Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
With Adam White
194 Plays1 year ago
Listen through to the end for a special 20% off discount code from 10ofThose.com!
When it comes to sharing our faith, we are blessed with a wealth of books and writings available from articulate Christians defending and presenting the gospel. Today on PEP Talk we have a great testimony from someone whose reading quest helped immensely in moving him from atheism to Christ. He now works for a Christian book distributor and gives us some great recommendations for books and evangelistic tracts we might find helpful.
Adam White became a Christian in 2020 after reading book after book on the evidence for Christianity. He now travels around Scotland recommending books that point people to Jesus in his role with 10ofthose.com, the Christian book ministry. Adam loves reading and has a keen interest in apologetics, spending his free time giving seminars on how to talk to atheists and engaging people in 1-2-1 evangelism.
Adam's Tract Recommendations:
Christmas tracts by Roger Carswell
Peace on Earth?
Love at Christmas
Whiter Than Snow
Titantic (A night to remember)
Last on God's List
The Scariest Stories Are the True Ones - Halloween tract
Book Recommendations:
The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel
Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain by C.S. Lewis
Strange New World by Carl Trueman
Can Science Explain Everything? by John Lennox
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction to 'Pep Talk' Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
Hello, everybody, and welcome to pep talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Gavin Matthews from solar. So I'm presenting this week on my own, neither Andy bannister nor Kristy meh can make it this week. And it's normally a kind of a two man pilot effort this but I'm flying solo this week. However, we always bring interesting guests who've got something to tell us about sharing their faith in Jesus Christ today.
00:00:31
Speaker
And we've had such a great range of guests over the last year or two. This week is no exception.
Guest Introduction: Adam White's Faith Journey
00:00:36
Speaker
I'm delighted to be joined by Adam White. Adam, hello. Hello. How are you today? I'm good. I'm good. I'm ready to chat all things evangelism and all things God related. So it's a good day. Fantastic. And which part of the country are you joining us from today?
00:00:52
Speaker
So I live in Edinburgh, so I'm based in Lief. I live in Stockbridge, so that's my general haunt all around that area. Wonderful. Now, you've come and joined us on a program where we're going to be talking about evangelism. But four years ago, that would have sounded ridiculous to
Transformation Through Wife's Awakening
00:01:08
Speaker
you, right? Because you've been a Christian three years, you told me. And I think if you had
00:01:14
Speaker
I've been told four years ago that you'd be on a podcast talking about sharing your faith in Jesus. You would have thought that was slightly ridiculous. Tell us what happened in your life that kind of brought you full circle to where you are now.
00:01:28
Speaker
Yeah, well, I mean, you're right. If you went back four years, I would assume somebody had kidnapped me, filled my brain full of chemicals and sent me back into the world, you know, a brainwashed man. And it's kind of ironic that phrase brainwashed, because I think that's exactly what's happened. I've had my brain washed. And therefore, I can now I can now think clearly, you know, this is the wonderful thing of learning who God is, is that he meets people where they are. And he certainly met me where I was.
00:01:56
Speaker
I was in a position where I was looking at the world and assuming that everything around me is just there, never really thought about it and never really give it a second thought. My wife grew up in a Christian family, but she wasn't convicted by any sense. Although she said she was Christian, she didn't really carry out any of her faith. And so looking at her and me side by side, you would just look at two pagans, essentially.
00:02:23
Speaker
in terms of actions. She was convicted after birth of our second child, and then something just changed in her, and I just remember her Bible coming out more. She started going to church consistently, and I remember saying to her, if you're going to teach our children about this man in the sky, I'm going to teach our children about science. A really arrogant kind of thinking that I had there, and it makes me cringe to even think about it now, but that's what I was like.
00:02:48
Speaker
In fact, one of the biggest memories I have is her saying to me in some difficult times, why don't you just try praying? And me shouting up the stairs to her, I'm never going to be a Christian. I'm never going to be a Christian. And followed up with everything that we have in life is because of what I've done.
00:03:06
Speaker
And no true words have I ever spoken than those as I look back at my life after being saved and realizing that all of the pitfalls were created by me. I had all kinds of problems in our life, financial problems and spiritual problems and marriage problems because of the way that I was. I was just selfish. So for myself, the journey started as we came up to Edinburgh, we moved back to Edinburgh actually in lockdown.
Exploring Christianity: Adam's Skeptical Path
00:03:34
Speaker
and started, I woke up one morning.
