Make Believe: Myth or Messiah with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the Medichurch podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

Well, I want to welcome you in.

If you aren't new with us, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta, and we are starting today a brand new series called Make Believe.

This series will take us all the way to Easter and then past Easter to baptisms on the 27th.

And we're really getting to the heart of what we believe about Jesus.

Really starting at the Enlightenment 500 or so years ago, and then progressively over the years, we have become more and more sure that we do not need religion, we do not need spirituality, we do not need the supernatural, the metaphysical, we don't need any of that.

At the Enlightenment, we decided we've needed that in the past because we have been ignorant and we haven't really known how to make sense of life.

And so when life is difficult, we can create some kind of mythical story and it can help us explain our hardships.

We haven't really understood the cycle of the seasons, and so we needed a mythical story to help us understand why our plants grow sometimes, why our crops die at other times.

We haven't really understood exactly how to prosper in life, but now we are enlightened.

And from the enlightenment forward, we will be guided by science and reason, and we will reject all this other stuff as nonsense for people who are less educated and need a way to cope with the hardships of life.

However, something else happened that was very interesting.

From the Enlightenment, as we started to pursue the sciences with vigor, this interesting phenomena took place that the more we learned, the more we realized how much we don't know.

It's actually a real sign of intelligence that the more intelligent you become, the more humble you become, because the more intelligent you are, the more you can see how little you are capable of knowing.

And so we have many today who will stand on the ground of science and pragmatism, and they will say that Christianity is nothing but a fairy tale for people who can't cope with the hardships of life.

And at the same time, as they cling to science as their religion of choice, they're very hesitant to make clear that science can answer relatively few of the big questions in life.

We've talked in series in the past here at MetaCurch about the beginning of the universe.

During the Enlightenment, when we decided we didn't need God anymore, virtually everyone believed in a static universe, which meant that the universe had always existed, which meant planet Earth had always existed.

Now we know scientifically that the universe did begin to exist.

At one point there was no universe, which means there was no space, there was no time, and there was no matter.

And yet, in this cosmic explosion, all came into being.

And of course, science could tell us how that happened, right?

Wrong.

Science has no way of telling us how the entire universe exploded out of literally nothing.

We have theories, and the theories become more and more wild as we learn more and more.

And as cosmology, the beginning of the universe, the more we learn, the more it begs for something transcendent to have instigated it.

We see life and we have various theories about the propagation of life.

We know how human life continues and animal life continues, and you know, I'm sure most of you in this room at this point have heard something about the birds and the bees, right?

Like we know, at least on some level, how populations expand and populations shrink, and we have various other theories, but even people who hold fast to Darwinian macroevolution, that we all came at one point from one single-celled amoeba cannot tell you where that single-celled amoeba came from.

The beginning of life is a mystery to science.

There are only theories, and the more we learn, the more the theories beg for a creator.

Science cannot give us an objective grounding for morality.

So there is no right or wrong, good, bad, there is no evil or righteousness.

It is all just a matter of opinion.

Science cannot account for our human consciousness.

No scientist has the answer.

We don't know where dreams come from or what they are.

We don't know where our thoughts originate from.

We have like zero answers to the biggest questions.

And the more we learn, the more those answers beg for a transcendent something.

And that makes sense because if we believe that God is the creator of the universe and science is the careful study of the universe, then the deeper we delve into science, the more we will start uncovering the fingerprints of God.

And you see, the easiest way to get people, especially in our online age, where you have some very famous YouTube atheists who don't really do their homework but have some interesting arguments that allow people to just reject Christianity right offhand?

The more we are asked as a society, the more we are asked as the church, is this all just make-believe?

Do we show up every Sunday and worship a fairy tale?

Are we in line with just all the other pagan myths that have gone before us?

Is this something real?

The starting point for us today is the person of Jesus.

If we're going to ask big questions about God and the movement that he started, we have to start with God incarnate, the man who claimed to be God in human flesh, the man who claimed that he could give us eternal life, life after our mortal bodies, after our physical death.

We're gonna start with the person of Jesus, and we have to ask the question, is Jesus myth, or is Jesus Messiah?

Myth or Messiah?

And the answer to that question will determine the trajectory of your life on earth, and maybe more importantly, will determine what happens after your time on earth is over.

Myth or Messiah.

See, there's a lot of arguments against Christianity, and some of them, to be honest, are very robust.

I've dealt with those in series in the past.

