The other day, I looked at the sky. There was a single cloud floating in a wonderful blue, featureless void. The grass was green – the trees were brown and gray. The sun lit the whole scene up in a yellow-gold light. A gentle wind was blowing and a small bird was chasing a red-tailed hawk that was trying to make his escape, like a B-52 being attacked by an F-16. And all I could hear was the gentle whisper of the leaves moving across the yard.
At that moment, my mind’s eye saw something else. There was a Presence with me, a gentle Voice that stood and whispered in my ear – “Be Alert – the Best is yet to come!” And I knew that my oldest friend was with me, the Holy Spirit of God, the gentle breath of God that blows upon the earth and speaks to those of us who listen. You see, the presence of God is all around us if you simply take time to look for God, to be alert, to listen for the gentle voice of the Holy Spirit. Whenever you see something beautiful, you can be sure that God has been there, for Beauty is found in nature and in godly people, while ugly is confined to self-absorbed people and their works. Perhaps more than anything else, Beauty – real beauty, the deep, deep soul-filling, life-giving beauty, tells us where God is in action. Ugliness, decay, corruption, death are places where we find evil.
I can tell you why a rainbow looks the way it looks, but I cannot tell you why we consider it beautiful, except that our Creator loves beauty. And the same thing applies to a beautiful mountain, covered with beautiful fall leaves or even covered with new-fallen snow or green in the summer. The mountain is beautiful, but the only reason must be that our Creator loves beauty. And the same thing applies to the deadly coral reef, beautiful, yet deadly to people, who can step on a fish and die in 30 seconds from the fishes’ sting. Beauty tells us that God is around – stay alert.
And coincidence does the same. One special event when two great things happen just right is a coincidence. But to those who believe, we know that those coincidences that happen over and over again, that happen weekly, even daily are no coincidences, but are instead the fingerprints of our God making our life safer and better and good for us. Watch out for those coincidences – stay alert – God is working in your life. As David wrote in the Psalm: “In you, Lord my God, I put my trust.”
If you are a believer, you know what I mean, for you have put your trust in God. But if you are not a believer, at this point, I’d like to let you know where the exits are, since you probably are looking for the exits, for we are talking about the supernatural, and the supernatural makes many people uncomfortable.
Here in this place, most of the people around you truly believe that the Universe was created by a supremely wise, all-powerful, all-loving God who pays personal attention to us, a Being that is beyond nature, the Being that created Nature. And I recognize that you may be one of those few people here who do not believe this. Today, I’m going to talk about why Christians believe there is a Creator God, and more importantly, the barriers to believing that we put in front of ourselves.
If you are a believer, I’m sure you have some friends, neighbors, or family members who do NOT believers. In fact, I’ve asked you to make a list of a dozen people outside the church who are not believers. I’ve asked you to pray for them to come to know the Lord, and I’ve asked you to try to praise God to them each time you see them. But you will notice that I have not asked you to invite these people to church – that will come much later. And so, this sermon will hopefully help you as you talk to people who do not believe in a Creator God. As Paul wrote in his letter to the Thessalonians:
12 May the Lord make your love increase and overflow for each other and for everyone else, just as ours does for you. 13 May he strengthen your hearts so that you will be blameless and holy in the presence of our God and Father when our Lord Jesus comes with all his holy ones.
First of all, I’d like to tell you a bit about myself. I once was an atheist, a young man who did not believe in any God. I earned a degree in Physics, focused upon astrophysics, the study of the stars and the planets and the galaxies, and how they formed and developed. When you think about the scientific atheist, I was that person. So I know many of the questions you have, and most of the reasons people don’t believe. I’ll be happy to tell you my story and why I changed my mind about God sometime when you’ve got a half hour to listen, perhaps here at the church or at your home, or at McDonald’s.
At first glance, it looks like there are dozens of different reasons why people don’t believe in God. But it is much simpler than that. There are really only four reasons why people don’t believe in God – Barriers that keep them from seeing Christ. –
- They don’t trust Christians.
- They see no need for God in their lives.
- They’ve decided that Christianity is no help with their problems, and finally,
- They see no hurry to become believers.
So the first barrier that people need to cross is a high stone wall labeled “I don’t trust any Christians”, and in order to cross that wall, they will need a trustworthy someone whose shoulders they can climb on and that trustworthy soul is you. Before anyone can trust in God, he or she must first trust a prophet of God – one who speaks for God – in short, a Christian.
We look around and we see the people around us as the only people in the world that we do trust, so we wonder why people can’t trust Christians. We have to understand why people trust some people and don’t trust others. People trust people who never hurt them, they trust people who love them, they trust people who are truthful, they trust people who have a proven record of being right.
