Is the Bible Reliable?

The Bible, for me, is a guidebook. I think it's inspired by God. I do think it's filled with inaccuracies. And you'll see things that then remind you of yourself. And it'll make you really want to change. You'll realize that that Bible is not lying to you, but it's telling you true. Just a storybook written by some people about some character. There's plenty of things that even if you don't believe in God, there's plenty of things in the Bible that can improve your life. I personally don't think everything should be taken literally. The Bible, that's controversial. Thank you for asking. The Bible is still here. This book is almost 2,000 years old. It still exists for some reason. And to me, that stands out. That means something that's not coincidence.

Well, welcome again to church. My name's René, one of the pastors here. Explore God is our series, looking at some of the top questions that people have about faith, about Christianity, about life in general. Doesn't it feel good, first of all, to just be in church today? How many of you are happy to be in church today? It feels so good. Sometimes you just want to go to a place where everybody knows your name. And they're always glad you came. And it just feels right.

So several years ago, I was getting ready to go to a fundraising dinner over in San Jose for some nonprofit that we were involved with. And at our rented house here in Santa Cruz, all of a sudden, I collapsed on the couch. And I thought I was having a heart attack. I had severe chest pains, and my head was splitting. I had tunnel vision. My ears were ringing. It felt like there was just a bowling ball crushing my chest. And my wife, Lori, rushes me to the hospital. And as I've told some of you many times before, in the ER, I end up getting a Christian doctor who—I didn't know this—attended Twin Lakes Church. He didn't reveal that until later. And he accurately diagnosed me as having an anxiety attack.

I mean, it was weird, because I wasn't even really thinking anxious thoughts at the time. But of course, anxiety attacks are a result of your system just getting so overloaded with a life of anxiety that suddenly your physical systems just kind of collapse. So he prescribes anti-anxiety meds, which I was very grateful for, and knowing that I was also a believer, he prescribed anti-anxiety Bible verses. And following his instruction, what I did was I wrote down these Bible verses that I found by hand that helps you—kind of like it goes through your fingertips and kind of gets into your memory. And so I put them on all three by five index cards, put a rubber band around them, and I kept them in my back pocket.

And any time I was about to switch to something new in my day, I would take out the stack of cards, and I'd read the verses. And like when I drive here to the office, I would read the verses before I came into the office. And when I had lunch, I would read the verses before I had lunch. And when I went home, I would read the verses before I went home. At night, I would put the verses under my pillow so that if I woke up in the middle of the night feeling anxious, I'd pull out the verses, and I'd read some of the verses, right? So let me just show you a few of those verses. Second Timothy 1:7. Let's read this out loud together, ready? For God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

The most powerful verses were the verses that talked about things that God said or God declared, like Hebrews 13:5. For God has said, I will never leave you nor forsake you. Maybe you're here today, you need to hear these verses for your own anxiety. Another one was Isaiah 41:10 and 14. Don't be afraid, God says, for I am with you. I will strengthen you. I myself will help you, declares the Lord. These Bible verses really reset my mind. They gave me confidence, they lessened my anxiety, they worked, but I got a question for you. Are they true? Them working and them being true, that's two different things. They inspired me, but you know, Hallmark cards are inspiring. Are they true?

So a couple of days ago, I emailed my friend, Fedi Ramadan. He is the director of Child Evangelism Fellowship in the Holy Land in Israel and Palestine. So I wanted to know how he's doing. We got tons of friends over there, Jewish friends, Christian friends, Arab friends, Muslim friends. We've been keeping in touch with them, trying to go. How can we help, how can we pray for you? He sent me back a great email. I shared it on Friday's Daily Video Devo, and partially based on his request, I put together a prayer guide for Israel and Gaza. That's on the back of your notes today. But here's what I want to talk about.