However, what I'm noticing is especially the online atheists, they recognize some patterns in ancient mythologies, and pattern recognition is how we live.

You need to know that.

As humans, we are pattern recognizing machines, right?

We see patterns, it's how we exist in the world.

However, that can become really convoluted.

Like, you have you noticed, maybe, maybe you're not online at all, and God bless you, you're more righteous than the rest of us, right?

But if you're online, like at all, you will have noticed in the last five years the uptick of conspiratorial thinking.

Anybody?

Anybody have, you know, that uncle?

And it's like, all right, everything, you know?

And here's what's tough is some things that have been called conspiracies, it's like, okay, you know, broken clock strike twice a day or whatever.

And so that's like, these three conspiracies were true, so all of them are true, you know?

Uh a conspiracy theory is just pattern recognition gone awry.

That's all it is.

And this has happened in this new argument that people are making to try and dismiss Jesus.

They say something like this You know, Egypt had a god.

The god's name was Horus, he was a falcon-headed mythological god, and uh he was born in very miraculous circumstances.

And, you know, uh there was a Greek god, Mithras, and and the Greek god, you know, also had kind of this miraculous birth, and and also shared this symbolic meal of wine and bread, and the elements really meant something.

And then there was the the pagan god of Dionysius, who was born, the story goes, from Zeus, a supernatural god and a mortal woman.

And Dionysius also, it's kind of hard to understand, but had some kind of death, not really a physical death, more of a metaphysical death, but a death nonetheless, and then came back to life and then ruled over the supernatural realm.

Are you recognizing the pattern?

It's like, okay, we have a virgin birth, we have supernatural battles, we have a shared symbolic meal of bread and wine, we have some form of death and resurrection, and these are all the things all of us agree are myths.

And so just take Jesus who fits into the pattern, move him under myth, and you can dismiss him altogether.

It's an argument.

It's an argument that's been made a lot.

It's an argument made by people who haven't really done their homework and probably have never really handled scripture, but it's an argument that is effective, and even people who've grown up believing in Jesus are beginning to walk away from him because of an argument that we will see the New Testament documents just simply do not allow for.

There are some robust arguments, and we must be ready to defend our faith, but today I want to ask the question: is Jesus a myth?

Does he belong with the Greek gods, with the Roman Pantheon, with the Egyptian gods, or is he something unique entirely?

We've seen thinkers throughout time, like Voltaire said this, the Christian faith is the most ridiculous, the most absurd, and bloody religion that has ever infected the world.

The new atheists make arguments like this: Jesus is a mythical figure in a mythical story with no more historical validity than Zeus or Hercules.

Now, these are people who are acknowledging Jesus of Nazareth was an actual human being in history.

He was a rabbi who traveled and taught, that he was crucified on a Roman cross.

Virtually all scholars do agree that Jesus of Nazareth really lived, really taught, and really died by crucifixion.

Some will go so far as to say that even Jesus being alive on earth is a myth.

Richard Dawkins in The God Delusion says it is even possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, historical case that Jesus never lived at all.

Is Jesus a myth?

And if he is, then what are we doing here?

Worshiping and submitting our life to something that is simply make-believe.

At the same time, if Jesus is who he claimed to be, then what does that mean for our lives?

What does it mean for us moving forward?

We're gonna take kind of a little overview of several people who documented the life of Christ.

And I want you to notice how they write about him.

We already looked at what Peter said in 2 Peter 1, verse 16.

2 Peter 1:16

Peter just says it outright.

We did not follow cleverly contrived myths when we made known to you the power and the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ.

Instead, so this is Peter saying, I'm going to give you the argument against Jesus as myth.

And here's my argument.

Instead, we were eyewitnesses of his majesty.

You see, mythological stories, especially about someone who lived in history, they develop over centuries.

It takes hundreds of years.

If you're gonna make up a mythological telling of somebody's life, number one, you have to allow for everyone who knew them and everyone who knew someone that knew them to die.

Because if the people who were eyewitnesses of the life of that figure are still alive, they can debunk your mythological telling immediately.

This is why you see, and we can record this, scholars have seen this throughout the ancient world.

When we get mythological tellings of real people, they don't come about for centuries.

As a matter of fact, there are rejected ancient narratives about the life of Jesus written in like the fifth century, 400 years after the life of Christ, like the Gospel of Thomas, which have mythologized Jesus.

They don't tell of real places, they don't tell of real historical events, they don't tell appropriate timelines, they get the geography wrong, they get everything wrong because they're not telling history.

