The following sermon is brought to you by Capitol Community Church, located in Raleigh, North Carolina. Capitol Community Church is a people awakened to a holy God. If you are searching for a new church home, or from out of town looking for a church to worship with, I invite you to turn to John chapter 18. And as you're turning there, let me pray. Heavenly Father, Lord, may you speak to us this morning through your word and seeing your truth. May we see you, Lord, and exalt you and praise you. Thank you, Lord, for the hope that you've given us in the Lord Jesus Christ. I pray, Lord, now that you would speak through me in the power of your Holy Spirit. In Christ's name, amen. Well, I direct your attention to verse 36 in John 18. This is Jesus before Pilate. We have been studying this response to Pontius Pilate in the realm of apologetics and evangelism. So look at Jesus' response to Pilate in verse 36. He says, my kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting that I might not be delivered over to the Jews, but my kingdom is not from the world. And then Pilate said to him, so you are a keen. Jesus answered, you say that I am a keen. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice." And Pilate said to him, what is truth? Whenever Jesus would speak in the gospels, people were mesmerized. They were stunned because he spoke the truth. Notice the article there, the word the is in front of the word aletheia, Greek word, truth. He spoke the truth fearlessly, regardless of what the government powers would think, regardless of what the religious authorities would think. He would speak the truth. In John 7, people said nobody ever spoke like this man. People were spellbound by the Lord Jesus Christ because he proclaimed the truth. And sadly, somewhere along the way in the 20th century, what happened in the American church with the rise of secularism is that the truth in many Christians' minds became compartmentalized. that it just pertained to spiritual matters that we dealt with in terms of the soul. And in large part, the message of the church became lost or, in the minds of many people, irrelevant. irrelevant, and what you had was the rise of what was called the seeker-sensitive movement, and they said, we need to get people back into the church because they've stopped coming, but rather than coming back and saying, we need to proclaim the whole counsel of God, we need to proclaim to people the truth, they said, we're gonna entertain people, and we're gonna bring people in with pragmatism. and therefore the church really has become, sadly, irrelevant in the 21st century. You look at guys who do these podcasts like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson. Why are people so attracted to these platforms and these voices? Because they're unafraid to unapologetically state what they believe is true regardless of the pushback they receive against it. And that's what our Lord did. And if we are going to have a prophetic voice in this culture, it's what we must do as well. We must proclaim the truth. And sadly, part of the problem in the church is we don't know what the truth is. People have no idea what is the truth of Christianity. Christianity is the bedrock of all truth. It is not compartmentalized. And so a lot of Christians have this bifurcation where this is what they believe on Sunday, and then the other six days of the week, they operate totally differently because they have not developed, as Paul said in Romans 12, a renewed mind. Our thinking is by and large secular. This is a book called The Christian Mind by Harry Blemires. He was a disciple of C.S. Lewis at Oxford, and this is what he wrote in 1965. 1965. He said, there is no longer a Christian mind. It is a commonplace that the mind of modern man has been secularized. For instance, it has been deprived of any orientation towards the supernatural. Tragic as this fact is, it would not be so desperately tragic had the Christian mind held out against the secular drift. But unfortunately, the Christian mind has succumbed to the secular drift with a degree of weakness and nervelessness unmatched in Christian history. It is difficult to do justice in words to the complete loss of intellectual morale in the 20th century church. One cannot characterize it without having recourse to language which will sound hysterical and melodramatic. That was in 1965. And it's only downgraded since then. Christians don't know how to think and don't know how to articulate the truth that we claim to believe, and that's a travesty. I want you to turn to the right to the book of 1 Peter, and I want you to notice what Peter says about this. This is in 1 Peter 3, look at verse 15. 