When I asked him, how are the kids doing? Because they do good news clubs, and they do Sunday schools at all kinds of churches all over the region. And here's what he answered me. He said, "The children are frightened and worried, especially when they hear the sirens." Can you imagine? He said, "So we are printing a couple thousand booklets of do you wonder why in the Arabic language to give to the kids?" Now, what's this little book about? Let me read you part of the English translation of the Arabic that you're seeing on screen. Has what's happened made you afraid? When bad things happen, it's natural to feel scared, sad, or even angry. It seems so unfair. But the one true and living God knows how you feel. And he understands he's also sad when terrible things happen.

Does God know and care about me? Yes. The living God does know you, and he does care about you. He knows everything. Not only does God know you, he loves you no matter what your thoughts and feelings are. In the Bible, God says he loves you with a love that lasts forever. And it goes on in that vein, quoting more verses like that and like the ones I memorized in my anxiety time. It's great. It's comforting. But again, is it true? When you read the Bible, not just for me, not just for those kids, when you read the Bible, is it true? And how do you know?

We really do need to know this because there are a lot of objections to the Bible floating around these days. You probably have heard a ton of them. I think they tend to fall into about four categories roughly. The first one I call bad copies, right? The Bible's been copied and recopied so many times. We have no, I mean it's 2,000 years after the New Testament, even more centuries after the Old Testament was put together. So how could we possibly know what was originally in there? All kinds of additional stuff is in there, bad copies. And it's unhistorical. It's full of myths and errors. All historians know that. And it's man-made after all. A bunch of different writers wrote this. It didn't arrive by facts from heaven or something like that. It's not divinely inspired. And it's even dangerous. Because history shows us it's led to imperialism and colonialism and oppression.

So I want to briefly answer each of these four objections this morning. Now, you might be thinking to yourself, well, I don't have any of those objections to the Bible. This is all an absolutely settled issue for me, René, so why should I even listen to what you say? Why not even come to church? I could've stayed home and watched football. Look at it this way. The cynic says, the Bible is definitely untrue. Why? Well, basically, I just know it, right? Everybody knows it. My professor at school told me. And a guy that I watched on YouTube said it. But the fundamentalist says, no, the Bible is true. How do you know? I just know it. My preacher told me, a guy that I watched on YouTube said it. Both the cynic and the fundamentalist making the exact same error, not looking at the actual evidence for themselves.

So let's look at it today. And clearly as a pastor, I want you to be able to read this with confidence, knowing that it's true, like capital T, true. Now, obviously, there's a ton more than I could cover in about a half an hour. So I put a list of resources on the bottom of the second page of your notes, including all kinds of books that we made available at our cost, making no profit out on this, out on a table in the middle of the lobby. You can get those at our bookstore. Also, great study Bibles to help you understand the Bible better. So let's dig in here today. I'm so excited about this because I'm going to tell you some great stories that help prove this. And I'm not going to be quoting other pastors who you might think, well, you know, you've got this vested interest in getting us into the Bible. I'm only going to quote people from the top universities on the planet.

So we can see their opinions about this, not just some guy on YouTube, okay? So there's an acronym I use to remember these stories and statistics, N-A-P-S, MAPS. And I'm starting with the M because I actually started initially with the S but then it spelled spam. And I thought that just didn't make a lot of sense. So the M is actually for the first objection, which is all we have are bad copies of this. The M stands for manuscripts. How do I know the Bible I read now? As any resemblance at all to the Bible people read 2000 years ago. It's been copied and changed so much. Very common objection in academic circles several years ago, like 150 or more years ago. But over the last several decades stretching back over a century or so something amazing's been happening.

And the wave all started with this man, Constantine von Tischendorf. Doctorates from both Oxford and Cambridge. One day when he's just 29 years old, he hikes to this ancient monastery, St. Catharines. This is at the base of Mount Sinai in the Egyptian desert. Back in those days you had to ride a camel for weeks to even get there. A lot of people couldn't even find this place. It's so remote that most of the Western world had forgotten that it even existed. But it is still occupied. It is the oldest continuously occupied monastery of any religion on planet Earth. So von Tischendorf got interested in the question that we're asking today and he thought to himself, I bet that there's really ancient manuscripts of the Bible to be found at some of these old monasteries. So I'm gonna start at the oldest of the monasteries.