00:03:38
Speaker
And it was like God just sort of touched me on the shoulder. And I just woke up one morning and went, okay, let me go and see if there's actually any evidence for this God thing. That's at least when I talk to my wife about God, I can have some level of congruence when we're talking and I'm not just sort of parroting information and just sort of pushing it to the side. So one of the little things God did for me is he gave me a wife that doesn't like to argue
00:04:07
Speaker
Whereas I do. If you do like to argue, then then sometimes you can just debate for the sake of debating, right? You can get stuck in a rut and think it heals. And my wife wasn't like that at all. But one thing she did is just quietly live out her faith. And that, I think, is a really important message in itself. She just quietly lived out her faith, you know, and the way that she acted was perfect for the type of personality I was at that time.
00:04:34
Speaker
She would watch a lot of these testimonial videos on YouTube, but she'd watch them in German. She's from Berlin. So when they would, and she can't use technology, so when they would fire up, they'd fire up on my phone from my account because she doesn't know how to set up her own YouTube account.
00:04:49
Speaker
So all these YouTube testimonials would pop up on my phone in German, though, and it was just removed enough from the word God for me not to really take them away. But that just made me go, OK, well, let me just see if there's any actual testimonials from
00:05:04
Speaker
non-Christians from atheists. Let's find out about atheists and let's hear their testimonies. And I struggle to find them online. Atheist becomes Christian in a direct format in the fashion of somebody talking at a camera and saying, I was an atheist and now I'm a Christian. I'm certainly on YouTube at that time.
00:05:20
Speaker
So that led me to just go, okay, let me, if I was to research, if there was a God, then I might as well start with Christianity, because that's my wife's religion, it'd be bizarre to start with Hinduism, you know, if that was the case, although I wasn't going to just, I wasn't going to, to not look into those. It just made sense to start with first God, first Christianity, because if Christianity is true, then by definition, I recognize this, then the rest must be
00:05:46
Speaker
false. They can't all be true, can they? So, and I like how C.S. Lewis said when I was reading his works, he said, you know, when it comes to maths, three plus three is six, but three plus three is seven, is a lot closer than three plus three is 17. Well, some people along those lines saying that some religions can come, they can get close, but that doesn't mean they're correct, but they're a lot closer than some others.
00:06:09
Speaker
So I started looking into, I just walked around the city reading different books. The first book I started with was The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. I read through that as a podcast, as an audiobook. So I just walked around the city. We had one hour a day where we could walk around the city if you remember those days. And I spent my hour walking around listening to The Case for Christ.
00:06:32
Speaker
And the reason I came to the case for Christ is I wanted to find an atheist. And the way I had it in my mind was I want to put this on trial. So I want it to be like in a courtroom. So I typed in this into Google, found a lawyer who had the same kind of mindset as me and wanted to do his own research. And he wrote a big PDF file and it was very hard to read on my phone and I couldn't really get into it.
00:06:55
Speaker
But he made reference to Case for Christ, and that led me to this book, and off I went. So I read that, and as I finished reading Case for Christ, then I read a book by Frank Turett called I Don't Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist. That was a big, big book. And then from there, I just sort of snowballed to the next book and the next book.
00:07:15
Speaker
And I realized that all of the questions that were being asked and answered in these books, some of them I thought of, but some of them I've never really thought of. And I think that's because I was just apathetic. I just didn't think to ask the questions. And then over a period of months, I just looked at the research and I came to a conclusion on the 27th of November.
00:07:36
Speaker
I just went, okay, there's lots of things I'm reading about that just seem to, I just don't know what to do with. I read about the prophecies in the Bible and I was like, well, what do I do with these? Because this is definitely describing Jesus, but this is hundreds and hundreds of years before when I'm reading Isaiah 53. And I'm going, what do I do with this?
00:07:58
Speaker
And I think there was something in the case of Christ where he said, just for eight of these prophecies to come true, eight prophecies true about Jesus, just eight of them would be the equivalence of taking one pound coins and stacking them up five feet high, sorry, one feet high, and covering the entire landmass of Texas.
00:08:17
Speaker
And my job would be to sort of helicopter around and pull one out. That's from 1999. There's only one from 1999. And I have to try and find that one. That are the same odds of eight of these prophecies coming true about Jesus. And then I find out there's more than eight. There's like 300. Then I find out in prophecies in general, there's thousands. And it just gets stuck into your mind that this is just
00:08:39
Speaker
It's just not reasonable to walk away going, oh yeah, God doesn't exist. I'd have to be denying a lot of things that I've learned in order to carry on with an atheist or agnostic mindset. I'd have to be pushing away truth.
