THE CASE FOR CHRISTIANITY

Introduction

{Want to do something a little different today, as I do some more topical than expository as I deal with a subject that is near and dear to me.}

-This past week on the Fox News website, former police officer and now Christian apologist J. Warner Wallace wrote an article that ought to be a wakeup call to parents and a wakeup call to the church.

-The article was titled: YOUNG CHRISTIANS ARE LEAVING THE CHURCH—HERE’S WHY----that right there ought to catch your attention. Here is some of what he said:

~A new, 2018 Pew Research Center Report polled a growing group in America: [who call themselves the] “religious nones.” This group describes themselves as “nothing in particular” when asked if they identify with a specific religious group. The vast majority are ex-Christians, and most are under the age of 35. Pew asked a representative sample of these “religious nones” why they now reject any religious affiliation and provided respondents with six possible responses….

~One glaring statistic was largely overlooked in the latest data collected by the Pew Research Center. When religious “nones” were asked to identify the most important reason for not affiliating with a religion, the largest response was that none of the six responses provided by Pew were actually very important. In this poll, Pew did not allow respondents to answer in their own words. So, even though respondents searched for an answer that approximated their experience, most didn’t believe that any of the reasons offered by Pew were very important to them when deciding to abandon their religious identity.

~What, then, is the real reason young Christians (and other religious believers) leave the faith? The answer lies in a prior, 2016 Pew Research Center survey which allowed respondents to answer in their own words. In this study, most “nones” said they no longer identified with a religious group because they no longer believed it was true. When asked why they didn’t believe, many said their views about God had “evolved” and some reported having a “crisis of faith.”…

~The teaching they question seems to be about the existence of God, and this is consistent with the explanations offered by ex-Christians in a variety of other recent studies. When Christians walk away from the faith, more often than not, it’s due to some form of intellectual skepticism. Ex-Christians often describe religious beliefs as innately blind or unreasonable….

~{Here’s how he concludes}

Ex-Christians often leave the Church because they don’t think anyone in the Church can answer their questions or make a case. It’s time for believers to accept their responsibility to explain what Christianity proposes and why these propositions are true, especially when interacting with young people who have legitimate questions. Rather than embracing a blind or unreasonable faith, Christians must develop an informed, forensic faith that can stand up in the marketplace of ideas.

We know why young Christians are leaving. Now it’s time to give them a reason to stay.

-So, here’s my summary assessment:

Our young people are going off to college where they are introduced to all sorts of ideas (that we had shielded) them from that challenge their faith.

-And when they are unable to answer those challenges on their own, and then they are unable to find anyone in the church to answer the questions these challenges raise, they believe that Christianity is a fraud because it seemingly cannot match what they learn outside the church.

-That means that the church has failed its members to equip them to demonstrate the truthfulness of the Christian faith.

-In one sermon it is impossible to answer all possible challenges and questions, but I wanted to make clear to you that a case can be made that Christianity alone is the sole true worldview that can be true.

-But I need to go about it in a bit of a roundabout way to convince you of the importance of knowing the WHY along with the WHAT:

I) Intellectual Contemplation is Biblical

-So many people think that when it comes to faith in Jesus Christ that they can park their brains at the door, because somehow faith and religion only have to do with the soul or the spirit or the heart, but not with the mind or intellect.

-But consider what the Lord says is the greatest commandment that there is (in Matt. 22:37):

And he said to him, "You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.”

-Jesus says that the mind (thinking and reasoning and rationalizing) is a part of loving God. When you think about God, when you think about the Bible, and when you think through the implications of what the Bible claims, your mind works through the truthfulness of what Christianity is all about.

-It is not enough to just know WHAT it is you believe—you need to be able to know and articulate WHY it is you believe it. To do otherwise means that you are a lemming merely following whoever happens to be leading the pack. When you move from the what to the why, you move beyond mere belief and move onto a conviction that you will hold onto tenaciously no matter what garbage a supposed intellectual will throw at you.

