Reasons to Witness

I presented this message at our first Do Hard Things meeting. This is the text of my speech on why we should evangelize. (Please, realize that failure to read the whole thing can result in some inaccurate conclusions about what I'm saying.)

I put a lot of passion (not to mention a pretty late night) into writing this one, and it represents why I believe that Christians should personally evangelize, even to strangers. This is something I really feel strongly about, so please, let it move you and take the message to heart.

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I have to say that I disagree with Makenna on the idea of personal evangelism. And I have a few reasons for this I think are quite valid.

First off, I think it is invasive to people's privacy. Personal evangelism is what has given Christians their reputation of being proselytizing freaks that hound people to love Jesus. We don't need to walk around telling people to repent of their sins. People have certain boundaries that you just don't cross.

Speaking of boundaries, you should notice that in our culture and every culture, we have unspoken but specific rules concerning appropriate conduct. There are different levels of intimacy in relationships. Say, I might call up my good friend Nick and spill all the deep, personal stuff that has been happening to me lately, but it would be totally inappropriate for me to do that to a total stranger! Jesus Christ is the deepest thing in a Christian's life. We need to build relationships with people before we can start talking about Jesus Christ. They won't listen otherwise!

If you must personally witness, which I don't recommend, then just please listen to a few brief guidelines. If you don't feel ready to witness to someone, then don't. You could get flat-out rejected. If you think it will make you or them uncomfortable, then don't. People who are really led by God to do the evangelizing can do the evangelizing. If we mess up and feed people the wrong answers, then they're gonna get the wrong answers! Someone was feeding Charles Darwin all the wrong answers about God. That's why he went down like that. When you're in doubt about sharing your faith, just don't. You could mess up. Right?

Right?

Right?

No. Not right. Do you guys realize what I've been doing here? I have been spewing the lies of Satan. These are lies that Satan has told me over and over and over. And I've bought into them. But now it is time for us to stop buying into the lies of Satan. It is time for us to start getting into the truth of Jesus Christ.

What I have just done is actually verbalized these lies. I've said them out loud. Usually they just prowl quietly around in my heart and mind. But I've now brought them out in the open so we can take a few cracks at them. Let's do that.

The first lie I told you guys today is that we should not tell strangers about our faith in Jesus Christ because it invades people's privacy, because it is proselytizing and because it crosses too many boundaries. Let me tell you something—Yeshua Ha'Mashiach, Jesus, the Messiah does not just cross boundaries, He shatters them. When Jesus was on earth He was never worried about staying within cute cultural rules. He trampled all over tradition. What did He say? In Luke 12, He said, “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on there will be five in one family divided against each other, three against two and two against three. They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law."” Jesus is not interested in us staying timidly enslaved within cultural bounds. Jesus is not interested in us staying within our comfort zones. Satan is.

Do we have to build up relationships with people before we witness to them? I don't think so. Why not? Wouldn't that be a good, sensible way to do it? You get to know someone for a while, take them to dinner, and tell them about Jesus. Good plan, right? Nope. Why doesn't it work? It doesn't work because the conversation never happens. You get three months into the relationship and you still haven't done it. You get six months into the relationship and you still haven't done it.

The truth is, there will never be a totally appropriate time to tell someone about Christ. The Bible says Satan is the prince, the god, of this world. He deceives unbelievers. He is not going to just hand them over so they can ask questions and get their little preaching session. You have to go to them. “For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” That's Ephesians 6:12. We are to wrestle against the powers of the dark world. We don't sit around and be cute Christian kittens avoiding conflict, avoiding offending people, avoiding speaking truth when it't tough. We're supposed to be out there fighting the good fight and keeping the faith.

Do we need to form a good relationship with people to witness to them? No. Can we witnes to total strangers? Yes. Most will say that it is much easier to talk to strangers about Jesus than it is to talk to people you know. I like what Mark Cahill says, something to the effect of, “why would you knowingly move people from a category that makes them easy to witness to, to a category that makes them hard to witness to?”

