Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc.: Welcome. The following message is a ministry of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance is known for ministries such as the Philadelphia Conference on Reformed Theology, as well as nationally syndicated radio programs like The Bible Study Hour, Every Last Word, and Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible. Our purpose is to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Thank you for listening.

Sye Ten Bruggencate: I love being a Calvinist. I was pulled over by the police on the way over here. I was sitting there and I thought, "Man, this is going exactly according to God's will." So is this conference. You're exactly where God wants you to be right now. If you love Him, it's for your good. What a comfort that is. I remember before I understood the doctrines of grace, I would be driving on the highway with my cousin and he would miss an exit. He would say, "God's will." I would say, "Shut up." Now I miss an exit on the highway and go, "God's will."

Indeed, the topic today is "Life and Times of Sye Ten Bruggencate." I didn't choose that topic. I have already checked the audience and my stalkers are not present, so I can safely say that as far as the Life and Times of Sye Ten Bruggencate goes, nobody cares. But since Bob wanted to know, I am going to give him a little bit of background. We can look at this just like a private conversation between Bob and myself, and you can act as though you are listening in.

I suppose the only interesting thing about me is that I am you out there. I don't have the degree behind my name. I am not the pastor. People who are stopping me are saying, "Where do you pastor?" I am not a pastor; I am a boiler operator. We are going to get into that a little bit more later on. I came out with a film last year called "How to Answer the Fool." How I came from being a boiler operator to teaching you apologetics, maybe that's what we're going to get into a little bit this morning.

This film, by the way, is available on the table back there for a donation of any amount, from one cent to one million dollars. If you had planned on giving more than one million dollars, feel free to take two. These were the topics that I had the option of giving: "Reformed Systematic Theology: A Necessary Foundation for Apologetics and Evangelism." I got rid of that one because I don't know what that means.

I was in a room with a bunch of pastors last night and they were saying "this and that," all these different initials, and they were talking way over my head. I thought, "What am I doing here?" Hopefully, by the end of this talk, you won't be saying the same thing. The other topic was "How Cornelius Van Til Influenced My Life and Biblical Evangelism in the Church." That would give my haters too much ammo, so I decided not to talk on that because there are people who say that I have dumbed down Cornelius Van Til too much.

I don't apologize for that. Hopefully, we will talk more about the methodology that I teach as far as apologetics goes tomorrow. You asked for it, so you're going to get something about my own background. Indeed, I am you out there. Probably there is a lot out there who have more of an education than myself, but I am the average person. I was working in a boiler room six years ago, and I came to have this film and be able to teach apologetics.

That's why I want to be able to give you some assurance with the fact that anybody can do this. We have been commanded to give a reasoned defense of our faith, and I am living proof that anyone can do it. I was born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Actually, when I was born there, it was called North York, and the mayor wasn't on crack. If you've heard of Rob Ford, the whole scenario... Since then, however, Toronto has snorted up many of the surrounding communities and now North York is known as Toronto.

That's what it says on my passport, anyway. I am the fifth eldest of seven children, four brothers and two sisters. My sister has five brothers, but she only has one sister. I normally say that and people say, "Oh, you're from a broken home," which is terrible, but do the math. Ours was a Christian home where Jesus' love was lived and shown, as the poem goes. I don't know a time when I didn't profess Jesus Christ as Lord.

I know there are people who come up to you and say that if you don't know when you became a Christian, then you're not a Christian. To them, I simply ask, "When did you start loving your mother?" If they can't say when they started loving their mother, I say, "I guess you don't love your mother, then." Doug Wilson gives an example of somebody who is saved from drowning in their teenage years, and it will make it on the six o'clock news. Big story, someone saved from drowning.

But how arrogant would it be for that person to say to somebody who was brought to swim lessons their entire life that they can't swim. I don't say that I was always a Christian, I just don't know when God saved me. My father was born and raised in Indonesia to Dutch parents. There, they owned a Ford assembly plant. My family used to have money. Although the name Ten Bruggencate is hard to pronounce here, in Holland it is quite simple.

"Ten" is a prefix. Some people call me Sye Ten, but "Ten" is actually a prefix for my last name, like "Van" or "De." People ask me what "Ten" means; I say it is actually my rating. My brother said, "Is that out of a hundred?" So I don't say that anymore. I don't know how Sye Ten got around. A lot of people call me Sye Ten instead of just Sye because "Ten" is part of my last name.

I think it is the atheists who really jumped on that because Sye Ten sounds like Satan. They seem to like that. I think, well, maybe if you are Australian, "Satan." My youngest brother lives in Australia, actually. I was visiting him once and he told me about this American newspaper columnist who wrote "Australian" as "Strine." Somebody asked, "Where are you from?" and they say, "I'm Strine." I guess that is how this fellow figured that they say Australian.

