Rice Broocks | First Conference 2018

Could we pray as we start?

Father in heaven, thank you that you are the God of the universe, that you became a man in Christ, and you lived the life we should have lived.

You died the death we should have died in our place.

Three days later you rose from the dead, proving you're the Son of God, and offering salvation and forgiveness of sins to everyone who repents, who turns to you, and believes.

We believe that is the gospel.

That you have entrusted us to steward that.

And so we at the outset of this year we do what you told us to do.

We beseech and entreat the Lord of the harvest to send out workers into your harvest.

We thank you that every one of us is responsible as we have said yes to you to be saved and to be transformed individually.

We have automatically committed to share that with others.

Help us to do it in a way that brings honor to you, that brings glory to you, that produces the least amount of stumbling blocks so that others may receive and have a fair hearing.

Lord, it is their right to know.

Because your gospel is the cure for injustice.

And we thank you in Jesus' name.

Amen.

Well, usually when I stand up and people see my name Rice, they they kind of wait for me to do the explaining, like um, what is this all about?

And um actually it's uh in Texas here, there's a university that my great-granduncle, you know, that that was always told me, Oh, your name is a great name.

Your great-grandcal, he founded Rice University, but that helps you not help you when you're getting teased.

Uh, I was I was Pastor Jack, we were talking about basketball, and he was kind of talking about the things he could do in basketball, and I was a little hesitant to tell him that when I played basketball in high school, I was the guy on the end of the bench that got in at the last moment and got to play about a minute, so yeah, they call me Minute Rice.

I was that guy.

So not a I kind of was I was wanting to kind of pretend there was a lot more there, but anyway, it wasn't wasn't happening.

But um grew up here in Texas.

Dad was in the oil business, uh was the head of exploration for an oil company called Sonoco and traveled all over the world drilling oil wells in the Sahara Desert.

We grew up in church, but uh it didn't stick.

And for me, I didn't understand it.

Uh I basically grew up to ignore it.

My older brother uh took a different turn and became, in terms of the Christian God, an atheist.

Uh he his hobby was actually harassing Christians.

If you were a Christian, he would try to basically get you unbaptized, so to speak.

And um, so growing up, and finally I get to Mississippi State University, and and someone in my income tax class, I was an accounting major, began to talk to me, and I began to look at their life and listen to them.

And as my in my third year at university, there was really a confrontation with the real Jesus.

And uh the problem is I had to go home and then tell what had happened.

And so my father was uh a little annoyed because he just figured that I remember I told him I was born again.

He said, Well, did your grades get born again?

Um so he wasn't interested in any kind of like inner thing going on.

It was like, what's you know, tell me what's happening here with this money I'm paying.

But when my brother found out about this, then he determined that he was going to get me out of this.

In fact, he told one of his suite mates at SMU Law School he'd gone and had a gotten a master's degree in psychology or counseling in psychology at Trinity, and then what was it at the top of his class at SMU Law School this third year?

And he came home one weekend.

My parents were hoping he would kind of calm me down.

It's like, you know, we don't we don't want him to be a skeptic, but he just needs to kind of calm down.

So my parents left.

My brother came home, and he had uh he began studying the Bible to find the contradictions in it.

I love those when I talk to people like that, especially on campus, if pretend this is the Bible, then they'll say, they'll say, Well, the Bible has so many contradictions, and I'll say, I'll usually have one close by.

I say, good, uh, let's talk about it.

Show me one.

They and they back away, they've never really been that close.

And uh they'll say, There's just so many.

Then I'll say, Good, it ought to be easy to find one.

And then when that I realize that that's just kind of a little bit of a smoke and mirror, then I'll agree with them.

I say, Yeah, the Bible does have a lot of contradictions.

I'll agree.

It contradicts most of what you do.

And so I can understand why you don't like it.

I remember one time I uh one of the reasons I know that the Bible was not a book that man wrote about God, but God inspired about us, is because if we would have written it, we would have made ourselves look a lot better.

Uh I remember the first time I looked into my mother's makeup mirror.

She had this mirror with two sides to it.

One side was normal, uh, you know it, and the other side is magnified with lights around it.

And I remember the first time I turned that mirror over and looked into that magnified mirror with lights and understood at that moment why women wear makeup.