So he goes to their library and he searches for ancient manuscripts just before he is about to leave disappointed and empty handed. The very elderly custodian of the library says something like this, excuse me sir, I heard you were looking for some old books. And I'm riffing on his accent there. I'm not sure he sounded like the guy from the Pepperidge Farms commercials, but just go with me here. Hey, we're looking for some old books. And he shows him this book, the Codex Sinaiticus is what it's now referred to as. You can tell how perfectly preserved this book is. This book was put together around 325 AD. And it was probably taken and put in this monastery during times of persecution against Christians that followed that about a century later to keep it safe.

It has the entire Greek New Testament predating the oldest Bible manuscript we'd had up to this point by almost a thousand years. So Titian dwarf is like struck gold, he starts to leave with it and then the head monk stops him at the door. Where do you think you're going with that? You can't leave with that. And so Titian dwarf stays there and sends a letter to his friend, the Russian Tsar. Nice to have friends in high places. A little help here. And Tsar Alexander II offers the monks great compensation and the Bible is taken to Russia, where it is kept safe in St. Petersburg until the Russian Revolution when communist leaders wanted to destroy it to show their disdain for Christianity.

But British newspapers got wind of this and started a public fundraising campaign saying to the British public, listen, the Soviets are in need of money, let's raise enough money to buy this priceless Bible manuscript from the communist government and they raised just enough money and it was brought to London where it was brought to the British Museum, the British Library where it is to this day I've had a chance to see it for myself and the ancient text almost perfectly matches our modern Bibles today. Now, once people realize that these old manuscripts were still around, the hunt was on. For example, a rare book dealer in Paris, France had a little book of sermons hand written by a pastor named Ephraim in the 12th century.

But he'd always thought that he could see faint writing underneath the pastor's handwriting and he brought it to our old friend, Konstantin von Tischendorf, who had perfected a chemical process to sort of peel off more recent ink so you could see the original old ink. That book is now called the Codex Ephraimae Rescriptus. It turns out that the priest had whitewashed the pages of the original Greek text and then written his own sermons over the original writing on the pages. Look more closely, you can see these all caps Greek letters, that's the original writing and this is his handwriting of his sermons and you can see the blue is the remnants of where he had just painted over the original writing.

What did he paint it over? The third oldest complete Bible ever found. Now, I am a pastor but I still think it's just a little bit arrogant to think, I think I'll erase the Bible for my own sermons. And guess what again, the Bible hidden under his writing matches our modern Bibles to an astounding degree. Then it gets better scholars cataloging the Vatican library gained access to the most ancient copy of the New Testament yet which dates even further back than the other true again, nearly word for word, the same as our modern Bibles and new manuscripts continue to be discovered nearly every year.

Bruce Metzger who for decades was a great scholar of this kind of stuff at Princeton says we now have 5,664 Greek manuscripts going way back within decades of the life of Jesus in terms of quantity, the New Testament is represented far more than any other piece of ancient literature. Now, I don't think most people in the general public realize this, people are always saying follow the science but when it comes to doubts about the Bible, I don't think people are following the science here. I think most people are still getting their information from guys on YouTube and the Da Vinci Code. This is what the experts are saying.

Here's another expert, Sir Frederick Kenyon who for years was the director of the British Library. He says the remaining interval between the date of writing and the earliest manuscript evidence is now so small as to be negligible. The last foundation for any doubt that the scriptures have come down to us substantially as they were written has now been removed. If that wasn't true, a guy at the British Museum, a guy at Princeton, their jobs would be at stake if they were just making this up. This according to their scholarly opinion, this is the truth about the manuscript evidence.

