Commending Osteen For His Recent Interview

John Starke:

Evangelicals have responded to the interview by saying, “We’re going to be asked this question more and more, let’s hope we do better than Osteen.” Maybe we can be more winsome or less nervous than Osteen. We should certainly explain that homosexuals, like anyone else, should put their hope in the finished work of the gospel. But the first and last word on why homosexuality is sinful is with the Bible. And Osteen didn’t budge from that. We can come up with all kinds of reasons and studies as to why homosexuality is harmful to society, but nothing is so authoritative as God’s Word on why it’s wrong. Only Scripture is definitive enough to cause us—indeed, every created being—to put our hands over our mouths.

In our discussions with skeptics, when we don’t have all the answers, Christians should be humble enough to say, “I don’t know, but I believe the Bible.” That is a good Christian response. We base our knowledge upon the wisdom of God, not on man. We can always reproduce the arguments of others or register sociological data, but we can never do better than God’s Word.

Read the rest.

I think it is also important to be able to give good reasons why we believe the Bible to be trustworthy.  Since our faith stands or falls on the historicity of the accounts, it would follow that the reliability of the Bible is an issue that has to be central in our witness.  Here is a great place to start for learning some good answers for why the Bible is trustworthy.

In my previous post, I found this to be a helpful contribution from a commenter:

At 3:50 Piers asks, “What would you say to a homosexual watching this? How do they change, what do they have to change to be better people?”

I would have loved to have heard something like this as a response:

“It’s not about being a better person, Piers. What I’m talking about is realizing that I personally fall short of the absolute holiness that God demands. And that even so, by the free grace of God, I can be declared righteous because of what Jesus Christ did for me. He lived a perfect life. He died for my sins. And even though I absolutely don’t deserve it, His righteousness is applied to my account. Will this have an effect on how I live my life? Absolutely. If this is really true, I will change to be a better person. But to focus primarily on that aspect is to get the caboose out in front of the engine…”