Youth & Outreach Director, Hunter Newton, preached this message on May 5, 2024.
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Audio Transcript
Of passages today. So just, just buckle up and we’ll have it on the screen. We’ll have it in your bulletin as well. Let me just go ahead and jump right in. If there is no God, then man and the universe are doomed.
Like prisoners condemned to death, we await our unavoidable execution. If there is no God and there is no immortality. And what is a consequence of this? That means that life itself is absurd. It means that the life we have is without ultimate significance, value, or purpose.
What a quote. To start Graduate Sunday. This is from William Lane Craig. He’s a Christian apologist. And as we think about Graduate Sunday, of course, it’s geared towards them.
What am I praying specifically? What do these two need to hear? But what do we need here as a congregation? It’s kind of our chance to do that. And so we’re looking at this idea that this faith we have is reasonable.
This faith we have makes sense. This faith we have is intellectually satisfying, but it’s also logical, too. And that’s what we’re looking at today. That’s where we’re going. And so here at Lake Wisconsin, we’re used to a steady diet of expository preaching.
And when I say that, I mean that we look at a text as we’re going through, of course, the book of Luke, we’re hitting pause in that for just this week. But we look at a passage of scripture and try to pull the meaning of. We try to expose it. We try to pull, okay, this is what this text means in its context, according to the grammar, history, all that sort of good stuff. And we’re used to that.
And that’s like, good. That’s like the meat and potatoes. This Sunday is kind of different. This Sunday is. We’re looking at just topical, more so, making kind of an argument like, what does the Bible say about our faith?
What does the Bible say? Like, how is it defendable? That’s where we’re going this morning. And so it’s just a little bit different if you came and you’re a guest. This is not what we normally do.
But also, I think it’s going to be still good and hopefully really helpful for us. That being said, we’re going to be jumping to a number of different texts to kind of prove our main point that this faith is reasonable. Some four points that’ll help us do that. We’ll look at how creation testifies to this. We’ll look at how the moral law testifies to this.
We’ll look at how prophecy testifies to this and we’ll look at how Jesus testifies. So let’s go ahead and let’s look at our first point. Create how creation testifies to the reasonableness of this faith. Genesis. We’ll look at Genesis 1:1:2 and then Psalm 19:1.
And my tip for you is to keep up on the screen or keep up in your bulletin if you want to flip to the passages with us. Genesis 1:1:2. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. The darkness covered the surface of the watery depths, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters.
Psalm 19:1. The heavens declare the glory of God and the expanse proclaims the work of his hands. So we’re looking at how this creation work, each of these points. How does creation point to our good great God? The way it’s going to work for each of these points is I’m going to give you kind of the gist, like we’re going to look at these relevant pastures and there’s a lot more, but these are some of the ones that most plainly see, at least hopefully help us most plainly see and how this shows to pointing our main point.
So if we start with creation, I think it makes sense to start there because no God who. If no God who didn’t make everything. So that’s bad grammar, good theology, like is worth following. If your God didn’t make everything, why do you care what he or she says? Why do you care about what they think?
If your God didn’t make everything, then they’re not really a God. Okay? They’re not much different than you and I. And we see different evidences of this through different religions throughout. And so this is one powerful, right, true testimony that our God, if he really is God, if this faith is reasonable, had to be Creator.
He had to make everything. And cause that’s the only reason he’s worth following. Because the God who didn’t make everything is not. Is not worth following. He’s not much of a God.
He’s not certainly not very transcendent. That’s just like a churchy word of saying, like outside of more important, that kind of thing. And some will be quick to say, yeah, but that’s great. But hasn’t creation been disproven by science several times over? No, not even the closest.
And that’s something that makes me sad is when people think that that’s a settled science, because it certainly isn’t. Creation has not been disproven by Science. And I’m going to show you just a few different ways we can know that to be true. Because I think the simplest and perhaps most powerful truth of creation, certainly for apologetics, is that everything cannot come from nothing. And it makes far more sense that there is an uncaused cause that’s the start of everything than everything coming from nothing.