They come up with crazy stories about Jesus as an infant taking clay and molding it into a bird like a magician, and the bird flies off, you know?

Like Jesus could have done that, but we don't have that recorded in history.

Even Jesus' life was mythologized eventually.

But is that what we have in the New Testament?

Peter's like, look, I knew Jesus.

I was a fisherman, that was my plan.

I was gonna make as much money as I could fishing, and then I was gonna die, and then I was gonna give my kids however much money I had left over.

That was it.

And then Jesus showed up and wanted to use my boat, and I didn't even want to let him use my boat, but he was popular, so I did, and then he made me go fish, and I'd been fishing all freaking night.

I didn't want to go, and then I caught so many fish it sank my boat, and he said, Follow me.

And I can't even tell you why, but I did.

Peter's like, I saw miracles, I saw him command nature itself, I saw him cast demons out of people.

Peter's like, I've told you he died and came back to life.

I'm that Peter, the one who denied him.

Even after he resurrected, I didn't think Jesus wanted anything to do with me.

I went back to fishing.

It's like this is not a myth.

This isn't Zeus, this isn't Athena.

I walked with this guy, I ate with this guy, I know this guy, I'm not making this up, and I am not the only eyewitness.

You see, Paul doubles down on this claim, and you might know a little bit about Paul.

Uh, Paul, before he met the Lord, he went by the name Saul, he was a persecutor of the church.

When Jesus took his last breath, and Peter was crying, and John was crying, and his mother Mary was crying, Saul was celebrating.

Saul couldn't believe that even after they had killed this guy, his followers were still growing and spreading his message.

He didn't believe in the resurrection.

He made it his life mission to track down the followers of Jesus and persecute and imprison them until Jesus got a hold of him.

Saul becomes Paul, he becomes the greatest missionary known to history.

He starts evangelizing parts of the world that no one would have gone to.

He goes to Corinth.

Corinth is a town built on myth.

And they picked the most salacious of all of the myths, and because of that, they lived on a foundation of licentiousness and sexual depravity and debauchery.

Corinth was like Vegas on steroids on steroids.

And that's where Paul chose to plant one of his churches.

Paul wants to make it clear they are not following a cleverly contrived myth.

Here's what he writes to the Corinthians in 1 Corinthians chapter 15.

1 Corinthians 15 · chapter mention

He says, For I passed on to you as most important what I also received.

That Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, that's Peter, and then to the twelve.

Now, this is a story, you know it, it's out of the gospels that Jesus lived a perfect life, he died for our sins, he rose again three days later, and then he appeared to his disciples.

Now, what did I say?

Mythologies, this isn't Claton's idea, this is scholarly consensus.

In the ancient world, mythologies take centuries to develop.

We know, because of all the documents we have from the ancient world of the New Testament, 1 Corinthians is one of the earliest documents in the entire scriptures in the New Testament.

It's one of the earliest documents.

He's writing to these people in short order after the resurrection of Jesus.

And what he is telling them right here, he says, I'm telling you what was passed on to me.

This is a Christian creed of the early church that goes back to within a few years of the resurrection.

Within five years of the resurrection, the church has a creed that means an established belief that Jesus lived, that he died for our sins, that he rose again, and that there were eyewitnesses to his resurrection.

That kind of mythologizing takes 300 years, and in five years, everyone believed this, and the message was spreading.

Now we know that part of the story that Jesus died, he rose again, and he came to his disciples.

But Paul actually shares new information in the very next verse.

In verse 6, he says, Then he appeared to over 500 brothers and sisters at one time.

Most of them are still alive, but some have fallen asleep.

Historians, especially atheist historians, have no idea what to do with this verse.

Let me explain why.

Paul is writing to Corinth.

We know he's writing early.

It's one of the earliest documents in the New Testament.

We know he is quoting a creed from within about five years of the resurrection of Jesus.

And then he doubles down.

He's like, look, it's not just Jesus' inner circle of these 12 few disciples who he appeared to.

He appeared to more than 500 men and women all at the same time.

Now, this is a couple decades later, he goes, Look, some of them have died, most of them are still alive.

If you want to create a mythology, the last thing you do is give people ability to fact-check you.

Let me give you an example.

If I stated the claim of my credibility as the leader of MetaCurch on the story that my senior year of high school, we won the state championship in basketball.

Now, not even close.

We didn't even make the playoffs.

