Does God Exist?

[00:00:02] Good evening. Good evening. I am really excited to be here tonight. If you don't know me, my name is Lex. I work on staff here at Christchurch. I'm the worship director and it is the joy and the privilege and the honor of my life and I'm really excited for tonight. [00:00:18] We are. [00:00:20] Thanks, guys. [00:00:22] We are in a sermon series on hard questions and doubt. [00:00:29] And tonight we are going to tackle a pretty tough question. [00:00:36] This may be a question that some of us have asked in this room. [00:00:41] And that question is, does God exist? [00:00:47] And if he does, which God should I believe in? [00:00:55] Many of us have probably asked ourselves this question, does God really exist? [00:01:05] I've always been a person who asks a lot of questions. [00:01:09] And when I was a kid, I would exhaust all my questions. I would always want an answer, and no answer would ever feel good enough. [00:01:21] Every answer my parents would give would be followed up with another. But why? [00:01:28] And being a parent myself now, I can understand how exhausting that must have been even now. Sometimes I'll be talking to my mom, and after a long, hard day, I'll be asking her a thousand questions and she'll be like, baby, I love you so much. But, like, my brain can't think anymore. We gotta. Gotta leave it for tomorrow. [00:01:51] And my parents were never, because I said so, parents. And so they always left space for me to ask hard things. [00:02:00] And my curiosity has always been one of my favorite parts about myself. But it's also been a part that has been pretty frustrating. [00:02:10] It's hard for me to believe in things. [00:02:14] It's hard for me to trust things. [00:02:17] And so it's caused a lot of questions in my faith and it's caused a lot of studying. [00:02:30] Sometimes I find myself saying, wait, do I actually believe that? [00:02:38] Like, I'll be listening to a sermon, or I'll be listening to a lecture and I'll hear a pastor say something and I'll have like, an existential crisis. And I'll be like, is that really what I believe? [00:02:50] And I'll kind of like curl in on myself and really dive into, do I believe this? [00:02:56] Is this true? [00:03:01] And so I've absolutely found myself in the position of asking myself, does God exist? [00:03:08] And if he does, which God should I believe in? [00:03:13] Maybe some of you have had the same question. [00:03:16] Maybe you wrestled with God's existence. [00:03:22] Maybe you've said things like, if God was real, then he wouldn't have allowed me to lose my mom. [00:03:31] Or maybe you've said things like, if God was real, then I wouldn't have had to experience Such horrible things and such horrible abuse when I was a child. [00:03:43] I was just a kid. [00:03:46] If God was real, he wouldn't have let me go, wouldn't have let me go through that. [00:03:52] Or maybe you're currently in a situation where you're facing such great suffering and you ask yourself, if God was real, I don't understand why I would be in this position right now. [00:04:08] Or maybe for some of you, you just think I can't intellectually agree with the concept of Jesus resurrecting from the dead. [00:04:19] Maybe you have a thoughtful mind and a gift of intelligence. [00:04:23] Maybe you're well versed in science. [00:04:26] Maybe you have advanced degrees and you just intellectually can't believe. [00:04:33] Or maybe you've looked at the church and the hurt that it's caused. [00:04:39] Maybe you experienced it yourself or someone you love experienced it and you can't believe in a religion that would cause hurt like that. [00:04:52] I get it. [00:04:54] If I knew your story, I wouldn't blame you for feeling the way that you do. [00:05:01] But if this is you tonight, if any of these are you, I want to challenge us a little bit in our thinking. [00:05:10] And some of you are here tonight and you do believe in God and you gave your life to him and you're strong in your faith, but maybe you have someone in your life who isn't. [00:05:25] Maybe it's a close friend, maybe it's your spouse, maybe it's your kid who went away to college and decided to deconstruct their faith and they came home and they left God. They left the church. [00:05:49] Or maybe for you, you love Jesus with all your heart. You're all in and all your friends are in and you're on fire for God. Maybe you got baptized on Sunday and the people around you are just exploding with love. [00:06:02] I hope tonight will make you feel more confident in the God that you serve and the God that you believe in. [00:06:10] Throughout this series, we're going to tackle some tough