Now, that's the New Testament, what about the Old Testament? It's far older than the New Testament. Well, let's take a trip. The place just east of Jerusalem where the landscape of Israel plunges down to the lowest point on the surface of the earth, lower even the Death Valley, 1400 feet below sea level, the Dead Sea. The time 1947. A Bedouin shepherd leaves his flock to search for a stray and he finds this cave. Now, I want you to see this because this was a hole made later. What he found were these two openings. So he's wandering this ridge and he picks up a rock and he tosses it in to see how far down the hole goes. And he's almost immediately shocked by the sound of something shattering.

And so he goes back and gets his friend and they go down with a torch and they find cylindrical clay jars with the lid still intact. They take off the lids and they find rolled up leather scrolls in almost perfect condition. I want to show you a picture of these two guys taken years later when they were young adults. But these two young men bring these scrolls they found on this cave. They don't know what they are. They bring them to a Bethlehem antiquities dealer named Kondo and Kondo recognizes that they're ancient scrolls and starts to put out word about this because he's looking for a buyer. And Hebrew University professor Eliezer Sukenek hears about this.

That afternoon he rushes to Kondo's shop asked to see the scrolls and is amazed in his diary for that day. Here is what he wrote. My hands shook as I started to unwrap one. I read a few sentences. It was written in beautiful biblical Hebrew. I suddenly had the feeling that I was privileged by destiny to gaze upon a Hebrew scroll which had not been read for more than 2000 years. How cool, this is like Indiana Jones stuff, right? So he's like, oh, we got to find a way to buy this scroll. He goes back to the president of Israel who was a friend of his to talk about buying the scroll.

Meanwhile, Kondo back in Bethlehem has sold the scrolls to a man named Archbishop Samuel. He's the head of an Orthodox church in Jerusalem. And so he's got the scrolls as you can see there. He's looking at one with all the care that you would handle an ancient scroll with. When war breaks out about a year later, he decides wisely, I think he's got to smuggle these scrolls out of the country. And he smuggles them to a church in New Jersey where they stay in the basement of the church just in some random box for years. And I think to myself now, can you imagine if they had some volunteer church clean up the basement day? Oh, what are these things? I don't know. Can you imagine how close they came to being tossed out?

Well, a few years later in 1954, he decides he wants to sell these scrolls. And so does he go through the art dealer's market or something? No, he decides to put them up for sale in the classified section of the Wall Street Journal under miscellaneous for sale. Miscellaneous for sale. Yeah, I got an old treadmill I don't use anymore. I got an old bike and the four Dead Sea Scrolls. Well, get this. It just so happens that the day that this ad is in the paper, do you remember the Hebrew professor Sukketek who saw the scrolls, wanted to buy them, but they slipped out of his grasp because Kondo had sold them? That day that this ad appears, his son happens to be visiting New York. And he says, "Dad, you will never believe what is in the classified ads today." That time he gets the scrolls.

And they take them back to Jerusalem to the Rockefeller Museum where a team of top experts looks at these scrolls for decades. What do they find? Well, these were all from the time of Jesus and even from centuries before. And again, amazingly similar, like almost word for word to our text of the Old Testament today. It's just remarkable, but don't take my word for it. A professor at Notre Dame, Eugene Ulrich, who's also Oxford's chief scholar on the Dead Sea Scrolls project, says the scrolls have shown that our traditional Bible has been amazingly well preserved for over 2,000 years. Again, I just think the general public just doesn't know this and doesn't have confidence.

How many times have you heard that objection? It's been copied so many times, they don't know this. But now you do. So you can pick this up with some confidence. Now, for the second objection, okay, so it resembled the original manuscripts, but it still is unhistorical. It's full of myths and legends. The A in map stands for archeology. In recent years, startling archeological discoveries have come to light which show the Bible to be historically reliable. For example, these ruins of a fortress are the city of Dan mentioned in the Bible. Archeologists discovered it, began excavating it. You can see where the modern level of the property is, and then this is all what they've excavated, and they found this 3,000 year old road and these walls. Look at all that builds up over 3,000 years. This is what happens when you do not dust your property. Let that be a lesson to you.

