Our Faith Is Not Blind

Good morning, how you doing today? I'm doing great, my name is Paul Spurlock. I may be causing some confusion for some of you summer visitors or others who go, wait a minute, I thought the redhead guy was Mark Spurlock. Well, there are two of us, we're brothers, both on staff, totally blessed. Here's our first happiest moment ever together. Absolutely. Now the way to tell us apart, there's really two main ways. First, if you didn't know this, Mark is actually a lefty, he's left-handed. So if you're playing ball with us, you'll know who's who. I on the other hand am normal-handed. And so that's how you can tell us apart. Yes, all the lefties are offended, of course. The other way is my head, as you can see, is slightly larger, probably literally and figuratively. And Mark used to say, gosh, Paul, your head is so big, there's a gravitational field working around it. And I'd say, well, maybe it's because I have more brains. I mean, after all, who's getting to sit on the block and hold the ball? I am.

Actually, I know the Bible says that our brother is born for adversity, but I gotta tell you, Mark and I, following the word as best we could throughout our lives, we've put that away. We've really never been each other's adversaries. I'm confident today to tell you that we have for the longest time been each other's biggest fans, for sure. I love him and he's away speaking at a camp this week. So we miss him, but we look forward to coming back and we're so glad you're here.

And these last few weeks, we've been going through a series called Light Bulb Moments. What do we mean by this? We mean that either through a series of events, like is my case, where lights seem to get brighter and brighter as the years went by, as the Holy Spirit brought new things to me, or maybe for you, it's just one poof, bright aha moment where you went, oh my goodness, Lord, I see that thing you've been trying to show me more clearly now. That's what we're talking about, our light bulb moments.

Well, my light bulb moment is the series type and it came to me in this way. When I realized that our faith isn't blind, let me repeat that. When I realized that our faith isn't blind, that's the beginning of my light bulb journey. No, not at all. In fact, our faith, if you don't know this, you will today. It's not based on blind faith. It's based on historical facts. So what do I mean by blind faith? I mean when you don't have any evidence or facts to back up what you believe. It's just kind of an inner feeling thing. It's just, well, I've been told it's true all my life and so I just believe it. That is blind faith.

Well, unfortunately, that is the predominant and stereotypical view out there of those who don't share the faith and it gets us in trouble and it makes us look even silly. In fact, here's a clip of a typical example of this misunderstanding of true faith. Check out the screen. I wanna thank you for being here because a lot of people who are people of faith don't wanna even be seen with me 'cause I am the opposite of a person of faith. So I appreciate your courage and I wanna ask you right off the bat, faith, the purposeful suspension of critical thinking. We haven't said anything controversial yet. That's right. It pretty much isn't controversial because even we have perpetuated the false notion that faith is blind. It is not.

But if you think it is, it's gonna get you in trouble. It's gonna slam into you one of these days like it did for me my first semester at Cabrillo. I'm in a class that is famous. It's packed out. It's with perhaps the campus' most famous professor and he started off the class in a way I can still vividly remember to this day. He says, now listen here. I know some of you out there, you believe in God, pie in the sky, by and by, but I wanna tell you something right here for this class. There is no capital T truth out there. So get over it. It's all about the here and now, not the hereafter. So just get about your business right now in the moment and do and get all you can. That's our class.

I remember at age 17 being sent back like, wow, smart man. He's just slaying the Christians right out of the gate. It set me back. And it gave me a little bit of a crisis of faith and my light bulb hadn't come on yet. And so it set me on a journey, even back to school repeatedly, to wanna know what is it that this man is saying compared to what I think, who's right. You're gonna have that moment too if you haven't already, because you need to know that this isn't gonna go away anytime soon. Someone's gonna come to you and say, you know, you're one of those church believers and you think there's some substance to this whole faith thing, but if you really opened up and dissected your whole belief thing, would there be any substance to it? Would it be just sort of a veneer, a thin thing that could be easily swept aside by a smart professor?