-Yet a lot of Christians will cry out that they are not smart enough to be able to “get all that apologetics stuff.” But it is not a matter of being smart enough, it is a matter of taking the time and energy to learn the answers to the questions that are raised. It is time to stop excusing our intellectual laziness and dig into (not only the spiritual aspects of the faith but also) the intellectual. That is when we love God with our mind.

-If we do not do this, then we lose the next generation. If the only foundation for faith that our children have is because THAT’S THE WAY I GREW UP or IT’S WHAT MY PARENTS BELIEVE then we will lose them to people who are able to poke more holes in those reasons than Swiss cheese.

-We need to tell our children that faith in God, faith in Christ, and faith in the Bible is not only spiritual, but it is intellectually satisfying and is able to give straight, true answers to all of life’s questions.

-Closely related to this I believe it is important to know that:

II) Reason is not Hostile to Faith

-At some point in church history a form of anti-intellectualism arose that led to people leaving their mind behind at home when they went to church. The mind and the intellect were looked on as something to be used in worldly affairs (like math and science), but that you couldn’t also think about your faith.

-And with a supposed growing hostility between science and the Bible, anything that smacked of using reason was looked at with suspicion (even though the hostility between science and the Bible is a false narrative).

-This led to Christians believing that somehow you are more holy when you just take everything by a faith that you don’t really think about. JUST BELIEVE, DON’T THINK ABOUT IT.

-But that is not what the Bible itself tells us. How the writer of Hebrews describes it (Hebrews 11:1):

Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen

-Where it reads in the ESV that faith is the conviction of things not seen, other translations use words like evidence/proof/assurance----it’s a word that literally means:

the evidence, normally based on argument or discussion, as to the truth or reality of something

-That means faith is not blind but is based on arguments and evidences that are able to demonstrate to the highest possibility that Christian claims and doctrines are based on truth and based on reality.

-Are there a lot of things about Christianity that are not seen by the eye? Yes—but that does not mean that it is beyond reason. And at the same time, using reason to think through what you believe does not negate faith—it can only strengthen our faith

-The only people that need to fear reasoning and evidence and arguments are those who hold to falsehood, because their false beliefs will be revealed for what it really is.

-But is someone able to demonstrate the truthfulness of the Christian worldview as well as the falsehood of all the other worldviews? Yes, so now I want to talk about:

III) Testing the Truths of Worldview

-I want you to turn to John 18, and I want us to read this interchange between Jesus and Pilate in verses 33-38 and we will talk about testing worldviews to learn if they are true.

33 So Pilate entered his headquarters again and called Jesus and said to him, "Are you the King of the Jews?"

34 Jesus answered, "Do you say this of your own accord, or did others say it to you about me?"

35 Pilate answered, "Am I a Jew? Your own nation and the chief priests have delivered you over to me. What have you done?"

36 Jesus answered, "My kingdom is not of this world. If my kingdom were of this world, my servants would have been fighting, that I might not be delivered over to the Jews. But my kingdom is not from the world."

37 Then Pilate said to him, "So you are a king?" Jesus answered, "You say that I am a king. For this purpose I was born and for this purpose I have come into the world-- to bear witness to the truth. Everyone who is of the truth listens to my voice."

38 Pilate said to him, "What is truth?" After he had said this, he went back outside to the Jews and told them, "I find no guilt in him.

-Jesus is claiming that His life, His teachings, His beliefs, and subsequently His death and resurrection are all based on TRUTH, and anybody who wants to know truth, believe truth, and live out truth, must believe and listen to Him

-Christianity is not some fairy tale or mythical legend that makes for a good story. Christianity is a worldview that is based on the truth of reality—and there is solid evidence that can demonstrate its truthfulness.

-And there are ways to test the truths of a belief, and what we find is that only the Christian faith is able to pass all of these tests.

-I want to briefly mention three tests for truth, all of which Christianity passes and no other worldview is able to.

-These three tests are not original to me—others like David Naugle and Ravi Zacharias agree that for a worldview to be true it absolutely must pass all three tests.

A) Empirical Adequacy

-This means that the claims of Christianity can be empirically verified—we can give evidence that a Christian claim corresponds with reality.

-There is a cumulative case of evidence from all different fields that demonstrate that Christian claims actually happened and agrees with the real world.