Because I wanted to put some on.

You know, I one of the um one of the things I worked, my brother and I worked in this bar in San Antonio, and one of the favorite things I got to do is turn the lights on at closing time.

Two o'clock in the morning, last call, turn the lights on, and I got to watch people that had met one another in the dark.

I got to watch them realize who they just gave their phone number to.

You see, light is not necessarily what most people want.

We want to live in the darkness.

And so as soon as you get close to Scripture, something begins to happen.

You're either going to run to it and embrace it, or do as Romans chapter 1 says, to suppress the truth.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

This is what my brother was doing.

It's like trying to hold a beach ball under the water.

And the more you push down on it, the more force exerts the other way.

And Romans chapter 1 says that it says that people suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

Romans 1 · chapter mention

It's not that they don't believe necessarily, it's they do not want to believe.

So, anyways, my brother began to talk about the in fact, he began to go through and tell me some of the problems in the Bible.

Um I basically said this to him, and I say this because this whole thing is about empowering you to have the kind of conversations that are going to come up.

Um it's not necessarily going on a mission trip or going to the you know to the street corners and doing that form of evangelism, which is very valid, but this is the kind of evangelism that all of us at some point or another are going to be face to face with someone who we either care about or seems to be after our own faith, and we're gonna have to give an answer, as 1 Peter says, give an answer for the hope that's within us, yet with gentleness and respect.

And as my brother began to talk, I literally, it wasn't that I had all of the cute little quips and responses and little clever comebacks.

Uh, I just basically pulled the thread that I sensed was loose on his worldview.

And when I did that, it just began to unravel.

And I said something like this Ben, it's not what you don't know about God that's bothering you, it's what you do know.

You see, there's something within side all of us that we have.

God has put his image within us, and with it within every human being, which is why we give every human being and treat them with gentleness and respect, regardless of what their beliefs are, yet there's something about that that is a residue of the image of God within them.

And so as I began to do that, um, well, long story short, the weekend that my brother came home to talk me out of my faith, we got in my truck, we drove around Dallas or we found a swimming pool and we baptized him.

And when he came up out of the water, he said, Uh, you really haven't answered my questions.

He said, But I think I was asking the wrong questions.

He said, But don't tell daddy, do not tell daddy.

We used to have these family discussions, and not long after that, we were having a family meal, and the subject about God came up, and you know, I began to talk, and my brother was conspicuously silent.

And um, so finally my dad kind of looked at my looked at looked at me, looked at my brother, he said, Well, what do you think about what he's saying?

And my brother's moment of truth came.

He kind of put his fork down, he goes, uh, hallelujah.

And you know, my uh, it wasn't long after that that my mom came home, and my dad was, my dad, you know, living all over the, he'd had this uh pretty expansive, extensive lit liquor collection.

So he was taking it down and putting it away, and my mama said, Are we, mother said, Are we moving?

And uh my dad said this, he said, All my life I prayed that God would show me a miracle.

And he said, I never thought it would happen.

He said, I've had every promotion I could ask for.

He said, I've even been a member of a church, but I've never been a Christian.

And he said, I once asked God to show me a miracle, and I thought it wouldn't happen.

He said, But I think he showed me a miracle in the form of my two sons.

And he said, Last night I got down on my knees, 57 years old, and I asked Jesus Christ to forgive me for my pride and my arrogance.

And so God changed my whole family.

My big brother is an attorney in Austin.

Here he is.

Wave your hand, Ben.

There he is right there.

My dad, my dad went on at 57, he ended up becoming in the Presbyterian world what's called the clerk of the session at Highland Park Church in uh in Highland Park here.

So a tremendous legacy.

He just went home to be with the Lord uh just a few weeks ago.

So tremendous home going.

But I saw the Lord change in my family, and that puts something within, even though I had graduated uh as an accounting major, I wanted to see this change that happened uh in my family happen other places.

So I, in fact, I was, I can say this in this kind of a church, but I was before I get into some of the more things that might seem to be more, you know, intellectual or academic in terms of defending the faith, I was literally out on a basketball court, you know, remember a minute, Rice, so I'd never give up.