Unfortunately, for many people, they have never met any mature Christians. Oh, it’s easy to find a Christian – just not a mature Christian. You see, most Christians are still in the disciple stage, the learning stage, where they are still hurting people as often as they are helping people, where they are still hating people as often as they are loving people, where they exaggerate things to make a point, and where they repeat things they have heard other immature Christians claim, things which have been shown to be wrong. In short, if there were a truth-in-labeling law for people, most of the people who claim to be Christians walking around in America should instead be labeled as “people learning to be Christians”. And so, our immature Christians often give Christ a bad name. They are like skinny, weak people who our friend begins to climb on, but they are so weak that they wobble and our friend falls to the ground, in worse shape than before they started to climb up and over the wall of trust.
The mature Christians, on the other hand, have worked long and hard at controlling their tongues. They have learned not to complain about others, they have learned to give other people grace, to help others understand the actions of the rude, the hurtful, the mean-spirited, the hypocritical, and they do not fall into these traps themselves. In short, they have practiced becoming holy – set apart for God and God’s purposes. They control what they say about others, and they limit what they claim for Christ, for there are many people who left Christianity when they prayed as a young child for a pet – or a grandmother – and then the pet or Grandma died despite their prayers. The mature Christian knows that God’s will is supreme, and that God may choose to save our loved one – or not – according to God’s purposes, and so mature Christians do not make promises for God which God may not choose to keep.
Mature Christians are never mean-spirited, and the mean spirit can apply to claims about science and other belief systems as well as about specific people. After all, if you believe that rubbing blue mud into your bellybutton on Wednesday mornings is the way to God, you will not trust me if I laugh at you, will you? And so when the immature Christian makes claims about science and scientists that are mocking – or worse yet – completely wrong – it does not help the cause when speaking to a scientist about a Creator God. Mature Christians, you see, are solid, strong, and stable. When another starts to climb on them to see over the wall of trust, they are like rocks of granite – strong, supportive, trustworthy. Are you strong and supportive and trustworthy for your unbelieving friends?
And so the first thing we work upon is to be trustworthy people in front of others. We must develop that trust over the weeks and months and years of a relationship – for example with the dozen people on your list. And this is not in the least bit a deceptive practice, for this is how we are supposed to be as Christians. In fact, we are to pray to become holy. As Paul wrote in I Thessalonians 3:13 “And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.“ We are not supposed to pretend to be trustworthy, but we are indeed supposed to be trustworthy people.
To share the Gospel, we must be trustworthy people and we must show love and understanding and joy and wisdom in all we do. What habits do you have that you need to pray for God to remove, that you need to work upon, that you need to destroy from your person so that you will be holy and blameless and trustworthy so that people will see in you the character of the Son of God standing before them? The Holy Spirit will guide you if you will listen to the Spirit. You must grow to the point where they can at least catch a glimpse of Christ shining through your smile, and then they will begin to trust what you say. Lift your friends up and help them to safely cross the Wall of Trust.
The second barrier to seeing God is when a person feels that they have no need for God in their lives. This barrier stands in front of them like a moat filled with crocodiles a hundred yards wide and they don’t want to get wet. For most people, a discussion of God is simply an intellectual exercise. It is a philosophical debate, a question similar to the other questions that will simply not matter in your life such as “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” or “Does life exist on other planets?” or “What is the price of eggs in China this week?” For most people, particularly people who are successful in life, these questions and the question of God’s existence are simply not important, and it doesn’t matter to them what the answer is. And so they can hold a discussion or debate and they believe the answer is meaningless in their lives. And so they will argue with you and simply work to score debating points - the issue never touches them personally. And so they stand on the shore of the moat and politely decline to cross the Moat of Need.
But for some people, the question of God’s existence has become very important. God has lit a fire behind them and that fire pushed them toward the Moat of Need where they must swim - or die on the shore. When you are lying in a hospital bed undergoing chemotherapy for Stage IV cancer, it really matters to you whether or not God exists, because you need to know what will happen to you if the poisons being dripped into your body fail to stop the killer. When your mother or father or child is lying in the hospital bed, you really want to know if God is real, for you want to know if you will see your dying loved one again in a few years. When you lose the career you’ve been working at for a decade or more, and when you have to start all over because of a bad marriage, it really helps to know what we are working for, why we are suffering, whether love is worthwhile.
And millions of people have recently begun to try to answer this question, because it really matters whether the God of Christianity is real, the God of Islam is real, whether they are both real or whether they are both simply pleasant ideas, for ultimately the answer to that question will decide what your actions in today’s world will be – will you follow the teachings of Christ, the teachings of Mohammed, the teachings of those who deny both, or the teachings of those who actually deny both because they claim that both are real? It affects our actions in today’s society.
