Craig Family Ministry

[0:00] are going to stand for truth, we need to know what is truth. What is truth? And that's what I want to talk to you about today. When Jesus was standing before Pilate, Pilate asked Jesus, what is truth?

[0:15] What is truth? First Timothy 2.4 says this, that God will have all men to be saved and come unto the knowledge of the truth. And so what I want to talk to you about this morning is that the need that we have to evaluate how do we decide something is true.

[0:36] And that's really what we're going to talk about, different ways that people decide what is true. And we all have different places that we're at in our life. We all have different levels of maturity, different ways of thinking.

[0:49] Thank the Lord that we're not all like engineers, right? I'm an engineer, so I can say that. But I do recognize that the way that I view the world and the way I view facts and the way I view ideas is different than other people.

[1:04] And that's a good thing, actually. But that doesn't mean that my truth is different than someone else's truth. It just means that perhaps I have a different perspective. But I want to focus our minds on what criteria do we require?

[1:16] What do we require in order to believe something is true? Romans 14.5 says, let every man be fully persuaded in his own mind. It's very important that if we're going to believe something, we know why we believe it.

[1:32] And as a parent, this is especially important to me because the question is, how do we help our children decide what is true? You see, when children are young, you can tell them anything.

[1:44] And they will believe you just because you said it. Okay? Young children will believe anything you say because if mom and dad says it, it has to be true.

[1:56] In fact, if an adult says it, then it has to be true. I told a young man this one time and then I left and we went home. And his mom called me the next day or texted me and said, you told my son that.

[2:10] This is a story I told young Nathan. And I said, you know that bananas are not really fruit. Okay? I can prove it to you. Bananas are actually moldy spider legs.

[2:21] These spiders grow in the jungle and they drape their legs over the leaves of the tree when they die and mold grows on their legs. And you know that because if you cut a banana, you can see the remains of their spider legs right in the center of the banana.

[2:35] And he believed me. And he wouldn't eat his bananas the next day. Children will believe anything. And yet, at some point, as they mature, they start asking the question.

[2:50] What's the question that every child asks a hundred times a day? Why? So you say something and they say, why? And then you give them the answer and they say, why? And you know what?

[3:01] God wired us to ask the question, why? Why? God wired children to ask the question, why? Which is why it's very important that we don't ultimately give our children the reason for truth is because I said so.

[3:16] Now, sometimes we need obedience. Because I said so. I can't stop and explain it to you. But at some point, we need to have that level of obedience. But as they mature, we need to be able to give children the answer, why?

[3:34] And here's the reason that that's the case. So they've been programmed to ask this question, why? And they're making connections all the time. It's neat to see this in children, especially around the English language.

[3:47] So we teach our children rules about the English language. And then we say, well, it doesn't apply here. And it doesn't apply there. But in other words, out in our field, you know, we milk a cow. And then there are cows in the field.

[3:59] Well, that makes sense. So we're driving down the road. And little guy says, hey, look, they're sheep. I never taught him the word sheep. Because it's sheep, right? Singular and plural is still sheep.

[4:10] But they make the connection. Oh, S makes it plural. Then they make the connection over here. And I'm sure that your children have all said things that are funny. Because they make up words using principles that you taught them.

[4:23] They're going to do that in life. See, we're going to teach our children how to think. And then when they go out in their world, they're going to encounter situations that maybe you didn't talk specifically with them about.

[4:35] But if they know how to think, if they know how to evaluate what is true, then they will be able to be successful. Because there's no way that we as parents can prepare them to think about every single situation and tell them, well, this is what you do in this situation.

[4:51] This is what you do in that situation. And the truth is what we're facing in our generation, this generation, is different than the fights or the conflicts or the struggles that they had maybe 50 years ago.

[5:03] And they're different than what's going to be 50 years from now. But truth is the same through all generations. Absolute truth is the same. And so if our children's questions are not adequately answered, they might change their mind about what is true.

[5:21] Let me say it this way. If the reason that you gave them to believe something is true isn't good enough later in the world, like they come up with a better reason to think something else is true, then they're going to discard the truth, even if it really is true.