I was out on a basketball court uh waiting to get in this game, and there was a uh one of the middle, it's a middle linebacker from Mississippi State named Curtis Curtis Stowers.

He was going up and down the court, and as I'm watching this big man going up and down the court, and this time in Mississippi was not very segregated, very just a subtle tension all the time.

And the Holy Spirit, if something inside of me said, He's been praying for somebody to talk to him about me.

Go tell him you're the answer to his prayer.

So I'm just wanting to get in, you know, you know, in the intermiral, you're just trying to wait to get into the next game.

That's all I was doing.

So finally I just basically went up to him and said, Look, hope you don't think I'm crazy, but I think God told me to tell you that you've been praying for somebody to talk to you about him.

It's me.

I'm the answer to your prayer.

He looked at me, he said, Well, you look like the kind of angel I'd get.

No, no, that's a wonderful life.

That's wonderful life.

No, he said, he said, I just prayed that.

So within a few days, he was baptized, seven other teammates were baptized.

Um I remember the head coach Emory Ballard, who was one of the founders of the wishbone, he kind of created the wishbone.

He called me and said, What's happening to my team?

Because there was a revival.

Now he didn't get mad after they beat Alabama that year in Bear Bryant because something very positive was happening.

But that went from Mississippi State to Alabama to LSU, and now we're on campuses uh in, like Pastor Robert said, in 70 countries.

So praise God.

Just a simple little beginning.

You just in fact I could stop and say that.

There is the subtleties of saying something that the Holy Spirit gives you that don't have to be dramatic.

You don't have to, you know, we don't have to put on affectation uh to try to deliver something.

Sometimes it's just very normal in a course of conversation.

I kind of do the Columbo method.

Look, I don't know if I'm wrong or right.

Remember the old detective, you know, might be wrong, but could this be?

You just, we don't have to, if the Holy Spirit is speaking to people, then it's gonna make an impact beyond what we can do with our own energy.

So as Pastor Robert mentioned, going around the world and seeing things happen in Africa, we have, you know, churches in Cape Town, London, different places, and again targeting university students, but I began to notice something back here in our own country.

In fact, I got talked, I shouldn't say talked into, that's terrible.

This is being recorded.

I got encouraged to get into a doctoral research program at Fuller Seminary.

I'd gone to Reform Theological Seminary as my master's uh degree, but I got into this doctoral program and really began to focus on, with seven other people from other denominations, to focus on the condition of the North American church.

How are we doing?

In Tennessee, I was sitting at a football game one day, and the people were at a high school football game, and people kept staring at the at the at the scoreboard, and the score, I think it's broken.

And yet they still stared at it even though there was nothing given back to them.

It was just a habit of looking.

So at some point, the question is, how are we doing in terms of the North American church collectively?

You know, if you're on the Titanic and the Titanic is going down like this, and I mean, even if you're doing good, let's say you had a restaurant at the top of the Titanic and everybody's coming to your restaurant, if you don't understand perspective, you would have a probably a wrong view of your situation.

So there's something happening collectively to us, and what I found was disturbing.

Number one, about 80%, according to Tom Raynor, I got this from him from Lifeway, 80% of churches in America are plateaued or declining.

Uh but only 3% actually grow through evangelism.

So this was the number one disturbing thing that came to me.

Was it why is it that so few churches actually grow through evangelism?

The second statistic that troubled me, which is even more so, was seven out of ten young people will leave high school, and when they get to college, they will lose their faith.

Some have even gone as high as eight to nine out of ten.

I think that's not founded, and this is not scientific surveys, this is just the estimates that are going on about what's going on.

So think about it.

Somebody leaving high school, going to college, they can have a great youth group, they can have a great church, but when they hit the atmosphere of an intellectual uh that that that cold wind of skepticism, all of the great things they had and emotional things that happened to them can dissipate.

I mean, Peter was on the Mount of Transfiguration.

If you want to talk about a conference, you want to talk about the conference, who's who was the speakers at this conference on the Mount of Transfiguration?

You know, he had, of course, Jesus, Moses, Elijah, the Spirit, and then the Father himself, a cameo.

I mean, that is the big five.

And yet Peter goes, you'd you would think that after having been in that atmosphere, that he would never be able to doubt again.