And so, for your friends, be close enough to your friends - in particular your dozen friends - that you will know when they begin to wonder what is important in this life, whether God exists or not. It is important to be there, ready to speak of God, to help your friend see that the real reason they are so fearful about death is because they don’t know if God exists or not, the real reason they are so frightened about being alone is because they have never felt the presence of God, the real reason they are worried about their money is because they have always depended upon themselves and they have never learned to depend upon God. Help them know that they need help outside themselves, help them to learn to jump into the Moat of Need, for that is the second barrier they need to cross to find God. As David wrote in his psalm: 9 He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way. People must get humble before they will look for God! And once they are humbled, they will run across the Moat of Need, running across the backs of the crocodiles to get to the other side!
The third barrier all people must cross is the tall, razor-wire Fence of believing that God is of no help to us in our time of trouble. If you have lost your job, you feel trapped by the Fence of No Help. If your car is being repossessed, you are looking for cash, not a bible study. If you have just been told you have breast cancer, you are looking for a choice surgeon - not a church sanctuary. Yet, as David wrote to God:
2 I trust in you;
do not let me be put to shame,
nor let my enemies triumph over me.
3 No one who hopes in you
will ever be put to shame,
As we know, God is the answer to people’s problems because…God is always the answer to all of our problems. There is something that frees our emotion from the tremendous weight we carry when we turn over our burden to God. Our spirit floats free, our soul rises high, we cry out of the depths and God’s voice comes back – “I’m here and I can handle your problems”, like hooking up the Goodyear blimp to a single concrete block that we can barely carry ourselves, God lifts us up as high over the Fence as we need to be lifted.
But to our friend who doesn’t believe, we are asking the impossible. When you are in a hole, looking at your feet, it is very difficult to see the Goodyear blimp. And so, we have to tell stories, true stories, believable stories, wonderful stories of how God acted in our lives, how God acted in our friends’ lives, how God has acted throughout time, and every one of those stories needs to be true, vetted for accuracy, unexaggerated, and told with passion, in earnest, and with a solid look into our friend’s eyes so that they will know that as far as we are concerned, God acted for us and saved us once, or twice, or three times.
We have to truly be witnesses of the good that God and Christ have done in our lives. Through our true stories, Christ’s body will walk once again on earth as He appears in the other person’s mind when you tell that story and they hear and imagine what happened to you that night you prayed for help. And so you need to tell many people - a dozen, twenty, fifty people - the stories about what God has done for you so that you will become good at telling the story for the one time it saves another persons’ eternal soul and sets the angels singing praises in Heaven.
And so, with your help and the stories you tell, your friend can reluctantly clear the third barrier, the tall, razor-wire fence labeled “God is no help”, for you will have provided a balloon labeled “Look what God did for Me!”
And then, standing before them is the fourth and final barrier, the great final barrier of excuses, the barrier of fear, the barrier of taking a few more days to think about it, the barrier of procrastination, the barrier of thinking there is no hurry. It is like an obstacle course filled with rings and jungle gyms and robe ladders and zip lines and trees to climb and concrete tubes to crawl through. And yet, you must help them to get through this obstacle course. As Jesus said,
34 “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you suddenly like a trap. 35 For it will come on all those who live on the face of the whole earth. 36 Be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man.”
You know when a person is ready to believe when they begin asking you detailed questions about your faith, about God, and about Christian ideas. When someone asks you to explain how the world was created in seven days – that person is ready to believe in God. When someone says they can’t believe in a God that would order the killing of innocent women and children, your friend is ready to become a Christian. When someone asks whether or not you think that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, you have someone who desperately wants to believe and find the answers to all their questions.
Our natural tendency is to become defensive, to cut and run, to get angry with them. But that’s because we think they are attacking us. They may look like they are attacking, it may feel to you like they are attacking, but that isn’t what is happening. What’s happening in their mind is very subtle, and it may be happening in some of your minds here today. Here is what is happening:
Every person understands deep down in their heart, perhaps below their conscious mind that believing in God has real consequences in our lives. You see, if we say we don’t believe in God, that means that we are the little-g god of our Universe. We are completely in control, we don’t have to listen to our mothers and fathers, we don’t have to do things we don’t want to do, and we get to stay up late, eat ice cream, and watch anything we want to watch on TV.
