How many people are truly evidence-driven?

Let me suggest a test.

Consider the Shroud of Turin. This old piece of cloth may be the single most important object in the world.

If it is authentic, Jesus was raised from the dead. And that’s a big deal. This event would establish the spiritual and philosophical foundation for all our thinking. It would affirm the reality of God as proclaimed by Jesus.

Now consider this: There have been many efforts to reproduce the Shroud—and all have failed—miserably.

With the most advanced computer technology, an image like that on the Shroud remains beyond reach. Think about it!

You know what we can do now. With AI, we can show FDR giving a speech he never made. There could be a new movie starring Bette Davis 34 years after she died.

(I wish someone would make that. Loved Bette Davis!)

Some folks are afraid AI may rule the world.

But it cannot—and never will be able to–reproduce the image on the Shroud.

There’s only one way to make that image.

You must crucify a man exactly the way the Romans did. And then you must get God to resurrect that crucified man.

That’s the only way.

I know the Shroud was carbon-dated to the Middle Ages. But a lesser-known carbon dating and three other dating methods place it in the time of Christ.

Everyone who is truly a thinking person, driven by evidence, must come to terms with the Shroud.
You can run from it. You can hide. But the Shroud will tell its story.

Can you face reality?

Houston Smith, who died in 2016 at ninety-seven, was a great scholar of world religions. He was a Christian.

But as a young man, he was attracted to some of the Eastern faiths.

He could not abide by the Christian teachings of hell.

On a retreat, he met a priest of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He was fascinated by him. He talked to him and missed other retreat activities.

He told the priest he could not settle on the Christian faith because of eternal punishment in hell.

The priest said, “Listen, you know that story where Paul was taken up to heaven?”

He meant Paul’s NDE, his near-death experience. (II Cor. 12)

Paul was so reluctant to share the story he put it in the third person. But it is clear Paul was talking about himself.

Paul said he was told in heaven things he could not repeat.

“I know what he was told,” said the priest to Houston Smith. “He was told that all people will be saved.”

That did it for the young man who would become the great scholar. He then felt free to become a follower of Jesus Christ.

And Paul did let the secret out. He said in Romans 11:25 that “the full number of Gentiles” would be brought to faith and then “all Israel will be saved.”

Well—that’s everybody.

Is there a hell?

Of course, there is. There must be a place for evil people when they die.

Hell is in eternity— another dimension. But hell is not forever.

There is no limit on God’s forgiveness nor on God’s saving power.

Through Christ, the world is reconciled.

We are all loved.

We are all forgiven.

An e-mail:

Rev. Max—We may at times get direction from God, but I am leery of the kind of ‘encounters with God’ you speak of. They may come from other sources, our imaginations, psychosis, even from the adversary himself.

Tom

Tom, Paul’s Road-to-Damascus experience was not a psychotic event, nor did it come from the Devil.

His NDE described in II Cor. 12 was not imagined.

Peter’s vision in Acts 10:9-16 did not reflect a deranged mind.

Conservative Christians are scared of religious experiences. They know people of all faiths can have them.

And the God we meet in experience is one who loves all people equally and unconditionally.

In other words, we meet in experience the God we know in Jesus Christ. We do not meet the angry and vengeful God of right-wing Christianity.

Why?

Because that God does not exist.

But let’s not let liberal Christianity off the hook. Liberal Christians often propose a useless God who does absolutely nothing.

That God does not exist either.

The God I know through both Jesus Christ and experience is one who is invested personally in our lives.

“In Him we live and move and have our being.” (Acts 17:28.) And this God is available to us and accessible to us through experience.

So, as a Christian, I am not liberal nor am I conservative. What am I?

I am a person committed to the evidence.

I don’t just believe.

I know.

And you can, too.+++

The July concert was a triumph. Don’t miss the one in August.

Because I speak often in this spot of the dangers of the inerrantist approach to scriptures, I am sometimes misunderstood.

I believe in a personal God. I believe Jesus was raised from the dead. I believe he appeared to the disciples and continues to appear to people today.

I not only believe these things, I believe they are provable to most thinking people who are open to the evidence.

(How many of you have I lost so far? If you are still with me, I may lose you on this one.) I believe in a communicating God.

I believe in a God who is accessible–a God we can know through experience.

For years I have worked on a book examining over 100 direct encounters with Divine Reality—or, in other words—with God.

Six of those accounts in the book are from me.

But I haven’t always known what to do with them.

In Discovering God, (still to be published), my accounts are in the contest of similar stories.

Outside the book, even in sermons, my encounters with the Divine can seem—shocking.

And unbelievable.

So, am I meant to share these events? Or were they just for me—to inform my ministry?

I am coming to believe (at my tender age) I should share these stories more freely. 

I will share an account in my sermon this Sunday.

I once asked God about human suffering.

And God answered.

+ + +
Saturday (tomorrow)
At 6:00 p.m. 
Choirmaster Blake Glass, and Soloist Shannon Davison, present:
A Night on Broadway 
Supper after—all free
(Offering taken.)
Come—for the joy of it.

Back in the pulpit this Sunday after a two-weeks absence due to illness.

Remember the classic novelty song from the late 50s: Yakety Yak?

Take out the papers
and the trash—
Yakety yak, yakety yak.

Ah, they don’t write them like that anymore.

But that’s what we will be doing in a series of sermons over the next few weeks: taking out the trash.

Trash theology, that is.

In visiting old churches in England, I noticed the ground beneath the east window often rises up on the church. That’s because so many people wanted to be buried there—close to the altar inside the church.

If you had money (like Mr. Shakespeare) you could be buried in front of the altar inside.

It was believed that those closest to the altar would be the first to rise on Resurrection Day.

Silly—including the idea of a Resurrection Day.

It’s trash theology.

We are “raised” the moment we die. Life continues uninterrupted.

In a spiritual world, we will have no use for those bones in the ground.

(Or that powder after a cremation.)

Paul said, “To be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord.” And every NDE tells us the soul, the true self, our consciousness, lives on.

Yet, surprisingly, many people still believe that, at death, we enter some “great sleep,” to be awakened at the “General Resurrection.”

Even the theologian John Pokingham says, “God will remember us back into existence.” Great minds can come up with dumb ideas–and bad theology.

This Sunday we will take more bad theology out with the trash.

Join us at 11:00.

In-person, if you can.