 Howdy, radiate. Hey, we just want to acknowledge both here and at Portage because Portage is live simulcast this morning. So can we just take a moment and just say hello to our family that are at the Portage campus. And we love you guys. So glad you're joining via video. And as well as those who are online, Facebook and on live stream, especially on a morning like today, if you went out to your car and left it out overnight, you had a glazed car overnight. So that's April in Michigan, right? That can happen in June. I think it might. I don't know. It's kind of one of those springs. Don't rebuke me. All right, so this is week number two of our Red Hot series. So today we're talking about Bible doctrine, theology, anything about the church in particular. Those are the questions that we're answering today. And to remind everybody next weekend is our third and final week of Red Hot. We've gotten hundreds and hundreds of questions. We can only get through so many in a particular service. So we're doing our very best. We're hoping after the series is over to go back and do something called Red Hot Rewind where we'll take some of your questions, put them on social media and see how many of your questions we can get answered. So stay tuned. Next week is wild card round, which means anything about anything goes. And we've already gotten a few of those in. Questions like what about marijuana? Will the Lions ever win a Super Bowl? Things like that. So next weekend should be wild and crazy. So this morning, Bible, theology, the church, and we've already begun to get several of your questions in. I haven't seen any of them. I have no lifeline, no call a friend, no multiple choice, just me and my trusty ESV. So let's see what kind of questions we get this morning. I have a really deep theological question that is pertinent to our faith. Dinosaurs, yay or nah? Pastor John Z from Portage, what are you doing? He's teleprompting himself over here. So dinosaurs, you know, sometimes people who are skeptics of the Bible, like to use dinosaurs as like the trump card. It's like you're having a great conversation about Jesus, history, theology, the Bible and they go, oh yeah, what about dinosaurs? They throw that down. I'm like, I've never been a big fan of Barney, but I know a little bit about the Bible. And here's the reality is on day number six. I think it's day number six, God created the beasts of the field. That's probably included dinosaurs as well. Not a whole lot written about dinosaurs because dinosaurs is a name that we came up with for large lizards that we discovered in the geological formations that were fossilized. It means giant lizard. So if you're looking for your Bible to say God created the dinosaurs, you're not going to find it, but God did create all the beasts of the field. Job chapter 41 talks about large animals. He calls it behemoth. He says it has a tail like a cedar and it has huge legs and it's a giant animal that God created. He's the apex of all of God's creation. Job 41 talks about Leviathan, talks about a great sea creature that has scales on the front and the backside that when it moves throughout the water, it actually leaves a wake that reflects the sun. It looks like fire. It's a massive animal. And those may be references to large animals like dinosaurs. They were in the original creation. Many of them, many of the species may have died out. What most people don't know is about 80% of what are classified as dinosaurs were actually the size of a large dog or a sheep. It's only some of the larger ones like the Tyrannosaurus rex and Brontosaurus and different dinosaurs that you grew up coloring on your little coloring sheets in school that are the larger, more dynamic ones. And many of them may have died out in the flood. If there, when there was a flood that was global in a scale, obviously Noah's not gonna be taking on Tyrannosaurus rex on to the Ark. Many of those would have died out and that would explain why the cataclysmic nature of the fossil formations as we find them of like large dinosaurs that were in the act of attacking, eating, giving birth, it would have been cataclysmic. They were locked in sand and soil formations. And then obviously we have many species of lizards and things that probably are connected to those dinosaur species. So it's not a difficult one. Dinosaurs were created when everything else was created and like many other animal species and kinds, many of them went extinct for multiple different reasons. So there you go, deal with that. All right, here we go. All my dinosaur peeps were happy with that one. Okay, this is from Portage and it says, second Corinthians talks about the third heaven. What is that? What is the third heaven? The reference that he's talking to is second Corinthians. I think it's in chapter 10-ish or 11, 11 or 12. Paul talks about, I know a man whether in the body or out of the body, I do not know, who went up into the third heaven and saw things that we're not supposed to even talk about that are too glorious for words. And when he's making reference to, I know a man, he's probably talking about himself. It's probably in reference to when he was stoned in the book of Acts in Leicester and Derby and he was dragged out outside the city, he was stoned. And by the way, when Jews stoned people, it was like they took brick-sized stones, they put you into a low space and they circled you and they pummeled you until you were dead. That happened to the apostle Paul and he was left for dead and probably either was dead or very close to death and then was brought back to life. He lived