Know It, Live It, Share It

Proofread Broadcast Transcript

We're glad you're here. We're glad you're here. Fellowship's sweeter, knowing you're here.

It's so good to see you. We hope that it's clear. Everyone loves you.

You'll feel like a hero. Welcome to Mark & Friends. I'm your host, Donna Leland.

And today I'm so excited to introduce you to one of my friends. It's Carl Kerby, and he has begun a ministry called Reasons for Hope. And he has got some great resources for us today.

Thank you so much for joining us here on Mark & Friends, Carl. Miss Donna, thank you for letting me be on here. What a blessing.

You have been a blessing over the years, and you've just brought just clarity to different issues. And I just love that apologetic ministry that you have. Give us a little bit of background for those who aren't familiar with Reasons for Hope.

Well, we started in January 2011. Prior to that, I was with a ministry called Answers in Genesis. My job was to raise the funds to build the Creation Museum.

I'd been on the board for 10 years, and then I went on staff to raise the funds to build the Creation Museum. And after that was done, I just knew that the Lord was calling me to go after younger generation and men. And so January 2011, made the decision, took off, man.

And it's just been a crazy ride ever since. We're going, and we're trying to get folks fired up about their faith. That's great.

Now you work with men, but you also are doing a lot of camp work. You, I'm sure, are still digging some sand out after your incredible summer. Tell us about that.

Yeah, I mean, we did the most camps we've ever done. We did seven camps this summer that we ran. We spoke to a bunch of others, but it's amazing.

We are in places like Montana, Ekalaka, Montana. We're in Stevens, Pennsylvania. We're in Florida.

We're in Georgia. We're in North Carolina, Iowa. So we go all over the place.

And the whole, it's really different this time, because we have 17 teaching sessions over five days, right, that are mandatory. People are like, oh, the kids won't sit that long. We never have a problem with that, because we're addressing issues that they're bringing up.

Like day one, we hand out index cards. What are the questions keeping you from selling out? Write it down, turn it in, because that's what we're going to focus on. And then we, in addition, we have four sessions that are voluntary.

We never have less than half the kids come back, because they are hungry. And so we're dealing with, as you said, apologetics, being able to tell people not just what we believe, but why we believe it. That's so exciting to hear that.

You know, young people are hungry, and they are looking for answers, and they do want truth. And I think they're waking up to the fact that there's just so many lies, you know, fomenting around. And I think they're ready.

I'm so grateful. Now, you also have a new resource. Tell us about it.

Isn't it like a cartoon book with a superhero? Yeah, yeah, well, you know, I'm an old Marvel comic guy growing up. And so I started doing this thing called the Gospel League. When it comes to our faith, I tell everybody we need to know it, live it, and share it.

Because I've been around apologetics for a long time. I've known a lot of people that are very, very smart, have great answers. But I've also seen that you can have great answers, but if your life and your lips aren't in sync, well, that's called hypocrisy.

And that's going to be one of the number one attacks against Christianity. So not only do you need to have great answers, you need to live a life that is going to show that those answers really mean something to you. But guess what? You can have answers, you can live a great life, and still be worthless when it comes to ministry.

Because if you never get to the point that you're talking about Jesus, then it's all worthless. And so we have to have all three of those points to be as effective as I believe we should be in evangelism and in our life. And so I made the characters, there's a character for each one of those, know it, live it, share it.

And they find out that, yes, we need all three, but without one another, it doesn't work very well. So I turned it into short studies, and if people want to take a look at it, I'm giving it away totally free. All you got to do is go to gospel-league.com. And that's going to be, there's three studies up there right now, and it's five weeks for each one of the studies.

And you can download the PDFs to teach from. You can get the, you can read the tracks right online, or you can even purchase the hard copies if you like. Wait, say that again, Carl.

I just, I heard this, it's free. Okay, you're just making this all available for free. Yeah, because here's the thing that I found this, Donna.

I'm at this stage where making a nickel is not worth it to me. I mean, look, we have people dying and going to hell. And so all of our stuff, if you go to our app, like if you download our app by just simply looking for R-F-O-R-H, stands for Reasons for Hope, you're going to find hours of content on there.

I don't do this, I'll show you 30 seconds, and then you pay me a buck, and I'll give you the rest. All of our debunked videos, all of our debunked TV, I think I've got 17 of my full-length talks that are up there. Studies for all of our books that we have, like Fascinating Facts and Fast Facts, we have studies.

I'm talking 30-page lessons that you can get the book, and now you as a leader, here's 30 pages of lessons to help you teach these things, because we need a generation standing firm. And the only way it's going to happen is if we get engaged with them. So I try, I really do genuinely try to put tools in people's hands that are going to help them teach.