Another thing that I am going to let in on the throngs here is that my first name is actually not Sye. My first name is Roland. It is a Dutch name, R-O-E-L-A-N-D, but my parents decided to call me by my middle name, which was Sye. It is S-Y-E, but in Holland, it is actually S-I-J-E. But they have a "y" with two dots on it, and they don't have that letter here, so it turned out to be Sye. Actually, my name is Roland Sye Ten Bruggencate.

I know that's a mouthful. I remember my father going back to Holland for a business trip once. He told the story of how he was registering at the hotel. The woman taking his name asked, "What's your name?" He said, "Ten Bruggencate." The guy behind him, his colleague from Canada, was asked, "What's your name?" and he said, "Joe Burns." The woman said, "Could you spell that, please?" You don't get that here.

Like I said, my family used to have money. My father had a Ford assembly plant in Indonesia. It was a Dutch colony; his parents were Dutch. But the Japanese invaded Indonesia, and my father's family destroyed their own plant so that the Japanese couldn't use it for the war effort. My grandfather died at the age of 39, just at the beginning of the occupation, with all the stress that was involved and under mysterious circumstances.

My father was just old enough at that time, when the Japanese occupation started, to go to the male concentration camp. He was just a teenager at the time. The rest of the family went to the family camp, but he was just old enough to go to the male concentration camp. His mother died in the camp and he never saw her again. He was there for about three years. There is actually a book that came out recently in my area of people that were interned in concentration camps during the war, and there is a chapter on my father there.

When my father was liberated, he moved to the Netherlands and there he met my mother. They didn't get married there, but they moved to Canada. My mother's family moved to Canada, and my father followed and they were married. My father passed away in January of 2011. I will probably get into that a little bit Wednesday when I talk about Reformed theology, but it is the beauty of losing a loved one when you're Reformed.

I remember looking at the lady in the funeral home there saying, "I'm glad he's gone." He suffered, I loved him, and I miss him, but really I'm glad he's gone because I know he's with our Heavenly Father. The woman looked at me and she said, "Well, my mother, she had eight brain tumors and she died in agony, and I was glad to see her go too." I said, "You know, if my father had twenty brain tumors, I would want to see him live for an eternity in that agony rather than go to hell."

She looked at me like I had two heads. But it was a comfort. I remember she told me, "You've picked out a really nice area in the graveyard." I said, "I don't care." She said, "Which casket would you like?" I said, "The cheapest one you got." They pulled it out of the basement and it was ugly. It was white with this blue argyle look. There were cigarette holes burned in it and I just loved it. I thought, "Man..."

I actually went to school for Law and Security. I won't go through my kindergarten years; I don't want to bore you any more than I'm doing already. I went to school for Law and Security. I was going to become a police officer. It might have helped when I was stopped this morning, although I got off with a warning. Man, they are strict out here. I just turned the corner and he nailed me in a 39 in a 40.

There were no signs, but anyway he let me off; I wasn't from the area. Instead, I followed in the footsteps of my Uncle George and I became a stationary engineer. I believe here they call them power engineers. I am basically a boiler operator. The first ten years of my career, I worked in a hospital. The first two and a half years of that, I worked for the hospital's energy-from-waste plant.

That is a place where they burned the city garbage to produce steam to make electricity to heat and cool the hospital. Two and a half years I worked with the city garbage. Does anybody want to guess what makes up most of city garbage? Because I got to learn that. Diapers. Yeah. You would think after two and a half years you would get used to the smell, but I remember on my last day there, I almost threw up. It was disgusting.

Then seven and a half years I moved into the hospital itself. A boiler operator, I think in a way that has kind of helped me with what I'm doing now because the first place I worked, it was a really hairy situation; things were always going wrong there. If a boiler were to explode, it would level a city block. So it was our job to make sure that that didn't happen. I've talked to people who've worked a forty-year career and have never lifted the emergency safeties on the boiler.

That is the safeties that lift when you overpressurize it. At that energy-from-waste plant, I remember one day we did it three times before breakfast for three different reasons. I think that kind of prepared me for some of the heated situations that I get in with unbelievers, or professed unbelievers, I should say. I remember one time I transferred into the hospital after that, and we were responsible for the diesel generators.

One night, it was a children's hospital, and the power quit. And the diesel generator quit. So this children's hospital, the largest in the city, had absolutely zero power. I pictured myself testifying at the coroner's inquest for all the preemies that would have died in their incubators. But by the grace of God, no one died. That didn't happen. From there, I moved to an automotive assembly plant.