[5:36] If their reasons are not sound, they're going to discard the truth and believe a lie simply because the reason they were given was better than the reason they were provided before.

[5:46] And so as we raise our children in the Christian faith, as we raise them to have a relationship with Jesus Christ, we need to make sure that we're giving them the tools to think about truth correctly.

[5:58] We really need to teach our children. We need to learn ourselves and we need to teach our children two things. We need to teach them how to evaluate truth claims. So if someone says something is true, how do I evaluate whether that's true or not?

[6:11] And then we also need to provide compelling evidence for what we say is true. We need to be able to give the reason for why we say something. Without reason, belief is just wishful thinking.

[6:26] It really is. If you don't have a reason, I just want it to be so, therefore I believe it is so. That's not a good reason. You know, our Christian faith is criticized in the world today.

[6:37] Our culture, our world is becoming increasingly atheist, functionally or literally. Because it doesn't really do good to believe in God if God doesn't really change anything in your life.

[6:48] You might as well just have God on a shelf there. So functionally, most of the world treats like God is just a person that's up on the mantle of the fireplace. It doesn't really impact their life. But Christian faith is being criticized as unthinking and ignorant.

[7:04] We are the ones who basically are the knuckle-draggers of the intellectual world. If we really believe Christianity is true, we are ignorant in their eyes.

[7:14] And that is true. But Christian faith is not that. Christian faith, Mark Twain said faith is this. Mark Twain said that faith is believing what you know ain't so.

[7:25] Okay? So you know it's not true, but you're going to believe it anyway. That was Mark Twain's view on Christian faith. And that's not true. However, if we cannot give reasons for why something is true, that's what we come across like to the world.

[7:43] Here's the definition of faith that I want to present today. Faith is beliefs and actions based on something considered to be trustworthy.

[7:54] So faith and actions based on something considered trustworthy, even though that something cannot be fully seen or fully proven. In other words, faith requires something that you can't see.

[8:09] When we are in heaven, we will not be able to exhibit or display faith in the same way we can right now. How many people here have seen Jesus Christ in person with your own eyes?

[8:22] There's no one here who has done that. When we are in heaven, we will see Christ face to face. We will not be able to display faith that Christ exists in heaven. We can do that now.

[8:33] We have the opportunity to. But that doesn't mean that we know Christ doesn't exist and we just hope he does so we're going to believe in him. We have reasons why we believe that Christ exists even though we've never seen him.

[8:48] That is Christian faith. That is faith. The something in my definition, that something that's considered trustworthy, that's what we call the object of your faith.

[9:00] So the object of the Christian faith is God or Jesus Christ, if you want to say it that way. They're the same person there. So the object of the Christian faith is Jesus Christ.

[9:12] And our faith is based on an object. Now our culture holds up faith sometimes. But they hold up faith for a different reason.

[9:23] They like the quality of the faith. If someone really believes something and they're willing to do something, if somebody's willing to climb a tree and live there for two months and say, I'm going to starve myself if you're going to cut this tree down.

[9:38] Our culture holds up. Isn't that great? They're believing in something. Right? That's the quality of faith. See, Christianity is not based on the quality of our faith.

[9:49] Christianity is based on the quality of the object of our faith. That's the difference. The quality of Jesus Christ is what makes Christianity true. Not whether we believe it or not.

[10:01] Not whether we believe with all our heart. Think of the person who's the first, well, not the first, but one of the first people who exhibited faith in the Bible. It was Abraham.

[10:13] What was the quality of Abraham's faith? And you're thinking of all the things, like he lied to Abimelech. He did it twice, didn't he? And he had Ishmael instead of Isaac.

[10:26] He wanted to alleviate all of these things that he did. And yet the Bible says in Romans 4 that Abraham staggered not in unbelief, but believed God, counting those things that are not as though they were.

[10:39] That was the quality of Abraham's object of faith. His faith wavered. And yet the Bible says it didn't waver because ultimately he stuck with what he believed to be true.

