21st November 2025 Question box

OK, tonights question is:

What are some good varied sources (historical, personal or otherwise) that we can use to explain our confidence in the gospel? How do we avoid giving purely anecdotal evidence while also speaking the truth in love?

It’s good for us to think about this. 1 Peter 3:15 says: “Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.” As the questioner points out, our confidence in the gospel is not just based on our own experience, its based on the fact that something happened in history: Jesus died for our sins according to the scriptures and was raised on the third day and appeared to many people. Your personal spiritual experience doesn’t prove this for someone else, although sharing your experience might suggest to others that the claims about Jesus are worth investigating.

But what resources are out there to help us? Let me give you a website, a podcast and a book:

• There’s a Christian couple in Melbourne who have put together a website called Confident faith. It gives clear and short answers to a whole lot of common questions that people have. As well as little booklets you can download. And so if someone is wanting simple answers, I’d quite happily share links from this site.
• For a bit of a deeper dive, there’s a podcast called: Undeceptions. There’s more than 300 episodes where John Dickson, (who’s originally from Sydney), interviews a whole lot of experts in science, history, philosophy and the arts. And the episodes are about an hour long. But if there’s someone asking serious intellectual questions, I’d happily share particular episodes.
• And thirdly, this book is called “Confronting Christianity,” by Rebecca McLaughlin. And what I like about this book, is that she engages with some of the moral arguments of our generation. She doesn’t so much cover the historical questions, like how we got the bible, but instead she covers questions like: “Is Christianity homophobic?” Or “How could a loving God send people to hell?”

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This question was originally answered in our evening service on 13 July 2025. I’ll aim to post another question and answer next week. You can read about how our question box works here.