A Knock at the Door:
How to Encounter Mormons and Jehovah Witnesses
July 1, 2025
Host: Dr. Jamie Mitchell
Guest: Tim Martin
Note: This transcript is taken from a Stand in the Gap Today program aired on 7/01/25. To listen to the podcast, click HERE.
Disclaimer: While reasonable efforts have been made to provide an accurate transcription, the following is a representation of a mechanical transcription and as such, may not be a word for word transcript. Please listen to the audio version for any questions concerning the following dialogue.
Jamie Mitchell:
Welcome again to Stand In the Gap. Today, I’m your host, Jamie Mitchell, the director of Church Culture at the American Pastor’s Network. Well, it’s summertime at least where I sit and I’ve seen more and more people walking around my neighborhood, even knocking at my door for a whole assortment of reasons from trying to mow my lawn or to find sponsorship for sports teams. Those things are easy to address and even get behind in support. But then comes two young men wearing a tie, a nicely dressed woman, and they begin to engage you in a religious conversation. It’s probably happened to you first. Usually are missionaries with the church of Latter Day Saints or the Mormons. The latter would be a witness of the Watchtower or the Jehovah’s Witness. And maybe you have never encountered these people. Maybe you haven’t in a while, but the possibility is always there.
And as followers of Christ Bible Believing Born Again Christians, we need to know how to respond today on Standard and Gap. We want to address these two cults and give you some insights and tools for effectively witnessing, especially to those who are involved in cults and to help us as a new guest. Tim Martin is the Associate Director of the Centers of Apologetic Research or cfar. The Centers are a unique international network of evangelical cult research and education agencies. Their main goal is to equip Christians in the developing world for discernment and defense of the faith and cult evangelism. Tim Grand, welcome to Stand Into the Gap today. We’re so glad that you’re with us.
Tim Martin:
Thank you so much for having me, Jamie. I’m looking forward to this.
Jamie Mitchell:
Well, Tim, I want to dig into the Mormons and the Jehovah’s Witness, but before we do that, can you explain to our audience what is a cult and what constitutes a religious group that we might label a cult?
Tim Martin:
Well, that’s a great question to start out with. The word cult can have so many different facets to it. People think in terms of sometimes like behavior, the way the group might dress, and those things might be helpful at times. But for us as Christians, the important thing is doctrine. What is it that they believe? And a really good memorable way of thinking about this, this is developed by a couple of guys in Watchman Fellowship that I still stick to today. It’s cults will add, subtract, multiply, and divide. And what we mean by that is cults will add to the word of God, subtract from Jesus, multiply the works needed for salvation and divide the follower’s loyalty. And Colts will usually have all four of these in some strength or another. Some might be more into subtracting the deity of Christ. Some are more focused maybe on their adding to the word of God. But these four things are usually somewhere in the mix as we study and research different kind of cult groups.
Jamie Mitchell:
Tim, that is outstanding. I have to tell you, after 40 years of ministry, I wish I had had that when I was in Bible college. I probably would’ve done better in my doctrine two class. But Tim, from where you sit and the research that you do and the interaction that you have, what cults are most active here in the United States? We’re going to be talking about the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witness, but are there more cults that are active in the US that we may or may not be fully aware of? And how are evangelical Bible believing Christians doing at evangelizing or at least engaging them in a responsive and effective way?
Tim Martin:
Well, that’s quite a question. That’s a tall question. What are culture most active? Well, pretty much all of them are active, but in different ways. And the difficult thing in this is, well, how do you quantify how many cults are there? I mentioned Watchman Fellowship where I got the definition before. I used to be with Watchman for a number of years, amazing ministry at one point. I don’t know where they are now, but they had files on 6,000 cults in the United States. And I mean, that’s just overwhelming. And of course many of those groups are not around any longer. So many of them are gone, but many more have appeared since then. So they’re all active, but they’re still around. Some of these might be really small cell groups, but then others are into the millions like Mormon’s, Jehovah’s Witnesses. The reason why we know about these guys is because they’re knocking on our doors.
