Series: Christianity and World Religions                                                              John 3:16-21           

Sermon: Why I Choose Christ                                                                             May 28, 2006

OF THOSE WHO STRAY

You know that Jesus has been in the news recently – this weekend The Da Vinci Code is in theaters everywhere.  I read an article in Christianity Today this week about a well-known New Testament scholar at University of North Carolina named Bart Ehrman.  He’s been in the news a lot recently because of the phenomenon of the Da Vinci Code.  He is an agnostic scholar who has critiqued the movie and the book, but he agrees with some underlying goals of the book – that there was a diversity of opinion in the early church about who Jesus was and Gnostic opinions were a part of that mix. 

What interested me about Bart was his personal story.  As a teenager, he was going through a time of difficulty and was befriended by a worker for Campus Crusade for Christ.  He heard the gospel and had a born-again experience.  He actually went then to Moody Bible Institute and Wheaton College where he studied New Testament.  He struggled with his faith.  “I kept reverting to my basic question: How does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired?”  The fact that 99.9% of the NT is textually sound is good enough for me but not for Bart!  Then he went to Princeton Seminary where the floodgates of doubt were opened.  He is now a self-proclaimed happy agnostic New Testament scholar.

WHY I AM STILL A BELIEVER?

Why do I start my discussion of Christianity here?  Because it forces me to ask, “Why didn’t that happen to me?”  My story is similar to Bart’s actually.  I was converted as a teenager and trained in evangelical schools of theology.  I also have studied the same texts in the same skeptical environments.   I also have stared into the abyss of doubt and feared that I would be sucked in.  But when I was challenged by certain problems with the biblical text, I went away on a spiritual retreat and rethought my understanding of biblical inspiration.  I came away with a deeper appreciation for God’s voice in the scriptures.  Doubt didn’t destroy me as it did with Bart.  Doubt strengthened me.

I have stayed the course because of a love that will not let me go.  I would have certain distinct academic advantages to becoming an agnostic.  But with no qualms, I choose Christ and will continue to choose Christ.  I want to share this journey with you.  This is the last sermon in the series on World Religion.  I’ve chosen Christ not only in the face of temptations to doubt, I’ve chosen to follow Christ in the Church over all other religious options.  Let me share some of that intensely personal journey with you.  These are the beliefs that nourish my soul and hold me home. 

A GOD WHO ACTS

At the core, we believe in a personal loving God who acts in human history to achieve our salvation.  For God so loved that he gave.  God loved.  God gave.  Christianity is not at its core a philosophy, a belief about the nature of the cosmos.  We believe that certain things have happened in human history that were actually the actions of God himself.  God acts in the Exodus from Egypt and in the cross of Christ and His resurrection.  We know that personally because we have, in Christ, seen God act in our lives.  Kitty has told me about the Wesley Class meetings with ALPS pastors.  They tire her out because of the stories, story upon story upon story, of people who had made absolute wrecks of their lives who were transformed by the powerful love of God in Christ.  God still acts.  God has acted.

But by seeing and hearing about how God is still acting, doing the miraculous, performing salvation, delivering from Egypt, we can relate better to the biblical stories.  Christianity – unlike Hinduism and Buddhism particularly – is not an agenda of self-realization and salvation through discovery of the God within.  We believe in a God who acts now and who calls us now into a new Kingdom of righteousness and love.  Jesus came preaching a new kingdom with new values that we are only still learning how to appropriate.  God has acted in Jesus Christ so as to open a doorway for us to be ushered into the rulership of God himself.  For God so loved the world that he gave his . . .

THE REALITY OF CHRIST

I believe because I am confident that the gospels are real and can be trusted.  This is especially under attack with the recent book and movie Da Vinci Code.  I’ve read the book – filled with laughable errors and a completely implausible and perfectly ridiculous theory - and I know all the arguments of those who attack the gospels as historically questionable.  Bart Ehrman is wrong.  I’ve listened to his teaching on The Historical Jesus and he is wrong.  He’s accepted the perspective of the skeptical academic approach to learning but this is an unproven hypothesis based on the belief that miracle stories are always legendary.  This is false and unproved.  In fact, the testimony of thousands of people around the world is that God still acts in really miraculous ways. 

I’ve experience divine healing myself.  I know thousands of others who have.  Even by the strictest laws of historical analysis, the least that can be said of the apostolic Gospel writers is this: they died believing that Jesus performed miracles, and was crucified and resurrected from the dead.  The New Testament is by far the best historical document detailing the life of Jesus and it has stood the test of time.  There is no good reason to doubt it both in terms of its textual integrity and its overall historical veracity.

I tell you that when I was going through my deepest doubt during my coursework, these truths held me soul firm.  Jesus was resurrected from the dead and the historical data proves it provided you are open to the miraculous.  I’m open, wide open.  Not that all miracle stories are true but some are and this miracle story holds sway over my soul.  Certainly all the apostles – who died for their proclamation of the resurrected Jesus – weren’t hallucinating!  Hallucination is the only theory that comes close to explaining events – the apostles clearly believed Jesus was resurrected.  They paid the highest price for their hallucinations – their own martyred lives. 

My conversion was not a psychological awakening but it was a deep encounter with a God who is, who acts, who speaks, who has come in Jesus, who was raised from the dead and sits at the right hand of God the Father almighty.  Bart is wrong.  Agnostics like him do not experience what their souls were created to know: a loving relationship with a God.  This is a real factual part of our present world and only our sin and pride and independence from God blinds us to God’s reality.  Bart and those like him are wrong.  God is true and real.  The most real parts of life are not material but spiritual.  It is our job to proclaim this; Christ resurrected and alive today!

