The Overwhelming Evidence of God | Eric Metaxas

[Music] well ladies and gentlemen you know many you know our speaker he's the new york times bestselling author he's the author of 30 children's book he lives from manhattan but he's here in arizona so would you give him a big arizona welcome eric mataxis thank you praise the lord wow so how many of you would have preferred to come to the eight o'clock service right i know uh what a blessing it is such a blessing to be here i'm here with my uh my current wife what's your name baby uh i is it too early for harsh joking i'm from new york uh and we're two hours later so it's really new almost noon in new york city so uh i'm gonna i'm gonna bring an afternoon message i hope that's okay uh i want to thank pastor bill and and mike grimm for allowing me to come last night by the way was it was a blessing to me people don't understand how i get blessed um by by hearing from folks like you how many people were here last night okay and the rest of you shame on you shame i spoke about well uh pastor bill interviewed me about my book his atheism dead and i don't want to really cover much that i spoke on last night but um the reason i titled the book is atheism dead just so you understand where it's coming from some of you know that in 1966 time magazine put out a famous infamous cover article right and it said is god dead and it's kind of interesting i find it interesting that in 1966 if you weren't really a hardcore christian and you're kind of like trying to read the tea leaves you know all the scientists were saying that science is really pushing out faith and that science is more and more enabling us to discover that we don't need god to explain the panoply of creation uh we can explain it through natural forces okay now that was never true but you could understand how around 1966 people got out over their skis or i know we don't have a lot of skiers here do we uh out kick their coverage what can i say work out you know but the point is that it's so fascinating that human beings are always tempted to say we figured it out let's go with it print it you know except of course we know uh now and you know even then that's just not right but but the science was it was a heady time right and a lot of people thought science is pushing it was the narrative and the thesis of my book is atheism dead is that around 1966 we got stuck in that gear that something happened in american culture that a lot of people just said you know we uh we'll let people go to church and you know you can believe that stuff but but the powers that be the elites know yeah religion is on its way out right well something funny happened since about 1966 the evidence for god from science has been piling up steadily steadily steadily steadily steadily until you get to a point now where the evidence i'm just talking from science for the idea that only god could explain everything that exists that random scientific processes cannot explain how we get everything we have whether it's the universe or this planet or life that evidence has been piling up and the evidence is astonishing but what's more astonishing to me and why i wrote the book is that none of us knows this you don't read this in a newspaper you know science pointing to god but the fact of the matter is that that is the case and if you read certain christian authors or if you're into apologetics you're starting to pick this stuff up but the mainstream media the culture tends to just ignore it like we settled that question in 1966 we've moved on well reality has not moved on god has not moved on the fact of the matter is that just the opposite has been happening now the most dramatic example when we talk about evidence for god is something called the fine-tuned universe how many people here are familiar with the argument for god from the fine-tuned universe i'm just curious anybody okay you guys can take your cigarette break right now go ahead go ahead i'll see you in 10 minutes really it's beautiful it's beautiful outside they're serving donuts by the way serving doughnuts when you walk in that's not biblical i don't know where you get that from i have no idea where you get that from i was like what is this what is this kind of luxurious living that is not biblical you know to do that and yet of course i'm upset that our church in new york doesn't do that i'm angry um but i just want to say that the fine-tuned universe i want i want to acquaint you with this because this is kind of the most simple example because there's all these examples from science but the most basic one is what's called a fine-tuned universe and it's gotten so ridiculous the evidence has piled up so much on this that it's open and shut it's not kind of like well it's compelling no there's a lot of compelling stuff this isn't compelling this is open and shut you know this is like evidence that the earth is a sphere if you've got questions about that i don't want to hear about it by the way in the book line okay if you're a flat earther please don't talk to me but the point is that there's certain things it's open and shut and the evidence for god from science from the final universe it's it's kind of piled up to a point where it's hilarious but to me again the headline is nobody knows this nobody talks about it and really what's funny is the the the the atheist christopher hitchens you know about 15 years ago somebody shoved a camera in his face in the back of a car said hey what's the best argument from the other side because he's always always debating christians and people of faith and he was a very unpleasant nasty debater and i say that in a positive sense uh he was uh he was really unpleasant you know there's certain people