We Asked AI If It Would Convert to Christianity - April 5, 2026

Good morning. Happy Easter.

Welcome to Resurrection Church. My name is Daniel.

I'm the lead pastor here. The the people who built the

most powerful AI platforms in the world are by and large, not

Christians. Sam Altman, who's the CEO of

Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, has actually written

about his belief that eventually humanity will merge with AI.

It doesn't sound like he's talking about a new technology.

It sounds like he's talking about a new type of God.

One CEO of one of these companies actually talked about

creating God. Anthropics executives, the

company behind Claude, are all devout humanists.

Silicon Valley by and large is not trying to find God, they're

trying to build 1. And all of these founders have

secular world views and they've built AI platforms based on

their non Christian world views. And that's why if you ask

certain types of questions, you get very political answers.

Why am I telling you this? Someone asked the leading AI

platform a really interesting question.

They asked it this If you are human and you heard the gospel

and you read the Bible from cover to cover, would you

convert to Christianity? No leading, no prompting, no

agenda, No Fear of death, no peer pressure, no Sunday school

background, no skin in the game. A non Christian worldview.

Just consider the evidence. A system built by people trying

to replace God, trained on all of human knowledge.

Looked at the evidence and actually said yes I would

convert. Surprise surprise.

Now to be fair, it actually used a lot more words than that.

It was a 1400 word response and it gave five major reasons that

it would convert to Christianity.

So I'm summarizing now. I know a couple of you probably

came into Easter Sunday today and you heard me say AI and

you've already checked out. Stay with me, because this isn't

really about a computer. It's actually about what happens

when something with zero reason to believe evaluates the same

evidence that perhaps you've been running from.

It's the gap between knowing and kneeling.

You see, a machine concluded that it would convert, but it

can't convert because it has no will.

It has no capacity to surrender. It can only conclude, and that's

the gap between knowing something and surrendering.

And that's what we're going to talk about this morning.

If you get nothing else out of today, the big idea is the gap

between knowing and kneeling. Now, every Easter, I always want

to answer the same question for you, particularly if maybe

you're new or foreign to Christianity.

And the question is this, was it real?

It seems like an important question.

Yes. Was it real?

The apostle Paul thought this was an incredibly important the

question. He wrote about it in First

Corinthians 15. He says it this way.

He says, and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching

is in vain and your faith is in vain.

We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we

testified about God that He raised Christ, whom He did not

raise. If it is true that the dead are

not raised, because if the dead are not raised, not even Christ

has been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith

is futile and you are still in your sin, then those also who

have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.

If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all

people most to be pitied. What is He saying?

If Christ did not wake up from the dead, step out of that

grave, we should be pitied because our faith is useless.

And what I want you to see, and what Paul is saying, what the

Bible says, is that it's not asking you to take a blind leap

of faith in the dark. It says examine this.

And if it didn't happen, you walk away.

Because if you were to believe in something that was false, you

would be the most pitied people on earth.

So did Jesus die on that cross and then get up and walk away on

Sunday? Because if he did changes

everything. It's the question behind Easter,

not how good will the food be. Are the bounce houses aired up?

Are we going to have fun today finding eggs in the backyard?

Those are not the most important question.

The most important question, is this true?

Now here's what I want you to know before we we look at this

and before we go any further. The AI answer had five reasons

for its justification. But the interesting thing about

those five reasons is that they're not new reasons.

Men and women have wrestled with them for generations.

Sceptics have tried to dismantle them for over 2000 years.

Every serious person who has sat down with this question of is it

real? Believe it or not, has had to

reckon with the same 5 pressure points so so the AI didn't

discover anything, it just processed what was already there

and came to the same place that serious thinkers have been

arriving at for centuries. The evidence isn't hiding, it's

been sitting in plain sight for over 2000 years.

The other thing I want you to see today is that these

arguments have faces because real people have struggled over

these questions, these five major things, and it has

converted them. Here are the five things #1 the

story of the Bible #2 the coherence of the Bible #3 the

evidence of the resurrection #4 observed nature of humans, and

#5 the fruit of Christianity historically.

