Alex McFarland Show-105-Evidence to Back Up Your Christian Faith

The spiritual condition of America, politics, culture, and current events, analyzed through the lens of Scripture. Welcome to the Alex McFarland Show. The Christian faith is unique in that it is a faith, a trust, a belief, but it's a belief built on solid evidence and sound reasoning.

Hi, Alex McFarland here. In this show and several shows that follow, we're going to talk about apologetics and worldview. Now, apologetics is defending what we believe.

The Bible tells us to do that, and we'll go over some of the well-known verses where the Lord instructs his followers to present, explain, defend the faith. Worldview is what we believe, and we are in a battle of worldviews now, not only for the souls of individual people, but really for the future of the nation, America, but the Western world. And so what I'm going to talk about really is how we got where we are. And frankly, some of the quotes and the philosophies that we're going to go over, you may actually find hard to believe, but nevertheless, that's what's contributed to where we are. And really the predominant worldview right now that is driving so much of public policy, definitely driving public education, is you may in a colloquial way have heard it called wokeness or political correctness.

And that's true. DEI, diversity, equity, inclusion. But really, critical theory is the driving philosophy right now, sometimes called CRT, critical race theory. But it's important to point out that critical theory touches so many other areas of life, economics, and certainly policy and medicine even.

I want to lay down some historical mileposts that really tell us how we got where we are. And I must warn you in advance, you're going to have to put on your thinking cap to even follow this trajectory and frankly, maybe your imagination. Because you may find it hard to believe that adults, rational adults, or perhaps I should say otherwise rational adults, would even believe such things. But nevertheless, we'll go there. I want to begin with a Bible verse from Isaiah 5. And if you read Isaiah 5, it's a great chapter because there's one part of it where it talks about, Hell hath enlarged herself. In other words, hell had to be expanded to accommodate so many people that believe what is false, reject what is true, refuse salvation, and die lost.

But Isaiah 5, if you read 4 through 20, it also says, Woe to those who call good evil and evil good. Now the Christian faith, God reveals himself to the human race. God sent his son. Jesus Christ died on the cross. We turn from sin to Christ. We say, Lord, I admit I'm a sinner. Lord, I do believe you died for me.

Dear Jesus, please save me. You accept that Jesus, who proved himself to be the Messiah, he fulfilled all the prophecies, lived a sinless life. He was crucified at Passover. The appropriate measure of God's wrath that we all deserve. The sin of the human race was put onto Jesus. And the Christian message, I believe it's not hard to believe at all.

I mean, here's what is being offered. We're guilty sinners. We've known the right. We've done the wrong. We deserve judgment.

We do. I'm a sinner. I'm a saved sinner.

I'm a redeemed sinner, but I'm a sinner. I trusted Christ for my salvation, as scholars of old would say that we deserved God's just displeasure. And so Christ proved his love.

Romans 5-8, he died on the cross, rose from the dead. I had an atheist once ask me, why would you believe in Jesus? And I said, why would I not believe in Jesus that he so patiently waited and made overtures and revealed himself to me and I can be saved. And this gospel message is a message validated, corroborated, verified by the facts of history. I mean, there's Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, incredibly verified historical documents for biographies of Jesus, if you will.

But even besides that, we've got Jewish, Greek, and Roman sources, contemporary with the early church, that reference all that we know about Jesus. Then we've got the church, how a small group of people were suddenly willing to die for this Christian message because they had seen the Lord Jesus risen from the dead. The gospel spread, the Western world was built, everywhere Christianity has gone, there has been the betterment of the human condition now for more than 20 centuries. And so, like I said to the atheist that asked me, how could I not believe in Christianity? Why would I not believe in Christianity? And here we are, and Christianity has something no other belief system has, not only a message of faith and then salvation, but empirical evidence to prove and back up what we're saying. That's why Alvin Plantinga, the great philosopher, nearly 40 years ago, he wrote a book, a very small book, it was a wonderful book, you can probably find it still, but it's called The Twin Pillars of Christian Scholarship, Faith and Reason. See, it's a faith which means trust, but it's a reasoned faith which gave birth to scholarship and learning and literacy. The Christian faith, this wonderful two-sided symbiotic coin, faith and reason.

And when Plantinga said these are the twin pillars of Christian scholarship, it's really true. That's why Augustine, one of the smartest mortals that ever lived, 1600 years ago, Augustine wrote this, quote, for who cannot see that thinking is prior to believing, for no one believes anything unless he has first thought that it is to be believed. Although even belief itself is nothing else than to think, to reason with assent, end of quote.

Now what does this mean? Augustine says, look, we believe, but it's not just some blind belief, we reason through it, we think about it. You can't believe without first having thought. And maybe even right now you're thinking, okay, in my soul I know that I need God. Wow, here's Jesus who claimed to be able to forgive my sin. A relationship with Jesus is the key to heaven. My goodness, he rose from the dead.