1 Peter 3, verse 15. Peter says, in your hearts, so in your soul, the seed of your affections. Honor Christ the Lord as holy. That means that the Lord Jesus Christ should be the heaviest reality in your life, that you regard him as holy. That means that you live distinctly as your Lord is holy. Peter says earlier, you be holy. And then look what he says. Always being prepared. to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and respect. He says when people see the hope that you have in the Lord Jesus Christ because of Christian truth, that you need to be always prepared, always prepared. to make a defense for the reason. So we're talking about truth. The reason, why do you have this hope? You need to be able to give reasons and to give a defense for what you believe. That word defense is the Greek word apologia. It's where we get our English word apology. And when you hear the word apology, what do you think of? You think of, well, I've offended somebody and I need to go and I need to confess something. I need to apologize and try to win them back. But that's not how the Greek word was used. The Greek word apologia is used to mean a reply. When somebody launches a criticism against the truth, when somebody launches a query against the truth, you give an apologia, you give a defense of it, you give a reply to it. So for example, The Apostle Paul uses this word in Philippians 1.16 when he says, I'm in prison, I am put here in prison for the apologia of the gospel, for the defense of the gospel, to give a response for the hope that I have. Now this task that we are all given is the task of apologetics. the task of apologetics. Now apologetics is slightly different from evangelism. Evangelism is where you are telling somebody about the Lord Jesus Christ. You are trying to win them over. Apologetics is when they start on the offensive against what you believe or start questioning what you believe. That you don't just say, well, this is what I believe because my pastor told me to believe this. Or you say, this is what I believe just because my Sunday school teacher told me to believe it. Or I just hope it's true. That's not an apologetic. And apologetic is when you say, this is why I believe what I believe. And sadly, I grew up in the church, and I never encountered anything to do with apologetics till I was in college. Nobody, the whole time I grew up, nobody ever walked me through. This is how you defend the faith, because it's truth. When I was in college, my senior year in college, there was a guy in the Corps of Cadets that I was friends with, and I distinctly remember I was sitting down with him in the Chow Hall at Duncan Dining Hall at Texas A&M, and he said, hey, I'm organizing these lectures in the Passion Week, in the week leading up to Easter, I'm calling these lectures Res Week. I was like, oh, that's pretty cool. And I didn't, I was thinking, you know, probably not going to go anywhere. I said, who do you have speaking at the Res Week lectures? And he said, well, I have Josh McDowell and John Piper. I said, what? I said, you got Josh McDowell and John Piper? I said, man, I'm there. And so I remember going on campus to the just big, big Rudder Auditorium seats, three, 4,000, every seat was filled. And Josh McDowell wrote a book, called Evidence That Demands a Verdict. Evidence That Demands a Verdict. And he goes through arguments like the liar, lunatic, lord argument, things like that, basically, in defense of Christianity. And he gave an apologetic for the resurrection. talking about why we must believe that the resurrection is true. And I was fascinated listening him walk through these arguments for the resurrection. Now, fast forward four years. I go in the Marine Corps, and it's my last year in the Marine Corps. Grace Anna and I were stationed in South Carolina. And Grace Anna's brother, who's also named Grant, Grant Brogy, we decide to go to the Ligonier Conference in 2011. It was my first exposure to Presbyterianism. It was at First Baptist Orlando and I knew I was in a different world when I walked outside in the courtyard and everybody was lighting up their cigars and their pipes. And I said, I'm not in Baptist land anymore. But I'll never forget, I'll never forget this. We were up in the balcony and Sproul came out and he said, I'm going to do a message on apologetics. And I'm going to show you that Christianity is not a blind leap into the dark. That it's rational. In fact, it's the most rational thing in the world to be a Christian. That it's truth. Truth all the way down. And this truth connects to everything. And Grant and I just listened, stunned, as he walked through how you can prove with 100% certainty the truths of Christianity. Simply astounding. And if you want to follow this line of thought, he wrote a book called Defending Your Faith, An Introduction to Apologetics. I probably read this book four or five times since I got it after that. But what I want to do this morning is I want to summarize some of the arguments that Sproul gave. Obviously we only have a short period of time. But I want to show you that Christianity is the truth. I want to show you that we don't have to park our minds at the door in order to believe what we believe. We don't need to be little pinheads running around. That Christianity begins in the mind. And yes, we're called to have faith, but