That’s just not how it works. We can sit here and say, and we can sit here for a long, long time. And I. If you’re like me, you like cheeseburgers. And the McDonald’s app is your best friend, but also your worst nightmare at the same time.
Because it’s dollar cheeseburgers. I know it’s a great deal. You don’t have to tell me twice. But we can sit here. I mean, man, it’s like they just get me.
They know. But anyways, we can sit here for a long time and I can stare at that pew and you and I could. We could have started this in first service and we can keep going until Jesus returns. And as long as we sit here, two pieces of bun, a slab of meat, and a piece of cheese is not going to manifest. It’s just not going to happen.
That’s not how that works. Why then are we often so content to put our faith in just because somebody told us that’s how it works? When we’ve known and experienced that’s not how things happen. It makes far more sense for a God to have always existed and to be the starting point of everything than just sit and say that everything we need to know for everything could come from absolutely nothing. That’s not how that happens.
It’s mathematically impossible.
And we look at how the universe is set up, how it works. Everything is still expanding. We know that stars in our sky are frozen further away now than when the world was created. And that makes sense compared when we think about the fact that God spoke it into existence. If there was a centrality to everything, and it would all be coming out from him.
He spoke it. God spoke the universe, and it came from him. It makes sense. And then everything would still look like it’s expanding. Everything cannot come from nothing.
We look at something like the human brain or, or the eyeball. They couldn’t just occur by random chance. It’s kind of a silly thing. But look at the eyeball. If the eyeball was even just a fraction off, we would have a lot more deaths and we’d have a lot more people running into things.
Like, we certainly wouldn’t get in our Cars, like the human eyeball, is so wonderfully complex. That does not happen by random chance.
Let this be a comfort to you friends, to know that a God who has always existed decided to create the universe out of an overflow of love within himself. This is one of the wonderful truths about the Trinity, because he’s one being, right? Three persons. And so out of an overflow of the love that the Father had for His Son, he decided to create everything to give to him. It says that Jesus is the heir of all creation, and he did that by the power of his Spirit.
That’s wonderful. It makes far more sense that he decided to do that for his son that he loved, then everything just happening out of nothing. And science will tell us that’s not how that works either. So let this be a comfort when we look, when we doubt, to look at creation, something as wonderful as the stars in the skyboard, or even as simple as a blade of grass, or as magnificent as the Grand Canyon, we should look to creation. Romans 1 says, we should look to creation and know that there is a good God, that there’s evidence of intelligent design.
So that’s how creation testifies. Let’s look then at how the moral law testifies to this faith being reasonable. Romans 2:14, 15 says so when Gentiles who do not by nature have the law, do what the law demands, they are a law to themselves, even though they do not have the law. They show that the work of the law is written on their hearts. Their consciousness confirmed this.
Their competing thoughts either excuse them or even sorry, either accuse them or even excuse them. This is just one passage in a number that highlights that the laws are in our hearts. We have an innate sense of right or wrong. That’s why when the toddler in Sunday school, or maybe in nursery right now, pushes somebody over, they have he or she has an if their conscience is working rightly, they should know that what they did was wrong. And they’re going to want either mom or dad not to find out or whatever adult takes care of them, and certainly not the teacher to see what just happened.
We know, we have an understanding what’s good, what’s right, what’s evil, what’s not. We have that law written on our hearts. It’s also why, of course, we have original sin that’s passed down from Adam and Eve, but also why it takes a lot of practice to become really bad. Because the moral law always stands up and says, are you sure you should do that? Are you sure you want to keep going there do you want to go to this step?
It’s a searing, it’s a marring, it’s a messing up with of the conscience. Nobody, unless something is devastatingly wrong. They have a sociopathic or some sort of disorder from the start, which is another effect of the fall. Like nobody becomes something as wicked or evil as a serial killer overnight. Because something which is the moral law keeps butting up against that.
It takes a continual going against hardening of the heart to be comfortable going to those places.
The other part of the moral law is that the fact that we need an objective truth maker to objectively say that anything is right or wrong. I love the Beatles. I think they wrote a lot of really good music. They obviously had a huge impact on American culture for a good chunk of a couple of decades. But John Lennon, I think, has always been a precarious individual.
