we continue now with our study of Christian apologetics and we have been looking at First Peter chapter 3 where Peter gives us the mandate to always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you a reason of course is when somebody says I understand what you believe but why do you believe that and when people ask that question they want us to substantiate the uh content of our faith that we have proclaimed so that Christianity involves as we saw in the early church not only the proclamation of the truth of God but in that Proclamation was included a defense of the claims that were being made by Christianity for example Peter himself who gives us this mandate elsewhere says when he's writing to his readers in the first century Breen we declare to you not cleverly def defined myths or fables but we declare unto you what we have seen with our eyes and what we have heard with our ears Luke when he sets forth his gospel begins that gospel by telling how he has done his research and his canvas the eyewitnesses of those things that took place in the life and Ministry of Christ so that what he's doing is drawing on the original sources of those who had been witnesses to Jesus and just as in courtrooms today we bring in witnesses to give testimony to the truth or the falsehood of what is being avowed so the New Testament does the same sort of thing now I mentioned in our last session The Dilemma that those who are in the reformed Faith have because as reformed thinkers we believe that nobody comes to Christ and is converted until less until first God the Holy Spirit changes the disposition of their soul and that all of the arguments and all of the reasoning and all of the testimonies that we bring to bear in Christian Outreach will be to no avail unless or until God the Holy Spirit brings the increase unless he changes the heart of the hearer so though apologetics is a task that is given to us and we are to be responsible in the handling of the truth claims of Christianity it's the situation that Paul speaks of where we may PL PL the seed and somebody else may water it but only God can bring the increase now some people believe that since it is the holy spirit's task to convert and not our task since it's beyond the realm of our power people say well then we don't need to be engaged in a defense of Christianity in fact to give Arguments for the truth of Christianity to give reasons for our faith would be in fact undermine the spiritual work of God the Holy Spirit I hear Christians all the time saying I don't want to study philosophy because I don't want to get in the way of the Holy Ghost and the Bible says beware of vain philosophies and I say to those people how in the world can you beware of something that you're not first aware of and if you're unaware of these Pagan philosophies sometimes you can be seduced by them and be sent in the wrong direction as Christians because you haven't paid attention to what's going on so even though I believe only the Holy Spirit can change a person's heart and ultimately the person's mind bring them to repentance nevertheless we see the very uh important dimension of apologetics in what I call Pre evangelism and also what we call Post evangelism now I've already talked about the value of stopping the mouths of the obstreperous as John celvin said and as as Peter speaks about bringing the opponents of Christ to a position of shame because by defending the truth of Christ we're defending him we're defending defending the honor of God not as if he needs us to defend his honor but nevertheless this is one way in which we bring honor to Christ by showing that the truth claims of his uh Faith are not rooted and grounded in nonsense or absurdity now in pre- evangelism here's the role of apologetics I have to do a little review for those of you who have been through our series on Doctrine and where we we studied justification because the Reformation Doctrine which I believe is the biblical doctrine of justification is that Doctrine known as justification by faith alone and when Luther declared in the 16th century that justification is by faith and by faith alone one of the immediate questions that arose at that time was what kind of faith saves because James tells us in the second chapter of his epistle what does it profit a man if he says he has Faith but has no Works will that Faith save him and he goes on to give a categorical answer to that question saying a profession of faith that is absolutely void of any response of obedience to God is clear evidence that that faith is a dead faith and no faith at all and so Luther in answering the critics of the 16th century said justification is by faith alone but not by a faith that is alone the only kind of faith that saves is what Luther called a fedas Viva a living faith a vital Faith a faith that issues forth in the fruit of faith in work now those works of course don't count towards your justification only the Merit of Christ counts but without the flowing forth of the fruit of Faith there would be no real faith in the first place that's the idea so again in that dispute in the 16th century the theologians of the time were saying well what is it that comprises saving faith and so the thinkers of the 16th century distinguished among several actual nuances or levels or elements of faith that together comprise saving Faith but three Chief levels and those are the level of notia or sometimes called the notai and then there is the level of as sensus and again the those of you who have been with us as we've studied justification this