Apologetics
Metaxas: ‘You are the greatest
apologetic for Jesus that there is’
By Paula R. Kincaid, The Layman, November 14, 2012
SPARTANBURG, S.C. – During the Truth for a New Generation 2012 Apologetics Conference, Eric Metaxas told the audience that Christians are the living and compelling apologetic in a world of post-modern people.
Mextas, along with John Stonestreet, co-hosts Breakpoint, the Christian worldview radio program founded by the late Chuck Colson.
“Sometimes biography is more important than theology and apologetics,” he said. “You are the greatest apologetic for Jesus that there is. That is His will for you, to be a living apologetic – a walking theology.”
Eric Metaxas
“As believers, especially when talking about apologetics and truths, we get caught up on the evidence,” he said. Christians consider the facts that prove something that leads to argumentation of legalistic proofs that are simply not compelling to today’s post-modern people.
“The truth we are talking about is not just a logistical truth,” he said, “It is somehow revelation. How do you deal with that? If I could simply prove what I believe to someone then I would not need the Holy Spirit.”
“If you want to believe in the resurrection,” Metaxas said then the facts can prove it did happen, and that’s an important aspect to the truth. It deals with evidence and facts. As Christians, though, “we believe that truth is a person,” he said.
Evangelicals have been guilty of buying into the Enlightenment world view that truth is materialistic, he said. If Jesus is truth and Jesus is God in flesh then the truth is both material and beyond the material world.
Metaxas spoke about content and tone. “It’s about how we communicate the truth,” he said. “If I say, Jesus is the Lord, you idiot,” what could the Enemy do? He can take the truth, upend it and communicate” untruth.
Metaxas said that if “you say that Jesus Christ is Lord in a way that is not of Jesus, then you are doing the Devil’s work, because conveying truth and untruth is more confusing than saying Jesus is not lord.”
“You can’t speak the truth in un-love,” he said. “How you communicate is as important as what you communicate. How you live is the most important thing some will see … How I communicate must line up with what I communicate. That is Biblical, but it is particularly important right now.”
“Sometimes biography is more important than theology and apologetics,” he said. “You are the greatest apologetic for Jesus that there is. That is His will for you, to be a living apologetic – a walking theology.”
Metaxas then told the story of his personal journey. He was raised in a Greek Orthodox Church, but was not “getting the guts of the Gospel.” The theology was good, he said, but there was no discipleship.
He said he went to Yale University but he “was not prepared. Do not go to a school like that with an open mind. If you don’t know what you believe and can’t defend it, you can become unchristian.”
He said he graduated “pretty darned confused.” Metxas said he “floundered and drifted for a season.” Laughing at himself, he added, “and if you flounder and drift just right, you move back in with your parents.”
It was a very harsh year and “I had time to think about the meaning of life,” he said.
He spoke of meeting an Episcopalian, who began sharing the faith with him. “He was a born-again believer who knew the Scriptures.”
After a number of months, Metaxas said the Lord visited him in a dream. “You don’t know how the Lord will speak,” but Metaxas confirmed that “the message has to line up with Scripture.” It was God’s way of reaching him, Metaxas said, and “everything changed, which is supposed to happen when you meet Jesus.”
“The Lord took me on a strange journey,” he said. “If you know Him and trust Him, He will lead you on a strange journey because you trust Him. He can take you to weird places because He knows you trust Him and will follow Him.”
Trained as a writer and with a heart passion to be an author, Metaxas agree to write a biography of William Wilberforce. He wrote Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and the Heroic Campaign to End Slavery. Metaxas said that Wilberforce “took the Bible seriously and he changed the world. That is what happens, if you take the Bible seriously, you will change the world.”
“Wilberforce’s conversion was amazing,” said Metaxas. “You cannot believe what our God can do with one person.”
Critically acclaimed for his biography on Wilberforce, Metaxas was sought after to write another biography this time on Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It was a story with which Metaxas admits he was completely unfamiliar before he was saved.