it's not a blind faith. You with me? Okay. Here's where we're going to start. We're going to start at the only place we can start. And that's with you and me. In terms of thinking, in terms of an argument, talking about for God, for Christianity, the only place you can start is with yourself. It's the only place you can start. Some people try and say you have to start with God, you have to start with the Bible. But as soon as you hear that statement, you have to start with the Bible, you. No, you start with you. Because first, you must understand that you are a person, that you are thinking, that you are there. You begin with your own thoughts in your mind. So, there are certain laws or rules of thinking that we must understand. So, this is the first step in understanding an apologetic for Christianity is our own, and I'm going to use a fancy word, but you need to know this word, okay? It's a fancy word, you need to know it. It's called epistemology, and that word It defines how we know what we know. Epistemology is how do you think and how do you understand truth. And God has hardwired certain epistemological truths that are incontrovertible. They're always true. And they help guide all human thinking. And a lot, when you're talking with somebody and when you're arguing with somebody about the truth claims of Christianity, a lot of times what they are doing and pushing back is they're violating these truths. So let me just walk you through three of them, the three most important, very quickly. The first is the law of non-contradiction. The law of non-contradiction. The law of non-contradiction states that A cannot be A and non-A at the same time and in the same relationship. Here's what that means. Any cat lovers in here? You like cats? Our family loves cats. Dog lovers? I don't see many hands. Dog lovers? Okay, a lot more. More popular. Okay, here's the law of non-contradiction. A cat cannot be a dog. at the same time and in the same relationship. You can call it a dog, but it's not a dog. It's a cat. An airplane, let's take an airplane. An airplane can be parked, it can be taxing, it can be taking off, it can be flying, but it cannot be flying and it cannot be taxing at the same time and in the same relationship. A cannot be non-A at the same time and in the same relationship. That is fundamentally how we think. It is what distinguishes everything. If you do not have the law of non-contradiction, you cannot understand the very basis of truth. It is fundamental to how we think and logic itself. God is logic. In fact, John 1.1, in the beginning, was the logos, the logic, and the word was with God. The logic was God. Let me read you what R.C. Sproul and John Gerstner said. This is in their book, Classical Apologetics. They said, the law of non-contradiction as a necessary presupposition or prerequisite for thought in life is neither arbitrary nor subjective. It is universal and objective. What is subjective and arbitrary is the forced and temporary denial of it. This is fundamental and basic to our epistemology. What secularism has done under the umbrella of secularism is a belief called relativism. And we've seen this. Relativism states that two plus two might not necessarily equal four. that a square might not necessarily have four sides. That's not how I perceive a square to be. Relativism states that your truth is your truth and my truth is my truth, that truth is relative to what someone thinks. And so much of the insanity in our culture is in direct violation of this law of non-contradiction. And we need to call it out. When you are talking with someone and they say something that is absurd, absurd, that is contradictory, illogical, It's violating the basic laws of logic that God has given us. The law of non-contradiction. This is fundamental to the Christian gospel. Fundamental that we maintain this. Because a Christian is not an unbeliever. God is not the devil. Heaven is not hell. The church is not the world. There's fundamental distinctions that we have to make in our thinking. And when somebody in a secular age begins to be drawn to Christ, it begins when they start thinking logically in regards to the truth, always. So that's the law of non-contradiction. Second law, very simple, very basic, stay with me here. The law of causality. The law of causality. This is the definition of the law of causality. Very, very easy. Every effect must have a cause. Every effect must have a cause. Now, that is true by definition. By definition, it's true. It's like saying that all bachelors are single. They all are, that's what a bachelor is. It's like saying all Texas Aggies are winners. We are. It's true by definition is what this is saying. In effect, is always what? Caused by something. And a cause always has an effect. And in our thinking, in our logic, God has designed our minds to understand this truth. When you watch a murder show, a murder mystery, and Columbo comes upon the body and starts walking around and looking at it, or whether it's murder she