SPEAKER_01 0:00

Well, good morning. I don't know your particular story, but um for some of you, maybe that's a question that you are wrestling with today. Uh is the question of does God exist? Is there a God? Um and before I get to that question, if you happen to be an elementary age kid and you did not walk out the back door, I see so few kids to the left. Uh kids are completely and totally welcome to stay in service, just so you know. Uh but if you want your elementary age kids or preschool age kids to go to class, they go out the back door there, and there's some leaders that will take them there. So anyway, got sidetracked for a second. I needed to say that. My name's Nick, and I am the lead pastor here, and it's great to have you here this morning. Um, this is the second week of us meeting here at Casuric Elementary as Redemption City Church. Uh, and and I could tell you more about our story, but I won't take up our time to do so this morning because the question that was posed in the video is a powerful one. In fact, I think it's the most important question that we all have to come to grips with. We all have to wrestle with, we all have to work through. In fact, A.W. Tozer, one of the thinkers in the Christian world that I I have respected for many years and have been encouraged by countless times, he says the most important thing, or the thing that comes to mind when you think about God is the most important thing in your life. And so I don't know your story, I don't know your background, I don't know what part uh of God that you uh like or dislike, or what part of church you like or dislike, or uh if you were invited here because you heard of explore God and you're here for part of the conversation, uh, of just wanting to be in a setting where it's safe to ask questions about that, about faith, about the hard, difficult questions that we as Christians and and if you're Christian or not a Christian have to wrestle through. But I want you to know that Redemption City Church is a place where we can all come and we can all interact together, and we are not here to condemn anyone, we're not here to uh to uh cause anyone to feel dumb. There's not a dumb question. We want people to be able to wrestle through their questions, wrestle through uh their doubts, their fears, and uh and to come to some answers. And so this morning, um, as we continue our discussion through the Explore God series, we're covering the second question. Uh last week we covered the question of does life have a purpose? And if you're with us last week, we said that the Bible, which as Christians we believe is our authority, says with a resounding yes, we have purpose. We have purpose and we have meaning in this life. Uh, that we have a point for why we are here. And so I hope that each one of you can hear me say that God has a plan and he has a purpose for your life. But if you haven't come to the place where you believe that there's a God exists, that there is a God in heaven, that he actually does exist, maybe you're still wrestling with that question. Maybe you're still working through. Yeah, God says I have a purpose, but I'm not even sure there's a God. And this morning, I want to be completely honest with you that there are no airtight arguments that I can make that prove the existence of God. There are no airtight arguments, there's always more questions, there's always open things that could be asked, but there are some clues that I would ask you to carefully consider. Now, here's what I know. Statistically, in the United States, 80 to 85% of people, somewhere in the between 80 and 85% of people, believe that there is a God. So the majority of us isn't here, just based on statistics alone, believe there's a God. And on top of that, you're in a church service. And most people who don't believe in God wouldn't attend a church service. So if you are here today and you are struggling and believing in a God, let me just say again, you're not only welcome, but this is a great place to ask that question. To ask questions about God. And so as I'm speaking, I'm I realize that the majority of the audience is from the mindset that there is a God. But if you're like me, um, I grew up, I'm just gonna be completely honest, I grew up in church. I grew up as a church brat, I like to say. From nine months before I was born, I was in church, I was hearing the Bible taught through in the womb. Okay? That's my story. And because of that, I never really questioned, was there a God? I never really wrestled through this idea of, is there really a God? It was ingrained in me from the time I was early, or very young, at a very early age. And some people might even say, um, if they don't believe in God, that I was brainwashed. But the truth of the matter is, is that I felt and I saw and I sensed and I interacted with God in ways as a young child that made me convinced that there really was a God. My problem was actually living life in such a way that revealed that I believed there was a God. In fact, um, one of the greatest hindrances to people believing in a God, particularly the God of the Bible, are other Christians. Because many times as Christians, we say we believe something, but our lives don't look any different than people who don't believe in God, right? Uh it's practical atheism, if you will. It's where we live as if there's not a God. So that was my story, and that's where I wrestled as a person growing up. But here's the thing, I have, over the past particular 15 months, but in the last six years, have interacted with a number of atheists at coffee shops and in my neighborhood and places around the city of Austin. And I've and I've had the opportunity to have real live conversations with them and the wrestlings and the rumblings that they are working through as they try to figure out is there a