How to minister to the ungodly: Third, understand faith. The real conflict between the ungodly and the Christian is over faith. It is over faith regardless of whether the person is Hindu, Muslim, Atheist, Evolutionist, or what their belief system is. Don't ever forget this fact. You will almost always find that unbelievers don't even know what faith is. Most Christians don't know what faith is-though they have faith, yet they are ignorant of what that faith is and how they got it. Faith only comes by a personal revelation of God. Your faith, if it is faith, involved you coming to know Jesus. You may have had to overcome some lies that were bound up in your mind; perhaps someone answered some of your questions. However, only Christ can overcome such things. Somewhere in this process, God spoke to you, and you acknowledged Him rather than your own flesh-controlled mind. No one can accept Jesus unless Jesus has personally revealed Himself to them.

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• The ungodly may deny the possibility of this, but the ungodly generally believe in the power of the human mind. They at least believe in the power of those human minds that happen to agree with them. They have an unfounded trust, based only on presumption, in the human mind. The person who is in Christ believes in Christ, the One Who wrote the Bible and reveals His truth through the Bible. The ungodly person questions and is skeptical of God. The follower of Christ believes and honors God.
• Everyone has a worldview. Most people think their own personal worldview has something to do with reality. To make matters worse, most people don't even know that there is such a thing as a worldview. They think that they are relating directly to reality, unaware of the fact that they are filtering everything through their worldview.
• When you get to the basis of any worldview, you run into the problem of circular reasoning. Logic is a valuable gift from God, but it runs out of steam when you get to the root basis. For instance, the root basis of Atheism is the unsupported claim that there is no God. The presupposition of materialism is simply the root basis stating plainly: "We accept as an Axiom that cannot be challenged that there is no God." The Atheist always has trouble admitting this and will present many so-called "proofs" for the non-existence of God. If you take the enormous amount of time to dig to the depth of the hidden assumptions, you will find that every one of those so-called "proofs" has been derived using the premise of "no God." Using this premise as the base, the Atheist seeks to prove that God doesn't exist. This is circular reasoning. The Christ followers, on the other hand, has as their root basis, not the Bible, but the God who wrote the Bible and reveals the Bible to them. This the Rock spoken of in Scripture. The wise man built his house on the Rock. It is solid and cannot be moved. The ungodly build on made-up assumptions, which is like building on sand. They are rationalizations, carefully hidden and covered with many calculations and magician's patter. They are just making stuff up! In other words, they are lying. Their lies aren't even all that well-hidden because the people who are swallowing their lies love to be lied to. These people want to be fooled because they don't want to hold God in their knowledge. They don't want God to speak to them and direct their lives.
• The Rock of revelation can be challenged by one argument: "If God reveals to every Christian, then why are there denominations and arguments over doctrine?" The answer is simply this: 1. Human weakness will automatically add to Scripture and take from Scripture, so we must keep our minds open to God so that God can correct us. 2. God knows our weakness and has built safeguards and offices into the Pattern of the Church to keep that doctrine pure and to allow for His perpetual unfolding of the meaning of Scripture by revelation. Without those safeguards and offices, the Church is subject to winds of doctrine.
• Deep down, every unbeliever has a knowledge of God. When you run into an unbeliever who absolutely refuses to hear the truth, you have met a person who doesn't want God. They are rebellious and do not want to acknowledge God. They do not want to hold them in their knowledge. How do we know? God has revealed it. If they accept the concept of God, they do not want Him to be what He is and they do not want to submit themselves to Him. That is the cause of the resistance.
• Christ the Body is not based on a worldview. There is no base assumption for the true Christian (Christ one). The true Christian believes because of the utterance of God. God speaks to the Christian and the miraculous ability to believe the truth (faith) comes. Faith (supernatural belief) cometh by hearing and hearing by the word [literally, utterance] of God. God tells the Christian that the Bible is without error, that it really cannot be broken. This is not circular reasoning. This is revelation. (some caveats about hearing God's Voice)
• The unbeliever may claim that God didn't reveal, but the claim of the unbeliever is not rational. It is based on the unbeliever's presupposition, whatever that base presupposition is depending on the unbeliever's worldview. Worldviews that deny the power of the True God to reveal or deny the authority of the Bible, which was written by God, act as filters to filter out reality. If an unbeliever claims to have knowledge that God didn't reveal to you and that God didn't write the Bible through those men who penned the words of the Bible, the unbeliever is claiming to know all things including the personal spiritual experiences of every person who has ever lived. In other words, the unbeliever is claiming to be God. That is insanity.
• You may also find that the unbeliever wants to define faith in a way that is contrary to Scripture. The unbeliever does this in order to argue, to cause confusion over the meanings of words. They can define their own faith as they desire. Remember that the unbeliever is blind and deaf to the spiritual realm. As Jesus told Nicodemus, unless a person is born again by believing in Jesus, they cannot see the Kingdom of God. And the natural mind cannot receive the things of God. Even after a person is born again, their vision and hearing is determined by their spiritual maturity. That is the reason for God's safeguards and offices.