Focal Point:

For the past 10 weeks of sermons in this series I have been providing you with tools and strategies to help you contend for and defend the faith. We have looked at 8 positive (offense) arguments for the existence of God, and there are over a dozen more that we didn’t get a chance to look at. What you should have realized over our time in this study is two-fold: 1) there are good reasons to believe that God exists, and 2) everyone can explain why they believe in God, regardless of the level of sophistication in the explanations. In all honesty there is no excuse as to why you can’t defend your faith.

Hard times for the Christian church are coming. It will happen. The level of freedom and legal protections we once enjoyed will soon be gone and we will find ourselves living in a post-Christian world. The writing of that reality is already on the wall. We will be taken back to the times of Polycarp, Ignatius, Justin Martyr, Clement of Rome, Tertullian, and Irenaeus. We will find ourselves living in a hostile world as they did, answering objections, allegations, and false pretensions against our faith. You can do it. You have it in you, because he that is in you is greater than he that is in the world.

Introduction:

Belief in God is a properly basic belief, and by that, I mean that the deeply held belief in God in the heart of every Christian is a belief that is rationally held without needing to be justified by other beliefs or evidence. In other words, it is foundational and self-evident, and does not depend on other beliefs to be considered reasonable. To us who have given our hearts to Jesus do not have to hold any reason to believe because we know it to be true. So, on a very personal level, you do not have to justify your beliefs to yourself. You are convinced beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is real because he has made himself real to you. But you are not everyone, and the Bible requires us to provide an answer to anyone who would ask us about this hope that lies within is.

Today I would like to spend our time looking at three very important concepts as we conclude this sermon series. The first is that we have to engage in the conversation. To take our minds out of intellectual neutral and not be afraid to enter the fray of theological debate. When someone challenges your faith, or attacks your belief, answer them. The second is the importance of apologetics. You can’t be a Christian and not do apologetics and you certainly cannot do evangelism without it. Finally, I need you to understand that our country, the United States of America, is an empire in decline. The last two sermon series, and the one to follow this one, have been intentionally chosen to help you understand this reality. Hard times are coming for the church. That is guaranteed to us by the scriptures. This isn’t meant to fear-monger, or brow beat you into compliance. The Spirit of God is telling me that it would be a dereliction of my duty as your pastor to not prepare you for what is coming. I’ve said this in previous weeks, but I believe it bears repeating: the quiet, comfortable life you have been living as a free citizen of this country is on its final pen strokes in the pages of history. I don’t want you to grow comfortable or complacent in things that cannot offer you such. Forms of government, civic codes written on pages of parchment (like our Constitution) political institutions, hallowed halls of academia, and cultural leadership figures are all the wrong things to put your trust in. If events of the COVID pandemic taught us anything, it taught us that our so-called rights enshrined in the first ten amendments to our nation’s Constitution are illusory. A right is an entitlement absent duty that is backed up by your own force to keep it. The people with the biggest armies are the one’s who grant and revoke rights. The hard reality we must realize is that our so-called rights can be taken away from us anytime the ones behind the levers of power choose, and they will be. Mark my words, a time is coming when Christians will be seen as the enemy of society. It has happened throughout the history of our religion. From the edict of Claudius to the Great Persecution, to the edict of Valerian, to the Diocletian De Maleficiis, and the edicts of Nicomedia and Thessalonica, and the rescript of Severus. If the great saints of our church endured such times, why should we think that we are immune? But just like the great saints we can use the art and discipline of apologetics to make an impact in history. Politics is downwind of culture, and culture is downwind from theology, and we have to get our theology correct. We cannot compromise Objective Truth for anything, for nothing. Nothing should dissuade us from truth. We are Christians, we are more than conquerors, we are the children of the King of Kings. We are Christians before we are anything else and our allegiance is to the kingdom of Heaven.