questions. [00:06:15] I want you to know that this series is for you, whatever stage you're in. [00:06:22] This series is meant to equip us to talk about our faith confidently and to defend it in healthy ways. [00:06:31] This is not a series where we can get more facts and opinions so that we can argue with our families and and shove the Bible in their face. [00:06:39] I urge you, please do not do that, but allow this series to be a tool to kindly and respectfully have conversations with people in a natural way and pray for God to give you opportunities to do so. [00:07:04] And so tonight I want to start by looking at some of the arguments, the proofs for the existence of God, the list is exhaustive. [00:07:18] And there are many, many proofs in every field that you can look. Actually, one of the proofs for God is that there are so many proofs. [00:07:28] And so today I want to start with the first one. I just picked a few that made the most sense to me. [00:07:36] There's many. And I think we all, you know, if you read them, we all kind of appeal to different things. Certain things speak to us more than others. [00:07:46] But these are some of the ones that I really like. [00:07:49] So the first one is called the Kalam cosmological argument. [00:07:53] And it's kind of a word that you forget pretty quickly, but the idea is interesting. [00:08:02] And so in this argument, the first premise says that everything that begins to exist has a cause. [00:08:12] The next premise, the universe began to exist. [00:08:19] Conclusion. [00:08:21] Therefore, the universe has a cause. [00:08:26] So I want to look at the first one, the first premise. [00:08:30] Everything that begins to exist has a cause. [00:08:34] Let's look at some things that began to exist. [00:08:39] The first one's pretty easy. Let's just look at you, for example, yourself. [00:08:44] At some point, you began to exist. [00:08:48] The conversation of conception could be for a different time, maybe a marriage sermon or something, but at some point, nevertheless, you began to exist. [00:09:01] And lost my notes. I'm sorry. [00:09:08] All right, let's look at another one. [00:09:11] Let's think about a car. [00:09:15] At some point, your car began to exist. [00:09:19] It didn't just pop out of thin air. [00:09:23] It didn't just show up all of a sudden one day put together perfectly, it began to exist. [00:09:32] There is an architect behind it, a creat, a person who knows the right parts and measurements, a person who knows how to assemble it so that it can operate it, has a cause. [00:09:52] Premise two says the universe began to exist. [00:09:57] We don't know exactly how God breathed the universe into existence. [00:10:05] But one scientific theory, and it is just a theory that most of us are probably familiar with, is the Big Bang. [00:10:13] The Big Bang is essentially a cosmic explosion that marked the beginning of the universe. [00:10:19] And science universally agrees that at some point the universe began to exist. [00:10:29] Whether it was from the Big Bang or another scientific theory. [00:10:35] Scientific research concludes that there was a beginning. [00:10:41] Whether you are a believer, whether you are atheist, whether you are agnostic. [00:10:47] Universally, science agrees that all of this had a start, that it's not infinite. [00:10:58] But the problem for the atheist is that they have to believe in one miracle. [00:11:07] They have to believe in one miracle about the Big Bang, that everything that we see today, that the Universe Full of one, let me get this right. Full of 200 billion trillion stars. [00:11:30] I don't even know what that number means. [00:11:33] 2 trillion galaxies, 100 sextillion planets. [00:11:40] And this is just the observable universe. [00:11:44] That all of those things, everything that we can observe, all life as we know it, all of creation, all of the universe, all of existence, they have to believe and put their faith and adhere to the theory that all of that came from nothing. [00:12:04] The Big Bang marks the beginning of time. [00:12:08] And the theory states that there was nothing before it. [00:12:16] And if someone says there was something before it, then they would have to say that nothing created that something that came before the Big Bang. And if something came before that, then eventually it leads back to nothing creating something. [00:12:36] Because everything that begins to exist has a cause. [00:12:41] And at some point, the universe began to exist. [00:12:47] We have to conclude that something caused the universe to exist. [00:12:52] Namely, God. [00:12:55] Genesis 1:1 tells us that in