wrote, whatever it is, what's the first question that is asked? What was the cause of death? What was the cause of death? Was it an accident? Was it natural causes? And if it's not that, then ergo, it must be a murder. Why? How can you deduce that? How can you say it must be a murder? Because every effect must, must have a cause. And by the way, the cause cannot be the effect. Those are different. So that is the law of causality. Second, or third, I should say, is the basic reliability of sense perception. The basic reliability of sense perception. And the Bible, maintains this. For example, in 1 Corinthians 15, Paul talks about the 500 eyewitnesses that saw the resurrected Christ. Peter says, I'm going to read this to you, this is 2 Peter chapter 1. Let me read you what Peter says about eyewitness testimony. He said, Verse 16, for we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. We saw it. We saw his glory. We saw the miracles. We saw his holiness. We saw who he was. And then he says, verse 17 for when he received honor and glory from God the father and the voice he said we heard the voice When he was baptized was born to him by the majestic glory. This is my beloved son with whom I am well pleased We ourselves heard this very voice born from heaven, for we were with him on the holy mountain." So he's saying, look, we saw with our senses, we heard the voice, our senses perceived that he was indeed the Messiah. We must understand that in order to function in this world, you have to be able to trust your senses. You have to. You have to. When you say that you cannot trust your senses in philosophy, What inevitably happens is a philosophy of skepticism, where you become completely skeptical of everything. Now people object to our ability to perceive things. They use arguments, for example, any of y'all ever been canoeing? Where you're canoeing down the river and you look in the water And there's an effect called the bent oar effect, where the refraction of light when it hits the water, it looks like, I remember this as a kid, it looks like that oar is bending off at an angle. You're like, what happened to the oar in the water? And it's an illusion where the light makes it look like it's bent, but it's really perfectly straight. So people say, look, you can be deceived by your senses. And certainly you can be deceived by your senses. That's what an illusionist does, right? There's not real magic. There's always some sort of illusion taking place. Sometimes there's Twins. You don't know that there's twins. You remember that movie, The Prestige? They maintain this whole charade, and one of the brothers is the one that appears, and the other brother's over there. Well, how did he do that? But it was really two guys. And it was a deception that was played. It's an illusion. But by and large, the illusion does not negate the fact that we must be able to trust our senses. When you go outside, as sometimes I do, and one of my kids throws a ball at me. Hit, catch, dad, and they throw the ball. What you don't do in that moment is say, well, is this really what I'm perceiving? Is this ball really coming at me? Can I really trust my senses? What do you do? You immediately put up your hands and try and block your face or catch the ball if you have time to see it before it hits you. Often it doesn't. Often you don't. No, you naturally trust your senses and use them in order to respond to the world in which we live. If you drove here this morning, you did that. You did that. We have to be able to do that. So those are the basic rules of epistemology. Okay, so that's the first step in understanding that. Second step. So we start with ourself. And now, how do we know that God exists? Let's talk about the existence of God. How can we give a reason or a rationale that God truly exists? Have you ever had someone respond to you, I'm an atheist, I'm an agnostic, I don't believe that there's a God, or I'm not sure that there's a God. How can we prove this logically? Well, I want you to turn over to Romans chapter one. Romans chapter one. In Romans chapter 1, Paul defines what theologians call general revelation. General revelation. It's an important word, an important term, I should say. General revelation. It's called general, well, first let me say revelation. Revelation is God's revealing of himself. That's what revelation speaks to. The word general has two aspects to it. One, it's revelation that God gives generally to all people without exception. God gives this revelation to all people in mankind, everybody that has breath. is given this general revelation. The second reason it's called general revelation is because it gives us general facts about God, general facts about God. It doesn't give us specific truths, for example, that God is gracious and merciful and that God is a redeemer. It gives us general truths about God, that God is transcendent and God is all-powerful, things like that. Well, look how Paul describes this general revelation being given. He talks about the gospel