Intellectual Approach

by Pastor Lee Meng Cham

Why do you believe Jesus is the Son of God?

Intellectual approach is being logical and rational about our approach to the gospel.

The example from Paul :
Acts 17:16-34
A. Determining the context for apologetics
- Paul is combating truth and knowledge
B. Delivering the content of apologetics
- Paul build a bridge, not barrier
- Move from Known to the Unknown (v 24-28)
- Go from insight to application (v 29-31)
- v 32-34

Most people do not have a reality of God but they have a problem about the nature of God
(Isaiah 55:6-7)
(Jeremiah 29:13-14a)

The exhortation from Peter
1 Peter 3:13-17
- Real hope endures (v 13-14)
- Real hope reveres
- Real hope answers
- Real hope invites (v 15-17)

Dorothy L Sayers :
"For whatever reason God chose to make man as he is— limited and suffering and subject to sorrows and death—He had the honesty and the courage to take His own medicine. Whatever game He is playing with His creation, He has kept His own rules and played fair. He can exact nothing from man that He has not exacted from Himself. He has Himself gone through the whole of human experience, from the trivial irritations of family life and the cramping restrictions of hard work and lack of money to the worst horrors of pain and humiliation, defeat, despair and death. When He was a man, He played the man. He was born in poverty and died in disgrace and thought it well worthwhile.”

The incompleteness of intellectual approach :
- belief as a Verb
- faith as a Leap
- the gospel as Foolishness (1 Corinthians 1:22-25)
- apologetics as an Unveiling

"Sister/Brother, I hope you know Jesus. He is everything to me in the world"