the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. [00:13:03] And this idea that nothing created everything. [00:13:13] This idea that nothing. And by nothing, I mean nothing. I don't mean darkness, I don't mean emptiness, I don't mean black space. I mean nothing. [00:13:25] The kind of nothing your brain can't really even comprehend. [00:13:29] That nothing created the universe as we know it. [00:13:37] That feels a lot harder for me to believe than God, the infinite, eternal, everlasting Creator, designed all that we see today. [00:13:57] Let's look at another argument. [00:14:00] This one's called the fine tuning argument. [00:14:04] You guys with me? Sorry. This is a lot of science and stuff. [00:14:10] This argument says that there are various constants in the universe. [00:14:18] There are scientific and mathematical equations that the universe must obey in order for life to exist as we know it. [00:14:28] So things like the strength of gravity, the parameters for the strength of gravity have to be so incredibly narrow for us to exist in the way that we do. [00:14:44] If gravity was to increase just by the smallest fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a hair of a percentage of a fraction, increase just the smallest bit, the smallest bit, that is. It's almost too hard to calculate. [00:14:59] If it were to increase just a little bit, then we would implode in on ourselves. [00:15:10] And if it were to decrease, we would forever expand outwardly. [00:15:17] Other constants are like the strength of the strong and weak nuclear forces, the expansion rate of the universe, the distance of the sun and the planets in relation to one another, the distance of the moon from the Earth, the distribution of matter and antimatter in the early universe. And all of these things are scientific constants that are kind of hard to Understand, especially for me. [00:15:45] But what I do know is that these constants are tuned so perfectly to each other that all of these things, if just one of them, is off by the smallest percentage. You can imagine that life does not exist as we know it. [00:16:08] The probability of a universe like ours existing without a creator is so incredibly low. [00:16:17] The chance of all of this happening is unfathomably, impossibly, improbable. [00:16:27] It's so breathtakingly precise. [00:16:31] The laws of nature have to be just right in order for life to occur. [00:16:36] If you didn't have gravity, then matter would never clump together and the planets and the stars never would have been formed. [00:16:45] If you didn't have the strong nuclear force, then all you would have is protons that would repel each other, and you couldn't have any atoms greater than hydrogen. Our universe would just be hydrogen. [00:16:56] The expansion rate of the universe, which is life permitting, has to be calculated to 10 to the 120th power, which is nearly incalculable from galaxies and stars down to atoms and subatomic particles. [00:17:15] The structure of the universe is determined by these numbers. [00:17:20] And wherever physicists look, they see examples of fine tuning. [00:17:26] It is so much more possible that life doesn't exist than for life too exist. [00:17:38] Every single thing that we see and know, all of the order, all that we see in nature, in science and math, they're all so meticulously fine tuned to each other. [00:17:51] Everything operating so beautifully and perfectly together that if even one thing were out of place, life would not be a possibility. [00:18:01] And all of this points to a creator. [00:18:07] Someone had to have finely tuned the universe. [00:18:14] I have a third argument, but I think I'm running out of time. So if you are interested in hearing more about this discussion, we are going to have some follow up podcasts on our Grow Tension podcast with Doc. And he's much smarter than I am, and so he can say things in a lot more interesting ways. So if you're interested in more of these, I encourage you to watch that. We'll be putting it out soon. [00:18:44] All right, I want to look at the last argument because these arguments are all very fascinating and they stretch our mind and they ask us to think deeper than we normally do. [00:19:00] But the problem with these arguments is that they only get us to the conclusion that God exists. [00:19:06] They don't tell us which God it is. [00:19:10] Is it the God of the Islamic faith, Allah? [00:19:14] Is it Brahma of the Hindu faith? Is it the universe itself? Is the universe God? [00:19:23] There's so many things to say about other religions. [00:19:27] And whole degrees, you can get understanding each one. [00:19:31] But