Author Tim Barnett
Published on 04/24/2017
Tactics and Tools

What Are the First Steps to Take When Learning to Defend the Faith?

Tim shares advise to those who want to become apologists of Christianity.


Transcript

What are the first steps to take in learning to defend the faith? Well let me give you three simple steps. First, you need to pray. You need to pray that God would use you, that He would give you opportunities to defend the faith, okay? So don’t just make defending the faith just an intellectual personal thing. We want to pray for opportunities to engage this world. Also, pray that God would soften the hearts of people that you’re going to get in conversation with and that you would have a maximum impact, an effective impact in their lives. So the first thing is pray.

The second thing is to engage. We need to get out there. Oftentimes we want to study, and learn, and read and do all that beforehand, but we’re not getting out on the field so to speak. And so my advice would be to engage people. Get into conversations with people. One way to do that is to ask questions. Get to know what people think, and what people believe, and why they believe the things they do. And so we pray first, and then we just get out there and we engage our culture.

But the last thing we to do is we need to study. We need to devote time to researching answers to the tough questions that our friends, and family, and strangers have. That involves reading books, maybe involve watching videos like this, listen to podcasts. I would strongly recommend listening to the Stand to Reason weekly podcast with Greg Koukl where you get to kind of sit over his shoulder, so to speak, and listen to how he engages with skeptics and believers. It’s my belief that these kinds of things, being a good apologist, a defender of the faith, is caught rather than it’s just taught. And, so those three things are the first steps. We pray, we engage, and we study. If you do those things, you’re on your way to being a good defender of the faith.