But yet he went down and when he faced adverse circumstances, something happened.

I mean, Lucifer, if anybody, if the presence of God was all we needed and we loved the presence of God, how could somebody in the presence of God that close, yet those arguments or that bitterness or whatever penetrated that got into his mindset, if you will, that caused him to not only him but a third of the angels.

That that is troubling.

So we have to have the word and we have to have the spirit and the word.

We have to have truth.

And so I began to write down the evidence for that just to kind of put it and codify it and put it in so I was writing this book called God's Not Dead.

And I had some friends that had a song like that.

I said, Look, okay, I said, we got to get people to not just sing a song.

And so I wrote a little speech that they, the newsboys would recite at their concert, the piano player would before they'd sing the song.

And then literally I'm in the car one day with a friend, and uh I told him, I said, I'm writing this book called God's Not Dead.

He said, That needs to be a movie.

So he brought the screenwriters to me and met at UCLA and then the Mel's Diners there at Mel's Diner, you know, Mel's Diner.

And uh I began to describe these stories just like this to them.

And then here comes this movie, and I kind of thought my kids would say, Oh, dad, it's gonna be terrible.

That's Christian movies are terrible, you know.

My kids were saying, Don't tell anybody till after it comes out.

So, but it's gone around the world.

I was I I feel a little bit like Forrest Gump.

I was it, I was invited to the Vatican again.

Uh I was there twice, you know, screening the movie, meet the poe, give them.

I'm that's pretty good for Presbyterian boy, anyway.

But now there's been a second one, which the first one dealt with the existence of God, the second movie was all about the historical Jesus, and now this third one is about um really about truth.

And that's really the most important thing today.

I mean, 2016 Oxford Dictionary said their word of the year was post-truth, which means that we have given up on having any sense of there is an objective reality.

But yet we're all skeptical in many ways.

I mean, I was on an airplane one time with a woman who was reading a Bible, and she had, I hope I don't offend anybody, what I would call a beehive hairdo.

Now, Tennessee, where I where I'm from, the higher the hair, the closer to God.

So I'm she's reading a Bible, so I just thought I'd give her a little greeting.

I just thought I'd give her a little Christian, you know, hallelujah.

You know, we like to smack a lot, so I just kind of did that kind of a little.

I said, So you're a Christian.

She snapped her head at me.

She says, No, I believe I am God.

Now to show you how bold I am, I looked at her and I said, Don't let me bother you.

And a few minutes later, it was like the Lord was saying to me, You're the only one crazy enough to talk to this weird elf.

I said, If you're God, I've got a lot of questions for you.

And so you wouldn't be surprised, or at Berkeley, California, where in one day at Berkeley on Sprout Plaza, where a lot of the protests are that were the main student walkway, I met a man who said he was Moses, and then I went down the walkway and met another man that said he was Jesus.

And I'm thinking, this is this hasn't happened since the Matter Transfiguration.

This is historic.

But we all begin to have to falsify or judge or be skeptics when it comes to that.

And so the goal of what we're going to do over the next year is I came and spent time with your pastor, and he's an evangelist.

He wants to see you empowered.

It's not just what we do on the platform, but it's what you do wherever God has called you to be and having those conversations.

And so that's what this is all about.

So when I was writing the book of God, and I did this was the thank you, Andy.

Let's give Andy the hey.

Andy, Andy, stay close, stay close.

Uh this was the Global Atheist Convention in Melbourne, Australia.

This was the largest indoor gathering of atheists in history.

Now you can compare that to this auditorium.

Y'all are doing pretty good compared to this.

Uh, but I wanted this had the leading voices of the atheist movement: Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss, Sam Harris.

These are the people that are uh that are aggressively coming after you and your children.

No holes barred.

I was actually in the back.

Uh this was kind of cool.

I got to be the creeper at the atheist convention.

Uh so, and I know I was probably the only believer there because the opening night were four professional comedians.

And all they did, of course, they talk about religion generically, but when I listened to them, I realized you don't really know the difference between a suicide bomber and a Sunday school teacher.

It's just all religion.

But obviously, Christianity was their the focus of their disdain and their ridicule.

Dawkins would say this: mock them, ridicule them in public.