the truth is only one can be true. [00:19:38] Please do not believe the lie that says, this is your truth, this is my truth, and this is their truth. [00:19:50] The lie that says this is true for you, but this is true for me. [00:19:54] There's no such thing. [00:19:57] There is such a thing as absolute truth, because if I say that two plus two equals five and you say two plus two equals four, only one of us are right. [00:20:15] Like, I can believe that it equals five, but that doesn't mean that it's true. [00:20:21] And oftentimes I'll hear the argument that every religion is essentially worshiping the same God and they're just calling him a different name. [00:20:30] But Jesus says, if you hate me, then you hate my father. [00:20:37] Every religion worshiping the same God with a different name, because we know that Jesus Christ is the name above every name. [00:20:48] They're not all the same. [00:20:51] The name matters. [00:20:53] The name is important. [00:20:55] If we ask things to the Father in Jesus name, our prayers will be answered. [00:21:02] John 14:6. Jesus says that he is the way, the truth, and the life. [00:21:07] And Jesus claims to be the truth. [00:21:13] And I've heard people say that it's arrogant to say your religion is the only true religion, but I would argue that it's no more arrogant than saying that all religions are equal. [00:21:24] We're both making truth claims. [00:21:27] We're both exclusivists, but in our own ways. [00:21:32] If someone believes that we have to agree that everyone has their own truth and there's no such thing as one absolute truth, then that mindset is no more exclusivist than claiming that there is one truth. [00:21:48] We're all making truth claims. We're all exclusivists in our opinions, just in different ways. [00:21:56] So tonight I want to spend most of our time in the last argument, the Jesus argument, because he claimed to be the truth. [00:22:07] I don't have time to look at all the other gods tonight. [00:22:11] But if Jesus claimed to be the truth and he's telling the truth, then he is the only true God. [00:22:22] And Lee Strobel is a former atheist. He got his undergrad in investigative journalism and his master's in law from Yale Law School. [00:22:32] And after about eight years into his marriage with Leslie, she started having interest in Christianity. [00:22:42] She became friends with a woman at work, and she invited her to church and to Bible studies. And Leslie was just really very fascinated in Christ and fascinated in His Word. [00:22:56] And so eventually she started going to church and she gave her life to Christ. [00:23:03] And Lee and Leslie were both Atheists when they got married, and it had been a big part of their identity. [00:23:09] Lee was the legal editor of the Chicago Tribune. He was an incredibly intelligent man who believed that God didn't create humanity, but humanity created God because we were afraid of death, and we wanted to make up a story that would make us feel better about our eventual fate. [00:23:32] And Lee was very uncomfortable in his wife's newly professed faith. [00:23:39] He stated that he wanted the old Leslie back. [00:23:43] He wanted it back to the way that it was before. [00:23:47] And so he decides to prove that Christianity is false so that he can convince his wife that she's following a lie. [00:23:57] He thought it would take him a few months to find enough evidence and proof to prove to her that it's not true. [00:24:05] But it ended up taking him a lot longer than he expected. [00:24:10] And so he investigated Christianity like any good journalist would. [00:24:15] And he used techniques that he was taught to study ancient text. [00:24:20] And he asked himself the question, is this telling me the truth? [00:24:29] Are these Gospel writers reliable? [00:24:34] And after two years of investigating, he, like any good lawyer, came to a verdict. [00:24:44] And like many of us have done, Lee got down on his hands and knees and he cried out to God. [00:24:56] And for the first time, he stopped relying on his logic. [00:25:02] He stopped relying on his reason. [00:25:05] And he allowed God to personally affect him. [00:25:12] He allowed space for a relationship with God. [00:25:16] And our God is so kind. [00:25:20] He's so generous. [00:25:22] He treats us so much better than we deserve, that even when we doubt and even when we don't believe, and even when we, like the prodigal son, drift away from him. [00:25:36] He meets us so gently, so lovingly, and he calls us home to him. [00:25:45] You see, only God can reveal himself. [00:25:51] We can't figure God out. [00:25:55] We can't know God through