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

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Michigan Conference of Seventh-day Adventists

Amazing Disciples

Mark Howard

4. It’s Not My Gift

Kameron DeVasher

1. Orientation

2. What is a Disciple?

3. Your Gift or Mine?

5. As a Witness

Marshall McKenzie

7. Friendship Evangelism, Part 1

8. Friendship Evangelism, Part 2

Wes Peppers

9. How to Reach the Atheistic Mind, Part 1

10. How to Reach the Atheistic Mind, Part 2

Jean Ross

11. Divine Commission

12. Cycle of Evangelism

Jim Howard

13. Grow Your Church, Part 1

14. Grow Your Church, Part 2

15. Giving Bible Studies

16. Missing Members

Doug Batchelor

17. Christ-Centered Doctrine, Part 1

18. Preparing for Baptism

19. Discipleship

20. Gospel Presentation, Part 1

21. Gospel Presentation, Part 2

22. Christ-Centered Doctrine, Part 2

23. Outreach Lab

24. Keys to Success!

25. Nurturing New Believers

26. Fishnet Demonstration

27. Caveman Theology

6. Christ’s Method Alone

Father in Heaven, we thank You so much for the opportunity to be here again.

We just pray that Your special blessing be with us as we go through this last segment.

Help us to be efficient and Lord, I pray it will make sense.

I just want to remind us again that the prophetic timing, establishment, and message of the Seventh-day Adventist church movement was and is God's answer to the movement of modern atheism.

And so we're going to take a look now at apologetics just briefly.

And a number of you were asking me yesterday, what exactly is apologetics?

Does it mean we're apologizing for something?

But no, as Mark explained, it literally means to defend the Bible to those who don't believe in the Bible.

And giving a reason for your faith using reason and logic and external evidence.

You know, most people who are atheists don't believe in the Bible, right?

So if you say, well, the Bible says, they're like, well, I don't really care.

And so there has to be a certain level of reason that you use with them.

Now you have to be careful with that because you can get into the circular reasoning and you can just go around and around.

But the goal is not that the reason and logic is our foundation or for what we believe, but the goal is to bring them to a place where they will have at least some kind of confidence in the Word of God as credible and valid.

So when I was an atheist, my whole argument was the Bible can't be trusted.

It's not really something that has any credibility.

There's no evidence for its validity, etc., etc.

And so I had no confidence in it, which I find interesting because when you look at you know books of evolution and so forth, you know a person who reads a book on evolution is reading a book by an author that in most cases they've never met, and the person that wrote the book is writing about things that they've never actually personally witnessed happening, and they've never seen the process take place.

And so a person who is believing these books is believing by faith a process that a person believes happened but hasn't really witnessed or evidenced it, and a person that they never met, so they don't even know the credibility of this person.

And so really, they're reading a book and believing a book by faith.

I mean, If you want to look at it at just a fundamental level, it's the same thing as a Christian believing in the Bible.

Actually the Christian has 1 step higher because the book that they're reading is written by people who were firsthand witnesses of what happened, not just something that I think might have happened, right?

All right, so atheism, Mark mentioned this, I'm not going to go over it too much.

The Greek words, A, meaning not or no, and theos, meaning God.

Atheism claims that the natural matter in the universe is all that exists.

The universe operates by natural laws only.

Any event that seems to happen supernaturally is really some sort of natural occurrence.

Reality of evil and so forth is the argument against God.

If it seems like I'm rushing, it's because I am.

Atheism believes that the Bible is a book of human invention, not the Word of God.

If Jesus, if He existed, performed no miracles, did not rise from the dead, and was not God.

Both atheism and agnosticism claim that human reason and scientific empiricism are the only sensible explanations for why things exist.

And so because no element of existence can be measured or tested, God cannot viably exist.

But if the origin of life in the universe can be explained scientifically, then God becomes unnecessary in the equation.

How many of you have heard of the scientific method?

There are 7 steps to the scientific method, and I want you to think about this.

And is everything that humans touch flawed?

And most, even most atheists would agree with that, correct?