through that or he was resurrected. And this is probably the instance that he is talking about. The heavens, when it talks about a third heaven, the first heaven is the atmosphere of the earth. Second heaven is talking about outer space, it's talking about the galaxies, the stars, the moons. That's a reference to the second heaven. Third heaven is talking about the dimension where God dwells, a spiritual dimension and that's the third heaven. So when Paul says, I know a man who, whether I was in the body or out of the body, I can't tell you, but I ascended or I found myself in a third heaven. He's talking about, he awakened to the presence of God or that place where God dwells and he saw and he heard things that would totally blow our minds so much so that God would not even give him permission to describe them and speak about them. So if you ever see a book in a bookstore where somebody says, I went to heaven, I don't know. A lot of times it's like, I went to heaven and there was like fields full of cotton candy. No, you just ate too much pizza. You didn't go to heaven. But there is a third heaven, it's where God dwells. That's what that's referring to. Let's take our next question. Does God ever hear the prayers of the unsaved? John 9, verse 31 says, we know that God does not listen to sinners. Does God only listen to the prayers of the saved? Well, if God did not listen to the prayers of sinners, you could not be saved because that's how a sinner becomes saved is you call upon the name of the Lord. Let's just go ahead and turn there real quick. John chapter nine, verse 31, and let's look at it quickly in its context. In verse number 31, or verse 30, it says, the man answered, why this is an amazing thing? You do not know where he comes from and yet he opens his eyes. We know that God does not listen to sinners. Now, Jesus didn't say God doesn't listen to sinners. This man said God did not listen to sinners. And so this man is operating on an assumption and the man who's talking to Jesus is a Jewish man and the Jewish belief was that they were the phariseical Jews of the Sadducees, the nation of Israel, believe they were the only people that God cared about. Everybody who was outside of the Commonwealth of Israel was referred to as a sinner, but that was an assumption that Jews made that actually limited them and their ability to fulfill the mandate or the vocation that God had for the nation of Israel, which was go to all the people that were far away from God. They were taking pride in the fact that they had the law, the prophets, the temple, and they wanted to get rid of all the other people out of Israel to kind of have a holy land. So that was the point of this conversation, but the reality is God hears the prayers of sinners. Number one, he hears when sinners call upon his name because it says, those who call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved, saved. So obviously God hears that prayer. There's another instance in the book of Acts about a man named Cornelius. Cornelius was a centurion, which meant he was over 100 soldiers in the Roman army. He's stationed in occupied Palestinian land or Palestine. That's what Rome called it, Israel. And it says that he would offer alms to the poor. He would give money to the temple. He was a Godfair. He believed in the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, but he was not a Christian. And an angel actually spoke to Cornelius and said that your prayers have come up before God as a sweet smelling aroma. So this is an unsaved man. So obviously God hears the prayers of the saints. Now there's a different, or the prayers of sinners. Now there's a difference between God responding to the SOS cry of a sinner and actually responding to the prayer of faith of a believer. And you and I, we pray as Christians in faith because we know that Jesus has said whatever you ask in my name, the Father will do it for you. We can have confidence that if we ask anything according to God's will for our lives, he will answer us. The fervent, effectual prayer of a righteous man, James 5, is very effective. So God hears the prayers. God hears the cries of sinners and those who are not saved. And obviously he's working in their life to draw them to a point of salvation. But that's a different kind of prayer than the prayers of the saints that are praying in response to God's will, God's word in the name of Jesus. That is a privilege. It has legal authoritative right and God responds to those prayers in a uniquely different way. So there you go. Richland, is it possible to lose your faith? If so, how does it happen? And how do we know if we have? Losing your faith. I think what this person's talking about is losing your salvation. So a lot of people have lost their faith and not all faith is equal. But when we talk about our salvation, there are really two schools of thought within Christian theology. You've got team John Calvin, you've got team Jacob Arminius. Calvinism, Arminianism. Calvinism in a nutshell says that once you're saved, you're always saved, nothing you can do about it. Arminianism says that you can start off in faith and believe in Jesus and be saved, but you can forfeit or become disqualified in your faith. Somebody asked, is radiant a Calvinist church or is it an Arminian church? We're a Bible church and I'm a Jesus believer. I don't, I'm not following John Calvin and I'm not following Jacob Arminius, I'm following Jesus. And I think John Calvin and Jacob Arminius would say the same thing. But if you're asking me which viewpoint I think is closer, I would say that I'm a Calvinian. I