-When you look at the field of history, the ancient biblical narratives actually occurred and are verifiable through normal academic means of studying antiquity. Be it events in the Old Testament, the life of Jesus, or even the resurrection of Jesus, historical scholarship has proofs and arguments that come from non-Christian sources that verify the biblical accounts.

-Related to this is the field of archaeology. Numerous archaeological finds have given credence to the biblical accounts of history, demonstrating that its account of events is exactly the way the Bible says that it was. And there has never been an archaeological find that has contradicted the Bible. Every piece of evidence found related to biblical times has confirmed events as the Bible gives them.

-Even science itself has demonstrated the truthfulness of Christian claims. Although the Bible is not a science book, but is written as literature, there have been scientific findings that confirm the biblical claims.

~For example, although a lot of people are afraid to talk about the Big Bang Theory, that theory actually proves that there was a point when the universe did not exist, and then all of a sudden it came into being. There is no non-Christian explanation to account for this. We know it by the phrase: IN THE BEGINNING GOD CREATED THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH

~Another scientific example is the fine-tuning of the universe—the entire universe has the perfect conditions for there to be life on Earth. If one small part of this fine-tuning was different than it is, life on Earth would cease to be. The chances of this happening by mere chance are so small as to be absolutely impossible.

-I probably could go on for days about the empirical evidences, but I think you get my point. For a worldview to be true, it has to correspond to reality and this correspondence has to be verifiable. Christianity is the only worldview to account for all the evidence.

But then there is another test:

B) Logical Consistency

-What this means is that there are no claims within Christianity that contradict other claims within Christianity or with reality itself.

-Not to get too philosophical, but there is a very important law at place here. It is called the law of noncontradiction which can be defined as the fact:

That two contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time under the same conditions.

~I cannot tell you that the only one Nissan Rogue that I own is red, and then to another person tell them that that same Nissan Rogue that I own is blue (if I mean it in the same way). It is either one or the other.

-There is nothing within Christianity that ever contradicts itself or contradicts reality.

C) Existential Relevancy

-This talks about the experience of someone who lives out their worldview. If you have a set of beliefs, but are unable to live out those beliefs, then there is something wrong with those beliefs.

-As one scholar described it:

There must be meaningful applications that can be made to a person’s life. This test will reveal the “heart” of a system. It will disclose how it deals with ethical issues, suffering and death, and the purpose for each individual life. Truth by its very nature and definition must apply to reality. Consequently, a worldview that is further from truth will ignore many of the existential questions of life.

-If your worldview is not livable ethically or morally or even practically, you can’t have a true worldview.

-That is but a scratch of the surface of these tests, but the bottom line is that only Christianity is empirically verifiable and logically consistent and existentially relevant. No other worldview, religion, or philosophy can make this claim.

IV) Only the Gospel Remains

-Since Christianity is true, that means the message of Christianity is true—therefore the gospel message alone remains as the only possible way of deliverance from the righteous judgment of God

-And in 1 Cor. 15:3-8 Paul very succinctly tells us the gospel message:

3 For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures,

4 that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures,

5 and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve.

6 Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.

7 Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles.

8 Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me.

-Islam is false, therefore it cannot save you. Hinduism and Buddhism are false, therefore they cannot save you. Materialistic naturalism is false, therefore it cannot save you. Christianity alone is true, therefore only the gospel message remains.

Conclusion

-No one can claim there is no evidence for God or Christianity—all they can do is willfully ignore the evidence that is there; and unfortunately most people do. Don’t let that be you. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and be saved—during the invitation come forward and receive salvation through Jesus.

-Christian, there are several things you can pray for:

1) Pray you would have the willpower to study the Christian claims for yourself and be able to answer WHY you believe along with the WHAT.

2) Pray for our young people that they would not be carried away by false doctrines or philosophies but would be knowledgeable of the truthfulness of Christianity.

3) Pray for someone who is not in the faith, that the Holy Spirit would use the evidence of Christianity to show them its truthfulness

-Maybe you are looking for a church that teaches the truthfulness of the gospel message…