And this Gospel League thing, that's even going to be on the app as soon as we can get everything finished. We're in the process of building it all right now, and I just want people to have good tools. That's amazing.

So, yeah, we just want to give a shout out to Reasons for Hope and everything that they're making available free of charge. And that's just fantastic. Thank you for doing that, Carl, for the church.

I mean, that's just such a blessing. Well, let's dig into this, because you also have resources about questions that people are asking. And how can we answer these questions? And I'm sure our listeners have come in contact with people who are throwing some questions at them like curveballs, and they want to know.

We want to be able to give a reason for the hope we have. So start us off. What's some of the questions? There's always the perennials.

I mean, why would a loving God allow death and suffering? What makes your book better than my book? I mean, come on, resurrection. How do dead people rise? I mean, those are pretty standard. You're going to get those all the time.

What I'm running into now is with this younger generation, they're not asking the same questions that they used to like three to five years ago. I'll tell you one. I mean, it used to be about eight, nine, ten years ago when I would have been on your radio show back then.

If we had done an open mic thing, they would have called in and said, where did Cain get his wife? That was always within like the top three, right? Yeah. Kids don't ask that anymore. They're biblically illiterate.

Now, the way that they'll ask it or mock it is that, well, if we all go back to one man and one woman, shouldn't we be a bunch of idiots by now because of all the incest and all the inbreeding? And so, therefore, how ridiculous to believe that we all go back to one man and one woman. So it's a little more antagonistic, and it's also a lot more feelings. It just that doesn't feel right to me.

I don't like that. You can give a solid scholarly answer, and people will still reject it because of feelings. And so, we have a generation that thinks different.

So the approach is, I still think we give the answer, the solid answer, showing how it fits with what we see in the world around us. It fits biblically. And then we challenge them that, okay, here's the alternative, like I'll do.

Just for instance, that one that I mentioned about all going back to one man and one woman and incest. You think believing in evolution gets rid of incest? It makes it worse. Because according to the theory of evolution, you have these incestuous ape-like creatures that are breeding and getting smarter to eventually turn into people.

I mean, how ridiculous is that to think that incestuous apes are going to get smarter? You think we got a problem? I got a huge problem with the system that says, given enough time, right circumstances, these things can just kind of happen all via naturalistic processes. Now, that's a great point. I had not seen that connection between, you know, the degeneration that would have happened genetically and the whole ape thing, right? I mean, those apes would have just, you know, been inbreeds with ten toes by the time it got to us.

And, you know, what's funny, Miss Donna, I had a guy, his name is John Sanford. He was a professor at Cornell University. But I was speaking close to the university and he came up to me and I'd read his book a long time ago called Genetic Entropy.

And I read, I understood about, you know, three paragraphs. I'm not that smart. I'm a simple guy.

I grew up around guys with one name, crusher, bruiser, mauler, assassin, right? My dad was a professional wrestler. So, IQ wasn't stressed in my home. He comes up to me and he introduces himself and I say, okay, come on, you're not the John Sanford that wrote the book Genetic Entropy, are you? He says, yeah.

I said, well, I read that and I understood like three paragraphs. And I said, but it was so good. I need to be listening to you.

And he said, no, I just wanted to hear. He said, Carl, let me give you a point. People that tell me that this process of mutation can eventually, these are my words here, that a worm can grow legs to crawl out of the land to become an amphibian, to turn into a rat, to turn into a wolf, to go back into the ocean.

That process of mutation, if that process could allow that to happen, that's the same as telling me that somebody had a 1968 Volkswagen Beetle sitting out in their driveway. They go out every day and hit it a hundred times with a ball-peen hammer and think in a hundred years they're going to have a Porsche 911. Every generation has 100 more significant genetic mistakes than the previous one.

So your children have a hundred more significant, there's more, but just significant genetic mistakes than you do. And so he said that we are getting to the stage where within thousands of years, we are going to be so bad that as a species, we won't be able to survive because there's so much breaking down. So this whole concept of millions of years, slow gradual processes getting better is absolutely contrary to everything that we see in the observational science.

That's a great point. And of course, Adam and Eve, fresh from the hand of God, they were genetically pure. They had incredible mitochondria.

They had the telomeres that were long. And yeah, they had a lot of good stuff to hang on and give to the next generation. That's right.

So I love that. That's an important point when people do the original parent thing for our listeners to remind ourselves they weren't broken. They were perfect.

Think of it like this. There is a whole field of study right now. You got me a little fired up here.

