GYC 2025: Seeing the Invisible

Note: The first part of this seminar was not recorded.

Biblical Faith - Secular World

Michigan Camp Meeting 2018: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

Reasons for Hope: The Case for Faith in a Secular Age

Jordan Reichert

Generation. Youth. Christ. (GYC)

The Investigative Judgment: What...?

The Remnant: Elitism or Evangelism?

We are now bridging a gap in our fourth presentation, 4 or 5 presentations.

The first 3 dealt with sort of general Christian apologetics in the sense of, you know, what about a person who is, you know, unchurched, you know, more of a secular mindset?

How would we, you know, how do we answer questions like is God even relevant anymore in the 21st century?

We moved into the reality that actually what we have available to us in the New Testament is essentially the best historically attested document from the ancient world.

I think that was just cool, powerful stuff.

We talked about the resurrection of Jesus.

There really was a man named Jesus of Nazareth who lived when the gospel account said that he did, where they said he did, who died a real death, who was God in human flesh, made those claims, but then vindicated every 1 of his claims when he rose from the dead, a real event in history, yeah?

We would not be here, there'd be no generation of youth for Christ if he wasn't risen from the dead, right?

Because you have to have Christ to have a generation of youth for Christ.

And then in the last session just now, we talked about the quiet and the pain.

Where is God in terms of, it seems like quiet, if somebody said, oh yeah, there's a God and there's, you know, he's capable of miracles and all sorts of things You're like, well, I don't really see that kind of stuff happening in the world the same way that I seem to read it in The Bible, right?

So we talked about some of that but then even probably more importantly we talked about How do we wrestle through the pain and the agony of real sorrow and trauma and evil that we experience in this world in the light of the fact that the Bible says that God is all-powerful and all-good, right?

And the heart of it basically came to, I don't know, what did we come to, friends?

What was the big slam-bang finish about it?

The story of the cross, the message of the gospel is that God himself knows what it is to suffer.

If any of this is interesting to you, let me know and I'm happy to hook you up with any further extended resources because I'm like I'm like this smart and there's other people who are a whole lot smarter, right and so but welcome Today we are venturing now into The first of 2 specifically more Adventist style topics.

I think that it's I think that it sometimes you know produces this mental image Of the person who's like basically got you machine gun against the wall and they're like no you're gonna you're gonna hear all my good Reasoning and then you are going to factually assent to being a believer, right?

Yeah Right, and then you when you get to the pearly gates you will pass you will pass the basic 25 you know 25 multiple-choice question test that makes you qualify to be a man it's like no not at all it's gonna be a lot of people Matthew 7 says that come rolling up to Jesus we're gonna say Lord do we do all these amazing things in your name in other words weren't we super present truth people Didn't we do a lot of incredible things?

We did seminars, we cast out demons in your name, we did incredible things.

Jesus will say, apart from me, I never knew you, you workers of lawlessness.

My goodness, all this time you thought heaven was a place, turns out heaven's a person.

So we're gonna talk today about something that's really on my heart and we'll start off with a word of prayer.

Father, I'm a big fool, but I determined to know nothing else except you and you crucified.

And I ask that you'd speak through that, the willingness of a fool who said yes, and God, that you guide your people here, that you've brought here.

I will never know most of them till eternity, but for whatever reason You have brought The paths and the strands of our lives to this moment to this room for this time and I ask that you'd make it something that needs to be what it needs to be.

I pray this in Jesus name shield me if I'm gonna say something that's wrong.

The imperative from our friend Peter, but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as holy 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 what?

You're not gonna do it in gentleness and respect.

It wasn't Jesus speaking through you, right?

You can still say something that's true and that's hard cutting and hard hitting but you can do it in a way that's gentle and respectful but always have a reason for the hope that is in you.

Don't be like my friend who called me up 1 day and said hey I'm talking to this guy here what is it that we believe about hell again?

Well For those of you who don't understand the joke, you know, if you have to ask that, you don't actually believe it, right?

Sister White says this, there's an eloquence far more powerful than the eloquence of words and the quiet, consistent life of a pure, true Christian.

For the sake of time, I'm going to jump into this next bit of it Look what she says here only through a living faith in Christ as a personal Savior Is it possible to make our influence felt in a skeptical world.

No other influence that can surround the human soul has such power as the influence of an unselfish life.

The strongest argument in favor of the gospel is a loving and lovable Christian.

If you get nothing else, hold on to Jesus.

And when your friends and your people and your community and your circles ask you questions about your faith, let the presence and the person and the love of Jesus shine through more than your ability to be very articulate and have good answers.