that they're they don't seem like they're interested in truth they seem like they're interested in ripping your head off and dancing on your grave but in a rare moment of candor and generosity he said oh uh the fine-tuned argument he actually answered honestly and said yeah you know somebody asked him what's the most what's the best argument for the god side he said the fine-tuned argument and he said it is the idea that if if things you know as science examines something they notice that gee if we're just a tiny bit this way or a tiny bit this way life couldn't exist so he was even moved by that and and said it out loud and he said and i and i suspect that most people on my side on the atheist side would agree with that um uh that that one takes a bit working out now by saying it takes a bit working out means we're stumped there is no answer to to it we don't like it so we will say things like it takes a bit working out yeah yeah things have been working out on a piece of paper um there's no working it out the evidence for the fine-tuned universe that god has designed everything brilliantly perfectly accurately is just staggering and again the biggest news is that most of us don't know it because it's been piling up quietly over the decades while we've been busy raising kids and doing things and and the newspapers aren't aren't really like you know going out there with these headlines or it really never piles up enough except uh before i wrote this book what led me to write this book was i wrote a book i guess about seven years ago called miracles and in it i talked about you know out and out miracles of god how god is a god of miracles and i talk about scriptural miracles and miracles that have happened to me and people i know that there's no other explanation except that's called a miracle god is alive and he does miracles anybody here dare to say that they've ever experienced some kind of a miracle from god okay you're all heretics get out uh of course that's real but what is the biggest miracle for me that i put in that book seven years ago was the miracle of creation when you start studying the fine-tuned universe you start studying the uh you know whether it's the the the big bang or or the the the earth or life or wherever you look you start saying this is so exquisitely perfectly designed that it it's an argument for god that's just breathtaking that if anything were this way or this way so i wrote the book and then i wrote an op-ed that was in the wall street journal the first time i was published in the wall street journal and uh since i've been vocal politically probably the last right uh but we kid is it too early to joke obviously i never would have cracked a joke like that at the eight o'clock that's why they had me here at the 9 30. so so i published this article it was a wall street journal and i said in this it's a short op-ed and it said science increasingly makes the case for god came out about seven years ago when the book came out that article that op-ed in the new york in the sorry in the wall street journal was literally the most popular shared article in the history of the wall street journal by a factor of more than double and i met the woman who wrote the article about the tiger mom who came in at number two man is she ticked um i actually did meet her she's sweet woman but but they said that that was shared like 300 000 times and mine was like 650 000. so you want to ask yourself why was it such a popular article it's because the culture we live in hardly ever acknowledges that the evidence for god is unbelievable it's piling up and so when i wrote about this little article you know a lot of people just freaked out they thought really wow i you know i i keep hearing over and over and over that science is at odds with faith and faith is at odds with science well that's baloney it's a lie from the pit of hell it's totally untrue but we never talk about it so i wrote about it in the wall street journal and it went you know and it was about the fine-tuned universe and people came out of the woodwork to to basically say oh this is ridiculous this fine-tune universe thing has been dealt with long ago nobody buys this anymore and i thought yeah except here's the problem like 10 minutes ago christopher hitchens you know the poster boy for atheism said it was the most compelling argument the fact is folks there's no getting around it so let me give an example when i say fine-tuned universe we now know now we didn't know this when a lot of us were kids but we now know from science that if the earth this is really simple right if the earth were the tiniest bit smaller i don't mean way smaller i mean just like a four percent five percent something like that tiniest bit smaller we wouldn't have the sufficient what they call a magnetosphere to retain the atmosphere that we have and therefore you'd not be able to breathe right now wouldn't that be uncomfortable you think it's hard sitting through church and you're able to breathe can you imagine if the earth were the tiniest bit smaller science knows this now that like huh coincidence it just happens to be big enough to have an atmosphere so we can breathe without thinking about it and we don't think about it do we take it for granted don't you you don't go like wow amazing i can breathe atmosphere cool we don't even think about it but science says well if the earth were a little bit smaller like mars zero atmosphere but here's where it gets creepy if the earth were the tiniest bit bigger same thing science now tells us this is science this is not christians this is science says that if the earth were a little bit smaller or a little bit bigger we could not have the atmosphere that we have and life