So today, for Easter, for just a moment, let's take a look at

these things, the story of the Bible.

Have any of any of y'all ever actually read the Bible cover to

cover? Anybody in here?

OK, if you've read the Bible cover to cover before, here's

you. You've probably already noticed

this. And if you haven't, I'm about to

inform you. It's really messy.

There are. There's a lot of evil in there,

a lot of mistakes and fallen heroes and moral failures.

It's just riddled with them. It's full of rebellion.

This book is nobody's wish fulfillment.

You've probably heard before that religion is just a crutch,

but to be honest with you, anybody that was fabricating A

comforting religion would not write this book.

It tells you that your heart is deceitful above all else.

It tells you that the path to salvation is narrow and few find

it. It tells you that if you're a

believer, you're probably going to suffer.

It tells you that the Son of God himself sweated blood in the

garden, begging for a different way and didn't get one.

Nobody invents that because it's not attractive.

In fact, when Jesus was explaining to his disciples what

it would look like to follow him and how difficult it would be,

they literally looked at one another and was like bro for

real not exactly like that. In in John 6 verse 60 he

John 6:60

explains what it looks like and and the disciples says.

When many of the disciples heard it, they said this is a hard

saying, who can listen to it? That's 1st century Aramaic for

bro. For real.

No one invents the story. It's not tidy enough.

It's not sexy enough. It's not attractive enough.

It's not comforting. There's a man named CS Lewis.

He was an Oxford professor. He's one of the sharpest

literary minds in the 20th century.

He's a committed atheist. He described himself as the most

reluctant convert in all of England.

He didn't walk into the faith, he was dragged into it.

He said he came to Christianity not because it felt good, but

because he kept running out of objections.

He spent years trying to punch holes in it, and he couldn't.

He didn't find Christianity comforting.

He found it unavoidable. If this book were invented to

make people feel better about themselves, Lewis would have

found it. He tried, and yet he converted,

wrote one of the most impactful books in all of Christianity.

The coherence of the Bible. You know, the Bible was written

across 1500 years, dozens of authors, 3 different languages,

multiple continents, and yet somehow there's one story arc

across the entire thing. You can't plan that.

The Passover lamb, the bronze serpent, these symbolics,

symbolic links hundreds of years apart, all pointing in the same

direction. Isaiah 53, written 700 years

before the cross, somehow describing the crucifixion with

surgical precision. These aren't vague Nostradamus

like predictions. They're specific, falsifiable,

and they've been confirmed. Imagine someone describing that

the twin towers were going to be destroyed by planes flying into

it. Except they prophesied that in

the 1300s Impossible. Impossible.

Listen to this little excerpt from Isaiah 53 about Jesus. 700

years before the cross. He was despised and rejected by

men. A man of sorrows, and acquainted

with grief, and as one from whom men hid their hide, their faces,

He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.

Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we

esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.

But he was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed

for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement

that brought us peace, and with His wounds we are healed.

All we, like sheep, have gone astray.

We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid

on him the iniquity of us all. That's not a coincidence.

Jesus alone fulfills over 300 prophecies.

There are 48 explicit prophecies about Christ that we can match

detail for detail from hundreds of years before.

Those are impossible odds. They're so impossible that a man

named Frank Morrison, who was an English lawyer, a skeptic, A

rationalist, a man who loved science and admired Darwin, he

set out to write a short paper called Jesus the Last Phase.

His goal was to legally and historically disprove the

resurrection and specifically to dismantle the prophetic claims

that he said they were too convenient to be real.

So he applied a lawyer's eye to the evidence, and he expected to

close his case quickly. His investigation led him

somewhere he didn't expect. He scrapped the paper and

instead wrote a book called Who Moved the Stone?

One of the most compelling historical defenses of the

resurrection ever written. The man who went in to disprove

the prophecies came out defending the resurrection.