I also worked in the boiler room there. It was nice because when things happened there, you weren't dealing with babies anymore; you're dealing with cars. When something happened with the line there, we just didn't care. I mean, we still wanted to get the job done, but people who did not work in an atmosphere where lives were at stake would panic. Being in a situation where lives were in your hands made that type of work a lot easier.

My tagline back then was, "I'm not paid for what I do, but for what I know." Good, the camera's stopping. I worked after that a brief stint in another hospital and then I got a job at an insurance company, also in the bowels of the insurance company in the boiler room. After that, my last job was also at an automotive assembly plant. I worked there for about ten months. It was a great job; I was making all kinds of money.

What happened was I went to an evangelism conference and I disagreed with 95% of what the guy said. I said, "Something has to be done about this." I didn't quit my job right away, but that week I went to see the Ben Stein movie "Expelled." At the end of the movie, he delivered his famous line from "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" when he said, "If we don't do something about this, who will? Anyone? Anyone?"

I thought, well, I'm not a proponent of Intelligent Design, I'm a creationist, but I thought if I'm so disgusted with the way that people defend their faith today, who's going to do something about this? Well, I figured that would fall on me, so I quit my job. People at work thought I was crazy because, like I said, I was making all kinds of money. It's really funny when atheists actually write my name with a dollar sign on it because they think that I am doing this for the money.

They have no idea. Six years ago as a stationary engineer, I was scuba diving, I was traveling the world, going everywhere I wanted. I haven't been on a vacation in six years. Well, a few weeks ago, I got to spend a week in Holland, but I'm definitely not in this for the money. All my life I had a passion for defending my faith, but most of my life I was doing it wrong.

A few years before I quit my job, I had registered the domain name ProofThatGodExists.org. What I did was I took the cosmological, teleological, ontological arguments, all those "-logical" arguments, and I dumbed them down to my level. A level that a boiler operator could understand. My Christian friends loved it. They said, "Sye, you have to get this out there, you have to get this down on the website, you have to get this out there for Christians to use."

So I had this website and I was working on it; it was a point-and-click to get to the logical conclusion that God exists with all of these different arguments. Then I started using them with unbelievers. And they would get them shoved down my throat. It wasn't until years afterwards actually that I discovered why: because they are terrible arguments. I would argue they are unbiblical arguments.

But it was odd because Christians loved these arguments. I discovered why: it is because they are Christians. Unbelievers never liked these arguments because they are unbelievers. So my passion for defending the faith actually just took a nosedive. It never affected my faith at all; I always had a strong faith by the grace of God. But it really affected my desire to defend the faith.

I was just not interested in doing it anymore. So I took a hiatus for a couple of years. I still liked listening to debates, though. My favorite debater at the time was William Lane Craig. We're going to learn more about William Lane Craig tomorrow. But by the grace of God, I got to listen to a debate called the "Great Debate" with a fellow named Dr. Greg Bahnsen and Dr. Gordon Stein.

Anybody who defends the faith the way that I do, most of them I've found have gotten their start by listening to this debate. I would encourage you to look on YouTube, look for this debate, and listen to it. I didn't know exactly what happened when I listened to this debate, but I knew it was something different. And it changed my life. We'll talk more about that tomorrow, but what I found out was that Dr. Bahnsen was what was called a presuppositionalist.

I thought to myself, "Presupposa-what?" It's a shame that they use such big words to describe stuff like apologetics because I didn't know what was going on. So I Googled it and I found a podcast. I found actually that Dr. Bahnsen had died at the age of 47 back in 1995. But I found a podcast by a fellow named Gene Cook Jr., and his podcast was called The Narrow Mind.

I started listening to this podcast and I became what's known as a Narrow Mind addict. He argued presuppositionalism, and he had a call-in segment for the show and he had atheists call in. He was always very kind with them, but the atheists' worldview was decimated. It wasn't until a few years ago that I was a guest on his show four times. It wasn't until a few years ago that I took a bunch of these old shows and I put them on disc and I took them in my car with me when I drove to Florida.

I was listening to these old shows of his and I actually didn't like it because I was thinking, "Oh, that's where I got that from." Stuff that I thought I had thought of myself, the one-liners and stuff, I thought, "Oh, I came up with that." And here I'm hearing it on this old show. So I had to contact Gene and give him some credit for how he really encouraged me in this apologetic.

I went to California a couple of years ago. I saw him at the very early stage of my ministry. I went to visit him and he insisted on meeting me in a Starbucks. I found out later that is because his wife didn't want me in her house because she thought I might be some internet freak. So I met at a Starbucks and I passed muster, so he actually brought me to his house.

A few months ago I was in California and I got to see him again; we did a little video and it is online. But I said it was nice for the Padawan to meet his "apologet-i." He didn't like the Star Wars thing, but that was what the analogy was from. One regular caller into that podcast was a fellow by the name of Pastor Dustin Segers. He was from North Carolina, and I really credit him also with helping me to formulate my view on this apologetic.

