Bible Verse: John 14:1-11
Full Sermon Transcript
WELCOME
Pastor Chris Paavola: Thank you so much band for leading us in worship. Hey everybody. Good morning. Really good to see you guys. My name is Chris Paavola. I am the senior pastor here at St. Mark and it’s great to be with you as we continue this series that we’re in called The Reason For God. We’re having a conversation on faith and doubt and just, I’ve been really excited for this series and I can just feel the congregation, I got to move this. I can feel the congregation leaning in and just these are topics that you care about or the people in your life care about. And so yeah, it’s just great to be a part of this journey with you. And thank you for your watching online or tuning in later on to listen to this. Last week we started the series by just laying some working definitions, some foundational terms of just like what is this thing called faith and how does it relate to doubt and all that kind of stuff.
And we talked about last week how actually doubt is not the opposite of faith. It’s not the absence of faith. Doubt is the evidence of faith and that the opposite of faith is actually unbelief and doubt kind of suspends itself in the middle of them, which is kind of a freeing feeling. And you should address your doubts, but it’s not unbelief. And then we talked about also how everybody, no matter what it is you believe everybody has faith. Everyone has faith in something. There are some things you just can’t empirically prove or prove through scientific method or investigative methods that at some point you have to have faith. Not everyone has blind faith. There’s reasonable faith, but everyone has faith and every faith can doubt. And if all that seems a little bit presumptive on my part, or maybe I just said some things that were, I was blasting through them without giving much explanation, you can go back and watch last week’s live stream or download our podcast to kind of get caught up to speed because today we’re going to move from that question with that kind of groundwork laid into our next question of how can there only be one true religion?
And this is a big one that I get all the time from people and just one of the main questions I get often is, how can there only be one true religion? I mean there’s like six or 7 billion, give or take a few people on the planet and there are over 4,000 religions. So let’s say this box of religion is full of packing peanuts and every one of these packing peanuts is one of, there’s not 4,000 packing peanuts in here. Okay, I didn’t count that. The point is there’s a lot, right? And how could you say that any one of these is the right one, that 3,999 are incorrect, and here is the correct one out of all of these, this is the one and everyone else is wrong. And that’s a good question and one we obviously need to be talking about.
DEFINING RELIGION
But before we can even address the question of how can there only be one true religion, we’ve got to first, before we talk about these packing peanuts of religion, we’ve got to first define the box what is religion? Let’s just, I think you guys could take a stab at this. How would you define religion? Just shout out your answers, what you believe in. Yep. Okay, what else? How you practice your faith. What’s that? How you practice your faith, how you practice your faith. Okay, that’s good. Anything else? How you believe everything’s going to be, how you think everything’s going to end the crash course collision that we’re on? Speeding. Train towards the, anyway, yeah, how does it all end? Afterlife kind of structure worship. Okay, structure of worship rituals are kind of in there for sure. Nobody has said anything about a God or deity yet.
That’s actually interesting to me. Worship the Lord. Yeah, worshiping the Lord. Okay, there you go. That’s good. All right. So here’s the problem is every definition you come up with, there’s some kind of exception that doesn’t fit in the box unfortunately. For instance, if you say it’s a belief in a God, well then what do you do with Buddhism? Because Buddhism doesn’t have a God or if it’s a belief in an afterlife or where everything ends, what do you do with Hinduism that has no afterlife, no concept of heaven and Hinduism at all, and the list goes on and out, multiple gods of animism or a single God. And it’s really difficult and you can’t say that it’s a set of rituals only because so is the 4th of July. And you can’t say that it’s faith in something because so is capitalism, right? And so it gets a little confusing.
So for the purposes, I’ve had a little bit more time to work in this, but we got to go really wide and broad in our definition to have something that’s encapsulating a box that holds all of these religions in. And so just for our working definition today, religion is a set of beliefs about how you relate to a higher power powers or ultimate reality. So religion is a set of beliefs about how you relate to a higher power or ultimate reality. And now with that, everything, all the packing peanuts can go in the box from Hinduism all the way to Judaism to Shintoism or whatever, they’re all in there. And now we can address this question of how can there only be one true religion? And the first thing that happens when we ask this question is where you go, well, they can’t. I mean look at all of ’em.