should be familiar by now and then the third is fedia and I want to review this so that we can see where apologetics comes into play in pre- evangelism fedia let me work backwards to fedia is that personal trust and Reliance that aspect of faith that involves a genuine affection for Christ that flows out out of a new heart and a new mind and it's the fidia we believe this level of saving faith that can only be engendered by the work of the spirit so I'm going to separate the fedia from the other two but let's now go back well let's now go back to the beginning the notia when we say that you are justified by faith the faith that justifies has to have a content so the immediate question is if I say you have to be saved by faith you should say to me Faith in what faith in hamburgers faith in Buddha I mean we have that idea in our culture where people say it doesn't matter what you believe as long as you're sincere oh does that mean I can put my trust in Satan and be saved or that the Old Testament people could trust in bail and they could be sa no no no there is certain content that is part of Christianity an essential level of information so that when the apostles went out to proclaim the uh Gospel of Jesus Christ they gave a summary of key points about the person of Jesus and about the work of Jesus how he was born according to the scriptures how that he uh suffered on the cross for their sins how he was raised from the dead and so on that's all part of the notes or the data or the notia that's the information that before I can actually call somebody to saving faith I have to give them the information or the content that they're asked to believe and that involves the mind that involves communication of information that people can understand before I can call upon Christ for example as my savior I have to understand that I need a savior I have to understand that I'm a sinner so I have to have some understanding of what sin is I have to understand that God exists I have to understand that I am estranged from that God that I'm exposed to that God's judgment in order for me ever to flee to Christ as a savior again manifestly I don't reach out for a savior unless I first am convinced that I have a need of a savior and so all of that is what I call pre- evangelism all of that is involved in the data or the information that a person has to process with their mind before they can ever respond to it in faith or reject it in unbelief now the second element of that is the element called as sensus which is simply the Latin word for intellectual Ascent if I say to you do you believe that George Washington was the first president of the United States what would you say yes yes but that doesn't mean that you have put your personal faith and Trust in George Washington to be your savior savior or anything like that I've just asked you if you believe in George Washington in the sense of does your mind give aent to the proposition George Washington was the first president of the United States now you have a whole movement in theology today that says faith has nothing to do with propositions that the Bible is simply a a book that bears witness to relationships and it's relationships that count not propositions and and again these are the people who think that all I need to be a Christian is to have a personal relationship with Jesus and I don't need doctrine I don't need any theology I don't need to affirm any Creed no Creed but Christ is the is the is the cause here is that I don't believe in propositions I believe in Jesus he's a person not a proposition you hear that sort of thing all the time and what they what those people are communicating that is very important and true is that obviously you can have a knowledge of the propositions and not know Jesus you can know about Jesus and not have a personal relationship ship with Jesus and surely the most important thing in the Christian Life Is the personal relationship that we have with Jesus however when I'm talking to people about this Jesus with whom I have a personal relationship I'm saying things about him I'm saying this Jesus is the Eternal Son of God and they'll say well that's a proposition I don't care about that that can be true or not true I said no no no no the the Jesus I want you to have a relationship with really is the Eternal Son of God and you can't have a saving relationship personally with this Jesus unless you know who this Jesus is unless you can affirm the truth of this Jesus that he really did die on the cross in a death that was an atonement and that it's true that he came out of the Tomb and I if you say you have a personal relationship with Christ but you don't believe in the truth that he was raised from the dead then you're telling me you have a personal relationship with a corpse that's all the difference in the world from saying you have a personal relationship with the resurrected Christ with the Risen Lord so all of those things that we say about Jesus and we say we believe about Jesus involves the mind saying yes to a proposition now as James says again that if you believe in God he says you do well even the demons believe and tremble for example if you have the information about Jesus and you even are persuaded that the information is correct and true and you can affirm it propositionally as Dr Kennedy says all that does is qualify you to be a demon because the demons know the truth it was the demons who were the first ones to recognize the identity of Jesus when he was on the this Earth and so they are convinced of the truth of who he is