How do we know that that system isn't flawed?

And B, how do we know that there's not some better system out there somewhere in the universe that we have not discovered yet?

So, the scientific method is kind of like the all-star process that people use to come to certain conclusions, but even the most ardent scientists will have to agree that even though it's a good method, it still has problems.

And every scientist I've ever talked to agrees with that statement.

The type of thinking, this type of thinking uses very limited knowledge as the standard by which all things must be measured or tested.

In other words, we simply don't know everything.

Even the most scientific guesses about the origin of man are simply guesses.

When they say 350 million years, they don't really know that.

And when you challenge them on it in a way that is systematic, they ultimately confess, we don't really know.

We don't have the evidence that it is this way.

We just think it is based upon things we see and our theory of what happened.

It's kind of like, you know, it's interesting when they'll find animals, fossils and so forth that died and they'll say, oh, it died because of this reason.

Something attacked it or a rock fell on it or whatever.

But that might be an idea of what might happen and in fact that might have been the way it happened but you still do not know.

And what blows my mind is that books will be written and they'll say, this is the history of life and it's written in such a way that it's fact, and they have the timelines of billions of years and millions of years and et cetera.

But then something is discovered somewhere and they say, oh, this totally rewrites everything we once believed.

And so they rewrite it the way they think it happened again and they print all the textbooks and they say to the students in college and et cetera, This is the way it happened.

But then a few years later, they discover something else and they rewrite the whole book again.

When the reality is that we need to just admit that we don't really know and not force it on people as if it's fact.

So think about this, not everything can be measured empirically.

So in other words, I can take this pulpit and I can make the dimensions and I can say it's this high and this wide and this deep and it's made from this kind of wood and I can do all these kind of facts and figures, but not everything that exists in the universe is measured that way, okay?

If you take a look at this picture, this was taken in Ukraine.

I've had all kinds of problems in my life.

I've had all kinds of issues but God still keeps my body together somehow.

But this is my wife and she's much more nice to look at than me, but anyway, can you tell by that picture that we love each other?

Can you put it in a bottle or put a ruler on it, you can't measure it, but you know it's there, right?

So to say that God doesn't exist because He can't be measured is like saying that love for my wife didn't exist because it can't be measured in a laboratory.

The reality is that not everything that exists can be substantially or materially measured.

Yeah, I mean electricity can be measured, but there are certain things that cannot be.

And the reality is that the Bible describes God as not being able to be measured by human systems.

So, what happens is you have people who take God and the Bible and they try to find the scientific evidence for Him and to measure Him and to put Him in our human scientific method when the Bible already says you can't do that.

And then they get upset when they can't do that.

And then they say, well, He must not exist because we can't do this.

When the book already said, you wouldn't be able to do it.

Now, what I'm not trying to say is that, well, God is just too big for us and we shouldn't, you know, the typical argument of the atheists against Christianity is anything you can't explain, you just say that God did it because you don't know how to explain it any other way.

That is the biggest misconception of atheists about Christians.

Series

Amazing Disciples

10. How to Reach the Atheistic Mind, Part 2

Transcript

Parent Series

Parent Conference

Sponsor

Recorded

OYC 2012 Seminars

In a Godless World: The Worldview of Atheism

1h

Plant-based Evangelism

50m

Practical Christian Living

Tips On Sharing Your Faith

32m

Reaching the Secular Mind

1h

Helping Them See

Medical Evangelism 101: A Mental Preparation for a Serious Calling

1h

How to Engage People In Our Modern Age With Our Unique Message

1h

ECYC 2012 Seminar: Reaching the Hearts of Your Loved Ones

Reaching the Hearts of Your Loved Ones, Part 2

50m

Into All the World

1h 6m

OYC 2012 Seminars

Standing Up: Winsome and Rational Apologetics

47m

Plenary

Sabbath School 2

55m

GYC 2011 totalChurch

Total Church: Adding to the Church

2h

GYC 2013 Seminar: To All: World Religions and Mission

04-“The Cross and Whatever”: Postmodernism and Missions 101

58m

Sound Doctrine