Aside from breaking up one of the best bands in history. He wrote a song called Imagine and it still surfaces. One of the top hits year in, year out. And it was, I think, the top 50 worldwide billboard during the last Tokyo Olympics. Because it played during the opening ceremonies.
Opening or closing. Don’t quote me on that, but it’s one of them. And it says he wrote a couple lines from that song, Imagine. Go. Imagine there’s no countries it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for, and no religion too.
Imagine all the people living life in peace. And Lenin here is essentially blaming religion for the source of the world’s problems, which he’s not the first to do that. People have done that up and down, left and right all day long. Yet what he’s saying here is fundamentally really dumb.
What he’s saying here doesn’t hold up a whole lot really at all. Because Christianity, when done rightly, is the greatest source of peace this world can know. Christianity, when done rightly, cares for and loves people with the most intense sort of love that we can possibly fathom. When Christianity is done rightly, it’s a total sense of peace. Because it’s real peace, true peace, lasting peace is not just an absence of chaos, but it’s the presence of Christ.
True peace is not just the absence of chaos, but it’s the presence of Christ. Because Isaiah calls him the Prince of peace. True peace, when Christianity is done rightly, is the presence of Jesus through and in his people. It allows us to have the great sigh of the soul. Things are okay, but in Lenin’s version of a happy world, there’s no God to set objective truth to, to even Say that peace is a good thing or that even should be sought after.
Nothing in that world is objective. It’s all subjective. And there’s no way to say what’s right or what’s wrong. And humans have been really quick to say, well, yeah, we decide what’s right or what’s wrong. Except for we don’t, we can’t, because that’s the definition of subjective.
Because it’s all based on personal experience. And we might think, yeah, but if we have this great race of humans, and maybe I love America’s, maybe it gets as close as we can. Well, I don’t like America. Maybe other countries are getting it right. Yeah, we can say that until we read a history book.
Because we don’t have to look super far to see what happens when countries decide what’s right or what’s wrong. This happened countless times over. We think of, of course, in recent years, like the 20th century. We think of World War II era. We think of, well, yeah, they said that was right.
And so does that make it right? And you and I, if our conscious is functioning rightly, we should say, no, that’s absolutely not right. But if you don’t have an objective truth maker, you can’t say that. You can just, it’s just your feeling. And I have this conversation with students because you’ve probably heard the phrase to live your truth or there’s no such thing as truth, and that itself is an objective truth statement.
Because you’re assuming that when you say there is no truth, that that is true. And it gets silly with students. But I say, like, if it’s my truth, that I have to punch you in the face repeatedly to be happy, then that’s probably going to butt up against your truth statement saying that, no, I don’t want to be punched in the face. That’s going to help me be happy. And one’s got to be right, one’s got to be wrong.
And there’s this tension because there’s an objective truth to the the world. There’s no way to say what’s right or wrong or good or bad in a world with no objective truth maker, because a world with no objective truth maker, a truth that comes from outside of ourselves, has no legitimate grounds to say that anything’s wrong. If we lived without God, there is nothing stopping us from saying that. Robbery, abuse, human trafficking, we have no objective way to say that that’s wrong. The best we can do if we don’t follow God, if we don’t know God, is to say, steal from him.
But we can’t do that if we don’t really know him, because this butts up against the moral law of God and moral law of God. But also we know that our God’s a God of order. And nature testifies that this is a thing. Nature testifies. This is true.
Because we look at the world. We look at our world is finely tuned. We’re the exact distance from the sun that we need to be. That seems like an awful great chance, awful, great coincidence. We look at how we have order, things like gravity, these things don’t happen on accident.
But we look at how it’s all mathematically provable. And so literally, order is woven into the fabric of our universe.
A right objective truth is a part of our world, whether we want it to be or not. Because inherently we know that God has written the law in our hearts. And this should point us to him, because he’s our great moral lawmaker. I’m going to quote C.S. lewis later, too, but a paraphrase here.