Nobody else did that. He was seen by eyewitnesses. Millions of changed lives attest to the reality of Jesus. So I'm going to give assent or acknowledgement and not mere intellectual recognition. No, I will believe I will follow him too. Now when we come back, I'm going to talk more about the philosophies that mitigate against Christianity, fight against it, but why we should believe. And as the Bible invites us to do, put our faith in Jesus.

And as the song says, our soul has found its resting place by believing in Jesus. Stay tuned. We'll come back with more after this. Fox News and CNN call Alex McFarland a religion and culture expert.

Stay tuned for more of his teaching and commentary after this. In recent years, our nation has suffered greatly and we seem to be on a rapid moral decline. We've rejected God, morality, and we've almost completely lost our sense of patriotism.

It's no wonder that many are asking the question, is this the end of America? Hi, Alex McFarland here, and I want to make you aware of my book, The Assault on America. How to defend our nation before it's too late. You know, our nation has seen politicians that are corrupted by greed and they've got a vested interest in power.

And many of our elected officials seem to care little about the country that they've been appointed to serve. Read my book, The Assault on America. We can stand up for our great nation and defend America before it's too late.

It's available everywhere. You can learn more on my own website, which is AlexMcFarland.com. Read the book, The Assault on America. How to defend our nation before it's too late.

He's been called trusted, truthful and timely. Welcome back to The Alex McFarland Show. There's a passage in the Gospel of Matthew, Matthew Chapter 12, really 43 through 45, where Jesus talks about the danger of once God has been allowed to be the Lord of your life, if you ever deviate from that, the potential is there for you to end up worse than before you ever were, before the gospel had come in.

Hi, Alex McFarland. We're talking about apologetics, the Christian faith, wokeness, and the philosophies competing for the hearts and minds of people. But let me read this scripture from Matthew 12, 43 and following, and I think you'll see how it applies to critiquing the worldviews and the false philosophies currently damaging our nation and world. Jesus said this about when an unclean spirit is in a person, and it goes in verse 43, when the unclean spirit has left a man, he goes through dry places seeking rest, or seeking another life to possess, and finds none. And the demon says, I will return to my house from where I came out.

And when he has come, if he finds it empty, swept and clean, then he goes and takes with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there, and the last state of the man is worse than the first, even so it shall be in this wicked generation. Now, here in America, unequivocally, we were founded on biblical principles. But right now, we're a nation that needs missionaries to come here. I was just talking to a student who went to hear a Turning Point USA speech, and there is a young woman making the college campus circuit these days.

She escaped from North Korea, and she was giving a lecture in Colorado. Now, listen to this, folks, and this is why we must defend the faith. We must influence those around us.

Pastors, leaders, this is why we must speak truth, even though it's hard. This young lady, her name is Winomi Park, and she said when she speaks on American college campuses, having defected, risking her life to escape North Korea, she says that on American university campuses, it's as bad, if not worse, than when she lived under the dictatorial regime of North Korea. Free speech is suppressed here on American university campuses. You're being forced, arm twisted, to be compelled to say things you know aren't true, like transgender ideology, Marxism, and she says that American university campuses are as bad, if not worse, than North Korea.

Let me share this as well. As I'm recording this, about three hours ago, I did a book signing at a Christian bookstore, and two dear ladies came through the line to get a book signed, and they said, we're from Germany, we're Christians, please pray in Germany right now. And as I'm sure you all know, Germany is the country that gave us the Reformation 500 years ago. Martin Luther preached the gospel, and the Protestant Reformation spread throughout Europe, and it was the Reformation that led the pilgrims to go from the Netherlands to form the Plymouth Colony, America, a Christian nation, was birthed.

And these two ladies in line at my book signing said, please pray for Germany. Nobody knows about Martin Luther anymore, or virtually no one. It's woke, it's transgender, it's homosexuality. The Christianity that was our nation for centuries is all but vanished, and we are so fearful for the future of our beloved Germany. Now folks, I am gravely concerned for the future of our United States of America, and just like Matthew 12, 43 through 45 warns, if a house is swept clean, and the demons come back and infiltrate, bring other demons with them, the latter state is worse than the former.

But about our nation, there is no such thing as a true tabula rasa, a blank slate, a cleaned house. Either you are filled with truth and Christ, or you are empty and vulnerable for whatever, as Charles Jefferson said in 1908, any insanity or delusion of the hour. And speaking of insanity and delusion, let's talk about the worldview that has given way to the wokeness that we experience all around us. Some of you may recall a decade ago everybody was talking about postmodernism. In other words, there was the modern era from really the mid 1600s up to about 1900, and the modern era was characterized by a number of things.