[10:52] He stuck with God. He did not depart from God, even though at times he wavered. And isn't that true in our life? Sometimes we do waver. Sometimes we struggle. Sometimes we do wrong.

[11:03] And yet God calls us to repentance and he calls us to humility. And that's really the ultimate, that's the goal of a Christian, it should be, to be humble and repent when we do what's wrong.

[11:16] So although many people believe things that are false, no one chooses to believe something they know is false. So everybody believes something is true, and yet how do we handle this?

[11:31] Because people believe different things. People believe conflicting things. How do we decide that? We need to recognize first that how we reach our beliefs is greatly influenced, is greatly influences what we believe and why we believe it.

[11:44] I need to say that again. How we reach our beliefs, how we come to that belief, influences what we choose to believe is true.

[11:55] I'm going to call this the paths to truth. Who we choose to listen to. There are so many voices that are competing for our attention.

[12:07] Well, I heard this illustration once. I think this is perfect. How many have been to a young child's baseball game, like maybe a t-ball game or a soccer game? Something where young children are playing a sport and young children don't always know exactly what they should do, right?

[12:22] So you've been there. I've been there, too. And there's 10 to 20 children out on the field running around doing something. And all of the parents are yelling instruction.

[12:35] Run! I mean, especially if it's like t-ball. You know, they hit the ball and run! Don't run! Run! Don't run! Right? You know? There's all of these rules that maybe the kids don't know as well. Well, each child out there probably will recognize one voice among that whole cacophony of voices, right?

[12:54] Their parents' voice will stick out to them. And that's what I mean by we need to choose which voices that we listen to. See, Christ's voice, the voice of God, needs to be louder, needs to be filtered into our hearts.

[13:11] And all the other voices of the world need to be filtered out when we are talking about the subject of truth. This impact of who you listen to can't be avoided. It's not something where we can say, well, that doesn't affect me.

[13:24] It makes me laugh sometimes when people talk about advertisements and they say, well, advertising doesn't affect me. As if advertising was all about, you see this 30-second ad and then you say, I have to do something and then I have to go buy this product.

[13:37] That's not the way advertising works. It changes how you think. And when you're going to make a decision, there's something that's kind of at the forefront of your mind.

[13:48] That name recognition is there. And advertising affects different people differently. But we're all influenced by the voices that we listen to. And so sometimes our truth or our beliefs come from that.

[14:04] So beliefs generally come from one of these six paths that I'm going to share. I'm going to share each one of them briefly. And I think you'll see the point here. The first path to belief is the relative path.

[14:18] And that is the belief that all truth is relative. And I've talked about that a little bit already. In fact, the existence of truth. Incidentally, if someone says to you, there is no such thing as absolute truth, what should be your response?

[14:39] Is that true? They have just made an absolute truth claim. And by making an absolute truth claim, they have refuted what they were trying to claim. Now, if they're honest, they will at least recognize that.

[14:52] They may still reject what is true. But if your argument refutes itself, you don't need to say anything else. You really don't. And if they won't recognize that, then probably anything you say won't go very far.

[15:06] But we need to at least think about this idea of relative truth. Because we absolutely will encounter this in the world. I have an example that I use. My children have heard it a lot of times.

[15:16] But I'm going to make a truth claim. Okay? My truth claim is that strawberry ice cream is the best kind of ice cream. Now, who was with me? Okay.

[15:27] Thanks. A couple people are with me, right? Strawberry ice cream is the best kind of ice cream. And then if I add two words, then you'll see the point. To me. See, you can have your own kind of ice cream.

[15:38] And it's the best kind of ice cream for you. And that is a relative truth. It matters who's speaking. If I say, my car is blue, and you say, my car is blue.

[15:49] I don't mean George's car. You say the pronoun my. Your car might be a different color than my car. And so we can say, well, my car is red. My car is green. My favorite ice cream is chocolate. Mine is.

[16:00] And Neapolitan really is the best because it's got all three of them in their face. But the favorite kind of ice cream is a relative truth. What we might call subjective truth.

