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Hello, welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. This is a daily conversation about scripture, culture, and media from a Reformed perspective. Get your Bible and coffee ready and prepare to engage today's topic.
Here's your host, Pastor Keith Foskey.
Welcome back to Coffee with a Calvinist. My name is Keith Foskey and I am a Calvinist. Today is December 11th, 2020 and we're getting closer and closer to Christmas Day. Do you have your Christmas shopping finished?
I know I don't. I still have a couple of things to get. I have only a few days to get them and so today we're going to be talking about Christmas gift ideas on the program. And this, I've been doing some special programs lately, been talking about Christmas.
I love this time of year. Last week we talked about Christmas movies and I had a couple of guys on the program with me to debate the best Christmas movies of all time. If you want to go back to last week's program, you can listen into those.
And this week I've been talking about several Christmas related subjects and yesterday I talked about gift ideas for believers. I said if you have believers in your family, maybe it's a spouse or maybe it's a parent or a brother or sister, somebody in your family that loves Jesus and is in the church, then I gave you some ideas on things that you can get them, study Bibles or books and things like that.
I gave a few recommendations and pointed to some resources for that. But today I want to deal with a different subject and that is the question of unbelievers. Okay, we all have people in our life that we love and that love us and that don't necessarily know Jesus.
And our heart breaks for these people, our hearts go out to them and for them because we want them to know the Christ that we know, we want them to be saved. And we find ourselves sometimes in a very difficult situation because some of the hardest people in the world to talk to about spiritual things are our loved ones.
Sometimes they're the most difficult people to talk to because they really are so close to us that sometimes it's hard to have difficult conversations without feeling like the relationship will somehow be divided.
And certainly we love these people, we want to maintain a good relationship with them. And I know I'm thinking specifically about people in my family who I love but I know don't love the Lord. And so obviously I pray for them and I look for opportunities to point them to Christ.
Obviously I often try to share the gospel with them when I can and to point them to the scriptures whenever the opportunity arises. And certainly I make myself available to them when they have spiritual issues that come up and questions.
Most of them know my phone's always on, my door's always open if they want to come and talk to me. They've all heard the gospel from my mouth. They've all heard me tell them about Christ. And so what can I do to move past that, to do more?
What can I do to do more? Well, over the years my wife and I have found that Christmas tends to be a way to reach out to our unbelieving loved ones in a way that can be effective but is not necessarily as confrontational as might ordinarily be.
And so one of the things that we have done is we have found that there are some really good websites that are available out there that have great resources that can be given to unbelievers and those resources can be a great way to reach out to people.
Something that the unbeliever in your life can receive and they're nice gifts. These are not cheap or junky gifts. These are nice gifts but they're gifts with a purpose, they're gifts with a message. And so one of the websites that I like to go to is called livingwaters .com if you are familiar with Ray Comfort.
Ray Comfort's ministry is an evangelism ministry and he is a man who is known worldwide for his The Way of the Master program, The Way of the Master teaching program where he teaches evangelism. And I know that my own evangelism was highly impacted by him and early on I used to watch The Way of the Master television program.
He and Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron, their program was great and I loved it. And so over the years what I have done is I have gone to Living Waters and I've looked under their books section and I have found very good and useful gifts but they're also gifts that are evangelistic in nature.
And I just happened to pull the website up here and there are books that are a little bit more expensive, there's books that are a little less expensive, but some of these books are specifically written toward the unbeliever.
Like for instance, here's one, Faith is for Weak People, that's the title of the book. And it's Faith is for Weak People, Responding to the 20 Top Objections to the Gospel by Ray Comfort. And this is the description, it says, Apologist and Evangelist, Ray Comfort has spent his entire career sharing the faith and answering people's objections to it.
He wants you to be equipped to do the same. In this practical book he shows you how to answer the top 20 questions to Christianity. And you might say, well this book is written for believers who want to share the gospel.
Yes, but at the same time he's answering the question that unbelievers have. So if you purchase this book for an unbeliever and say, hey, you know, I know you have questions about Jesus, I thought this book might help you answer those questions.
And so this is a tool, so you're giving them something that has value for them, that can point them to the gospel. And there are several different resources here like this. And those are some of the books.
They also have videos that are available, videos like the Atheist Delusion. They have the 180 video, and the 180 video is only $4 .99, but you can buy them for as low as a dollar if you buy enough of them.
We used to give them away at our church. The 180 video talks about the issue of abortion and points people again back to the gospel. Every one of the videos that you see of Ray Comfort is going to be pointing people back to the gospel.