Should we wait until we have formed a relationship to witness to people? What is a relationship, anyway? It is a circle of knowledge. It's a flow of information. The other person knows things about you, you know things about them. A relationship is all information. My question is, is Jesus Christ so unimportant to me that He should be one of the last things people know about me? Should they know my name before they know the name of Yeshua, the Messiah? Should people know that I like parkour and pizza before they know that I love the Lord my God? No. I want Jesus Christ to be the first thing people know about me.

Say you do wait six months before telling people about Jesus. People can die in six months. People can die in three months. People can die in three days. They can be gone before you ever get a chance to talk with them. And you could seriously regret it.

And here is the clincher. Jesus commanded us to witness. Luke 10:2, “He told them, "The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of the harvest, therefore, to send out workers into his harvest field.” The world will try to tell you that people are not interested in the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That is a lie from the lips of Satan. When I go out witnessing the majority of people are hungry for the truth. They want to hear what Jesus has to say. If I run into people who are antagonistic to the Gospel, they are in the minority.

Romans 10:13-15 says, "for, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved."
How, then, can they call on the one they have not believed in? And how can they believe in the one of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone preaching to them? And how can they preach unless they are sent? As it is written, "How beautiful are the feet of those who bring good news!""

How can people be saved without God's servants giving them the truth? People are dying every single day. The longer we put off communicating truth to them the more danger they are in of facing the wrath of our great God. And God does not enjoy giving them just punishment for their sins.

Ezekiel 18:23 says, “Do I take any pleasure in the death of the wicked? declares the Sovereign LORD. Rather, am I not pleased when they turn from their ways and live?”

2 Peter 3:9 says, “The Lord is not slow about His promise, as some count slowness, but is patient toward you, not wishing for any to perish but for all to come to repentance.”

God wants everyone to be saved, and so should we. Jesus commanded us to witness, and so we should. Let's look at Matthew 28:19-20.

“Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you. And surely I am with you always, to the very end of the age."

What did Yeshua, our wonderful Savior, go through for us? He suffered intensely. He was scourged by the Romans. Many died from that punishment. The whips for the scourging had metal balls and sharp pieces of stone in them, and they tore bodies open to the point where the spine and intestines were exposed.

And that wasn't enough. Jesus suffered even more. He was crucified. The cross is almost always glamorized today, but it was bloody, brutal, and cruel to the point of being inhuman. Huge spikes were driven through the hands of the crucified criminals. These spikes would crush the median nerve, which is the same nerve that runs down to your elbow and is what you typically refer to as your funny bone. You know the pain that you feel when you hit your funny bone? Now imagine that same pain for hours upon hours. Imagine that nerve not just getting hit but crushed. This was such an awful, unspeakable pain that they had to invent a new word for it: excruciating.

Jesus suffered a death by asphyxiation, that is, suffocation. When on the cross you can breathe in easily but you can't breath back out without a struggle. The posture causes you to have to push up on the nails driven through your feet in order to get a breath out. There is only so much you can take before you suffocate and die. Suffocation is possibly the most horrible death out there. Being deprived of the oxygen you have thrived on for years and years is unspeakably awful. I know friends who have had awful nightmares about dying of suffocation underwater.

And yet, Jesus did it all for us. That is what He went through on that cross. That is the price He had to pay for our sin, for your sin, and for my sin.

We should be unspeakably grateful. And yet. After all that He did for us, we cannot even step outside of our comfort zones enough to obey His commandments. We refuse to do the smallest things for Him even though He gave everything for us.

But I'm not just here to point out how awful we are and to stand here moaning over our problems. We are here to actually do something about this problem. We are going to start overcoming. We are going to start serving our Messiah, our Lord and Savior, Yeshua, Jesus of Nazareth. We are going to start loving Him because He first loved us. And we're going to start today.

We're going to step outside of our comfort zones and share the good news—that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world on the cross. That Jesus Christ provides hope and salvation available for anyone. That Jesus Christ is alive and wants to have a personal relationship with individual human beings.