[16:11] It depends on the subject. Who's saying it. Then there's a different kind of truth, which is absolute truth. We might call that objective truth. And that's based on an object.

[16:23] That's based on something else outside of the person speaking. So when I say, Jesus Christ is the way, the truth, and the life, I'm not making a claim that's true to me.

[16:37] Because he can't be the way, truth, and life for me. No man comes to the Father but by me. But Jesus, when he said that, it can't be true for me and not true for someone else. Because then if it's not true for them, then it can't be true for me.

[16:50] It can't be that no man comes to the Father for me, but somebody else comes to the Father. You see, they can't exist together. So Jesus, when he made that claim, really set a line in the sand of objective truth.

[17:06] He made a truth claim that's either true or false. C.S. Lewis said it this way. Many people want to lift up Christ as a good man.

[17:17] He was a good teacher. But he didn't leave that option. See, Jesus Christ didn't leave that option. C.S. Lewis said he's either Lord or he's a lunatic. Because he claimed absolute truth that either is true or is not true.

[17:33] There was no in between. And so either what he said is true or it's not. So truth is not what you make it. Objective truth is true for everyone at all times.

[17:45] And that is what absolute truth means. Now, if you get past that first hurdle, now I'm in the camp of there is absolute truth. Now, how do I get to what that truth is?

[17:57] How do I decide what is true? And there are five paths that people take. And they kind of come in a couple groups here. So the first group of two is really focused on myself.

[18:08] So my truth that I believe is based on my experience or what I feel. And so there are two of them. One is the intuitive approach to truth or the intuitive path to truth.

[18:20] I just believe it's true. I just know it's true. It's something I feel in my heart. And there's a couple problems with this approach. One is that your feelings change.

[18:31] I mean, how many have had your feelings change about something, right? You find something else out and it's like, oh, now I think differently or I feel differently about it. Okay? So if you determine truth based on your feelings, there's a good chance.

[18:41] There's a good chance that you're going to be deceived about something because your feelings will probably change. Also, what if someone else doesn't feel the same way you do?

[18:53] How can you convince them that it's true if they don't feel the same way you do? Your reason for believing something is how you feel. Well, you need to get them to feel the same way, which is really a difficult thing to do, right?

[19:05] So intuitive approach really fails to be an adequate reason. The other approach that's on ourself is what I'll call the mystical approach. This is the idea that I was shown this.

[19:19] Okay? God showed this to me and so therefore I know it's true. A very common example of that or well-known example outside of Christianity would be Joseph Smith.

[19:29] Joseph Smith was given a vision and then the evidence of that vision that he wrote down doesn't even exist. So we have no way of checking his claims. It's either we believe that God showed him something or we don't.

[19:40] But we have to put our faith then in Joseph Smith, right? We can't put our faith in anything else. There's nothing else to look at. When we give someone our interpretation or what we believe is the right interpretation of the Bible and the reason we give them is I prayed about it and God showed this unto me.

[19:58] Therefore, I know this is true. That is a, that is a, I think it's a bad reason to believe something is true. And this is why. It is that person, if they're going to accept your reason, they really have to just trust your experience.

[20:12] Now, I can, God showed that unto you. That's great. And so sometimes we're willing to, depending on who the person is, we're willing to accept that truth just because that person had the experience even though I did not have it.

[20:23] Again, the focus is on ourselves. The intuitive approach, I just feel it's true. I know it's true. And, or the mystical approach, God showed this unto me. The next two paths to truth are really a focus on someone else or something else.

[20:39] I think maybe you've already thought of this, the authoritarian approach to truth. This is easy to see in a church setting with a pastor, especially if you have a pastor who's very dogmatic and very inflexible.

[20:51] And he says, this is true and you have to believe it or not. Truth is, if you want to say it this way, truth is what you've been told. That's the way it is. Just accept it.

[21:03] And that's all the reason you need, by the way. And if you don't believe it, then there's the door. Okay? That is the authoritarian approach to truth. And the problem with that is now you're putting faith in someone else rather than reason, rather than what the Bible says or anything like that.