think that there's some, both of them grabbed ahold of some truth that we needed in the body of Christ. So let me just say this, here's a balanced approach. You can't lose your salvation like you lose your keys. If you truly have been born again saved, repented of your sin, made Jesus Christ the Lord of your life, there's nothing that can separate you from the love of God. You don't just one day, oh, I sinned one too many times. It's not like you get a punch card from heaven. You know, of 10 free sins before you have to re-up your salvation. And you accidentally got your 10th punch, didn't renew your card. Now you're driving around with a suspended salvation license. That's not how it works. And all of a sudden you show up to heaven and say, I prayed that prayer. And he's like, yeah, you sinned 11 times. We gave you 10, that last one was really big. And so sorry to the fire you go. That's not how salvation works. That's not the heart of the father. On the other hand, the other extreme is kind of the once saved, always saved view where it's like, you can say a prayer and say, Jesus come into my heart when you're five years old, live like the devil, do whatever you want to and you keep pulling out your identity card saying, well, I'm a Christian, I prayed the prayer. Now Jesus said, if you're truly a Christian, you're going to have fruit that proves that. There's gonna be a change in your life. There's gonna be transformation in your life. We talk a lot about having faith, but the thing that precedes faith is repentance. We need to repent from dead works, have faith towards God. Those two work together kind of like two pedals on a bike. And so I would say you can't lose your salvation. Is it possible though, for somebody who has at one time believed in Jesus, really had a sincere relationship with God to swerve from the faith and actually be far away from God and be under the penalty of eternal judgment. I believe the answer is yes. I believe that there were many people in the Bible started off following Jesus, started off in the church. Paul talks about Deimos. He says in one of his letters, he mentions Deimos, who's part of his apostolic team. In another letter, he says that Deimos has loved the world more than things of God and he has departed for the world. Second Peter talks about it, says, it would be better for those who were enlightened knew the truth through Jesus Christ, but yet have now walked away from that. It would have been better for them had they never known the truth to have known it and then walked away. And here's the reality is if you get to that extreme where you've rejected Christ, and unfortunately I know some people in this situation that were pastors, they were sincere believers. I can't judge their hearts. Somebody on the Calvinist side would say, well, they were never saved in the first place. It seemed like they were saved. It seemed like they, if you had asked them, it seemed like they prayed, received Jesus, believed the Bible, were trying to help other people do the same thing, but now they have swerved away from Jesus and now they believe all kinds of crazy stuff. They believe there is no God. They believe the universe is an energy that we're all reincarnated and we should worship the mountains and they are not following Jesus. This is why the Bible says, number one, examine yourself to make sure that you're in the faith. It also says don't swerve away from the truth. I believe though if you get to that point, it is you have kicked against the convicting work of the Holy Spirit over and over and over and over and over again. And exhausted it until finally God says, have it your way. And here's maybe a controversial statement. I believe that when somebody has sincerely become, what in theological terms we call an apostate, which means they were in the faith, they're no longer, I don't think there's any way for them to find repentance and come back. So this isn't like, I got, see, because I grew up in a church that, when it was real little that taught, every time you sin, you lost your salvation. Well, I was getting saved every Sunday. It was like, pastor, give the altar call. It's like, are you kidding me? I needed this on Monday. And I was scared that somehow my sin had separated from me from God. Your acts of sin are a call for you to repent because they affect your relationship. They don't affect your salvation. It is a cognizant decision to reject Christ. I think it's rare, but I think it's possible and it has happened. Okay, let's take the next question. Is the existence of hell a closed-handed issue that all Christians must accept? What does hell tell us about God's character? Wow, that's a great question. That's on live stream. So hell is obviously a hot point of discussion. Pardon the pun. There are some people that believe that hell is a medieval construct. Some people believe that hell is a physical place in the center of the earth. Other people believe it's a spiritual dimension. That is a separation from God. There's a large spectrum of opinions in theological circles about what hell is. And here's what I believe the Bible teaches. I believe that the Bible teaches that there is a heaven and there is a hell. Every human being will live forever. You are not eternal, meaning that you... God is the only eternal being. He has a beginning, or he has no beginning and he has no end, he just is. Human beings are immortal, which means once you're created, you live forever. You are an immortal being. And God's desire is that every single human being would be saved, would be forgiven, and would spend eternity