So we know that they’re around and they’re active, but others, other cults might not want that kind of notoriety, that kind of exposure. So it’s the ones that are into that and believe, well, this is God’s calling. We need to proselytize. We need to draw people into our religion. Those are the ones that we know about and hear about. However, there’s far more than that, that have sizable numbers. For instance, like maybe varieties of the Seventh Day Adventists are all over. They draw people in with the health message instead of knocking on doors, they have their health message and getting the members to draw people in through that way. There’s followers of William Marion Branham. There’s Hebrew Roots movement. And also if we’re just thinking of SY in general, word faith movement is all over the United States. All over the world draws people in through their messages of prosperity and healing, and you have this power within you to speak things into existence, into existence. So heresy is alive and well in the United States, and it comes at us in many different ways, different modes of coming to us through our television, through the radio, through our friends, through our family. It’s out there. Absolutely.
Jamie Mitchell:
How are Christians doing, Tim, in combating or even knowing how to address this? Because I don’t see this being discussed in a lot of churches today.
Tim Martin:
No, it is not. And it’s discouraging in some ways. So there’s maybe a good news and bad news part of that. And I would say the bad news part of it is the field of cult research is not very respectable with a lot of our educators ministers inside evangelical colleges. But the grass tax down with the person on the street, the event on the street, we do wonderful. We still find ways of understanding the different groups. There’s a lot of people in former groups like maybe ji, there’s former members that will know the group from the inside out that will start websites and put out information. So if you meet somebody that’s part of ji, what is that? You can find information out there. So there are challenges that we have, but evangelicals are amazing in their ability to want to find resources. There are some out there if you look. And so I really appreciate that about the Evangelical spirit, that though we have challenges, there’s so much out there, there’s still things that we can find out there to get us some information.
Jamie Mitchell:
And that’s what we want to do today. Friends, our program is entitled Today A Knock At the Door. How to Encounter Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses? Our guest is Tim Martin. What a great start. So let’s roll up our sleeves and start drilling down on some of the most common cults and when we return, who are the Mormons? What do we need to know to encounter them? Don’t go anywhere. This is Stand in the Gap today and we’re here to equip you about evangelizing cults throughout America. Well, welcome back. Today we’re trying to gain some awareness and even some tools needed to talk to different cults and specifically the Mormons and Jehovah’s Witness. Tim Martin from CFAR, the Centers for Apologetic Research is our guest, Tim. Many of us have met Mormons. From my perspective, they are kind, they’re hardworking, they’re family oriented, they’re very devout, yet they’re, their faith is wrought with errors and twisting of Christian doctrine. Help us out today. Who are the Mormons and in general, what do they believe?
Tim Martin:
Well, let me start with how much I agree with the way that you characterize them, kind, hardworking, they are wonderful people. If you could get saved by being a good person, if anyone could do it, it’d be the Mormons I would just assume have a Mormon as a neighbor than anyone else. They are honest, kind, wonderful people. But like you said, their beliefs are fraught with problems. So let’s see the approach in explaining their beliefs. Let’s start with God. They believe, and this is going to sound crazy to folks, but this is really what they believe, that God, the Father, heavenly Father, is a human being with a physical body just like ours. In fact, he was born on another planet to his God in ages past, and he obeyed his God. He followed the precepts of his God and eventually became qualified to be God over our planet.
He is married. Where we got our start is heavenly Father and heavenly mother, which they believe in Heavenly Mother, though they don’t really talk about her, they don’t pray to her. However, they believe that she exists because we were born to our heavenly parents in this place before this world was created. So we were born in spirit, children, and then eventually the heavenly Father created this world. We were sent down to this world so we can be born into physical bodies and then we would be tested to see if we would be worthy to return and be with our heavenly parents again someday. So we have to now follow God’s commandments, do what he tells us, and if we do so, we can return and be with God and eventually we’ll get to move on and create a planet and populate it with our offspring the same way heavenly Father did. So this is a law of eternal progression. This has gone on from time immemorial up until all the way into the future. There’s been gods and planets, people creating planets and filling it with their offspring.
Jamie Mitchell:
Now, what do they think about Jesus and who is Jesus to them?
Tim Martin:
So Jesus would be, I mentioned that we were born in spirit children in this pre-existent place. Jesus was the first one born to our heavenly parents. So they may refer to Jesus sometimes as our elder brother Jesus, and they mean that literally He was the first one born to our heavenly parents. He was sent down here with a special mission. All of us were sent down here to be tested, but Jesus was given the special mission of providing himself as a sacrifice for sin. So he does have a special role, but nevertheless, by nature he’s the same as us. We were born of heavenly parents and then we’re born here as well. So yeah, that’s an important part of it. Who is Jesus? He’s our brother from the preexistence.
