On Being a Christian

All biblical quotes are taken from the New International Version of the bible

The Gospel of Jesus Christ

We are all sinners who have fallen short of God's perfect standard:

Romans 3:23
For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God
Read and consider Genesis chapter 3.

Yet God had made a way:

John 14:6
Jesus answered, "I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the father except through me."
1 John 4:10
This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.
John 3:16
For God so loved the world that he gave his only son, that whosoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life

The King has reached out his hand with the gift of eternal life, will you accept it?

John 5:24
I tell you the truth, whoever heres my word and believes him who sent me has eternal life and whill not be condemned; he has crossed over from death to life
Romans 10:9-10
That if you confess with your mouth, "Jesus is Lord," and believe in you heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be save. For it is with your heart that you believe and are justified, and it is with your mouth that you confess and are saved.

The Apostle Paul helped to bring this all together when he stated:

1 Corinthians 15:1-5
Now, brothers, I want to remind you of the gospel I preached to you, which you received and on which you have taken your stand. By this gospel you are save, if you hold firmly to the word I preached to you. Otherwise, you have believe in vain. For what I received I pass on to you as of first importance: that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve.

Where Do We Go From Here: The Doctrine of The Trinity

Unfortunately, we live in a day and age where the clear teachings that have been a part of our society since that wonderful day that Jesus rose from the dead have been confused, misdefined, and outright lied about. Chief among these is the answer to the question: Who is the God of the bible?

The answer to this question hinges on understanding the very Nature of God as he has revealed it. Get the Nature of God wrong and everything else falls apart:

Within the one Being that is God, there exists three coequal and coeternal Persons, namely, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.
From this we get three critical foundations:
Foundation 1 .......... Monotheism: There is Only One God
Foundation 2 ............. There are Three Devine Persons
Foundation 3 .... The Persons are Co-Equal and Co-Eternal

Looking at it another way: we have one what revealed in three who's.

Christianity is also a simple matter of faith through grace

Ephesians 2:8-9

For it is by grace you have been save, through faith -- and this not for yourselves, it is the gift of God -- not by works, so that no one can boast.

But it is also much more

Yet, Christianity is not a blind leap into a dark chasm. Rather, it is faith founded upon historical fact such as the following. These evidences are merely a summation of larger works made available thanks the work of men like Hank Hanagraaf, President of The Christian Research Institute

They can be summarized using the acronyms: FACE and MAPS

FACE

The Creation/Evolution Debate

F = The embarrasment of the fossile record.

When pushed to the wall, experts on the fossile record will all admit that they can point to no transitional forms in the fossile record. Noted Evolutionist, Stephen J. Gould, has gone so far as to admit this fact by publishing his Theory of Punctuated Equilibrium in an attempt to explain evolution in spite of the fossile record.

A = The embarrasment of our ape-man ancestors

What do we really know about our suppossed ancestors? Neanderthal man was actually an extinct pig. Peking man lived after homo-sapiens were around. Pilt-down man was an out and out fraud. Java-man lived at the same time as homo-sapiens. Even such noted specimans as Lucy have a problem. Why is it that they cannot find the expected ground apes that should have also been alive at that time?

C = Chance - the study of statistical probability.

Mathematicians, after wildly scewing the initial data in favour of Evolution, have determined that the chance of producing a single protein molecule is so remote (somewhere around 10^-350 to 1) that for all practical purposes the answer is 0. Now imagine the mulitiplied difficulty of producing the second protein molecule.

E = Empirical Science - what does Physics say about Evolution

At the heart of Evolution is the belief that there is a universal principal that states the disorder can auto-organize into order. Where in all of physics do we find any principal that speaks on this issue? I know of only one, The Second Law of Thermodynamics. It tells us that the natural order of the universe is to go from Order to Disorder. Something that is exactly the opposite of what Evolution requires.
Now, some will argue that this law only works in a closed system. They are wrong. The only time this law is ever violated in when creative processes are used to build a mechanism that can temporarily increase local order, but always at the expense of the larger system. Just adding raw energy, such as the energy from the Sun, actually increases the rate of decay.

MAPS

The Bible is Divine rather than Human in Origin

M = Manuscript Evidence for the Bible

NO text produced before the European explosive use of the printing press has more Manuscript evidence than the Bible. There are more Original Greek Language copies, more Translations, more Commentary on the Bible than works considered by scholars to be completely genuine and without question (By the order of Thousands of copies). Then we have the Dead Sea Scrolls. Rather than disproving the Old Testament manuscripts faithfully transcribed by Jewish Scribes over the centuries, they have shown beyond any doubt that the Jewish traditions that rules how to transcribe a document kept those copies accurate to the original. What few changes have been found are in Style only, NO fundemental ideas have been changed.

A = Archeology and the Bible

The Bible has proved to be an incredibly accurate guide to the Near Eastern Archeologist. In fact, everywhere that definitive evidence has been found, it has been found to support the Biblical text.

P = Predictive Prophesy

No other book ever written can even begin to compare with the Bible's record on prophesy. From the history of Tyre, to the down fall of Jerusalem, to the hundreds of specific prophesies fullfilled by Jesus, the Bible stands alone in its accuracy.
And if it was completely accurate back then, you had better believe that it will be accurate today.

S = Statistical Probability

What are the odds of so many people from so many places producing a single whole work that has one underlying theme? None
Yet, the Bible does just that. In Genesis, we have the fall. In Revelation we have the restoration. Between we have God's perfect plan of redemption. This in spite of the fact that it was accomplished by 40 authors, working over 1600 years, on three continents, in three languages, while dealing with literally hundreds of specific subjects.

Contents Prev Next