and the righteousness of God in verse 17, and then Paul says, he begins really the argument of the book of Romans by talking about this general revelation, verse 18. For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men. Now look at this next clause. Who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. Suppress the truth. You see that? What Paul is saying is that this truth of revelation is given to all people, all people, but yet in their unrighteousness, suppressed means to push it down, that you put your thumb on it and push it so that you don't have to deal with it. Look what he says in verse 19. For what can be known about God is plain to them. because God has shown it to them. God has revealed it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly perceived ever since the creation of the world in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse. Notice what Paul says in verse 20. This is what is called the cosmological argument. Cosmological argument. He says, man, by his sense perception, is able to see through the things that God has made in creation. In the cosmos, in the universe, man can look out and see what God has made and discern God's character by looking at the creation. How does man do that? Well, one, you perceive that there is a cosmos that is out there Your sense perception tells you that. You see the trees. If you've ever been to the Grand Canyon, you see the big ditch. Your eyes tell you what you see. You look out into a telescope and you see the vast number of stars. Now you begin to use the law of cause and effect. I see the effect. What was the cause? Remember, every effect must have a cause. Our minds naturally understand that. So in asking, how did this universe come to be? There cannot be an infinite chain of causes. That is absurd. Therefore, there must be an uncaused cause. And God, by definition, is self-existent. God, by definition, is self-existent. So you see, even a five-year-old can use this logic. See what has been created and ask the question, why is it here? Why is it here? It had to come from somewhere, where did it come from? The only logical answer is God, because only God is self-existent. There's several objections that are made to this argument, several objections, and you need to know them so that you can respond to them. But one objection is that the universe created itself, that the cosmos worked through chance, through a big bang, and it created itself. But friends, remember the law of non-contradiction? The cosmos can't exist and not exist at the same time and in the same relationship. The cosmos cannot be the cause of its own effect. I said last week, it's like pulling a rabbit out of a hat without a rabbit or a hat or the magician. It's illogical. It's completely absurd. The cosmos could not create itself. The other objection is that, well, the cosmos is eternal. It's eternal, it's always been here. It's always been here. But here's the problem with that, is no one has found a molecule or a cell that's transcendent. Nobody has found a particle or element somewhere that's eternal. Nobody's found that. It doesn't exist. It doesn't exist because it was created. It's illogical. There has to be a self-existent being who created the cosmos. It's logical. It's truth. And even a little kid sees it. In Apollo 8, Jim Lovell, you remember him from Apollo 13? In Apollo 8, national broadcast, when they catapulted around the moon, Jim Lovell and the other astronauts began reading national TV, Genesis 1, in the beginning. God created the heavens and the earth. And they ended by saying, and God saw that it was good. They did that because it was self-evident. You look at this big blue planet Earth, perfect distance from the sun, and these bright shining stars lighting up the galaxy. And he said, when you see that, it's self evident that there is a God who created it. I remember when I was in Boy Scouts, we went to hike at Philmont Scout Ranch in New Mexico. We made that long drive, miserable, 15 passenger van with a bunch of, smelly Boy Scouts, all the way out to Cimarron, New Mexico. And I remember we stopped at a state park. We got out of Dallas. We were all a bunch of city boys in Dallas. And at the state park, we laid out a tarp, put our sleeping bags on the tarp, and we all just went to sleep looking up. And out of the city lights, we were just blown away. You see that band of the Milky Way galaxy. And yet our galaxy is just one of trillions of galaxies, each with billions of stars. It's self-evident, friends. Every effect must have a cause. And God must exist. So that's the second step. The third step. Well, how do we know Christianity is true? I concede that God is real, it's obvious that God is real, but how do we know that Islam is not true or one of the other religions? How do we know that Christianity is true? Well, the third step is to look for God's signature or God's Authentication. How does God authenticate that Christianity is true? Well, the way that God has done this, the way that God has shown