Don't fall for the convention that we're far too polite to talk about religion.

Religion is not off the table, religion is not off limits.

One of the main speakers there the final night was Lawrence Krauss, who's a physicist from Arizona State.

He wrote a book called The Universe from Nothing.

And here was his, oh, I don't think I put it here, but his his uh his quote was I'm here to tell you that you're far more insignificant than you imagine.

We constitute about 1% of a bit of pollution.

We're completely irrelevant in the universe.

I'm thinking, I'm not, I don't, we don't, we don't need you giving the pregame speech at any Super Bowl here.

But see, this is the this is the fallout of what skepticism produces.

And if if this hasn't touched you, if you say, well, I don't need anybody to go through this evidence for God, I don't need this, I'm fine.

Yet if skepticism touches someone you love, or you or you are like someone who goes to, let's say, University of North Carolina, where Bart Ehrman, who went to Moody Bible College, where Moody, where Bible is our middle.

And then went to Wheaton, where Billy Graham went.

And then he went to Princeton.

And he studied under Bruce Metzger, one of the foremost Bible scholars of the day, and lost his faith.

And now he is a New York Times bestseller, ridiculing the New Testament, saying it's not, it's not certainly inspired.

And I've I've been in the very room he teaches at Hamilton 100 there at the University of North Carolina.

And I've been in the same room following his uh class to do our events like this.

And it's not uncommon for somebody to go to North Carolina, let's say, and within a few weeks of attending, call back home and say, Dad, I don't believe in God anymore.

And that's that's far too common to be content with that or to say, well, that's just the way things go.

One of the things they kept saying is, there's no evidence for God.

There's no evidence for God.

In fact, when you um when you think about it, when you think about evidence, it's a little bit, this is kind of this is a hair trigger here.

I'm I'm figuring it out.

Uh when somebody says, and this is the standard political line from a skeptic, well, there's just no evidence for God.

Bertrand Russell, the famous skeptic, oh, there's just no evidence.

And then you'll look at him and say, okay, I got it.

That's your that's your line.

So what kind of evidence would you accept?

And hadn't really thought about it.

And then you have to say, well, look, if you're if you were looking, if you were looking for Steve Jobs, you wouldn't find him by breaking down an iPhone.

He's not in there.

So you have to understand what evidence looks like.

We're actually looking for the evidence of intelligence.

Is there an intelligent mind behind the universe?

Um I read, and I'm I'm a little nervous to do this because I'm not sure in the sake of time, Einstein said the most incomprehensible thing about the universe is that it's comprehensible.

Why should the universe be so rationally ordered?

Uh this is I read this last year.

This was stunning to me, 2016.

0.0% of Icelanders 25 years or younger believe God created the world.

Now I I actually read the Washington Post, they had a this was a poll that was taken, and um, but the skepticism of Europe is coming this way like a bad storm.

And so it was kind of cool because I called my publisher Thomas Nelson and I said, I want to get my book in Icelandic.

And they said, We've only had one book ever published in that language.

So they emailed the guy who who translated this one book they had published, and within about a day, I was in on the email chain.

So I just jumped in there.

I said, Hey, I'd like to talk to you.

And he says, Well, I'm actually here in America on vacation.

So within a week, he was in my home.

Um, the book is translated, and so just in November, we just did two nights at the University of Iceland there in Reykjavik, and I'm here to tell you that this is no longer true.

Okay?

So in fact, in the training sessions, we we've we we document all this in the training sessions.

Uh a young atheist, a geneticist, uh, he's actually graduated college, but he's working in genetics, he wrote a comment card and we have him on camera saying this on the comment card, he says, Thank you for bringing the evidence.

And here's what he said.

He said, The kindest thing a believer could do for an unbeliever is to save their soul.

And then he left a phone number, marked atheist.

So I got him on camera going on about this.

He said, if I believed what you believed, I would do everything in my power to make sure everybody knew.

And I could just sit there and I'm stunned to say this man understands.

Pen Gillette, a very famous skeptic, is the same way.

He said, I don't mind people trying to convert me.

He said, if I believed what you believed and did not do everything within my power to not just be exuberant, but actually to study.

To actually to learn, to think, to study.