“This man stood up to Hitler … was sent to a concentration camp … killed three weeks before the war ended,” Metaxas said, “and I had never heard this story. So I was scandalized.”
He said that the book – Bonhoffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy – was “very hard” to write, but while writing it he felt the Lord’s presence. “The success of the book took me by surprise. The Lord chose to bless this book … I am thankful to the Lord that I am wise enough to know it’s not me. It’s the Lord.”
“God is using this book to wake people up,” Metaxas said, and it speaks about “where we are in culture. It’s one of the reasons the Lord gave it to us.”
He said that Bonhoeffer was born into an amazing family and that his father taught him to think logically, not emotionally. “Today, people think emotionally.”
Bonhoeffer’s father also trained his children to live out what they believed to be true. “The Lord wants us to live what we believe,” said Metaxas. “Most people are looking at your life for evidence as to whether you believe what you say.”
Bonhoeffer decided at age 13 to be a theologian and got his doctorate in theology at age 21. Later in life he traveled to New York City, where he was invited to attend an African American church.
There, he saw people who had suffered, some had even been slaves, said Metaxas, but “these people took the faith seriously … Bonhoeffer was moved profoundly … They worshiped the living God with everything they had. The sermons were not fussy, homiletic sermons. They were fiery sermons meant to affect lives and if it doesn’t affect your life you might be a hypocrite.”
Metaxas said that Bonhoeffer went back to a changed Germany, where people were turning to Hitler. “People will do desperate things when looking for hope,” he said. Following Hitler’s election, Bonhoeffer got involved in the Confessing Church movement.
“There are trends and themes here,” Metaxas said. “We could be in trouble here. We need to pray because God hears prayer. We need to pray for the nation, wherever you are in the political spectrum.”
He said that “we serve a God of grace and mercy, who if we cry out to Him for our own sins, humble ourselves and turn from our wicked ways – that’s the Word of the Lord and it happens to be tru
e – if we do that God will hear.”
“We know the end of the story,” he said. “Bonhoeffer did not succeed in reaching the German church. Friends, we know there is a wrong way to be political as a Christian. If you make an idol of politics – if you put political victory above God – He will not honor it.”
The other side of that coin is “I don’t want to get political, just preach,” he said, “but if you are a slave on a ship, don’t you want someone to get political? If you are a baby in a womb, don’t you think that he would want someone to get political? He can’t speak. Don’t be a mere conservative, but be a Christian and pray that He would lead you and bathe what you do in prayer.”
Bonhoeffer stood up for the Jews, said Metaxas, adding that he was part of the conspiracy to try to kill Hitler with a bomb. When the bomb went off early, the conspiracy was exposed and Bonhoeffer was arrested and sent to a concentration camp. He was killed at dawn on April 9, 1945.
“Don’t skip the cross and the suffering. If you stop there you lose everything.” Metaxas added that Bonhoeffer “was constantly in prayer. He went to the gallows with the peace of Jesus Christ”. Sounding more like a preacher than an apologist, Metaxas declared, “If you trust in Him, you never die …. and are compelled to have no fear of death or this life.”
“Speak the truth in love with no fear,” he said. “That’s the only way to go out of this world and if you have that faith you will live differently. You will be different. That’s how the Lord calls us – no exceptions. It is the most powerful apologetic of the Lordship of Jesus Christ that you will ever be able to offer.”
Metaxas is the New York Times bestselling author of Amazing Grace: William Wilberforce and Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy. He and John Stonestreet are the co-hosts of BreakPoint commentaries, which air daily on more than 1,200 outlets with an estimated weekly listening audience of eight million people. He spoke at the 2012 National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C., and his web page can be found at www.ericmetaxas.com
The Truth for a New Generation 2012 Apologetics conference was held Sept. 28-29 at First Baptist Church, North Spartanburg, S.C.