How about the resurrection that Paul says?

Everything hinges on the evidence for the resurrection.

The apostle Paul in First Corinthians 15 that we read

earlier said all of Christianity stands or falls on the

resurrection. The creed that was developed for

First Corinthians 15 that we see when we read it, actually came

about about three to five years within the resurrection.

That means there were still people alive who could have

disproved it. There could have still been

contradictions and people who would have pushed back against

this if it were not real. The disciples who ultimately

died for this claim did not die for a belief.

They died for a claim about something they said they had

personally witnessed with their own eyes.

People will die for things they believe to be true, but nobody

dies to protect a lie they invented.

Listen to the apostle Paul explain this in First

1 Corinthians 15:3

Corinthians 15 verse 3. For I delivered to you as the

first importance what I also received, that Christ died for

our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried,

that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the

Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas.

That's Peter. Then to the 12.

Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most

of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.

Then he appeared to James that was Jesus half brother who

didn't believe he was the son of God when he was alive.

Somehow he believes now. Then to all the apostles and

last of all as to 1 untimely born, he appeared also to me.

What's Paul saying? You don't believe me?

Go check. There's 500 witnesses, go ask

them. Don't take my word for it.

Most of them are still alive. Go look at the evidence.

There's a man named Lee Strobel. He was the legal affairs editor

at the Chicago Tribune. He was Yale Law trained,

committed atheist. And then his wife became

Christian and he did not take it well.

So he launched A2 year investigation not to find God,

but to rescue his wife from what he assumed was a cult.

He applied his journalistic and legal training to the

resurrection case. He interviewed historians,

scholars, archaeologists, medical experts.

He analyzed the evidence the same way he would build a legal

case. And he came to 1 conclusion.

It would take more faith to stay an atheist than to believe.

And he wrote a book about it. It's called The Case for Christ.

The man who went in to destroy the case for the resurrection

built the strongest version of it instead. 4th what we see

about human nature. I want to Why don't you take a

step back and think about this for just a minute.

Everything you you, you've seen in your life about human nature.

You see, the Bible's description of human nature is the most

accurate one on the table. And let me explain what that

means. And I want you to think about

what you know about humanity for a minute.

We launch ships into the stars. We write symphonies.

We run into burning buildings to rescue strangers.

We are capable of breathtaking love and sacrifice and

ingenuity. And in the same century we

invented the Holocaust and murdered millions.

We are simultaneously the most magnificent and the most

horrifying creature on the planet.

Only Christianity looks at both sides of what we actually

observe and says both of those things are true at the same

time. And here's why.

I am a glorious ruin made in the image of God.

That's the glory. Fallen, broken, catastrophically

selfish. That's the ruin.

And I cannot fix myself. That matches what we observe

about humans more precisely than any other scientist or religion

has ever offered. Consider that the Bible would

say both of these things in Genesis 127.

So God created man in his own image.

In the image of God. He created him, male and female.

He created them. Glorify beautiful Romans 323 For

all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, made in the

image of the Creator, lost and cursed in rebellion to him.

Both are true. That's you and that's me, and

that's everyone in this room. Francis Collins was the director

of the Human Genome Project, the man who led the effort to map

and sequence human DNA. He's one of the most decorated

scientists in the world and a committed atheist, and he

decided at some point that intellectual honesty required

him to actually study the best arguments for the faith before

dismissing them. What broke him open wasn't

cosmology or biology. It was moral law.

This universal human sense, that of right and wrong, that shows

up in every culture across every century, defies evolutionary

explanation, and that points to something written into us from

outside of us. He later said that moral law was

the strongest signpost of God he ever encountered.

The man who mapped the human genome concluded that the most

remarkable thing he found wasn't in our DNA at all, and he wrote

a book about it called The Language of God.

And 5th, The Fruit of Christianity.

Historically, maybe some of you are familiar with William

Wilberforce. He abolished slavery in England.

