Zondervan Inspire

Evidence of Changed Lives

From the Editor: I lead a Bible study on Tuesday evenings, and this Tuesday we studied Acts 14 where Paul is stoned and left for dead. After the brothers gathered around him (I’m sure there was some praying and healing going on), Paul gets up and waltzes back into the city where he was just stoned! The very guy who stood supporting those who stoned Stephen for proclaiming Jesus as Lord is now stoned for the same reason. Pretty dramatic change.

Wishing you blessings today,

Keith

A proud, vindictive, violent, arrogant, self-occupied religious leader named Saul of Tarsus was traveling down the road when suddenly he had a vision of Jesus. As a matter of historical record, he became Paul — a different man with a different name, whose mind, writings, love for people, and self-sacrificial gift of his life to the world were so compelling that human minds are still fascinated by him two thousand years later. People devote their lives to studying what he wrote. How did that life get changed? The evidence of lives changed by Jesus is so abundant that the full story can never be told. It can never be matched. Not by any culture, by any book, by any program, by any hero. I have never heard the story of an accidental, meaningless universe changing a life like that.

From Faith & Doubt

by John Ortberg

Any comments or testimonies today?

Everyone Knows Two Things

From the Editor: I’m finding Faith & Doubt by John Ortberg to be an intriguing work, not like his usual fare, but geared more toward those who are searching for answers. He gently addresses questions many have about Christianity all the while presenting it as both reasonable and appealing.

Wishing you blessings today,

Keith

Every human being knows two things: There is a way we ought to behave. We do not invent this code; we only discover it. We might be fuzzy on the details of it sometimes, but we have a general idea of what it is. We also know that we don't live up to this standard. We all fall short. We need forgiveness. We need grace. We need to get fixed.

Every time people argue, they are implying that the universe is not an accident, that there is a moral order built into the way things are, because it was put there by Somebody, and that Somebody is God. The good news is that he is a gracious God. That's part of why I believe in God.

From Faith & Doubt

by John Ortberg

Any comments or testimonies today?

We Must Move On

Theologian Lesslie Newbigin writes that we live in an age that favors doubt over faith. We often speak of "blind faith" and "honest doubt." Both faith and doubt can be honest or blind, but we rarely speak of "honest faith" or "blind doubt." Both faith and doubt are needed, yet it is faith that is more fundamental. Even if I doubt something, I must believe there are criteria by which it can be judged. I must believe something before I can doubt anything. Doubt is to belief what darkness is to light, what sickness is to health. It is an absence. Sickness may be the absence of health, but health is more than the absence of sickness. So it is with doubt and faith. Doubt is a good servant but a poor master.

"Doubt is useful for a while.... If Christ spent an anguished night in prayer, if he burst out from the cross, 'My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?' then surely we are permitted doubt. But we must move on. To choose doubt as a philosophy of life is akin to choosing immobility as a means of transportation."

From Faith & Doubt

by John Ortberg

Any comments or testimonies today?

One Road to Certainty

There is one road to certainty — through a door marked "death." Then I will know, or there will be no me left to know. But I need to decide how I will live on this side of the door. Once we have been born, trying to put off deciding what to do about God is like jumping off a diving board and trying to put off actually entering the water. When I think about this urgency, I'm reminded of a saying my friend Kent the drummer told me about: "If I refuse to sing a word or play a note until I'm certain of perfection, there will never be music."

The question of faith is never just a question of calculating the odds of God's existence. We are not just probability calculators. We live in a burning building. It's called a body. The clock is ticking.

From Faith & Doubt

by John Ortberg

Any comments or testimonies today?

Faith Keeps Spreading

Ever since what was modestly called the Enlightenment, people have been predicting the demise of faith in God. I want to listen to doubters and not just argue with them, partly because deep down I have doubts enough of my own, and partly because when I'm just trying to win arguments, I turn into Dan Ackroyd debating Jane Curtain in an old Saturday Night Live sketch: "Jane, you ignorant ..." Nobody wants to be around me then. Not even me.