00:08:55
Speaker
in order to go forward. And the one thing I said to myself on the beginning was try to be as objective as possible. This is not about trying to prove that I'm right. It's just about finding out what's actually true. And I'll go where that leads.
Acceptance of Faith and Influences
00:09:10
Speaker
And when you're an atheist, it's a scary place to go when you find that this is true. But I did, ultimately. And the last thing I did, and I like to credit,
00:09:23
Speaker
Christopher Hitchens with the last nail in my atheist coffin. The last thing I did is I watched Frank Chirik debate Christopher Hitchens.
00:09:31
Speaker
if anyone doesn't know, Christopher Hitchens is one of the most renowned atheist apologists out there. And he debated Frank Turek, and he was very succinct, and he's very witty, and he's very charming. And Frank Turek, for all of his wonderful qualities, was very loud and very American. Very, very just brash, you know, if Frank ever hears this, sorry, but very, very brash. But
00:09:55
Speaker
But the difference between them was this. Frank Turek came with facts and stats and data and logic and reason. And Christopher Hitchens came with rhetoric and anger. That was really it. He basically said, I hate God.
00:10:13
Speaker
I was like, God doesn't exist and I hate him for it. And that's what I really got. And I realized that there's nothing in this atheistic argument. And that just, boom, that put the nail in the coffin. I realized I wasn't getting carried away on a wave of apologetic ideas. You know, I was just being pulled into this camp. I went back and listened to the arguments against and they were just empty.
00:10:33
Speaker
And that was it for me. I just went, okay, this is true. In the shower that night of all places, I just went, Lord, I believe this is true. I don't know what that really means, but it's true and I know that you're God and I want to follow you.
00:10:50
Speaker
Obviously, things have changed completely for you since then and now you're involved in evangelism.
Ministry Through Tracts: Methods and Impact
00:10:55
Speaker
Now, I first met you at Gala Shields because you were representing 10 of those who were doing the bookshop for our conference. At the bookshop, when you were given the bookshop plug, you surprised me, I think, at first.
00:11:05
Speaker
You said that you're really involved in ministry with tracts. Now, tracts have had a pretty bad name, haven't they? I think for two reasons. Some people say they're not relational enough, you know, drop a tract and leg it before anybody asks you a question. And we've also seen some pretty bad tracts, to be honest. So, tell me, what makes you think that tracts are still a really good way of sharing this faith that you discovered three years ago?
00:11:27
Speaker
I think the thing about tracks and you're right, people just think they have this, they're very old fashioned and maybe I remember speaking to quite a prominent author and she said, when I think of tracks, I just think of people using them instead of tips in America, they give you a track instead and it gives them a bad name.
00:11:45
Speaker
Now, for me, what hit me about tracks was this. I heard a couple of stories about tracks and one of them was, the story was that there was two university students and one of them was given a track and he'd taken it, crumpled it up and thrown it in the bin. And his flatmate went over and fished it out the bin, opened it, read it,
00:12:04
Speaker
came to Christ right there and then and now he's a prominent minister in the States. Another more incredible story was about a cleaner who was cleaning away down some building and then there was a tract almost like pulp in the drain, caught in the drains and he fished it out and looked at that and thought I wonder what that says.
00:12:24
Speaker
He doesn't know why he wondered that, but he did. And he took it home and dried it out, dried it out and read it. And he came to Christ from reading that. So when we see tracks, sometimes we get disheartened. You might give someone a track, then you might see it on the floor. For me, I think, well, if God can use that track to bring that person to Christ, it doesn't matter where I think this should end up.
00:12:44
Speaker
It's what God does with them, and the Lord knows exactly what he wants to do with any tract that we put out there. So I think in terms of the power of tracts, God's behind them, and that's the thing to remember, pray over these tracts and send them out. And it does not matter how it looks to our eyes in terms of them being successful or failures. But the other thing is, I think, is we just don't know what to do with them.
00:13:08
Speaker
And we think awkwardly hand them to a friend and run out the door. We just don't know what to do. So for me, I like to, and this is me by the way, maybe not so 10 of those endorsed, but this is Adam White's approach to doing things out of control. I like to do things, I like to hide them inside of, I like to go to Waterstones and hide them inside Richard Dawkins books.
00:13:30
Speaker
I like to go into things like Primark, I like to put them in the breast pockets of jackets when people go and buy them, they find them in there. You know, little things like this, it's kind of covert, you don't need to have a direct communication with someone. The owner of 10 of those told me a little story of what he does. He says he takes a tract and he puts it on a bus seat and he prays over that and he says, Lord, this is no longer my tract, this is somebody else's property now.
