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2/8/2015

Four months ago on a flight from Chicago to Japan I sat next to a Japanese scientist and somehow managed to move the conversation in a spiritual direction. Then I spent the next 45 minutes in our dialog building a bridge for him for the existence of God both philosophically and scientifically. After about 45 minutes he said to me something like, there does seem to be some evidence for the existence of a Creator. From the moment he confessed this…my whole approach changed and moved quickly to build a bridge to the gospel with him. I used our Five Planks Model that we talk about in our second edition of Conversational Evangelism. (I am accountable to my Creator in some way, I don’t measure up, I am a sinner, I need an outside source, and I need what only Jesus alone can give). After building these bridges I invited him to trust Christ. Unfortunately (but not surprisingly) he did not accept Christ. But I certainly may have got further with him than one might have expected trying to witness to a Japanese person steeped in Shintoism!

 

More recently I was on a flight from Chicago back to Charlotte and sat next to a wealthy business man (the one I talk about in my first post). Now he confessed to be a Catholic and insisted that he believed in God and that we were accountable to God. He also said he believed that Jesus was the only way, but yet still said things that seem to contradict himself. Through much of the first half of our hour long conversation he kept saying things like, “But I am sure other faiths think that their beliefs are true also.” This happened over and over again. Now at this point I could have chosen to get out my big apologetic guns and use all the training I’ve learned over the years from my father (Christian Apologist, Norman Geisler) to establish a strong philosophical bases (Much like I did in my other witnessing encounter) for the existence of God to help rebuild his foundation in God from the ground up. But in my efforts to be sensitive to this situation and more importantly to be sensitive to the Holy Sprit, I concluded that this would not be the best approach with this particular person. As a result, I built a heart bridge first (later on I also built so more head bridges). I shared with him the principle that when people stop believing in God they may have difficulty in finding meaning and purpose in their life just like Nietzsche believed. Then I shared the story of my sister Rhoda’s suicide 13 years ago and how that when she gave up her belief in God and Christianity, she found it more difficult to find meaning and purpose in her life.

 

Now from the moment that I said these things to him, our whole conversational changed. He no longer insisted that other faiths could be true and started to let down his guard. As a result I even got to explain to him that we can go to church all our life and still not be a Christian whether we were raised Catholic or a Baptist (Like me). That opened up the door then for me to explain to him the difference between believing in Jesus and believing only that Jesus was the Messiah but not being a Christian (Js. 2:19). In my conversation with him I learned that his Catholic priest told him that if he was pro-choice (he was very strongly pro-choice), he could not take communion! That meant for him that he couldn’t be saved. This was the sticking point with him to move further to the cross. As a result I tried to further clarify what scripture teaches by mentioned verses like Eph. 2:8-9 and Titus 3:5, but he really didn’t show much interest in me going further into these details. It’s as though he didn’t really want to hear what he knew he needed to do! I did tell him however at the end of our conversation that the thing that drives me is that someday I will have to stand before God and have to answer for what I did in my life as a follower of Christ. I also clarified that it wasn’t my good deeds that were going to get me into heaven…only what Christ has done for me. Now unfortunately he wasn’t really very open to going further in this conversation. I am reminded at times like this, when I want to say more and feel like that doors aren’t really open, that Jesus also had this problem at times in not being able to go as far as he wanted to in a conversation. For example, he said to his disciples in Jn. 16:12 “I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bare them now.” Now the problem is for us a Christians there are so many things we want to say to our non-believing friends every day about Christ but unfortunately there is only so much they can hear. I believe then we need to be more sensitive to the Holy Spirit to know how far to go in every encounter.

 

I hope that understanding what I did in these two different situations, may give you one example of how you might be able to use apologetics in more culturally and personally sensitive ways in your witnessing to others.

 

By divine appointment on my flight back from Singapore to Japan…I got to talk to a self-professed pantheists (someone who believes that we are all a part of God). He talked to me for about two hours…so at least I made him curious to continue the conversation about religious beliefs! My key question for Ted (let’s just call him that) was…what kind of evidence would you need to see to convince you that God is theistic and not pantheistic? He told me he would think about it. Surprisingly he was willing to at least admitted that there were greater consequences for him if God really was theistic as opposed to pantheistic. I also asked him. “Is possible that God can be both separate from the universe that he created (theism) and yet at the same time in the same sense identical to the universe (pantheism)?” He seemed to think this was possible but the more I explained to him the difficulty in saying this…the less sure he seemed to be. He took my e-mail contact and told me he would get back to me. Pray for Ted that God would break through in his life!