People aren't looking for you to always have the right answers.

Sometimes they're looking for you to be the presence of Jesus in their life, right?

Which might look more like, I mean, like in Elijah's case, it meant like a nap and making him some food, right?

You remember that story love that story so good the remnant elitism or evangelism Start off with a question each time.

I'm gonna have you I'm a classroom teacher Turn to somebody next to you Imagine that somebody casually strikes up a conversation with you and you mention that you're, oh yeah, we're Seventh-day Adventists, and they're like, oh, you know, the knowing, oh, yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.

They start kind of sizing you up and like you look like you need more protein in your diet, whatever it is, right?

And they make some remark about like you're the ones who Like think that your church is like the only right church or something.

I don't know something some remnant something like that What would you say?

If somebody said yeah, what's that all about?

Now maybe you've never even heard of this doctrine.

We'll try to define our terms here in a minute.

So it makes sense but turn to somebody next to you What would you say if somebody said?

Oh, yeah Your your movement claims to be like the 1 true church or like the final faithful church and everyone else's I don't know What would you say?

You're only gonna need the edge I want to hear from you.

I would say, I hope you feel the same way.

I would say that the idea of a remnant of the biblical truth that we see throughout Scripture.

Okay, yeah, I had a fun conversation with my uncle about this once What an arrogant claim like well, like the word is actually in the Bible Do you like the Bible?

So like it's that's a thing right somebody is gonna be that group What about us?

The Quiet and the Pain: Where is God?

It's a great relief to realize that being an effective witness for Christ doesn't mean you have to be the knowledge person about everything.

Instead, just be a person who's going to the cross all the time.

Just be a person who's wanting to direct people to the cross of Jesus all the time, right?

It turns out what people usually need, probably more than 90% of the time, isn't like direct specific answers with like factual data.

What people want is the presence of somebody who is the hands and feet of Christ.

I was terrified when I first became a teacher.

I work out for those of you who, this is your first time here.

It's our Adventist Conference boarding school.

I was terrified my first several years being a teacher because I was like, oh man, I teach Bible classes.

I don't know what I'm going to do when they ask me questions I don't know what to do with.

And then slowly I read stuff and studied stuff.

And then I got like a little bit kind of arrogant like, oh yeah, this is good.

Like I found a lot of really good material.

And then over the years I've kind of realized that even that didn't scratch the itch for a searching person.

Just turns out people are looking for the presence of Christ more than anything.

The 20th century gave us more genocide than in any other century of world history.

And it was supposed to be the century that was going to do away with war.

You look at the 1870s, the 1880s, the 1890s, all the world peace conferences that were building up coming to the turn of the century in the name of enlightenment progress, the building of democratic, quote-unquote, empires.

This was supposed to be, we were supposed to purge the world of war and suffering, and then 1914, yikes, the guns of August roll out and tens of millions of people are killed throughout the fields of France and other places in Europe, World War I, World War II.

We come to things like the Holocaust, the Nazis, horrible genocides that have happened in Southeast Asia and China and other places in Africa throughout the world and Turns out for all our intellectual acumen guess what?

The human heart's still pretty messed up.

Yeah And what about the families what about my grandmother?

My grandmother was a little girl She was a German.

They were living in Yugoslavia, and Christmas morning, she was like 6 or 7 years old, the war had started, and the Russians were actually coming into town, and they were looking for local Germans to kind of punish them for everything that's happening with Germany, you know, World War II.

And my grandmother was, she got a little doll, it was Christmas morning, and then all of a sudden, knock at the door, Russian soldiers, you have 10 minutes.

Tells the family, you have 10 minutes, gather all your belongings, get out, you're not coming back.

Took all the belongings and what'd they do?

Saw my little, my Oma trying to hide her little doll, her little baby doll under her dress.

She watched her mom die in a concentration camp.

Little bit of a just, like, ah, doing that again.

Yeah, sorry, I'm a classroom teacher, is what we do.

So turn to the, you know, and if you are single and you are on the Adventist dating plan which is go to GYC then seat yourself well close our eyes seat yourself where You need to sit so you can turn.

Really quickly, turn to somebody next to you.

What do you do when somebody says to you, oh, you believe in God?

But there's so much horrible evil in the world.

Now that your conversation is going good, I'm going to cut you off.

There's all so much evil, horrendous evil in the world.

Somebody on this side, what would you say?

You want to unpack that suitcase a little bit?

We're going to unpack some of that today.

I was going to say, it's a test that no matter how many chapters of the Bible you do, there's a chance that you have to go down and just say, I'm on that.