But for the sake of my illustration, let's say that I said, I won senior year, state champs in basketball.

Now you probably know if you've been going here for a little while, I went to high school in the hill country of Texas from Jolotus.

It's like two hours.

You could drive there in an afternoon.

If I said, look, our whole town came.

There were over 500 people at this game watching us win this champion.

They saw it, they watched my triple double.

It's a fake story, so I have a triple double in it now, right?

The problem with me staking my entire credibility on something you could go fact check is you could just drive to Lampasas.

Over 500 people?

This unbelievable event happened.

You could just go ask around.

You could stop at like three stores.

You could go to the high school and realize Lampasas has never won a state championship in anything ever, right?

Paul is staking the credibility of the movement of Jesus just years after the resurrection of Jesus, quoting a creed from right after the resurrection, and he's writing this letter to Corinth.

Corinth is a port city, which means they have access to chartering a ship.

Some in the church might have owned a ship.

Not only that, Corinth is a very affluent town.

They had the means to take a very easy, by ancient standards, a very easy trip from Corinth to Jerusalem.

If there are 500 people who saw the risen Savior and anyone wants to fact-check Paul, they have the means to do so.

And yet the movement didn't stop.

And maybe that's because it was true.

What did Peter write?

Peter said, For we did not follow cleverly contrived myths.

What is Paul saying?

He's going, look, Jesus did this, and this isn't Zeus, this isn't Athena, this isn't Horus, this isn't.

Like, yes, people worshiped these pagan myths.

Yes, people reverenced these pagan myths, but this is key.

They never witnessed them.

They never walked and talked with them.

They never sat and prayed with them.

They never broke bread with them.

You can say a lot of things about Christianity.

You can make a lot of compelling arguments that there are good answers for, but the one thing you cannot do is say that the New Testament, the only documents that historically record the life of Jesus, are recording them as myth because they are not.

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, those are the historical, chronological accounts of the life of Jesus.

If you haven't read them for yourself, you should.

I want to look at just the intro to Luke's gospel.

It goes like this.

Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us.

Just as the original, say it with me, I witnesses and servants of the word handed them down to us.

It also seemed good to me, since I have carefully investigated everything from the very first to write you in an orderly sequence, most honorable Theophilus.

That is Luke's friend that he is compiling this narrative for.

Why?

He says, so that you may know the certainty of the things about which you have been instructed.

I'll tell you a little bit about Luke.

Luke joins Paul miraculously on one of Paul's missionary journeys.

And Luke is a Gentile, he is non-Jewish, which makes him unique among the writers of the New Testament.

And he is a doctor, which means he is educated at the highest level that you could be educated in the ancient world.

He is incredibly, incredibly thorough.

And he tells his friend that he's writing to I've investigated everything, I have gone back to the very beginning, and I have talked to all of the eyewitnesses, and after all this work, I have compiled it for you chronologically to build your confidence in the things that we are saying.

This is not myth, this is history.

As a matter of fact, the famous archaeologist Sir William Ramsey said that Luke is a historian of the first rank.

Not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy, but he should be placed among the greatest of historians.

He's not writing a myth, he is writing about real people in real places, real geography, real time frames, real dynasty, real rulers, real governmental structures, and he records it all accurately.

Because Matthew, Mark, and Luke, and Peter, James, and John and James and Jude, the half-brothers of Jesus, they wrote the New Testament and they were writing things that actually happened.

These are not false pagan myths who come up for a little while to help people make sense of the happenings in their world and then die off eventually.

This is not like a modern religious prophecy, uh like Scientology, which just exists to like take Tom Cruise's money or whatever.

It's not the prophecies of Joseph Smith and the Latter-day Saints, which are known forgeries that were interpreted into known inconsistencies that have no archaeological evidence.

These are people in the ancient world.

In the same way, the more we dig into science, the more science is begging us for a creator, the more we dig into history, the more verified the scriptures become.

The more archaeology is unearthed in the part of the world that scripture references, the more affirmations we find about the truths held within it.

God is revealing himself to us.

And in John's gospel, it says, no one has seen God.

And it's very hard to understand God because he is infinite and we are very finite.

And so John says Jesus came incarnate in flesh to reveal God to us.

It's why the series has to start with Jesus.

Is it all just make-believe?

If Jesus is not God, if Jesus is not who he says he is, and if he did not do what he said that he did, then we can throw the rest of it out as myth or fairy tale or make-believe.

