Atheist’s Conversion To Christianity
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I would submit to you these things, scripture, the manuscript evidence, Jesus, what a great resume. Jesus has a really good pedigree. Doesn’t he? Prophesied coming, virgin birth, sinless life, miraculous deeds, heal the sick, raise the dead, made the blind to see, the deaf to hear, the lame to walk. Laid his back to a beam of wood. Shouldered the sin debt of the world. The appropriate measure of God’s wrath was poured on Jesus that you and I had deserved. Three days later comes out of the grave, victorious, alive. He ascends to heaven. He runs the universe, general manager of the universe. He’s coming back. All of these things best understood in terms of the… Think about it, does God exist? What kind of God exist? How may I know this God who exist? It’s Christianity. Now what you’re getting is a seminar of like three days in 45 minutes.
Here’s a Pieter Bruegel picture, the blind leading the blind, and they all fall in the ditch. This was out at the Getty in LA. I don’t know if it still is. Bruegel was a painter. I really like his stuff. A lot of biblical themes. We live in a world where maybe it’s because of just rampant skepticism, maybe it’s political correctness and the desire to never offend anybody or maybe it’s somebody just read a goofy blog site, but a lot of people, even those within the church, are reticent to affirm the Bible is God’s word. The preachers that really don’t have the spiritual backbone anymore to say you must be born again, which is what Christ said. Listen, we are blind leading the blind. We’re falling into a ditch of hedonism, relativism. Hey Chesterton, by the way, you know who G.K. Chesterton, Gilbert Keith Chesterton had a big influence on C.S. Lewis.
Wrote a lot of really cool books. He wrote a biography of Thomas Aquinas, and I want you to read it. It’s called The Dumb Ox. Because Aquinas was a big, heavy set lumbering kind of quiet guy and some of his brothers in the monastery said he’s a dumb ox and Aquinas’s tutor said one day the world will hear that ox roar. Chesterton wrote a very accessible, easy biography of Aquinas in 1908, but listen to this quote, it’s really cool. Chesterton said, “As much as we need to win the loss to Christianity, more and more increasingly we need to win the Christians to Christianity.” Isn’t that something. And if that were true in 1908, how much more so 106 years later in 2014. Let me move on here and I have, this clock says one minute, that one says two. I’m going to go with that one over there.
Because I like to share some stuff that I wanted to share. Here’s a quote by Oz Guinness and it’s a long quote. I like it so I’ll read it. Oz Guinness says, “Man cannot bear the thought of simply being another piece of the machinery in a naturalistic world rather than face the loneliness and oblivion of a completely mechanistic universe in despair. Man has turned to demons rather than God.” There’s almost two pendulum swings. There’s atheism and with it the cold iron fist of statism and government, it’s just a completely secular world. There’s no God, there’s no moral code. There’s just organization and power. And that’s a dark future I will tell you and then there’s spiritualism. Everything is God, including me and so we become superstitious. We become occultists. We become Wiccans and Satanists and pagans. Listen, the hedonism and self indulgence of a naturalistic godless world will only take you so far and will leave you empty.
It’s amazing how people will revert toward in their young years, teens and twenties and early thirties, atheism woo, no God, party on. And then they reach their forties, fifties and there’s two paths if they don’t find Christianity. There’s despair and often suicide. You ought to read A.N. Wilson, God’s Funeral. He talks about after Europe really embraced Darwinism and atheism in the 19th century. By the Dawn of the 20th century there was two phenomenon. There was a lot of suicide and people dying of alcohol poisoning and just numbing their psyche with substances and then there was also the rise of spiritism and in the teens and twenties there was the age of mediums and the occult and fortune tellers and seances. See there’s godlessness and with it generally self-indulgence, then there’s hyper spiritualism where there’s got to be some transcendent meaning, but oftentimes that leads people into the occult and I believe satanic deceptions. In the middle there’s no God or everything is God. In the middle there’s a man who said, “No, I am God and I’ll prove it by rising from the dead.”
John 13:13, “You call me Lord and so I am,” and Jesus said, “Destroy this temple in three days, I’ll rise it up again.” We live in a world that’s lost its way. Bruegel’s painting is so apropro, the blind leading the blind and so we who know truth are called to show truth to a world. Now I’ve sinned. I’ve got to repent. I’ve got to ask your forgiveness, summits and Gods because I’ve gone over time, but I’m going to give you a quote and then I’m going to hush, okay. Present, explain, defend, be ready always, do well and put the silence arguments. See, look, you can not only do apologetics. If you’ll live for Jesus you yourself will be an apologetic. So here’s the call. C.S. Lewis as is so often the case we consult Lewis. By the way it is God’s will that you know about C.S. Lewis, you don’t even have to pray about it. But anyway, so Lewis once was talking about the return of Christ.
Here’s what he said and I close C.S. Lewis said quote, “Indeed, the curtain on the stage of history has already fallen and we believers know how the story ends. We know that Christ is coming back and time as we know it will one day be over, but that does not absolve us of the responsibility to faithfully carry out our God given daily tasks. Some of us are called to feed the animals on a farm and others are called to plan some great campaign that may benefit history a hundred years from now. Deep in our heart we know Christ is coming back. Time will come to an end and our plans for tomorrow may never come to fruition, but it didn’t matter,” said Lewis. “The important thing was this, we were at our post when the inspection came. When King Jesus comes to inspect the troops, let’s be faithful and be at our post, living and bearing fruit for him.” That’s truth and our call to live it out. God bless you. I’m done.
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