I mean, you see people in sports studying the game films and trying to figure out where's the crack, where's the open door.

That's how vigilant we have to be.

And that's why I say to my, I have five kids and I and we homeschooled, and I say to my teenagers, you know, hey, this may be over your head, but it's not out of your reach.

So we just have to want it.

You know, we don't, we just can't say, oh, I can't, you know, get up, honey, would you cut the light out?

You're closer.

No, we have to literally get up and exert a little effort.

So you've done that by being here tonight.

Let me walk through a little bit of what I said in a in miniature in Iceland.

And I'm looking at at the clock and I'm I've taken way too much time.

I have a long introduction more than the message.

The Bible says that the invisible attributes of God are clearly seen through what is made.

Now think about this.

The scripture itself says that if you just study creation, if you don't have a Bible, then that the attributes and nature of God.

So when I talk, when someone says, if this was a room full of skeptics and you're you don't have a subjective experience of the Lord changing your life, and you're saying, Look, I don't have any of this, what reasons do you have to believe God exists?

The first thing I say and I said a nice one was there was a beginning.

Now that sounds like, oh, sure, great, the big deal.

Well, Einstein thought the universe was eternal.

From Aristotle to Einstein, they thought the universe was just there.

And so the very term Big Bang was a derogatory term coined by an atheist named Fred Hoyle because he said, if you start saying the universe had a beginning, then you're letting the divine foot in the door.

Now here's what's baffling: that at the beginning of the universe, space and time came into existence.

It wasn't just empty space and some matter and energy blew in there.

Literally, space and time had an absolute beginning.

So if we're asking the question of Romans 1, then we can deduce from that that the cause of that would necessarily be what?

Spaceless and timeless.

So when I'm defining God, I'll cut to the chase.

God is the spaceless, timeless, uncaused, eternal, powerful, and ultimately personal.

Why?

Because if you go from absolutely nothing, see the universe was nothing.

I mean, that's what rocks dream about.

Nothing to something, a decision was made.

So God is the God is a spaceless, timeless, uncaused.

Now, somebody said, Well, who made God?

Okay, that's a fair question.

Because if you go in an infinite regress, you're gonna want, can you you have an explanation for that?

But guess what?

The skeptic has the same problem.

So the celebrated physicist and a strong and uh uh Stephen Hawking would say this in his latest book, The Grand Design, because there's a law like gravity, now think about this, because there's a law like gravity, the universe can and will create itself out of nothing.

Wait, that's a I like what John Lennox, the mathematician from Oxford, says.

Wait a minute, that's a contradiction.

Because there's a law like gravity, the universe creates its out of out of nothing.

Gravity is not nothing.

So guess what?

If you're a skeptic, you posit an eternal law like gravity.

And all we do is say, what's more logical?

An eternal law or an eternal law giver?

You see?

And so, number two, I can tell that was overwhelming to you there.

You just were just, you were just completely just anyway.

Number two, life is no accident.

You have two choices.

I was at the University of New Orleans and I basically said, look, you got two choices.

Either everything you see created itself or it was started by something besides itself.

And a student in the back raised her hand and said, Well, there's a third choice.

I said, What is it?

They go, Maybe we're not here at all.

I said, Well, in that case, you wouldn't be here, so please be quiet.

But we're here.

So the question is, where did life come from?

Evolution, again, I'll quote John Lennox from Oxford, evolution only tells you what happens after you get life.

So let's just concede that.

The question is, where did the first self-replicating molecule come from?

Because as the as the discoverer of DNA, Watson and Crick, Watson wrote a book called Life is Information.

Life is Information.

In the 1990s, the Human Genome Project, a man named Francis Collins, who heads the NIH, had I was actually in his home writing this book as well when I was doing that, just another little piece of the puzzle.

A beautiful believer.

But he basically opened up DNA and showed us how to read it.

Now I ask a student this, and I'll ask you, I said, if they you can think that life can happen.

I said, have you ever gotten a text from somebody that just me makes no sense?

It's not that you don't you don't think they're rational, but it's just jumbled.

You can tell they sat on their phone, and then I I can never figure out how they hit send.

But but then, I mean, you know that that was just a what we call a pocket text.

