Yesterday morning at Wildwood, I preached a sermon (together with Dr. Mike Strauss) about the reasonableness of believing that God really exists. I am now posting this sermon audio on my blog for you to either listen to (for the first time) or for you to share with a friend.
To listen to this audio online, use the imbedded media player below:
To download the audio to listen to later, click on the link below:
I once went fishing in far northern Saskatchewan on Wollaston Lake. Wollaston Lake is not in the middle of no where . . . it is north of there. While fishing on this immense lake (the lake is the size of New Jersey), you hardly ever see another person unless they are in the boat with you. You can hardly imagine a recreational lake in Oklahoma that is not surrounded by homes and boat docks. However, up near the Arctic Circle, life is different and more desolate.
While fishing on these waters you see a lot of things on the shore line that look very natural . . . beaver dams, boulders, and bushes. No matter where we went around Wollaston Lake we saw some combination of these things.
However, after long hours on the Lake, we came to a particular bay that looked quite different. Up on the side of the hill guarding the bay’s entrance sat a beautiful log cabin. The cabin was not luxurious, but it was fantastic . . . exactly the kind of cabin you would want to retreat to in the Canadian wild.
Over the course of our fishing trip I floated past this cabin 4 or 5 times. In all my journeys past “cabin bay” I never saw a single person outside the cabin . . . yet I have no doubt that someone built it. The complexity and organization of its construction prevented me from believing the cabin was just the product of “if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around . . . ”
I was thinking about this experience this week as I am preparing for Sunday’s sermon at Wildwood Community Church. A common question asked by many is, “Is there really a God?” A related question is, “how can I prove that God really exists?” Is religion just a blind leap into the dark?
Just as it is not a blind leap to think that someone built the cabin on Wollaston Lake, so it is not a blind leap to think that Someone (God) created the world in which we live. Each boulder, beaver, and bush so naturally placed around Wollaston point to a supernatural origin. In light of the evidence, belief in God is not a blind leap into the dark, it is a step of faith into the light.
Don’t believe me? Join us this Sunday at Wildwood in either our 9:30 or 10:50 worship services as we will explore this question deeper. I will be preaching this message in tandem with my friend Dr. Mike Strauss. Mike is a Physicist at the University of Oklahoma who crashes atoms into each other in Cern, Switzerland in his spare time. I will set the stage and direct us towards some relevant Scripture then have Mike share a good bit about the Scientific Evidence for God. You won’t want to miss this!
Looking forward to worshipping with you this Sunday at Wildwood Community Church – wildwoodchurch.org.
Here is a summary of questions we will be addressing in our “FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions about Christianity” sermon series:
Have you ever been asked a question you don’t know the answer to? (If you are breathing, you should have just nodded your head “yes.”) Being asked a question you can’t answer is never fun, but when you feel like you should know the answer, it goes from uncomfortable to humiliating. Since none of us like to be in situations where we feel humiliated, we tend to steer ourselves only into conversations where we think we know the answers.
On one particular episode of the sitcom “Everybody Loves Raymond,” Ray agrees to talk to his daughter about the “birds and the bees” in order to impress his wife. In preparation for this conversation, Ray studies up by reading a number of books on the topic. When the time comes for Ray to “have the talk” with his daughter, he shows up with an arsenal of info to answer what he anticipates his daughter’s questions to be. However, things don’t go quite like Ray had planned out . . . [watch this video below]
When the conversation takes a turn, Ray bails out. I would guess it was quite some time before Ray ventured into this conversation with his daughter again!
Recently, my friend Mark Burget shared this clip with me to illustrate an important point about the spiritual life. Often, as Christians, we steer the conversation AWAY from spiritual things when talking to our non-Christian friends because we are afraid we will be asked a question we do not know the answer to. This fear often prompts us to run away from the conversation altogether and retreat to safer ground. Shoot, many times we steer away from asking tough questions with our CHRISTIAN friends because we don’t want to appear as though we don’t already have all the answers!
Knowing this dynamic exists, we wanted to take a series of messages this fall in our main worship services at Wildwood Community Church to ask some of the bigger questions we have about our faith. Questions like:
In this series, that we have called “FAQ: Frequently Asked Questions about Christianity,” we will be seeking answers to these questions for ourselves . . . as well as equipping our minds with thoughts to share with others as these frequent questions are asked.
We will be kicking this series off this Sunday, August 18, at Wildwood Community Church. In the first three messages of this series, we will be looking at three preliminary truths that will help us understand the relevance of this series. These messages will cover the basic motivation of this series in a 1-2-3 format:
Bruce Hess and I are excited to team teach our way through this series this fall. We hope you plan to join us . . . and invite others to join us also as we progress through these important topics. We hope to see you this Sunday in either our 9:30 or 10:50 services.