would not be possible well you think well gee isn't that a great coincidence aren't we lucky that our planet just happens to be exactly the right size for this atmosphere and for life isn't that isn't that lucky and you think yeah you could think it's lucky or you could think it appears like maybe it was designed but we don't want to believe that because that would mean we believe in god and that's repulsive so we'll reject it we'll call it luck but science discovers other things and other things and other things wherever science looks it discovers gee that's creepy it's exactly it looks exactly fine tuned the existence of the moon how many people are aware that we have a moon a lot of you a lot of you yes uh well did you ever look up at the moon and think that if the moon weren't there we couldn't be here we never think of that you never even occur to us like why i mean it's nice it regulates the tides well that's pretty big but you know what do you care in phoenix about tides let's be honest right it's been i think it's been like what 180 million years since you've had any water here right you don't care about tides but let me tell you something we now know and again this is in the last 50 years since time magazine's article we now know that the moon if it weren't there and if it didn't have the size that it has the or the moon is an outrageous anomaly in our solar system i mean if you look at other planets and their moons the our moon is gigantic compared to the size of earth i mean it's really really big right when you think of the size of earth it's you know 2000 miles across and earth is 8 000 miles across it's huge science now knows without any doubt that if it weren't there we couldn't be here we now know that the moon regulates the rotation that our the wobble of our rotation without the moon would be so outrageous that there is just no chance that we were able to have any kind of climate or atmosphere anything that we have so there's another thing you think wow great coincidence how lucky but wherever you look that was my wife laughing see that's what keeps our marriage young she still laughs at the old jokes um thank you honey thank you um that's why my daughter's not here she does not laugh at these jokes no but i i just want to tell you those are just two obvious things but science as it has improved over the decades think about this right science has gotten able to see more and more on the microscopic level on the the level of you know better telescopes better microscopes the more we could see with science the more we could see how perfectly designed everything is those are two obvious examples another one which is really bizarre since you live uh in a part of the world where you can see the sky and stars how many of you have ever seen saturn uh or sorry jupiter in the night sky anybody here ever see jupiter a nice guy a lot of okay you could take a cigarette break don't be ashamed go ahead it's uh i gotta tell you something we live in new york city in manhattan we don't get to see jupiter okay we have a lot of lights and um and the mayor doesn't allow us to to look outdoors anymore and um hey roman's 13. you got to obey you got obey uh and so when i come to a place like this i was in albuquerque a week ago and you asked that question a lot of hands go up like oh yeah we've seen jupiter well let me tell you something that pinprick of light in the sky called jupiter it is 400 million miles away the the sun is 93 million miles away jupiter is 400 million miles away so it's so far away that it's inconceivable but it is so large that the gravity from jupiter and saturn to some extent is so powerful that it pulls away meteors and asteroids that would otherwise strike earth they are pulled toward jupiter and they either hit jupiter or or just move in that direction because of the gravity of jupiter and science now knows that if jupiter that little pinprick 400 million miles away if it weren't there about a thousand times as many asteroids in meteors would hit earth and science knows that if that were the case we wouldn't be here or you'd be really jumpy look looking up all the time like what but the fact of the matter is that we don't even who thinks about this who thinks about hey how awesome that that little pin prick of light 400 million miles away is there because science now tells if it weren't there we couldn't be here we we just kind of take it for granted but if you start studying the science it begins to freak you out it's like well that's interesting it's almost as though somebody put it there it's almost as though somebody designed the solar system for our benefit but that couldn't be we don't want to believe in god that's like obsolete you know that's medieval right we don't believe in that well i'm here to tell you it's amazing that everywhere you look in the universe you see this kind of evidence now if if a meteor i mentioned this last night about the size of this sanctuary about 180 feet maybe something like that that happened in uh tunguska siberia in 1908 right we know this that a meteor about 180 feet in diameter which when you think of the size of the earth it's like unbelievably tiny right it's like like a grain of sand but it hit a remote area of siberia in 1908 just that size that's just one okay and the effect of that one meteor of that size was so outrageous okay it came in to our atmosphere that size about 35 000 miles per hour and exploded about five miles over the surface of the earth in this very remote section of siberia and the power of that explosion was the equivalent of one 000 hiroshima bombs it instantly flattened 80 million trees now i know you don't have trees here but trust me they're that's impressive that's