Today, we are going to care enough about the souls of human beings, and we are going to care enough about the atoning sacrifice of our spotless Lamb, Yeshua, to go sharing the gospel, to go spreading our faith, to go make disciples of all nations. Amen.

Theology "Debate" - Help With College?

Hey guys,
I was just hoping some of you that I will see on Monday could help me out with an assignment for my Moody Bible Institute class. I'm taking The Church and its Doctrines and I have to do the following:

"Find two people you know who have either different political views, different theological views, or some major difference in opinion. Discuss with them their opinion considering some matter of theology."

So, if you feel strongly about any of the following topics, leave a comment:
Calvinism/Arminianism (does God pick and choose who will be saved?)
Determinism/Free Will (has God predetermined everything that happens?)
Infant Baptism/Adult Baptism (which is biblical?)
Original Sin (are we all guilty of eating the forbidden fruit?)
Eternal Security (can a Christian lose his/her salvation?)
Eternal Conscious Torment/Annihilation (are the wicked consciously tormented forever in hell, or annihilated?)
Exhaustive Foreknowledge (does God exhaustively know the entire future?)
Pre/Mid/Post-tribulation Rapture (will the church be raptured before, during, or after tribulation?)
More Scripture to Come (will God add more to the scripture we already have?)
Soul Sleep/Intermediate State (are the dead asleep until the resurrection, or are their souls alive in some form?)

If you would want to help, that would be great! I will hopefully be doing this during lunch.
Thanks guys!

Three Men And Three Questions

This is kind of odd, but I came up with this quote.

The fool asks, "why is God so inhuman?"

The thinker asks, "why is man so godless?"

The wise man asks, "why am I so godless?" and does something about it.

Calvinism Undermines the Cross

I have noticed that most false doctrines have a tendency to undermine the necessity of Christ's death on the cross.

Calvinism is no exception. How does it undermine the cross? Simple.

If, as the Calvinists say He did, God made the decision to override human free will in order to save His chosen, then why did Jesus still have to die on the cross?

Couldn't God, if He were going the route of overriding free will, just make His preselected, elected individuals never commit a single sin all their lives and thus be righteous? Why make His Son suffer all the torments?

The fact is, if Calvinism is true, individuals are really saved by unconditional election, not by Christ's atoning death. Unconditional election could have followed whatever pattern God wanted it to. Whatever an individual must do to meet God's standards and be saved, God could have simply overridden human will and made some of His creatures meet the standard.

I have known of Calvinists who have given testimony of how they were saved, saying that finally, after hearing the gospel again and again, unconditional election was the doctrine that humbled them enough to repent.

We are saved by Christ's substitutionary, atoning death on the cross. Nothing should overshadow that. Nothing should make it unnecessary. Nowhere in the Bible do we read of people being saved when they heard the doctrine of unconditional election. It is always about Christ's death.

Genesis 30, Jacob's Sheep Breeding, and Epigenetics

NO. WAY.

Sorry. I don't normally begin articles that way. But that's how I'm feeling right now. My brain absolutely blew after finding this out.

I've been having a lot of struggles with Genesis 30. I read several articles about how pre-scientific Jacob's breeding methods were. I'll just let you read the whole story.

Genesis 30:25-43
After Rachel gave birth to Joseph, Jacob said to Laban, "Send me on my way so I can go back to my own homeland. Give me my wives and children, for whom I have served you, and I will be on my way. You know how much work I've done for you."

But Laban said to him, "If I have found favor in your eyes, please stay. I have learned by divination that the LORD has blessed me because of you." He added, "Name your wages, and I will pay them."

Jacob said to him, "You know how I have worked for you and how your livestock has fared under my care. The little you had before I came has increased greatly, and the LORD has blessed you wherever I have been. But now, when may I do something for my own household?"