us that the Bible is true and that his prophets and his apostles and most importantly the Lord Jesus Christ testified to the truth is through Miracles. Miracles. You see, if God is true, and He is, and God governs the universe, which He does, then the way that God can authenticate the truth, the way that God can put a divine signature on something, is by superseding the normal way that the universe operates. And that is called a miracle. We need to think carefully about this because I think Christians are very confused about what a miracle is. Sometimes I hear people, you know, I went to the grocery store and I pulled in and I got that parking spot right next to the doors. It was a miracle. Unbelievable. You know, one time when I was stationed over in Japan, I went on a ski trip up to Nagano, where they had the 98 Olympics. And I get on the lift at Nagano, and I see one of my buddies from college just happens to be there. We ended up skiing together the whole day. And some might say, wow, I can't believe that, you know, of all places, y'all met there on the ski lift and all that stuff. It's a miracle. No, it's not. Wasn't a miracle. It's called the providence of God. I got on an airplane, he got on an airplane, and in God's providence, working through normal means, we happen to be at Nagano at the exact same time. But it's logical. Unless one of us was beamed there from the Starship Enterprise. We both got there by normal means. That's providence, and providence is amazing. Unbelievable, God uses normal means, normal ways in order to orchestrate what he wants in our lives. But that's the providence of God. The miracle is when his normal operations are superseded. When Jesus turns water into wine, not through decay, but instantaneously by pouring the water into these jugs. When Jesus says, take up a mat and walk, and your legs are instantaneously healed. Or Jesus says, start walking towards the temple, and as you're walking, the leprosy begins to fade away. That is a supernatural event. were the normal means of providence. are superseded, and that is a miracle. And what God has done through history, you look at Moses, you look at the prophets, and most importantly, you look at the Lord Jesus Christ, the way that God has testified that these are his spokesmen and that they are speaking the truth is by working supernatural miracles. Let me give you some examples. Example in John chapter two. At the end. Verse 23, when he was in Jerusalem at the Passover feast, many believed in his name when they saw the signs that he was doing. When they saw the miracles that he was doing, many believed. John 3, verse 2, talking about Nicodemus, this man came to Jesus by night and said to him, Rabbi, We know that you are a teacher come from God, for no one can do these signs, these miracles that you do unless God is with them. You see Nicodemus' logic? It's the same logic that I'm talking about. That in order to understand that it's truth from God, it is attested to by miracles. With the paralytic in Mark chapter two, Jesus said to those around him after he said to the man that his sins were forgiven, Jesus said, but that you may know that the son of man has authority on earth to forgive sins. I say to you, rise, pick up your bed and go home. So Jesus said, look, so that you can know that I, God, only God can forgive sins, have authority to do this, I attest to the truth with a miracle. And the truths of Christianity, through and through, Christ and the apostles have been attested to by miracles. So we know, logically speaking, that they were speaking the truth. And then you ask, well, what did they teach according to God's word? What did they teach according to God's word? Well, you can look at what Paul said, for example, in 2 Timothy 3. He said, all scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, reproof, correction, and training in righteousness. All of it is. Jesus said over and over again, have you not read? Have you not read the Old Testament? It's scripture, it's truth. So the ones who claimed Truth, by virtue of their miracles, said, look, this book, 66 separate books, all one book, constitute the sacred scriptures which have been attested to by God supernaturally by miracles. And that's how we know from the outside that the Bible is true. Now, from the inside, you can look at fulfilled prophecy. and the hundreds of prophecies that have been fulfilled in looking through Scripture from the inside. But from the outside, we see miracles pointing to its veracity. Now, in understanding that, as R.C. Sproul used to say, the rest is exegesis. Because once you know that the Bible is true, it's game over. It's game over because now it's just a matter of interpretation. Now it's just a matter of reading and understanding what the Bible says, that it's truth all the way down. So that right there is the classical argument for Christianity. It begins with ourselves, the only place that we can begin. It begins with understanding how we think. It begins with then understanding that