CENTRAL VBS LETS TALK ABOUT SALVATION part 3
How Do I know I’m Worshipping the Right God?
John 7:17-7:17
QUESTION PEOPLE ASK
Some of you can remember the old game show, where some old stars tired to figure out between 3 contestants, who the real writer, or teacher, or whatever, really was. At least at the end of the show you knew who the real one was. In deciding about God, I am afraid that it is very important that we don’t wait until the end to figure out which one is real. The stakes are much too high.
Of all the religions, how do we know Christianity is right?
Now, first I would like to show why logically, it makes sense to be a Christian,
above all other religions, and second I would like to show some evidences for Christianity.
I. WHAT RELIGIONS SAY ABOUT THEMSELVES
1. Hinduism - Started about 2000 BC. In Hinduism there are many gods. They believe the world is an illusion & the goal of humanity is to keep from being reincarnated so your soul can be absorbed into the ultimate principle. In others words, if you get it right, when you die you become part of “The Force.” Good Karma - absorbed Bad Karma - come back & do it again.
2. Buddhism - Started by Siddhartha Gautama who was born in 563 BC. He was a Hindu, but he was dissatisfied with the answers Hinduism gave to life’s problems. One day as he sat under a fig tree he suddenly found the answers to life’s problems through enlightenment. Later, he was called Buddha (Enlightened One). Goal in life is to become enlightened.
Some - no life after death
Others - Reincarnated until you get it right.
3. Islam - Began w/work of Muhammad who lived from 570-632. It began in what is currently Saudi Arabia.
Holy book - Qur’an. Salvation through good life, giving money to the poor, 5 time a day prayer, pilgrimage to Mecca.
Believe in some sort of heaven. Problem, the Qur’an, their own holy book teaches that Allah is a distant God, who doesn’t pay much attention to people, and who tries to trick people out of being saved.
4. Jehovah’s False Witnesses - 144,000 people go to heaven. The rest of the saved folk live on paradise earth. The bad, burn up & it’s over with.
a. Cross – We believe Jesus was crucified on a cross. – Torture stake.
> John 20:25 So the other disciples kept telling him, “We have seen the Lord!” But he said to them, “If I don’t see the mark of the nails in His hands, put my finger into the mark of the nails, and put my hand into His side, I will never believe!”
> 1 Corinthians 1:18 For to those who are perishing the message of the cross is foolishness, but to us who are being saved it is God’s power.
b. Jesus is God – John 20:28 Thomas responded to Him, “My Lord and my God!”
1) He is to be Worshipped –
> John 9:38 “I believe, Lord!” he said, and he worshiped Him.
> Hebrews 1:6 When He again brings His firstborn into the world, He says, And all God’s angels must worship Him.
2) He is the Creator – JW’s believe that Jesus is a created being. Christians believe that Jesus is the Creator of all things.
> Genesis 1:1 In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
- John 1:1-3;
5. Mormons - 3 choices - Hell, rebuilt earth, heaven - where good Mormon men become gods over their own planets. Their wives have to play their cards right so their husbands, after they are resurrected, will call their celestial names so they will rise as well. If they do, then they go have a bunch of children & populate their own planet.
You get another chance after this life.
6. Christianity -
> Hebrews 9:27 it is appointed for men to die once and after this comes judgment.
- Mark 9:43-44
II. HOW DO I KNOW OUR GOD IS REAL?
1. Creation –
Romans 1:18-25. Creation testifies to the existence of God.
Genesis 1:1 says, “In the beginning, God created.” There was no preamble, no introduction of God. The Bible simply begins, “In the beginning, God created.” My friends, if we could only get that one fact straight, the rest would come easy. God has created all things.
