Know God with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the Medicurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at Medicurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time to get alive.

That God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

I want to welcome you guys in.

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

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

We are in the sixth and final week of our Know God series.

I'm going to get to my sermon in just a moment, but uh want to kind of circle in on where we ended things last week.

Uh we decided that we were going to really try and step up and do something tangible for the families in Uvaldi and that any money that came in over the last week, including Sunday's offering, that we would send all of it down.

And so you probably don't know this because why would you know it?

But uh in the church world, we kind of know how money moves across weekends on first and third weekends.

It's usually our biggest offerings because that's when we all get paid, and then second and fourth weekends are kind of normally a little bit down.

And then every once in a while, you may not know this, but last Sunday was a fifth weekend, and fifth weekends can be kind of low offerings because everyone's like, again, like another Sunday in the month, and so it's not always the highest offering, and I really encourage you guys to try and knock it out of the park because it was going directly uh to the cause in Uvaldi.

And uh I am so happy to say y'all did that last week y'all gave sixteen thousand eight hundred forty-seven dollars and thirty cents.

Yeah.

Uh that is a great offering.

We're we're gonna round that up to 17,000.

And the other thing I shared, you know, we're really big on transparency here, is just let you guys know last Sunday that we hadn't actually decided how we were gonna get that money down there or what organization we were gonna go with.

You may or may not know this, but when tragedy strikes, so do con artists.

Every time something like this happens, there's millions of dollars that go unaccounted for.

So we wanted to make sure our money counted.

We didn't know exactly how to do that.

So while we were investigating and praying about that, before I left the building last Sunday, I got a text message from a close friend of MetaCurch, Dr.

Christine Wong, her husband Lee Wong, Pastor Lee, comes and preaches for us sometimes.

Uh, she wanted to connect me with someone who is on the ground in a mission critical role, and so now we have someone to facilitate this money that we all came together to give.

We will be able to account for every cent that goes down there.

So God just showed up in big ways, and you guys showed up in big ways, and with those things coming together, we're very excited to take this first step, hopefully, one of many of finding tangible ways to serve uh our brothers and sisters just right down the road in U Bauti.

So thank you guys again uh for all that you did there, and uh I am confident this is gonna go a long way.

We are in a series, and if you're just jumping in with us, we've been asking like the most basic core questions of our faith, like, does God actually exist?

And is Jesus' resurrection reasonable?

And what about all the objections that people have to faith in God?

And it's been kind of a dense series.

There's been a lot of information.

Uh, we've been preaching on Sundays and then Wednesdays we've had overtime, where there's even more content that we've streamed on YouTube and on our Facebook page.

You can get fully caught up on all of the content at metachurch.tv slash know God.

That's metachurch.tv slash K N O W G O D.

Um, all the content we've put out is on there and uh could be helpful for you.

Also, if you know people who are wrestling with these questions, that is a website, kind of a one-stop shop where you can send to them and encourage them to get caught up.

What we're gonna do today is a little bit step outside of the arguments that we've been making, scientific, historical, philosophical, cosmological arguments, and get down really to the root of the root issue of whether or not we can, in fact, know God.

That is my message today.

It is know God.

Would you pray with me?

God, we love you and we thank you for loving us.

Uh, we are here, different people across all different parts of our faith journey.

God, I thank you for a place like Metachurch, uh, somewhere where they can come and anyone can come and belong, even if they don't believe exactly what we believe.

I thank you for those who are tuning in online or watching this back on an archive.

I pray that you would help us to do what sometimes is the most difficult thing, which is just to be brutally honest with ourselves.

And in doing so, brutally honest with you today.

We love you.

And we pray these things in Jesus' name.

And everyone said?

Amen.

I want to talk about presuppositions.

Uh, this is something that you suppose before you ever even get into a conversation or an argument.

It's just something that you already hold as truth.

And it's important with all of these conversations we've been having in this series and the deep arguments that we've really tried to dig into, because something that atheists will accuse Christians of very often, and we've earned the accusation, is that we only argue with presuppositions in mind.

And here's what that means.

As a Christian, by definition, you do believe in God.