He says, if I. He says we can know God exists a number of ways, but one way is we long for Him. If I get hungry, it’s because food exists. If I get thirsty, it’s because a drink exists. If I long to be with my friends, it’s because they exist.
It makes sense that when I have a longing of this world, cannot satisfy that gnawing sense of feeling when you’re laying at bed at night. It’s because that doesn’t exist in this world. But it. But it is out there. We long for we should be pointed towards our moral lawmaker.
So that’s a quick version of how the moral law testifies that our faith is reasonable. But let’s look then at how prophecy testifies. Four passages for this 1. Genesis 3:15, Galatians 4, 4, 5, Joel 2:32. Romans 10, 9, 10.
Genesis 3:15 says, I will put hostility between you and the woman. He’s speaking. God speaking to Eve and the serpent, between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring. He will strike your head, and you will strike his heel. Galatians 4, 4, 5.
When the time came to completion, God sent his son, born of a woman born under the law, to redeem those under the law, so we might receive adoption as sons. And so what we’re doing here is we’re just. We’re showing a parallel. This is the prophecy, this is fulfillment. And we’ll do it again with Joel and Romans.
Joel 2:32. Then everyone who calls on the Name of the Lord will be saved, for there will be an escape for those on Mount Zion and in Jerusalem, as the Lord promised. Among the survivors, the lord calls Romans 10, 9, 10. If you confess with your mouth, Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. One believes with a heart, resulting in righteousness, and one confesses with the mouth, resulting in salvation.
Friends, brothers and sisters, Even on low estimates, some 300 prophecies were fulfilled during Jesus lifetime. That’s like the ones we’re doggone sure. The ones we can prove without a shadow of a doubt. And we could go through them if we had a ton of time. We don’t.
But we just looked at some parallel passages because in Genesis, the promise was given to Adam and Eve that she would have a son who would defeat sin and death. And Galatians 4 highlights how this came to be, how this came to be true. We see something similar in Joel 2. It says if you call on the name of the Lord, you’ll be saved. And sure enough, Romans talks just like that.
And so we don’t have to keep going down the list of all these prophecies to know they’re true. But one thing we can know, one thing that is true, is that everything God has promised either has come true or will come true. Everything that God has predicted either has come true or will come true.
That’s the thing about it. He is 100% a guarantee every single time.
Hebrews 11:1 talks about this idea when it talks about how faith in God is different than anything else says now, faith is the reality of what is hoped for, the proof of what is not seen. Because with God, we don’t have to second guess because he bats a thousand every time. I don’t care if you’re really great at slow pitch softball, you’re not batting a thousand. And so he just we don’t have to worry about him going back on his promise. We don’t have to worry about him paraphrasing.
We don’t have to worry about him forgetting the paperwork or forgetting to sot to sign the T and dot the I. We don’t have to worry about him dropping in a puddle on his way to deliver the promise to you. His dog never eats his homework. Like he gets it right every single time because he never messes up something and he never gets it just mostly right. It’s 100% true.
100% how it exactly needs to be all the time. His word is always yes and amen. Second Peter talks about his word this way. Second Peter 1:16 through 21 we read. For we did not follow cleverly contrived myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Instead, we were eyewitnesses of his majesty, for he received honor and glory from God the Father. When the voice came to him from the majestic glory, saying, this is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased. We ourselves heard this voice when it came from heaven while we were with him on the holy mountain. We also have the prophetic words strongly confirmed, and you will do well to pay attention to it as to a lamp shining in a dark place until the day dawns and the morning star rises in your hearts. Above all, you know this.
No prophecy of Scripture comes from the prophet’s own interpretation, because no prophecy ever came by the will of man. Instead, men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. You could look also at Deuteronomy. Basically, if a prophet predicted something and it didn’t come true, that God’s word says kill him. Because that’s how serious this is.
Because it’s God’s reputation on the line, because God doesn’t get things wrong. In other words, we can trust God because he’s never been wrong and he won’t start now. And those are just a quick few prophecies, but just something as a quick search. Look at prophecies fulfilled in Jesus, or Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in the New Testament. It’s astounding.