"What shall I give you?" he asked.
"Don't give me anything," Jacob replied. "But if you will do this one thing for me, I will go on tending your flocks and watching over them: Let me go through all your flocks today and remove from them every speckled or spotted sheep, every dark-colored lamb and every spotted or speckled goat. They will be my wages. And my honesty will testify for me in the future, whenever you check on the wages you have paid me. Any goat in my possession that is not speckled or spotted, or any lamb that is not dark-colored, will be considered stolen."

"Agreed," said Laban. "Let it be as you have said." That same day he removed all the male goats that were streaked or spotted, and all the speckled or spotted female goats (all that had white on them) and all the dark-colored lambs, and he placed them in the care of his sons. Then he put a three-day journey between himself and Jacob, while Jacob continued to tend the rest of Laban's flocks.

Jacob, however, took fresh-cut branches from poplar, almond and plane trees and made white stripes on them by peeling the bark and exposing the white inner wood of the branches. Then he placed the peeled branches in all the watering troughs, so that they would be directly in front of the flocks when they came to drink. When the flocks were in heat and came to drink, they mated in front of the branches. And they bore young that were streaked or speckled or spotted. Jacob set apart the young of the flock by themselves, but made the rest face the streaked and dark-colored animals that belonged to Laban. Thus he made separate flocks for himself and did not put them with Laban's animals. Whenever the stronger females were in heat, Jacob would place the branches in the troughs in front of the animals so they would mate near the branches, but if the animals were weak, he would not place them there. So the weak animals went to Laban and the strong ones to Jacob. In this way the man grew exceedingly prosperous and came to own large flocks, and maidservants and menservants, and camels and donkeys.

Frankly, I almost entirely lost my faith over this. Seriously, I thought, what is this even saying? That the sight of the striped branches caused the sheep to have striped kids? I mean seriously. No way.

So I went searching. And found nothing. All the articles by Bible-believing Christians were, to be honest, pretty pathetic. They ducked and skirted around the issue in any manner they could.

I got lost. I mean really. I felt like I had no one to trust anymore. I couldn't trust God, I couldn't trust the Bible. I didn't know where to turn or where to go or what to do. My life had been so real. I had been sharing God with others. I had been psyched about Him. I had been breathing Him in, experiencing God in huge ways.

And then it hit me. Doubt shot through the core of my being and left me numb. I didn't know. I remember taking a bike ride with my family and just being totally zoned out. I didn't want to be with them. I didn't want to be with anyone. I just wanted to be left alone until I could sort myself out, assemble the broken pieces I had thought of as truth.

My brother had accidentally broken a window a while ago. The gaping hole was always there in the living room, staring at me. It was like a wide, ghoulish mouth. I remember thinking that a demon must have come through that hole in the window and gotten into me somehow.

I knew myself, though. I guessed I would come back around. I knew I would be back to normal by the time that the window was fixed.

I did get back to normal. And right on time. When the hole was patched, I was patched. It was an interesting sort of metaphor for the gaping hole in my heart. My faith came back and God began to fill me in that same sort of way again.

Finally, I had sort of come to terms with things and realized that I couldn't go on with half-doubts. I needed to identify the doubt and either recognize it as the voice of truth - and make scary modifications to my beliefs - or recognize it as a plaguing doubt.

I did the latter. Simply too much of my life has revolved around God and Scripture in such real ways that it is ridiculous to think that it could all be fake. There is too much reality to it all. It exhumes the essence of reality.

Genesis 30 had to be right, somehow. My understanding of it was fallible and left plenty of room for a lot of misinterpretation.

The conclusion I came to was that I was simply having trouble understanding a God Who could break the laws of genetics He created. The fact is, during the course of Jacob's life, God was bent on blessing him. Who was I to say that God couldn't have used any means - even the funky superstitious stick thing Jacob did - to bless him?

So I sort-of officially dropped my worry about Genesis 30. The fact is, that answer should be good enough for any Christian. God can make it work.