Like you're actually convinced of God's existence, that you do believe in Jesus, that he's God in human flesh, died on a cross, rose again, ascended to heaven, is coming back someday.

You believe that the Holy Spirit indwells the life of every believer.

You believe that the word of God, the written word of God, the documents that we have in our scripture, that they're inspired and infallible and inerrant.

And so, for years and years, hundreds of years, when Christians would argue for the Christian faith, they would argue from a position of presupposition.

And what that means is I already believe these things, so you should too.

And so you'll often hear Christians argue with atheists, and they'll say, Well, but don't you know the Bible says?

Well, don't you know that Jesus, and don't you know the Bible, and Jesus in the Bible?

And the problem is the person they're arguing with doesn't believe in those things, right?

That's why you're having the conversation.

And so, you know, that can feel a little bit offensive, but to be fair, you know, every once in a while a Latter-day Saint will come and knock on my door, the nicest people in the world, and and when we get into conversations, and the the hard thing is when they knock on my door, they're kind of unaware of whose door they're knocking on.

I'm ready for the conversation, I'm excited, and and so you know, they come in and we eat dinner and we dig into, and and and the problem is they will cite the Book of Mormon because they presuppose that it's true.

But I've really studied the Book of Mormon and I'm not convinced by it.

So they're leveraging a presupposed authority that I don't believe in.

And often as Christians, when we are talking to non-Christians, agnostics and atheists, we are trying to leverage something that we believe in, but it holds no weight in their life.

That's called presuppositional apologetics.

We learn in week one apologetics is a defense of our faith.

And so what happened is about 40 or 50 years ago, some very intelligent Christian scholars started figuring out how to do apologetics, give a defense of our faith without the presuppositions of the faith.

Can we actually go and start with science, with history, with philosophy, with logic, with cosmology?

Can we start at those places and still build a case for God?

Still build a case for the resurrection of Jesus?

And what they found is exactly what you would think you should find if our God actually does exist.

If God does exist and he's the creator of all things, then he should be found at the cornerstone of science, history, philosophy, logic, the natural law, the created order.

We shouldn't shy away from those things because God would have created all of those things.

And so we have some incredible apologet uh apologists throughout the years, like Norman Geisler and William Lane Craig and Frank Turek and many others who were really inspirational on this series that we put together.

And what we try to do in this series, especially the first couple of weeks, is to come without our presuppositions.

Now you guys know this, and I actually do believe in God.

I actually believe in Jesus, I believe the whole thing's real, I believe in the Holy Spirit, I believe in eternity, and that's where I'm headed, I believe all of those things.

And so it's kind of difficult because you can't help but for that to come out a little bit.

It is what I believe.

But especially in the first two weeks, we didn't make arguments out of the Bible.

We made arguments that in turn were biblical.

But that is a big difference.

We started with science, we started with philosophy.

I didn't really quote the Bible much.

If you go back to the first two weeks, what I quoted more than anything was atheists, philosophers, and known atheist thinkers in their own words.

Here's where it gets interesting.

For years and years, centuries on end, atheists and agnostics have pointed at Christians, rightly so, and said, you're bringing your presuppositions into the argument.

But we learned in week one of this series, it is not just the Christians, it's not just the religious who have faith.

Everyone's worldview requires faith.

And the same way that for years and years Christians brought their presuppositions to the arguments, so have the atheists.

And we've seen some of these.

Like a consistent atheist must be a materialist or a naturalist, which means the only thing that really exists is what is physical, what is tangible, what you can empirically study through the scientific process.

That means there's no room for anything supernatural, there's no room for anything metaphysical beyond the physical or beyond the natural.

It's really interesting.

I've watched hundreds of hours of debates between the top Christians and top atheists.

I've read most all of the books that both sides have put out.

And here's what you will find over and over again.

You will find the atheist pointing at the Christian and saying, You Christians are so close-minded, which is a really interesting claim.

Because on one hand, you have the Christian who is open to both the material, natural, scientific world and the supernatural world.

On the other hand, you have the atheist in the debate who presupposes before the debate starts that nothing supernatural can be.

Everyone brings in their presuppositions.