with him in heaven. But because every human being is immortal and they are gonna live forever, and because part of God's character is that God is a God of justice, and because God is a God of holiness, and he's also a God of mercy, in his mercy, he's offered sinful humanity a path to salvation. His name is Jesus. In his holiness, sin cannot dwell in the presence of God because God's presence would actually destroy sin. And in God's justice, the soul that sins must be vindicated. So if you reject God's avenue, his substitute, which is his son who died on the cross as an atonement for your sins, then every man who refuses that will stand before God and have to give an account for their own sin. And the Bible says that hell is a place of separation, eternal separation from the presence of God. C.S. Lewis says it like this, it says that hell is actually a, hell is a prison that is locked from the inside. So the image that we have of God taking people angry and throwing them into the flames of fire and them screaming out no, give me one more chance is a misnomer. Everybody who goes to hell will be there because it was ultimately their choice, because they've rejected God, they've rejected Christ. Now God doesn't desire that anyone goes to hell. God desires that all should repent and come into salvation. But ultimately, because God created human beings as free will entities and they found themselves into a position of rebellion where not just rebellion but self-glorification, God in his justice is not going to allow human beings to shake their fist in his face and say, no, I don't deserve this when in reality we do, we all deserve hell. But God in his grace and his mercy has made a way for us. But in the end, there's going to be nobody who stands in God's presence and says, oh, oh, oh, I need a second chance. No, no, no, God says, sorry, too late. It's like this, it's going to be if we live our whole life saying I don't want your will, I want my will. Not your will, my will, God, my will, my will. And I know you, I don't believe in Jesus, I don't believe in you, I reject the claims. Really it's in our self-deception. We will end up on judgment day with God graciously in a way saying, have it your way. This isn't my will, but in order for God to change somebody's will, he would have to superimpose his will on them and say, no, no, no, no, no, no. In the end, if we've lived a life saying not your will but mine, God in the end will say have it your way. And hell is a sobering doctrine. Hell is something that we should not glory in. Hell is not something that we should lightly banter around and say, well, that person obviously went to hell. You don't know that. That's between God and that individual. People ask the question, what about people who've never heard the gospel before? Well, I don't think there's an easy answer to that. I'm not ashamed of saying I don't know the answer to that, but here's what I do know. I know that God is good. I know that gracious, God wants people to go to heaven way more than we want them to go to heaven. And I have to trust God that he's all wise, he's all merciful, he's all gracious, and he wants as many people to go to heaven, spend eternity with him and his new created heaven and earth that possibly can be there. So if you feel that hell is an injustice, you need to realize God wants people to go to hell, spend an eternity separated from him less than you do. And let me just say this real quickly. If you are a Christian and you are offended at that, then you better have a life justified by your actions in reaching people with the gospel that is far louder than your debate about God's ability to be just in judgment. Because if we believe there's right and wrong, we need to go and do something about it. We need to be giving to missions. We need to be witnessing. We need to be living a life of pursuit of that so that it's a witness to other people because heaven and hell really are in the balance. If you're looking for it, Revelation 21, Luke chapter 16 talks about it. Second Peter talks about Tarotaris, talks about how the Old Testament, the word is Sheol, talks about the grave or the Netherworld. Okay, let's go on to another one. Livestream. Is tithing supposed to be on gross or net? Or does that not matter? And is it just the attitude of the heart that matters? Thank you, Livestream. It's a Livestream question. So the issue of tithing or giving God, the principle of giving God not as a law, but as a principle, giving God your first fruits, the first tenth, tithe means tenth, honoring God with the tithe, that principle is all throughout the scriptures. Is that on the net or on the gross or is it really all to do about the heart attitude? Let me answer, because there's two questions. Number one, has everything to do with the heart? Has everything to do with the heart? Because it's possible to give and not love, but it's impossible to love and not give. And so you can give and have a bad attitude. Has anybody ever done that before? You ever given a gift at one of your family parties and you could really care less about the person, but you were afraid they were gonna have a gift for you? So you stopped at Walgreens on the way there and bought a gift superset and a box of cologne for $15? No, just me? Okay, sorry. So it definitely is an issue of the heart. Primarily, the reason God asks us to give is because of the heart. God knows our human tendency towards idolizing things and becoming materialistic. The antidote to that in his wisdom is giving, it's generosity. The other part of it is tithing. Okay, so tithing is