God is there, the existence of God, and then how God has testified that His messengers spoke the truth. Now, what are we to do with this? How do we apply this? First, let me say something here. When you do this, and what you wanna do in a conversation is normally you're not gonna be queued up where you can just walk through exactly what I walked through. You're gonna face different questions, different pushback, but what you need to know when you're talking with somebody is they already believe this. You remember what Paul says? That they suppress the truth in unrighteousness. They already believe this intuitively. You're not having to convince them of something that they don't know. Psalmist says, the fool says in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt. They do abominable deeds. Solomon says in Ecclesiastes that God has put eternity into man's heart. The reason why people suppress the truth is because they don't want it to be true. Morally speaking, they don't want it to be true. That is why they suppress the truth. Because if what you're saying is true, that there is a God, and He has revealed His will in His word, then that means I am accountable to God. And so it's not that people can't think logically and coherently, they can. It's that they don't want to believe the truth. And that is why we need the Holy Spirit. When you are having a conversation with somebody, you will never argue somebody into the kingdom. You need God, the Holy Spirit, to open the eyes of their heart where they will see the truth and believe the truth. Because morally speaking, we are dead in our sins. And we hate the fact of God. And we will do everything that we can to avoid it. I once saw, do you remember that documentary? I've mentioned this before, that documentary that Ben Stein did where he interviewed Richard Dawkins and basically walked him through the cosmological argument. And Richard Dawkins at the end said, well, I'd basically rather believe in aliens than God. He'd rather, he said, I'd rather believe that than come to the reality that there is a God. People want to avoid it. Second. The most helpful thing in evangelism and apologetics is the witness to the gospel in our changed lives. Do you remember what Peter said? Give it a fence for what? The hope that is in you. Too many Christians do not display the hope that they have. You know, they're dour and everything's coming to an end. The sky's falling, it's just terrible. There's no hope displayed or there's no fruit in our lives. When you read the epistles and when you read the Acts of the Apostles, what turned the world upside down was people seeing others' lives changed by the gospel. The Thessalonians, their lives were changed and people all over Greece started talking about it. And then the quicker that you can get to the gospel, the better, because the gospel is the power of God unto salvation. If you can get there without having to give a defense for the existence of God, for having to give a defense for truth, get there. You want to get to the gospel quickly, because the gospel is God's power to save, Romans 1 16. Faith comes by hearing, hearing by the word of Christ. So I'm trying to get to the Bible as quick as I can, and I'm only using the apologetic arguments when I get the pushback. Now I go back to the cosmological argument, and if they push back against that, now I'm going back to the epistemology where I'm saying, look, let's understand basic truths about how we think, but I'm only doing that If when I go to the scriptures, that's rebuffed. I go to the scriptures first, and then I'm going back and using the arguments when the reply is given to me. Third, one of the reasons I did this this morning is so that you would know that Christianity is the truth. That you are not taking a blind leap into the dark. that it is the most rational truth in the world. Yes, we are called to have faith. We are. We are called to have faith in an unseen God. but that unseen God has communicated himself to us so that we are without excuse. So we can have hope that the truths that we believe are indeed rational. And I praise God for that. I praise God for the truth. I praise God that He has revealed Himself to us in a way that we can understand and know Him and know that His Word is indeed the truth. Heavenly Father, we thank You for the truth of Your Word. We thank You, Lord, for how You've revealed Yourself to us. We thank You, Lord, for the wonderful hope that Christianity gives us for the future, that your son came to save sinners, die on the cross for us, so that we might be reconciled to a holy God, and it's all revealed in your word, and that you've revealed yourself in creation, so that none are without excuse. Lord, may we be faithful evangelists, and may we be faithful honoring Christ the Lord as holy, giving a defense whenever we are asked for the hope that is in us. In Christ's name, amen. Thanks for listening. For more sermons, information, and events, check out our website at capitolcommunitychurch.com.