I love apologetics. I enjoy digging into God’s Word and debating theology. I love listening to where people have been and why they believe what they believe, and God has given me the opportunity to meet so many different people from many different places with many different beliefs and I treasure those moments in life.
However, nothing compares to watching the Holy Spirit unveil someone’s soul in an unexpected, yet predestined exchange. Nothing compares to listening to someone’s real and raw past of failures or survival, their current journey, and their desperate need for a touch of heaven or their testimony of deliverance and redemption. These vulnerable moments orchestrated by the Creator are often void of researched opinions, intellectual references, and detailed facts and well-constructed narratives, but they are unmatched in the way they evidence the truth of His existence and the power of His resurrection.
There is more power in real-life triumphs told through pain and tears with a desire to learn about the Savior or to proclaim the goodness of God than the sum of every satisfying theological conversation I’ve ever experienced. When the gospel displays its miracles through the suffering that brings the broken to healing, the defeated to victory, and the fallen to freedom, that’s where the power is.
Jesus Christ is the Word. Knowledge holds its value, but it also has its limits. It will only take people so far. It often goes straight to the head without stopping to check on the state of the heart. Apologetics is necessary and debating can be refining, but even the whole truth and counsel of God holds no power to save without the sacrificial love of Christ that penetrates a heart.
The world teaches that the pursuit of knowledge is life’s greatest achievement, but the world is an illusion of light filled with darkness. Knowledge can go down in history as a life well-lived, but it can be a perishing legacy that leads a soul into a destructive eternity.
The heart of the world has been hardened through fallacy disguised as truth. Knowledge is human and it matters, but the world has lied to the masses. Knowledge is not power.
Humility is power, repentance is power, and the love of the cross is transcendent.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and the knowledge of the Holy One is insight. – Proverbs 9:10
For the word of the cross is folly to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written, ‘I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.’ Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe…For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men. For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, ‘Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.’ – 1 Corinthians 1:18-21, 25-31
