Chuck Colson – Defending Your Faith.
Chairman and Founder, Prison Fellowship Ministries
- If you are a shepherd/leader your job is not to pander to your people, but to lead them to the truth.
- The law of noncontradiction – Aristotle
- 2 truth claims cannot be true – one must be false – even the supreme court can’t overturn it.
- Stop blaming the culture when everything goes wrong.
- Bad gay marriage remark goes here.
- 2.3 million people are there due to a lack of moral training during their formative years
- Don’t blame the culture.
- Culture is the church incarnate.
- If the culture is sick it means the church is sick.
- Are we in babylonian captivity – captive to the culture around us?
- Essay: The church in babylonian captivity leads to the reformation.
First Question asked in the book
1. What is christianity?
- conversation, relationship with jesus, religion?
- None of those things, all of those things, and so much more.
- It is a worldview – it is a way of seeing all life through the eyes of God and christians are called to live that way.
- If secular people call out mine – it’s mine – we call out his – it’s all his
- What does it rest on? Certain truth claims – the foundation of what we believe.
- The first presupposition about reality is that God is.
- Not only is God is – but he has spoken.
- This is a fallen world.
- G.K. Chesterton – what’s the problem with the world today?
His answer: “I am.”
- Get that wrong and you get your theology wrong.
He just said thirdly for the third time – his structure is very hard to follow.
- The birth of Christ – isn’t a baby in a manger, but a creating God becoming flesh and saying you are forgiven – dwelling among us and paying
the price for our sins.
- This is the greatest story ever told.
- A conversion isn’t saying I acept Jesus, but when you go to the cross and the old is crucified, and you become new.
- When we are reconciled to one another we become a community – that’s the church
- That community is where you learn on of the most fundamental truths, you must be holy.
- The christian worldview is the only one that is rationally sustainable
- We don’t live by today’s utopian schemes, but by revealed truth.
- You can’t force a conversion – Luther
- Free Will leads to free government, and markets, etc.
- We don’t impose – we propose
- The first thing people should say about us is my how they love each other and us
- Lead and equip
- Give your people a big vision