Investigating Easter: Keep it 200 with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch 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.

Wanna welcome you in.

If you're new with us, my name's Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at MetaCurch.

We're in a series called Investigating Easter.

This is an Easter series for skeptics.

As Christians, we have some beliefs that we hold, and in a typical sermon, we're almost presupposing those beliefs.

But from time to time at MetaCurch, we go into a series where we're very intentional about giving reasons for the faith that we have.

Maybe you grew up in a religious environment where you never felt like you could ask any difficult questions.

If you did, people would tell you you just need to have more faith and you need to stop questioning God.

And we don't believe in that here.

We believe that God is big.

In fact, he's infinite and he can handle the questions that you have.

And if you will seek those questions, intellectually honest and with humility, that you will find God at the end of those questions.

It dawned on me this morning.

I'm usually a little slow on the holidays, so happy, you know, St.

Patrick's Day.

Um for my 10th anniversary, Katie and I went over to Ireland and we kind of drove around the island.

It's a real small place, especially if you're from the great state of Texas.

Ireland feels really tiny.

And we went to a historical historic site called the Rock of Cashel.

And the legend is that when St.

Patrick came and brought Christianity to Ireland, that it started on the Rock of Cashel, where he converted one of the kings who held a lot of the land in Ireland to Christianity.

And the story goes that Saint Patrick, when he would perform a baptism ceremony, he had a scepter.

And this was like half cane, half sword at the bottom.

And before he would pray, y'all think I'm dramatic sometimes, he would do this really dramatic thing where he would stab it into the ground, you know, and then it had like a cross on top, and then he would pray over people and then he would baptize them.

And so when the king was converting and had confessed his faith in Jesus, Saint Patrick got ready to pray, but first he stabbed it in the ground.

The only problem was the end of the sword went through the king's foot.

The king muffled his own cry, didn't say a word.

Saint Patrick had this long, lengthy prayer afterward.

He removed his scepter.

The king never said a word, walked into the water and got baptized.

Later, someone said, Why didn't you say something?

And the king said, I don't know anything about Christianity.

I thought it was part of the ceremony.

We should ask questions about our faith.

And if someone's not wearing green today, you can step on their toe instead of pinching them, right?

That'd be more in the tradition.

Um, we we should be able to ask these big questions, like, where does this fit and how does this make sense?

And that's what we've been doing in this series.

And we started last week.

If you missed it, you can get caught up at youtube.com slash metachurch.

We started at the beginning, and we saw how the birth of Christ isn't the beginning of the story of Christ, that in John's gospel in the first chapter, he links Christ all the way back to the beginning, that in the beginning Jesus was there, he was with God, and he was God.

And we saw that everyone has one really big problem, whether you're like a hardcore believer or a strident atheist, that no one knows how the universe got here.

The best scientific data from the last 600 years shows us that at one point the universe did not exist.

No space, no time, no matter.

Which means you need a miracle one way or the other, because the universe does exist.

It's almost incomprehensible in its scope.

And so either the universe came out of nothing from nothing, that would be atheism, or the universe came from nothing by means of a timeless, faceless, immaterial, all-powerful creator.

Either way, there was a miracle involved.

Today we're gonna move on and try to understand Jesus as a man.

This is easier said than done because there's never been anyone quite like Jesus.

Some see Jesus as a great human teacher and a philosopher, but just that.

Just a man, one of the most significant people in history.

Others throughout time have seen Jesus as God, spirit, but don't believe he ever took on flesh.

Here's how Paul describes Jesus.

In Colossians 2 9, he said, For the entire fullness of God's nature dwells bodily in Christ.

Paul and the entire Christian scriptures make a very remarkable claim that Jesus was 100% God, and at the same time, Jesus was 100% man.

So, how exactly does that work and why is it so important to our understanding of Easter?

We're going to find out.

And my message today, it's called Keep It 200.

Would you pray with me?

Jesus, we love you and we thank you for your great love for us.

I ask that we would come and just humble ourselves.