But, so here's what happens, right? Israel has a climate almost exactly the same as California's, right? They only get rain in the winter time, and so what they do at the end of a dig season the summer is they put loose dirt over the archeological sites so that they can come back after the rains, get the loose dirt out and keep excavating. So Jila Cook, who's an American, who's a volunteer on the site, sees the bulldozers putting dirt back over the ruins, and she's kinda bummed because they didn't really find anything great, and all of a sudden, she sees something that looks like it was a man-made piece of stone or some kind of a monument tablet, and so she yells waving her arm, stop, stop, runs in front of the bulldozer, calls over the archeologists.

They gather around this thing. It's in pieces, but it's clearly used to be some just big giant plaque that somebody had put up in the ruins of the city, and one of the archeologists unscrews his water bottle. This is exactly how it happened, and he pours water from his water bottle over the flat side of this piece of stone, and as the sun is setting, the slanting rays put the letters that are etched into the stone in relief as the mud rinses off, and they all gasp, because what they see is this. This is the first evidence outside the Bible for the existence of the kingdom of David. They see very legibly here, Beit David, which means House of David, and if you look a little closer, you can read it too, because the Canaanite alphabet actually gave rise to the alphabet we use today.

Of course, they read the opposite direction of us, but you can see kind of the proto B, if you know what you're looking for, E, T, and then D, Y, W, and V were all the same letter for them, and then D, so Beit, which means House, Dawid, which means David. So they could read it instantly, and they just went, oh my goodness, because until now, the only evidence for King David and his empire had been in the Bible, and so scholars said, well, if he was such a big deal, we would have found evidence for him elsewhere, but there's no evidence for him, and suddenly there was, and it didn't just stop here.

As James Hoffmeyer, an archeologist said, this was a tremendously important find that will certainly cause anxiety for skeptics. I love the way he put that. Many more names from the Bible have been discovered after that, at least 83 people mentioned in the Bible now have been confirmed by archeological evidence like this. This is a seal of King Hezekiah. In those days, people, kings wore rings with their seal, like their signature, and they would use it to stamp official documents and letters. This says, belonging to Hezekiah, son of Ahaz, king of Judah, a king who's mentioned many, many times in the Bible. It's just incredible stuff.

I'll stop this point with just one more example. The Hittites. Until recently, people believed the Hittites were just legend. You know, the Bible talks about so many of these tribes that were enemies of Israel, right? You've got the Israelites, you've got the Hittites, you've got the Jebusites, you've got the Canaanites, you've got the electrolytes, you've got the cellulites, all of these "ites." But there was no mention of the Hittites outside the Bible. Until some archaeologists were in an Egyptian tomb, and they deciphered Egyptian hieroglyphics, referring to the Hittites, and describing their kingdom. And based on the clues they found there, they decided to search for the Hittite ruins where they'd never looked before, outside of the Middle East, way up north in Turkey.

And there, based on the clues from that Egyptian tomb, they found the ruins of Hattusa, which was the capital of the Hittite kingdom. And best of all, they unearthed the main library of Hattusa, which has tens of thousands of clay tablets describing Hittite life, Hittite daily life, Hittite business, Hittite politics, Hittite belief. And the Hittites went from being viewed as a complete myth to being one of the most well-documented ancient civilizations ever, confirming the Bible's descriptions of them as a formidable foe. Many, many more examples.

Now, of course, archeology cannot prove whether the Bible's claims about God are true, and there are still unresolved historical questions, especially about the oldest part of the Old Testament. But as Nelson Gluck, famous archeologist, the only archeologist outside of Indiana Jones to ever get his picture on the cover of Time magazine, he said this, "It can be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference." And get this, only about 10% of the known archaeological sites related to the Bible have even been excavated, so we know there are going to be more and more and more discoveries.

Well, just a couple more. I'll go over the last two letters very quickly. There's manuscripts, there's archeology. And for the third objection, well, it's just man-made, it's not divinely inspired. That's where prophecies come in. Many examples of this, but I just want to focus on the prophecies about Jesus. Over 300 references to the Messiah in the Old Testament fulfilled in Jesus Christ, like the time the Messiah would be born, as in the year, the place, as in the city of Bethlehem, the method that he would be killed, including a lot of details about his death in books like Daniel and Micah and Zechariah and Isaiah and the Psalms.