It should be comforting knowing that he can’t get it wrong, knowing that he won’t start now. So that’s the prophetic argument as to why this faith is reasonable. Let’s look at how Jesus himself testifies to this faith. 1 John 1:1 4.
Says, it was from the beginning what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have observed and touched with our hands concerning the word of life, that life was revealed. And if we have seen it, and we testify and declare to you the eternal life that was with the Father and was revealed to us, we have seen and heard, we also declare to you so that you may also have fellowship with us. And indeed our fellowship is with the Father and with His Son, Jesus Christ. We are writing these things so that our joy may be complete.
Jesus is God. He always has been. We’ve talked at length before about how he is fully God, fully man, how that works out exactly how he needs to. He’s been the second person of the Trinity. And the Apostle John Starts off his letter with reminding his people.
He said, I’ve seen him. I’m an eyewitness. I know what he’s like. I’m not making this up to you. And let’s just take a sidebar.
I don’t get when we have these conversations with people and they say, yeah, but you’re making that up, or you want to make that up. Paul says if this is not true, we should be pitied more than anybody. Like, why would we make this up? My God is naturally so much holier than me. And naturally, some things he says are going to butt up against what I want.
That doesn’t feel like something I would concoct on my own. I don’t want that. But it’s what God knows is for my flourishing. Because John says he was an eyewitness to Jesus. And he says that Jesus is the life, and there’s no eternal life outside of him.
He says, Jesus is salvation. He alone pays for sins. He’s the only way to be made right with the Father. He’s the only one who’s gonna bring lasting, genuine peace. It’s not about how good you are, man.
There’s a lot of great people who don’t know Jesus that are gonna have a rude awakening someday. And that’s another part of the reason why we take evangelism so seriously. That’s my testimony. Before I came to know Christ, I was a good guy who was on his path to hell. And that’s who Jesus came exactly to save.
Cause he came to save and save lost sinners.
Jesus alone pays for sin. He takes our shame and he trades it for honor.
He takes our inability or our unwillingness to come to him, to approach him, because we’re so weighed down by guilt, by shame, by wondering, how could a holy God ever care about me? And he trades it for honor. He takes our guilt and he declares us innocent. You’re probably familiar with the idea of justification. He declares us, stamps us legally not guilty.
If we repent and put our trust in Him. He does all this for us because he loves us so much further, so much more, so much better than we could possibly fathom or imagine. Because John’s point in these four verses is that Jesus is who he says he is. And that seems so remarkably simple, doesn’t it? But Jesus is who he says he is.
He’s the real deal. And I’ve shared this illustration before, but I just think it’s so, so helpful. It’s from CS Lewis, famous dead guy, wrote the Chronicles of Narnia also I think one of the most important Christian apologists ever. And he says you have to do one of three things with Jesus, because you can’t just say he’s a good guy. He, he doesn’t give you room to do that.
You have to do one of three things with Jesus. And he alliterated and he’s smarter than me, so maybe he knows what he’s doing. But he said you have to do one of three things. You have to call him Jesus. He’s there lunatic or liar, lunatic or Lord.
You have to call him liar, lunatic or Lord. And I think if we start with liar, we understand that he knowingly lied to people during his entire time on Earth. He knowingly lied to his closest friends to death. So he’s a wicked person, sociopathic if you will. And so he’s done those sorts of things and so he lied.
And that might be somewhat more plausible than the lunatic thing. But I think one problem is as soon as the nails go in the hands, I would imagine the jig would have to be up, if not sooner. Probably for me, as soon as somebody’s like, hey, we think you’re a heretic. And if I was, I would probably want to make that right. But as soon as those people start hating him or get flogged, but as soon as the nails go on the hand, I’d have to imagine people like, if he really was a liar, I’d have to imagine that he would have given it up.
Or he’s so totally deranged that he didn’t care. So that’s how you’re, you can do, you can do that with Jesus. I don’t think it’s intellectually super defensible or satisfying. Or you can say that he’s a lunatic and believe that he’s in the same mental capacity as somebody who earnestly believes that he’s a marshmallow. And so you say he’s just, he’s just nuts.