Is it just, again, super thin and of no substance? Kind of like, in a silly way, the relationship that New Jersey woman Danielle Davies has with a life-size cutout of actor Bradley Cooper. Miss Davies, and I'll just read what she says. She says, "The fact is, while most of us don't actually live our lives with movie stars, many of us wish we did." She also writes, "I want a life with Bradley Cooper. Well then, I'll just make one up." The cardboard Cooper helps with chores, runs errands, works out. And even as Miss Davies read to him while laying in her lap. On her site that she made for this whole experiment, she writes, "Her husband possibly is the most patient husband in the world. Her daughter, meanwhile, keeps referring to Mr. Cooper as Mark Wahlberg, that's another actor, and her son is frequently irritated." I would say he's got the most grasp of reality in the whole family.

Now that's crazy, I know. And maybe when we talk about our faith, we're not that silly, but honestly now, if you were pressed, could you bring forth something from a challenger that was more real, less pretend than a cutout Jesus? That's what we're gonna try to do today. I really wanna give you a lot of confidence and be able to overcome some of the critics that have been around for a long time, like way back, say, with Mark Twain, he said, "You know, you believers, faith is just believing in that which you know ain't so." Now back then, they were a little bit more innocuous. They sort of took shots at believers from afar, but that is no longer the case.

This may shock you, but there are actually books out now that are trying to talk you and me out of our faith. Peter Boghossian, professor of Portland State University, just up the coast several miles, actually wrote a book called "A Manual for Creating Atheists." I read this over vacation this summer, and the intent of the book is to train non-believers and atheists in how to talk you and you and you and you and me out of our faith. That's the intent of the book. And he's not content with just a book. He's starting a television show this fall called "The Reason Whisperer," in which he will take a camera crew, unscripted, into churches, and I think they plan a West Coast tour, and they will walk in and they will talk to you or you or you or me and say, "Tell me about your faith." And then they will go on the offensive and try to talk you out of it.

Now as a large West Coast church, I think there's probably pretty good odds that we might get a visit. If we do, what are you gonna say if the camera is put in your face? You're probably gonna say, "I need to go to the restroom. I'm gonna go to the coffee hut. Go talk to one of the pastors." Now that might sound a little extreme, and it may not happen, it might, but what about the more common ones? You're at a family meeting. It's the holidays, and you have that crazy uncle we all have who sort of drops that anti-Christian belief bombshell in the middle of a conversation. He doesn't really wanna talk about it, doesn't really know his stuff, but he likes to kinda rib you and, "Yeah, they kinda disproved that years ago." And he steps away, right? And you're left hanging like, "Well, wait a minute."

Or maybe you're at work and a coworker shares about their negative church experience, just went bad. And they say, "Hey, aren't you a churchgoer? Is it different for you?" And you're like, "Ah, blah." Or maybe like many of you, you have a young person who's gone off to college. You're a grandparent. Maybe you helped send that young person. Or you're a parent, and you've read the statistics that say that six, maybe seven out of 10 young adults, when they go off to school or work, also leave the church. They leave Christianity. They come home and say, "I don't believe anymore." And you're alarmed. I'm alarmed by this, and I wanna fight it. That's what today is all about.

I wanna give you confidence that that doesn't have to be the case. I wanna help you so that when that family member drops the bomb or the coworker says, "What about you, Bible believer?" Or the young person comes back from school and says, "I don't think I'm in it anymore, Mom and Dad." I wanna give you some simple things, some good things to answer with so that you have something to say. And you do have something to say, because if you're a believer, your faith is rooted in truth. Truth is very, very important to Jesus. In the longest recorded prayer in the Bible of all of Jesus' prayers, look at what he says. He says, "Father, I pray that Santa Cruz County will finally have an In-N-Out Burger." All right, how many of you have honestly prayed that? Come on, that's up. We get the email prayers, we know who you are.

In actuality, he said in John 17, he said, "My prayer is not that you would take them out of the world, but you would protect them from the evil one. They are not of the world, even as I am not of it. Sanctify them by truth. Your word is truth." Truth really matters to Jesus, absolutely. Okay, but aren't the, Paul, wait a minute. You've had skeptical friends too, I'm sure, that have said, "Isn't there some part of your whole faith thing that is kind of blind?" It's not blind, but yes, we do deal with things we can't see or fully understand at times. But all of life is like that.