just one principle of giving. There's offerings, there's alms for the poor, there's all kinds of different aspects of giving. Tithing is a foundation, it's the baseline. God says, I want you to start here. I want you to honor me with the first tenth. This is not a suggestion, this is a principle. You find it in Genesis, you find it all the way through the scripture where God calls his people honor him with the first tenth. Is it on the gross or on the net? Let me ask you a question. Which one of those do you want blessed? Do you want God to bless your gross or do you want God to bless your net? So it's a rhetorical question because I know you all want it on the gross. But here's the reality. Here's why I think giving on the gross is significant spiritually. It's because if I give net, the first thing that I give to is the government. And after the government gets theirs, then I give to God. And I want God to have my first fruits. I want him to have the first tenth. And so I give on the gross because that is giving before the government gets their share. Now I'm fine with being a taxpayer. I don't want to pay exorbitant taxes but we're to pay taxes and we do that. But you know what? If I'm more committed to giving my taxes to the government than I am giving my tide to the Lord than I'm more tied to the things of this world than I am the things of the kingdom. And I want my heart to be tethered to the things of the kingdom. And so it's not a law. Again, listen, we're not under the law. I don't tithe because I want to maintain a relationship with God. Tithing is an overflow of my relationship with God because I'm recognizing my paycheck is not my provider. The government is not my provider. My hands aren't the things that prosper and provide for me. God is my provider. And I want his supernatural blessing on my finances so that I can be a blessing to the world around me. Does that make sense? All right, great question. Why have churches become so casual? Example, lights, entertaining, music, cafes, shops, et cetera. Is any of this for God has the world influenced Sunday morning services? Yeah, that's a great question. Thanks, Tasha. Well, you would be surprised that in every generation, the things that you think are traditional when they were introduced were not traditional. They were modern. For example, I've had people say, well, I don't like the music. It's not sacred, it's not reverent. I think we need a pipe organ. Well, do you know that when the pipe organ was introduced to the church, it was called the instrument of Satan? And people argued in the medieval period when they began to put pianos and organs into the church that it was instruments of Satan, it was hellish. Do you know that for a good portion of Catholic history, women were not allowed to be singers or canticles? It could only be young boy and boys' choirs. And it was because women weren't allowed to speak at church. At least that was their interpretation of it. So that was traditional. And now we have women singing in church. Do you know that hymns, many of the hymns that people think, well, those are holy songs. No, what a lot of leaders like John Wesley did was they took bar songs and they changed the words to scripture. So they were bar songs. So just imagine Bon Jovi living on a prayer, changing the words and singing those in church. That's in your hymn books. See, it's just been a couple hundred years. And now because we've done it for a couple hundred years, we tend to make traditions out of things and attach holiness to tradition. And Jesus said this to the Pharisees. He says, you make the word of God of no effect because of your traditions. Now there's nothing wrong with traditions until we worship them. So lights, the reason why we use lights is because if you look at the tabernacle in the Old Testament, remember Moses goes up on a mountain, God shows him his presence, says, here's the blueprint. I want you to make the tabernacle. Is going to be the place where I live and dwell among my people. It had three compartments. It had art and tapestries on the walls. It was coated in gold and silver. The priests garments had diamonds, rubies, sapphires, emeralds on them. They actually had lights. They were called lampstands. They had a smoke machine. It was called the altar of incense. They had bread and they had a baptismal or a a baptistry that was made out of bronze. It estimated to build Solomon's temple cost $14 billion in modern terminology. So before you get mad at me on our building programs, if I ever show up with a $14 billion one, now we're just getting biblical. Lights, smoke, shop, somebody asked me one time, why did Jesus turn over the tables in the temple if he, you know, because they were selling things in the temple and we shouldn't have a bookstore or a cafe. That is not apples and oranges. The reason why Jesus turned over the tables in the temple is because there were money changers. And money changers were this. Jesus's answer, and I think it's in Matthew or Mark 11, was he says, number one, they were set up in the outer courts which was the outer courts for the Gentiles. It was so lost people could come and worship God and they didn't have room because they'd set up tables. And the other reason why is in order for you to worship God in the Old Testament, you had to buy sacrifices in the temple. You had to buy pigeons. You had to buy different wheat offerings and different things. So what the religious leaders did was they set up their own currency and their own pigeons and said, no, to worship God, you have to buy our pigeons. And by the way, you can buy