And it really gets difficult, and we've talked a lot about this, so I'm not just gonna go through the whole series again.

But one of the things we found is there has to be more than the material.

There is metaphysical reality beyond the physical.

Because that's what thoughts are, that's what the laws of reason, the laws of logic, the laws of science and mathematics.

You can't find the laws of logic under a microscope, their metaphysical properties.

That's what your consciousness is, that's what your dreams are, that's what the future is, metaphysical.

And so they bring in their presuppositions.

And both sides do this.

And both sides require faith for their worldview.

Here's what I want to do today.

I want to move even deeper than that.

Because what I have found, and it's not true in every circumstance, but in the vast, vast majority of circumstances, people who end up in the agnostic or atheist camp have a presupposition that is below even all their other presuppositions.

They have a starting place, and we can track where it comes from and how it takes root, and it causes them to close themselves off to what might be the most important reality of all.

This is highlighted by many atheists.

I mean, the number of quotes I could choose from were almost endless if you read the writings, especially of the new atheists.

Here's the one I chose.

Thomas Nagel, who's a professor at NYU, he's a self-proclaimed atheist, he wrote a book called The Last Word, which is really a defense of atheism in its truest form.

This is what he said in his book.

I want atheism to be true.

And I'm made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers.

Now notice, he is made uncomfortable not because he knows that he knows that atheism is true, but because he wants it to be true.

It is not something rooted empirically, it's something rooted in a desire.

He goes on to say, it isn't just that I don't believe in God and naturally hope that I'm right in my belief.

It's that I hope there is no God.

I don't want there to be a God.

I don't want the universe to be like that.

This is the kind of ruthless, vulnerable honesty that I am really searching for today.

And look, there are a lot of things you could do with your Sunday morning.

And if we're not gonna come in here and be real and be honest and like have a real conversation, there's probably better uses of your time.

But if we can really, really get honest, then there are some of us, and some who've been watching the series online, some of you who got drugged here by your boyfriend or girlfriend or by your parents, and every argument we've made in this series for the existence of God, you have greeted that argument like this.

And all the points, as valid or invalid as you might find them, you didn't dig in, you didn't even really receive them, you weren't willing to test them against the best evidences that are out there, you just met them with a sigh, a shrug, and a roll of the eyes.

Your mind is already made up.

Here's what I want to talk about today.

I want to talk about the difference between I don't believe versus I don't want to believe.

Here's what I am suggesting.

That at the core presupposition, many, many, most people who have rejected the idea of God started not from the position of I don't believe, but from the position of I don't want to believe.

Thomas Nagel, this quote that I pulled, this does not make him unusual.

If you read Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, what you will find over and over and over again is not only that they have built arguments opposed to the existence of God, but their starting place is they don't want to believe in God.

Almost every one of the famous atheists that are out there debating Christians have been asked many times over, is there anything that God could do to convince you that He is actually real?

And most of these atheists will say no.

Well, what if God wrote a message to you with your name in the sky, signed it, God, would you then believe?

And they say, No.

I would search for the naturalistic explanation.

I have presupposed that God does not exist.

And what I want to suggest is before that presupposition was a desire for God not to exist.

And I know this personally.

People don't want God to exist because of bad Christians, because of bad theology, and because of bad life experiences.

Bad Christians, bad theology, and bad life experiences.

Let's take those apart for a minute because many people decide they don't want to be a part of what God is or might be because of the people on earth who claim to represent God.

Bad experiences with bad Christians.

Now let's go a layer deeper and just acknowledge and admit we're all bad Christians, okay?

None of us are out there living perfectly, none of us are shooting a thousand percent.

It just doesn't happen.

And so, you know, I don't know how open you are with your faith.

My hope would be that it'd be something you embrace and that you're proud of and that you let people know about in the right way and at the right times.

But there is a real danger in that because we are broken people.

That's like the starting place when we planted Metachurch.

We are a movement of jacked up ordinary people, and yet we have the extraordinary power of the Spirit of God inside of us, the extraordinary purpose of being a part of the movement of Jesus in front of us, the extraordinary promise of God in eternity on the other side of this life.

We are so full of power and purpose and potential, and yet so often we live in our flesh and we live and we sin, man.