And I asked students, what would you say if you had a text from somebody that said, Don't tell anyone, but I cheated on the test?

Now there's no way you're gonna think that somebody could sit there and and do that, hit send, and all of that ordered and sequenced.

What if you got a text from somebody three billion letters long?

That's the information ordered and sequenced in the human genome.

Information always points to intelligence.

If you're walking down the beach and you see your name written in the sand, you don't think, look at what the waves can do have given enough time.

Information points to intelligence.

So when people are looking for why won't God give us some kind of sign, maybe we can see the writing in the sky.

He wrote the world's longest sentence.

As Bill Gates would say, DNA is software, but far more complicated.

Life is no accident.

There's a DNA chain.

Number three, good and evil are real.

Good and evil are not illusions.

I'm on an airplane with a guy seated in uh 14D, and he began to talk about God and evil, and God couldn't be real because of evil.

And I said, I looked at him and said, God could just kill everybody.

He could just kill us all.

I said, that's how you stop evil.

He could just kill us.

I said, he tried that once, but he left one, even the best family, he left one family, but the virus was inside of them and it replicated.

And then I began to talk to him and I said, you know, really, if there is no God, there is no evil.

You can't even explain the world.

In other words, when an animal kills another animal, if our way, if there's no difference between you and the and your dog besides where your dish is in the kitchen, then really then there are no real moral choices going on here.

Animals killing other animals are not crime scenes.

So it's because we have a soul, because there's something beyond this reductionistic physical thing that there is a soul.

There's evidence of that, and we'll talk about that in these training sessions to come, because there's evidence that there is a real you.

So when I'm talking to an atheist, I said, let's not talk about God's existence.

Do you exist?

Is there really a self?

Now, Buddhism would say the self is an illusion.

So I basically looked at this man and I said, Look, it's in Seat 14D, and I said, you know, God wants to get rid of all the evil in the world starting in Seat 14 D.

We're gonna start right here.

But the problem was he wanted us to get rid of our evil, but not his.

You see, the existence of evil doesn't indicate the absence of God from the world, but the absence of him from our lives.

And this is why the gospel is the ultimate human right.

When people are debating about human rights, and we as the gospel people are over here going, remember us, we've got a message, all be quiet.

We're talking about serious social issues.

You see, the gospel is the ultimate social justice issue.

Why?

Because it deals with injustice at its source.

A few years ago, the largest oil spill in history, the United States speaking, was in 2010, the BP oil explosion, 200,000 gallons of oil dumping into the Gulf for over 80 days.

Cleaning it up would have been a noble effort, but but you had to stop it at its source.

When you speak the gospel to someone and tell them the truth, you're literally giving God a chance to stop injustice, like what I said in Seat 14D.

You see, just like when you get arrested, you may they when they somebody arrests you and they say you've got a right to know this.

Every human being on the face of the earth has a right to know the gospel.

Now they can accept it or reject it, but you have to have that conviction that it's true.

The final thing, and then we'll stop.

Again, atheism doesn't take away the pain, it just takes away the hope.

It's Jesus and the resurrection.

Gary Haberbass is a friend of mine, he was losing his faith in Michigan State.

And he went to his doctoral committee there at Michigan State and he said, This was many years ago, he said, I'd like to do my dissertation on the resurrection of Jesus.

And he said, Because if I, because the Bible itself says that if Christianity stands or falls, in essence, whether the resurrection happened.

No other religion in the world bases everything, all of its truth, on one single historical event.

And Habermas said, if I can beyond a reasonable doubt, show that the resurrection happened, then I think my faith will stand.

And the doctoral committee said, he said, Well, how long does it have to be?

And they said, they said, okay.

They said, you can do it on the resurrection, but don't come back and tell us Jesus was raised from the dead because the Bible says so.

He said, Well, how long does it have to be?

They said, 200 pages.

It ended up being 350 pages.

And Habermas came up with what he calls the minimal facts.

These are the facts of history that even skeptical scholars like Bart Ehrman that I mentioned from the University of North Carolina, Bart would accept these.

That Jesus was executed by Pontius Pilate.

He really did exist.

And that happened.

If you don't even have a Bible, that's that's that's part of historical bedrock.

His tomb is found empty.