Holy Spirit, I do believe you're here and that you're moving and you're impressing on us and you're wanting to speak to us.

God, I thank you for the skeptics in the room and watching online who are willing to engage and wrestle through these really big questions.

And I just pray you would guide our time.

We love you.

We pray all these things in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to keep it 200, say amen.

Amen.

We're gonna go through a litany of scriptures quickly just to show across the New Testament and even some of the Old Testament prophecy that scripture shows Jesus as 100% God and 100% man.

Scripture makes it clear that Jesus was in fact a real human.

We saw last week that in John chapter 1, he says, the word, that's Jesus, became flesh and dwelt among us, became flesh, that's our word, incarnate in the flesh.

John 1 · chapter mention

Galatians 4, 4 says, when the time came to completion, God sent his son born of a woman.

Jesus was birthed into this world, he entered our reality with the same route every single one of us takes.

In Luke 2, 52, Jesus increased in wisdom and stature and in favor with God.

And with people, Jesus grew just like humans do.

His body matured, he was a baby, and then a toddler, and a child, and a preteen, and a teenager, and eventually a man.

In Matthew 4, 2, it says that after he fasted 40 days and 40 nights, and Jesus was hungry.

Jesus was a human, so he got hungry and tired and weary, and he cried and laughed and cracked jokes with his friends.

Hebrews 4:15 says, For we do not have a high priest, speaking of Jesus, who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who's been tempted in every way as we are, and yet without sin.

Hebrews 4:15

It's one of the most comforting verses in the entire Bible to me to know that Jesus, our great high priest, can actually sympathize with my myriad of weaknesses, that he has actually been tempted and tried in all the same ways that I have.

He's not a distant God who stands at arm's length and simply judges based on an experience he hasn't had, but he came into this world as a human and really does understand.

Scripture shows again and again, this is a small sample that Jesus was, in fact, an actual human being.

And at the same time, Scripture confesses Jesus as God.

In John 1, we saw this last week, in the beginning was the word, the logos, the orienting structure of all reality.

And the word was with God, and that word, Jesus, was himself God.

He was with God in the beginning, and all things were created through him, and apart from him, not one thing was created that has been created.

In Colossians 1, it says he is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation.

Everything was created by him in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities, all things have been created through him and for him.

He is before all things, and by him all things hold together.

Even the Old Testament prophecies foretold of the deity of the future Savior.

In Isaiah 9, 6, a child will be born for us, a son will be given to us, that's a human, a child, a son, and the government will be on his shoulders, and he will be named wonderful counselor, mighty God, eternal Father, Prince of Peace.

There are countless other verses that display the unmistakable deity of Jesus, but none are quite as on the nose as when Jesus said of himself in John chapter 10, the Father and I are one.

John 10 · chapter mention

Jesus, 100% God, Jesus, 100% man.

Now, this is a series for the skeptics.

And so, if you are a skeptic, you've probably already spotted the issue.

The majority of what we know about Jesus comes from the New Testament, which is in our Bible.

Now, there are quite a few extra-biblical accounts that place Jesus as a historical figure outside of the Bible, but it still stands the vast majority of what we know we get from the New Testament of the Scripture.

For most skeptics, that completely invalidates the entire conversation, because of course a religious text is going to uphold its founder as some sort of incredible spiritual figure, maybe even some kind of deity.

I mean, just think about all the things the New Testament claims, like that Jesus turned water into wine or multiplied food to feed thousands, or walked on the water on top of the sea, that he healed people who were blind, lame, even lepers, that he raised his friend Lazarus from the dead back to life, and even that Jesus himself died and rose again three days later.

This creates two issues for the skeptic that we have to address if we're gonna even start to understand and appreciate who Jesus might have been and what Easter has to offer us.

Here's the two questions that we're gonna spend a lot of our time tackling today.

Question number one, can we trust the New Testament?

This is where we learn the majority of what we know about Jesus.

Are these reliable documents?

Can we trust them?

And question number two, are miracles possible?

Because if miracles are not at least possible, and the New Testament is full of claims of miracles, then we cannot, in fact, trust them.