[21:25] And here's another problem. So if I have an authority in my life and he says something is true, and then someone else has an authority in their life and they say something is true, what if those authorities contradict?

[21:37] And they do all the time, right? I'm thinking of parents. Parents are an authority in children's life. But just because a parent said something is true doesn't mean it's true.

[21:47] And sometimes parents even contradict themselves. Pastors. Okay? Pastors of two different churches, they contradict each other. Or even I put in there the Pope because it's a third P. You know, you've got parents, pastors, and Pope.

[21:58] But that's the point of the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church says the authority of the Pope overrides what the Bible says. And it can change. And so when the authorities contradict, then you're left with, well, whose authority do I accept?

[22:12] And if we're going to put our trust in a man, I personally vote for Jesus. Okay? I mean, I don't vote for another man who's alive today on this earth.

[22:24] I really don't. I don't have enough faith for that, if you will. So one is authoritarian. The other is tradition. So truth is what we've always believed.

[22:35] This is very common also. We're not allowed, in many circles, we're not allowed to question whether something is true or not.

[22:45] I don't mean look at the reasons why. I mean question that something is true. It's always been this way. It's always been believed. And therefore, that is the way it shall be for now and forevermore.

[22:58] If the tradition and the authority of the church would have been upheld, then the Reformation would never have happened.

[23:09] We need to recognize that Reformers were motivated by something other than authority and tradition. In fact, they went against both of those things. Martin Luther, when he nailed the 95 theses on the wall, he was actually questioning the authority of the day.

[23:29] And so we need to recognize that although authority and tradition may be true, that's not a good reason to believe that something is true. So that's the fifth path.

[23:42] The sixth path is what I'll call the evidential path. And this is truth is what logic and evidence points to.

[23:53] Now, this is where the engineer part of me comes in because I like logic and evidence. But the truth is we have to use – there's a reason why. There's a reason why we think logically.

[24:05] Okay? Now, this is something – this is my interpretation of the Bible, but I think it bears out. The Bible says we were created in the image of God. That means that the part that makes us human as opposed to an animal, that part is like God.

[24:22] That doesn't mean it is God. That doesn't mean it's exactly like God. But the things that we have in our humanness that are good, that's what God is. See, we long for logic.

[24:37] We long for to see things in a way that's coherent or a way that doesn't contradict. We long for that because we recognize that if we find a contradiction, that means we haven't found truth.

[24:53] You see, if my mom says something is true, you know, Santa Claus is true, and my dad says Santa Claus is not true, a child knows both of those can't be true at the same time. Right?

[25:03] They just know that. And so when we hear things that contradict, we try to sort them out. Now, some people really get jazzed by that. I'm one of those guys.

[25:14] You know, other people, there's not very much that gets them engaged in that critical thinking, if you will. But we all do this. We all do this every day. It's how we live.

[25:25] And the reason we live in a logical manner is because God is a logical, rational being. God is not irrational. Okay? So the question, you ever heard the question about God, you know, can he make a rock so heavy you can't lift it?

[25:39] You know, that's an irrational question. It's like saying, can God make a married bachelor? Think about that for a second. No, he can't. But that's because it's irrational.

[25:50] It's because both of those things can't exist at the same time. You can't be married and a bachelor at the same time. It's just impossible. Because it's illogical. And so our heart yearns for something that we know is true that is free of contradiction.

[26:06] And that's the whole purpose that we study the Bible. Because the Bible, on first glance, the Bible might seem to have contradictions. And it might have things that are hard to understand.

[26:16] And I don't see how that fits or something like that. But we need to dig into the Word of God and look for evidence for why we believe something is true. Now, evidence doesn't have to come solely from the Bible.

[26:29] I'm really excited to live in this day and age because science, regardless of what you read on Fox News or MSNBC or any of those other ones, science supports the Bible.

[26:41] It really does. It is amazing the things that they find. How many people know that 10 years ago they found red blood cells and DNA of dinosaurs?