Think about the very pew that you're sitting on right now. How do you know what's gonna keep you up for the entirety of this service? In fact, we've rigged one whole row to go down. It's up there, no. Why do you trust the pew? Here's why, because you've come here week after week after week and it's always done its job. That's what biblical faith is like. It's not just going, I'm gonna blindly just go, okay, I put my belief over here. I buy in. No, it's saying, this thing's proved to be reliable. It's proved to be trustworthy. Therefore, I will put my faith, or better said, my trust in the fact that that pew is gonna hold me up. That, men and women, is what the first Christians also did with Jesus. That is how they started off.

It's exactly the same thing. Look at 2 Peter 1:16 in your notes. It says, for we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty. This is not blind, and better yet, I love 1 John 1:1. What was from the beginning, speaking of Jesus here, what we have heard, what we have seen, what we have looked at, what we have touched with our hands, the word of life, Jesus. Wow, heard, seen, looked at, touched. This is a very physical thing, not a blind thing, a physical thing that they put their faith in because they saw him resurrected.

So today I wanna give you five easy to remember, I think they're really good reasons to hold your confidence in the fact that the Bible and its gospel story and Christianity, these are true things. So in your notes, there's a hand diagram there that I want you to put in your Bible so you'll always have it handy, or if you are like me and you have a smartphone, you can take a photo of it and save it, and you'll always have it on your phone to recall when the questions come your way. And so after today, I hope that you will literally have at your fingertips some easy good answers when the critics come your way.

Well first, we're gonna use our pinky. Now the pinky, of course, is our smallest digit, and things typically start small in their early stages, and so that's why the small early stages is gonna refer to our pinky, because the writings and the accounts are early. There's your first fill in. You may not know this, but the gospel accounts were written during the very lives of the first followers. Now follow me here. Jesus dies in the early 30s. The biggest adversary of the church, Saint Paul, converts radically from hater of Christians to now being one of them in the early 30s too. The whole book of Acts is about a 30 year history till Paul's death in the late 60s. Early 30s, late 60s. That's the lifespan of the first followers of Jesus, and that's when the Apostle Paul and Luke, the two that wrote most of the New Testament, were doing their business of writing the New Testament.

What does that mean? Who cares? It means that there were living people there in the early stages who could verify the truth of the story. It's hard to write a fiction and make up twists and turns in the accounts if people that saw the real thing are there to say, wait a minute, this is the truth, not that. So your Bible and its witness is early. Check out this astonishing text that even goes earlier than Paul. I love this. This is my first big light bulb moment. First Corinthians 15:3 says, for what I, this is Paul, received, I passed on to you as a first importance. So Paul gets this early. He's getting something earlier than even his time. And what does he say? He says, Christ died for our sins, according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day, according to the scriptures, that he appeared to Cephas, and then to the 12. Jesus died, he was buried, he raised, and he appeared, died, buried, raised, appeared. That is the four cornerstone beliefs of the early church and from the get-go. And it's early, they were there. So this is incredibly powerful.

But you might say, wait a minute, even if it's early, maybe Aesop fables were early, but they were intended to be fables. Maybe it's all just make believe. Well, the next E counters that strongly, I think. And what's we've got, a pinky is early, ring finger, because with your ring finger, you have to go when you wanna get married and have witnesses to your marriage. So ring finger is eye witnesses, and these are eye witnesses, I believe, to actual history and not fable. Why is that? Look at 1 Corinthians 15, it says this in your notes. After that, he, Jesus, appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep or died. Then he appeared to James, that's Keek, 'cause remember, James was Jesus' brother, the great skeptic. Then to the apostles, and last of all, he appeared to me. Paul is writing. 500 witnesses.