Dustin and I did a number of debates together, and they are also available on my website ProofThatGodExists.org. If you go to the multimedia page, you can find these debates. He's a brilliant guy; he could run circles around me with his apologetic. We really complemented each other well because he would take these difficult arguments and he would explain them to me over and over, and then I would try and dumb them down, give them back to him, and then we'd take them out on the street.

What we would do before I would do a debate is that Dustin would play the unbeliever. Dustin was a mean unbeliever. He was harder than any atheist I've ever debated. I liken it to practicing for a swim meet in a tracksuit, going up and down the lanes in a tracksuit, and then when you get to the meet itself, you take the tracksuit off and go through the water. That's what it was like with Dustin, that he was really hard to debate with, but then when I got to the show and actually debated with the atheist, it went really well.

Anyhow, now as a presuppositionalist, I'm not much of a reader; I am more of an audio-visual learner. Thankfully, just about everything that Dr. Bahnsen had said has been recorded, and there is a website called Covenant Media Foundation. I probably own about 200 of his lectures at two bucks a pop, but I encourage people to go there. Just about any topic as well, because he did teach apologetics, but he was a pastor and he had some really hard times in his life.

Some of the messages were very encouraging, so I would encourage people to go there as well. I would read the books—Cornelius Van Til, Dr. Bahnsen—and I'd get bored out of my gourd. So thankfully, like I said, most of the stuff was on audio. Thankfully, most of my stuff is on too. I'm working on a book, but that will probably never see the light of day.

That's one thing that's terrible when you quit your job and you discover you're not a speaker or a writer. I'm more of a debater and, well, maybe I'll have to go to work again. So it was back in 2006 that I actually launched my website ProofThatGodExists.org. It was a part-time endeavor for me until, like I said, I went to that evangelism conference and I disagreed with 95% of what the fellow said.

The thing is, when you come to understand this apologetic, as I hope you will when I explain it tomorrow, is that you're going to run into that. You're going to run into fellow Christians and you're going to be shaking your head, thinking, "Excuse me, that's not the God I believe in." One of my favorite verses is 1 Corinthians 4:7: "What do we have that we've not been given?"

That is why when you run into somebody who doesn't defend the faith right, first of all remember that it used to be you and you don't beat them over the head with it. Because if God has shown you a proper defense of the faith, you thank Him, you praise Him for that, and you come alongside your brother. That's why I never understood the big Calvinism/Arminian fight.

I'm one of seven children and we fought like cats and dogs. We never had to apologize because we knew we loved each other. We would have this big fight and then five minutes later we'd be laughing our heads off, somebody would crack a joke. That's what I expect with my Christian brothers and sisters. I had no idea about the animosity between the camps.

I just mentioned the fact that I'm a Calvinist—is this on?—I just mentioned that, and the vitriol you get is just astounding. I just don't understand that. Anyhow, that's what you'll find with this apologetic too: you'll find that people are doing it wrong. Hopefully, if you find that that's you, that this apologetic when I teach it tomorrow is not just a cool way to argue, it is life-changing.

When God goes from Lord of your theology to Lord of your apologetic, it can't help but make you love Him more. More about that later. Most of my life, I discovered that I was doing this wrong. Back in 2006 when I launched my site, I had a site tracker on it. If anybody put a link to my site on their website, then I would get a notification. One of those sites that put the link on there was a fellow by the name of Eric Hovind.

I don't know if you've heard of him; his father is Kent Hovind, "Dr. Dino." He had an atheist that actually tweeted my website to him and said, "Go make fun of this guy's website." An atheist tweeted that to him, and Eric went to my website and he loved it. He actually posted this link on there. Like I said, when anyone posts a link, then I get a notification. So I went there, and I didn't know Eric at the time, but I started debating with the atheists on his wall.

Eric saw something that he'd never seen before. I really cut my teeth in the forums. I had some forums that went over a thousand posts. I've been deleted, I've been banned from at least half a dozen atheist websites. Usually they say it's because I'm too stupid to argue with them. One website deleted the entire thread that I was talking with, that I was engaging people in, because I was so stupid.

I said, "You think if I was so stupid you might want to leave that out there so that you could see how stupid this Christian is who has a website that's called Proof That God Exists?" I went to a debate in Guelph, Ontario, and the topic of the debate was "Is God Necessary for Morality?" The fellow that was debating, he was an evidentialist, and—like I said—we'll get into that tomorrow.