[26:56] 10 years ago. How many read that 10 years ago? You know that it took the scientific community five years to stop attacking Mary Schweitzer who discovered that. They attacked her for three, four, five years and said it can't be true, it can't be true, it can't be true.

[27:10] And the reason it couldn't be true, it wasn't because of the scientific evidence. It was because of our prior belief that dinosaurs are 65 to 500 million years old. And it doesn't matter how old in the geological record they dig up bones.

[27:24] They find DNA and the remnants of red blood cells in every place they look. Isn't that amazing? It's amazing and yet they don't talk about that.

[27:37] They just talk about, isn't it amazing how these things have been preserved? We need to figure out how they've been preserved for 100 million years. Instead of maybe questioning their assumption, that's not 100 million years old.

[27:48] That's just one example. Just one example. I could list 10 right now. It's so exciting to see evidence. But you know what? I am convinced that if they found Noah's Ark with animal remains, not remains, animal droppings, if you will, and food, and they found everything like Ken Ham built, and they found fur, all this stuff, if they found that, how many people do you think would believe it?

[28:15] I think few. I think some would be convinced, but most would reject. Because evidence is just one part. The Bible says without faith, it's impossible to please him.

[28:28] So don't take what I'm saying as we need to have evidence, and if we can convince someone it's true with evidence, they'll believe. There is still a part, remember that part that can't be fully seen or fully proven to be true?

[28:40] God requires that in this life. Because in the next life, we cannot exhibit that. We cannot exhibit the same faith in Christ in the next life that we exhibit in this life.

[28:53] Every knee will bow before God and proclaim that he is God. He will either be our Savior or he will be our judge.

[29:05] And that is the message or the truth of the Bible. That's the truth. And God wants us to exhibit faith in him in this life.

[29:18] Because after this life is over, the judgment is next. That's what's coming next for all of us. Death is 100% of humans in this life, 100% will experience death, regardless of what you read on the news, that we're going to live forever in a digital world.

[29:42] So, if we come to belief and faith in any of these first five paths, then it's more likely, it's not for sure, but it's more likely that we may think differently in the future.

[29:54] But evidence, I mean evidence, facts, evidence doesn't change. Interpretation of evidence can change. Maybe we see things through a different eye. But the evidence, as far as like the Bible, You know, we have a book that's been preserved over 1,500 years.

[30:12] And there's all of these prophecies that have been fulfilled. And Jesus Christ, in the central character of the Bible, Jesus Christ, all of these have been fulfilled. We have that evidence.

[30:23] What are we going to do with that? Christian faith, the Christian faith is not opposed to knowledge. Rather, it involves trusting and acting in agreement with what we believe to be true.

[30:39] That's what the Christian faith is. It involves knowledge and action. Both of those things are there for Christian faith. So, why do we believe something is true?

[30:51] It might be because of tradition. It might be because of authority. It might just be because you were born into the family you were born into. I mean, my children didn't really have any choice in what they were taught as a young child.

[31:04] And neither did yours. You know, you taught them what you taught them. But I want them, my goal with every one of my children, is when they leave my home, they will know what they believe.

[31:16] And the reason will not be because Dad taught us this was true. I do not want that to be their reason when they're 20. Now, when they're 5, it probably is going to be their reason.

[31:27] But I want them to move from childish thinking to adult thinking. That's what I want for them. So, we believe things for a lot of different reasons. But I think that there's only one reason that we should believe something is true.

[31:42] There's only one good reason. And that's because we should believe something is true because it is. It's the only reason. The only reason we should believe something is true is because that's the way it really is.

[31:57] Now, the rest of our life is taken up with finding out the way things really are. You look at evidence. You look at the way the world is around you. You look at what the Bible says. You look at the testimony of people who have come before us.

[32:10] And you say, could this really be? If it is, then maybe I should do something about it. So, truth is being attacked in our culture.

[32:21] The authority of God's Word is being denied. And yet, we need to, as we just sang before, we need to stand for truth. We need to know why we believe something.

[32:32] And we need to know what we believe. And that takes a lifetime. We never stop learning. We never stop growing. We shouldn't, anyway.

