Gospel

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How many times have you as a Christian heard the tired proclamation from unbelievers that what you believe requires a gullible acceptance of blind faith supported by zero fact? With smugness and a condescending tone, we are told repeatedly that reason has prevailed over out-dated bronze-age myths, and that only those with the mental capacity of a child would believe in God, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But really, all they’re doing is redefining reason to assume naturalism or atheism. It is no more reasonable to believe that nothing brought forth a universe, or that lifeless matter could produce, even in billions of years, the complexity of the cell; let alone DNA or the human brain.

I’m not worried that they think such foolishness is the epitome of reason; that’s there own folly, and it doesn’t embarrass us, it embarrasses them. What concerns me however, is that a lot of us Christians come to believe what they say as much as they do. Many of us are resigned to think that the Christian faith can only be based on faith and faith alone, with reason being the enemy. Mind you, no man is saved by anything else but faith(Ephesians 2:8), and only regeneration by the holy spirit deems anyone a genuine Christian. But to concede that our faith entails no reason and no evidence to support its claims, is, in a sort of defeatist way, only concurring with what our critics are saying.

Apologetics is among the least explored concepts of the Christian faith in the church today. Apologetics is derived from the Greek word apologia, meaning, “defense of”, or “speaking in defense of”, whichever.

15 But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear. 1 Peter 3:15

Peter instructs us to be ready to answer people concerning questions about our faith. In a godless, arrogant age where science and philosophy are the supposed be all and end all of all things true and knowable, as believers, we best have some compelling answers to the tough questions we are often pressed with. Answers to questions like creation, morality, the problem of evil, the meaning of human existence, and why people should accept the bible as inspired and inerrant.

I’m very concerned about those of us who have children attending public schools and secular colleges because they are exposed to environments hostile to Christianity and replete with liberalism, socialism, Darwinism, and Marxism. About 75% of Christians who enter college will abandon their faith by the time they finish and that’s due to never being able to defend it. Marxist professors glory in punching holes through Christianity and embarrassing Christian students who weren’t prepared to answer them. Mainstream culture is no less relentless and Christianity is seen as something only uninformed simpletons adhere to, and the church by and large is unresponsive. Therefore, as the culture sees it, because we don’t give answers it must mean that we have no answers.

When a powerful public figure like Barack Obama stands before thousands of people and proclaims that the Sermon on the Mount is outdated, how do we respond? We’d better worry about it because this guy stands a great chance of becoming President of the United States. It concerns me that barely any churches teach any hint of basic apologetics. How many do you know that teach their flocks to answer difficult questions people have about the Christian world view? I strongly believe that some basic knowledge of some apologetics is essential to not only answering critics, but for the purpose of witnessing. This is the age of Darwinism, and modern culture has been indoctrinated into believing great-great grandpa was an orangutan. Knowing even the basics of creation science can demolish what most people think they know about evolution. A good place to start next time you have the opportunity to witness to a committed unbeliever, is to ask them precisely how life began on early earth–Richard Dawkins can’t even answer that one. Also, ask the person how they determine right from wrong. Ask them where they think human beings, who are supposedly just a conglomerate of various chemicals from some prehistoric pool of sludge, derived this conscious awareness of morality. Flip this skepticism around and start asking them tough questions. The vast majority of laymens, and even many in academia have no answers for them. In fact, most of the general population who remain skeptical have no better response then to blurt out “ Well I don’t know, but I’m way too smart to believe in some invisible sky-daddy!!!”

Am I implying that the conviction of the holy spirit is not enough to save people? Absolutely not, it is the holy spirit alone who opens blind eyes. But giving some answers for our faith glorifies God and provides us a viable avenue for effective witnessing. Besides, Peter instructed the church to do it, and Paul the apostle practiced it himself:

2As his custom was, Paul went into the synagogue, and on three Sabbath days he reasoned with them from the Scriptures, 3explaining and proving that the Christhad to suffer and rise from the dead. Acts 17:2-3

In the same chapter, it tells us Paul did the same thing in Berea, and in Athens with the Epicureans and the Stoics. There must be some convincing evidence as to what we proclaim, otherwise we give critics no better reason to believe in Jesus Christ then we do Zues.

But surely, knowing basic apologetics requires years of college commitment, degrees in textual criticism, hermeneutics, New and Old testament theology, biology, physics, and astronomy right? For those in the body called to be full time apologists yes, dedication to one or more of those fields of study in necessary, but no one is asking anyone to become an apologist. If that's the desire of your heart, great, but we’re all called to do different functions and apologists fulfill only one of many. I think we ought to study independently at least the basics of what they work hard to bring to us. I don’t have a degree in anything, and I’m not an apologist, but I can read and have a thirst for study and for truth. You need credentials to be a recognized apologist, but knowing the basic answers to basic questions about our faith requires only a desire to learn and equip yourself to be able to defend what you believe. All a Christian needs to do is allocate some time to learning what our brethren in the fields of apologetics have worked tirelessly to provide us. There are plenty of them out there who would be more then happy to to come to most churches and teach apologetics to the flocks. In return, we can support their ministries through cheerful donation and help the next generation of apologists get started.

There should be no dispute that we’re losing most of our young people to atheistic influence in society. The church has no answers for them, so in turn they retreat to the secular world to find them.

Apologist John Warwick Montgomery wrote this in "Reasons for Faith: Making a case for the Christian

“We have woefully neglected our responsibility to train our young people in the solid case for Christianity, and then we wonder why they depart from the faith under the influence of secular university instruction. We give our parishioners and our missionaries no foundation in the defense of the faith, and then wonder why our evangelistic efforts show so little fruit in a world where people have long moved beyond accepting something just because someone else believes it.”

This is the era of postmodernism and all guns are firing at the central doctrines of Christianity. We need to quit reading trash like “Become a Better You” and start reading books like “The Case for Christ”. We need to get out there and begin talking to common folk; asking them what they believe and what questions they harbor concerning theism, Christianity, the bible, life in general, and the afterlife. From that we can construct feasible answers from the Christian world view and properly give an adequate reason not only why we believe Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life; but also why they should believe it, instead of randomly throwing bible verses at them. If we continue to neglect the defense of what we claim to believe, then the hounds of skepticism will persist in gnawing away the foundations of our faith that the early church worked so diligently in amassing, and more and more people will be dragged away from the truth of Christ; seeking truth, direction, and salvation from the frivolous philosophies of a godless culture, and end up damned as a result.

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