God? And for most of them, they are completely convinced that there's no possible way that there is a God. At least that's what they articulate to me. That's how they say it. But as I said this morning, there are no airtight arguments that I can give them. I can't stand in front of them and give them these convincing proofs that are so solid there's no holes that can be punched in them. Because there's always another question to be asked, there's always another angle to take. In fact, Christopher Hitchens, he asked this question. He says, What can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. So, what can be asserted without proof can be dismissed without proof. And for many of my atheist friends, and I have friends who are atheists, friends that I love, friends that I care deeply about. They would say, Well, there's no way you can prove this to me, so therefore, there's really no way I could possibly believe this. But I want to give you some clues this morning. And before we get to the clues, I want to read from God's word in Psalm 19. So if you have a Bible, I want you to pull it out. If you don't have a Bible, I encourage you to look down. There's a few Bibles scattered around. They either look like this brown one right here, or they are black with the same cross on the front of it. I encourage you to read it, whether you believe in God or not. I encourage you to get the Bible out and to read it. Because many people I interact with, they say things like, I don't believe the Bible's true. And my question is, Well, have you ever read it? And many times they're like, No, I haven't read it. Well, go read it first, and then come back and tell me it's not true. Okay? But let me say, as we read this morning from Psalm 19, this is written by a psalmist, uh David, is what it tells us, who was the king of Israel. He was uh a poet, he was a warrior, and uh he did an amazing job of painting these pictures for us throughout the Psalms, these songs that speak to who God is and who we are in light of who he is. Psalm 19, if you don't know your Bible very well, it's on page 354, for those of you that are using these Bibles like this. Here's what it says The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky proclaims the work of his hands. Day after day they pour forth speech. Night after night they communicate knowledge. There is no speech, there are no words, their voice is not heard. Their message has gone out to all the earth, and their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens he has pitched a tent for the sun. It is like a groom coming from the bridal chamber. It rejoices like an athlete running a course. It rises from one end of the heavens and circles to the other end. Nothing is hidden from its heat. The instruction of the Lord is perfect, renewing one's mind. The testimony of the Lord is trustworthy, making the inexperienced wise. The precepts of the Lord are right, making the heart glad. The command of the Lord is radiant, making the eyes light up. The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The ordinance of the Lord are reliable and altogether righteous. They are more desirable than gold, than an abundance of pure gold, and sweeter than honey, which comes from the honeycomb. In addition, your servant is warned by them. There is great reward in keeping them. Who perceives his unintentional sins? Cleanse me from my hidden faults. Moreover, keep your servant from willful sins. Do not let them rule over me. Then I will be innocent and be cleansed from blatant rebellion. May the words of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to you, Lord, my rock, and my redeemer. I want to give you three clues that come from this particular passage of Scripture. And we're going to work our way backwards through the section that we just read, okay? The first thing, the first clue that we have that there is a God is morality. Morality. Let me ask you a question. What is something that when you see it in the world, you just know that it's wrong? Anybody? Murder. Slavery. What else? Anyone else? Huh? Okay? So listen, here's the thing. How do we know it's wrong? How do we, as humankind, know that that stuff is wrong? How is it that within us, from the time we are born, we look at the world and we we know there's something not right when we see someone say something that's that's uh rude or unkind? I mean, that's that's something very simple, but even a young child gets that. How do we know that it's wrong as we even look across the oceans right now to Syria and we see poor innocent children killed by gas? How do we know that that's wrong? Where does that come from? I would argue to you, and I believe the Bible argues to us this morning, that that comes from a sense of morality, a sense of understanding right and wrong that is in us from our Creator. That in our operating system, in the way we are wired as human beings, God has put in us the ability to understand there is a right and there is a wrong. In the psalm that I just read to you, David says something that's very, very significant. He says this in verse 12 Who perceives his unintentional sins? Who perceives his unintentional sins? What is David asking? He's asking the question who really can know their heart? Who really can know their motive? Who really can, like, at the end of the day, can we really know that everything that we do, good or bad, like we can we can say this is bad, this is good. Uh when we do the good good things, can we really know if we did it for the right reason? I mean, can I be honest? I mean, there's so many times I do the right thing, but I I don't do it for the right reason. I do it so others will see it, so that I get the attapoise or good job, I get the attention from it so much of the time because my heart is depraved, messed up. But how would I know