They've got one here called Evolution vs. God. It's very good. I've seen it. There's several books, or rather several videos here that are just useful and encouraging. And so I would point you, first and foremost, if you're looking for gifts, and they even have a section called Gifts for Family and Friends, and they have a section called Gifts for the Unsaved.
And if you look at the Gifts for the Unsaved, you'll see specific things. And as I already mentioned, Faith is for Weak People is in there, $10 .99 book, I think it would be great. Why Christianity, $4 .99.
Why Christianity by Ray Comfort and Kirk Cameron. These would be tremendous gifts for unbelievers, and the only issue I could say right now is it might be hard to get them by Christmas, but you're going to be listening to this.
Today is Friday. You've got two weeks, basically, to Christmas. So I imagine if you got on the internet right now, went to livingwaters .com, click on Store, click on Christmas, and under Gifts for Unbelievers, you will see several things here that are very, very useful.
But I want to give you another idea. Yesterday I talked about Bibles. By the way, they also have here, they have something called the Evidence Bible. This is something that was edited by Ray Comfort, and I used to have an Evidence Bible.
I don't know where my Evidence Bible is now, but it's pretty good. It has some very good quotes in it and some very good, useful things. But let me say this. Something that you can do for an unbeliever in your life is simply to buy them a Bible.
There is no greater Gospel tract than the Word of God itself. There's no greater Gospel tract than a Bible. And so you can get someone a Bible and write them a personal note. Tell them why you're giving them this Bible.
You're giving them this Bible because this is the Word of God. And you want to see them know God, not for your sake, not even really for the sake of the evangelism or the ministry. It's for the sake of God's name and for the sake of their soul.
You want them to know the God who exists. You want them to be saved. And so you can write them a handwritten letter. Several years ago, I made a video for our family, and basically I took pictures from all the different family members, and I made a long family album, and it was just pictures of the family and pictures of cousins, grandmothers, and everything.
And I made the video. I forget how many minutes long, but it was only a few minutes long. But it had several dozen pictures of all the different family members. On the DVD, I had the DVD created with a DVD program.
Again, we're no longer in the age of the DVD. But basically what I did was, at the end of the DVD, I recorded myself explaining the gospel to my family. And I reached out to them on the recording saying, you know, I love you.
I want you to know that there is salvation available, but it's only available in Jesus Christ, and it's only available to those who believe in him. And I pointed them to Jesus Christ. And I did so on video.
You know, that may be something you can think about, especially if you're thinking about gifts that are for, you know, something for unbelieving family members, something that includes a genuine, heartfelt outreach from your soul to their soul about the Lord that you love and the concern that you have for their heart.
Maybe buy them a Bible, put a note inside, maybe make a video. And maybe if these are family members who don't live near you, maybe make a video with some family pictures on it. And at the end of it, talk about the importance of family and then talk about the importance of God and segue that into something.
Make a short video and send it to the people that are maybe a distance away from you and that you're wanting to give them something. Say, hey, I've created this video for you as a Christmas gift. Merry Christmas.
And please watch the ending because that's the most important part. It tells you about the person who's most important in my life and the person who's most important in my life is Jesus Christ. And here's why.
So these are all ways that you can reach your unbelieving relatives and your unbelieving friends around Christmas time. You can give them a movie or a book or something that points them to Jesus. Like I said, the most valuable thing in the world may be a Bible.
I know people don't have Bibles or in their home they don't know where their Bibles are. Get a Bible that's easy to read, like an IV or an ESV, something that they can sit down and actually ingest as people who don't know what the word says, just to help them understand it.
And give them that Bible and pray that God will use it. Pray that God will minister to them through that word. You know, the Bible says that the word of God never returns void. So if you give a person the word of God, certainly it will have value in some way.
So these are ideas, again, for unbelieving relatives. Things that we can do to point them to Jesus Christ. Now, I want to end by simply saying that this is ending out the week for this week of programs.
And in the comments below, if you have any thoughts about gifts that I didn't mention on yesterday's program, I mentioned gifts for believers. Today I mentioned gifts for unbelievers. If you have thoughts about gifts that I haven't mentioned but you think might be beneficial, either for believers or unbelievers, if you're listening to this on one of our, we stream to multiple platforms.
If you're listening to a platform that allows for comments, I would love to hear your comments in the comments below about gift ideas that you have and you can share them with our audience. Thank you again for listening today to Coffee with the Calvinists.
And thank you for listening this week. I look forward to seeing you next week on our program. Thank you again. My name is Keith Foskey and I have been your Calvinist. May God bless you.
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As you go about your day, remember this, Jesus Christ came to save sinners. All who come to Him in repentance and faith will find Him to be a perfect Savior. He is the way, the truth and the life. And no one comes to the Father except through Him.
May God be with you.