And so let's talk first about the New Testament and whether or not it is reliable.

As a young man, I discovered something about the New Testament that completely blew my paradigm apart.

I had always viewed the New Testament and the Bible more broadly as a religious book.

And you know this, there are a lot of other religious books out there.

There's the Quran, the Rigveda, the Analects of Confucius.

A more recent example would be something like the Book of Mormon that started the Latter-day Saints.

These are true religious texts, in that they were written wholly or primarily by one person for the expressed intent of starting or upholding a religion.

One person writing a religious text, propagating the ideas of that text, and starting a religion with them.

For all of my life, and I grew up in church, I put the New Testament of our Bible in that same category.

Now I thought our religious text was true, but I thought it was one of many, and somehow ours was just right and everyone else's were wrong.

But it's worth asking, does the Bible actually fit into that category?

A simple evaluation of what the New Testament actually is answers that question with a resounding no.

There's several reasons for this.

First, there was not an author of the New Testament.

Now, if you're not a believer, you probably know that as Christians, we do believe that God inspired all of the words that are in Scripture.

However, the New Testament was written by at least nine human authors.

Nine different authors who were writing unique documents, and they were not starting a religion with these documents.

Instead, they were chronicling what was already happening inside of a movement that had already begun.

To put it simply, Christianity does not exist because of the Bible.

Christianity does not exist because of the Bible.

The Latter-day Saints exist because of the Book of Mormon.

Islam largely exists because of the Quran.

Christianity is completely unique among world religions in that it was already in full swing when the documents of the New Testament began to be written.

This is a massive break from the rest of the religions, and it's because Christianity didn't start as a religion, it began as an organic movement.

So remember, religions first write their text and then they propagate by force or fear or manipulation.

That is not how we got the documents of the Bible.

As a matter of fact, in the first three centuries, one of the most dangerous things you could possibly be was a follower of Christ.

Just possessing one of the documents of the New Testament, much less copying and disseminating those documents, could put your very life at risk.

Christianity does not exist because of the Bible.

You've heard me say this in the same way you do not exist because of your birth certificate.

Your birth certificate was recording the historical event of your birth.

You didn't even know you're out here making history, right?

We've got a document for it.

The Bible, Christianity rather, does not exist because of the Bible.

The New Testament was documenting a movement that was already moving.

Here's a fact.

Very, very, very astonishingly few things in history are notable enough to be documented, dispersed, and protected through the ages.

In other words, things that happen in history overwhelmingly stay in history.

Most things that happen in history are lost to history.

And we don't even have to go back to ancient history.

There's probably a very small percentage of you who know your great-great-great-great-grandmother's name.

It's just lost to history.

Most things just aren't that notable.

Very few things get recorded, dispersed, and protected.

Jesus was seen as a Jewish rabbi during his earthly ministry.

There were at hundreds, if not thousands, of other Jewish rabbis who were alive during the time of Christ.

Do you know how many other Jewish rabbis during the life of Jesus had books written about them?

Zero.

Because most things that happen in history overwhelmingly stay in history, but not the life of Jesus of Nazareth.

Tiberius Caesar was the emperor of Rome during the time of Christ.

He was the most powerful man on earth.

He's mentioned in only four works in history, and he's barely mentioned in any of them.

Tiberius Caesar was almost lost to history, but not Jesus.

The New Testament also is not one book or one narrative.

It is several categories all telling the same story.

We have the four gospels, these are the historical accounts of the life of Jesus, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

Then you have the history of the early church, which is called the Acts of the Church or the Acts of the Apostles.

After that, you have the epistles.

That word just literally means letters.

These are the letters that the apostles wrote to send back to the churches, the movements that they had started.

There's also prophecy, especially condensed in the book of Revelation.

Let me say it again, these documents were not written to start a religion.

They were written, received, hand copied, and spread like wildfire by a movement that actually believed that God had come to earth, lived a perfect life, died for their sins, and then walked out of a grave.

For over 300 years, these documents were copied and spread and copied and spread and protected and copied and spread.