I mean, it's, I'm not saying it's not the Word of God, it is, amen, but like it's pretty awful.

It's like this long, sad, one-sided love story of a patient, loving God who is suffering in the sufferings of his people, who are willfully choosing their own suffering, and he has the remedy, but they're like, yeah, no, yeah, no, right?

So no matter how much he keeps on, he keeps on sticking with.

Anthony Bosman

Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Reasons for Hope: The Case for Faith in a Secular Age - Part 1

This is a five-part seminar, so the theme is reasons for hope.

And we're looking for a case for faith in a secular context.

And so we're really looking at how we can make the case for faith in a way that's attractive, that makes sense to our friends who maybe come from more of a secular background, or have some basic questions about Christianity.

And so it's in 5 parts as Israel indicated.

Today we're talking about faith and reasons, what's the relationship between these 2, is faith irrational, is faith entirely rational, how should we think about these.

Tomorrow we'll talk more about science and how does faith in science relate?

Should we think about these being intention or do they fit together quite well?

And then throughout the week, we'll look at history, on the problem of evil, the problem of suffering.

And Friday, we really have quite a bit of time for Q&A, but hopefully today as well, we'll have a little bit of time for some questions, so if you can't wait till Friday, we're trying to take some of those today as well.

So what I want to do is to begin setting up the the whole theme of Reasons for Hope, is I want to look at this Word of Counsel from Peter.

Peter tells us in his epistle, 1 Peter chapter 3, Peter tells us that 1 of the ways that we honor Christ is by always being prepared to make a defense, the Greek word there is apologia, to make a defense, an apologia, to anyone who asks you for the reason for the hope that is in you.

So that's where our title's coming from, a reason for the hope that's in you.

And so Peter says, what about Christian duties is you need to prepare yourself, such as by coming to a seminar like this, so that you can make a defense, an apologia, or give a reason for those who ask you for the hope that's in you.

Now already there's a lot of things that stand out in this passage.

What Peter sees here is he sees people be coming up asking you questions, right?

It's not just you going out and engaging, but actually he envisions people will be coming and asking you questions.

And so Peter already has in view Christian community that's mingling with, and interacting with those of other worldviews, so that people have an opportunity to ask them questions, right?

And so, my own experience very much is this thing placed in the context of a university campus, but this could take place at your workplace, maybe even in your family, through service projects, whatever- wherever you're coming into contact with people where you're living out your faith and they're beginning to ask you questions, Peter says, think ahead of time so you're ready to give some kind of response to the questions they might ask you.

I also appreciate this passage because while Peter emphasized you should be given a reason, it should appeal to the intellect.

He also indicated it's more than just intellectual, it's ultimately a reason for hope.

And so what Peter is indicating is that ultimately what we're doing is not just giving a philosophy but we're providing people with hope.

And so what we're gonna do in this presentation is appeal to intellectual questions people might have, but really in such a way that can give people hope.

So the purpose of apologetics, apologetics coming from this Greek word apologia, or defense, a defense of the Christian faith.

There are 2 basic purposes of apologetics.

So the early church, especially by the second century, there were 3 main criticism the early church was accused of.

The early Christians, believe it or not, were accused of being atheists because they did not worship the Greek and Roman gods and so it's, oh these must be some kind of atheists, not a very negative connotation.

There were some Christians who had gone out and done all kinds of immoral acts, and so they gave a bad name to Christianity.

But in particular, 1 of the main charges of immorality against Christianity was cannibalism.

Can anyone think why the Christians might have been accused of cannibalism?

There was confusion over what the Lord's Supper was, and so they heard that there was individuals coming together and they're eating the body and the blood of their leader, and so they thought it was some kind of cannibalism.

And the last 1, a final critique that was very common by the second century was disloyalty to the Empire.

Why might people be criticizing Christians in this way?

That's right, they talked about this King Jesus, right?

And so when they talked about this different kingdom it sounded like oh is this some kind of insurrection and then when they refused to do various kinds of loyalty oaths to the Emperor it came across as insurrection.

Some people thought that they were trying to overthrow the Roman government.

And so what happened by the second century is there was a need to respond to these criticisms.

So Justin Martyr was 1 of the first Christian apologists and he wrote something called the first apology where he goes and he addresses this to the Emperor of Rome and he tries to systematically go through each of these critiques and clarify the Christian position.

He says yes that we don't believe in these many gods but we do believe in the 1 true God.

He says, well, some Christians are the immoral things.

That is not to be representative of Christianity as a whole.

In fact, Christians are passionate about caring for the poor, and he gives a defense explaining the Christian position.