our logic and our reason. [00:26:00] Knowing him is a gift of the Holy Spirit. [00:26:05] And the moment we finally understand, we finally believe that moment is a gift from God. [00:26:15] And that day, Lee accepted the gift and he gave his life to Christ. [00:26:20] And he's been doing incredible ministry ever since. [00:26:24] And tonight I want to look at his verdict. [00:26:29] I want to look at what he concluded, because he looked at the Gospels, which are the first four books in the New Testament. [00:26:40] You see, the Bible isn't just one book. [00:26:44] It's more like a library of 66 books. [00:26:48] And today we conveniently have the whole collection placed together in a nice binding. [00:26:55] And it's tidy and put together and complete. [00:26:58] But it wasn't always like this. [00:27:02] You see, the Bible consists of the Old and New Testament, and it's made up of 66 books written over 600 years across three continents by over 40 authors in three languages. Greek, Hebrew, and the minor language of Aramaic. [00:27:25] And there are different versions and there are different translations. [00:27:29] And so sometimes that can feel confusing. [00:27:33] I'll hear people often say that the Bible is the world's oldest game of telephone. [00:27:38] You know, that game where like I tell her a word and then she tells her a word and then she tells her that same word and then she tells him, and so on and so forth and. And by the time it gets to the end, the word is so much different than what I said. [00:27:54] And people think that's how the Bible works. [00:27:58] They think that the Greek was translated into Latin and then Latin got phased out and it was translated into, let's say, German, and then German was translated into English. [00:28:15] But that's not how it happened. [00:28:18] Wesley Huff, who is a Bible historian, studies ancient copies of the books in the Bible. And he works on 2nd century papyrus, which is just the material that was used to write on in the time of Jesus. [00:28:32] And this is a second century copy of the Gospel of John. It's called p66. [00:28:39] It's among the earliest known manuscripts of the Gospel of John. [00:28:43] And its proximity to the original writings in the first century make it crucial for reconstructing the text and understanding how it was transmitted. [00:28:51] And if we look at P66, we see this. [00:28:55] This is the literal translation from the Greek that you see here into our modern day English. I'm sorry, that's kind of hard to read. I'll read it for you. [00:29:05] In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made. [00:29:19] And if you have an ESV version of your Bible and you're reading John 1:1, it will look exactly the same as this. [00:29:30] You see, the Bible is not a game of telephone. [00:29:33] It's a single step from the original language into our language. [00:29:38] It's not a web of translations getting passed down and interpreted wrong. It's directly from the original language into what we're reading today in our Bible. [00:29:51] Christians in the second century that were reading on this old papyrus in Greek were reading the same thing that we're reading today. [00:30:02] And so Lee Strobel, he looked at these books, specifically the Gospels, right at the beginning of the New Testament. [00:30:10] Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. [00:30:14] The life and ministry, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. [00:30:21] And he came up with four categories of evidence. [00:30:25] They all start with E. [00:30:27] So that makes it a little bit easier to remember. The first one is execution. [00:30:33] Some people say that Christ didn't actually resurrect from the dead because he didn't actually die that day on the cross. [00:30:39] They say it was a cover up so that it would look like he rose from the dead. [00:30:45] So let's look at it. [00:30:48] We read in all four gospels about the crucifixion of Jesus, the end of Christ's life where he was brutally beaten, mocked, spit on, humiliated, whipped, beaten, and being nailed to a cross by his hands and feet. [00:31:13] And the way a cross worked is that when you were nailed, you were hanging. [00:31:21] And the only way for you to get breath was for you to push up on those wounds in your hands and feet, take your breath and fall back down. [00:31:33] Which would mean that every single breath was indescribably painful. [00:31:41] And the Roman soldiers knew how to do their job. [00:31:45] Crucifixion was an ugly form of execution. [00:31:51] It was saved for the lowest of the low. [00:31:55] The Romans knew how to do it. [00:31:58] Modern medical