Not the way I like to debate. And then the atheist... there is a time when you could hand in questions. You couldn't stand at the microphone, but you wrote questions down. My question was... because this guy would argue that evolution was the source of morality. So my question was, "Well, if there was a group that evolved to believe that the planet was the most important?" Because there are people like that, like a fellow in Canada, David Suzuki.

He says people are maggots on the face of this earth. He said that all people should die so that the earth could survive. And then there are people who think that the people on the earth are the most important. So my question to this fellow was, "If there is a group that evolved to believe that the planet was the most important and there was a group that evolved that believed that people on the planet were the most important, how would you know who was right?"

Because they both evolved differently. He hummed and hawed and he danced around the answer, and he never really gave an answer. But I went and I joined the atheist at the pub afterwards. I went up to the fellow and I gave him a card for my website and I said, "You know, I'd love to debate you sometime." He was really interested. I said, "By the way, that question, that was mine."

I got an email from him a week later. He said, "I will not debate you; you're too stupid to debate." I said, "Well, again, wouldn't you want to expose my stupidity?" But I know the real reason you don't want to debate me, and it is not because I'm too stupid. I was engaging on the forums for quite a while, and there was a fellow who got wind of that. He found my website and he wanted to use my website in a website that teaches people how to defend their faith.

Through theological differences, I never ended up joining up with him. But he was engaged in this one forum and he was getting beat up by a bunch of atheists. So he asked me to come into that forum and I joined there, and he really loved it. He told me that he was going to be on a Christian radio show in England called "Unbelievable," and the host was Justin Brierley. He wanted me to listen to that.

I hope he never watches this video because it was terrible. It was terrible. I contacted Justin Brierley and I said, "You really need to get a presuppositionalist—that is the way I defend the faith—you really need to get a presuppositionalist on the show." So he finally invited me to be a guest on the show. Initially, there was a woman who was supposed to debate me, but for some reason she had backed out.

Nobody knew me at all then, but they found a fellow whose name was Paul Baird, and he ended up debating me. We were both nobodies; I would say we still are both nobodies. But that debate was number nine of the top ten downloads for almost a year. It wasn't because either of us were notable, but people said it is the most lopsided debate they've ever heard in their lives.

One of the reasons that Paul gave that the debate was so lopsided was, he said, "Because you're such an experienced debater." I said, "Paul, that was my first debate." I'd been on a few podcasts before, but this was my first debate with a moderator. When you defend your faith biblically, it exposes the folly of the unbeliever. For an example, this Paul, he would say to me with his British accent—he doesn't like when I do the British accent—but "There is no certainty."

I said, "Paul, are you certain about that?" And he would just start laughing. At one point, he denied the laws of logic, and he said to me, "Sye, your argument is circular." I said, "Is circular argumentation absolutely fallacious?" If he says yes, he affirms the laws of logic. If he says no, he has no argument. So he just started laughing, and that is basically how the debate went.

Just a little bit before that, there's a fellow named Mark Spence from Living Waters. I actually have his jacket back at the place there, so I should have brought that one too because he's a little bit smaller and might have fit you a little bit better. Mark Spence from Living Waters, he found my website and we exchanged a bunch of emails, and he introduced the apologetic to his friend Chad Williams. Oh, let me just check the time here... Oh, it's late.

To his friend Chad Williams. Chad Williams is a retired Navy SEAL, and he took up this apologetic like a Navy SEAL takes up anything. Within a month, he had a video out there of him engaging people on the streets of California, and it was really powerful. Living Waters had back then an Ambassadors' Academy. What they would do there is they'd teach open-air preachers how to defend their faith.

Chad invited me to this Ambassadors' Academy. That was really my first experience with open-air preaching, but they wanted to see how this apologetic looked on the streets. So I went out there. As I was coming in from engaging these people—some of these encounters are online—first time I've ever done this on the street with unbelievers, the people at that Academy were smacking me on the back. "You demolished that guy." "You creamed that guy."

I said, "No, wasn't me. It's by the grace of God; I am only a tool." There was this sickening buzz going on about me at that conference. "Who's this guy? He's teaching us all this new stuff." This woman, she came up to me and she said, "What's this buzz about you? What's going on?" I said, "Well, I'm teaching people what I think is a biblical defense of the faith."

She says, "What do you mean?" I said, "Well, let me ask you: when somebody comes up to you and says they don't believe in God, what do you do?" "I give them evidence." I said, "Right, that's what most Christians do: they give evidence." I said, "Where do you hear evidence most often out in the world? You hear it in the court of law."

I say, "Who do you give evidence to in the court of law? The judge and jury." I said to this woman, "When you give evidence to the unbeliever for the existence of God, who are you saying is the judge and jury?" She almost fell over backwards realizing what she'd been doing all her life: that she'd been putting the Lord of Glory on trial and elevating the unbeliever to the position of judge. She was shocked.