Jamie Mitchell:
And I’ve always been interested in their view of who Satan is because that again fits into this scheme, doesn’t it?
Tim Martin:
Yes, yes. Satan originally, Lucifer was born in the Preexistence, the same as all of us, the same as Jesus. So a Mormon can say, and their leaders have explained it very clearly, that Jesus and Lucifer then are spirit brothers from the preexistence, the same as all of us. Now, that doesn’t mean that they’re saying that Jesus has a satanic nature, and I’ve heard Christians make this mistake. Oh, so Jesus has a satanic nature. No, Satan didn’t even have a satanic nature in the beginning. It was pure and simple. Then he made his choices and then he became a demon. He became who he ended up being. He’s Satan beginning though. He was just the same as Jesus, just like all of us. So yeah, Jesus and Lucifer are spirit brothers as well as we are spirit brothers and sisters from the preexistence.
Jamie Mitchell:
How long ago did Mormonism start and who is Joseph Smith?
Tim Martin:
Yeah, yeah. The character of Joseph Smith is very important to Mormonism because it hinges on him completely. He was born in 1805 and he wrote the book of Mormon. Now, they would say that he translated it though the original manuscripts of what he translated from have never been found. They were taken away by God after he translated them. But basically he’s the prophet that started the Mormon church in 1830 is when the Book of Mormon was published. And the full name of the church today is the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. So they look to him as they’re not just the founding prophet, but he is almost a Christ figure, especially in the way Joseph Smith thought of himself. Now, they would not like me saying that, but if you listen to how much they talk about him and revere him, he is like the cornerstone of where they’re at because of him, the whole Mormon church rests on his story and how he came to know the truth by a visitation from Heavenly Father and from Jesus that told him, don’t join any of the churches. They’re all wrong. They’re in abomination and instructed him to eventually start God’s true church. The Mormon church,
Jamie Mitchell:
Tim, a Mormon would believe that they have sin and sin is a problem. How would they view getting saved? And can you explain a little bit about how they view baptism?
Tim Martin:
Right. Well, yeah. This is one thing with cults is they will use words that we use, but they have a different understanding of what they mean. So definitely no original sin, like we think of no sin, nature, we’re all born in a neutral state, and as I explained before, we’re sent here to this earth to see whether we will follow God and keep his commandments. We don’t have a sin nature. We have all this problems in this world that may draw us in different directions, but it’s within our decision to be able to choose the right path and follow the right thing. So they would say, yes, sin is bad. However, there’s a positive aspect to sin is it sets up the test for us in this world. It provides us something to be tested against. We’re born neutral. Are we going to choose the right path and prove ourselves worthy to God or are we going to choose the wrong path?
So sin helps us prove ourselves to God. That doesn’t mean they think sin is good, it is a bad thing, but it sets up the test that we can prove ourselves to God. And one of the things we have to do is we have to choose the right church, the Mormon church. And in doing so, the key element is we get baptized. So though they will talk about baptism is important, it’s essential and indispensable to your eternal existence. It’s only their baptism that counts. So you get baptized in the Baptist church, no, it doesn’t work. You have to be baptized by a legal administrator of the gospel. And what does that mean? It means them. They’re the only ones with the authority to baptize. So your eternal life is dependent on being baptized into their church by their priesthood holders. Otherwise it doesn’t count and you’ll not have eternal life.
Jamie Mitchell:
Tim, I want to talk about how we should actually evangelize them, but before we do that, the reason we would probably have that opportunity is what they would consider their missionaries and those who have been deployed. Can you just share just a little bit about that whole experience and what they’re trying to accomplish? I guess we as evangelicals should learn from it. They give themselves for a certain period of time to go out and learn how to evangelize. Tell a little bit about the whole idea of that.