impressive so that's one meteor about that size that happened in 1908 nothing like that has happened since because you'd have heard about it but science knows the devastating effect that they have okay and we now know oh oh yeah because of jupiter 400 million miles away that's not happening very often so we're not nervous about it we're not jumpy about it we can exist because coincidentally jupiter just happens to be there protecting us you know like running interference right but everywhere we look we see these evidences of design there's a whole chapter in my book on water and i have to tell you this is i didn't think i'd write a chapter on water you think what could be more boring what do we take for granted you know it's like breathing who cares it's water what what well science in examining water realizes that water makes no sense it appears to be exquisitely designed and you kind of think well uh it's colorless uh it's odorless it's you know i it what could be more average what could be more normal than water well that's kind of the whole point it is so astonishing the design of water science says that you know when you look at a water molecule it doesn't really make sense it's not supposed to be kind of a substance that boils at 212 degrees fahrenheit uh and that freezes at 32 degrees right from from a chemical point of view it really doesn't make sense and of course i use fahrenheit because what are we communists come on please enough with the celsius enough i don't want to hear it so uh so science looks at water and says it seems just to be a crazy brilliant design and the one of the weirdest things about water there are two properties that are kind of interesting that make it look designed for life right one is that every substance when it becomes more dense okay i'm sorry when a substance goes from you know gas to liquid to solid it gets denser and denser right so that when something becomes a solid when it freezes it becomes super dense and sinks right yeah except for water water when it gets colder and colder up to 39 degrees fahrenheit it gets denser and denser just like you'd expect but at 39 degrees fahrenheit it flips and it starts to get less dense and less dense and when it hits 32 and freezes it's nine percent less dense than the liquid water and so it floats and you think well yeah ice floats i know i had a high ball once admit it admit it and we're gonna have an altar call for all of you when this is over and i want you to throw your highball glasses and the stirrers on this altar okay seriously water freezes and it floats think about this we don't we never think about it but science can now tell you that if it weren't for this weird thing that water this substance floats we would have a runaway uh freezing effect and life couldn't exist ponds and lakes and and all the science now knows that this is vital to life on earth and it's a really strange quirk of water almost looks designed but we know it couldn't be designed we know that right because there's no god we know water also has a curious thing i didn't expect ever from a pulpit to be talking about viscosity and forgive me if that offends you but the viscosity of water is such right the thickness of water as it flows is perfectly designed so that it erodes rocks so that when water flows it erodes rocks kind of like it's just thick enough to erode rocks to take the metals and the minerals along with it as it flows during the erosion process and then of course water also has this creepy ability to dissolve things perfectly they call it the universal solvent and so it carries along with it the metals and the minerals that it's dissolving and wherever it flows however far it goes it carries those minerals and metals with it feeding plants wherever it goes so that the most far-flung and i know here you don't have a ton of plants i get it but go with it i grew up in connecticut think about it wherever water flows it feeds the plants and the grasses and the trees and whatever wherever it flows because it has this weird property of eroding and then dissolving and carrying these things and then animals eat the plants and animals get the metals and the minerals and he'd say this is what a great design but of course it's just ran it's just it's just happenstance it just happened we're just lucky well i never really thought about erosion as a positive thing in my life but we now know that if water didn't do this there there would be no life on earth this is just one of these weird things that we take for granted everywhere you look in science you find more and more and more evidence along these lines and erosion of the erosion of water it's so powerful that it should over millions of years it should have eroded all of the mountains down to nothing 10 times over so they say well that's a problem that's a design flaw what are we going to do about that well science discovered in our lifetimes something called plate tectonics that god designed this planet so that the the plates move around and continue to create mountains as quickly as the water is eroding them or could that just be a coincidence everywhere we look we see evidence of god's design and it has piled up to a level that i promise you if you're intellectually honest it will freak you out you will say this can't be random this can't be natural processes in fact there are so many things that if they weren't just this way or just this way the fine tuning that it it's kind of like if you had 200 dials on a wall behind me and he said if every any one of those dials is a millimeter to the left i apologize for using metric i apologize a 32nd of an inch to the left or a 32nd of an inch to the right just a hair okay here is not metric right just a hair