You know what's interesting is if you were writing mythology, if that's if that's what we're claiming, if that's what the new atheists are claiming that this whole New Testament is just mythologizing of Jesus, then the writers of the New Testament have done a terrible job.

One of the things you don't do if you're trying to mythologize someone is write about how during their entire life almost no one believed in them.

Jesus was rejected by his family, his own people that he came to offering the kingdom of heaven, nailed him to a cross.

It wasn't until he walked out of the grave that the majority of people realized he was, in fact, who he claimed to be.

It wasn't until Jesus called his shot, they're going to kill me three days later, I will come back to life.

No one knew what to do with that until he did it.

And now we have the power of the eyewitnesses, and we stand in the legacy of the eyewitnesses, but you need to know this because you might be thinking that's great for them.

That's great for the first century followers.

But we're here, and it's 2025, and none of us have gotten to see Jesus just like fresh out the grave.

None of us have gotten to do that.

So what about us?

You need to realize that before they were the eyewitnesses, they were people who could say, I witnessed.

I have seen something from Jesus, I have experienced something from Jesus, I have felt something in his presence.

And so maybe you're here and you're not convinced of the claims of Christianity.

And maybe you've even been convinced by this new, very soft argument that here's some patterns in ancient myths, and Jesus kind of has some of these patterns, not exactly, but kind of, so you can just push him aside and ignore him like you ignore Zeus and Hercules.

Maybe today for the first time you realize the New Testament is not documents written to mythologize someone, it is documents written by eyewitnesses of historical accounts.

Maybe you think that'd be great.

And if I could see Jesus, I mean, sure, if Jesus would walk in the room, let me remind you of one of his disciples.

When Jesus resurrected, he showed up back to his disciples, but one of them was not there.

I tell our staff all the time, you cannot be late to meetings.

You have no idea what you're gonna miss, you know?

So Thomas is out of the room, Jesus shows up and he misses it.

And Thomas shows up late, and he doesn't bring donuts and he doesn't bring coffee, he's just late, you know?

And he gets there, and everyone's like, You will not believe what you just missed.

And they tell him, and Thomas is like, you're right.

I do not believe that.

And we call him doubting Thomas, and I'll tell you the truth, I feel bad for the guy, you know.

You make one mistake and that's your name for the next 2,000 years.

You pee your pants one time in second grade and you're PP tiner for like ever, you know?

I mean, that didn't happen.

Ah, that happened.

All right.

So he's doubting Thomas, you know?

And what does he say?

He's like, if I can put my hand in the side where the spear went through it, if I can touch the holes in his wrist that held him to the cross.

See, in the Jewish mind, there was no category for physical bodily resurrection from the dead.

The resurrection to the Jewish mind happens at the end of the age, right?

And we're like, how could Thomas have not believed?

Uh as a pastor, I do a lot of funerals, a lot.

And I'm just letting you know, if I got back home and Katie was like, you'll never guess who was just here, I would not believe that it was the person I just buried, all right?

We get mad at Thomas, but we don't put himself in it, we don't put ourselves in his shoes.

And Jesus shows back up.

And do you remember what he says to Thomas?

He says, Thomas, you are blessed.

Because you have seen and believed.

And maybe that's a word to anyone who has not yet come to Christ, and the Holy Spirit is drawing you to Christ, and one of your hesitancies is how much doubt you have had, and you assume that God is just gonna be too mad at you because of the doubt you've displayed previously in your life.

What does he say to Thomas?

Thomas, you're blessed.

You've seen, and now you've believed.

But then he says, and even more blessed are those who do not see and still believe.

And Jesus knew that 99.9999% of people who ever put their faith in him would not get to physically see him before they put their faith in him.

But the thing about Jesus is he is still alive, he is still moving.

And if you're not convinced of the claims of Christianity, while no one at Metachurch were eyewitnesses to the event, you are surrounded by people who can say, I have witnessed.

I have witnessed Jesus coming and healing my marriage.

I have witnessed Jesus bringing my kids back into relationship with me.

I have witnessed as Jesus took an addiction that was the Lord of my life and has usurped it and now has helped me and healed me.

You are standing and sitting and in community with people who are witnesses to the very real power of Jesus.

We're gonna wrap up with a very interesting place in scripture.

And it's interesting because it's before the resurrection, it's before the cross, and it's actually moments before Jesus, for the very first time, tells his followers that he is going to Jerusalem to die and to rise again.

They don't know this yet.