So there's a mathematician named Peter Stoner who took 48 of those prophecies, and what he did was he calculated the odds that these things would happen. How many people would be born of Bethlehem? How many people would be born that year? How many people would be crucified in this manner? And then he calculated the odds that all of those things would happen to the same person. And he said, "We find that the chance that any one man might have fulfilled just 48 of those 300 prophecies is one in ten to the 157th power." And that tells me that there's a super, you know, human power behind this book.

Now, before the final point, you do need to be careful here because some people get so focused on prophecies or archeology or manuscripts, you can tell I'm really into this stuff, but it's easy to lose the forest for the trees. You know, we don't want to create... Being a Christian doesn't mean being a Bible scholar. If that was true, then the people you know who know the Bible best would always be the nicest, kindest, most grace-filled Christ-like people, and you know that's not true. Why not? Well, look at what Jesus himself said to the religious fundamentalists of his day, the Pharisees. He said, "You diligently study the Scriptures because you think that by them you possess eternal life, but these are the Scriptures that testify about me, yet you refuse to come to me to have life."

I love the way that John Stott, Oxford and Cambridge educated, professor and pastor John Stott put it. He said, "There is no magic in the mechanical reading of the Bible. The written word points to the living word and says to us, 'Go to Jesus.'" Right? He says, "If we do not go to the Jesus to whom it points, we miss the whole purpose of Bible reading. We don't worship the Bible. We worship the Christ of the Bible. We love it only because we love him of whom it speaks." My goal as I try to persuade you, this is a pretty cool book, and it's true, is I know from my own personal experience that when you get into this book, it can draw you closer to the one who can bring life to your life. And if you're not into this book, what's taking its place? Some guy on YouTube, right? That's distracting you.

So one final point, and this is for the idea that the Bible is actually dangerous. The S in my mind stands for society, how the Bible has impacted society in so many positive ways. You might have read the book Dominion, came out a couple of years ago, made all the bestseller lists. It was written by a historian named Tom Holland, not the Tom Holland who played Spider-Man, but the Tom Holland of Oxford, the Tom Holland who sits on the board of the British Library, the Tom Holland who is a famous scholar. So he says in his book that he was, for much of his adult life, rather anti-church, anti-God. His specialty was Roman history, and he says the more he studied history, the more his thinking changed.

How? This is a quote. He says, "It took me a long time to realize my morals are certainly not Greek or Roman, but thoroughly and proudly Christian." He says, "Most people are oblivious to the way the West's Christian heritage has shaped education, health care, music, art, literature, the scientific revolution, to name a few concepts like human rights." They don't go back to Greek philosophers. They don't go back to Roman imperialism. They go back to the Bible, the epistles, the gospels. Watch what he says, "The most influential, the most impactful, the most revolutionary writings that have emerged from the ancient world." Our concept of fundamental human rights, it comes right out of this book.

Now, you're probably thinking, well, that's great, but Christians certainly have not acted in ways, always, that have improved society, and that is sadly very true. Christians both personally and institutionally have behaved horribly at times. But when you say that, what you're pointing out is not that Christians have been too Christian. You're pointing out that Christians haven't been Christian enough. You're pointing out the need for Christians to act more Christian. And this is exactly my closing point. We've looked at manuscripts, archaeology, prophecies, society. I love all this stuff. But listen, ultimately, the best way to make credible what the Bible teaches is for us to do to live out what the Bible teaches.

You see, if you don't agree with this, most people in the world, a vast majority, they know that the Christian Bible says things like, "Love your enemies, don't judge, give to the poor." They even know that it says Jesus is Savior and Lord, our teacher, our master. If they know anything about the Bible, they certainly know things like this. Whether they believe it or not, whether they believe it's historically accurate or not, whether they believe it's divinely inspired or not, whether they believe it's been misused by imperialists or not, they know that this is the kind of thing that it teaches. So they're looking to see if the Christians really believe this.