But now some skeptics might say, yeah, but could still be maybe a fabrication or conspiracy. I don't think so. Would you die for a known lie? Would you die for a fable or a fiction? I don't think so. Why would Paul go from hating these people to now promoting the cause with just incredible power? He wouldn't, a known lie wouldn't persuade early people to say, yep, sign me up for the Christian thing, 'cause it says come and suffer. I'm not gonna suffer for a fiction, okay? I don't think you would either. And to say that this was all made up or distorted over time would be like someone coming to you and saying, so I understand you have this Pearl Harbor thing in your history, December 7th, 1941. Well, I'm here to tell you that actually it was Canada that perpetrated the attack. And they didn't use attack planes, they used hot air balloons. And it wasn't Hawaii or Pearl Harbor that they attacked, it was actually Disneyland. But the only thing that got bombed was it's a small world.

Now if you're a normal grownup man, you'd be at that point going, yes! No more taking the kids or the grandkids to that place with that song plays over and over as you're in that boat, you're trapped in and those little dummies shake their hips in the song. Over and over and you just have it in your mind for weeks and you have to get medication and shock therapy to get it out of your mind. I know I've got issues, but I've got three daughters, people, okay, we've been on that ride a lot. But seriously, you would know the account you were just told was bogus, why? You have enough good history to know better and you could still find living eyewitnesses to tell you, no, I was there in Hawaii, I know it went down. That's the same thing and situation the early disciples had. They knew it would be bogus.

All right, so early eyewitnesses, the next D is empty tomb. Now this middle finger is our empty tomb, I had to choose carefully here. Because let's be honest, if you misuse the middle finger, it can get you in a tomb. Right? So that's your little memory trick, I know you'll never forget that one. So early eyewitnesses in empty tomb, why is this relevant? Because some might say, wait a minute, maybe they just hallucinated the whole thing. People have crazy dreams all the time and think it's real. Here's the big problem with that. I might have hallucinations, maybe even vivid. And if you know me, you know I do, no. But if you had a hallucination, you could still go to a literal real thing, an empty tomb. You can't hallucinate a literal physical empty tomb, okay? They were able to go and verify that the body was missing and they couldn't give an account for it.

Now some might say, yeah, but maybe he just survived. You know, maybe he came out and escaped or they stole the body or something. Here's why that probably doesn't work. If you're the early disciples and you're already hiding away 'cause you're beaten and Peter's already even denied Christ and Jesus walks in the door surviving the crucifixion, you might be excited, but that's not gonna inspire you to think this is a God man in the flesh before you 'cause he's gonna die pretty soon anyway, looking at him, right? That's not gonna transform you. And if you steal the body and you're in on a known lie, you might keep that going for a while until when? You are persecuted. You start getting persecuted, you're gonna give up the lie, all of us will. So that's why that's so significant.

And I can illustrate this by time that Renee and I were in the Nicaraguan jungle. It was my turn to preach in a little church, open air. Now here at a church like this, we have what's called the video cry room and this is for nursing moms who want some privacy and do what moms do over there and watch the screen. In these little jungle churches, there's no video cry room. Well there is, but it's not over there. It's right here, it's the front row. And if you're preaching, you're about 10 feet away. Now I didn't know this and so I get up to share and all of a sudden the video cry room moms begin to do what video cry room moms do, right in front of me, 10 feet away. And Renee, one of our missionaries are in the back and they see this and I'm trying to be a good guy and here's my version of the story. I held my Bible up high and I kept preaching like this and I stayed on task.

Now if you ask Renee what happened, he would say that I did not do that. I was hoping that he, my mature friend and boss would go like from the back and send a signal, Paul, I will pray for you. That's what I wanted, but what did I get? I got this. I mean, he had the biggest grin I've ever seen in my life. And he claims, if you ask him his version of the story, that I lost myself in the Bible. I drifted from my text in the Old Testament to 1 Peter 2, 2, which says, like newborn babes crave pure spiritual milk. Or that I went from, and I was preaching on God's best for you and Renee claims that I stumbled in my words and said, I wanna talk about God's best for you. That's his story, but what's my point? My point is if you put me right here and Renee up here this morning and you said, whose version is true? We'd both tell our story and we'd hold to it until you started to torture us. Once the torture begins, I'm saying, Renee is right. I did everything he said. And I'm sure he'll do the same for me.