And so we pick this up in Matthew chapter 16, verse 13.

Matthew 16:13

When Jesus came to the region of Caesarea Philippi, he asked his disciples, Who do people say that the Son of Man is?

Jesus is like, What, you know, what's the word?

Like, what are people saying about me?

And here's their answer.

They replied, some say John the Baptist, others say Elijah, still others Jeremiah or one of the prophets.

And we still do this to this day.

Who is Jesus?

He's a great teacher.

Oh my gosh, Jesus, so wise.

So wise, you know, you've got Jesus, you've got Gandhi, you've got the Buddha, you know, like all he's just wise.

It's a great historical figure.

Oh man, what a moral example.

He was so he was so kind.

Remember the whole thing where he was like, let the kids come.

And they were like, no, Jesus, kids are so annoying.

And he was like, No, no, I got this.

Like, let I love that part of Jesus, you know.

Oh, these are the ones that really fresh my Jesus was such a political revolutionary.

Oh, what an amazing social activist.

I just want to model my social activism off.

Islam, now the second largest faith in the world.

Islam, which takes the Old Testament of our scriptures and basically just completely reverse engineers the story to say the opposite of everything it says, they even hold Jesus as blessed and as the greatest prophet.

But he never died, he never rose again.

And the problem with all of these, while there are kernels of truth to some of them, is this is not who Jesus claimed to be.

In the next verse, Jesus asked them, but you who do you say that I am?

And Simon Peter spoke up.

He answered and said, You are the Messiah, the Son of the Living God.

Jesus later lets Peter know that he didn't actually even come up with this on his own.

It was such a dynamic truth claim that it was given to him by the Holy Spirit.

And Peter could have stopped at Messiah.

Peter answered, You are the Messiah.

Everyone in Israel was waiting for the Messiah.

Messiah means the last and final king, the anointed one from God who would make all things right.

But in the Jewish mind, the Messiah was just a man, an anointed man, like King David, like Moses, like Abraham, but just a man.

And Peter didn't stop there.

He said, You are the Messiah and you are actually divine.

There's no category for that.

The Holy Spirit gave that to Peter.

100% man and 100% God.

This is who Jesus claimed to be.

And the problem with mythologizing Jesus and putting him in the category with the other great ancient myths and dismissing him and extracting out the lessons that we can learn and setting the rest aside is you can believe that Jesus is the greatest man, the greatest teacher, the greatest prophet, and still spend eternity separated from God.

That Jesus did not ask us to believe in him as a moral example.

He asked us to put our faith in him as the God of the universe.

And anything short of that is short of what we need to receive the blessings that God has for us in our life.

To kind of give you a bottom line, if Jesus is a myth, his movement means nothing.

But if Jesus is Messiah, his movement means everything.

We've talked a lot about who Jesus is.

Let me explain why Jesus came.

If you're new to the faith, maybe you're just new to Metachurch, here's what we believe about Jesus.

Jesus is God.

And that the reason there is something instead of nothing, the reason the universe sprang into existence is because God is love.

Scripture doesn't say love is something God does, it is ontological, it's part of his being.

And because of his love, he created you for loving relationship with himself.

And because he is love and created the universe out of love to express his love to you, it took an entire universe.

He gave us one initially, very low bar, we still couldn't clear it.

One rule to establish relationship, and yet we had the freedom to break the rule that broke our relationship with God.

And sin entered the world, and the world is stained by sin, and you know that because of your experience living in this world.

And we all sin, and because we sin, we fall short of God's perfect standard.

And God, who is perfect, cannot be in the presence of sin.

Our sin separates us from the love of God and from a relationship with him.

And yet, God is love.

He's just, but he's love.

And in his love, he never stopped pursuing us.

As a matter of fact, he is not some distant God of some no-name religion.

He's the God who loves you enough that he left peace and perfection to come down into our pain and our brokenness.

The wages of our sin, the price of our sin is our death, not just physical death.

Spiritually, that's actually not that big of a deal.

The real death is eternal separation from God.

And the only thing that stops that is coming back into relationship and something dealing with the weight of our sin.

So Jesus came and he lived a perfect life.

And he substituted his life for our death.

Three days later, he walked out of his grave, proving to you and to me that he could in fact deal with physical death.

It no longer has to have the last word in our lives.

I love what C.S.

Lewis said.

He said, Christianity, if it's false, is of no importance, and if it's true, it's of infinite importance.