In fact, let me give some contrast right now. In the modern era, there was really a unified worldview. It was a Judeo-Christian worldview. Truth exists, truth is objective, we can discover truth. In fact, it's life's obligation that we discover truth.

And there was accountability before the law, and there was equal protection before the law. In science, they talk about unified field theory, a theory of everything. Well, for the West, for 2000 years of Western civilization, and certainly 235-ish years of American history, we did have a unified worldview, the Judeo-Christian worldview. Now, as they are so prone to do, liberals decided to take their tools and crush and dismantle the Judeo-Christian worldview. So what do we have today?

We don't have unity of thought, we have diversity of thought, pluralism, equity, inclusion, except there's no inclusion for the worldview that questions the validity of inclusion. So we've gone from the modern era to the postmodern. Now the term postmodern was first used really in the 1920s, but it took about five more decades to get down to the street level, and we're at a time where, think of these contrasts. We were a nation that was very rational and reasonable. Now everything is very subjective and emotional and personal. There was a belief that truth was absolute. Now truth is relative and personal.

I make it up for myself. There was, and I've got to give you some terms here and concepts, but there was the idea that there is truth and we can know it. In other words, certain knowledge. Nowadays, people say, oh, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual. And I've had many a college professor, they'll say, you know, Reverend McFarland, it's not the destination, it's the journey. In other words, there's no conclusion to ever be reached, no truth to ever be found. It's just this spiritual seeking and journey.

But C.S. Lewis said this, and he was right. He said, look, a journey is only meaningful if there is eventually a destination at which one arrives. Now when we come back, we're going to talk about the destination, the certainty, the arrival, and that is that God is real. He's revealed himself, and we can know God through Jesus Christ. And more about the philosophies that have built the broken world we find ourselves in after this brief break.

Don't go away. Fox News and CNN call Alex McFarland a religion and culture expert. Stay tuned for more of his teaching and commentary after this. Christian author and speaker Alex McFarland is an advocate for Christian apologetics. Teaching in more than 2200 churches around the world, schools, and college campuses, Alex is driven by a desire to help people grow in relationship with God. He arms his audiences with the tools they need to defend their faith, while also empowering the unchurched to find out the truth for themselves. In the midst of a culture obsessed with relativism, Alex is a sound voice who speaks timeless truths of Christianity in a timely way. With 18 published books to his name, it's no surprise that CNN, Fox, the Wall Street Journal, and other media outlets have described Alex as a religion and culture expert.

To learn more about Alex and to book him as a speaker at your next event, visit AlexMcFarland.com, or you can contact us directly by emailing booking at AlexMcFarland.com. Over the last several decades, it's been my joy to travel the world talking with children, teens, adults, people of all ages about the questions they have related to God, the Bible, Christianity, and how to know Jesus personally. Hi, Alex McFarland, I want to make you aware of my book, The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask About Christianity. You know, we interviewed hundreds of children and parents and families to find out the questions that children and people of all ages are longing to find answers for. In the book, we've got practical, biblical, real-life answers that they have about how to be a Christian in this modern world.

My book, The 21 Toughest Questions Your Kids Will Ask, you can find it wherever you buy books or at resources.afa.net. He's been called trusted, truthful, and timely. Welcome back to The Alex McFarland Show. Welcome back to the program. We're going to resume our talk about apologetics, Christianity, and the woke critical theory world. But I want to say a big thank you to everybody who prays for our ministries and donates. You know, as you hear this, we just wrapped up a major crusade in Plainview, Texas. We've had events this spring in Florida, Indiana, Ohio, and we're getting ready for seven summer camps. 1,200 middle school and high schoolers will be in summer camps, and we talk to them about God and country. Every summer, hundreds and hundreds of youth enthusiastically come to Christ. They commit to pray for America. I often say this, we are trying to woke-proof America's kids. I will tell you that between now and early summer, late May, June, we really need the Lord to provide an additional $50,000 of funding for our camps.

In 25 years, we've never turned a youth away. Between staffing, insurance programs, travel, very fruitful ministry, but it does take resources. So if you would pray about helping us, everything you give to Alex McFarland Ministries, also known as Truth for a New Generation, everything you give is tax-deductible, handled by our board. We have a third-party outside accounting firm that handles our bookkeeping.

Everything is absolutely transparent, and I think that's why God is blessing us. You can give securely online at alexmcfarland.com, or you can mail a check, if you would, to TNG, as in Truth for a New Generation, just TNG, P.O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina, P.O.

Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina, 27404. Thank you for standing with us. Thank you for helping call our nation back to Christ. And as we said, we don't want America to be worse than what it was.

We were Christian. Right now, we're at a crossroads. Will we have a revival? Will we rediscover our moral biblical principles? Or will America turn into something unthinkably, unspeakably evil?