There's a whole field of study going on where they're trying to find the genetic switch inside the human body. They say it's there that when they turn it on, we're going to live to be a thousand years old healthy. Because as you said, the telomeres, they break down.

And right now, that's why we age at a certain point. They quit reproducing and repairing themselves. Right? Yeah.

So they're breaking down. We start aging. The gray hair comes and all that kind of a thing.

Well, they say they can turn this switch on and we're going to live to be at least a thousand years and healthy years. Now, here's my point. If God created the way that he said that he did, as you were talking about, Adam and Eve were genetically perfect, created to live forever.

But they didn't because the wages of sin is death. By one man's sin, death came into the world. They started to break down after the original sin.

If they were supposed to have lived very long ages like the book of Genesis indicates, you should find the capability inside the human body. Guess what you find? You find that capability. But God turned that switch off.

Man is not going to be able to turn it back on. If we come from incestuous apes, to find that capability to live thousands of years inside the human body makes no sense at all. And didn't God say 120? Didn't he say we get the 120 and then we're done? Yep.

You know, there is an expiration date stamped on us. Give us another question. People are writing on those little index cards.

Well, you know that you mentioned that. I'm sitting here looking at over an inch of index cards from the very last camp that we did. So, when we get to heaven, will we automatically have the entire Bible memorized or will we still need to read it? That's a great question.

It is a good one. It is a good one. And my response to the person was, well, think of it this way.

When we get to heaven, we're no longer going to be like we are here. We're not going to be the broken, fallen, fallible. What was I talking about? You know what I'm saying? We're not going to have that kind of a thing.

We're going to have that perfect. It's going to be a restoration of what it was like in the beginning. We're going to have that perfect memory, that perfect mind.

So, yes, I believe that we will have the entire Bible memorized, quote unquote. But it's going to be more than just memorized because you can memorize something and not believe it and not own it. I think it's going to so encompass our whole life.

But we're never going to fully, fully grasp it because of the God that we serve. He is so much deeper than just the 66 books that we have here now. We'll spend an eternity learning more and more about this God that our poor, feeble brains can't even begin to understand right now.

And another one, a follow up to that is, and this is a real common one. How do you figure out your calling? I mean, why are we here? I'm getting that one quite a bit. So that's another one of the perennials.

And boy, the only way I know how to do that is tell you what God said about you. You're here to praise God, to bring glory to him. And that's what he has created you.

You are his masterpiece, that word workmanship. Look at that word workmanship. I put it like this.

If you gave me a block of clay and I made a pot and fired it and did all the things that you're going to do. And then I take it and try to sell it. Am I going to make anything off of it? No, I'm going to have to pay somebody to take it, right? I have no skill in that.

But you give it to a master artist. See, it's not just the contents. It's the one that created the contents.

That's where the value comes from. And God says you and I are his workmanship. And that's what workmanship means.

Our value doesn't come from just the product. It comes from the one who made the product, designed the product, laid the product out, and loved us enough while we were still sinning to die on a cross for us. You want value? You want worth? Only he gives that to us.

And I know our dear listeners understand that, you know, we have treasure, this treasure of the Holy Spirit in jars of clay. Because, you know, a lot of us are feeling the cracks, right? I mean, we're kind of chipped. A little chipped pottery here going on.

The treasure's inside of us. And we just, you know, listen to the Lord. And he's got a calling on our life.

I know a lot of our listeners are in the stage where, you know, we can't jump up and be a part of perhaps a kid's camp experience. You know, we can pray, we can give, we can bake some cookies. But, you know, and so then the calling that's on our lives here at the, you know, winter season, the calling is, isn't it just to be faithful in whatever comes in front of us to pray? I feel like that really is the ministry, Carl, for people who have time.

You know, now we have time. And now we can really raise our hands in prayer. And, you know, pray for ministries like Reasons for Hope.

Pray for our church and for our loved ones. And I love that as a calling. I've had the mature generation kind of say this to me before.

Well, you know, I taught Sunday school for 30 years and I'm done. And I'm like, my response back is it wasn't a prison sentence. It's not like you did your 30 years and now you get to go free.

You have to understand that as long as you're breathing, you have, you have a purpose. And people like me, you don't think I need mature people calling me out, holding me accountable. Oh, we all need it.

So I'm going out and doing my piece. But the body of Christ, the mature believers are so vitally important. And I think it's a lost piece that we're not utilizing correctly in the church today.

Yes, you can do the praying. That's vitally important. There's nothing.