And that makes some sort of sense, except for you run into the issue of his followers. People throughout human history have been able to spot lunatics usually. And if they haven’t, they’ve never had quite the scale, some 2,000 plus years later of following, like, why on earth, if he’s not Lord, are we still following him in America, some however many thousands of miles, 2,000 years later. And so if you think he’s a lunatic, you can do that. I’d advise against it.
Or you call him Lord. You believe that Jesus Christ, Jesus of Nazareth is who he says he is fully God, fully man came to do and accomplish exactly what he came here to do, that he’s just as much Lord, meaning that he’s in charge of everything. And that’s a term we get from. From, like the medieval time, like lord over certain lands, or you maybe think a landlord, but. But he’s Lord.
He rules and he reigns overall. But you can’t separate that from him being Savior because it’s just as much a part of him as your eyes, even more so. But even more so. Then you and I have two names. You can’t separate those because he’s Lord, he rules and reigns overall.
And he wants to do that in our hearts, but also he’s Savior. He wants to redeem us. He wants to buy us back. He wants to pay for our sin. And friends, we have to do something.
We have to do one of those three things with Jesus. He doesn’t give us room to. You might be thinking, yeah, well, we don’t know if he existed. Except for that’s not really debate anymore. That’s not really much of a conversation.
It’s like, yeah, we know he exists. And Bart Ehrman, pray for him. He’s a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, but also one of the staunchest defenders to the historicity of Jesus. He doesn’t know him. He thinks there’s some issues.
So pray for him. He hasn’t. He hasn’t quite grasped how to follow Jesus. But he says, despite the enormous range of opinion, there are several points on which virtually all scholars. Antiquity, that’s just a way of saying, like, ancient times agree.
So Jesus was a Jewish man known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified parentheses a Roman form of execution in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea. All those things are pointing to the fact that he existed, that he walked, that he lived. And in the first couple of centuries, they had to convince people that Jesus was God. Now we’re having. Sorry.
They had to convince people that Jesus was a man. Now we have to convince people that Jesus is God, that he’s always been both in the first couple centuries, like, yeah, he’s a spirit. Yeah. Except for he ate people or he didn’t eat people, he ate with people.
There. That’s how you know you’re still paying attention.
He ate with people and he did these things. He had a physical body. Now we’re working to convince people that he is God, that he’s worthy of our Worship. Since we know that Jesus really did live, we have to do something with him. You might think, yeah, but what about his resurrection?
That seems pretty unbelievable. But doesn’t it seem pretty believable knowing that he’s the God of the universe, that he can rule and reign over everything. Does that not seem like a small thing? We might think, yeah, but he didn’t really die. The text says that he, his body spilled water out.
And that comes up against what we know with modern science knowing to be true. And there’s no way we can know that he just was simply fainting, because why would they have carried him off? Or how would nobody have ever seen like the marks like that again? And especially just like, look, let’s look at the Resurrection. The Roman guards would have guarded the tomb with their life.
And if he would have gotten away, they would have been murdered.
So what he offers us is better than we can imagine. Because even just looking continually at the Resurrection, we look at over 500 people saw him, they saw him walking around after he clearly died. And we might be quick to think, yeah, but that’s all hallucination. Except for it’s not. That’s not how hallucinations work.
500 people, all at the same time. That doesn’t happen like that. His closest followers also all died terrible deaths because they would not say that he was lying. We could go back to the same if they knew he was lying, if they thought he was wrong, there’d be no reason to keep up the charade. They’re not gaining anything from it.
In fact, they died terrible deaths, drugged through the streets, some were crucified upside down. The only one who didn’t die in a wicked sort of way was John. And he died in an island, in exile by himself and an extrovert. And that might sound even worse like that, that sounds terrible.
Because it’s clear that Jesus is the key reason that our faith is reasonable, because he defies even our wildest expectations. We couldn’t have come up with a God like him, no matter how much we tried, because he’s the best apologetic, and it all comes down to who he is. Let’s look then at some practical application for what do we do with this? We’ve been giving you that throughout. Some practical things, but just really spelled out some ideas here first Peter 3, 15.