He did so on Christian conviction against enormous

economic interest against the most powerful empire in the

world at the time. It was Christians that built the

1st hospital system. Before Christianity, if you were

sick and poor, you died alone. Christians ran toward plague

victims when everyone else ran in the other direction.

Universities like Yale, Harvard, Oxford all started to train

ministers. The abolitionist movement, the

civil rights movement, the Underground Railroad, driven by

people who believe that every human being bore the image of

God and therefore mattered. The greatest social movements in

our history are from Christianity.

We should judge a tree by what it grows when people actually

follow it. It's actually a biblical concept

that Jesus says in Matthew 7. He says you will recognize them

by their fruit. Are grapes gathered from thorn

bushes or figs from thistles. So every healthy tree bears good

fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.

A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree

bear good fruit. This is what Christianity has

produced. Now some of you may rightly be

thinking, what about the atrocities?

What about the Crusades or the Inquisition?

I'm not dismissing that. But people acting against

Christ's teaching is not an indictment of Christ's teaching.

Judge a tree by what grows when people actually follow it, not

when they betray it. The Crusades were Christians

acting against everything Jesus said.

The hospitals, the abolitionist movement were Christians acting

according to it. It's a man named Peter Hitchens

burned his Bible at 15 years of age in the schoolyard, A

deliberate and ceremonial act of rejection.

He became a Russian revolutionary.

He's the brother of Christopher Hitchens, probably the most

famous atheist of the last generation, the author of a book

called God is Not Great. Two brothers, same upbringing,

same rebellion. Peter spent years as a foreign

correspondent inside the Soviet Union.

He watched from the inside what a civilization built without God

produces. He watched the moral collapse.

He watched the institutionalized cruelty.

He watched the way a society behaves when there's no

transcendent value anchoring human dignity.

And what he saw there didn't just change his politics, it

sent him home. The man who burned his Bible at

15 came back after watching what the world looks like without

one. He wrote a book about it later

called The Rage Against God. How Atheism Led me to Faith.

We judge trees by their fruit. 5 unavoidable arguments and five

notable atheists with stories about wrestling with these same

things. Now, that's not to say there

aren't reasons to struggle. The problem of suffering is

real. The exclusivity claim of

Christianity is hard. No worldview resolves every

difficulty. The question is whether

Christianity answers the most important ones like who am I,

what's wrong with me, and what's been done about it more honestly

than anything else. I think the biggest question of

the day is not whether or not it's real.

It has nothing to do with the evidence that I just gave you

because all of these men, these notable scholars who all

converted, I don't think that your problem is an evidence

problem. Even the leading AI platform in

the world created by unbelievers evaluated the evidence and

conclude concluded it would convert to following Jesus

Christ, but it didn't convert. It can't.

It's not human. It can only conclude.

And you see a lot of you people here today or listening online,

I think you're in the same position.

You've heard the evidence, you might even believe it, but you

haven't moved, you haven't surrendered.

See, the Bible actually says that this is the real problem.

It's not a lack of evidence in Romans one.

The Bible states it this way. For the wrath of God is revealed

from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness

of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the

truth. For what can be known about God

is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.

For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and His

divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the

creation of the world. What is he saying?

Look around at what has been created and know there is a God,

because in the things that have been made we are without excuse.

The problem isn't that people can't see it.

The problem is that people suppress it.

That's what the Bible says. It's not a knowledge problem,

it's a surrender problem. Here's what I will tell you

after years of doing this. Evidence can get you to the edge

of the water, but only the Spirit of God can make you jump

in. So we've been praying all

morning for you to jump in. I know because this is exactly

where I found myself in college. I knew God was real, I just

didn't want to surrender. I knew it so well that in the

middle of my rebellion, drinking and partying and chasing a

horrible lifestyle, I actually LED my boss to Christ on the

floor of a warehouse office one night after work drinking beer.

Yes, the Holy Spirit works on dirty warehouse floors just like

He works in dirty centers like me.

I had not even surrendered, but I knew enough that God would use

me to reach someone else for Christ.