We get things wrong, and like who knows what happened in your morning and what you and your husband were fighting about or how disrespectful your kids were, but you got to your office and punished everybody in there.

And so, I mean, there's some real pressure, you know, because you're the office Christian, and now you came in and you were a jerk to everybody, and now someone in the room has taken one smaller turn to I don't want to believe in God.

God calls us his ambassadors on the earth.

You know, this is why we put a lot of energy into helping people get to the point of meeting Jesus, trusting in Jesus.

But we don't stop there.

We're jacked up, but we're moving.

We're jacked up, but we're growing.

We're jacked up, but we are maturing.

We're not the same we were yesterday or last year.

We're on a path, we're becoming more and more like our leader, Jesus.

That's a high cost because you know Jesus always put others before himself, and that's not a whole lot of fun.

And Jesus always sacrificed on behalf of others, and that can be really inconvenient sometimes.

And so here's the thing: we're all jacked up.

We all have days where we're bad Christians.

And it actually doesn't mean that just because you had a bad day at work and took it out on everybody, that you've completely lost the game, that you just assured that someone will never walk through the doors of meta church.

Because God is so good and the world is so upside down that you can actually take a bad day as a Christian and turn it into a net positive if you're willing to do what Jesus would have you do, humble yourself, apologize, and make amends with people.

You know, the world doesn't usually do that.

That's like a unique Christian characteristic that has seeped into the world and become a value we all hold.

So you can be uh have a bad day and not be a bad Christian.

But there are people who are out there and you know them.

And they claim the name of Jesus louder than anyone else, and yet they are more judgmental, more hateful.

They are online picking fights with everyone they can get their hands on, and some of you have been inconvenienced and frustrated by people who claim the name Jesus, and others have had your lives turned upside down by them.

Some of you have had people who stood on platforms like this and had spiritual authority in the movement of Jesus and who use that to abuse you or manipulate you, or even worse.

Many people decide that they don't want to believe in God because it's like uh I think Gandhi said, I really like Christ, I just don't love the Christians.

Most people are pretty okay with Jesus, they just keep having bad experience with Jesus followers.

This is why this matters.

It why it's why a movement of God that is just real people who are going to be real, who are not gonna try to be the super spiritual elite and hold it over everyone and judge everyone, who can actually integrate Jesus into our real lives and allow our light to shine before the world that is so filled with darkness.

That is why a place like Metachurch and a movement like your movement actually matters because people are deciding, not that they don't believe, they don't want to believe.

People don't want to believe because of bad Christians and because of bad theology.

A lot of people are preaching about a God that doesn't exist.

We sought to prove theism in week one or at least make some arguments for the existence of a God.

And then we dug deeper and deeper into the characteristics that God would have, and then we saw the fulfillment of that God in human flesh in Jesus Christ, as affirmed by his resurrection in week two, and and so the life of Jesus is the fulfillment of who our God is like.

If you want to know what God is like, look at the life of Jesus.

And a lot of people are preaching some wild versions of God out there.

Around Easter, we talked about angry God, you know?

The God who is like up there, nice beard, hasn't missed a day of CrossFit in centuries, you know.

He's jacked, his favorite pastime is just lightning throwing, you know.

He can't wait for you to screw something up so he can strike you down.

And it's like, yes, God is just.

And God's wrath is expressed against sin.

And that's scripture, we don't need to try to hide that.

But when it's not balanced out by the rest of who God is, that God alone, angry God, that God doesn't exist.

It's like, well, I quit believing in God because he's so angry all the time and he hates everyone, he hates all the marginalized groups.

It's like, good, you were believing in a God that didn't exist in the first place.

Some people like uh Oprah God, you know, prosperity God.

You get a car, you get a car, you get a car God, you know.

If you're not healthy, wealthy, blessed, famous on Instagram, if you're not, you just don't have enough faith.

Or you're probably not giving enough to the church, you know.

It's like that God that we push for, who his Ultimate goal for your life isn't to unleash your purpose and spread the gospel to the ends of the earth.

His ultimate goal for your life is whatever your goal is for your life.