But if we accept that God exists, we believe that there is a price to be paid. That price we believe is that we owe God a debt for creating us, and if we owe God that debt, then we believe we will have to change our daily actions in some way. The changes we think we will have to make depend completely upon who we are and what we are doing that is in rebellion to our view of what God desires of us. For example, we may have grown up with the idea that Christians don’t drink, we like to drink, and therefore we believe that if we become Christians we’ll have to stop drinking. Or we may believe that being intimate outside of marriage is wrong, but we do it and we like doing it, and we are afraid that God will call us on the carpet for this. Or perhaps we just like sleeping in on Sunday mornings and we’re afraid that accepting God means we have to get out of bed early on Sunday mornings. It can be as simple as that.
The real problem, you see, is that we want to be in control of our Universe – our entire Universe – and we don’t even like the idea that a God may exist who has the right to tell us what to do and the power to make us behave. And so we rebel and we offer up all sorts of excuses which keep us from coming to God, even though we know that we need God and we know that God will help us. And we really have a hard time believing that the real price has been paid, and Christianity truly is the gateway to freedom. But the price has been paid by Jesus Christ two thousand years ago and our freedom is there waiting for us to pick it up out of God's metaphorical hands. But we still think we owe a debt.
And so we ask about whether or not Ezekiel saw aliens when he saw the wheels in the sky and we ask if a whale could actually have swallowed Jonah, and we ask if Jesus could actually have been a Hindu holy man who was misunderstood and we look like a fish on a hook slowly being reeled in, but we fight, we fight, we fight every foot.
I have most of the answers to most of these questions that people pose and probably fifty more, and I’ll be available to answer questions, any questions you might have because I had to have most of them answered myself, for I took a LONG time to reel in. Feel free to send me a question in the comments if you want, or via Facebook or email.
You see, you can lead your friend over the obstacles, through the concrete tubes, down the zip lines, and through every one of the barriers he or she wants to put in God’s way. But the simplest way to handle all of these endless questions is to walk around the obstacle course. Be honest with your friend to help them face the truth about how they are avoiding God. Try gently using this general answer for all of these questions:
“My friend, you already know that God exists, you already know you need God. These questions are small questions which my pastor answers all the time. Look around – there is a beautiful world around us, and I’ve told you stories of how I’ve seen God in action. Our world is a world that people are messing up, not God. Would you like to get into a good relationship with God right now and join a group of people who are working to take hate and destruction and death out of the world with God’s help?"
If so, repeat after me the following prayer:
Lord God,
I’ve messed up in this life and now I believe you exist.
Please forgive me, and help me in my life.
I pray this….in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
And so you’ve looked over the wall of Trust, swam the Moat of Need, floated over the fence of God’s Help, and walked around the obstacle course of Delay to reach God on this side.
Are there other reasons we think that God exists and that Christianity is true? Yes, of course. In fact, we have about seven or eight other reasons which I can talk about in some detail, (and do in my book "What do Evangelical Christians Believe?", which is found on Amazon.)
· First of all, there is the consistent testimony of the 66 books of the Bible, written by over 30 authors over a period of 1200 years. All are consistent in their narration of who God is, and the character of God. And we have many reasons we believe that the Bible is a trustworthy account of the life of Jesus Christ and what Jesus said.
· Second, there are the philosophical ideas that all things have a cause, or are set in motion by some other object or some force. Christians refer to God as the First Cause, the Cause that set into motion the Big Bang, the Creation of the Universe.
· Third, there is the moral argument that around the world, no matter where people are located, there is the concept of murder, the concept of marriage, the concept of theft, and many other legal, moral, and ethical concepts. The details differ from place to place, but all groups of people have these concepts, which points to there being some common origin of these concepts. Christians, Jews, and Moslems all point to the origin of these concepts as being the God who contacted Moses in the desert.
· Fourth, there is the logical concept first put forth by St Anselm in the 11th century, that since God is imagined to be a perfect Being, if God were not to exist, this would be imperfect, and a contradiction, so God must exist. An updated version of the argument is that if we admit that in some possible Universe God exists, then God exists in all Universes because God is powerful enough to move between Universes. I know – only a student of logic or math would love this argument, but it works for some people.
· Fifth, the argument from design points out that some things are so complex and require so many parts to have evolved simultaneously to be of any use, such as the eye, or the immune system, or even the existence of human beings on this planet, that a Designer must have manipulated things.
· Sixth, the very existence of consciousness proves that there is something beyond purely natural processes from a chemical soup involved in life, and the fact of our self-awareness means that there is something more to you and me than just the automatic reactions of a couple of pounds of wet cells. In other words, the fact that the mind is more than just the brain implies that there is something beyond physics, chemistry, and biology in this world. Which leads to…
· Seven – If you accept any supernatural idea at all – a mind, a soul, ghosts, life after death, angels, magic, spells, zombies, telepathy, miracles, Beauty, Justice, Righteousness, Mathematics, giving thanks, whatever – then this automatically should lead you to accept the existence of a supernatural Creator God, for the supernatural ideas that you cannot touch and feel and smell and taste and hear such as the perfect 90 degree angles found only in the ideas of geometry cannot come from the strictly natural. They require something supernatural – something found in the world of ideas at least.