[32:44] Right? And it's easy to get complacent. So, if that's where you're at right now, I encourage you, stop being complacent. And start being excited about the truth. Because the truth is the way the world really is.

[32:56] And that's what's going to reign for eternity. Truth is going to be true for eternity. Most of the things that are being talked about today aren't going to be talked about in maybe the near future.

[33:08] Right? So, I hope that that's an encouragement to you. And I hope that maybe it's challenging you to think about, why do I believe some of the things I believe? And if you're not sure, well, it's perfectly okay to ask someone else why they believe something.

[33:25] That's one of the questions. I'll share it. I'm going to stop preaching now. I'm just going to share a little bit. This is kind of things that I talk about with my children sometimes. So, when you're talking with somebody about what they believe, there's two questions you should ask.

[33:37] And if you don't know these two questions, you should write them down. They're terrific. And they're not original with me. A little secret, nothing I ever say is original with me. I've had to break that to my children.

[33:48] You know, I've learned from other people. And you should too. Right? You don't have to think up something brand new to say the truth. But two questions you should ask is, how did you come?

[33:59] Well, the first question is, what do you mean by that? Okay. Somebody says something, and the words that they use might not be the same meaning that you have for those words. So, if somebody says, well, I believe all life is sacred.

[34:13] Well, what do you mean by life? Right? Right? There are any number of questions that are in our culture today. What do you mean by that? Get them to define their terms so that you can be speaking about the same thing.

[34:26] Okay? The second question is, how did you reach that belief? Or how did you come to believe that's true? Because that will answer this path to truth issue here.

[34:36] You see, if their path to truth is because they had some crisis in their life, and they began to doubt everything that they were ever taught, well, that's going to help you to evaluate, okay, what are they saying?

[34:49] What do they mean by what they're saying? And then you can connect on a more personal level. So, what do you mean by that? And how did you reach that conclusion? Two excellent questions.

[35:00] And what that does is it gets the person to talk, and it gets them to share things. Because if you want to have a dialogue, well, dialogue goes two ways, right? So, we want to get people talking and thinking.

[35:12] If they're not thinking, then they can't evaluate anything that's true. So, let's do this. It's 1135 or so. Does anybody have any questions or comments that they want to say here?

[35:25] Elisha? Come on up here. This is the orange microphone, Keith. I know Marv almost always promises to have question and answer time.

[35:37] But I've noticed a trend. But that's okay. I'd like to listen to him, too. Nathan? Yeah, that's great. So, I love the message.

[35:50] You know, I've gotten excited about things that were true before. And, you know, you get excited and you think, man, if people just knew that if you just present the truth to them, they're going to believe it because it's so obvious.

[36:03] And I've had so many times I've talked to people about something that's true, and they reject it. And, you know, when it comes to giving people reasons, you know, that's not the – it was an apologist, William Lane Craig, who says that apologetics are giving reasons for faith.

[36:29] They're not the object of the faith, right? Those reasons aren't the object of the faith. Christ is. But they give people intellectual permission to believe the gospel. Amen. For so many people, they don't have – because of what they've been told, what they believe, they don't have the intellectual permission to even consider the gospel.

[36:49] I got a newsletter from an evangelist that I support. He goes on campuses, college campuses, and preaches the gospel and shares with students. And he said, still, for the last 20 years, the number one reason people reject the gospel is because of evolutionary biology.

[37:06] And they've bought into that hook, line, and sinker, and they won't even consider the gospel because of that. So there's such a big open door to help people. At least open the door, right? You can't make people go through, but you can at least open the door of giving folks intellectual permission by giving them solid reasons for faith.

[37:23] Amen. Anyone else?

[37:38] All right. Let's close in prayer. Lord, we thank You for the truth, the truth of God's Word, the truth that You are real and that You exist and that You have provided salvation for us.

[37:51] And I pray that we will believe the truth and also act on the truth. Help us, Lord, as we go out into the world this week to stand for truth. In Your name I pray.

[38:03] Amen. Amen. Amen. Amen. Pro- Amen.

[38:27] There were two words.