that? You see, I think David is pointing to something that all of us as human beings would be, would be arrogant to think that we had the corner market on the truth of what is good and is right in and of ourselves. Are you with me? Like for me to stand up here and say, like, I am the standard, you guys would say, you're crazy. We're leaving, right? I'm not the standard. I don't want to be the standard. This world would be really messed up if I was the standard. But here's what I know that every single one of us in here have a moral code hardwired into us that says that there are things that are right and that there are things that are wrong. I mean, there's cultures around the world that do things that are wrong and unjust, and there are things that we know that are wrong, and in their culture, they would say it's completely okay, it's completely acceptable. And I would argue that in that moment they are truly not tapping into the hardwiring code that's in their life, that they are missing what is in them. They know deep within that it's wrong. Can you believe that there's no God? Can you not believe in God and still be a moral person? Absolutely. I know some of the people that are in my world that are atheists that would say I don't believe in God, and they are incredible people. Really can be kind, really can be servants, really can be nice, and all those things, but I would say that that doesn't make a case for the fact that we don't need God, that there is not a God, but that even in people who don't believe in God, there is a sense of what is right and what is wrong. So it's the moral code that's in us, and that's morality. Fyodor Dosovisky, I probably just botched his name, he's a Russian uh novelist that wrote, he says this if God does not exist, everything is permitted. If God does not exist, everything is permitted. In our lives. How do you know? I believe we know because God created us with the ability to know. In Romans chapter 2, verse 14 and 15, you don't need to turn there, but let me just simply say to you that in Romans chapter 2, we get this passage where it says this in verse 14. So when Gentiles who do not have the law, the law of God, instinctively 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 consciences confirm this. So let me just say what Paul's trying to write here. He's saying that people who don't even believe, i.e., the Gentiles of that day, who weren't God's chosen people, who didn't have God's law, they were doing things that were in line with God's law, and they were holding each other accountable to things that were God's law. Not because they were God's people, but because they as human beings knew that there were things that were right and there were things that were wrong. Are you with me? So it was in them that even in that day, Paul says we can see that the Gentiles who don't even believe in God, who are outside of God's family, they're doing these things based on the fact that it's written on their hearts. There's a code that's built into them. The second reason, or the second clue, it's a clue that I ask you to consider this morning, is the clue of complexity. The clue of complexity. Have you guys ever stopped and thought about how complex this world is we live in? Have you ever really sat down and just looked out across nature? Uh, maybe uh just to drive out and just to watch the sun go down? Or maybe you've had an opportunity to travel into the mountains, or maybe you sat on the beach and watched the ocean. Have you ever really thought about the complexity of the world in which we live? It's amazing, it's fascinating, it's unbelievable. The psalmist says it this way He says, in the heavens, he, being God, has pitched a tent for the sun. It's like a groom coming to the bridal chamber. It rejoices like an athlete running a course. I like how he gets both the romantic imagery in there and then that's like the athletic imagery in there. Okay, he gets a little bit of both there. But he says that the sun rises and it goes from one horizon to the other. But he goes on to say something really powerful. He says it rises from one end of the heavens and circles to the other end. Nothing is hidden from its heat. Do you guys know? Have you considered just how amazing it is that life exists on this planet? We know so very little about the universe that we live in, which except for the fact that it's massive and we are so tiny. But here's what we can say as we look at the universe, it is very, very complex. It's very, very complicated how this thing works, how it sustains. And the psalmist, who's not even a scientist, he was a king and he was a warrior, okay? He says, look, the sun comes up and it goes down and the heat covers the whole world. It's just right. It keeps things going, it keeps the ecosystem intact. In essence, everything that we experience that creates this context where life can be here is a miracle. It is a miracle. It is absolutely fascinating to stop and to look at the biology of our ecosystems, to look at all of life, to look at the way that we live and we breathe and we move and we function. It's fascinating. Have you ever uh gone on a hike in the woods and you see all the creation around you? I remember the first time that I went to the mountains. And the first time that I went to the mountains, I was just overwhelmed. Like this is crazy. Like, look at these gigantic rock structures. Look how high that is. Look at those trees. But you know what's crazy is that as I get older, now I drive to the mountains, and because I live in Texas, I appreciate it. But it's not near as fascinating as it was to me as a kid. Because we human beings, we so quickly can just get to where we like to see things. Oh yeah. In fact, this last week there was a man who moved here from Colorado, I heard. And somebody said, Oh, that's so