But for me and billions of other people, the most compelling reason that I have that God exists is that I have seen God work directly in my life and in the lives of people around me. The number of coincidences has become truly astounding – and remember, my background is in hard science, mathematics, and statistics.
My final thoughts on this are these:
If the Christian God exists, the existence of this most loving yet powerful Being changes absolutely everything for anyone who is truly honest with themselves and sees the world around them. If the Christian God exists, our daily concepts of living and what happens after our physical death need to change and this God needs to become the center of our lives. You can’t really believe in God and then ignore God’s existence daily. But many people try. Are you one of those people?
And if the Christian God does not exist, then a tremendous number of the greatest and best minds of the Western world have fallen for a great scam – people like Galileo, Newton, Lincoln, Washington, Churchill, Harper Lee, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, Larry Niven, dozens of Popes, Augustine of Hippo, Francis of Assisi, Maya Angelou, and millions of others. Humankind would save many resources if you could prove that they were all wrong.
Either way, the question is worth spending some serious time on – it is worth gathering all the evidence to make up your mind about. The question is important!
For when Jesus Christ of Nazareth claimed to be God Himself walking on the earth, He did so repeatedly and the crowed recognized this. This was the reason he was executed – for claiming to be God! And so He was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord of the Universe. The evidence that He existed is far too strong to say He did not exist, and we cannot say that He was just a very wise and good moral teacher, for wise and good moral teachers do not lie about critical claims and lunatics do not make as much sense as Jesus did, and so we left to face His claim to be God Himself – which is exactly the question He wants each of us to face.
So be alert – look around you for signs that God exists and point them out to yourself – and to your friends, your neighbors, and your families as we look forward to the Day of Christ’s Arrival into the world…and each of our lives.
We look around and we see the people around us as the only people in the world that we do trust, so we wonder why people can’t trust Christians. We have to understand why people trust some people and don’t trust others. People trust people who never hurt them, they trust people who love them, they trust people who are truthful, they trust people who have a proven record of being right.
Unfortunately, for many people, they have never met any mature Christians. Oh, it’s easy to find a Christian – just not a mature Christian. You see, most Christians are still in the disciple stage, the learning stage, where they are still hurting people as often as they are helping people, where they are still hating people as often as they are loving people, where they exaggerate things to make a point, and where they repeat things they have heard other immature Christians claim, things which have been shown to be wrong. In short, if there were a truth-in-labeling law for people, most of the people who claim to be Christians walking around in America should instead be labeled as “people learning to be Christians”. And so, our immature Christians often give Christ a bad name. They are like skinny, weak people who our friend begins to climb on, but they are so weak that they wobble and our friend falls to the ground, in worse shape than before they started to climb up and over the wall of trust.
The mature Christians, on the other hand, have worked long and hard at controlling their tongues. They have learned not to complain about others, they have learned to give other people grace, to help others understand the actions of the rude, the hurtful, the mean-spirited, the hypocritical, and they do not fall into these traps themselves. In short, they have practiced becoming holy – set apart for God and God’s purposes. They control what they say about others, and they limit what they claim for Christ, for there are many people who left Christianity when they prayed as a young child for a pet – or a grandmother – and then the pet or Grandma died despite their prayers. The mature Christian knows that God’s will is supreme, and that God may choose to save our loved one – or not – according to God’s purposes, and so mature Christians do not make promises for God which God may not choose to keep.
Mature Christians are never mean-spirited, and the mean spirit can apply to claims about science and other belief systems as well as about specific people. After all, if you believe that rubbing blue mud into your bellybutton on Wednesday mornings is the way to God, you will not trust me if I laugh at you, will you? And so when the immature Christian makes claims about science and scientists that are mocking – or worse yet – completely wrong – it does not help the cause when speaking to a scientist about a Creator God. Mature Christians, you see, are solid, strong, and stable. When another starts to climb on them to see over the wall of trust, they are like rocks of granite – strong, supportive, trustworthy. Are you strong and supportive and trustworthy for your unbelieving friends?
And so the first thing we work upon is to be trustworthy people in front of others. We must develop that trust over the weeks and months and years of a relationship – for example with the dozen people on your list. And this is not in the least bit a deceptive practice, for this is how we are supposed to be as Christians. In fact, we are to pray to become holy. As Paul wrote in I Thessalonians 3:13 “And may he so strengthen your hearts in holiness that you may be blameless before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his saints.“ We are not supposed to pretend to be trustworthy, but we are indeed supposed to be trustworthy people.
