Sometimes things don’t go as expected or planned, and you find yourself in a situation in which you are stumped. Your idea is neatly outlined, your course of action is carefully planned, and the situation is going perfectly as expected, when suddenly something confusing and unexpected happens! You try to understand the chaos, and you struggle to right the floundering ship still uncertain of what happened and how it was that you didn’t see this particularly difficulty coming. The word for this is, “confounded.”

Did you know that God’s will for your life is to be a confounder? Let me clarify. God doesn’t want you to be confounded. His desire for you is to be fully informed, intellectually aware, cognitively responding to Him as He progressively reveals Himself to you. God wants you to understand Him so that you know Him more and more. His desire is that you would love Him with your whole mind!

But there are some who abjectly refuse to worship the True One with their minds. Having an awareness of truth, they still refuse to worship Him. These individuals become obstinate as their hearts become hardened. Polite cultural custom suggests that we let them go their way. But the Bible says that we should confound them.

Where does this come from?

Acts 9:20 -22 says that Paul, following his Damascus road conversion, immediately proclaimed Jesus to the stubborn Jews in the synagogue. They resisted him, but still marvelled because they knew him to be the chief tormentor of the heretical sect of the Nazarene. And here he was preaching Jesus, the very one he was formerly trying to destroy.

Verse 22 says,

“But Saul increased all the more in strength, and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus by proving that Jesus was the Christ,” (italics added).

The world should not be allowed to go along merrily believing its own self deception. The prevailing notions of good and bad, humanism, materialism, and the all-consuming god of this age, atheism, must be challenged. Those who hold to these ideas should be… in a word… confounded, for their own good! It is love that calls us to the ministry of confounding.

From this passage I gather that intellectual inquiry is a good thing. Logic, debate, persuasive speech and rhetoric are important tools that we are called to develop as a part of our Christianity. But most of all, God is calling His people to be of good cheer and stout heart with an intimate knowledge of Him. Courage and faith are necessary to be a good confounder. To this end, I would like to recommend the Apologetics Conference coming up the first weekend in March. Would you care to join Bridge Baptist Church as we journey to Abbotsford Friday and Saturday, March 1-2, and sharpen our skills at confounding others?

For more details see here. You can check out the Apologetics Conference website here. Please consider joining us. Weèd love to have you!