cool that you lived in Colorado, you get to be around the mountains, and he's like, Oh, they're all they're not that great. Because he lived there every day and he saw them every day, and so to him, it just became part of his scenery. But what if you were walking through the woods with a friend and you came across a shiny object on the ground and you picked that object up and you looked at it and you dusted it off, you cleaned it off, and you started to notice this round face and these little marks on it, and these little hands that were ticking around, and it had the name Rolex on it. Would your first question be? I wonder how long it took for this thing to develop and create and come to be here on the floor of the forest. Would that be your first question? My first question would be, I wonder who left this. I wonder who dropped this. I wonder who this is. You see, when we look at the world around us for so much of the time, we have this amazing, fascinating world, and our question may, if we're honest, it shouldn't be how did this thing just like happen by accident or just come to be. But the question is, is who designed this? Who created this? Who put this together in this unbelievable way so that everything works and there's constants. In fact, Francis Collins, a scientist, he says this when you look from the perspective of a scientist at the universe, and I'm not a scientist, I I love science, I'm not afraid of science. I think science and faith integrate really well. But he says, when you look at it from the perspective of a scientist, it looks as if it knew we were coming. There are 15 constants, gravitational constant, various constants, and the strong and weak nuclear force, etc., that have precise values. If any of those constants was off, by even one part in a million, or in some cases by one part in a million million, the universe could not have actually come to the point where we see it. Matter would not have been able to coalesce, and there would have been no galaxy, no planet, or people. Think about that for a minute. I mean, the slightest change, the slightest adjustment, the slightest difference in angle of the sun and whatever it might be, this life would not exist the way that we see it. And and all scientists, they know when they study science, when they look at it, that science is a fascinating A great job of giving us these ideas about how things came to be, but here's the question that science doesn't answer. It doesn't answer why. Why is it here? Why does it exist? Another man named Stephen Hawking, he says this the odds against a universe like ours emerging out of something like the Big Bang are enormous. It would be very difficult to explain why the universe would have begun in just this way, except as the act of a God who intended to create beings like us. And I realize people can poke holes in that and they can say this is circular reasoning. They can say all these things about, well, that's your view and that's your perspective. But let me just, again, ask you to stop and consider the world and the complexity of the world in which we live. The third clue that I think God has given us, and I ask you to consider this morning, is the clue of beauty. The clue of beauty. And the love that I have for my kids, I have such a difficult time believing that what I feel for them is purely just some sort of chemical reaction. You know, when I think about my life and I think about how I feel about my wife and the love that I express for her, I have to believe that there's something bigger than this world that has put desire into our heart. That has given us the capacity to want and to desire things that you can't explain with scientific methodology. It's bigger than all of that. And so when I think about beauty, I'm I'm blown away because I'm just captured by this idea that when we look at the world as the psalmist says here, the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands, and day after day they pour they pour out speech, and night after night they communicate knowledge. Have you ever just gone outside on a dark night and looked at the heavens and glance at the stars? Oh, we live in Austin, so there's light pollution, so you can't see them, right? But if you can get somewhere where it's dark and look at the stars and thought about how small we are, how fascinating that is. The beauty of the world, but we can the fact that we can appreciate the beauty, we can appreciate the things that are in this world that are beyond just simple uh mental understandings, intellectual ideas. There's something more. In fact, C.S. Lewis says this creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for these desires exist. A baby feels hunger, well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim, well, there's such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire, well, there's such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. And I believe that inside of every one of us, there's something that's driving us that's so much bigger than what we can see. That we have a longing, as we talked about last week, that's greater than just pleasure and greater than just accomplishment, and greater than just simply enjoying the life that we see in front of us. I believe that God's put a desire in us for something more that's outside of this world or beyond this world. And this morning, I ask you this question. When you look at the clues of how do we know that there's a right and wrong, and when you think about this idea of complexity of the world, and when you think about the beauty and the love that we share, the love that we express to one another, can you can you at least say there's gotta be something that I can't fully understand and wrap my brain around that's driving all this? I want to show you a quick video, and then we'll close up.

