A Question

"How do we cope with such people who think evil is outside of themselves?":

This question was raised in a youtube clip of a seminar with Ravi Zacharias and others

My answer, here expanded from a post on youtube,  is this:

Show them a love that they cannot deny and cannot refute. What did Jesus say? To paraphrase his prayer  "Father make them one that the world will know you have sent the Son"

When we have this all the words they  have will  have no meaning for they are exposed as empty talk and this not by our words but by our  lives.

I must add here  that I am not denying the value of our words as regards truth content, but their persuasiveness is compromised when being loveless we are nothing but hypocrites. And without love we are indeed nothing but hypocrites

But we do not have this love. All we have is empty talk which makes a mockery of all our apologetics and even our preaching.

And the unbelievers will not be impressed.

Neither am I.

When an unbeliever asks "Why does a good God allow suffering ?" the question is likely an excuse whereby he can blame God. It is a taunt, a sneer.  I did this myself .

But if he were ever to ask "what have you got? I want it," then we know we have an attentive hearer. Oh, the other questions will be answered later  but given the nature of the human heart I assert that they are almost always excuses.

However if we do not have something that they want, commonly known as love joy peace and the rest of them, as well as the Sabbath Rest of the Believer (see  the letter to the Hebrews), then they have no reason to ask what we have or even want it.

The Kingdom is not words but power, as the Apostle said. The distortions, and they are gross, to which the likes of Pentecostals subject this to notwithstanding, if we do not have the love of Christ exuding from our very pores, we have no power, not the power that counts.

We have only dead letter, which is another term for empty words