this way or a hair that way the whole universe the whole solar system life as we know it would not exist now that's what science says so if you are really worthy excuse me i didn't have enough breakfast obviously and my stomach grumbles like that um honey i told you i should have had the omelette i apologize um so if if you really hate the idea of god and you see all this evidence from design what do you do what do you what do you say you say something like hi don't cover the bottom what happens if i cover the bottom ah that was good she's clever that was very clever that was not scripted that was not scripted that's a clever woman is she married okay there's a young man looking for wife i believe looking for a clever clever is good it can also be bad though be careful um are we done here i think we're done so if you hate the idea of god and all of the scientific evidence piles up and up and up and up what would you do what would you say well you have two options one would be like it looks like there is a god who designed the universe if you're intellectually honest you'd say maybe it's not jesus i don't know what i think i've got questions but it sure looks like an intelligent designer designed everything the evidence is overwhelming and there are people intellectually honest enough to come to the conclusion one of the most famous atheists of the 20th century remember the 20th century way way better than the 21st right actually no uh but his name was anthony flu some of you know this story he was he wrote textbooks on atheism but he was convinced by this argument as he studied these things he said it the evidence of design is not just impressive it is overwhelming overwhelming and he came to believe in a god who created the universe and of course all his atheist friends just lost their minds and and he thought and he actually said well you know what is your problem i i've always believed in the socratic method you follow the evidence you follow the evidence you don't worry about where is it taking me you follow if you care about truth so there are atheists that that have that mindset that they believe in truth and they're following the evidence and they're honest and then you have people like christopher hitchens and richard dawkins who clearly have a very shallow view and they just kind of bat this stuff away but anthony flew at the end of his life had the privilege of meeting him he came to faith in a god who created the universe when he had spent his whole life writing the philosophy of atheism basically now but what if you don't have the intellectual courage and honesty of an anthony flew what do you do well they've come up with a this is kind of funny right it's kind of funny because a lot of times atheists will say that christians believe crazy stuff well here's what they've come up with which is infinitely crazier than anything we would believe they've said okay so everything in our universe is exquisitely fine tuned like you know 200 levels of perfect fine-tuning and they say okay we'll accept that because we have to but well here's here's what we say we say there's probably an infinity of universes and we just happen to be in the one that's perfectly fine-tuned that takes an infinity more of faith to believe than that jesus rose from the dead or the bible is true it's preposterous i mean it's genuinely preposterous and part of what i try to do in this book is to to say ladies and gentlemen this is preposterous it's not even interesting it's ridiculous you should horse laugh someone like that out of the room you should say we could talk about whatever you want but that's a joke you're kidding right we're at a point where the evidence for god has become overwhelming it's become absolutely overwhelming and i think in these crazy times of cultural marxism and cultural marxism is of course deeply atheistic okay we we see god raising up a standard in the midst of this battle and giving us evidence and i thought we need to have that evidence so that our faith is not like well i believe it folks believing one plus one equals two doesn't really take a lot of courage it's true you know it's true and i really believe the lord wants us to know that these things are true not to hope that they're true or to say well i was always taught that they were true but just to know he exists and he has given us given us evidence for his existence and science ironically which we keep being told is pushing faith out is doing exactly the opposite and i could go on and on and on with examples we don't have time but i want to tell you that it really is astonishing the second part of the book i talk about biblical archaeology it's the same thing people have said the bible's a bunch of folk tales well yeah except that archaeology continues to uncover evidence that what the bible says is history and it happens over and over and over the most dramatic example what really led me to write the book was uh i i met a man in albuquerque which i think i said uh always reminds me of a johnny cash song i met a man in albuquerque uh and he told me he was a biblical he's a biblical archaeologist who discovered biblical sodom and i thought biblical sodom sodom is like at the first couple of pages of the bible like i don't expect archaeology to be able to prove that or to find that that's like way way past it well if you read that chapter in my book you realize it's practically open and shut it's not like we think he's discovered it he's discovered biblical sodom and archaeology over and over and over in the last 150 years has shown that what the bible says you can take it to the bank it's true it's history it's not some folk tales but it happens over and over and over again but again where are