.

The language that we speak is not the same as what was spoken in the King James Version, so we don't understand that language as clearly as we do our own.

So I think we need a Bible that speaks to us in our language in a way that's godly and faithful, but that we can understand.

Yeah, it's interesting that many of the King James -onlyists are vehemently anti -Catholic, and yet they unconsciously adopt the same kind of superstition over a language.

Like, for instance, you have some of the superstitious traditionalist Catholic who, if the

Mass is not in Latin, then it's not real. It's a fake Mass, it's an abomination.

Now, I as a Protestant believe all Masses are an abomination. But the

King James -only folk have a really superstitious view of this antiquated

English, the King James English, and it really can be quite bizarre.

And I think it becomes heretical, as our listener was saying, when you start claiming that different translations are not the

Word of God. Isn't that a dangerous thing to say about a translation of what is in reality the

Word of God? Yeah, I think that's a very dangerous road to go down, because what happens is, are they translating the

King James version into Swahili or these other languages? If they want to do that, it's not the same language in the

King James version. So can people who don't speak English, do they not have access to God's Word because of that? And again, that's why

I think when people really look at the arguments on both sides, it really falls apart. And that's why

King James -only controversy is becoming less and less over the years. Even people who love the language of the

King James version Bible understand that there's nothing particularly special about it. There's nothing, certainly it's not the last repository of God's Word.

Yes, and I do have many friends who prefer the King James Bible, and these are wonderful brethren in Christ who do not denounce me as being a heretic or not even being a brother because they use different translations.

But I am not in any way, shape, or form mocking those who prefer the

King James and even exclusively use it from their pulpits and so on. And last but not least, and we could do a whole show on this, and maybe we will, tips on finding time to pray.

Very important subject that I need to learn more about myself, if you could.

Yeah, I think one of the first things is to recognize how important is prayer to us?

And I think if we actually looked at how much time we spend praying, we realize it's not that important to us at all because we don't spend any time.

We spend more time watching TV or playing video games or just doing other activities.

And I think if we really decide that prayer is important, we need to schedule it. We need to find times, carve out times of our day where we're just spending time with the

Lord. And I think for a lot of us, it's better to take shorter times more often than, say, a one -thirty -minute, hour -long prayer session.

I think, you know, four ten -minute sessions in a day are a lot more effective as we spread them out throughout the day.

And I think that can really help us focus on God throughout the day and focus on, you know, really talking to Him about what's going on in different parts of the day.

I think maybe in the mornings, we talk about preparing for a day. And at lunchtime, we pray for certain people on our prayer list.

And in the evening, we pray about what's going on that evening. It helps us kind of have that rhythm of going throughout the day, always communing with God, always setting aside special times to talk to God.

And I think even that one small step there can have a huge difference in our prayer lives instead of just kind of hoping that we can squeeze in, you know, five minutes before bed.

By the way, R .J., give us your mailing address, and you have won a free copy of the NIV Life Hacks Bible, over 1 ,500 pages.

It's a hardback. And keep your eye out in the mail for a very large package from cvbbs .com.

Last but not least, we have C .J. in Lindenhurst, Long Island, who asks,

I have heard that the Lord's Prayer, otherwise known as the Our Father, is really just a pattern or blueprint that Christ has given us to pray.

And others, especially some of my Presbyterian brethren, will recite that prayer every

Lord's Day. And of course, on the other end of the extreme, you have Roman Catholics who repeat it over and over again.

What is your view on this prayer? Should we incorporate it verbatim into our prayer life, or are we becoming involved in vain babbling like the pagans as our

Roman Catholic friends sadly are involved in? I kind of take it a little way. I use it in my book to kind of show what the pattern is and how we can kind of play on that pattern to kind of create our own prayers.

And I don't think there's anything wrong with using the words directly, because I think we can pray all of Scripture, especially the

Lord's Prayer. We shouldn't be limited to the actual prayers. There's like 637 prayers, I think, in the

Bible. But we can pray any part of Scripture, and we can certainly pray the prayers that Jesus prayed.

But I think we've got to make sure that those aren't the only prayers we're praying, and that we don't let them become just vain recitations of words, that we're actually praying the words along with Jesus, rather than just kind of using them as just kind of a magical incantation.

Yeah, right. When I was a Roman Catholic, I can remember just reciting the words like they were sounds over and over and over again, the sounds that we rehearsed and memorized, like with the quote -quote

Hail Mary and so on. And we really weren't even paying attention to what was being said.

It was just like a magic spell, if you will. If you could, in one minute, conclude our program with what you most want etched in the hearts and minds of our listeners, brother.

That spiritual formation is necessary. If we want to be obedient to God, we need to set aside time.

We need to find a way to incorporate this in our life. And if we do, it will not only transform ourselves, it will transform the church, transform our culture.

And the only website I have for you is acton .org, a -c -t -o -n .org.

Do you have any other website or contact information you care to share? Yeah, you can also reach me at thegospelcoalition .org

and e -r -l -c .org, e -r -l -c .org. e -r -l -c .org.

And what does that stand for? That's for the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Okay, e -r -l -c .org.

I want to thank you so much, Jo. I look forward to having you back on the program. If you could actually stay on the line so I can book another date with you on the air.

And I want to thank everybody for listening today, especially those who took the time to write in.

CJ, give us your mailing address so we can ship you out a free Bible. I want you all to always remember for the rest of your lives that Jesus Christ is a far greater

Savior than you are a sinner. We look forward to hearing from you and your questions tomorrow on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio.