I walked into a Religious Education classroom in a public school in the other day and with tongue-in-cheek wrote in large letters across the blackboard:

"I hate religion.”

“Man, in this class, you'll get shot,” gasped one student in amazement.

“But I’m sold on real Christianity,” I responded.

“Well, what’s the difference?” several chorused.

"Let me explain," I replied.

1. God's Purpose

True, Christianity is a religion, but people can be religious without being Christians. Christ condemned the religious Pharisees of his day because they hid their real selves behind a facade of religion and external morality.

It may sound odd, but God isn't into religion or external morality. He’s into relationships and reality. That is, he wants us not only to have a right relationship with him, but also with each other and with ourselves. And he wants us to be real – to see and admit what we truly are so he can help us.

Neither is it God's goal to make us good. It's to make us whole, for only to the degree that we are made whole will our actions, lifestyle, and relationships be wholesome!

Religion tends to want to fix us from the outside in. God wants to fix us from the inside out. The first can become an impossible burden. The latter is what brings freedom. Christianity is not a set of rules and regulations. It is experiencing divine love, divine acceptance and divine forgiveness.

It helps to realize that God isn't out to zap us for the wrongs we've done. In fact, no matter what we have ever done or have failed to do, he loves us with an everlasting love and has a wonderful purpose for our lives – for this life as well as the next! As Jesus said, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.”1 And again, "My purpose is to give life in all its fullness."2




2. Man's Problem

On the outside we may look like we are doing very well, but on the inside everyone of us has a major issue. Seneca, the ancient Roman philosopher, put it bluntly when he said, “We have all sinned. Some more. Some less.” God's Word, the Bible agrees. It reads, “We have all sinned and fallen short of God’s standard.”3 Sin, however, is not only doing harmful acts. It is anything that falls short of the standard of perfection that God envisioned for us. This includes nursing grudges and other negative emotions, pride, jealousy, mixed motives, etc. Most of us, too, are guilty of sins of omission; that is, not doing what we know we should and could do.4

Another misconception about God is that he is out to get us or to punish us for our sins. We bring sin's punishment on ourselves because sin has its own natural consequences. If we try to break the universal law of gravity, for instance, we can’t. It will break us. Neither can we break God’s universal moral law. When we do, it breaks us, and besides its painful effects in this life – suffering, sorrow, sickness and spiritual death – its ultimate and tragic consequence is eternal death or separation from God.5

We are like a burned out or "dead" electric light bulb that cannot respond to its power source. And because we are spiritually dead, we cannot respond to God’s love and power either, without his first “fixing” us. Furthermore, because of our spiritual deadness, it is impossible for anyone to save him or herself. Only God can do this. This is why all the "good works" in the world cannot make us alive to God. Only when we see and admit this, is God able to "fix" us!

3. Christ's Answer

Because our sin has separated or disconnected us from God, we have been left with a God-shaped vacuum, or spiritual emptiness, within. As Augustine put it, “You have made us for yourself, O God, and our hearts are restless until they find their rest in you.” The world’s many religions are all evidence of man’s endless search to find God and fill this vacuum. However, because God loved us so much, he sent his own sinless Son, Jesus Christ, to save us from our predicament.6

Christ did this by dying on the cross in our place to pay the consequence of and ransom price for our sins – death. Thus, Jesus Christ is God’s only provision for our sin, and he is the only way back to God and the only door into eternal life.7

God's Word, the Bible, says, “For there is one God and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all men.”8 Had there been any other way to save mankind, Christ wouldn't have had to die for us. Because he was without sin, he was the only one qualified to die for our sins.




4. Your Invitation

If you were found guilty of a serious crime and were condemned to death – if offered, would you accept a free unconditional pardon?

Because of Christ’s dying for us, that’s what God offers us, and with it the gift of eternal life. All we need to do is to accept his pardon. Here’s how to do this:

First, confess. God’s Word says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins.”9

Second, repent. That is, we need to turn from sinful and selfish ways to follow God and his ways. Jesus said, “The Kingdom of God is near. Repent and believe.”10 That is, we need to turn from sinful and selfish ways to follow God and his ways.

Third, believe. “Believe in the Lord Jesus and you will be saved,”11 declares the Word of God.