Men and women, that is the situation with the first followers of Jesus. Why did they hold true to this? No dissenters at all in this, why? Because they saw the living Jesus. But you might say, as one of my good friends, still not a Christian, says to me, he says, Paul, you're pretty fanatical about your beliefs, but there's a lot of religious fanatics out there and they're sincere, even more than you. And I have to say, you're right. And he says, what's the difference? Two things, one, liars make very poor martyrs. People will lie and do things for money, sex, or power, but they usually won't lie if they're gonna be tortured. And here's even the bigger point. Take the kamikazes in World War II. They were told the emperor is God and they believed in it, and it was a righteous cause to them. These were noble men who believed in what they were doing. And they volunteered to line up for a one-way flight, as you see on the screen, a loaded down plane with bombs, to take out an enemy ship. They lined up, they literally had more applicants than planes, why? Well, they were sincere.

So what's the difference? It's this, none of the leaders of that movement, of kamikazes, or any other religious group, have ever come back from the grave to say, what we were told before going in is true. I've seen the hereafter. All the glories, the promises, the blessings, it's all true. No, that's never happened except one time, Jesus Christ. And he didn't return to people already sincere in their beliefs. He returned to defeated people. And they turned around on a dime and went from cowering, defeated, everything else, to we will die for this. That's the big difference.

So let's recap. Pinky, early beginnings, ring finger, eyewitnesses, middle finger, empty tomb. I just explained the thumb without telling you what it was. That's enthusiasm. They were so over the top, enthusiastic, thumbs up. That's the thumb. And then the final E is Christianity explains life. Now my first four points are kind of narrow and laser focused, demonstrating the historicity of this whole Jesus story. This one then branches out of that and goes big time wide. And watch how it does this. The Bible says you and I are created in the image of God. Not the same nature as a God, don't confuse that, but his image somehow. The Bible repeatedly calls us image bearers.

And we see this play out in life as Christianity, I think, accurately explains it, how so. Like our image making God, we love his creation, the beauty. We love nobility and self sacrifice and good deeds and love, just like him. But also just like him, we recognize that something's gone wrong, very wrong. There's evil and horrible things and endless wars and endless evil. It seems like, and we also on a soul level connect with that and say it's wrong. But then also like our image making God, we love it when we see evil undone and rescue and restoration. Think about your favorite movies or books. What are their themes? It's probably one of three. It's either good vanquishing evil or a dramatic rescue or relational homecoming and reconciliation. All our movies are about this, why? 'Cause those are imprints from our maker that's put on us, on our souls. That's the image bearing part.

And we long for the things he longs for. A photo that I think sums this up so well is of Dan Whitney, longtime TLCer. He's running a camp up in Oregon right now with a couple of our pastors and high schoolers called Camp Attitude. And because we're image bearers, like our maker, we see Dan in his present broken body status and we go, oh, our hearts ache that one bike accident set him with paralysis for the rest of his life on this planet. And like our God who loves, we see there's just something wrong about that, really wrong. Why does he have to suffer like that? And we see the boy in the picture and we say, he wasn't born and nor did he make any choices about how he would be and all the disabilities he has to be challenged with. We see that's wrong.

But then, like our God, we respond and are inspired by the fact that Dan and his crew don't just sit back and feel sorry for themselves. They started a camp in which they reach out to other people with physical challenges. And we just come alongside and we get teary-teared up and we wanna go participate with them like many TLCers are right now to change lives and give them dignity and meaning and purpose. And we say, Dan, you're doing like Jesus did. I mean, he saw a tragedy us and he said, I'm not just gonna stand back, I'm gonna invade that world. I'm gonna put my life on the line for it. I'm gonna vanquish it and I'm gonna start turning this thing around. And in the end of all, Dan has also given us a glimpse of heaven in which there'll be no more broken bodies and no more suffering and no more injustice and no more war and no more tears. And finally, yes, even finally, even death itself will be no more. Can I have an amen?