To share the Gospel, we must be trustworthy people and we must show love and understanding and joy and wisdom in all we do. What habits do you have that you need to pray for God to remove, that you need to work upon, that you need to destroy from your person so that you will be holy and blameless and trustworthy so that people will see in you the character of the Son of God standing before them? The Holy Spirit will guide you if you will listen to the Spirit. You must grow to the point where they can at least catch a glimpse of Christ shining through your smile, and then they will begin to trust what you say. Lift your friends up and help them to safely cross the Wall of Trust.
The second barrier to seeing God is when a person feels that they have no need for God in their lives. This barrier stands in front of them like a moat filled with crocodiles a hundred yards wide and they don’t want to get wet. For most people, a discussion of God is simply an intellectual exercise. It is a philosophical debate, a question similar to the other questions that will simply not matter in your life such as “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” or “Does life exist on other planets?” or “What is the price of eggs in China this week?” For most people, particularly people who are successful in life, these questions and the question of God’s existence are simply not important, and it doesn’t matter to them what the answer is. And so they can hold a discussion or debate and they believe the answer is meaningless in their lives. And so they will argue with you and simply work to score debating points - the issue never touches them personally. And so they stand on the shore of the moat and politely decline to cross the Moat of Need.
But for some people, the question of God’s existence has become very important. God has lit a fire behind them and that fire pushed them toward the Moat of Need where they must swim - or die on the shore. When you are lying in a hospital bed undergoing chemotherapy for Stage IV cancer, it really matters to you whether or not God exists, because you need to know what will happen to you if the poisons being dripped into your body fail to stop the killer. When your mother or father or child is lying in the hospital bed, you really want to know if God is real, for you want to know if you will see your dying loved one again in a few years. When you lose the career you’ve been working at for a decade or more, and when you have to start all over because of a bad marriage, it really helps to know what we are working for, why we are suffering, whether love is worthwhile.
And millions of people have recently begun to try to answer this question, because it really matters whether the God of Christianity is real, the God of Islam is real, whether they are both real or whether they are both simply pleasant ideas, for ultimately the answer to that question will decide what your actions in today’s world will be – will you follow the teachings of Christ, the teachings of Mohammed, the teachings of those who deny both, or the teachings of those who actually deny both because they claim that both are real? It affects our actions in today’s society.
And so, for your friends, be close enough to your friends - in particular your dozen friends - that you will know when they begin to wonder what is important in this life, whether God exists or not. It is important to be there, ready to speak of God, to help your friend see that the real reason they are so fearful about death is because they don’t know if God exists or not, the real reason they are so frightened about being alone is because they have never felt the presence of God, the real reason they are worried about their money is because they have always depended upon themselves and they have never learned to depend upon God. Help them know that they need help outside themselves, help them to learn to jump into the Moat of Need, for that is the second barrier they need to cross to find God. As David wrote in his psalm: 9 He guides the humble in what is right and teaches them his way. People must get humble before they will look for God! And once they are humbled, they will run across the Moat of Need, running across the backs of the crocodiles to get to the other side!
The third barrier all people must cross is the tall, razor-wire Fence of believing that God is of no help to us in our time of trouble. If you have lost your job, you feel trapped by the Fence of No Help. If your car is being repossessed, you are looking for cash, not a bible study. If you have just been told you have breast cancer, you are looking for a choice surgeon - not a church sanctuary. Yet, as David wrote to God:
2 I trust in you;
do not let me be put to shame,
nor let my enemies triumph over me.
3 No one who hopes in you
will ever be put to shame,
As we know, God is the answer to people’s problems because…God is always the answer to all of our problems. There is something that frees our emotion from the tremendous weight we carry when we turn over our burden to God. Our spirit floats free, our soul rises high, we cry out of the depths and God’s voice comes back – “I’m here and I can handle your problems”, like hooking up the Goodyear blimp to a single concrete block that we can barely carry ourselves, God lifts us up as high over the Fence as we need to be lifted.
But to our friend who doesn’t believe, we are asking the impossible. When you are in a hole, looking at your feet, it is very difficult to see the Goodyear blimp. And so, we have to tell stories, true stories, believable stories, wonderful stories of how God acted in our lives, how God acted in our friends’ lives, how God has acted throughout time, and every one of those stories needs to be true, vetted for accuracy, unexaggerated, and told with passion, in earnest, and with a solid look into our friend’s eyes so that they will know that as far as we are concerned, God acted for us and saved us once, or twice, or three times.