Fourth, receive. God also said, “To all who received him [Christ], to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God.”12

Admitting our sinfulness, believing that Jesus died for our sins, inviting him into our lives as Lord and Savior, and accepting God’s forgiveness is what makes us real Christians. The following prayer will help you do this:

Dear God, I confess that I am a sinner and am sorry for all the wrongs that I have done. I believe that your Son, Jesus Christ, died on the cross for my sins. Please forgive me. I invite you, Jesus, to come into my heart and life as Lord and Savior. I commit and trust my life to you. Please give me the desire to be what you want me to be and the desire to do what you want me to do. Thank you for dying for my sins, for your free pardon, for your gift of eternal life, and for hearing and answering my prayer. Amen.


5. Here's Great Assurance

If you prayed this prayer and truly meant it, you are now a true Christian and have the gift of a new spiritual life as well as eternal life. You are also a child of God and a member of his family.13 God promised this. Choose to accept it. Take it by faith and not feelings. Feelings change, but God’s Word never does.

God’s Word says, “And this is the testimony: God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. I write these things to you who believe in the name of the Son of God so that you may know that you have eternal life.”14

When you pray to receive Christ into your life, you have a brand new spiritual life, and this life needs care and nurturing just as your physical life does.

Cute.

One thing though...

You can't prove that God exists, nor doesn't exist, therefore this whole thing was a complete waste of time, and perhaps even some brain power.

Think up something new, think up a new angle, instead of this religious stuff that everyone seems obsessed with.

Go.. have fun.. yeah do that.. go go go.. yeah.. whatnot..

*waddles off*

In my opinion, it is never a waste of time or brain power when discussing matters of eternal value.
Besides, the onus is on YOU to prove that God doesn't exist, is it not?
How do we know that God exists? Are there good reasons for believing in God, or must His existence be accepted on blind faith?

The Bible does not support the idea of “blind faith,” or faith as a “leap into the dark.” Biblical faith is a faith that sees what those who have no faith fail to see; it is a leap into the light, not into the dark. For Christians, God is not a theoretical abstraction, but Someone who loves us and who has made Himself known to us.

Thus, the bottom line is that we know God exists because He has revealed Himself to us. He has done this in many ways — through creation, through our moral consciousness, through miraculous experiences, and in many other ways. Philosophers have designed arguments that spell out the logic of these testimonies to God’s existence, but these arguments simply formalize what should be intuitively obvious to anyone who looks around and within themselves.

In short, there are many arguments for the existence of God, most of them valid and quite powerful. However, although these many arguments for the existence of God are substantial, because we are sinners and cut off from immediate communion with God we need something more than good arguments. What we need is for God to reveal Himself to the world. This is exactly what He has done. First through prophets in the Bible, and then fully and concretely in Jesus Christ, God has spoken to the world, told us about Himself, shown us what He is like, and called us to be reconciled to Him through the death of His Son, giving proof to the world by raising Jesus from the dead and through Him fulfilling numerous Old Testament prophecies. And that is how we know that God exists.

Alright... to sum up what you just said..

We should waste our time talking about things that are unimportant and constantly conversed about..

Then blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah, god exists cause the bible says he created us and god knows we all believe that, and then there's the thing about how god did this and that and "He's" the most powerful potent thing in the world.


Thank you for wasting more of my time.

Did you forget your medication this morning, dude?
LOL.
You seem a bit unstable to say the least.
Can you at least TRY to come up with something a tad bit more coherhent in any following posts.....because you TRULY do waste peoples time with your thoughtless nonsense.
Just asking for you to be more polite in the future and to try not to defeat your own silly argument about "waste of time" with your own posts.

i think John Preston'd funny
see, he can be happy without god!!!
you people just need someone to blame for all the FUCK in this world...why doesn't God erase the suffering??? why does he molest children and why does he hate me???ok, you're gonna say "He's all about the love"..well, i think you just smoked too much marijuana(how the FUCK do you spell that )

and the "he loves you even if you hate him" is just a cheap trick for "making" everyone christian..if he loves you anyway, then why do you have to be christian? why should you not fuck someone before you're married??? he loves you anyway, doesn't he???
ohm sorry for the insult, God, but i didn't write "he" with a capital H...forgive me??? thanx!!!

1. God (if he does exist) has no true reason for having created us, other then to have his own ego pumped up with little munchkins worshipping him, therefore we have no real reason for being here other then to bow down to some "almighty asshole".