It wasn't until 350 AD that we had the first organized copy of the New Testament where all of these unique documents were compiled together.

It wasn't until 386 that the Old and New Testament were put together and for the first time ever called the Bible.

That means there were 300 years of Christianity, 300 years of the church without a combined New Testament.

What they had was not a religious text.

What they had were inspired documents, recording, real events that they believed in so much that they would give their life for those beliefs.

The authors of the New Testament did not know they were writing the New Testament.

How do we know this?

We can look at one of our Gospels for some clues.

We're gonna look at the Gospel of Luke.

Now, Luke was unique in a couple of ways.

Number one, he was far more educated than the writers of the other gospels.

He was a doctor by trade, he was incredibly meticulous in his investigation.

Luke also was different because the other authors were Jewish men, and Luke was a Gentile.

He was non-Jewish.

To me, I've always thought if I could just go back to the first century, if I could go back to 35 or 40 AD and just go to all the places where Jesus had traveled and taught and healed people and like investigate and talk to people, and what did you see?

And scripture says there were over 500 eyewitnesses to the resurrected Jesus.

I would want to talk to them, you know.

Like, did you really see him?

And are you sure it was him?

If you've always wanted that, you have it.

It's the gospel of Luke.

That's exactly what this Gentile did.

He traveled everywhere that Jesus went and investigated for years to put together his gospel.

Why did he do it to write a religious text?

He answers that in the first four verses of chapter one.

Luke 1:1, he says, Many have undertaken to compile a narrative about the events that have been fulfilled among us.

Luke 1:1

Number one, he's saying, I'm not the only guy trying to write about Jesus here.

Many have set out to do this.

Like the message of Jesus is going around the world, and what's he writing?

Events that have been fulfilled.

Luke's like, I'm a doctor, I've got some credibility on the line here.

I'm only interested in writing about things that actually happened.

In verse two, he says, just as the original eyewitnesses and servants of the word handed them down to us.

Luke is not writing this a hundred years after the fact.

He is traveling where Jesus traveled and interviewing eyewitnesses to the life of Jesus.

In verse three, he says, It also seemed good to me, since I carefully investigated everything from the very first to write you in an orderly sequence.

He's putting together a historical biography of the life of Jesus.

But why?

To start a religion?

To put together a part of scripture?

The rest of that verse says, to write to you, who's the you, in an orderly sequence, most honorable Theophilus.

We miss this.

Luke is not writing, didn't think he was writing, to Metachurch in the year 2024.

Luke was writing to his friend.

Luke and the authors of the New Testament did not know they were writing the New Testament.

Matthew didn't know it, Mark didn't know it, John didn't know it, Peter and Paul did not know it.

These documents were chosen to be in the Bible 300 years later because they were so valuable.

They were writing what had actually happened, and they were writing for a purpose.

Here's verse 4.

He's writing to his friend so that you may know the certainty of the things about which you've been instructed.

Luke wanted Theophilus, his friend, to be able to investigate the claims of Christianity confident.

That if he did investigate them, he would find that they were valid.

This isn't Muhammad writing the Quran, this isn't Joseph Smith writing the Book of Mormon.

This is a first century doctor doing careful historical investigation and writing the history of what happened.

Now, before we can decide, our first question is can we trust the New Testament?

We first have to know what the New Testament is.

It's not a religious text, it's documentation from the first century and a movement that was started by people who genuinely believed that Jesus Christ of Nazareth walked out of an empty tomb.

So now we ask, can we trust them?

These documents are close to 2,000 years old, most of them, they're written a very long time ago.

And it can get difficult because in a court of law, the way we tell if something is true or not is broadly two things evidence and eyewitness.

We don't have any living eyewitnesses to the events of Jesus because this was 2,000 years ago.

And the evidence we have is ancient evidence, and the text that we have in these documents is ancient literature.

And so the question becomes how do not Christians, but secular literary analysis, how do they determine whether we can trust ancient documents?

This is something called forensic literary analysis.