A Marxist, communist, lawless state of anarchy that none of us would live to see turn around. We must act, and we must act quickly. And I thank you for your support.

And let me just say this. One of the ways that we act is to understand what's going on. So, when did the foundations begin to crumble? Well, around 1950, there was a German philosopher named Martin Heidegger, and he encouraged the deconstruction of truth and the building back through one's own personal interpretations. And this really became a focal point of academia in the West.

Now, as I warned you earlier, you've got to really put on your imagination to get through this with me. But there were a couple of disciples of Heidegger, there was an Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida, he died in 04, and Michel Foucault, looks like Michael Foucault, but he was French, died in 84. And these guys believed that you don't look at a text, you don't look at history, you deconstruct it and build it back the way that you feel so led. These guys took that, but they elaborated on it, and they basically said knowledge and power are inextricably linked.

Now here's the thing. Jacques Derrida was a Marxist. Now he said he wasn't a Marxist, but he was. And the other thing that Derrida wrote about and believed in was pedophilia.

So he was a sexual pervert. Now Michel Foucault, he was a Marxist, but he took pains to try and hide this. Now here's the thing about it, folks. Nowadays, when someone like Hillary Clinton says that the Constitution is a living document, and it's not what the original intent of the founders was, but it's what it means to us today. We must look at the words through our lens that's very Heideggerian, that we deconstruct and we reconstruct.

Now folks, let me just say this. When President Biden says build back better, it's no accident that he's really repeating the mantra of Heidegger that basically encouraged people. This is 70 years ago, but deconstruct, tear down whatever you see around you and build it back in the way you choose.

That's the way the left is trying to tear down America and they would say build back better. Now the interesting thing about this is that what is up for grabs besides the future of our nation and the souls of people. What is really hanging in the balance is the way we use language. Another dead philosopher, yet still influential, was the Austrian-born Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Now, he died in 1951. Wittgenstein argued this, and again, you have to use your imagination how these people reasoned in such a way. I really think that between their lack of a moral compass and coming up in Europe that still had a residue of Christianity, but they not only rejected it, but mocked it. In comes the influence of demonic delusion. But Wittgenstein said language enables us to make no meaningful statements about God.

He said, quote, talk about God is meaningless. Now, the fallacy, and I've spent literally 30 years pointing this out at university campuses, all of the people who say words don't mean things, they use words to explain why words don't mean things, and they expect you to understand and comprehend those words. Now, we are at a point where critical theory, and really Foucault and Derrida alluded to this, but it is believed that if someone is in a position of power, necessarily, they are an oppressor. And in the world of post-postmodernism, wokeness, critical theory, there are only two kinds of people in the world, the oppressed and the oppressor.

That's why they fought for a $20 minimum wage in California, because if somebody is working an entry-level job, they are a victim, they are oppressed, and that doesn't necessarily follow at all. But folks, you might be thinking to yourself, look, I'm just a Christian, I just want to go to church and be left alone. C.S. Lewis said this, to walk away from the struggle would be to throw down our weapons and betray our less educated brethren who, before God, have no defense against the intellectual attacks of the heathen but us. And Lewis said this, the learned life is then for some a duty. I would elaborate on that and remind us all, myself included, of 1 Peter 3.15, where the Word of God says that we are to set apart Christ in our heart and we are to be ready always to give an answer. Jude 1 verse 3 says we are to earnestly contend for the faith. So understanding the battle of world views, understanding how to defend the Christian faith, being willing to get out of our comfort zone, talk to others, pastors being willing to get in the pulpit and preach sermons that are going to make some parishioners uncomfortable.

Look, I'm not saying it's always convenient, but I'm just saying it's right. It is the moment in which we live, these are the battles to which we've been called. Alex McFarland here, my promise to the Lord and to each one listening, and we're in this together, family of God, fellow Americans, we will pray, we will speak, we will prepare ourselves, we will influence this nation, young people and those of all ages, for the Lord Jesus and for that solid ground of truth that at least for this moment we seem to have lost. Folks, we must stand together. We can. God's word is still truth.

The philosophers of pagan people will not undo what Christ and his words say, but it is up to the church to know it and proclaim it. Let's do this thing, shall we? May God bless you. Alex McFarland Ministries are made possible through the prayers and financial support of partners like you. For over 20 years, this ministry has been bringing individuals into a personal relationship with Christ and has been equipping people to stand strong for truth. Learn more and donate securely online at alexmcfarland.com. You may also reach us at Alex McFarland, P.O. Box 10231, Greensboro, North Carolina 27404, or by calling 1-877-Yes-God-1. That's 1-877-Yes-God-1. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you again on the next edition of The Alex McFarland Show.