SPEAKER_00 26:35

My name is Jennifer Folweiler. I was a lifelong atheist, and I'm now a Christian. I write a blog called Conversion Diary. It's a chronicle of the ups and downs of what it's like to have faith after an entire life of being an atheist. I never believed in God, not even as a child. When my dad would come read books to me at night, I believe I was in fourth or fifth grade, and our nightly reading was Carl Sagan's Cosmos. So I was very much raised on a diet of science and reason and evidence-based rational thought. You believe what you can prove. I believe that I have pants because I can see them. I believe in a black hole, even though I've never seen one, but you know, science can tell us about the way matter moves around it, that we can observe. And so this very rational worldview always made sense to me on a fundamental level. Before I got to the point that I could really start researching faith with an open mind, something had to happen. And for me, that occurred after my first child was born. I looked down and thought, what is this baby? And I thought, well, from a pure atheist materialist perspective, he is a collection of really evolved chemical reactions. And I realized it's not true. And I look down at him and I realized that's not true. It's not true. I didn't know what to do with that. I got my books about Buddhism and about every religion except for Christianity, basically. I assume that anything could be true except for Christianity. And my husband, who considers himself a non-practicing Christian, said you might want to start with the one major world religion that is after God. After all, it's really easy if it's true if it's not true. And I thought I was I would say what about what about what about history? I was really surprised when I actually found this very intellectually for people to talk about their face from a place of reason and not a place of emotion. And when I looked at evidence like that on the whole, I started to think something explosive, something world-changing happened in first century Palestine. You have this guy named Jesus who comes from a lower class region, gains a bunch of lower class followers, and ends up being executed by the Romans, and yet in droves, you see thousands and thousands of Jews giving up these traditions that they had held dear for thousands of years. And the people who joined in on this new religion, there was no benefit for them. It was a persecuted religion. People who joined this religion didn't tend to work out too well, they tended to lose social status and often face death. But I wasn't yet, you know, convinced and ready to become a Christian. And so I started the blog. I just threw out every hard question I could think of. I just put it all out there on the blog. And as I would watch the atheists and the Christians go back and forth and debate, I realized we atheists, we don't have the lock on reason that I thought we did. But what I saw with the Christians was they had that too. They had all the knowledge of science and material world that we atheists did, but yet they had the total picture of the human experience, of love and triumph and hope, and you know, they could articulate that in a way that the atheists couldn't. It wasn't until after I had made the intellectual decision to become a Christian that I think I finally believed it in my heart. When I set my pride aside and said, Okay, I feel like I'm talking to myself, but Jesus, I want a relationship with you. I want to know you, even though I don't know how to go about doing that. This peace entered my life, this joy, the way my whole being was transformed, there was just no question that this is somebody real. I think that not only am I more alive now that I'm a Christian, but I'm so much more intellectually alive. Finally, nothing is off limits. I can ask questions about science, but I can also ask questions about the spiritual world, and I'm free to really seek the truth.