That God doesn't exist.

People quit believing in that God is the wrong God in the first place.

We have all of these gods that people are pushing and propagating for their own self-interest.

And people leave, they leave the idea of God or the pursuit of the truth of God altogether because they were fed bad theology, usually by bad Christians.

And the third reason that people don't want to believe in God is because of bad life experiences.

We talked about this in week three.

If God is good, then why does he allow bad things to happen?

If God is all good and he's all powerful, why is there so much suffering, so much evil, so much pain in the world?

And so people maybe even are inclined to believe in God, some kind of God, in their youth.

But then when their parents didn't stay together, and then their marriage fell apart, and then they didn't get the degree that they thought they were gonna get, and then they're behind in their career, and then they're underwater financially, and then they can't seem to hold any friends, and then addictions overcome and overrun their life.

It's like how many things have to go wrong before you're like, if there's a God, I would rather not even know about them.

I would rather there not be a God who is watching all of this happen and just passively standing by.

There's probably no other reason that's greater than that in our world today of why people don't want to believe.

This is such a core presupposition for people who have walked away from faith or never considered faith that many people don't even know that's where they started.

Many people really think they started with, I don't believe.

And the burden of proof is on you at that point.

You are making an affirmative claim there is no God.

That means you've really done the work.

Like you have gone completely open-minded, fair and balanced, you have dug in scientifically, historically, biologically, philosophically, physiologically, cosmologically.

You have searched for the answers.

You've read the books, you've gone down that path looking for truth, and you've become convinced that God doesn't exist.

And the truth is, very, very, very marginally few people actually take that path.

Most people decide at some level, even subconsciously, they don't want to believe.

And the problem is that's not a good enough excuse.

When your religious grandma or your uncle or your whoever is like, you're not going to church anymore?

You're you don't believe in God anymore.

I don't want to believe in him, isn't a good enough excuse.

And so, look, whatever you want to believe in, you can find some arguments for it.

If you want the earth to be flat, give me three minutes on YouTube and I can set some arguments for you.

Whatever you want to believe, you can find some talking points around.

And that's what we are.

We're talking point culture, clickbait culture.

We go on and we get in our tool belts enough one-liners, enough little arguments, enough if God is good, then why does two-thirds of the world only live on a dollar a day?

We get enough of those in our belt to keep the religious people in our life at bay so that we can live the life we want to live a life without God.

Blaise Pascal, he's a pretty incredible historical figure.

In the 17th century, he was a mathematician, a physicist, a philosopher.

He wrote some incredible works.

He said this: people almost invariably arrive at their beliefs not on the basis of proof, but on the basis of what they find attractive.

He said that in the 17th century.

He said that before Twitter, okay?

It's exponentially worse today.

There's a graph.

I I thought of it last sermon.

I wish I would have put it in my message.

There's a graph and it goes like this.

And it measures confidence and experience.

And it looks like this.

Confidence, no confidence.

And what it shows is the people who are most confident in any given subject area are the people who know just enough to be dangerous.

They've read the first half of one book about it.

And what happens is the more you learn, the more you realize you don't know.

And so the question really of my message today is when you think about your life, the maybe 70, 80, maybe 90 years that you get on earth, your one life to live.

Is that life valuable enough for you to actually do the work, spend the time, and put the energy forward to see what you actually believe?

Not the talking points, not the clickbait, not a couple of YouTube videos.

Really seeking out what the truth is.

And here's the issue: you need to know this.

You live in a culture who no longer values truth as the highest good.

We are not a culture, we're not a society that is seeking out truth.

We are seeking out happiness.

We want to be happy, we want to live the life we want to live, and you don't really get to speak into it.

And nothing says this more than one of the most famous sayings of the last 10 years.

You know, I'm just trying to live my truth.

If you all get your own truths, then we are moments away from chaos.

You don't get your own truth.

I'm just trying to live my truth.

When do people say that?

People say, I'm just trying to live my own truth when they are trying to live apart from what is actually the best for them.

The people who love them, who are pointing them in the right direction, who are trying to get them to their actual life purpose.

Oh, everyone's always hating on me.

I'm just trying to live out my truth.