His disciples claimed he appeared to them.

Now they won't concede that he appeared.

They kind of see it kind of like Star Wars, kind of like Jedi Jesus, where he's kind of up there in the air and they all kind of had this hallucination.

The resurrection was proclaimed early.

Christianity started in the very place where it would have been easiest to disprove, Jerusalem, three days later.

So here we stand tonight.

We stand at a place of asking ourselves, is it really true?

You see, I said at the beginning of the message that a few churches that grow through evangelism, and then the alarming stat of seven out of ten, and you say, Well, what's the real reason that people are leaving the faith?

The bottom line is they just don't believe it's true.

My kids love Star Wars, they can tell you all the storylines, they can tell you all the actors, but if you press them, they know they know it's not true.

Justice League, Avengers, whatnot.

Leslie Nubigan came back from 30 years of the mission field in India to England and found that the gospel was receding.

And here was his conclusion.

He said, the gospel is is receding because the gospel is receding, he said, because people see it as private truth, not public truth.

You see, we believe the gospel is public truth.

You can accept it or reject it, but just like any other scientific or academic endeavor, we have done the work, it happened in history, therefore, here is our findings of what truth is to us.

And if we develop that kind of conviction in our individual lives, not just with emotion, not just with sincerity, sometimes we Pentecostals, if we want to really show how we're right, we just talk louder.

But this isn't about just talking louder, this is about being clear of what the gospel is.

I want to just close, and I'm gonna have on the locations that once this video is over, then those leaders of the of every congregation leading the service will come up and pray and minister to you.

But this is a summary of what you've learned tonight.

This video, other videos that I didn't show, I have many other things to share with you, but you cannot bear them now.

Um we'll do that.

We'll have plenty of time in the days to come in these events, which I'm really honored and glad to be a part and to partner with Pastor Robert and the team to do this.

But this is all available.

This is all available on a free app.

God's Not Dead, the app, the videos, the training.

We're trying to get as many people up to speed as we can.

So the next voice you hear after this will be the people that uh will be leading the service.

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

There's no question in scientists' minds that there was a beginning.

But what they can't answer is how it began, or more importantly, why?

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Is the universe merely a product of random chance?

Or does it reflect the order and information that speaks of an intelligent mind behind it all?

Some have suggested that the universe could pop into existence out of nothing.

But what they fail to tell you is that in quantum terms, nothing isn't really nothing, it includes the laws of physics.

So you either believe in an eternal set of laws or an eternal lawgiver.

Then there's the question of life.

And how did it begin?

Some scientists and philosophers say that evolution can explain it all.

Unfortunately, evolution is a theory that only tells you what happens once you have life.

It can't tell you how it began.

The chance that it could have happened by chance is staggering.

Have you ever pocket texted someone by accident?

You might get a few letters that are strung together that make no sense.

If someone texted you and said, Don't tell anyone but I cheated on the test, the chances you could claim you pocket texted that would be extremely low.

But what if it was an ordered sentence of three billion letters?

That's the intelligent information in our human genome, in our DNA.

The most accurate statement about us as humans is that we are fearfully and wonderfully made.

And for the question of why we are here, we were created for relationship.

Relationship with God and relationship with each other.

But something happened to this wonderful creation.

A virus was introduced into the system called evil.

Evil is the opposite of good, and evil is a choice, it is a wrong choice.

The evidence of morality itself, again, points to the God that made us.

Because without God, there wouldn't be no basis for morality.

As the Russian writer Gustovsky said, if there is no God, then all things are permissible.

But why would a loving God allow the evil?

It was the risk he took to give mankind a real freedom to choose, and evil would not have the last word.

God entered his own creation as a man, Jesus Christ.

He lived the life we should have lived by choosing to do good and not evil.

And he died the death we should have died in our place.

He took the punishment for our evil upon himself on the cross.

And three days later he rose again from the dead, proving he was the Son of God, and he ultimately broke the power of evil over us.

As Jesus said, I was dead, but I'm alive forevermore.

I have the keys of death and hell.

And it's when Christ comes to live inside of us that we get the ultimate proof that he indeed exists.

The God that created the galaxies lives on the inside of every heart that believes the gospel.

God's not dead.