His name is Scott Desheno. He messaged me this week on

Facebook. He said, man, thank you so much.

I said, bro, I was a flaming wreck.

And you know what he said? So was I.

But I'm not anymore. The most important question on

Easter Sunday is not did it happen, it's what will you do

with the fact that it did? I still remember the day I

surrendered. Is today your day because I want

you to meet Him. Jesus died for your sin.

He walked out of a tomb. He is alive and he is offering

you something that no one else can not self improvement.

Not a moral upgrade, but a rescue.

Every other religious system gives you a ladder to climb.

Only Christianity lowered the ladder to the floor.

So here's the invitation. Repent and believe not, not

perform and earn. Now there's another group of

people here today and, and, and online and you, you surrendered

your life to Jesus at some point and then you messed up and you

failed and you ran away, just like we heard Peter do last

week. Peter failed Jesus

spectacularly, denied him three times, and what did he do?

He he went back to fishing. He went back to his old life.

He went back to what he knew before Jesus.

Jesus doesn't write him a a letter.

I can't believe you Peter. What a jerk.

He didn't wait for Peter to clean himself up and come

crawling back. He showed up at the beach that

Peter was at and he made him breakfast.

He found him in his old life. Fire was already lit.

The fish were already laid out and those of you that know

Christ and have run from Him, this is for you.

Jesus is not waiting for you to find your way back.

He is already at the beach. So maybe today is the day for

you to turn back to your Savior who's sitting on the beach

waiting for you to realize that His invitation to you has never

left because He loves you. Come back.

Before you leave the building today, make a choice to come

back and tell somebody about it. Come back.

I'm going to give you an opportunity today, if that's

you, to make a declaration in your heart and publicly to turn

back to Christ, to rededicate your life to Him.

I told you earlier that the big idea was the gap between knowing

and kneeling. And so there are a few of you in

here today and watching online who have never surrendered your

life to Christ. You know all of the evidence.

That's not the problem. The question is whether or not

you will kneel. So I want to offer you the

chance to do that today, the same invitation that Christ

extends to you. Will you all bow your heads and

close your eyes for a brief moment if you are ready to

surrender your life to Christ, not merely to intellectually

acknowledge that He exists, but to give over your will and life

to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords?

I want to give you that chance. Will you repeat this prayer

after me? Jesus, I know I'm a Sinner who

can't save myself. I need you to save me.

So I surrender everything to you.

I repent and believe. Be my Lord.

Please Jesus, if you've just made a decision to surrender

your life to Christ for the very first time, will you be brave

and raise your hand for me to see?

Thank you, thank you, thank you. You could put your hands down.

Thank you. If today is a day that you know

you should turn back to Christ because he is chasing you

relentlessly and you've been running, I've got good news and

bad news. He's got long legs and He loves

you. If today you would like to

rededicate your life to pursuing Jesus King, will you raise your

hand for me to see? Thank you, thank you, thank you,

thank you, thank you. You could put your hands down in

Jesus name, Amen. All right, real quick, if you

just made a decision to surrender to Christ for the very

first time, welcome to the family.

If you have already signed up to be baptized, I want you to get

up and head toward that door with the very happy, beautiful

people waving at you. There he is.

If you have given your life to Christ and you have not been

baptized, this is the public profession of an inward

decision. Even if that was just moments

ago and you want to be baptized. We have towels and we have extra

clothes and the water is warm. It's oildale water, but it's

still warm. All you need to do is get up and

walk right over there. Will you stand with us?

If you just chose to surrender your life to Christ for the

first time, there are tables in the back.

It says I raised my hand. We would love to celebrate with

you and we start singing. I want you to go back there.

We have a gift for you and we're excited for you.

If you just rededicated your life to the Lord, our prayer

team is going to be up here. We love praying with you for any

reason you bring your prayer requests.

We would love to pray over you. If you made a decision to

rededicate your life, we'd love to pray over you as well and

celebrate with you. You come as the Lord leads you.

I'm going to sing this song together.