the headlines we live in a world that says well you know in 1966 we kind of decided that we're not going to cover that stuff we've already figured it out god is you know yeah probably uh an archaic thesis so we're not gonna we're not gonna really cover that stuff well i'm here to tell you the evidence continues and continues and continues to come out and you really asked you know uh it's kind of like is it chi chico marx talking to one of the marx brothers movies he's like who are you gonna believe me or your own eyes you know like it it it's really it's like somebody's asking you to believe them not what you see the science the biblical archaeology everything seems to to pile up and believe me i'm just skittering over the tops here but we need to know that the evidence is astonishing for the lord of scripture and not just for his existence but also for the historicity of the bible that this is not just some old stuff but that this is history this is the word of god you can trust it i i think you know so the question when we say we believe something the question is always do we do we really believe it right when jesus asks is it martha or mary you know at the tomb of lazarus lazarus he he says you know i'm the resurrection and the life and and then he says do you believe this and our answer is always like oh yes lord oh yes lord i believe it but it's almost like he's looking at our hearts he's probing our hearts he's like do you really believe this do you really trust me do you live like that's true or do you hedge your bets because if you don't believe these things folks and this is where at the end of the book i i kind of turn the spotlight on atheism and i say okay you've got a lot of questions about the bible and this and that but let's look at what you believe because no one ever does christopher christians never volunteers uh they never volunteered the unbearable bleakness of the atheist worldview the atheist worldview tells you there's no god there's no meaning we're alone in the universe but they don't they don't really want to connect the dots and say that means that you're not creating an image of god you evolved out of primordial soup through random processes therefore your life has literally no value therefore you're an accident therefore you're not sacred therefore killing a child in the womb out of the womb life has no value they don't want to go there because they know that won't play well people people be like oh that doesn't sound right to me i love my wife and my children and my parents and i don't i i don't know about that you're telling me that that's all random that's just the evolutionary process making me want to perpetuate the species there's nothing transcendent in this idea of love there's no such thing as beauty there's no such thing as meaning good or evil is that what you're telling me well very few atheists have the guts to say yes that's what i'm telling you and even when they do have the guts they contradict themselves because here's the problem even an atheist making that claim is created in the image of god and they themselves long for meaning and even when they argue with you for their atheist position they are inadvertently revealing that they care about meaning and truth because if it's true that we come from nowhere and we're going nowhere when we die it's like crushing mosquito it's nothing if that's true why would you get so passionate about arguing against religion why would you care well the fact that they care proves that they don't believe the universe lacks meaning no one can believe that it's an unbearable bleak view that there isn't a soul alive who can face it or if they do they're just they're they're they're playing games uh even by believing even by saying that that they believe that but then they they ask us to believe some stuff right like they'll say like oh yeah racism is wrong and you'd say well okay i know it's wrong i know why it's wrong why do you say it's wrong if you ask somebody who doesn't believe in god they say you believe that we evolved out of the primordial suit by accident darwinism by the way was in the first decades uh and all the way up until you really get to hitler it was openly racist because it said darwism it proves that we evolve differently and and some things are more evolved than others and it's just scientific to say that some racists and some groups and some ethnicities are more evolved than others that's just science well they haven't been mentioning that in the last few decades right they say no no we know racism is wrong and i think well that's really nice i know it too but tell me why do you know it what does your philosophy tell you my philosophy from the scripture says god created us all equal in his image that is why christians have been at the forefront of abolition of slavery at the forefront of civil rights that's why we believe in mercy toward the weak and the poor and the suffering that's christian doctrine that's biblical doctrine where do you get your ideas from where do you get the idea that you should care for the poor why survival of the fittest says crush the poor kill the poor who cares well there have been times in history when when people have lived out that bleak nihilistic atheist philosophy but we're living in a time where they're pretending like oh no no no that those are we don't agree with those people we don't want to want to hear about that well we're here to tell you you have to deal with that because your doctrine demands demands that you face the meaninglessness of life the brutality of science do you know that um uh i always forget the columbine murders those two young men that that killed you know 20 people i mean that one of them was wearing a