00:13:58
Speaker
uh please get it into their hands so if somebody says oh you forgot this he can genuinely honestly say no that's not mine and you can leave it there which is a wonderfully clever you know a very simple way of knowing that i'm not lying here that isn't mine anymore that belongs to someone else what about petrol pumps i don't think you did with the petrol pump that you mentioned at galas yours yeah that was probably
00:14:19
Speaker
It's my favorite one. The petrol pump is you get the petrol pumps there where you can pay. You can pay at the pump and you put your credit card in. So the tracks, most tracks that you see are the width of them or the same width of a credit card.
00:14:34
Speaker
So you pay for your petrol and then you slide a track into the credit card slot. So the next person that comes to the pump has no choice but to take that track down in order to put their card in. And then while they fill up, they've got something to read. And I think that's just one of the more fun ways of just sharing a track. Pop them in. But I think it's just a case of if you're shy or you're not sure what to do, you've got opportunities all around you.
00:14:59
Speaker
There's always an opportunity. Another one, for instance, which came to my mind is beer bottles or beer cases inside supermarkets, they slip right into the beer case. So you pop one in there, they open up, they get the beer, there's a tract in there as well. There's 101 ways of
00:15:18
Speaker
of getting tracks out there. And if you if you know that you are still a bit worried about sharing one to one, you can still do this work and God will bless it. You know, there's lots of ways of getting them out. There are good and there are bad tracks. I was handed a track about four weeks ago, and it was
00:15:34
Speaker
Bonkers, it was almost like bits of the Bible mixed up with kind of David Icke. I mean, it was just loony. There are some bad tracks to avoid. Tell us about some good tracks that are helpful that people are willing to read that you'd be very confident putting into the hands of non-Christians or putting in a beer case or a petrol pump. What's good that's out there available and how can folks get hold of them?
00:15:55
Speaker
Obviously, we're coming up to Christmas now, so there's some wonderful tracks that my company, Ten of Those, sell. A great series by Roger Carswell, who's a prolific writer and he's so good at writing tracks and getting an interesting start to the topic and weaving the gospel into it.
00:16:14
Speaker
Peace on Earth is a really good one for Christmas. Another one's called Love at Christmas, Whiter Than Snow. But some of my favorite tracks, just all-round, all-year tracks, I would say, I'd say my favorite one is called, it's a story of the Titanic, the chap on the Titanic who was witnessing while he was in the water, the story of the chap who was witnessing to people
00:16:42
Speaker
as the Titanic was going down. That's such a powerful tract, I think. And, you know, and another one that's just come out, which I've just finished reading the book, it's called Last on God's List, which is such a powerful message, this book, this biography, Last on God's List, which talks about a man who was from London who was right into drugs and gang fighting and stabbing and all these things, and how his life was just turned around. And this tract is focusing on people who just know, we just know in our heart sometimes that
00:17:12
Speaker
But I just think I've done too many bad things that I can't, surely I can't, there's no hope for me. You know, when we can have tracks that shall talk from apologetic angles, but I think for most people, that's gonna be the thing that really grabs them. It's actually, you know, you're not so far gone that God can't bring you to salvation, that He can't save you. So I really like that one as well. And obviously Halloween coming up, we've got some really nice
00:17:42
Speaker
nice Halloween tracks. The scariest stories are the true ones. I quite like that track. I think that's got a really nice way of just bringing an idea of what the gospel message is to kids, but not in a too forceful fashion that the parents can grab that, the kids can grab that, and then actually take it. I'm a big fan of a track that doesn't look obvious as you start reading it. It builds to the actual story. I think a lot of people, if you shut down with tracks, if it says,
00:18:12
Speaker
if it says God on the front or Jesus on the front before you even open it up, there's a good chance they just get thrown away anyway. Now that's not to be said though, because I believe that, as I said, God will, that might be the very word they need to hear and see. But I think there's different tracks for different people who need to be approached
00:18:33
Speaker
in different ways. I needed some intellectual understanding of Christianity and I needed to have an understanding of that this wasn't just all fairy tale and there was no truth to this, you know, that there was, there was real concrete intellectual evidence for the
Book Recommendations for Understanding Christianity
00:18:48
Speaker
faith. Yeah. So moving up from track staying to some, some bigger books, some longer reads, what would be your go-to books that you would want to recommend to people if they were like you, you know, wanting to really kind of seriously investigate Christianity, you know, maybe sort of three or four, what are your go-to
00:19:02
Speaker
book recommendations for contemporary culture for sharing the gospel with folks. Sure. Obviously, the first on my list will be The Case for Christ, as that was such a powerful book for me. Such a simple way of asking questions, giving objections and getting concrete, reasonable answers. It's a wonderful book and really well tied into how we think about modern day, using modern day examples and crime cases and then linking them to the examples in the Bible. It's a really clever way of
00:19:31
Speaker
congruently putting those two together. So, case for Christ is really powerful. Mere Christianity, in fact, C.S. Lewis, I'll give you the double, mere Christianity and the problem of pain. I love the fact that C.S. Lewis, once he came to Christ, went, what's the hardest subject to deal with? Well, that's going to be pain and suffering. So, let me just dive head first into that. You know, his introduction in the problem of pain, where he says,
00:19:56
Speaker
When I was an atheist, if you ask me why I didn't believe in God, I would have told you because the world is so cruel and the universe, and he just built this massive case for why God shouldn't exist, but then just turns it on a dime and says, but where did I get this idea of good from?