Tim Martin:
Right. Well, as you mentioned in the beginning of the program, we see the young men out with their book of Mormons and Bibles and going door to door if you invite them in. Their main goal in this first meeting is very different than what we think of missionaries. We think of career missionaries. People who go into a culture and saturate themselves with the culture try to understand and figure out bridges to share the gospel for the Mormons. It’s not like that they are full-time proselytizing missionaries. If they don’t think that you’re going to be open to the truth in that first meeting, they’re gone. And what they want to do is challenge you from the Book of Mormon to pray. They’re going to present the ideas is about the Book of Mormon and about Joseph Smith, and they’re going to turn to this passage Marone in chapter 10 in the Book of Mormon that says, when you receive these things, which is the missionaries, their information about Joseph Smith, when you receive these things, if you pray to God with real intent, with faith in Christ, he’ll reveal the truth of it unto you.
So what this means to them and what they’ll explain, you’ve heard this we told you about, we don’t want you to just believe in Joseph Smith because we told you. Pray and ask God if this is true. And if you do this, the Holy Spirit will come to you and convince you that it’s true. This is their primary objective on the first time you meet. If you don’t say you’ll pray and you can’t give them a good enough reason why you wouldn’t, they may never come back. And when you look into it, this prayer is a very manipulative thing. The Bible doesn’t hold out prayer as this is how you know what truth is not at all. First Thessalonians chapter five says, examine everything carefully. Hold fast to that, which is good. It doesn’t say put your mind on check and pray. If your listeners out there don’t believe that God is a human being with flesh and bones, that became God. Well, why would you pray and ask God if it’s true or not? If you don’t believe it’s true, you can’t go to God and ask him if it’s true.
Jamie Mitchell:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, when we get to the fourth segment, we’re going to talk more about how to actually evangelize cult members. Well, one thing I know the Mormons and many cults believe it’s something that Jesus said, the fields are right under harvest. That is why they’re out there knocking on doors, talking to potential harvest when we return. The Jehovah’s Witness are not just interested in giving you some publications. They want to pull you into their fellowship. Stay with us here at Standard of the Gap. Well, thank you for staying with us and we hope and pray that today is wetting your appetite to study more about these cults and build yourself up in the faith. My guess is, I guess the ministry like CFAR would love to help our audience. Tim, how can CFAR assist believers in churches and where can they go to find out about your ministry?
Tim Martin:
Well, there is several ways that you might find us. We have our main website is the centers.org, which I know it sounds strange to me when I first came across it. It’s plural, the centers, and I thought, well, how can you have more than one center? Well, it’s more than one center depending on which country that you’re in. So we have centers in many different countries, so it’s the centers.org or our newer website is the Africa Center, so it’s ACFAR. ACFA R.org is another website, plus you can find us on YouTube. We have YouTube channels. If you want to find my personal YouTube channel, my teachings on many different cultures there. If you open up YouTube and just do a YouTube search, Tim Martin Bible, you should be able to find me within the first few searches there. So we’re on there. We can look forward to help in any way possible. Our contact information should be on our websites. Let us know what can we help you with, what kind of information can we help you find? I
Jamie Mitchell:
Want to encourage you all to do that. There’s plenty of resources there. We’re only touching the subjects today, Tim. Let’s talk about Jehovah’s Witness again. Who are they? Where did they come from? What is a kingdom hall? And then let’s get into some of the doctoral error that we should be aware of.
Tim Martin:
It’s funny you asked that. What is a kingdom hall? Can I tell you? As I’ve been teaching on Jehovah’s Witnesses for what, 35 years? One of the main questions that I get from Christians is how come kingdom halls don’t have windows? So Kingdom Hall is their version of a church and almost all the time they don’t have windows. There’s nothing hidden going on. It’s not that they’re trying to hide anything. They just want a very practical, pragmatic, we need a place to meet, and if you put windows in, it takes longer to build. That’s the explanation I’ve heard. They just want to get their building up, have a meeting place for them. So that’s where they attend what they would call like we would call going to church. So the Jehovah Witnesses started in the very late 18 hundreds through a guy named Charles Hayes Russell.