I asked GotQuestions.org about it. This is what they said:

Thank you for your question concerning Jacob and the flock of Laban. Your desire to dig into the details of Scripture is commendable. The New American Standard Version can help on an important detail. In verses 38-39, we read, "He set the rods which he had peeled in front of the flocks in the gutters, even in the watering troughs, where the flocks came to drink; and they mated when they came to drink. So the flocks mated by the rods, and the flocks brought forth striped, speckled, and spotted." Some might call this selective breeding, or genetic engineering. Apparently Jacob had the knowledge that the natural chemicals under the bark of the plants he used could cause mutations in coloration of the animals. He put the branches in the drinking water of the animals. It was not their seeing the branches, but their drinking the water that caused the mutation. The animals that mated shortly after they drank the water were effected. Notice also that he did this only when the healthy and strong animals came to drink. The result was that Jacob’s animals flourished and he became a wealthy man. Many lessons can be learned from the life of Jacob in Genesis Chapter 30. Out of mundane and even puzzling events the foundation of the nation of Israel was laid through the sovereign plan of God. Our Lord, who is very much involved in His creation stepped into time in the person of God the Son, and brought into reality the plan of redemption for all that believe in Him.

Fudged, I thought. That sort of answer to the problem is totally fishy. There's no way that the mother sheep drinking the water with branches could possibly affect the colors of their children. Not a chance. No way.

I just contented myself with the it-was-a-miracle answer. Which, I might remind you, is not a bad answer, because in Genesis 31 Jacob does attribute his success with the sheep to God's providence, not his fancy breeding.

But nevertheless, tonight I searched again for answers on the subject, not really expecting to find anything.

But I did. Something came up.

This is so radical I cannot begin to describe the effect it has had on me. It is so amazing. God is so good. I have been in total shock tonight.

Read this article. Read it. Seriously.

http://www.geneimprint.com/site/press/12861015-1154826620

"In people, a forebear's diet can influence obesity, heart disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. In mice, diet can influence body weight, blood pressure and even fur color. Because examples of this inheritance are only starting to emerge, scientists still don't know the full extent to which diet influences health. But they may be starting to figure out how."

Read this article, too. Yeah, read it.

http://www.biotech-info.net/moms_diet.html

"The reason some animals were yellow and some were brown lay deep in their fetal past, biologists at Duke University Medical Center, Durham, N.C., reported this month: Some of the mothers consumed supplements high in very simple molecular compounds that zip around the genome turning off genes. One silenced gene was for yellow fur; when it is turned off, the mouse's fur color defaults to brown. For the mice, it wasn't just that "you are what you eat," but that you are what your mother ate, too."

"There is no doubt that, in the case of the brown or yellow mice, the "you are what your mom ate" phenomenon reflects just such epigenetic influences."

No. Way. So, as we get into the science of epigenetics, we may just find out that Genesis was right after all.

My doubt is gone, I've been set free.

My Thoughts on Original Sin - An Amendment to "Common Logic"

In my last post, I went over how I think Calvinists end up blaming the sin nature (they call it original sin) for man's sin, not the sin itself. But I do need to clarify.

Romans 5:18-19
Consequently, just as the result of one trespass was condemnation for all men, so also the result of one act of righteousness was justification that brings life for all men. For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so also through the obedience of the one man the many will be made righteous.

I can't argue with that. Clearly, mankind's righteousness is shot because of what Adam did. However, I am still wary of the "original sin" versus "actual sin" concept. Take a look at this.

Ezekiel 18:1-4
The word of the LORD came to me: "What do you people mean by quoting this proverb about the land of Israel:
" 'The fathers eat sour grapes,
and the children's teeth are set on edge'?

"As surely as I live, declares the Sovereign LORD, you will no longer quote this proverb in Israel. For every living soul belongs to me, the father as well as the son—both alike belong to me. The soul who sins is the one who will die."