And he articulates what the Lord's Supper is.

It's, we're not literally eating the blood and the body of someone.

It's not cannibalism as you might have heard.

Rather, we do this in memory of the sacrifice of Christ.

And then the disloyalty, he stressed that although we can't do some of these oaths because we cannot worship idols, he indicates that we are loyal to the government for the kingdom we talk of is not a kingdom of man but a kingdom of heaven.

So he makes these distinctions to clarify the Christian position and respond to the criticisms.

Can you think of any prevailing criticisms or misconceptions of Christianity today?

Can you think of any common criticisms or misconceptions of Christianity today?

In the first century, it was atheism, and immorality, and disloyalty to the government.

Someone from a non-Christian background, what might be some of their criticisms or misconceptions of Christianity?

Maybe everyone might be ignorant that people think that Christians are blind followers, because it's ignorant of reality and science and all those things.

Okay, so they may believe that to be a Christian is to be ignorant and so they can't conceive of someone being well educated and Christian.

They think that Christianity is something that's like a superstitious or something of the past but once you become more educated or more engaged in the sciences then you naturally grow out of that faith.

Any other common misconceptions or criticisms of Christianity that come to mind?

They could think that we're self-centered.

That we don't reach out, that we're this little group where we don't reach out to other people.

They see us gathering together and they maybe get this idea that they're kind of exclusive, they're kind of cliquish, they're kind of self-centered.

In the school of alternative lifestyles and all of that, I think that a lot of times they think Christians are not loving.

Not loving or not tolerant of other kinds of lifestyles, other ways of living.

And so you can see today there's also a need for us to respond to these types of misconceptions or criticisms of Christianity and attempt to clarify just as they did in the second century.

And so we're going to try to begin to do that throughout this week.

We won't hit all the topics we engage with, certainly science will be tomorrow's topic, but a number of them we'll begin to engage with.

There's a second purpose of apologetics, and that's to remove intellectual objections to faith.

That is, apologetics, the goal of apologetics is not to produce faith in someone.

We're told in Romans that faith is a gift from God.

So we can't produce faith in someone, but what we're trying to do is we're trying to clear the road of these intellectual objections.

Because while someone is in the position that they think, you know, someone's thinking Christianity is bigoted or Christianity is ignorant or Christianity is- if they have these beliefs, it's tougher for them to respond positively to the Holy Spirit.

So what we're trying to do is we're trying to clear the way, remove some of those obstacles so that the Holy Spirit can impart in them the gift of faith.

Here's some data I was looking at recently of trends in North America.

So in the United States currently, this was a from last December, young adults between the ages of 18 and 29 were polled on their belief in God.

43% indicate that they have belief in the God of the Bible.

Now there may be lots of different interpretations of what that means but some basic belief in the God of the Bible.

This is the first generation in America where it's less than a majority.

So if you look at older age groups, 30 to 40 or 40 to 50 or 50 plus, and in these older generations it's always been above 50%, but now we look at young adults between the ages of 18 and 29, it's dropped only 43% hold belief in the God of the Bible.

39 percent, roughly the same number, believe in some kind of higher power.

Now they wouldn't describe to be the God of the Bible, they might say some cosmic force or energy or some other kind of higher power.

And 16 percent report belief in no such God or no such higher power.

And so what you've seen is as look at generations that in this generation in particular there's been a rise in those who believe in no God at all or in a vague higher power and a drop in those who believe in the God of the Bible.

And so I believe this shows evidence that we really need to, our work's cut out for us, to start clearing the road of some of those intellectual objections, right?

This generation in particular has a lot of intellectual questions and objections about belief in God and so the role of apologetics is trying to respond to some of those critiques so that the Holy Spirit can give the gift of faith.

Back to Menu

Presenter

Jordan Reichert

9 Teachings

Recent

The Investigative Judgment: What...?

1h 4m

The Remnant: Elitism or Evangelism?

51m

The Quiet and the Pain: Where is God?

50m

Most Listened

The Quiet and the Pain: Where is God?

50m

Reasons for Hope: The Case for Faith in a Secular Age - Part 1

1h 6m

The Remnant: Elitism or Evangelism?

51m

Series

Series

Biblical Faith - Secular World

4 parts

Series

Reasons for Hope: The Case for Faith in a Secular Age

5 parts

Also Appears In

Conference

Dec 31, 2025 – Jan 4, 2026

GYC 2025: Seeing the Invisible

5 series

Conference

Aug 18, 2016 – Aug 16, 2019

Michigan Camp Meeting 2018: As a Witness, Matthew 24:14

40 series

Sound Doctrine