That's the one thing with open-air preachers, they're really committed to what they're doing. They actually defend their faith. So when you confront someone like that who's been doing it wrong all their lives, the reaction was stunning. Some people don't think anything of it because they never defend their faith. Some people, I think, because they don't even know that God... and we're going to talk about that a little bit later on.

So anyhow, there is this sickening buzz going on, and they opened the microphones at the end of the session to have people give testimonies. Like I said, people were talking about me and all this stuff, and I was in the background and I was praying, "Lord, please don't let them mention my name. Lord, please don't let them mention my name. Lord, please don't let them mention my name."

Then I stopped praying and said, "Now I hope somebody mentions my name." That's how insidious this is. Because with this apologetic, one of the beautiful things is that you will win arguments. But one of the dangers is you will win arguments, and you're going to think it's you. People are going to smack you on the back. So I raced up to those microphones afterwards and I read from Luke 17 about the unworthy servant: that we're only doing our duty.

Because I was at a conference a few years back when I was still working at the automotive assembly plant, and it was actually a training session. There were some Canadians there, and they wanted to see how to get more Canadians involved. So they asked the question: "What's the biggest difference between Americans and Canadians?" I said, "Americans live vicariously. They live through their children, they live through their heroes. They're hero builders."

That's what I found at that Academy. Don't get me wrong, Canadians have their own idiosyncrasies; we have an inferiority complex against our big American brothers. You talk to a Canadian and within five minutes they're going to tell you, "Did you know Peter Jennings was Canadian? Did you know so-and-so?" and they'll mention all the Canadians. So anyhow, they said, "What's the biggest difference?"

I said, "Americans live through their hero, they live through their children." For example, I said, "In Canada, you would not be caught dead with a bumper sticker that says 'My son is an honor student.'" You could hear a pin drop. I leaned to my buddy and said, "Maybe I should have checked the parking lot first." But it's just a different way.

And that's what they do with their preachers too, and that's what they do with their apologists. I think that's one thing that you have to be careful of: when you learn this apologetic, give glory to God. I do that to a fault. Somebody praises me on Facebook or so, then I make sure that I give glory to God. I think of Herod in Acts 12 when he was praised by his underlings and he did not give glory to God, and worms ate his body and he died.

God gets all the glory for this apologetic. That's what you'll find. Somebody watches a William Lane Craig debate and they say, "Man, that guy is so smart, I could never do that." They watch one of my debates and they say, "That guy's an idiot. I could do that." Like I said, they opened the mics and I read of the unworthy servant. It's a street preaching community that has really embraced this apologetic because, like I said, they're the ones who are used to getting the terrible argument shoved down their throat.

I have to tell you that I used to teach this apologetic differently than I did, because I would be at a conference like this and I'd be talking about the constituents of logic. Logic is universal, abstract, invariant, and the guys would be writing all this stuff down. The women would be sitting there, their eyes would be glazing over.

"At first I had to learn all this evidence, and now you're telling me the constituents of logic that you can't make sense of without God." And the women just were not getting it, and the guys loved it. It was the women who actually showed me that I was doing it wrong. It's not about the constituents of logic. I mean, that's helpful, but then you're just doing what the evidentialist was doing before.

So when I go and I speak at a conference like this, I say, "You know what? I'm going to throw you a little bit of a curveball. I'm not going to teach you how to defend your faith in God. I'm going to teach you how to defend your faith in your parents." And they look at me like, "What do we need this bald freak coming down from Canada to teach me how to defend my faith in my parents for?"

I said, "Why is that crazy? Because you know your parents." So why do I have to come here and teach you how to defend your faith in God? The issue is relational. It is a relational issue. Women are relational. If you don't think that women think differently than men, ask for directions sometime. They'll both get you there, but the women will do it a little bit differently.

The man will say, "You go north on this road for a mile, then you go east for a half a mile, and then you go north for another two miles." The woman will say, "Well, you go down this street until you see that white house, and then you turn left and you see a red house with a nice white picket fence." They'll get you to the same place, but they just do it differently.

So now when I teach the apologetic, I talk about it being a relationship with God. Just talk about the God that saved you. Now I'm not saying that apologetics, a defense of the faith, is a testimony; it's not. But when you talk about God, just talk about the one who saved you. Don't lie about Him anymore. It is that easy to defend your faith. That's what we're going to talk about more.

Because of that conference and because of other conferences, I got to speak at a whole bunch of conferences. I spoke at Jeff Rose's conference and there is some word of mouth. But I was down in Florida and I was helping a ministry down there with the apologetic, and I found out that they didn't like the new direction that their ministry was going. I found out the most of the staff hated me, so I was kind of depressed.