SPEAKER_01 31:55

I watched that video this week. Um, I actually saw it for the first time 18 months ago, and I was reflected over her story, and I think about how many people that I know personally that have that view that God does not exist, that God can't exist, that there's no reason to believe in God. And almost every time without fail, when I get to the baseline root issues with these people, what I find is that there's typically some sort of emotional wound that's affected them intellectually. I'm not saying that if that's you today that, you know, that if you don't believe in God, that it's, you know, I that I know what that wound is. But almost without fail, every time I've talked to someone who is an atheist who would say they are an atheist, they tell me that there's a wound in their life. They wouldn't describe it as a wound, but many times, sadly, it's been Christians that have hurt them. It's been the church that has hurt them, or it's been a hardship that they've endured that they just flat out can't believe a God, a good God, would allow to happen in their life. And so they just give up on faith and they give up on God. And believe me, this has been a challenge for the Christian faith forever. It's always been a problem. It's always been a challenge. There are things that happen in this life, and there are mean people in this life who cause us to doubt the existence of God. One man named Thomas Nagel, he is a uh renowned atheist, professor of philosophy at uh NYU. He says, I want atheism to be true, and I am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God, and naturally hope that I'm right in my belief, it's that I hope there is no God. I don't want there to be a God, and I don't want a universe like that. See, for some, they've been wounded, but for many, we just don't want to be accountable to the fact that there is a God, because there are huge implications if there is a God. If there really is a God in heaven, if there really is a creator of all that we see, if there's a creator of you and me, then those implications will affect and impact every facet of life, won't they? Because then we have to actually ask the question, who is this God? And how does this change? And how does he want change the way I live? How does he want me to live? How does he want me to do life? How does he want me to respond to the fact that he does actually indeed exist? In Romans chapter 1. It's on the screen here, you don't have to turn to it. Beginning in verse 16, I want to read this to you, and I want you to think about this today. For I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is God's power for salvation to everyone who believes. First to the Jew and also to the Greek. For in it, God's righteousness is revealed from faith to faith, just as it is written, the righteous will live by faith. For God's wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth. Since what can be known about God is evident among them because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power, his divine nature, have clearly been seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. And as a result, the people are without excuse. My friends that I've spent time with that don't believe in God, the one question that I ask them regularly is this question. Do you want to believe in God? Are you interested and even open to the fact that there could be a God? Because many times I find that they're not. And let me just again say to you and encourage you and ask you and challenge you that if you are here today and don't believe in God, let me just invite you to open up your heart to the idea that He could even exist. And if there's people in your world, there's people in your lives that don't believe in God, then as you interact with them, ask that question Do you want to believe there's a God that exists? Because what Romans tells us is that humans in our rebellion, that we suppress the truth. We suppress the truth. And I think, I believe as a Christian, I believe as someone who's interacted with a lot of people who are not Christians, that most people know when they get still and they get quiet, they know, and they look at the world, they look at the evidence, they look at the clues, that there's something more. There's something more, there's something supernatural going on in the world around us. So as I said at the beginning, I don't know your story. And if you've been wounded by the church and that's caused you to doubt God, I say I'm sorry. Please forgive us. On behalf of the church, please forgive us if we're doing that. If you are a believer and you trust, if you put your trust in God and you know that there's a God in heaven, then my challenge to you and to me is to let's let's like live as if there's a God. Let's live in such a way that would point others to the reality that there's a God. But wherever you find yourself today, know that there's a God in heaven who wants to speak to you, who wants to use your life to point others to him, who wants you to experience the life he designed you for. And that happens through the gospel. That happens through the good news that there is a Savior, Jesus Christ, who came from heaven and who gave us light. He gives us hope. And so, in order to believe in a God, you don't have to conform your lifestyle to fit a set of rules. You don't have to start behaving a certain way to believe in God. You just have to say, God, I bel I want to believe that you're there. Would you just reveal yourself to me? And then in light of that, everything else will begin to change. Everything else will begin to shape itself around that reality. And I want to pray for us today. And I want to pray for those of you who maybe are struggling, who've doubted, who've had fears or concerns, or whatever it is you find wherever you find yourself today, I want to pray for you, and I want to pray for myself too. That we would live in light of this awesome God who has created us and made us. And that we would spend our lives pointing people to that reality.