2. (Kicks the iMac) If he doesn't exist then oh well. We are going to die, we are born into death, and we die into life... that darn simple. To live is to die, and to die is to live, understand? No? Go think for a second then.

3. The bible and all other "religious" books are completely worthless things. That is mainly because you don't know if they really came from "Above" or not.

4. Bowing down to some God and saying "Oh I'm sorry I did this" is stupid, since if He does exist then He would want us to make mistakes, otherwise we wouldn't be able to make them.

5. I like incoherent babbling when I use it to respond to a post which states more or less what everyone keeps telling me day in and day out.

*waddles off to find something to do*

Everyone here thinks everyone else here is wasting their time. But maybe we're all wasting our own time . . .

Here is an approach for someone who wants 'physical' proof of God's existence.


Once in a while a piece of e-mail gets passed on to me that I respond to personally. One was a challenge from some attorneys.
How do you deal with an attorney's objections to Christianity? It's natural to think attorneys are really hard people to deal with because we consider them so smart and articulate. They're more formidable--in our eyes--than the rank and file. Because they're used to vigorously rebutting opposition, we're less likely to take on an attorney.

I've mentioned frequently--and I'll say it again, because I think it's worth remembering--that the most intelligent and articulate people often make the most foolish mistakes in thinking and reasoning when it comes to spiritual things.

It's amazing to see people turn from hard-headed rationalists into mystics in a single moment. They are confident objectivists until spiritual things come up; then they turn into radical skeptics. They refuse to treat religious ideas with the same care that they deal with other ideas. Attorneys are no exception.

When a friend was confronted by two attorneys with the challenge, "Prove that God exists," I suggested she ask the same question I ask anyone who says, "Prove it." "What kind of evidence would count as proof?" This is a test to see if they're really fair with their challenge. If they say, "I think God should appear right in front of me and show himself to me," then ask, "Is that the same kind of evidence you would require in a court of law for something to be demonstrated as true?"

I ran into a similar situation with the question that was e-mailed to me: "An attorney for whom I work as a computer information coordinator has told me he would believe there was a God if this God's interaction with someone could somehow be measured in terms of the impact that God has upon the person." The key word here is "measure."

The note continued, "I think he means some physical manifestation of God's interaction with me when I pray, or something like that. Is there a way to respond to this?" Then he adds, "He also says that if the soul existed, then we could measure its existence--that when a person dies and when a soul leaves the body, there should be some way to measure the fact that the soul is not with the body anymore, if the soul is part of the 'real world.'" Notice the use of the words "measure" and "real world."

By the way, there is a way to measure when the soul leaves the body. It's called death. That seems obvious to me. At any rate, maybe he wanted to measure the soul's absence by putting the body on a scale and noting that the dying man lost some weight--maybe an ounce or something--right when he died. (People actually do lose a smidgen of weight, but I think that's because they exhale. The air in the lungs actually weighs something.)


How does this attorney justify his fee when, on his view of proof, he's constantly working on things which don't even exist in the "real world"?


The attorney in this particular case had made a fundamental error. He assumed that anything "real" must be physically measurable. That's an odd statement, coming from an attorney. If that same attorney attempted to convict a criminal, he'd have to show that the defendant had a motive. But a motive is not a physical thing. It may be inferred from physical circumstances or from physical evidence, but the motive itself is not physical.
Would this attorney consider it a legitimate response if the defense said, "Counselor, if there really is this invisible thing called a motive that you attribute to the defendant, please show it to us. Where is it? Put it on the table so we can label it 'Exhibit 1.' If this motive exists, as you say, if it's part of the real world, then we should be able to measure its existence."

Do you see how I've taken the objection the attorney raised about the existence of the soul and put the exact same objection in the context of law? By this attorney's reasoning, something like a motive would be impossible to prove. Clearly this isn't going to do. The attorney's entire livelihood depends on being able to prove as a matter of fact in the real word a whole host of things that can't be measured physically.

This teaches us that there are different ways to prove a thing's existence. If a thing is physical, then some physical test should be able to reveal it, at least in principle. But if a thing is not physical--like a motive, a soul, an idea, or a host of other things--then a person has to infer its existence by different means. Attorneys do this all the time. They infer the existence of a motive by other means of reasoning. Why can't a soul be demonstrated to exist, at least in principle, in the same way?