I was driving back through Atlanta going home again and Marcus Pittman, who's the director of the film that we did, called me up. He said, "Sye, we'd like to interview you." I said, "I really don't want to. I'm just kind of depressed. Finding out how many people hate you is not fun." And he said, "No, I think it'd be edifying to the body if we just do an interview with you."

I said, "All right." So I showed up at David Shannon's house. David Shannon is the Chocolate Knox. He's also hip-hop, formerly from Todd Friel. We went to his house and we dragged his leather couch onto the driveway and Marcus actually started interviewing me. David said, "No, no, no, not like that." So he got Marcus up to hold the camera and David started interviewing me and we had such a good time.

If you look on YouTube, that series is called "Edified." They started doing that where they take this leather couch around and they interview people. That actually was the birth of "How to Answer the Fool." Now again, it was the Americans that picked that title. I had initially decided to do that for the title of my book, How to Answer the Fool, but I floated that title past a bunch of people and they just didn't like it; they thought it was too harsh.

I said, "Well, then you're not going to like your Bible." But I thought I'd pick a different title. I was Skyping with the people down in Atlanta and I mentioned the title that I was going to use for my book, and their eyes went wide open. So that is how we got How to Answer the Fool. On one of my trips through Atlanta, I stopped at American Vision and I had lunch with Gary DeMar.

I was explaining to him the apologetic at a basic level, and he just loved it. So that is how How to Answer the Fool was birthed. Eleven o'clock, oh, I'll just close out here soon. Like I said, I've been doing a lot of street preaching lately. I don't really call myself a street preacher; I am more of a street teacher or a street debater because I was saved early in life.

This is how I liken it, this is how I try and explain it to people: I say if you were adopted into a billionaire's house at three months old, you get used to the Ferrari in the garage. You get used to the granite countertops. But if you get adopted into that house when you're 20, "Whoa, look at that Ferrari!" You find that with street preachers too; it is the people who are saved later in life who are the ones on the street that are the most on fire for the Lord.

When I'm out there, my testimony is different. I'm not saying it's a boring testimony, but it's not like the people who were saved later in life. So I basically teach. I teach the things that I've learned throughout my whole life as a Christian, things that might trouble somebody who's been a new Christian. That's what I do on the street. Usually, a lot of times, it's the other street preachers who will be listening, but the unbelievers will listen to it as well and hopefully have Christianity explained in a way that they can understand it.

So I'll just close now since we're coming short of time here, or out of time. What I found with the apologetic is that the biggest problem with defending your faith is that people have lost sight of the glory of God. If you understand the God who saved you, you can defend your faith and you can do it easily. This is a story that I like to tell, and it's my friend Chad, the retired Navy SEAL. He's the one who's allowed me to tell this story.

Chad was a quitter. Everything he did, he quit. He was a skateboarder, he was in commercials and then he quit that, and he was doing all sorts of stuff... he quit it. He quit school one day. He told his father, "I'm going to become a Navy SEAL." He said, "I quit school and I'm going to be a Navy SEAL and I'm going to start working out."

His father was really disillusioned. He said, "Chad, you're going to quit that too. You're going to end up scraping paint off of boats in Japan in a harbor somewhere." Chad's father loved his son so much that he decided what he was going to do was look in the yellow pages for a retired Navy SEAL. He asked him to take Chad on a workout to beat his desire out of him to become a Navy SEAL.

So he found a fellow named Scott Helvenston. Scott took Chad on a workout. He reported back to his father the next day. He said, "Sir, I'm sorry to report this, but I think your son has what it takes." So Scott became like a second father to Chad. He took him under his wing, and Chad loved Scott dearly. I guess they don't back then, or maybe still now, they don't support retired veterans that well in America, so he was running out of money.

Scott Helvenston had the opportunity to go back to Iraq with the Blackwater operations, a private security firm where you make all kinds of money. He was saying to Chad, "Should I go there?" and Chad says, "Yeah, yeah, go kick some butt." So he went over to Iraq to do this, and Chad still kept working out like Scott did. He had workout tapes because Scott was a very famous Navy SEAL; he was the youngest ever, he broke all kinds of records that still stand.

He had this workout tape of his friend Scott. He went to his television, turned his television on—it was one of those ones with the VCR built in on top there—and he's about to put this tape in to do this workout with his friend Scott. He saw his friend Scott's face on television. He thought, "Oh, that's weird," but he's a famous Navy SEAL, he's done interviews before.

But then he saw something that floored him. It was the date of his birth and the date of his death. The next scene he saw was Scott's body being dragged through the streets of Fallujah. It was dismembered and burnt, and they hung him upside down from the Euphrates River bridge. He was age 39. His hero, his father figure, was killed. Now I want you to imagine Chad, who did become a Navy SEAL, he's involved in ministry work now.

