| Time | Text |
|---|---|
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Endless Reasons to Reject
00:03:41
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| Dr. Brown, let's get back to your book. | |
| Would you explain to me what the deconstructionist movement is? | |
| Wow. | |
| Yes, so you hear a lot of people talking about deconstructing, and you could even call it a movement in that regard. | |
| So what it means is people are now asking questions and saying, okay, I just took this for granted. | |
| I believed the Bible was God's word. | |
| I believe the Christian faith was true. | |
| I was raised with it. | |
| Well, how do I know the Bible is God's word? | |
| How do I know there is a God? | |
| How do I know if there is a God, that the Christian faith is the true faith? | |
| And they're asking questions and now saying, well, we have deconstructed. | |
| In other words, we are no longer believers or we are ex-evangelicals. | |
| And there are whole movements of this, social media gatherings where people come around this. | |
| And it's almost become kind of the smart thing to do to show how I'm a thinking person and I'm deconstructing. | |
| So I actually have a chapter in the book, Can Deconstructionism Be Good? | |
| Can it be healthy? | |
| Because immediately we hear deconstruction and we throw it out. | |
| There can be something healthy about asking honest questions with humility and with a real heart to find the truth. | |
| It can be very dangerous to come with arrogance and say, I'm going to prove this thing as false. | |
| If you want to reject the Bible, you could find endless numbers of reasons to do it. | |
| Endless numbers of websites that will tell you how bad the Bible is. | |
| Endless numbers of videos that will show you all the so-called contradictions in the Bible. | |
| Endless stories of people who were, quote, hurt by the church and on and on and on. | |
| If you're looking for a way out, you can find it. | |
| But that's not being honest. | |
| That's not being truthful. | |
| That's looking for a way out. | |
| What you have to do is say, all right, God, if you're really there, I want to follow you and know you if you're really true. | |
| If the Bible is true, no matter what you require of me, I want to follow you because you're a God. | |
| But if this is not true, if I'm talking to the heir, I want to know that. | |
| And see, when I got saved, I'm a brand new believer. | |
| My dad says to me, Michael, it's great you're off drugs, but we're Jews. | |
| We don't believe this. | |
| So he brings me to meet the local rabbi. | |
| So as a brand new believer, just saved a few weeks, I'm now talking to the local rabbi, and he's challenging me. | |
| He's a learned man. | |
| He's fresh out of Jewish Theological Seminary. | |
| Not long after that, I start college. | |
| All my degrees, my bachelor's, master's, and PhD were all at secular universities. | |
| I never once studied with someone who believed the same thing I believed in the academic world. | |
| They all were hostile to my faith or indifferent to it or contradictory to it. | |
| And that meant I had a search for answers. | |
| And I got to a point in life when I said, I just want to follow God and his truth wherever it leads. | |
| I knew he was real, and I want to follow God and his truth wherever that leads. | |
| That only reinforced me in my beliefs. | |
| I have a colleague, a messianic Jewish friend of mine whose mother was a Holocaust survivor, and she became a believer. | |
| And when he was a young man, just an older teenager, actually, he decided, I'm going to study the Bible to prove to my mother that Jesus is not the Messiah. | |
| And he got saved in the process. | |
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Together, Let's Find Answers
00:00:33
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| So I take people through the process. | |
| And look, Jude says, have mercy on those who doubt. | |
| It's okay to come with your questions. | |
| Let us cultivate an atmosphere where people feel safe answering their questions. | |
| And when we feel safe, fielding those questions and say, hey, together, let's get answers because there are answers to every single objection. | |
| God's word is tested and true. | |
| When the objections are gone, when the atheists are gone, when the mockers are gone, the word of God will still be standing strong. | |