In virtually all cases in the ancient world, you do not have the original manuscripts that were written.

And so what you do is you discover as many copies as you possibly can.

There are three things that you're looking for to establish confidence in ancient text.

It can be said simply like this: how early, how many, and how much corroboration?

How early, how many, and how much corroboration?

It's actually quite simple.

You want to see how early your oldest manuscripts are.

How close to the actual events did they happen?

For most things in the ancient world, they're somewhere between 100 and 1,000 years removed.

That's typical.

How early are your manuscripts?

Number two, how many do you have?

This is simple math.

The more documents you have, the more you can verify across those documents that they're all telling the same story, the more confidence you can build.

And third, how much corroboration do you have?

Other documents and authors telling the same stories, painting the same picture, you want to see them holding the same timelines, eyewitness testimony, other historical documents placing key characters, events in the same time frame, as well as things like archaeological evidence verifying claims to make a big difference.

You can fact-check me on your own time, but here's what you need to know.

The New Testament has earlier documentation, has more documentation, more eyewitness testimony, and greater historical, archaeological, and geographical corroboration than anything else in ancient history without exception, and nothing else even comes close.

By the secular standards for the forensic analysis of ancient works, nothing can be verified like the documents of the New Testament can be verified.

Here's a chart of the most verified works of antiquity and how they stack up against the Bible.

The two last columns are what you're gonna want to pay a lot of attention to because this tells us how early from the events do we have documents attesting to those events.

If you look at second place, it's Homer's Iliad, the closest to it is 400 years later.

You get down to Aristotle's writing, the closest is 1,200 years later.

That's how early, nothing is close to the New Testament.

Then you ask, how many?

You look down at Caesar's Gaelic Wars, there's 251 total copies that have been discovered.

In second place, the Iliad has a little over 1,700, and then you get to the New Testament.

How many copies are there?

Over 25,000 copies of manuscripts from the New Testament documents.

Why are there so many?

There are so many.

Because people were convinced that they were copying and disseminating and protecting the most important event in human history.

To say it simply, if we cannot trust the New Testament documents, then by the standards of ancient literary criticism, we can trust nothing from the ancient world.

Can we trust the New Testament?

When we understand what it is, it breaks our paradigm of just seeing it as another religious text.

And since it's not just another religious text, it's ancient documents recording an event, we can look at how we assess the veracity of ancient documents and find that it stands out among all ancient literary documents with the most corroboration possible.

However, although it passes that test with flying colors, you also know the New Testament makes claims of the supernatural.

Lots of stories of lots of miracles.

And so the second question remains: are miracles possible?

Because if it can be proven that miracles are impossible, then it throws out the rest of what the New Testament documents.

The most well-known argument against miracles was put forth by a philosopher all the way back in the 18th century.

You may have heard of him, his name is David Hume.

I cannot overstate how much power this argument has been given.

As a matter of fact, many atheists will say out loud they don't even have to deal with the issue of miracles because Hume put it to rest almost 300 years ago.

Millions of people have been led to discount the possibility of miracles because of the argument that Hume put forth.

So let's look at the best argument in history against miracles and see if it has any weaknesses.

According to Hume, the evidence in favor of a miracle, even when it's provided by the strongest possible testimony, will always be outweighed by the evidence for the law of nature, which is supposed to have been violated.

Let's talk about how to define a miracle.

A miracle is a highly improbable event, that's what makes it miraculous, that violates the natural laws that govern our world.

A highly improbable event that violates the consistent natural laws that govern our world.

Let's see if we can track down the problem in Hume's argument.

Here's his argument in simplest form.

He says the uniformity of natural laws and the inherent improbability of miracles make it more reasonable to reject miracle claims than to accept them.

Hume's position was: no matter how credible the testimony, anyone who is claiming a miracle should be rejected because of how improbable it is and because it violates the natural laws.

You may not see it yet, but there is a serious flaw in this argument.

Let's look at the miracle definition again.

A miracle is a highly improbable event that violates the consistent natural laws that govern our universe.