t-shirt that said natural selection okay that's darwin right survival of the fittest they planned those murders it they happened on april 20th that's hitler's birthday they did this on purpose there's a world view that says survival of the fittest that the idea of mercy of helping the weak of caring for the old caring for the young that that's just those are just silly ideas survival of the fittest natural selection that is the world view that arises out of atheism and so i think we need to say to atheists listen you can believe anything you want it's a free country but don't tell me you're against racism because you're just blowing smoke and i know you are it is only somebody who believes in the scripture that has any reason to say we shouldn't be racist or that says we should care for the poor your doctrine says oh i create my own meaning and we just we just believe these things or we just believe it it's sophistry folks it's smoke blowing they're playing head games i'm here to tell you the evidence for god the evidence for scripture has mounted and mounted and mounted and we can now have enough evidence from the world of atheism over the decades to say that we see that that worldview is not just wrong but unprecedentedly destructive and evil my wife and i just saw a movie mr jones kind of a hard movie to watch not for the kids but it talks about stalin in the ukraine and how the soviet atheists they didn't believe in in life or the meaning of life and they wiped out millions of people because they didn't believe that life is sacred but at the time you had a lot of journalists and and people who said well we believe in the concept of of communism it's going to be utopia for the workers whatever you can give them a pass because they hadn't seen where it's going to go but that's 90 years ago and today we can say mr atheist we have a record of what your doctrines have done in the last nine decades and it is unfathomably bleak it's so bleak it is evil it's frightening we need to talk about what we believe and what it does and what you believe and what it does and we need to be honest we need to be honest that the evidence for god is overwhelming now i just want to close with this thought that when i looked into the fine-tuned universe and you start seeing how god has designed everything because i just mentioned a few things but everywhere science looks on the microscopic level on the cellular level when you talk about life there's a few chapters in the book where you talk about a single cell the simplest life is so complex you can't even bear how complex it is and science says to you oh it just happened randomly it just kind of collected itself you know there was like a that that's like a tornado going through a junkyard and creating a 747 with you know with seat belts and trade tables like if there's not even a you know that everywhere you look you see evidence of design that makes you have an appreciation for who god is that i'll bet you wouldn't have before because we all say oh god is an awesome god when you start seeing how awesome it is frightening when you start thinking who he is it is frightening you want to fall on your face and you realize i didn't appreciate quite who god was and then you realize oh here's the good news that god who created atomic structure and subatomic structure in the universe and the far-flung galaxies and life that god knows your name and loves you and has a plan for you today and tomorrow and all the days of your life and wants you to be with him in eternity forever that god died for you not for humanity for you well some people have said that's good news it can't get much better than that when you realize who god is and then you realize that yeah that god knows your name and loves you it's it's the most astonishing news in the history of news there is nothing in reality that can compare to it and so i think at the end of the day we need to be a little bit bolder in our faith let me rephrase that we need to be dramatically bolder in our faith you don't need to have all the answers you never will and i never will but we know enough to say that the god of scripture who died for us on the cross who defeated death on the cross that's not a metaphor he defeated death on the cross he has given us enough information to live out our faith with utter boldness with no fear about speaking the truth especially at a time when people are being told hey shut up when you're told shut up whatever they're telling you to shut up about make sure you scream about it as often as possible live out your faith with utter boldness because god has given us evidence on a level that if you don't it's on you we have no excuse let me pray lord jesus we love you and lord the truth of who you are is unbearable if it were not for jesus we could not bear it lord god but because of jesus death on the cross because of your love for us expressed in his death and resurrection you give us the ability to walk and to live as we were meant to from before the foundations of the world you give us the boldness and the faith to live with genuine freedom and in this generation lord i know that you are calling this church your church to live freely and to behave in such a way that we will never regret how we have lived but that we will live as boldly as you have enabled us to live for your eternal purposes in history lord we ask for an anointing of boldness and faith on everyone who can hear this for your eternal purposes until we see you face to face in jesus mighty name amen god bless you [Music] you

Channel: Arizona Community Church

Views: 131,079

Keywords: Tempe, church, Christian, God, Jesus

Id: ybn--uIbOA0

Length: 46min 36sec (2796 seconds)

Published: Sun Feb 27 2022