You don't get your own truth.

There is truth.

We all share it.

And for most of human history, people were trying to discover truth and understand truth, and no longer.

Now we want our own truth because if I can make up my own truth, I have myself convinced that I can make up my own happiness.

We're on a search for happiness, and yet the more we try to pursue happiness as a culture, the higher the suicide rate climbs.

The higher percentage of our country is on antidepressants.

The less people are even bothering to get married while at the same time the divorce rate stays sky high.

Pursuing our own truth and pursuing our own happiness has left us more miserable, more depressed, and more divided than ever.

Maybe there is something more to light that is the truth.

People don't want to believe in God, but what about the actual God, the God of the Bible, the God of scriptures, as revealed through Jesus Christ?

Why don't people want to believe?

I want to suggest two reasons.

Number one is that if there is a God, then I am guilty.

Nobody wants to feel guilty.

This is one of the first impulses that you learn as a kid.

Isn't it weird you don't have to teach your kid how to lie?

You don't have to walk them through it like here's the deal.

When you do something bad, I'm gonna come in and ask you, you know, did you take the last cookie?

And then what you're gonna do is this thing called lying.

Okay, this is how it works.

You're gonna make up a story, you don't have to teach your kid that.

The word sin in the Greek is an archery term, it's the Greek word amateria, and it means to miss the mark, to miss the mark.

God's glorious standard.

We've all sinned, we all fall short, we all miss the mark on God's glorious standard.

If there is a God, there is a standard outside of us, and when we miss that standard, we are in sin.

We have fallen short.

If there is no God, you know, you made some mistakes.

Yeah, I mean, you're not perfect, I guess.

You were young, everyone was doing it.

If there is no God, there is no guilt.

And in our minds, what a great world.

No guilt.

You mean I don't have to feel bad, I don't have to have the pain of conscience whenever I want to do what I want to do when I want to do it.

If there's a God, you're guilty.

Not just mistakes, sin, transgression, going beyond the bounds, beyond the scope of what God allows for your life.

If there's a God, there's a standard.

If there's a standard, then we're guilty and we don't love this.

And more and more, we talked about in the series, people are saying there is no objective standard.

Consistent atheism believes, has to believe in subjective morality.

Everything's relative.

There isn't actually one standard of right, wrong, good, bad, and evil.

And so morality works by consensus.

And on that view, you can't really say that slavery was wrong.

At one point in America, more people believed in it than didn't.

It's morality by consensus.

Relativistic, subjective morality says, I can live my life however I want, and you can't say anything about it.

You can't say right, wrong, good, or bad.

There is no God, which means we're all God.

The standard is within us.

So it changes, it moves from culture to culture from time to time.

And yeah, we don't actually believe that.

You know, that's a fine view if you're the plantation owner.

It's not a great view if you're the slave.

It's it's a fine view, I guess, if you're one of the Nazis.

It doesn't work so well if you're a Jew living in Germany in the 1940s.

This is this is what happens when you become the victim.

If you actually claim there is no God, there is no standard, there is no morality, wait till you're the victim.

Wait until you're wronged, wait until you're abused, wait until it comes knocking on your door, all of a sudden, you will be very crystal clear that there is actually right, wrong, good, bad, and evil.

And if there is, if there is a standard outside of us, that standard is God, and if there is a God, we are guilty.

If there is a God, I am guilty, and because I am guilty, I am held accountable.

No one wants to be accountable.

These are good reasons to not want there to be a God.

No one wants to be held accountable, and yet we know in our lived experience, if you if you have any experience in the workforce, you know this.

People cannot thrive if they are not held accountable.

If you have coworkers who have no accountability over them, the countdown has begun to chaos.

You will end up doing all of their work, there will be no consequence for them, they will never achieve their potential.

We all need accountability.

Your children need accountability.

Odds are that if your children are out of control, if you have kids that you can't stand being around, they need more accountability.

That's how that works.

They have to have accountability to thrive.

That's why when you and your hubby finally get away for a week and ship them off to grandma and grandpa, just know and don't be surprised when you get back, they will be the worst they've ever been.

They win a week of no accountability.