Let’s look there quick.
But in your hearts regard Christ the Lord is holy, ready at any time to give a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason, for the hope that is in you. That’s a scriptural text or scriptural basic basis. I think three things we should do as a result of everything we’ve heard this morning, self included. This should help us be ready to share the gospel with others. This should help us reassure.
This should help reassure us when we have doubts. This should inspire us to worship our great God in spirit and in truth. If we care about reaching people with the gospel, we should care about apologetics, because people fall into either two camps. This has been my experience, maybe there’s more, but they either struggled to believe in the heart that a good God, a holy God, a loving God, would want them. That was me.
That was my testimony when I came to know Jesus, like, how could he ever want me? Or people struggle with intellectual component of it. Is this intellectually plausible, Logical? Hasn’t science disprove this? How do we know he’s the right God?
If we care about reaching people with the gospel, we should care about apologetics. We should care about knowing why our faith is reasonable. We should care about that, as this reassures us when we have doubts. This should help us kind of think of it. Our anchor is in Christ.
He’s our hope and our faith. But also some practical things. Well, we know this to be true. Maybe we should have some spiritual reasons, but also some, some reasons from God’s Word, but also some, some. Some empirical proofs that we can look at and say, well, I know that I didn’t end up here on accident.
Or we should have some of this. Like, this should reassure us when we have doubt, when we question God’s goodness. This should help reassure us when we struggle there. And it’s okay, let me just be. Also, it’s okay to struggle with doubt sometimes.
God is not afraid of our doubt. In fact, our doubt should draw us closer to Him. But then this should. This should inspire us to worship our great God in spirit and in truth. We should worship him in spirit with our hearts and the relational aspect of it.
And we should care about celebrating and worshiping and praising God. But also intellectually, we should care about the head and the heart because our God relates to us on a heart level, but also an intellectual level, because he can engage us with the mind and also provide satisfying proof for who he is and why Jesus did what he did.
And just before we close here, just I want to say a couple of things. First, I’m not an expert in this apologetics. Studying it is something that’s somewhat new for me within the past five years or so. And so if you’re on The I doubt you’re on the edge of your seat, but if you’re on. Hypothetically, bear with me.
If you’re on the edge of your seat and you’re like, I wish he would talk more about creation, or, I wish he would talk more about prophecy, or, I wish he would talk more about this. Come find me after service. Like, I would love to talk with you. I’d love to have more resources to share with you. And there’s people in this church who are far smarter than me that can go in depth on those sorts of things.
So if that’s you and you’re just like, I’m not sure, or if this created some cognitive dissonance for you, that’s just a fancy way of saying that I’m unsettled. My worldview’s kind of shook up a little bit. Or I’m still. This is gnawing at me. Don’t leave here like that.
Don’t leave here with your worldview in jar and you don’t know what to think or why to think that you can come find me. You can come find anybody you’ve seen on stage, anybody with a name tag on. And it could very well be that this is the first time that Jesus is calling you to himself. Because if we’ve believed something, just always because we’ve believed it, this might be the way that God gives us actual, real, true peace, both spiritually and intellectually, because our God’s a God of order and cares about those sorts of things. So if you’re in either of those spots, we invite you, we call you to come.
Just come talk to us. Hopefully, you know, by. Even if this is your first time, hopefully you’ve gathered that we care about you a tremendous amount. So let this then be an encouragement to you, friends, both in the head and the heart, knowing that this faith we have is so reasonable. Let’s pray.
God, you are wonderful and good, mighty and careful and so, so incredible. We thank you for the peace that you are, the peace that you bring in what you’re doing. We pray that our worship would be glorifying to you, that we would celebrate you, that we would enjoy you as we. As we leave this place. We pray for peace, for resolve, for places like Mount Horebuh, the tragedy that happened there.
But you’re a God who sees and knows and understands, and you may even use things like that to draw people to yourself. We pray. I pray that you’d use this morning to draw people to yourself, whether for the first time or with ever greater, deeper affection.