a pigeon out there and it's $14. You can buy a pigeon in here and it's $1,400. And you are poor and you want to worship God but the religious leaders were putting a barrier between you and your ability to worship God. And so they created money changing where you had to get their currency. They had 100% inflation on the currency. Jesus was not irritated that they were giving people resources to grow spiritually or selling coffee so that they were awake during worship. Jesus was irritated because the religious leaders were putting a blockade between the average person and Gentiles in the presence of God. Now, let me answer that question this way. The reason why we have lights and modern music and video is so that we do not create a barrier between people who have no idea about our religious traditions and have never sung our hymns and don't know the Bible and we live in a world where they need to grow and buy books and drink coffee. We want to actually draw people closer to the presence of God, not create barriers. It's completely opposite, it's not the same. So, there you go. How do we know that Christianity is the one true religion? That's a great question. Who wants to answer that? Anybody want to come up? How do we know that Christianity is the one true religion? Well, you and I are living in a time where we want everybody to be right. And so, we have major world religions. We have Islam, we have Christianity, we have Judaism, which are the big three, monotheistic religions. In addition to that, you have over a billion Hindus in India, in Asia, Buddhism, and various different animistic philosophies and Taoism and Confucianism, which is a philosophy that are all throughout the world. How do you know that Christianity is the one true religion? Well, let's start philosophically here. A lot of people make this assumption and you might even see the coexist bumper stickers where it's like all religions basically teach the same thing. Well, let me just answer that by saying absolutely, no they don't. All religions do not teach the same thing. There might be similar elements that are found across the board in faiths and philosophies, but not all religions on the major tenets of what we would call religious tenets, they do not teach the same things. Islam and Christianity do not teach the same things. For example, you will never find the term love of God in the Quran, it does not exist. Because they don't believe that God loves humanity and they don't believe you can have a personal relationship with Allah. They believe that Allah is the all sovereign creator and judge, but there's no way to have a relationship. Christianity teaches God is, where all other religions basically are systems, if you wanna have a picture of a ladder, where humanity, by their best efforts, build a ladder and make their way up to heaven in order to have a relationship or be right with God by their good efforts. It's man pursuing a right relationship with God. Christianity is unique in that it is a story about God who enters into his creation, experiences are suffering, climbs down his own ladder out of heaven in pursuit of us. And instead of us by our good merits, gaining a relationship with God through our best efforts, Christianity is all about God's finished efforts that make it possible for us to freely be restored back to him and it's all because of love. So how do you know that Christianity is the one true religion? Well, number one, somebody has to be wrong and somebody has to be right. If all religions don't teach the same thing, then obviously some are wrong and some are right. Hinduism, for example, teaches reincarnation and karma. And so when you go to India and you see a beggar on the road who comes up to your car and is missing an arm, odds are the family actually cut the arm off to make him a better beggar because in being a better beggar, he's actually paying his karma so that he comes back in the next existence on earth as a better, higher form. So think about that. So in India, there is no welfare. And the reason why is because if you give welfare or charity to the poor, you're actually hurting them in their process of reincarnation, not helping them. So that's the polar opposite of Christianity. Judaism is the foundation upon which Christianity was built on. So all religions don't teach the same thing. Number one, number two, somebody's gotta be right and somebody's gotta be wrong. How do you determine that? Well, if you're looking for empirical evidence, you're not gonna be able to scientifically prove in the laboratory Christianity versus other religions, but there's other forms of knowledge. And here's what I would say is I believe that the gospels specifically are the most reliable documents about the emergence of Christianity in Jesus. And the apex of the gospels talk about the claims of Christ who he claimed to be, he claimed to be God, he claimed to be man. He said that I'm gonna die for the sins of the world. And then the apex of it is he's validated that in the resurrection. Now I don't have enough time to go into it, but I think that there's abundant evidence that the resurrection truly took place. It's recorded in secular history and it actually has changed the course of history. The disciples were murdered for something that if they were purporting a lie would have backed down upon, but they didn't. They were willing to give their lives. And there's no other explanation for the proliferation of Christianity. Other interesting thing about Christianity versus other religions is all other religions become very static in their power centers. So