Scott Tsao’s Reviews > How to Talk to a Skeptic: An Easy-to-Follow Guide for Natural Conversations and Effective Apologetics > Status Update

- People are searching for their story. They long to make sense of this world and find some reason for hope. We have the truth they are looking for. God has given us an amazing opportunity and we must take advantage of it.
- My prayer is that you are now better equipped to do just that.

- Indeed, right now Christians have a unique opportunity to multiply the effect of telling that story as Christianity currently has no strong worldview competitors. "At this beginning of the third millennium, there is only one comprehensive, coherent, compelling, hopeful story of the human project being proposed to the world, and that is the Gospel of Jesus Christ."

- You can be encouraged by the fact that you have the answers that unbelievers need, whether they realize it or not. "Our job is to alert people to their own story."
- God has entrusted us with the task of telling the world the truth about the meaning of life, the source of evil, and the wonderful plan God has enacted to fix it.

Telling the World Its Story
- Today's most vocal unbelievers are not rejecting Christianity based on a reasoned attempt to explain the evidence in some other way. Their attacks on the faith are not well-thought-out and substantial arguments, but propaganda assaults that don't stand much scrutiny, and cannot compete in an host marketplace of ideas.

Sex is intended to be the source of great light in our world. Sexual immorality, however, leads down an increasingly dark path. It seems that once a person has embarked on that road, there is a point at which the easiest way to justify himself is to simply deny that God exists. That is one reason sexual immorality is perhaps the major cause of skepticism.

Adam and Eve knew that life was all about love because they could see each other naked. They knew from the very form and nature of their bodies that they were made to give of themselves to each other.
Love is inherently creative; it cannot be contained. The joining of two persons in love results in more people to love. Adam and Eve were created out of God's love, their children are created out of their love.

- Biblicists tend to be motivated by a desire to make sure the Bible is not degraded or treated in a manner unworthy of the Word of God. Unfortunately, and ironically, in their attempt to exalt it to its proper place, they have actually undermined Scripture and kept it from accomplishing its purpose.

…as a unity. By examining the events themselves (not just the words that point to the event), we can get to know God's character and His overall plan.
- The goal of evangelism is not to get people to accept the Bible as true or inerrant or even the Word of God, although I am convinced that Scripture is all of those. The goal of evangelism is to get people to know God. The Bible is intended to help them do that.

… They constantly saw types of Jesus in the OT and viewed their own time, the church age, as foreshadowing the age to come.
- The spiritual sense is always built on the literal sense of Scripture. And, proper spiritual interpretation must be based on the fact that God reveals Himself in historical events, not just in words.
- Because all those historical events reveal the same God, they relate to each other...

- The analogical sense is the meaning of a text that reveals Jesus.
- The moral sense of Scripture reveals how one should live today.
- The anagogic sense looks to the future--we interpret texts in a way that tells us something about the glory that is to come.
- When we read the Bible in the spiritual sense, we are simply doing what the NT writers did themselves...