Defending the Faith

Q: How would you describe your approach to defending the faith?

A: I always keep an eye on the end goal. It’s not to win an argument; it’s to win the person to faith. My experience has been that when we can empathize with people, when we can relate to them, when we can be gentle and respectful with them while listening honestly to their questions and doubts, and when we can develop a relationship where they’re willing to be honest about what’s holding them up in their journey toward God, often that’s a fruitful way of wedding evangelism with apologetics.

Q: How do you deal with objections that seem to mask a person’s real issues?

A: It’s very common for a skeptic to have a “smokescreen objection” that isn’t really their main obstacle to faith. Often, they’ll ask a series of rapid-fire questions, such as “Why does God allow pain and suffering?” and “How can God send people to hell?” Sometimes I’ll just be candid and say, “If I can give you a good answer to that question, will you bend your knee to Jesus Christ?” And often the answer is no. So I ask, “Well then, what’s the real issue? Are you just machine-gunning me with objections to fend me off?”

You have to pray for discernment: “God, help me discern where the real issue lies and how I can be most helpful to this person in coming to You.”

Q: Billy Graham often said that the most important step in Crusade preparation is prayer, prayer and prayer. What difference have you found that prayer makes in evangelistic conversations?

A: Prayer must be all through the process—before, during and after. I want to bathe it in prayer. I want to pray that God will open their eyes and their heart to the truth of who He is. Often, somebody will raise a tough question about faith, and I’ll pause and pray, “Lord, guide me, help me. Lead me to the answer.” And afterward, I pray that the seeds that have been planted will come to fruition and that the person will come to faith in Jesus.

Prayer must be a constant because apart from the work of the Holy Spirit, there’s nothing we can do in and of ourselves to lead anybody to faith. We need God’s guidance every moment, every step of the way.

Q: What would you say to Christians who don’t feel confident enough to engage with hard questions and objections?

A: I think people should follow the leading of the Holy Spirit in taking courageous steps to share Jesus with others. I had the opportunity to be with Luis Palau just before he died, and he said, “Lee, I can tell you something from personal experience. When you get to the end of your life and all is said and done, you will never regret being courageous for Christ.”

I’ve never forgotten that, and that’s what I would say to anybody. Whatever God is leading you toward doing, you’ll never regret taking the courageous route.

I have a friend who was at an airport, and he felt God was leading him to share Jesus with the cashier at a little sunglasses kiosk. He’d already been to the little shop and had walked out already, and he thought, How do I go back?

But he decided, If God is leading me, something’s going to happen. So he went back in, and he said, “So, sunglasses, huh?” And the cashier said, “Yeah.”

“These are great for protecting your eyes from the rays of the sun.”

“Yeah.”

And he said, “Wouldn’t it be great to have something to protect us from the fires of hell?” A very inept transition into a spiritual conversation! But the guy looked at him and said, “I’ve been thinking a lot about that.” And my friend said, “Really?” The cashier put down his newspaper, and my friend shared the Gospel and led him to faith right there. And you think that was a rather inept transition into a spiritual conversation, but God honored it. Who knew that man was ready? Who knew that God had been plowing the ground already for the planting of the Gospel?

I think God surprises us sometimes with opportunities that we don’t recognize initially.

Q: Really, apologetics is just one aspect of personal witnessing, isn’t it?

A: Absolutely. I think we make a mistake if we think it’s a separate exercise. Martin Luther called apologetics the handmaiden of evangelism. When we keep our eye on the goal, which is to see people come into the Kingdom of God, then we begin to see apologetics not as an end goal, but as a means to an end.

So I need to keep in mind what I’m trying to do. Am I trying to impress someone by how much I know? When we do that, we end up answering questions they’re not asking. If I’m really trying to lead them to faith in Christ, then I’m just looking for an open door. I’m trying to get them past the sticking points that are holding them up, identify those, try to provide an answer, and see if God might open a door.

Q: So it doesn’t always have to be philosophical, does it? We can simply tell people what God has done for us.

A: That’s a huge part of it. What greater miracle than what God does in the heart of a human being? We don’t necessarily have to be an expert on the historical data for the resurrection or the scientific evidence for the origin of the universe. If we can just share an honest, authentic story about how God has changed us from the inside out, that’s maybe the most profound miracle any of us will ever experience.

And it’s amazing how many times that opens the door. Maybe it’ll open the door to questions, and that’s OK. Sometimes a person will ask a question and we won’t have a good answer. It’s OK to say, “That’s a great question. I have no idea how to answer it, but let’s find an answer together.”
 

Q: The Gospel itself is the power of God for salvation. How do you keep that in mind as you try to answer questions?

A: That ought to give us confidence. It’s not our cleverness or our ability to uniquely marshal the evidence that’s going to result in a person coming to faith. God has got to be in the process, and there is power in the Gospel. And when you share it with someone, their eyes open wide and they say, “I never understood that before.” Without God in the process, without the power of the Gospel, we just have empty words.  ©2025 BGEA
 

Interviewed by Bob Paulson, editor.