They stay up however late they want and eat however much sugar they want.

There's no rules.

We need rules, we need accountability.

And sin brings with it the ultimate accountability.

Romans 6.23 says that the wages of sin, what we earn from our sin, what we have bought with our sin, the wages of sin, is death and not just physical death, but the kind of death that comes from being eternally separated from God, and all that is good.

If there is a God, I am guilty and I am accountable.

And so let me say something that may strike you as counterintuitive, but if you've decided not to believe in God for those reasons, you see, following Jesus will cost you.

Jesus said that.

Everyone's like, okay, I'm ready.

Get my notes out.

Take up your cross, pick up your instrument of torture, and march to your death with me.

Following Jesus will cost you.

It will cost you time, it will cost you energy, it will cost you money.

Following Jesus will cost you, being a part of the movement of Jesus, not passively attending a church service, actually moving with Jesus will cost you.

Jesus said, before you follow me, count the cost.

That's good advice.

Is it actually worth it?

If that's why you don't want to follow, you're like, I'm fine putting people ahead of me every once in a while, but most of the time I'm gonna do me, I'm gonna live for me, my money's for me, my time's for me.

I like Jesus, he did a good job, but I'm not trying to be Jesus.

If that's why you don't want to believe, it's a valid reason.

Now I think you're missing out on purpose and eternity and life to the fullest, and actually understanding your created potential and communing with the divine on a daily basis and waking up and all of the foundations of hell itself, quaking in fear because you're about to get going in your world, living a life that you will be rewarded for in eternity.

Man, I think you're missing a lot, but if that's the conclusion you come to, I get it.

The problem is that's not where people go.

They start with, I don't want to believe.

Following God doesn't seem like the easiest, quickest path to my personal happiness.

I've been hurt, I've been misled, I've been confused, I don't like Christians, the church is hypocrites.

Fair.

I don't want to believe.

I'm not actually gonna look into it.

I'm gonna get a few arguments in my pocket and I'm gonna live my truth.

If that's where you're at, I want to suggest that your life, and if there's even a chance that we're right and that you have an eternity in front of you, it is worth a year of your time.

Take one of your 80, give it a year, seek God fully, look at the arguments fully, look at the best minds on both sides fully and openly.

Seek God here.

Stay with us at MetaCurch.

You belong here.

Open yourself up to experiencing Him in worship.

Put to practice living a life as closely modeled after Jesus as you can.

Your life will get better, you will get better at life, and you will experience God.

It is worth it.

And I don't believe is not a good enough excuse to not see what God might have in store for your life.

Here's what keeps us away.

If you admit to God, you must submit to God.

If you admit to God, you must submit to God.

And so we don't want to believe.

And we live our life apart from Him, and your life will be hard.

Even in your success, you will not find fulfillment.

If you are not successful, you will try every other path.

At some point in our search for happiness, we become bandwagon believers.

And maybe you know these people, you have these friends, maybe you've been this person.

You try out this philosophy for a little while until it doesn't make you happy, and you jump over to another one.

And you try out this religion for a little while until it doesn't make you happy, and then you try another one, and you never really invest in any of them, you never really understand any of them, you're just looking for the next thing and the next thing and the next trend and the next fad and the next job and the next relationship, and you're just a bandwagon believer, searching for fulfillment, happiness, and purpose and everything in the world.

And as soon as it doesn't bring you happiness, then you change course.

We see this in sports, you know, bandwagon sports fan.

You didn't know you had so many friends who like the Boston Celtics, right?

All of a sudden they're good again.

Oh, lifelong fan.

This is like the weirdest parenting thing, but when my boys got a little bit older, I was like, nah.

You know, because the Warriors were good, they were Warriors fans, you know.

The Chiefs got the Chiefs got my homes, we're Chiefs fans.

It's like, no, no, no.

You're gonna learn how to ride or die, all right?

Pick a team, doesn't have to be my team, and when they only win five out of 82 games, you're gonna still wear that jersey, rep them proudly, no more bandwagon.

You gotta have conviction at some point.

Heck yeah! I'll still wear my Spurs jersey, not even making the playoffs.

You gotta have conviction at some point, and so they did it.