We have to truly be witnesses of the good that God and Christ have done in our lives. Through our true stories, Christ’s body will walk once again on earth as He appears in the other person’s mind when you tell that story and they hear and imagine what happened to you that night you prayed for help. And so you need to tell many people - a dozen, twenty, fifty people - the stories about what God has done for you so that you will become good at telling the story for the one time it saves another persons’ eternal soul and sets the angels singing praises in Heaven.
And so, with your help and the stories you tell, your friend can reluctantly clear the third barrier, the tall, razor-wire fence labeled “God is no help”, for you will have provided a balloon labeled “Look what God did for Me!”
And then, standing before them is the fourth and final barrier, the great final barrier of excuses, the barrier of fear, the barrier of taking a few more days to think about it, the barrier of procrastination, the barrier of thinking there is no hurry. It is like an obstacle course filled with rings and jungle gyms and robe ladders and zip lines and trees to climb and concrete tubes to crawl through. And yet, you must help them to get through this obstacle course. As Jesus said,
34 “Be careful, or your hearts will be weighed down with carousing, drunkenness and the anxieties of life, and that day will close on you suddenly like a trap. 35 For it will come on all those who live on the face of the whole earth. 36 Be always on the watch, and pray that you may be able to escape all that is about to happen, and that you may be able to stand before the Son of Man.”
You know when a person is ready to believe when they begin asking you detailed questions about your faith, about God, and about Christian ideas. When someone asks you to explain how the world was created in seven days – that person is ready to believe in God. When someone says they can’t believe in a God that would order the killing of innocent women and children, your friend is ready to become a Christian. When someone asks whether or not you think that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene, you have someone who desperately wants to believe and find the answers to all their questions.
Our natural tendency is to become defensive, to cut and run, to get angry with them. But that’s because we think they are attacking us. They may look like they are attacking, it may feel to you like they are attacking, but that isn’t what is happening. What’s happening in their mind is very subtle, and it may be happening in some of your minds here today. Here is what is happening:
Every person understands deep down in their heart, perhaps below their conscious mind that believing in God has real consequences in our lives. You see, if we say we don’t believe in God, that means that we are the little-g god of our Universe. We are completely in control, we don’t have to listen to our mothers and fathers, we don’t have to do things we don’t want to do, and we get to stay up late, eat ice cream, and watch anything we want to watch on TV.
But if we accept that God exists, we believe that there is a price to be paid. That price we believe is that we owe God a debt for creating us, and if we owe God that debt, then we believe we will have to change our daily actions in some way. The changes we think we will have to make depend completely upon who we are and what we are doing that is in rebellion to our view of what God desires of us. For example, we may have grown up with the idea that Christians don’t drink, we like to drink, and therefore we believe that if we become Christians we’ll have to stop drinking. Or we may believe that being intimate outside of marriage is wrong, but we do it and we like doing it, and we are afraid that God will call us on the carpet for this. Or perhaps we just like sleeping in on Sunday mornings and we’re afraid that accepting God means we have to get out of bed early on Sunday mornings. It can be as simple as that.
The real problem, you see, is that we want to be in control of our Universe – our entire Universe – and we don’t even like the idea that a God may exist who has the right to tell us what to do and the power to make us behave. And so we rebel and we offer up all sorts of excuses which keep us from coming to God, even though we know that we need God and we know that God will help us. And we really have a hard time believing that the real price has been paid, and Christianity truly is the gateway to freedom. But the price has been paid by Jesus Christ two thousand years ago and our freedom is there waiting for us to pick it up out of God's metaphorical hands. But we still think we owe a debt.
And so we ask about whether or not Ezekiel saw aliens when he saw the wheels in the sky and we ask if a whale could actually have swallowed Jonah, and we ask if Jesus could actually have been a Hindu holy man who was misunderstood and we look like a fish on a hook slowly being reeled in, but we fight, we fight, we fight every foot.
I have most of the answers to most of these questions that people pose and probably fifty more, and I’ll be available to answer questions, any questions you might have because I had to have most of them answered myself, for I took a LONG time to reel in. Feel free to send me a question in the comments if you want, or via Facebook or email.
You see, you can lead your friend over the obstacles, through the concrete tubes, down the zip lines, and through every one of the barriers he or she wants to put in God’s way. But the simplest way to handle all of these endless questions is to walk around the obstacle course. Be honest with your friend to help them face the truth about how they are avoiding God. Try gently using this general answer for all of these questions:
“My friend, you already know that God exists, you already know you need God. These questions are small questions which my pastor answers all the time. Look around – there is a beautiful world around us, and I’ve told you stories of how I’ve seen God in action. Our world is a world that people are messing up, not God. Would you like to get into a good relationship with God right now and join a group of people who are working to take hate and destruction and death out of the world with God’s help?"