interpretation indicates that Jesus was dead when he was taken down from the cross. [00:32:05] A group of doctors actually studied the crucifixion and they concluded that Jesus cause of death was drowning in his own blood. [00:32:16] We find outside sources, texts written outside of the Bible that confirm the death of Jesus. [00:32:23] Sources such as Josephus, that tells us that Jesus died under Pontius Pilate in Judea between AD 26 and AD 36. [00:32:34] Not only do outside sources confirm the death of Christ, but scholarship at large, even atheist scholarship, pretty universally agrees that Jesus Christ was a real person who at the very least they admit died by crucifixion. [00:32:53] And so Lee's first conclusion is that Jesus did in fact die and was executed on the cross that day. [00:33:01] His second conclusion is early, early testimony. [00:33:07] The accounts of Jesus life that we find in the Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were written 30 to 57 years after Christ's death. [00:33:18] To put this into context, the information we have on Alexander the Great was written 400 years after he died. [00:33:30] Many of us have learned about Alexander the Great. I'm sure we recognize the name in history class. [00:33:38] And we've never questioned, hey, this probably isn't history because it was written 400 years after he died. [00:33:45] Because that's just how ancient biographies worked. [00:33:49] And yet the information we have about Jesus is 30 to 57 years after he died. [00:33:58] And it was from eyewitnesses or people that got their information from eyewitnesses. [00:34:04] Now I often hear the argument that we can't trust the Gospels because we don't have any original sources, we don't have any original documents. [00:34:13] But the truth is we have very, very, very little original documents for sources not only in the Bible, but outside the Bible. [00:34:22] In fact, this blew my mind. [00:34:25] We do not have any original prints of Shakespeare's plays, the plays that we memorized in high school. [00:34:36] We don't have any original documents of the works of Shakespeare, only copies. And Shakespeare wrote his plays 1500 years after the death of Christ. [00:34:47] Not only that, but it was extremely rare in the time of Jesus to have for anybody to have a biography written about them. [00:34:56] So for us to have four accounts of the life of Christ is such abundant information for that time. [00:35:05] Tiberius, who was the emperor during the life of Jesus, has the same amount of biographies that Jesus has. [00:35:14] Tiberius, who had extravagant wealth and extravagant means, has four accounts of his life just like Jesus. [00:35:24] Why, this would have been unheard of. For someone of Jesus social status to have such a large library of information written about his ministry and his work. [00:35:40] It was expensive. [00:35:42] The ancient world was. [00:35:44] The majority were illiterate. [00:35:47] Why are they spending the time? [00:35:50] Why does Jesus have as many writings as royalty? [00:35:55] There has to be something that happened that first Easter morning that made his life worthy of giving an account for the Gospel of Luke starts by saying many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us. [00:36:18] Luke is telling his readers, many have undertaken the task of writing all of this down. [00:36:27] And Luke didn't know that the Bible would look like it does today. He didn't know that he would be in this nice binding. He didn't know he was writing this Bible that we call it. [00:36:41] He was writing what actually happened. [00:36:45] He was giving an account based off of eyewitness testimony. [00:36:51] Similarly, in the book of John, John writes, but these are written so that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name, these Gospel writers are writing historical facts. [00:37:09] John was an eyewitness to the life of Christ and he's writing this so that we may believe. [00:37:17] His third conclusion was that the tomb was empty. [00:37:27] We can read in the Gospel of Matthew that Jesus tomb was guarded closely. [00:37:34] Look. [00:37:35] The next day which followed the preparation day, the chief priests and the Pharisees gathered before Pilate and said, sir, remember, we remember that while this deceiver, they're talking about Jesus. That while this deceiver was still alive. He said, after three days I will rise again. [00:37:53] So give the orders that the tomb be made secure until the third day. [00:37:59] Otherwise, Carrie, you can hit the next. [00:38:03] Otherwise his disciples may come, steal him and tell people, you can keep going. He