A. God created the universe – Think for a moment of that first encounter between Satan and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Look for a moment at Genesis 3:1. - Read Genesis 3:1
Here were Adam and Eve in the garden. They had no problems, they had no worries, no disease, no suffering, they had no pain and no death; then came the Devil. In verse 1 he asks, “Has God said . . .?” Then he moves to step 2 of his plan. In verse 4 he says, “Ye shall not surely die.” Then he concludes in verse 4 by saying, “You shall be as gods.” My friends, all of this stuff about the Big Bang, and evolution is nothing more than the same old lie the Devil has been telling from the beginning, “Ye shall be as gods.” The Devil wants to do all he can to convince us that we are nothing more than the result of a cosmic burp that took place some 41/2 to 5 Billion years ago, and he has done all he could to reinforce the idea that there is no Creator, no One that we are responsible to by instilling that lie in the minds of our children.
Adolph Hitler once said, “If you tell a lie long enough and loud enough, and often enough, people will believe it.” By repeating the lie that the world was created by chance again and again and again, over billions of years, some have come to the conclusion that all of life is the result of chance and so there is no Creator to be responsible to.
My friends, I want you to know that the world is not the result of chance; it is the result of Creation. Our Creator spoke, not billions of years ago as some teach, but rather thousands of years ago, and the world came to be.
We know that because of:
*the moon. Each year, the moon gets a little further from the earth. Not much, just and inch or so. That means it used to be closer. Now, if you go back a few thousand years, that’s no big deal, but if you go back 1/5 as long as they say the universe has been around, the moon would have been so close to the earth that our gravity would have broken it into pieces, which would be circling our planet like the rings of Saturn.
*the comets. The comets we see are made up primarily of rock and ice. They are basically “dirty snowballs.” Now each time they circle our sun, part of them is blown away by the solar wind, thus giving them a tail. Now, with the amount of material they lose each time they circle our sun, it is estimated that none of them could exist for more than 10 thousand years, yet they are here.
* the magnetic field. The Earth is surrounded by an invisible magnetic field. This magnetic field is what makes compasses point north. Now, our magnetic field is getting weaker all the time. Now, since it is getting weaker all the time, that means it used to be stronger. Dr. Thomas Barnes is a physicist who has studied our magnetic field in great detail. He estimates that 830 to 1400 years ago our magnetic field would have been twice as strong as it is now. Go back another 830 to 1400 years and it would have been 4 times as strong as it is now. According to Dr. Barnes, if we went back 10,000 years, our magnetic field would have been as strong as the sun’s, and would be burning like it. So, our earth could not be any more than 10,000 years old.
* It is has been calculated that our rivers carry 300 million kg of nickel into the oceans each year. The oceans have an estimated 3000 billion kg of nickel in them. If all of this nickel was carried into them by the rivers, the earth could not be over 10,000 years old. Since some of the nickel was probably in the oceans to begin with and some enters the oceans as dust from meteorites, the earth could not be over 8000 years old.
*My friends, there are countless evidences for a young earth. I don’t have time to go into all the reasons, from science, we know the earth is young, so study it for yourself, but know this, God is the Creator of the universe. Many have forgotten that. They have also forgotten that God is the Creator of people.
B. God created people – Evolutionists would have us believe that you and I are the result of random chance. That somewhere, millions and millions of years ago, a few chemicals got together, and then, somehow, by chance, life evolved.
- Hebrews 11:3
This verse says that what we see in the world was made by Christ and that it was not created by what it is seen. In other words, it did not evolve out of something that was here. Jesus Christ made it all, instantaneously.
Genesis 1 tells us God created us, man, in His image. We are special. Evolutionists try to tell us that we evolved from apes, that we are not special, and they trot out “missing links” to prove it.
* Java-man, ½-man, ½-ape. They forget to tell you that this whole animal was constructed from 1 skull cap found in 1891, and 1 human thigh bone found a year later, 46 feet away.
* Nebraska man, which was used in the “Monkey trial,” against creationists in the early 1900’s. They don’t tell you the entire man was invented from 1 tooth they discovered. Years after the trial, the rest of the skeleton was found and it turns out the tooth came from a now extinct kind of wild hog.