like Hinduism is in India. Buddhism is in Asia. Taoism is in China and on and on and on. But Christianity has an ever expanding global influence. It started in Jerusalem. It then was shifted to Europe. Has been in the United States and the West. And now the majority of Christians globally are below the equator and east in the eastern hemisphere of the globe in Africa and in Asia. So it's not a cultural, it's not a culturally static power center. It's actually spread globally. And I think here's the reality. A lot of people say, well, I like Jesus, but I don't believe he was God. I like his principles, but I don't believe he rose from the dead. C.S. Lewis said this. If Jesus Christ did not rise from the dead, if he wasn't God, if all of the things that he claimed about himself are not true, then we should dispel and totally do away with everything that he taught because he was either a liar or he was a lunatic or we have to come to the conclusion that he was Lord, that there was something very unique about him, that he taught what he taught, backed it up with a sinless life that was recorded in the gospels, affirmed by secular history, and then a band of uneducated Galileans were willing to go to the grave, died to terrible deaths in the process of preaching this gospel in order to sustain the gospel message. And 2,000 years later, after having every attempt by the most powerful empires in the world to extinguish Christianity and the Bible off the face of the earth, it's actually the most influential. Jesus is the most influential character and Christianity is the most influential frame of reference in worldview that the world has ever seen and there's no natural explanation for it. Even Bart Ehrman, who is a New Testament scholar and an atheist has just released a new book called The Miracle of Christianity because there is no logical natural explanation for it except Jesus Christ was God, he died on the cross for the sins of the world, God raised him from the dead and it has forever changed human history and therefore Jesus is the way, the truth and the life. And I don't know of any other religion that has that much historical backup, a leader that has made that claim and has also that global influence like Christianity. So we're on firm footing that Jesus is Lord and Christianity is true. And of course, that's just a nugget. And these are awesome questions and we need to all be students of the word. Let's all stand up together if you would here and over at Portage as well. God wants us to be students of the word and God's not afraid of our questions. You might wonder, it's like, how do you learn this stuff? Well, you have to read, you have to go to the word, you've got to be a student of it and the reason why it's so important for us to be students of this is because there's nothing that matters as much as this and God's not intimidated by our questions. You have questions, God has answers. If you have philosophical questions, you will never hear me say, oh, just have blind faith. No, you need to have faith and you need to have blind faith relationally but intellectually God's not afraid of you digging deep. In fact, he's inviting you. God's not intimidated by your questions because God's got the answers and the answer may be, I don't know yet but at least we ask the questions. And I truly do believe, you might say, well, do you truly believe that there was a man named Jesus who was God, who was sent from heaven to the earth, who entered into history in our human suffering, died upon a Roman cross at the bequest of Jewish leaders and on the third day, literally, physically, rose again from the dead and that he ascended into heaven and he seated at the right hand of God. The Father, do you really believe he's coming back to make all things that are wrong right and establishes kingdom on earth? And here's my answer, I believe it to the bone. And not only do I believe it, but I believe it's the only answer for a broken and a fallen and a sinful world and broken and sinful human beings. Our God, our Creator has come to rescue us and if you don't know Jesus, if you've never had a personal encounter, God's not just calling you to be an intellectual, God's calling you to be a child of God because there's something spiritual that happens that when we surrender our life, our sin is stripped away, shame is taken away. You look the same on the outside, but God changes everything on the inside and gives you eternal life. You go from being dead to alive, you go from being a sinner to a saint, you go from being an exile to a child of God and the same God who created you before the foundations of the world had a plan and a purpose for your life. Today, wherever you're listening online at one of our campuses or you're here, let me just encourage you, if you've never surrendered your life to Jesus, do it and start the greatest adventure of your life. Let me pray for you. And now I'm gonna invite our campus pastors to come up and close the service. Lord, today would you meet us? Would you speak to our hearts? Would you stir a hunger for righteousness in your word on the inside of us? Lord, we don't wanna be red hot in our arrogance and our pride that we just know so much, but Lord, we wanna be red hot in our love and our pursuit after you, our first love. God, we wanna run to your word like a love letter from heaven. We wanna search out eternal truths and we wanna hear the still small voice of your Holy Spirit beckoning us to come and to draw close. Bless us, draw us, influence us to be light and salt in our culture and our generation. In Jesus' name, amen.