has been raised from the dead. And the last deception will be worse than the first. [00:38:15] Take guards. Pilate told them, go and make it as secure as you know how. [00:38:21] They went and secured the tomb by setting a seal on the stone and placing the guards. [00:38:27] And so we can see that the tomb was sealed and guarded. [00:38:34] The opponents of Jesus even conceded to the tomb being empty. [00:38:39] The enemies of Jesus said that the tomb was empty. If we skip down a little bit further, in Matthew, we read that the soldiers were bribed to lie about how the tomb became empty. [00:38:51] It says as they were on their way, some of the guards came into the city and reported to the chief priests that everything had happened. [00:38:58] After the priests had assembled with the elders and agreed on a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money and told them, say this, his disciple came during the night and stole him. Talking about Jesus while we were sleeping. [00:39:16] If this reaches the governor's ears, we will deal with him and keep you out of trouble. They took the money and did as they were instructed. And the story has been spread among the Jewish people to this day. [00:39:31] Similarly, the people that found the tomb empty were two women, Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of James. [00:39:44] And in ancient times, a woman's testimony was considered to be invalid. [00:39:49] So to put this in the Bible, that two women found Jesus tomb empty would actually have. [00:39:55] It would have weakened the validity of the truth. [00:40:01] But what happened is that they put it in there because that's actually how it went down. [00:40:12] The Gospel writers are giving us historical facts because both the followers and the enemies of Jesus conceded to the fact that the tomb was empty. [00:40:23] The last conclusion, eyewitnesses. [00:40:27] We read in First Corinthians that he appeared to over 500. This is talking about Jesus after he rose from the dead. That Jesus appeared to over 500 brothers and sisters at one time. And most of them are still alive, but some have fallen asleep. [00:40:47] Paul makes a point to say that most of These people, these 500 that saw Christ after he rose from the dead, that they're still alive. [00:40:59] They could have gone and asked, hey, Paul, you said that these 500 people saw the resurrected Christ. [00:41:09] Hey guys, Paul said that you saw the resurrected Christ. Is that true? [00:41:16] 500 is not a small number. [00:41:18] That's a lot of people that you could fact check with. [00:41:22] Why would he say that if it wasn't true? [00:41:28] Even more than the eyewitnesses we find people that were killed or persecuted for their faith in Jesus. [00:41:34] We read in the book of Acts that Stephen, a man full of faith, a man who was preaching, a man who believed that the Lord Jesus was his Messiah, was killed for his convictions. [00:41:45] Then later in Acts, we read that James, the brother of John, was killed violently by Herod, that Peter was arrested and thrown in prison. [00:41:55] We also know that John was exiled. And all of these men faced serious affliction for their faith. [00:42:05] Church. You don't die for what you know to be a lie. [00:42:11] They would have caved if this was all just some big story that they concocted. If this was all just some big lie so that they can. [00:42:20] I don't even know why they would lie about it. [00:42:26] If this was just all a story. When it came down to the wire, they would have caved. They would have not given their life for it. [00:42:40] And the Bible is no less than all of these things, but it is so much more. [00:42:52] The truth. [00:42:53] And all this evidence and all these proofs and all this logic and all of this history is the only part of the story. [00:43:04] In Matthew 16, we find a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples. [00:43:10] It goes like this. [00:43:11] When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, who do people say that the Son of man is talking about himself? [00:43:20] They replied. Some say John the Baptist, others Elijah. Still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets. [00:43:28] But you, he asked them, who do you say that I am? [00:43:36] He starts by asking the question, who do other people say I am? [00:43:43] We probably know quite a bit about who other people say Jesus is. [00:43:55] To some, he's no more than a great teacher, no greater than Plato or Aristotle. [00:44:04] To others, he's a figure that stands for a belief system riddled with hypocrisy, hate, racism and oppression. [00:44:16] But then Jesus