10/25/25

On a walk this morning I listened to Dr. Charles Stanley’s sermon on the radio called “A Solemn Warning to Those Who Reject Christ”. It’s about hell and belief. There are four words used in scripture for hell. All refer to a place of eternal torment. Dr. Stanley presents a very clear gospel message in this sermon, and towards the end I questioned my own heart about my belief in the gospel message. The scriptures tell us to examine ourselves to see if we are in the faith. 2Cor 13:5

Do I believe all the bible has to say about God’s story? Do I believe that God created the earth in six days? Were Eve with her husband Adam perfect but chose to disobey God and instead believe a lie from the serpent? Do I believe that God gave Moses the law on Mt. Sanai, yet over the ensuing centuries Israel forgot God’s deliverance, choosing to rely on their own wisdom concerning the nature of the world and the way to conduct themselves? Do I believe that God sent His Messiah, Jesus Christ, to live and die as a man, sacrificing himself on a cross to pay the price a just God required for His people’s rebellion? Did Jesus rise from the dead to sit on the right hand of God, interceding for his people? Do I believe that God still directs the affairs of men today, my affairs, according to His plan to freely give people his own son’s righteousness? Will there be people redeemed from every tribe and nation so that they live with Him forever on His new earth? Do I believe this Jesus is coming back to earth to rule it for 1000 years, after which He will defeat all his enemies in a final battle and usher in an eternal kingdom where crying and pain will not exist?

To my own flesh, it sounds like a fairy tale. Satan is very good at imitating God. Satan is very good at deceiving, confusing, redirecting our attention to what we see and feel, clouding the reality God presents to us in the book He wrote. But the fairy tales are just an imitation of the real. I’m very good at believing the original lie that what I see is more to be desired than what God tells me. My desires are often more real to me than God, and my thoughts of how things really are more true to me than  what my Eternal Creator says.

So, do I believe? God has not left me without evidence for His biblical claims.

History has documented in sources both biblical and extra-biblical that Jesus was a man who preached in ancient Israel and died on a Roman cross. The bible is the most well-documented, studied book from ancient history. It would stand up to scrutiny, and has, in any court of law under trial. Many scientists living today say that the odds of this universe being set in motion and expanding to create our delicately balanced world and everything in it are so statistically impossible that it makes no sense to believe in anything other than a divine creator. Jesus fulfilled all of the Old Testament prophecies about him during his life. That is also a statistical impossibility. The bible contains 66 books, written over a span of 1500 or so years, on three continents, by over 40 different authors, and it consistently maintains just one primal message throughout. It doesn’t contradict itself.

Given all this evidence, do I believe in Jesus, the eternal son of God, who paid my sin debt?  My brain is too well washed in a skeptic acid of toxic cultic theology and prideful human intelligence to just accept belief in things I can’t see, feel, and understand without a fight. My mind is too well tempted by the ancient lie that I can become God, knowing good and evil even better than He does, to lay down and roll over like a submissive dog.

So do I believe? I asked my heart that question this morning as I walked.

“Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”  Hebrews 11:1

Hope isn’t logical. It’s a belief in an unknown future that we plan on being good for us. Every heart that has ever existed has hoped for a future better than the one in which we currently live. But how can we possibly know that this future will come to pass? We can’t unless we base our hope in someone outside ourselves who knows the future. If man is just a mix of chemicals and minerals that blew up from nothing billions of years ago without a designer, hope is illogical. Hope is mythical. So is right and wrong and any sort of morality.

But man has had hope and morality and a desire to live forever since the first man walked the earth. We are born with a conscience and a desire for more and better things. But since that first man, we are born with a thought that we can know what that better thing is out of our own observation, thinking, and reasoning processes. We neither believe nor desire to get those better things from an authoritative source outside ourselves. We desire to BE God, not obey God. We hate to admit that we don’t know, and we hate to accept instruction in things way too big for us to understand. It’s been this way in every man and woman since the beginning of time.

So do I believe? Yes. My own heart convicts me of the truth of God and His bible. There was a designer. I’m just like every other man that’s ever existed, wanting to know good and evil and be wise and have superiority over myself and others, not submitting or admitting to divine authority. I’m just like Eve as described in Genesis. And Jesus is just like the God that revealed Himself to men through the centuries before His coming.

Something about God’s way of justice in sending Jesus to die as a sacrifice doesn’t get through to my analytical mind. It’s the one most important event in world history, and the one about which I understand the least. But perfect understanding was never a requirement of God from man. Obedience was and is. Belief is. Faith is.

Memory is. God told His people in Deuteronomy 5:15:

15 You shall remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt, and the Lord your God brought you out of there by a mighty hand and by an outstretched arm; therefore the Lord your God commanded you to observe the sabbath day.

I remember the day my daughter was born. At 6 ½ months gestation, she wasn’t ready to be born. But my body said it was time, and after weeks of bleeding, labor started. The doctor’s tried to stop it three times with different medications, but they didn’t work. The doctors wanted to try another medication on the third try, telling my husband and I that at this stage, our daughter could die or be severely disabled if we allowed her to come. So we did. Yet that same night about 11 PM, my husband called my hospital room to tell me that he sensed God telling him to let her come if labor started the next day. He had been reading in Exodus where God told Moses to raise his staff over the red sea and go forward. Moses did, the sea parted, and the people went through on dry land. When I heard that story again, my heart agreed with my husband’s desire not to stop labor again..

The next day labor started the fourth time, and our daughter was born weighing 1 lb, 12 oz. Not only was she born perfectly formed, but perfectly operating. Breathing normal room air, crying, no holes in her heart or eyes or intestines. In addition, the doctor saw that her growth position in my womb was dangerous, and had she stayed in any longer, we both could easily have died from a imminent rupture. My doctors were amazed. God was not.

I remember the day several years later when I was feeling so defeated and jealous of a church family that had so much more money than I did as a single parent. They got to go on lavish vacations and had a nice house and no debt. I knew this deep envy was a sin, but I didn’t know how to let these feelings go. So I grabbed my bible, walked over to a nearby park, and asked God what to do with them. I sat on that warm summer day at a picnic table under a tree, and my bible fell open to the Psalms. As I read through several chapters, they came alive to my soul. God put His goodness on display in those chapters and said to my heart “you are not less than these people I have blessed with wealth. As a matter of fact, I’m blessing you in ways you can’t see, but which are much better and more complete than worldly wealth. I’m doing things in your life and heart that you can’t even imagine.” The jealousy left and my heart was full that day. And still, from time to time, envy tries to seep in to my soul and God is so good to remind me of the riches in Christ that are mine.

About six or seven years ago, sitting in a church I no longer attend, I finally came to the realization that all my doubting, all my thinking and longing to “get it” was never going to bring peace to my troubled soul. But giving up and just believing and stopping the endless arguments with God would. And I did. I don’t have to ‘get it’. I just have to receive Him. Pursue Him. Love Him. Watch for Him. Wait for Him. Guard my heart and the faith God has delivered to it. And watch God work.

Yes, I believe.