I do not like books by believers or doubters that make it sound like the question of God is simple, that anyone with half a brain will agree with them, that people in the other camp are foolish and evil. I have read and known too many people who don't believe in God who are better and wiser than me. But I do not think the professional doubters will make faith go away. The predictors keep dying, and faith keeps spreading.

From Faith & Doubt

by John Ortberg

Any comments or testimonies today?

irony

Voltaire is reported to have said that within a hundred years of his day the Bible would be a forgotten book. In a strange twist of irony, within a century of his death, one of his homes in France would belong to the Geneva Bible Society and serve as the place where Bibles were printed and distributed. But at least Voltaire, Sartre, and Nietzsche were honest and consistent in their views. They admitted the ridiculousness of life, the pointlessness of everything in an atheistic world.

Contemporary atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris, however, are so blind to the conceit of their own minds that they try to present this view of life as some sort of triumphal liberation. Sartre, as atheistic intellectual elites know but are embarrassed to acknowledge, denounced atheism on his deathbed as philosophically unlivable. A few years ago, in a debate between atheism and Christianity, Antony Flew described a Christian philosopher's experience of knowing Christ as "grotesque." But Flew has now vacated the atheistic camp, no longer able to honestly justify its metaphysical moorings (see Psalm 14:1-3).

From The End of Reason:
A Response to the
New Atheists

by Ravi Zacharias

Any comments or testimonies today?

high regard

I've always had a high regard for a person who says he is an atheist, because at least it shows he is thinking about spiritual issues and whether there is a God or there isn't a God. Too many religious people are religious because their fathers and grandfathers were religious. They just go along with the current. But atheists are thinking and they are challenging the status quo and therefore it's fun to discuss with an atheist. An atheist and a Christian have one thing in common: we think hard.

From A Friendly Dialogue between an Atheist
and a Christian

by Luis Palau &
Zhao Qizheng

Any comments or testimonies today?

know

An atheist can be a very lonely man because, having no connection with a creator, he is very much on his own. I've talked with many atheists, East and West, and they're very lonely people inside. There is a certain lack of peace of mind and heart until you meet your creator.

Do you remember Jean Paul Sartre, the French philosopher? He said, "Man is alone, abandoned to his own destiny." And that's really an expression of a person who doesn't know God. You feel alone and you feel abandoned to your own destiny. But if you know God, then you have a point of reference.

From A Friendly Dialogue between an Atheist and a Christian

by Luis Palau &
Zhao Qizheng

Any comments or testimonies today?

God Is

Since all basic presuppositions begin with faith, "God is" is as rational as any other first premise. Evidence that points toward the intelligent design of the universe increases the probability that God is. The more that is learned of the structure of the billions of human cells that make up our body, the clearer it is that cells function based on intelligent information, DNA, that is more complicated, as Bill Gates has said, than any software ever written. And there is now abundant cosmological evidence that this planet is uniquely hospitable to human life—the unique orbit of the earth, the distance from the sun, and the like. It is as if, one scientist wrote, "the universe in some sense must have known that we were coming."

The presupposition "God is" is today not without abundant supporting empirical evidence. It requires no flight from reason to believe it.

—Charles Colson, The Faith: What Christians Believe, Why They Believe It, and Why It Matters

Any comments or testimonies today?

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What You Look for, You Will Find

I have learned that what you look for you will find. If you want to be a cynic, there's plenty to be cynical about. If you want to be a skeptic, there's plenty to be skeptical about. If you want to be a pessimist, there's plenty to be pessimistic about. What you look for you will find.

But in Psalm 14 it says, "A fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" Now this is fascinating, because you and I would say, "Somebody who rejects the divine, this is somebody who's made an intellectual decision." The Psalm says, "No. Somebody who rejects God, who says, 'There is no God,' this is somebody who's made a decision in their heart." The psalmist says that such a decision is not ultimately an intellectual decision—a cognitive ruling that person has made. It's a posture of the heart.

—Rob Bell, Everything Is Spiritual

Any comments or testimonies today?

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Christianity, spirituality, Everything Is Spiritual, Rob Bell, atheism, Zondervan

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