Why do we connect like that? Because Christianity explains life. We just naturally know this stuff. Why? God put it in our hearts. So early eyewitnesses, the empty tomb, enthusiasm and an explanation for life. That's when my light bulbs (whooshes) one at a time came on to show me that our faith is not blind. You might say today, well, okay, that's good for you and them, but what about me? I came in with a broken heart. Not only do I not have someone to share life with, I'm struggling even to have friends. Or maybe you have kids and you long for them to give up these things that set them back, maybe even addictions. Or you just can't get a job and your self-worth is just shot. Or it seems like anything you do these days, it just doesn't go well. And you're very, very discouraged today.

Well, let me just give you three quick examples of how this transforming truth of God helps change people in those situations. This can apply to any situation you're struggling with. The first one is this. And it's that the truth of God resurrects dead things. The truth resurrects dead things. A great example is when Renee and I were in Guatemala and we met a young man who started off in a very poor family, father always gone. Mom was not a nice person. She was outright mean. She used to even yell at young Henry and say, you are good for nothing. And she would tell him, you're gonna get out there and you're gonna get food, even if you have to beg for your sisters. And Henry would go out as a young boy and he would beg and it never seemed to be enough to please his mother to the point that he was suicidal.

At age seven, he tried to hang himself, failed. At age 11, he decided to cut his wrist but he couldn't quite bring himself to it because he thought, if I'm gone, my sisters will have no one except mom. So he gutted it out. But to make money then, he joined a gang and he got good at it. He became the muscle. He started to hurt people. Then one night he had a dream as he told Renee and I the story. He said, I had a vivid dream, not like the regular ones where you kind of forget and go, what was that? It was vivid. And the dream was simply that he saw two paths in life. One led to life, one led to destruction. The very next day, he meets a stranger, a man who says, hey young man, I wanna tell you about something I'm into. It was Christianity. And he said, my Bible talks in essence in some about two paths we can go by. One to life, one to destruction. Henry was shocked and set back. It just rattled him 'cause he had just dreamt this.

Well, as time went on, he kept meeting with this man and the man finally gets Henry to a breaking point and Henry gives his life to Christ, leaves the gang. You think that'd be good news. No, his mom said, what? She was furious with him because that meant no more money from the gang. So he didn't even have support at home. But he kept praying for his mom. And years later, she finally enters the church, he attends and comes to Christ. Two years later after that, his father gives his life to Christ. Today, Henry is not a gang banger instrument of darkness. He is a beacon of light, the light of the truth of Christ. He got married and here's his parents, there's his wife and you'll see his parents at his wedding, formally despising him, telling him he's no good to now supporting him in his new life as a light bearer of truth.

So Henry is now a living example of our second truth, the truth sets us free. You may not know this, but after the Korean War, the North imposed atheism. The South embraced Christianity. Check out this photo from a satellite of the Korean peninsula at night. Look at the North as compared to the South. Wow. The North has chosen literal darkness and sadly spiritual darkness. The South has done the opposite. And they are free because of it, aren't they? Yes, the truth sets us free. So the truth resurrects dead things, it sets us free. And finally, the truth gives us the confidence to face life's biggest challenges. You remember that former Christian hater, the apostle Paul, who went from persecuting Christians to being used by God to actually write the majority of the books of the New Testament? Look at his transformation and what he wrote in Romans 1:16. He said, "I am not ashamed of the gospel because it is the power of God to bring salvation to everyone who believes." Wow, what a transformation.

Men and women, that truth transformed cowering, defeated, Christ-denying first believers into world changers. It changed the Henrys of the world. It changed me, it can change you. It changed Paul and the skeptic James. What about you? What is it in your life that needs just a dunking of this truth to change something? Or maybe you came today and God is putting on your heart somebody who is in your life doubting, thinking about giving this all up. Maybe God wants to use you to bring the truth back into their life. Let's pray and ask the Holy Spirit to help us do that.

Heavenly Father, thank you that we don't just deal with a make-believer, cut out Jesus. We actually have something that's rooted in history, in reality, and that's you. So Father, for everyone here today, whatever their need is, whether it's encouragement for reasons or just being buoyed back up in the faith because you're real, may your Spirit meet them at their own place of need and send us out more bold or emboldened ambassadors for your sake, your kingdom, and what you want us to do. Thank you that you're true, Jesus. And everyone said?

Amen.