I heard somebody say that right now for most skeptics, the reason they're skeptical about Christianity is not that they don't believe the Bible, it's that they don't believe we really believe the Bible. Because they see Christians not acting like what it tells us to do, not acting like Jesus, not loving enemies, judging other people, not being gracious. And so again, the best way to bring credibility to the Bible is for us to do what the Bible teaches. And that is the big motivation behind all these fall acts of kindness that we do as a church.

So just this weekend, we had a massive crew right out there in the lobby assembling the pajamas that you donated for kids in transitional housing. 921 pajamas donated. Fantastic. Also, we put together 100 hygiene bags for unhoused people, 230 new warm coats with handwritten encouragement notes from our middle school volunteers. We also got a big thank you poster from the Del Mar teachers and staff for the gift bags that we gave them this past week. Thank you so much for all your donations for all of that. I know somebody at Ria Del Mar School and she says all the teachers and staff were saying, "That one likes, that seems like such a loving church."

Jesus said it. This is how they will know that you are my disciples and that God sent me by your love. In a series on apologetics, that's our best apologetic. And now this weekend, we launched the final component of our acts of kindness month. And it's the biggest component, our fall food drive. Our goal is $200,000. Big goal. To reach it, everybody who attends in person and everybody who joins via livestream, grown-ups and kids, would need to give an average of $100 each by the weekend before Thanksgiving. That's a lot. Inflation has hit us hard. And if you can't give, please come and get food. That's what it's there for. Our own food bank has never been busier.

But if you can, imagine the credibility it brings. When people see that even though it hurts a little, we do what Jesus commanded. So if you can, by the weekend before Thanksgiving, you can give online at tlc.org/food or use this QR code. I appreciate you praying about it. This is how people see churches. And by the way, all the 170+ ExploreGod churches that we're doing this with, we all decided to do fall outreach projects to our community for the same reason. Imagine how hearts can be changed.

But let's close by going back to where I started. I mentioned when I had those anxiety attacks, I read verses like, "For God has said, 'I will never leave you nor forsake you, and do not fear, for I myself will help you declare the Lord.'" Verses like that, people, they changed my life. And I know they will change your life too. You know how I know? Because these verses are true. Invincibly true, actually true, historically true, eternally true. And so I urge you to do yourself a favor and just get into this amazing book. Here's just a little starting it because you're like, "Oh, that sounds so great. I want to." But I have no idea how.

So get a Bible, and we have free Bibles for you, paperback new believers Bibles, and also the study Bibles that I talked about back there at the lobby bookstore. But if you have a Bible, get a Bible, open it up to a classic passage. Psalm 23 is good. Romans 8 is good. Luke chapter 6 is good. Those are all good classic passages. And then every day, just read a verse or two from that chapter. When you're done, just go back again and read it again. It's so rich, right? And then here's the big tip. Don't close it. Because you know what the hardest part of starting to read your Bible is? This part. That part right there. So just do that part one time. And then just leave it open around your house for the rest of your life. I got that tip from Billy Graham. He said, "I haven't closed my Bible in two decades. Just leave it open on some table at your house. I know that when you get into this Word, you will meet Jesus, and Jesus will change your life."

Now, let's pray together. Would you bow your heads with me? Heavenly Father, in a culture with so much noise, help us soak in what is true and what points us to the living Word, Jesus Christ, your Word, the Bible. And Lord, I also want to pray for Foddy and all the kids that he works with in the Holy Land and now also the people in Lewiston, Maine, who've lost loved ones. I pray that you would comfort them with your true words from Scripture and with the real presence of Jesus, supernaturally and through the churches there. And finally, God strengthen us in this time of war, chaos, that we keep our eyes on you, not just guys on YouTube, and not the uncertainties around us, but on you. And it's in your name we pray. Amen.