Even a crime can't be measured the way our attorney friend is demanding. A crime is not a physical thing; it's an historic event, a relationship of individual actions that happened in the past and is gone forever. Corporate lawyers face the same problem because a corporation is not physical. A corporation may own physical things like buildings or machinery, but it isn't physical. It is real, but it's not physical.

Frankly, I'm hard-pressed to think of anything an attorney deals with that is principally physical. Even a contract is not physical. The paper and ink are not the contract. Rather, the contract is the invisible information tokened by the markings on the paper. You know the contract is not physical because that same contract can be on ten pieces of paper at the same time. It can also be on your computer disk. Physical things cannot be in more than one place at one time. The contract, therefore, is real, but not physical..

So here's the question I ask: How does this attorney justify his fee when, on his view of proof, he's constantly working on things which don't even exist in the "real world"?

When an attorney asks me how I prove there's a soul, I can appeal to his own discipline, law, which already has a rigorous methodology of proving the existence of things that aren't physical. I find that when an attorney objects to the existence of the soul because I can't provide physical proof for such a thing, I can go back to him and say, Listen, you don't demand physical proof for a motive, which isn't physical. You infer a motive from other evidence. You negotiate contracts; they're not physical. You deal with corporations; those aren't physical. So why do you make a demand on me and on my religious claim that you would never make on yourself when deciding weighty matters of law? Why won't you play by the same rules?

And if the attorney applied the same rules to spiritual questions that he applies every day to issues of law, his challenge could never be sustained. Objection overruled.

PS. You might have noticed a useful tactic in my response. When a person asks me a question, I've found it helpful to try to frame my response in the context of his own discipline or profession. This tactic makes it easier to persuade him, because he sees the issue in light of things he already knows to be true, or procedures he's already familiar with. This is an important step of establishing common ground.



This is a transcript of a commentary from the radio show "Stand to Reason," with Gregory Koukl. It is made available to you at no charge through the faithful giving of those who support Stand to Reason. Reproduction permitted for non-commercial use only. ©1996 Gregory Koukl


For more information, contact Stand to Reason at 1438 East 33rd St., Signal Hill, CA 90807
(800) 2-REASON • (562) 595-7333 • info@str.org • www.str.org

More Commentaries

k, i'm NOT gonna read that...

Wasn't that interesting.. oh by the way.. you never really did anything that proved to me why you should be wasting your time writing about stuff everyone writes about.

Pardon my typos.
*Waddles off for a bit*

Dear Sir, I really don't have to prove anything to you.
In fact, you have concretely proven to everyone that you must enjoy "wasting" time by the huge amount of time that you spend "wasting" making your own arguments against my posts.

No, Mr. Preston, you don't find it a waste of time at all do you?
And that is exactly my point my friend.
So, please do continue reading as I continue posting.
And thank you for taking the valuable time to respond thoughtfully.
I enjoy your rebuttals.
Sincerely,
Samichking

Seeing as it takes me only a few seconds to type out that stuff, no, it isn't a waste of time, since barely any time progresses by while I am doing it.

What YOU did though was a complete was of time, and also a complete waste of thought, since it contained various holes that make me flinch.

Well, if you say so.
Of course I disagree.
But thanks for reading.
Things happen when you read ya know.

faith - the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

you believe in the wind eventhough you can't see it physically. wind can be seen in a way though. you see the effects. things blowing around, etc.
i believe in God although i can't see him physically. i can see the effects. God has changed my life. he does miracles. he heals people.

people don't want to believe in God. they don't want to change the way they think. they don't want to change the way they live. stubbornness doesn't get you anywhere.

So you compared god with the wind?

Well first, there is physical and visible proof that the wind exists.
It moves things, oohhhhh, it brushes against you like some invisible force. You can see what it does, therefore you know it exists.

God on the otherhand has no physical nor visible proof that he truly exists. People are healed eh? How so? tell me please.

If you have any idea about the metaphysical/preternatural/supernatural then you'll realize that there is proof that some people are healed by others by some psychic means.

Now go find some perfect proof that proves his existence, and I'll believe wholeheartedly, but until then I'll shoot you people down when you say God exists because of so and so, when that so and so isn't anything other then something already recorded and done by humans or something else that is normal, albeit strange.

I hope you stick around. You make good sense and you
are very practical in your words.
Nice job brother.