The only thing it cannot be is modestly important.

The only thing Christianity cannot be is a side issue.

The only thing the movement of Jesus cannot be is, I'll get to that later.

If it's not true, it doesn't matter at all.

And if it is true, it's the only thing that matters.

It is the biggest question you have to wrestle with during your time on earth.

If Jesus is a myth, he doesn't matter at all.

But if he is, who he claims that he is, then it means everything.

C.S.

Lewis really summarized our entire conversation today in his book, Mere Christianity.

I want to read you an excerpt.

He wrote, I'm trying here to prevent anyone from saying the really foolish thing that people often say about Jesus.

They say, I'm ready to accept Jesus as a great moral teacher, but I don't accept him as God.

That is the one thing we cannot say.

He goes on to write, a man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher.

He would either be a lunatic or else he would be the devil himself.

So you have to make your choice.

Either this man was and is the Son of God, or he is a madman or something worse.

You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit on him and kill him as a demon, or you have to fall at his feet and call him Lord and God.

But do not come with any patronizing nonsense about Jesus being a great human teacher.

Jesus did not leave that option open to us.

He did not intend to.

This whole argument that we can put Jesus over there with Gandhi and Buddha and the Dalai Lama and all the great philosophers and thinkers, Jesus closed that door.

The New Testament does not teach a myth, it gives you eyewitness account of the man who loved you enough to step out of heaven and into this earth to pay the price of your sin, to prove his love, demonstrating it by hanging on a cross after our rebellion against him, and then inviting us with the free gift of eternal life.

The question that Jesus asked his disciples 2,000 years ago is still lingering in the air, demanding an answer from us all.

Jesus asks, Who do you say that I am?

Who do you say that I am?

Today we come to a crossroads, and I want to invite you to put your full faith in Jesus.

That he is who he claimed to be God in human flesh, and that he has done what he says that he's done, lived a perfect life, died to pay the price of your sins, and rose again, promising to bring us back to life with him.

Let's pray.

As we close, would you bow your head and close your eyes right where you're at?

If you do not know Jesus, my guess is that the Spirit of the living God has gripped your life.

Scripture uses the metaphor that Jesus stands and knocks on the door of your heart.

He will not kick it in, he will not invite himself in uninvited, but he will be persistent.

And in the quiet and in the moments where you lean in and seek God, he keeps finding you there, wondering if today will be the day that you lay aside your pride, that you humble yourself, and submit.

All Jesus asks to come into relationship with God is that we put our faith in him.

He's done all the work.

This isn't a religious exercise.

There's not ten hoops to jump through.

It's a simple act of faith.

And so if you're at one of our venues, you've never had a moment in time where you have made the decision yourself to put your faith in Jesus, I want to give you the opportunity to do that right now.

With everyone's eyes closed, I want to ask you for this moment of courage to just simply raise your hand up.

Raising your hand is a symbolic gesture that says, Today I choose to put my faith in Jesus.

Amen.

Amen.

For those who raised a hand, I want you to know that Jesus sees and accepts your faith.

Scripture says all of your sins, past, present, and future, have been covered by the righteousness of Christ.

That you in this moment have been adopted into God's family.

And as his child, you will live with him eternally.

Here's what I want to do.

For everyone who raised a hand, I want to very simply help you acknowledge this moment with a prayer.

I'm gonna ask that you repeat this with me.

I'm gonna ask all the believers across our venues to pray out loud as well.

Let's pray like this Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I believe you are God that you died for my sins and rose from the grave.

I thank you for loving me and forgiving my sins.

And let me pray over you.

Jesus, I thank you for more of your children coming home.

You have asked us to take you up on your offer of eternal life with you.

God, I pray for those who are new believers that now they would take their next steps, not to earn anything.

You've already given it to us, but to walk in light of the salvation we have received, to live lives on purpose and with purpose.

We thank you for all that you're doing.

We pray you would continue to move, that you would make Metaturch a bright, bright light in an ever-increasingly dark world.

Show us that we all have work to do as your church.

We all have a ministry on our lives.

I pray we would live that out to your glory.

We pray it all in Jesus' name.

And everyone said, Amen.

Give the Lord a hand.

Thanks so much for listening to the message today.

If this was helpful to you and you want to help us get the word out, you can subscribe to this podcast.

You can rate and review or share it with your friends.

If you want to get connected further with what MetaCurch is doing, you can go online to metachurch.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys and I hope you have a great rest of your day.