Save Your Breath

Posted on Tuesday, January 30th, 2007 at 8:43 pm

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Like many of you, I speak to many people who think that it is my job to answer every question that they might have about the Bible.  There are some of these people whom I feel called to spend a great deal of time with.  There are others whom I feel that it would be better if I saved my breath.

That may go against the training that many of you have had and you may think that we all have an obligation to spend as much time as any person is willing to listen.  I tend to feel otherwise.  There are some people who are simply not being drawn by the Holy Spirit, and no matter what I say, or what argument I put forward, there will be no conversion without the calling of the Spirit.  I realize, of course, that I don’t have a pipeline to heaven and the Spirit is not always making it clear to me whom He might be working on and whom He might not be drawing at that particular time.

I have a tool that I use, given the fact that I have limited time and that there are those who would spend days doing nothing but arguing with me, yet have no real desire to accept Christ even if all of those objections were answered.  The tool that I use is this.  I try to center the questions about the truthfulness of the Bible on the resurrection of Christ.  This is the central miracle of the Bible, and the most important event in the history of the world.

After asking the “argumentative soulâ€? if we can center on one issue, and make that issue the resurrection of Jesus I use the answer to help me decide whether they are really serious about questing for truth, or just like arguing.  If they are willing to center on this one issue, I am happy to continue the conversation.  If they are not willing, but want to bring up a different argument every few minutes, I save my breath.  I know that they are not seeking truth but seeking argument and that no-one is argued into the Kingdom of God.

If they are willing to center on this one issue, I spend a few moments giving them two or three of the best arguments for the resurrection.  I will try to post a small one page outline of some of these arguments, but most of you are familiar with them and they are available in any standard apologetics textbook like Scaling the Secular City Then I ask them if I could answer whatever problem or question that they had about the resurrection would they be willing to turn their lives over to Christ.  Many times you will find a “no, I am not willing to make that commitment.â€?  At that point I ask if they would be willing to read a book that would show strong arguments for the true bodily resurrection of Christ.  If they are unwilling to commit to reading a book, I feel that it is time to save my breath. 

I save my breath because there are other people whom the Holy Spirit is working on and who need to be spoken to.  I cannot let my fleshly nature (I have to “win the argumentâ€?) overcome what is the best use of my time for the Lord.  I can only trust that the Lord will guide my decisions and help me to use my breath at the right time and save it at the right time.  Our job is to be “wise as a serpent, but harmless as a dove.â€?

There are a lot of great books on the resurrection.  They range all the way from suitable for doctoral philosophy students N. T. Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God down to middle school students The Case For Easter.  A middle of the road book written by a good scholar, but not so technical that it cannot be understood by your average reader is The Weekend that Changed the World

Happy Fishing,

DrSamLam