They picked a team.

They picked a team.

It's like, yo, when your team's out of the playoffs, then pick who you want to root for, but until then, you ride or die.

No bandwagon.

It's important, it's important.

And it seems silly, but you know, everything we do is instructing our kids, and everything that you decide is instructing your life.

When you just jump from relationship to relationship to relationship to relationship, every time it gets hard and impedes on your happiness, you're out.

You're setting a path for your life that will make its way into every area of your life.

Your life matters.

That's what we start with at Metaturch.

You were created on purpose, you are created with purpose, and what is like this is why I do this.

This is the angst in my heart is that the people of God are not living with the power of the people of God.

We're just chasing the same things.

Happiness, I want you to be happy, but more than that, I want you to be powerful.

I want your life to matter, I want you to leave behind a legacy.

You don't want to believe in God.

If there's a God, you're guilty.

Not mistakes, sin.

And if you are guilty, you will be held accountable.

And yet, we've been sold a God that doesn't exist, a God that leaves us guilty.

The story of reality is the God who created it all.

We saw in week one, there was nothing, and now there is a universe that is bigger than we can comprehend.

That God, the first mover, the uncaused cause, the designer behind the design, he set in motion a world, set his people, the highest order of his creation in it, gave us the freedom to rebel against him, to break the rules, even the rules that broke our relationship with him.

We are guilty and we are accountable.

But the story isn't over because that same God entered into his creation, lived in poverty, suffered in every way imaginable, was tempted in every single way that you and I are tempted, and yet lived in perfection.

The historical figure of Jesus Christ really went to a Roman cross, really died on that cross, and three days later, I am putting my life on it.

He walked out of that grave and changed history forever.

It's not make-believe.

And you can start with, I don't want to believe.

You can close yourself off and say, dead people don't come back to life.

But your life matters far too much to not give the next year to see if there might be some legitimacy to that claim.

To actually look at the data, actually look at the arguments and ask yourself what makes the most sense of reality.

You can't know the gospel, which means good news, until you know the bad news.

The bad news is you're guilty and you're accountable for that sin.

Romans 5.8 tells us the good news, but God demonstrates his own love for us in this while we were still sinners.

While creation was still in active rebellion against its creator, Christ came and he died for us.

If there is a God, you are guilty and you are accountable.

But because there is a God, there is forgiveness for those sins.

Jesus came to move your sin debt from your account to his own.

Your sin has been accounted for on the cross of Jesus.

Because there's God, there is forgiveness.

And because there's God, there is a relationship with the divine.

Jesus came to put you back into right relationship with your Father in heaven.

He did it by accounting for your sins and paying that sin debt with his own life.

I don't want to believe is not a good enough excuse for you to not seek after God.

We read about Blaise uh Pascal earlier.

His most famous writing is Pascal's Wager.

It very simply says this.

If I believe and God is real, I gain it all.

If I believe and God is not real, I have lost nothing.

All you've really done is live the most moral, selfless life you could.

If God is not real and I believe, I've lost nothing.

If God is not real, or if God is real and I do not believe, I have lost everything.

He said that to say this.

Give a year of your life.

Seek after God.

If God is real, it changes everything.

I understand you don't want to believe.

I've been there myself, and yet your life matters too much to not see what is actually the truth.

If there is a God, He loves you, He is pursuing you, and if you will crack open that door to just maybe, just maybe, there really is something to this faith, you will be stepping into the stream of all of humanity that wrestle with who God is and whether or not we should follow Him.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we love you, and I know that you uh you love us, every one of us in this room watching online.

You love us.

You demonstrated your love, you proved your love.

You didn't just talk a big game.

You came to earth and you showed us.

God, uh I'm not here.

I don't believe you're here to cast stones at people who don't want to believe.

As a matter of fact, I think you're an all-knowing God, an all-seeing God.

You see the hurt, you see the pain, you see the reasons why people want to live without you, and yet you pursue us anyway, you're pursuing us now.

I pray if anyone doesn't want to believe, they would give a year.

They would search for not their truth, the truth, and I believe they will find you.

We love you, and we pray these things in Jesus' name.

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.

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