but they hate that truth and so what Dr Kennedy was getting at there was that again unless God the holy spirit moves you from these two levels to this one you haven't reached a saving Faith so let me repeat having these two without this will save no one but you can't really have this without having the first two that's the point I'm trying to get at and that's where apologetics is of vital importance I said on the first day that in the early church apologetics was closely linked to proclamation in the sense that there were all kinds of misconceptions about what Christianity was about people were believing that Christians were cannibals because they were meeting in secret eating somebody's body and drinking somebody's blood and so the theologians had to say no no no no that's wrong information you're responding to a distortion so let me clarify for you what the New Testament actually says so that you have a correct understanding of the information now again I can say this is what we're actually saying so that you're not rejecting a man you still May reject it but at least you know what it is you're rejecting at the point of rejection now the next step is where you try to prove or give evidence for the truth claims of Christianity again we live in a time where we've been infected with what's called fism which says I don't need to have a reason for what I believe I just close my eyes like time Alice and take a real deep breath and scrunch up my nose and if I try hard enough I can believe and I jump into the Arms of Jesus I take a blind leap of faith I hear that expression all the time and every time I hear that word or that expression of people say take a leap of faith I have a pain that starts at the back of my my feet and goes all the way up my back and I want to say no no no the Bible never tells you to take a leap of faith into the darkness and hope that there's somebody out there the Bible calls you to jump out of the darkness and into the light and that is not a blind leap that the faith that the New Testament calls us to is a faith that is rooted and grounded in things that God does that makes it very very clear that this is the truth for example when Paul does encounter the philosophers at Mars Hill and he says to them the former days of ignorance God overlooked but now God commands all men everywhere to repent because he has appointed a day in which he will judge the World by what by that one whom he has proven to be his son by the resurrection of the Dead you know it's not like uh God comes down in the form of Christ and Jesus goes into a closet someplace and offers an atonement and after he offers the atonement then God in the closet raises his up raises him up from the dead nobody sees him nobody knows about it's like Joseph Smith behind the sheets privately and secretly reading the secret message that he has from the angel morona there's none of that in Christianity when Paul is before agria he said King Agrippa these things were not done in a corner Jesus was crucified openly and it's not like we went to an empty tomb and say we can't figure out what happened here somebody stole the body but Christ came out of that tomb not in secret but publicly where we have eyewitness after eyewitness over 500 people who saw him at one time and as one born out of due time oh King I saw him with my own eyes Now ladies and gentlemen maybe you think that Paul's testimony is that of a lunatic and you don't want to give credibility to it but do you see the difference between giving making a case for the truth claim or just saying well yeah no nobody saw him die nobody saw him rise God did all that in a corner someplace or in a closet and he asked you to just believe I'm asking you to believe it close your eyes take a deep breath and take it by faith that's not Faith that's credulity that's Superstition and the task again of apology itics is to show that the evidence that the New Testament calls people to commit their life to is compelling evidence and worthy of your full commitment now that's involves often a lot of work and sometimes we would rather duck the responsibility of doing our homework of wrestling with the problems and answering the objections and just say to people well you just have to take it on faith that's the ultimate copout that doesn't honor Christ we honor Christ by setting forth for people the cogency of the truth claims of scripture even as God does even when God sends Moses to Pharaoh's court and says you tell Moses or you tell Pharaoh that I said to let my people go and to bring them out where they can worship me at this mountain and Moses says how am I going to know how am I to get in there who am I to tell Pharaoh that and will the people follow me how are they going to know God says here's how they're going to know Moses put your hand in your shirt and he puts his hand in his shirt says pull it out pull it out it's lepos leprosy Moses terrifi put it put your hand back in your shirt puts it back in his shirt pulls it up it's gone take your staff throw it on the ground turns into a snake he said ' that's how you're going to know' when you I'm going to empower you in such a way that even Pharaoh won't be able to deny that it's the Lord God who is behind this mandate and that's why we have to take the trouble to do our work before the spirit does his work because the spirit does not ask people to put their trust and their faith and their affection in nonsense or in absurdity or an unsub unsubstantiated truth claims that's why we have the testimony of the scriptures uh for our consideration