Notice that part: "the soul who sins is the one who will die". Ezekiel 18 goes on to say that if there were hypothetically a man who were perfect in every way, he would surely not die. It then speaks of the son of that man, supposing that son turned from his father's righteousness into wicked ways. This man, according to Ezekiel 18, would die. Then it moves on to the son of that wicked man. If the son was also hypothetically a righteous man, then he would not die. If there were still an "original sin" resting on this man from the sin of his father, that would not be true. The fact is, God clearly will not damn us for the sin of our forefathers. Yes, the iniquity of the fathers will be visited on the children unto the third and fourth generation, like Exodus 20 says. It happens in the form of AIDS to entire populations after adultery is committed. But no one will die for sin he did not commit.

Many Reformers point to Romans 5:12-13 to say that every man committed Adam's sin with him.

Romans 5:12-13
Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all men, because all sinned— for before the law was given, sin was in the world. But sin is not taken into account when there is no law.

Frankly, I don't see how this says that every man committed Adam's sin. It does not say that every one of us was there committing Adam's sin with him. If we were, the hypothetical man in Ezekiel 18 who keeps all of the commandments would still be damned, because Adam sinned for him.

I view it more this way: Adam committed a sin, and all men were made sinners, because now we have to fight against sin and can't win. It's an uphill climb that none of us can possibly do for ourselves.

We are damned for Adam's sin in the sense that because he sinned, we now have the disease of sin and cannot possibly get out of life righteous. Adam's sin causes us to commit our own.

But the point I am making is that we did not, as some believe, commit Adam's sin with him. When Jesus judges the sinners of the world, I don't believe He will add to their list of offenses: "eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil."

All I would really like is a change of terms. Sin nature is a common term, and I think it is far more accurate than "original sin".

The truth is, original sin was originally a Catholic doctrine, and they taught that the way to get rid of original sin is baptism. In other words, you must be baptized to be saved.

The thief in the cross was not baptized. A Catholic might say a man like that still had original sin.

Also, we know that Jesus' blood covers ALL of our sin, not just actual sin. If baptism covers over any of our sin, then Christ's blood did not cover it. Christ's life was not just given to forgive us, it was given to us to heal the entire disease of sin.

In the Bible, a lot of focus is given to wrong choices and a bit less focus is given to sin nature. In Calvinism, a lot of focus is given to sin nature, and very little/none to wrong choices.

I rather like this article.
http://www.learnthebible.org/sin-nature.html

This is a rather nice article with a dash of humor. The writer is Reformed and makes a good case for sin nature, even though he does call it "original sin".
http://www.tulip.org/trf/wsc018.htm

Common Logic vs. Calvinism

I can't help but write another post on why I do not believe Calvinism to be a true doctrine.

First off, let's ask a few questions and answer them as a Calvinist would.

Why are some people going to be damned?
Calvinists say that they are damned because of disobedience to God.

Why did these people disobey God?
Calvinists say that they disobey God because that is their evil nature, and they are wicked, depraved, sinful creatures.

Where did these people get this nature?
Calvinists say people got their sinful nature from Adam and Eve. When they sinned, the human race fell under a curse, and that race received the sinful nature.

Can a person ever obey God by himself?
No; humans are wicked, depraved creatures, and they cannot do any good of themselves. The sin nature in them is too great.

Notice where the logic is going here. People are sinning not because they themselves are opposed to God. They are sinning because Adam and Eve were opposed to God, and thus made the human race unable to do any good.

In the Calvinist's Herculean effort to make sure man receives every drop of blame and is seen as an absolute sinner, the Calvinists trip over their own logic and end up blaming the sin nature for sin, not the sinner himself!

The fact is, if people do not have the ability to do good, then they only have the ability to do evil. That is not rocket science. Therefore, no one in his right mind can blame a person for doing evil he simply cannot help but do.

My Arminian way of looking at things would be considered heretical, because I believe that a wretched, depraved human being can do good. But really it is I who puts the heavy blame on mankind, for I let the blame rest on individual men, not the sin of Adam and Eve.

Please, do check out my amendment to this post. I don't want this one to leave you with unbalanced ideas about sin.