asks, who do you say I am? [00:44:24] And I want to ask you tonight, who is Jesus to you? [00:44:30] Is he just a great teacher? [00:44:35] Is he a myth made up by man? [00:44:41] Or is he who he claimed to be? [00:44:44] He's God in human form, but you've never really taken him seriously before. [00:44:53] You've never given your life to him. [00:44:57] Maybe for you, you've agreed with each premise that I've laid out tonight. [00:45:01] You believe in God. You believe that Jesus is the truth, but he's just not first in your life. [00:45:09] He's not seated at the throne. [00:45:14] He's not someone you talk to when you make decisions. [00:45:17] He's not someone that you say yes to. [00:45:20] He's not someone that you listen to. [00:45:22] He's just not a part of your life. [00:45:28] Can I appeal to you for a minute? From wherever you're sitting, Jesus Christ is more than a historical figure. [00:45:39] He's more than a great teacher. [00:45:42] He is our Lord and Savior. [00:45:46] And that day on the cross he took our sin upon himself and died in our place. [00:45:56] The Bible says that the wages of sin is death. [00:46:00] And all of the ugly parts about ourself, all the things that we've done, all the things that it hurts too bad to even think about, the lies, the cheating, the deceit, the insults we've thrown at our spouses, the hurtful names we've called, the people that we love the most, all the wrong that we've done. Jesus took the punishment and he paid the price. [00:46:24] Putting your faith in Jesus means that you do not have to do this life alone anymore. [00:46:31] I was reading in the Bible yesterday, spending time with God and I was reminded of the words of Jesus that say, you did not choose me, but I chose you. [00:46:45] Knowing God, understanding God is a beautiful, beautiful gift from the Holy Spirit and church. There is no God in any religion that is anything like our God. [00:46:59] There's no God who offers this great sacrifice. [00:47:03] There's no God who offers Himself as the payment. [00:47:07] The gods and the other religions require merit based faith. You have to earn your way to heaven. [00:47:14] You have to follow every rule strictly and everything relies on you and what you can do. [00:47:20] Everything depends on our works. And we have to earn our way to God. We have to reach the highest level. But our God, Yahweh, El Shaddai, Adonai, Abba. Father, our God did the work. [00:47:41] We don't earn our way to him because he came down to us. [00:47:46] We don't get to him through merit. We get to him through Jesus. [00:47:50] And our God stepped down from heaven into our world and lived a perfect life and died the death that we deserve. Because he loves us and he wants relationship with us. [00:48:04] And his name is the name above every name. [00:48:09] When I ask myself the question, who do I say Jesus is? [00:48:15] Jesus is the one who found me when I was a little girl and I didn't have any friends. [00:48:23] And he said, I'll be your friend. [00:48:28] Jesus is the one who held me when my marriage was facing adversity. [00:48:33] And he said, you and Jer aren't the only ones inside this covenant. I'm here and if I'm here, all things are possible. [00:48:43] Jesus is the one who found my husband when he was stuck in his addiction. [00:48:48] And he said, I'm the One who frees. I'm the one who breaks the chains of addiction and he freed him from a ten year battle. Amen. Jesus is the One who called me to ministry, informed my character, and continues to grow me into a better woman each day. [00:49:03] Jesus is the One who gave me my beautiful baby girl and my wonderful family who are the very best parts of my life. Jesus is my everything. [00:49:13] He's the Lord of my life and he's so, so worthy of our praise. [00:49:22] Pray. [00:49:24] Dear Lord, I pray that you would give us the gift of knowing you. [00:49:35] Lord, we understand that we can't ration our way into knowing youg. We can't logically understand who youo are, because if we could, you wouldn't be worthy of our worship. You are so much greater. You are so much more incomprehensible than we can ever understand, Lord. And so just knowing the pieces of you that we do, we're grateful for it. Thank you for the gift. [00:50:01] Thank you that we get to study you. Thank you that we get to know you. Thank you that we get your word. [00:50:08] So Father, tonight I just pray that you would open the eyes of our heart that we could worship you for who you are. [00:50:18] Because you are so, so, so worthy to be praised. [00:50:22] We give you all the glory, all the honor. [00:50:26] It's in your good Son's name I pray. Amen.