* Piltdown Man. Around 1900, he was discovered. That entire man was built around a few bone fragments found in a gravel pit. It was 40 years before researchers discovered that he was nothing more than an elaborate hoax. Several bones were taken from a human skeleton & an ape. They were aged with chemicals to look older, and then they were buried in a gravel pit, only to be uncovered 3 years later by the same man who hid them.
- Genesis 3:20, Eve the mother of all living
- Romans 5:12, by 1 man, sin entered the world, & death by sin.
There is no evolution. Though scientists have tried countless times in their laboratories to create life, they have been unable to. As far as anyone has been able to see, pigs come from pigs, cows have baby cows, ducks have baby ducks, and people have baby people, ever since God made them all. My friends, God is the Creator. He is the Creator of the universe and He created us.
But, because of the Devil’s subtleness, his lies and man’s desire to be his own boss, his own God, many have willingly chosen to deny, in spite of the evidence, that God created them. What does God think of evolution? He thinks it is a sin worth punishment.
2. Fulfilled Prophecy -
Nothing can stop the Bible. It is useless to call it the world’s best seller, though it is because that term implies comparison - and there is nothing that even remotely compares with the Bible in sales and circulation.
The Bible, or parts of it, has now been translated into over 1,100 languages. It is estimated that there are over 200 million Bibles in the world today. Placed end to end, they would make a line 17,000 miles long.
The Bible contains over 2,000 prophecies, which have come true. Some related to events in the kingdoms of the world and most relate to the first coming of the Messiah, Jesus Christ. The Bible predicted that Jesus would be born in Bethlehem (Mic. 5:2), born of a virgin, killed, betrayed for 30 pieces of silver, and that His garments would be divided. They were.
1000 years before the Romans invented crucifixion, the Psalmist prophesied in Psalm 22 that Jesus’ hands and feet would be pierced. How in the world could anyone predict such a thing if our God did not tell Him?
A number of years ago, a doctoral student in mathematics earned his PHD by figuring the odds of all the monkeys in Africa running over a single typewriter and typing every book in the English language without mistake. The odds were 1 to 1 with 64 “0’s” behind it and yet the odds of 1 man coming and fulfilling just 12 of the prophecies Jesus fulfilled are less than that.
My friends, I know our God is the real God because when His Holy Book says something is going to happen, it happens.
3. Changed Lives - I know our God is real, because of the way He has changed lives.
While in seminary, I volunteered as a chaplain in a prison in Memphis. While there, one of the other chaplains told me about a man he had given a Bible to. Most of the time, we give out Bibles in the prisons that have regular paper, and not the thin paper that many of our Bibles have. We do that, because some of the prisoners used the thin paper in our Bibles to roll cigarettes with. Anyway, this man told the chaplain that he wanted a Bible like ours. The chaplain agreed on the condition that before he tore a page out of the Bible, that he would read it. The man agreed. Some time later the chaplain saw the man again. The man told the chaplain, “I’m a Christian now.” When the chaplain asked him how it happened the man answered, “Well, I smoked Matthew. I smoked Mark. I smoked Luke, but I just couldn’t smoke John.” God had gotten a hold on the man’s heart and wouldn’t let go.
Some of you have had your lives miraculously changed because of your relationship with Jesus Christ.
The Bible says,
> 2 Corinthians 5:17 If any man be in Christ he is a new creature. Old things are passed away, behold old things are become new.”
I know our God is real because of fulfilled prophecies. I know our God is real because of the lives He’s changed. I know our God is real because of answered prayer.
4. Answered prayer -
Here I gave examples of answered prayer in my own life & ministry. You will need to do the same.
5. God’s Provision
Last Christmas. Leah calling, needing some stuff for a needy family. Woman from our church calling, needing some stuff for 17 children and 7 families. Kids Club Christmas party – Bicycles.
IV. YOU CAN KNOW AS WELL
- John 7:17