I mean, there's nothing more than prayer that we need, each of us in ministry, right? But you can do so much more taking the prayer and then putting feet to it. I tell everybody, if you've got a youth leader that's trying to build their own little kingdom and not reaching out to this mature generation to come in and love on some of these kids, you want to get rid of that joker. Because we don't need this cool kid that's leading all these others.

No, you need a mature group that is pouring into this younger generation. And so, man, get them involved in, hey, these are your three kids. You know these kids.

You love on these kids. You talk to these kids weekly. You're praying with these kids and build it like that.

Because this generation is so relational. You have to have relationship with them if you really want to be effective. You know, the senior saints, they could get the names of three kids.

Maybe every Sunday, just make sure they go up to those kids and say, hi, how are you? And just let them know that they're seen. I remember growing up and no adults ever talked to us. Funneled in and funneled out.

And there was no adult interested, asking questions, showing that we had value and worth. So that's a wonderful ministry, Carl. I love that idea.

Give us another question. Why did God make us and sacrifice for us even when He knew we were going to reject Him? Boy, you talk about a perfect opportunity to preach the gospel. Why did he do it? You know, that really, Miss Donna, that's a tough question.

Because I don't fully understand why God wants to have a relationship with me. I mean, when I look at my background, I look at all the stuff that I've done, all the times I've failed. How could you love me? It's really a hard one.

But here's what I have to fall back on. God told us that he did it. He told us that he created us.

He told us that he loved us while we were yet sinners to come and die on a cross for us. So even if I can't fully grasp the meaning and the reason why he did it, I can know this. He did it.

And that gives me a solid foundation to build my life from. It's like, okay, I have value because he demonstrated how much value I have by dying on the cross for me. It doesn't come from how much money I have, how pretty I am.

Because trust me, you can have money in the bank. You can have great looks. That can all be taken away from you.

But the one thing that can never be taken away from you is Jesus Christ dying on the cross for you and loving you enough to draw you into his relationship with him. So why would he do it? I can't fully give you that answer. But I can tell you that he did do it.

And he demonstrated it for us. And, man, you don't have to doubt that one in the least. I'm thinking the psalmist said, you know, what is man that you are mindful of him? So that's a good question.

And they're answering a biblical question, asking it. And yeah, we are all always going to be stunned at God's incredible love for us and his patience and his kindness and his mercy. I love that.

This is a good one. How can I continue sharing the word in a country where racist hate, lack of love exists? And, you know, this is a funny one, Miss Donna, because I tell everybody perspective is vitally important. You know, Christians and non-Christians all have the same evidence.

It's how we explain the evidence that really is the difference. Right. So when I first read this one, here I am.

We're in the middle of the Q&A and we've got our speakers up on stage and I kind of I'm the moderator. I lead it. And I say, OK, well, I'm going to take the first shot at this one.

How can I continue sharing the word in a country where racist hate, lack of love exists? And my response was, how can you not continue sharing the word? I mean, this tells me that this is why we are so needed, because this is the world that we live in, that this has become the norm. That I hate somebody because of a different skin tone, a different eye shape, a different hair texture. Right.

And we see this division going on so strongly in our culture. So how can we not share it? And I kind of went down that road. But then Juan, Dr. Juan Valdez, who's one of my co-laborers, he is like, Carl, I think they were asking how we can do it.

OK. Give us some practical applications. And I'm standing there like, and I said in front of the whole group, I said, wow, I feel like such a goof.

Yeah, of course, that's the way that it is. It was a powerful illustration to tell folks, you guys, this is one of the things that I've been talking about. Perspective is vitally important.

So how do we do it? They wanted real world application. And if you go to our app, like I told you, you'll go to down at the bottom, you'll see speakers and you'll see my picture. And that's good for keeping mice out of the pantry as well.

But you hit that and you'll see a tab under that section there says Carl's tools. And under Carl's tools, scroll down and you'll find this thing that says free PDFs and booklets. And if you hit that, one of the booklets that we have on our app and on our store, our web store, online store, is called seven ways to share your faith without feeling like a goof.

And you can download it. Now, when you go to the store, it'll have a price tag on it. Just type in when you check out to get all seven of them free.

Carl's Gift, two words, Carl's Gift. And that will take the price off and people can download and use it free of charge. That is so generous, Carl.

Thank you so much for making that available to our listeners. And if you missed any of those details, no worries, because we've got great program notes right now. Go to Mark & Friends tab, click that on and you'll get the entire transcript along with other goodies for Mark & Friends.

I'm your friend Donna Leland. This is part one. I hung on to Carl and he's going to do a part two for me next week.

Thanks for listening to Mark & Friends. We're a ministry of Great News Media. Have a great day.