If so, repeat after me the following prayer:
Lord God,
I’ve messed up in this life and now I believe you exist.
Please forgive me, and help me in my life.
I pray this….in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
And so you’ve looked over the wall of Trust, swam the Moat of Need, floated over the fence of God’s Help, and walked around the obstacle course of Delay to reach God on this side.
Are there other reasons we think that God exists and that Christianity is true? Yes, of course. In fact, we have about seven or eight other reasons which I can talk about in some detail, (and do in my book "What do Evangelical Christians Believe?", which is found on Amazon.)
· First of all, there is the consistent testimony of the 66 books of the Bible, written by over 30 authors over a period of 1200 years. All are consistent in their narration of who God is, and the character of God. And we have many reasons we believe that the Bible is a trustworthy account of the life of Jesus Christ and what Jesus said.
· Second, there are the philosophical ideas that all things have a cause, or are set in motion by some other object or some force. Christians refer to God as the First Cause, the Cause that set into motion the Big Bang, the Creation of the Universe.
· Third, there is the moral argument that around the world, no matter where people are located, there is the concept of murder, the concept of marriage, the concept of theft, and many other legal, moral, and ethical concepts. The details differ from place to place, but all groups of people have these concepts, which points to there being some common origin of these concepts. Christians, Jews, and Moslems all point to the origin of these concepts as being the God who contacted Moses in the desert.
· Fourth, there is the logical concept first put forth by St Anselm in the 11th century, that since God is imagined to be a perfect Being, if God were not to exist, this would be imperfect, and a contradiction, so God must exist. An updated version of the argument is that if we admit that in some possible Universe God exists, then God exists in all Universes because God is powerful enough to move between Universes. I know – only a student of logic or math would love this argument, but it works for some people.
· Fifth, the argument from design points out that some things are so complex and require so many parts to have evolved simultaneously to be of any use, such as the eye, or the immune system, or even the existence of human beings on this planet, that a Designer must have manipulated things.
· Sixth, the very existence of consciousness proves that there is something beyond purely natural processes from a chemical soup involved in life, and the fact of our self-awareness means that there is something more to you and me than just the automatic reactions of a couple of pounds of wet cells. In other words, the fact that the mind is more than just the brain implies that there is something beyond physics, chemistry, and biology in this world. Which leads to…
· Seven – If you accept any supernatural idea at all – a mind, a soul, ghosts, life after death, angels, magic, spells, zombies, telepathy, miracles, Beauty, Justice, Righteousness, Mathematics, giving thanks, whatever – then this automatically should lead you to accept the existence of a supernatural Creator God, for the supernatural ideas that you cannot touch and feel and smell and taste and hear such as the perfect 90 degree angles found only in the ideas of geometry cannot come from the strictly natural. They require something supernatural – something found in the world of ideas at least.
But for me and billions of other people, the most compelling reason that I have that God exists is that I have seen God work directly in my life and in the lives of people around me. The number of coincidences has become truly astounding – and remember, my background is in hard science, mathematics, and statistics.
My final thoughts on this are these:
If the Christian God exists, the existence of this most loving yet powerful Being changes absolutely everything for anyone who is truly honest with themselves and sees the world around them. If the Christian God exists, our daily concepts of living and what happens after our physical death need to change and this God needs to become the center of our lives. You can’t really believe in God and then ignore God’s existence daily. But many people try. Are you one of those people?
And if the Christian God does not exist, then a tremendous number of the greatest and best minds of the Western world have fallen for a great scam – people like Galileo, Newton, Lincoln, Washington, Churchill, Harper Lee, Blaise Pascal, Rene Descartes, Larry Niven, dozens of Popes, Augustine of Hippo, Francis of Assisi, Maya Angelou, and millions of others. Humankind would save many resources if you could prove that they were all wrong.
Either way, the question is worth spending some serious time on – it is worth gathering all the evidence to make up your mind about. The question is important!
For when Jesus Christ of Nazareth claimed to be God Himself walking on the earth, He did so repeatedly and the crowed recognized this. This was the reason he was executed – for claiming to be God! And so He was either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord of the Universe. The evidence that He existed is far too strong to say He did not exist, and we cannot say that He was just a very wise and good moral teacher, for wise and good moral teachers do not lie about critical claims and lunatics do not make as much sense as Jesus did, and so we left to face His claim to be God Himself – which is exactly the question He wants each of us to face.
So be alert – look around you for signs that God exists and point them out to yourself – and to your friends, your neighbors, and your families as we look forward to the Day of Christ’s Arrival into the world…and each of our lives.
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