A COMPELLING VISION OF GOD

The doctrine of the Trinity has been very helpful to me here.  This is a distinctly Christian doctrine and one that keeps me coming back for more.  We believe – not in three deities as the Muslims accuse, yet not in a simple unity of deity as other monotheistic religions do – but in a complex unity.  We believe God is one and three; a perfect union of one nature three persons who meld together in purpose and action but who remain eternally distinct.  God is a community of perfect unity and oneness.  What is the power of this confession?

It means that at the center of all the universe is a loving relationship of perfect unity and mission.  Wow.  Unified and purposeful relationship stands at the core of all that is.  God is a relationship on a mission.  We are completely unique in this belief.  In Islam, God is essentially power and judgment.  The tendency to violence (of which we are not immune!!) stems from the fact that, for the Muslim, God is essentially power.  For us, God is essentially loving relationship.  When we experience absolutely unified purposeful relationships in communities of faith we experience something that goes to the core of who God is.  That is why this is always so beautiful.  What destroys relationship destroys our contact with God because God loves community and relationship.  God is not essentially power.  God is essentially loving community.  I’m into that.  I want that for us.  In a beloved Latin text of the medieval church.

UBI caritas et amor, Deus ibi est.

WHERE charity and love are, God is there.  Christ's love has gathered us into one.

Our relationships as a community flow from the very relational Trinitarian God we love and adore.  Oh love that will not let me go!  I remain a believer because I remain transfixed by this God of powerful presence and life-affirming love.  Nothing is truer to Christianity than this – a God who acts and a God who is at the core a relationship of love.

THE REALITY OF CONVERSION

The greatest miracle of any human life is their own conversion.  The gospel, energized by the power of the cross and resurrection, makes real positive changes in lives.  My own story is a case in point.  I was self-centered, prideful, anxiety-bound and prejudiced before God got a hold of me.  God transformed me from inside out during my senior year of high school.  I have felt a peace and joy since that day that has never gone away.  I remember the very moment when God walked into my life.  I was sitting on a rock overlooking a beautiful valley in the central Texas hill country.  I said to God, “God, if you really are here, if you love me, if you have died to forgive me, if you are Messiah and LORD, then here I am.  I’m yours.  I give you all my anxiety and pride.  Take my life and make it yours.”  I don’t know how to describe it other than to say that God walked into my life and has never left.  I’ve struggled, I’ve doubted, I’ve sinned, I’ve wandered, but God has been a faithful friend and a wise guiding force for these 26 years since April 1980.

You may not have a conversion story like mine, but if you love Jesus and want to be a disciple of Christ, if you know you are a sinner and have received his grace and mercy, if you are filled with desire to walk the way of holiness, you are saved.  You can rest assured of this.  You can stop worrying and fretting.  You may need to grow and become increasingly sanctified (that means morally improved) but you can have peace and assurance of your salvation.

THE NECESSITY OF THE CHURCH

Another element of Christian life that has held my soul from the abyss of skepticism and doubt is the powerful phenomenon of the church.  The church is a mixed-bag.  We have highs and lows.  Some church history is embarrassing: the crusades and inquisitions, the failure to be involved in the civil rights movement, the justifications for slavery based on NT.  The church is also glorious.  I am not simply a person who has encountered a spiritual high.  I stand in a spiritual community that is 2000 years old.  That is saying something.  Gnosticism lasted about 150 years.  With all the various opinions and theological debates, there is a concentric core of Christian intellectual tradition.  I stand in that tradition.  We believe certain things.  We confessed them this morning.

I remember realizing, in the depths of doubt and spiritual soul-questioning, that by leaving the Christian fold and becoming an agnostic like Bart, I was simply changing one set of presuppositions for another.  I was simply shifting from one faith-community to another community of faith.  Remember, the agnostic academic religionists and scientific communities are based on unproven presuppositions.  They don’t know that God couldn’t do the miraculous.  Yet there are so many millions of people who believe God has.  Are they all wrong?  All?

Being a Christian makes sense of my world.  It makes sense of my mind structures; God created my mind to believe true things.  That makes sense of rationality.  It isn’t an accident that when I believe something as simple as, “I remember eating a banana for breakfast,” that this memory belief is true.  I cannot prove memory beliefs!  Not without other memory beliefs.  But I have confidence in that because God made me to believe true things.  God makes sense of my mind and my thoughts; God made my mind to work and to typically believe true things, not exhaustive truth but actual truth.

I look at the world and think, “There really must be a God who made this.”  It makes sense of my consciousness; I am an aware conscious being because God made me to be who I am.  Belief in God makes sense of my moral nature; my belief that senseless murder is fundamentally wrong isn’t just my opinion.  God hates evil and made me in his image to hate evil.  My moral nature makes sense.  The church is my community that believes these things together.  Life as deep meaning.  I crave deep meaning in life.  I crave deep meaning because God made me to live a life of deep meaning.  These are our beliefs; just like the Apostle’s Creed.  We’re a part of a 2000 year tradition of people believing these things.  That community holds my soul in peace and joy.  A whole host of saints have gone before us preaching a resurrected Jesus Christ.

[OFFER THEM CHRIST.]