What Hume's doing is making a sophomore level mistake, two mistakes, when it comes to logic and reason.

The first is he's begging the question, which means in his argument, he's assuming the answer.

And because he's begging the question, he is also reasoning in a circle.

And circular reasoning is poor reasoning.

Let me give you an example of what he's doing.

Let's say I don't believe in the existence of elephants.

And you're trying to argue with me that elephants do, in fact, exist.

And so I put forward an argument that says elephants cannot exist.

Because if they did, there would be an animal that weighs two tons with a long trunk and floppy ears.

You see, the problem with that is I'm begging the question, I'm already assuming I'm right, and my logic is circular.

The argument I just made is actually I don't believe in elephants.

Because if elephants exist, elephants would exist.

It's just not a good argument.

Why does Hume say miracles are impossible?

Because they're improbable and they violate the laws of nature.

But that's the definition of a miracle.

In other words, Hume's argument is miracles do not exist.

Because if they did, they would be miracles.

I cannot tell you the countless people who have walked away from the claims of Christ because of an argument put forth in the 18th century that has been given insurmountable weight that couldn't even pass a sophomore level logic exam.

Begging the question and circular argument.

Let me show you my cards for the skeptics in the room and online.

I am not saying that miracles are highly probable.

By definition, they're highly improbable, but that's what makes them miraculous, not mundane.

However, in the history of philosophy, the best argument we have to try and disprove the possibility of miracles falls cosmically short.

In fact, it's an argument that doesn't make an argument at all.

I can't prove to you, probably in this moment, that miracles are real or they do exist, but I can't tell you no one has proven that miracles are impossible.

And let me remind you, if you were here in week one, we all need at least one miracle.

Because at one point, if you rewind the tape, this universe doesn't exist, and now it does.

Either the miracle, the universe leapt into existence out of nothing from nothing, a miracle, or the universe came into existence out of nothing from a timeless, faceless, immaterial, all-powerful creator.

Also a miracle.

So where are we left?

Both biblical and extra-biblical, archaeological and eyewitness testimony tells us that a man from Nazareth named Jesus lived in the first century.

He traveled for three years, teaching, preaching, healing, and casting out demons.

After three years, he was arrested and crucified outside of Jerusalem.

Hundreds of eyewitnesses claimed that they saw him three days later.

These people dedicated their lives to trusting him as God and traveling the world, encouraging others to do the same.

Over the years, dozens of these eyewitnesses would unwaveringly give their lives to hold on to their belief that a Nazarene carpenter that they had known had died and actually come back to life.

This belief started a movement that we're still a part of 2,000 years later.

In the first century of this movement, people documented it.

Church planters wrote letters to instruct their churches.

Prophecy was given about the future.

All of this became the New Testament of our Bible, or what we call the Christian scriptures.

And so who was Jesus?

Scriptures tell us that he was a man.

He ate, drank, slept, cried, worked, napped.

Scriptures tell us that he was God.

And the power of God was revealed through his words, his miracles, his life, death, and resurrection.

Jesus, 100% God and 100% man.

I do believe we can trust the New Testament and that miracles are possible, especially if the God who created the universe stepped down into it.

And so why does it matter that Jesus was 200% all God and all man?

Scripture tells us that our sin separates us from God.

God is perfect, he cannot dwell in the presence of sin.

Because we go against him and fall short of his standard, we're estranged from him.

In the Old Testament, the way that man would stay in right relationship with God is every year they would offer sacrifices.

And man had to initiate those sacrifices because we have this small role to play in this reconciliation.

However, the reconciliation was temporary because we would go on sinning.

And we'd make sacrifices and we'd go on sinning.

And we'd make sacrifices and we'd go on sinning.

And Jesus came to do away with sin once and for all.

However, it's our sin.

It required a human to initiate the sacrifice for humanity.

Hebrews chapter 2 tells us this.

Hebrews 2 · chapter mention

It says, now since the children, that's us, have flesh and blood in common, Jesus also shared in these.

He also put on flesh and blood.

Here's why.