He was part of what we call the Millerites movement. Whether he knew it or not, he was in contact with several Millerites and then started his own brand of it, which eventually became the Jehovah’s Witnesses. So they believed that Jesus came back and spiritually in 1914 and looked around and saw that only these early watchtower followers were teaching correctly, and so chose them, ordained them, and led them into becoming what they are today, and they are the only ones teaching the truth. Now using the definition that I gave earlier, the abstract, multiply and divide. Let me use that for explaining their beliefs. So add, they add to the word of God, not with a book of scripture, though they have their own version of the Bible, which is totally corrupt, totally changes the doctrine, but their ultimate authority isn’t even in this false Bible. It’s in the Watchtower society.
It’s through their organization. God uses a channel of communication from Jesus down to the Watchtower society and then disseminates it throughout the world through the Jehovah’s Witnesses. That’s their authority. They subtract from Jesus the same as the early Arian that started the Council of ea. They believe that Jesus is not God. He’s the first thing that God created, but he is not God almighty. He might be a mighty God, but he’s not the almighty God. He’s not Jehovah. Then they multiply works for salvation, meaning that you have to do works in order to be saved. Yeah, what Jesus did that was helpful, but you need your works and the most important work is doing your door to door ministry knocking on doors or standing in the marketplaces, passing out watchtower and awake magazines. This is a requirement for eternal life. And then they divide the follower’s loyalty, which what we mean by that is there’s only one mediator between us and God. That’s Jesus Christ that’s found in one Timothy two, five. There is nothing between us and God, according to the cults though, you need them in order to be saved. You need to be part of their organization. You need to be a Jehovah’s witness. If you’re a Jehovah’s Witness or for the Mormons, you have to be part of their organization in order to be saved. They want to divide your loyalty instead of loyalty just to God. It’s loyalty to them and their organizations in order to be saved.
Jamie Mitchell:
Tim, as I’ve talked to JWS in the past, the focus has been a lot of times our conversation finds its way to the Trinity and especially the role and nature of Christ, and they don’t like when you quote verses I and the Father are one. When Jesus says that, what do they believe and why do we need to be clear on what we believe?
Tim Martin:
Well, that is very important. The last part, why do we need to be clear on we believe the reason why we need to be clear on what we believe is because they’re so clear on what they believe part of their salvation is. You have to have accurate knowledge for them. And of course, what is the accurate knowledge that they need? Well, it’s the knowledge of what the Watchtower Bible and track society tells them. So they’re really good on what they believe they practice over and over and over. The average Christian can usually be baffled in a heartbeat with the Jehovah’s Witnesses because they know their stuff so well. You and I were talking earlier, Jimmy, about Walter Martin, one of the quotes from Walter Martin, which is great. He says, the average Jehovah’s Witness can make a doctrinal pretzel out of the average Christian In about 30 seconds.
We walk into the conversation thinking, well, I know John won one, and you’re walked into their trap. They have ways of explaining this, a way of twisting it around your head. Christians really need to know and understand, not just understand the doctrine of the Trinity, which it’s impossible to completely comprehend it to our finite minds, but you need to be able to find verse in the Bible and then you need to be able to explain the verses and then defend them. We have to roll up our sleeves. We need to know what we believe, how to support it, and how explain it to somebody who’s going to be combative. So it’s very important for us to know what we believe, start from there and then start looking into the cults. Well, what do they believe? For Jehovah’s Witnesses, they totally don’t believe in the Trinity, obviously God.
God is Jehovah and Jesus is not. Jehovah is the Almighty being who created the world first created Jesus, then created everything else, the Holy Spirit. It’s not even a person. The Holy Spirit is just the power that emanates from God, from Jehovah God, kind of like electricity. It’s not a person. It’s just the power that we use to fuel our radio that people are probably listening on right now. It’s not a person, and that’s what Jehovah’s Witnesses think about the Holy Spirit. So definitely no Trinity and Christians need to be aware of what they believe before you engage them in a conversation so you can know, well, how would I support what I believe? How would I explain to a Jehovah’s Witnesses what the truth is?
Jamie Mitchell:
Tim, whether it’s the Mormons or Jehovah’s Witness, these cults have some unusual practices. If I remember correctly, Jehovah’s Witness, do they not celebrate birthdays or Christmas is holidays? What is some of that strange practices that they have?