I want you to imagine that he was with a ministry and he was at a restaurant. In that restaurant, there was a young man who was in his 30s and he was still single. The rest of the people from that ministry were joking with him, bugging him, "How come you're still single in your 30s?" He said, "I want to be just like Chad's friend Scott who gave up his life in his 30s."

Of course, that's a denigration of marriage, comparing it to death. But it is also making fun of Chad's friend Scott. Now Chad's a mild-mannered guy, but he can kill a man with his bare hands. I would imagine that he would have gotten up and there would have been a fight. "That's my father figure you're talking about. That's not funny." But you know, that part of the story isn't true.

It wasn't Chad in that restaurant. It was me. I was involved with a ministry. Sitting around that table was a man in his 30s and he was still single. They said to him, "How come you're still single? You're in your 30s." And he said, "Jesus Christ gave up his life in his 30s and I want to be just like him." And everybody laughed. I was mortified.

I thought, "You're making jokes about the crucifixion of our Lord, and you're going to go out and preach Christ crucified? I don't believe you." That is the problem with apologetics today: we've lost sight of the glory of God. The head of that ministry came up to me and said, "You know, I don't think that's a fair comparison." I said, "What if it was your wife that was raped and murdered? And he said, 'I want to be just like your wife.'"

Would you think it was funny? Would you think you have to give a little bit of a chuckle because of the person telling the joke? No, you wouldn't. Why do we even consider laughing at a joke about the crucifixion of our Lord? And the reason I tell the story about Chad first is because sometimes I was thinking of telling the joke first. But if I do that, the most people in the audience would laugh.

It's even worse than that because I went to a gathering of over a hundred open-air preachers. The lawyers got up to tell us where we could preach and where we could not preach. He started off with a joke and I urge you, please don't laugh. Because I've said that before and people have laughed after I've told this joke. But the lawyer said there was a man who is on his deathbed and he had a chair on either side of his deathbed.

He had an IRS agent and a lawyer on each side. They didn't know what they were doing there and he's about to die. They said, "What are we doing here?" and he said, "Well, Jesus Christ died between two thieves and I want to be just like him." Over a hundred open-air preachers burst out laughing. They were going to get out on that box that day and the next day and preach Christ crucified.

I thought, "I don't believe you." That is the problem with apologetics today: we've lost sight of the glory of God. Now the thing is, I'm not saying that I'm perfect, because every time I sin, I do the same thing. I mock the crucifixion of my Lord. I am no better than the person that laughed that day. But the thing is, I was adopted into that billionaire's house as a young man, and I know you don't put your feet on the coffee table.

You don't walk in with your muddy shoes. Jesus is not your homeboy. So, brothers and sisters, know the God that saved you. Don't lie about Him, and you can defend your faith differently than you ever... we're going to get into the meat and potatoes tomorrow. We're going to get into the meat of it. But just if you remember that, talk about the Lord who saved you and it'll change the way you defend your faith. Let's close with prayer.

Lord God, I thank You for this conference, for this opportunity, Lord God, for the knowledge that each of us are here for a purpose, Lord God. Because we love You, Lord God, we know that You are working this for our good. Please, Lord God, use this in our lives. Help us to truly know Thee and love Thee and serve Thee as we ought, Lord God. I thank You, Lord God, for hiding the depth of our depravity from us, for who could stand, Lord God.

I thank You for hiding, Lord God, the extent of Your glory from us, because who could stand? But please reveal, Lord God, the depth of our depravity and the height of Your glory to us, to the extent that we can serve You better. Please be with us, Lord God, for the remainder of this conference, for the remainder of this week, and help us to seek to serve You in all that we say and do and think in our... pray this in Jesus' most precious name. Amen.

Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals, Inc.: You've been listening to a production of the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals. The Alliance exists to promote a biblical understanding and worldview. Drawing upon the insight and wisdom of reformed theologians from decades, even centuries gone by, we seek to provide contemporary Christian teaching that will equip believers to understand and meet the challenges and opportunities of our time and place.

The Alliance ministry also includes the Bible Study Hour, featuring Dr. James Montgomery Boice; Every Last Word, with Bible teacher Dr. Philip Ryken; and Dr. Barnhouse and the Bible, featuring Donald Grey Barnhouse. For a full list of radio stations carrying our programs, please visit our website: www.alliancenet.org.

For more information on the Alliance or to make a contribution, please contact us by calling toll free 1-800-488-1888. Again, that is 1-800-488-1888. Or, you can visit us online at www.alliancenet.org. Ask for your free resource catalog featuring books, audio teachings, commentaries, booklets, videos, and a wealth of other materials from outstanding reformed teachers and theologians. Again, thank you for your continued support.