00:20:12
Speaker
and all of a sudden it just builds wonderfully. Mere Christianity obviously is a classic, it's not a book so much as a lot of radio talks that have been compiled into a book, but it's so well, and those radio talks were over the World War II, so it has this sort of urgency in them. And I think that's a great read now as people may be worrying about all the things that are happening in the world, obviously in Israel and the war in Ukraine. His messages are just as powerful and just as relevant today.
00:20:42
Speaker
as they were back then. A couple of others for myself, Strange New World by Dan Truman was a really, really good read just to understand how the culture I've got to and how I used to think about certain things, how that even became part of my thinking, how these old thinkers from 100 years plus
00:21:02
Speaker
postulated ideas that got debunked within most of their life, most of them debunked within their lifetime about how they sort of percolated and then through society, they sort of like slow cancer move back to the forefront of thinking. So I think that's really powerful just to help understand why I think the way I do.
00:21:18
Speaker
And then two more, then I would say, can science explain everything by John Lennox? Because people think that science is the answer. And he is so good at just showing that, you know, science, when you think about science, and when you when you think about, you know, how this world works, and how we then take the data, that we have a presupposition there, if we're not careful. And if our presupposition is naturalism, then we will never allow for a miracle. And therefore, we think that science will solve everything, but science can't explain everything.
00:21:48
Speaker
The irony is, is that one of my favorite parts in this book is he says that science can't even explain science. You can't use the scientific method to prove science itself, which is, which you wouldn't even, I mean, it's just a wonderfully clever book, which I think, you know, I pray that my brother gets that book and reads, but I think it's great to read that, to understand that more.
Special Book Discount Announcement
00:22:07
Speaker
That's great. We'll put a list of all those books in the show notes so that people can look those up. All of those will be available at 10 of those.com.
00:22:15
Speaker
So 10 as in number of those.com and you have a deal going on those, some of those, I believe.
00:22:23
Speaker
Well, that's right. Actually, for all the listeners, for the next four weeks from hearing this message, if you go to tenorthos.com, you can actually go to the partnership page, or maybe you can make that link available in the link of the podcast. But you can go there and look at the titles there, but you can also just use a code, and the code will be, I think we said we're going to call it pep talk.
00:22:46
Speaker
And the code will be pep talk and you'll get 20% off anything on the website for the next four weeks from hearing this message. So all those titles are there as well. Well, we hope we can get some of those out into the community and get some of those red and some of those tracks and evangelistic things out. Our time has gone. It went in a flash. Thank you so much. I love your passion and your enthusiasm for the gospel. And it's lovely to hear your testimony.
00:23:12
Speaker
at the start as well. Now without turning this ending into an Oscar speech, I have a few people to thank. Thank you first of all to all those of you who listen. Without you being there, there would be no point in doing a program. Thank you to Adam for joining me today and being a really wonderful guest and empowering us and enthusing us to share the gospel, particularly using tracts and literature and things that were so important in his coming to Christ.
00:23:33
Speaker
And behind the scenes, we need to thank David Hartnett, our producer, and Catherine Tompkins, who keeps us all organized. We will be back in a fortnight's time. The subject will be the same, sharing the gospel of Jesus with people today who need to hear it, need to know about Him and the hope and the life and the forgiveness of sin that He alone brings. But we'll be back in a fortnight with more interesting stuff on sharing the gospel today. Thank you for listening. Again, goodbye.