Tim Martin:
Yeah, good question. For Jehovah’s Witnesses on most of the things that they don’t participate in, they trace this idea all the way back to the beginning with Adam and Eve. The way they reason this is when Adam sinned, basically what he was doing is he was challenging God’s right to rule and to judge. So Adam was saying, I don’t think we don’t really need you. We can figure out all this on our own. And so human history up until now has been mankind trying to show that we can judge and rule ourselves and it’s not going too well. They’ll point that out and I think we can all agree, yeah, it’s not going great. So what they say then is, so what we need now is we need God’s government, God’s rulership. So they have a very kingdom idea of rulership, and that’s why they call ’em kingdom halls. And now we shouldn’t be part of the world’s government. You wouldn’t want to vote, you wouldn’t want to celebrate the 4th of July because well then you’re getting involved in the same thing that Adam and Eve did, you’re saying, yeah, I think I’m going to vote because I think this human being can govern as well. No, no. They’ll say he can’t. You need to be part of God’s government. So only follow God. Don’t follow human governments, don’t be involved in this. These of things,
Jamie Mitchell:
30 seconds, they take the name witness from the 144,000 that’s mentioned in Revelation. Isn’t that the background of that name as well?
Tim Martin:
As far as the word witness? I don’t think so. I think that there’s, excuse me, verses in the Bible that talk about will be witnesses unto God. Now the revelation chapter seven with 144,000, also in chapter 14, they say that this is a special group of anointed people. These are the only ones that will have eternal life in the presence of Jehovah. Anyone else, they’ll be part of the great crowd. Also mentioned in Revelation seven. So if you’re part of the 144,000, you could get saved and be with God the rest of us. Well, we’ll just be in paradise on earth, not necessarily in the presence of God like that.
Jamie Mitchell:
That’s excellent. Really, really helpful. And again, check out Tim’s YouTube channel and all the resources. Friends, we’re just scratching the surface here today and there’s much more we need to know, but you got to start from somewhere. Hopefully today we’ll serve as a motivator for you for further study courage and challenge your pastors. Hey, let’s do a study on cults When we come back. The truth will always set you free. We need to know truth if we’re going to engage and answer the questions and the statements that cults make. Stay with us as we finish up today as we discover about how to talk to the CU cults. Well, we’ve come to our last segment in this special program about witnessing to Mormons and Jehovah’s witness understanding cults. Tim Martin’s been our guest, and again, we encourage you to check out CFAR and the resources that they offer. Tim, no matter the cult we encounter, there must be some common mistakes we make when we attempt to counter their arguments. What would be some missteps we might be prone to make when talking to cult evangelists?
Tim Martin:
Yeah, well, I guess to start with kind of the trajectory that we were hitting there, we need to start with doing our homework. And our homework would need to start with, well, we need to kind of be grounded with what the Bible teaches on the subject. You can’t really defend something that you don’t know well enough yourself. And then the other part of the homework then is to find out what you can about whichever cult that you’re looking at. Now, sometimes we might not have the opportunity to do that homework. Maybe it’s somebody that we encounter on the street or they encounter us, but we can do our homework and come back to them and then have more lively conversation if we understand where they’re coming from. But along with that, in engaging them, what’s very important to me is the manner that we do this.
And my key verse, well in almost any apologetics would be the first Peter three 15 verse, sanctify the Lord in, excuse me, sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asks you for a reason of the hope that is within you. Now, that’s our key verse for apologetics always being ready to have an answer to everyone. But what we leave off often is the very end, but do this in meekness and in fear or as other translations say in gentleness and respect. So we need to come to them with this humility aspect, realizing that if it weren’t for the grace of Christ, we could be in the same place that they are. We could be lost. In fact, I think it’s a judgment for sin. We should be lost. If it weren’t for the grace of God, we could be where they are. So that is a common mistake that we start to depersonalize them, act as if they’re just an argument to conquer. No, they’re a person that we want to see them. No Christ, so many Christians have depersonalized them in this way, that they just want to show how smart that they are. And that’s not the way you do it.
Here’s an example. I have heard this so many times when I’m taught in churches and Christians will want to come and tell me their story. And their story is often, yeah, these Mormons came to my house and I quoted John one, one and they had no idea how to deal with that, and they just walked away and they’re almost laughing. That’s not impressive to me to say that a lost person came to your house. You said something that they couldn’t answer and they walked away and we present that it’s a good thing. No, find a way that you can talk to them to keep them coming back, expose them to truth over a longer period of time. Also on that, I guarantee you, when that Mormon or Jehovah’s witness or whoever walks away from your house that last moment, they’re not shaking. They’re not like, oh, I didn’t know how to answer that verse.