So that through his death he might destroy the one holding the power of death, that is, the devil, and free those who were held in slavery all their lives by the fear of death.

It required a human to pay for the sins of humanity.

However, in order to not have to pay again and sin again and pay again and sin again and pay again and sin again, it required a God to become the perfect sacrifice.

Here's where we started, Colossians 2 9, for the entire fullness of God's nature dwells bodily in Christ.

And when you were dead in your trespasses and in the uncircumcision of your flesh, he made you alive with him.

And he forgave all of our trespasses, all the wrongs you've done, the mistakes you've made, all the times you've missed the mark, transgressed and gone too far, all the people you've hurt, the relationships you've damaged, everything you've done against a holy God.

He forgave all of it.

How did he do it?

He erased your certificate of debt with its obligations that was against you and opposed to you.

How?

He's taken it away by nailing it to the cross.

100% man, 100% God, human because humanity had to play a role in the reconciliation between us and God.

Fully God, because only God could give a perfect sacrifice.

And here's the craziest part.

Jesus not only came as our high priest to offer the sacrifice, he also came as the Lamb of God to be sacrificed.

And he says, now you have no work to do.

All you need is faith.

John 3, 16 says that God loved the world so much that he gave his only son so that everyone simply believed in him.

Jesus did not come to make a down payment so that you could work off the rest.

Jesus paid it all.

He came and did all of the work and gave the fullness of sacrifice once and for all to rid us of sin.

And all he asks of us is to put our trust in him.

When we do, we are moved from spiritual death into spiritual life.

We are brought back into relationship with our Heavenly Father, and we can live with confidence that we will spend eternity with him.

Right where you're at, if you'd bow your head and close your eyes, nothing magic about it, just create some space for you and for the people around you.

And I wonder if there are some here, some who are with us online, who have struggled with some of this.

Struggled with seeing the New Testament as just another religious text, just some more dogma to try and follow.

Maybe you've struggled with the idea of miracles.

Maybe for the first time you're beginning to see that while improbable, if there is a God and He does love us and He did come to this earth, miracles are more than possible.

Maybe you're beginning to see that the scriptures that we follow are not just another religious book written to start another religion there, cataloging, describing, instructing, a movement that was started.

Not by somebody who just got a revelation from the stars or had some magic moment from a man who claimed to be God.

And to prove it, he called his own shot, told his followers we're going to Jerusalem, they will kill me.

Three days later, I'll be back.

His followers thought it was a metaphor.

But then they saw him on a cross.

And they knew where his grave was.

And three days later, they saw him again.

They believed in it so much, almost every one of them would give their lives to hold on to their faith.

And so maybe you're here and God's been showing up to you in your life.

You don't have an answer to the question of what comes after I die.

Maybe you have been unchurched or de-churched, maybe you've been hurt by religion.

Maybe you grew up in the church, but you've never had a personal relationship with Jesus.

Jesus died so that you could live.

He hung on a cross so you would never again have to question how valued you are, how much you are worth, how deeply God loves you.

If you're here today and you've never had a moment in time where you have put your faith in Jesus, and today you are ready to make that decision, with everyone's heads bowed and eyes closed, I want to ask for a moment of courage for you to just lift your hand up where I can see it.

If you're ready today, amen.

If you're ready today, I'm ready to put my faith in Jesus.

Amen.

God sees you, he sees your faith.

We're gonna acknowledge that faith together.

Let's pray this.

Jesus, today I choose to put my faith in you.

I thank you for loving me.

I ask that you forgive my sins.

I believe you are God that you came to earth, died for my sins, and I believe you rose again.

Today I thank you for a new eternal life.

Let me pray over you, Jesus.

We thank you for your children coming home, putting their faith in you.

We believe that they are now a new creation.

God, that they would allow today to be day one of a new life, walking that out, taking next steps, and seeking to fully realize what it means to live a life on purpose and with purpose, following after you, Jesus.

We love you.

We thank you, Holy Spirit, for how you're moving, and we celebrate with you all that you're doing.

We pray it in your name.

And everyone said, Amen.

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.