Real Objections to Christianity

Augustine spoke of the steps it took for him to be saved in his Confessions (see an indication of this in Book VI, chap 1 here and my comments on it here).

At the end of chap 11 and at the beginning of chap 12 (see both here) he talks about the real reason why he kept himself from giving his life fully to Christ. He said:

"I delayed my conversion to the Lord; I postponed from day to day the life in thee, but I could not postpone the daily death in myself. I was enamored of a happy life, but I still feared to seek it in its own abode, and so I fled from it while I sought it. I thought I should be miserable if I were deprived of the embraces of a woman, and I never gave a thought to the medicine that thy mercy has provided for the healing of that infirmity, for I had never tried it. As for continence [i.e., self-control], I imagined that it depended on one’s own strength, though I found no such strength in myself."

And...

"I quoted against [Alypius] the examples of men who had been married and still lovers of wisdom, who had pleased God and had been loyal and affectionate to their friends. I fell far short of them in greatness of soul, and, enthralled with the disease of my carnality and its deadly sweetness, I dragged my chain along, fearing to be loosed of it. Thus I rejected the words of him who counseled me wisely, as if the hand that would have loosed the chain only hurt my wound."

Augustine resisted the happiness to be found in Christianity because he was enthralled with the deadly sweetnesses of sexual immorality. This kept him from becoming a Christian after the intellectual hindrances were removed (and, I suspect the reason for his intellectual objections was his love of sexual sin).

Augustine's life reminds us that when doing evangelism there are the dozens of objections a person gives us, and then there are the real ones. Ask God for wisdom to see these through the smoke screens we're so often trying to blow away.