Usually when they walk away that last time, they’re thinking, well, that guy has no idea how to find the truth. They pity you. They have not understood you, you have not understood them. Come with humbleness. Present your ideas to them. Present verses and talk to them. See what they think of it. And if they present an idea, see, this is what scares a lot of Christians. I don’t know that I could answer every verse. You know what? You’re right. You can’t, especially Jehovah’s Witnesses, they know their way of thinking of the Bible better than you do. So what you do in that case is still going to the conversation. But be ready to say, wow, that’s a really good verse. I never thought of that verse before. Can we talk more about this later? I’d like to think about it. They know when you don’t have a good answer.
And when we start grasping at straws and inventing arguments, they can sense it, be honest with them, be humble and say, I don’t know. Let’s come back and revisit this and then do your homework. Ask a pastor, ask a friend, do some research on the internet. Well, what does this verse mean? It seems to back up their point, be ready for them to have answers to things that you couldn’t imagine. Them being able to back things up, enter into an honest conversation with them and be ready for something interesting and challenging and hopefully rewarding as you see them come to Christ. Potentially they do come to Christ sometimes,
Jamie Mitchell:
Tim, as I’ve encountered both Mormons, Jehovah’s Witness and other cults and false religions, I have always lived by this. Start with the general and the known and then move to the more specific and maybe the unknown. And what I mean by that is don’t try to answer every specific question, everything they bring up, because in some respects that’s what they’re trying to do. They’re trying to get you to a point where you lack the confidence and then all of a sudden you start doubting or questioning your own faith or the Bible or Jesus or how you have viewed the gospel and you just open yourself up, remain with the general things as well as the general things you know about that cult. And then move to more specific. And I love what you said. I’ve used that so many times even with people in church that come to me when I was a pastor and said, Hey, I don’t understand this. I have no problem saying that is a great question. Give me a week and I’m going to find out a more thorough and complete answer for you. Tim, as we finish up here, the best way to spot a counterfeit is to know the real thing. In our last couple minutes here, what Christian doctrines are probably the most important if you’re going to be effective in dealing with cults, and why do you think they’re so vital?
Tim Martin:
Well, good question. And let me dovetail this with what you’re saying about, and I can’t remember the way you just phrased it though, I just listening to you, but choosing our battles because they might bring up some crazy ideas. Mormons might talk about baptism for the dead. Do we really need to fight them on that? It doesn’t really affect someone’s salvation. If they have a strange idea here and there, I will sit and listen to a lot of strange ideas. We need to choose our battles. And though I don’t like the term battle as if we’re fighting them, but we need to pick and choose what are the important issues. And they would be the things that define us as Christians in our doctrines. And beginning with what we’ve talked about, the doctrine of God, the Trinity. How is the Father and the Son the same God, but different persons?
Though we can never understand it fully in this life, but how could we possibly explain this to somebody who is in a system that’s set up to disagree with us? So the Trinity, as well as the two natures of Jesus can be a difficult one to deal with people who are in cults. This can be a snag for us. If we don’t really have it figured out in our minds, how are we going to explain it to somebody who’s set up against it as well as other doctrines? Salvation by grace alone. So doctrine of God, salvation by grace alone through faith alone. They will use, as I mentioned earlier, words that we use like salvation and maybe even the word trinity, but they define it differently. Salvation by grace alone means just that without explanation. It’s only by grace. Whereas they think of grace often as something you still have to qualify for. I mean, yeah, we’re saved only by God’s business, but you have to do your part. No, that’s not what the Bible says. And what does the Bible say? All the works that you do are tainted with sin. You can’t use that. We need to know why is salvation by grace important? And then from these ideas come doctrines of Holy Spirit and other things we need to know. Yeah.
Jamie Mitchell:
Hey Tim, thank you for your expertise. There’s a number of other cults and false religions that we need to get schooled up on. Friends, we pray for your witnessing opportunities. Be bold, be proactive, be schooled up, and live and lead with courage. Until tomorrow, this is Jamie Mitchell for the American Pastors Network and Stand in the Gap.
Recent Comments