NO RELIGION
And the overwhelming evidence makes you kind of do a couple things. One thing that has been done in history is go, well, none of ’em are true. There’s too many of ’em. They’re obviously all saying different things. None of ’em are true. This is the opiate of the masses, none of it is true. And we could ban religion altogether. And when this has been done, when governments have tried to ban religion every single time, one of two things happen and sometimes both. First of all, religion just goes underground. People don’t stop practicing religion just because ban it. The underground church in China right now is a great example. It’s the fastest growing church in the world and it’s underground. There’s something in people that wants to worship or believes in something beyond us that explains what we can’t explain and helps us understand reality.
And the other thing that happens is when you remove religion from people’s lives is what ends up happening in a religious societies is they become more heinous and murderous than even religious ones. History is replete with examples of what happens when you remove religion from people and the hundreds of millions of people who have been killed afterwards, the Khmer Rouge, communist China, Nazi Germany, the Boxer Rebellion just to name a few again and again when you try to remove it, people just, it descends into anarchy very quickly. So it’s not a very good solution, at least I don’t think so. Let’s just say let’s get rid of all of ’em. None of ’em are true. The other thing that you naturally do when you look at all of these is you go, well, maybe they’re all kind of true. Honestly, this is the soup du jour in our society today.
HOW ARE RELIGIONS SIMILAR?
Maybe they’re all kind of true. Maybe they’re all saying generally the same thing. Just be a good person, pick one and you’re doing right and God will reward you. They’re all kind of saying the same thing. This is pluralism is the word for this sometimes, and then it has a cousin of relativism it. It’s your truth, whatever your truth is, this is my truth. It’s all relative. And really it doesn’t really matter. You’ve heard this, you’ve seen the coexist bumper stickers, you’ve heard this in a lot of the social contract tracks we have with one another or the way we handle religion in the public sector. And this is also universalist. Unitarianism actually is what this is. And they kind of talk about how all the paths on the mountain lead to the top. So just pick one, it doesn’t matter. Or maybe another analogy that you’ve heard before is the analogy of an elephant and six blind men feeling an elephants.
And this is an analogy of like, well, all religions are trying to do the same thing. All religions are just kind of groping about and feeling their way and describing what they know of God, but it’s bigger than any one of them. You’ve heard this or something similar to this. And so you got six blind men trying to feel their way through an elephant. You ask them, what do you feel one of ’em would be like, I feel something like a sharp sword. One of them would say, I feel a rope. One of them would say, I feel a wall. Or one of them would say it’s like hugging a tree trunk. And they would all be partially, but neither of them, none of them would be entirely right. And at first glance, this makes a lot of sense. I get it. It’s a way to understand a complicated question. Now there is a fatal flaw in this example though, and the fatal flaw in this example of this pluralism, relativism or whateverism you want to attach to it is that you can see the whole picture.
It means you, the person making an evaluation have this whole picture. You are the purveyor of the superior knowledge. You have the whole picture and no one else does. And the question is begged, well, what if he is actually hugging a tree trunk? And in the end, if you push on the logic of pluralism, it’s just another religion. It’s a set of beliefs about how you relate to a higher power and the ultimate reality. That’s why it’s an ism, it’s an ism. And in the end, pluralism becomes guilty of the very thing that they set out to solve being the one true religion and it falls apart.
HOW ARE RELIGIONS SIMILAR?
So how can there be one true religion? And we’re looking at this box and all these packing peanuts, and we’re going, okay, we’re any closer to an answer. If we say there’s no religion and we’re not any closer to an answer, if we say they’re all true, well now we’re forced to consider all of their differences. And man, there’s 4,000 of them. I’ve got some books from my bookshelf here to just kind of demonstrate how daunting this really is to go ahead and start researching in all your free time this week, guys, if you want to, you can come grab these books. Nobody has grabbed this book from the other services so far or these books because it’s just overwhelming. It’s paralysis by analysis, man, how am I supposed to read up on all of these religions and make a conclusion this would take me and would I really be any closer after all this research?
Would I really be any closer to knowing the truth? I mean, because all you look at them and they all kind of are similar, but you look at them and you notice that there are nuanced differences between all of them. I mean, they’re all a little bit different. Unfortunately, out of the 4,000 or some religions, there’s only five major religions that pretty much 90 some percent of the world’s population is a part of. One of the five religions, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, you could kind of say it is barely in there, but it’s in there. Islam and Christianity. Okay, now those are the five big ones. And when you look at just the five big ones, once you know it, they look kind of similar, but they’re all a little bit different. I’ve already kind of highlighted some of them, but they all say something about suffering.
Buddhism actually speaks about suffering a lot. Well then so does Islam and Christianity and they all say something about good and evil. They all say something about God or Gods or some type of power that’s greater than us. They all have some type of objective and a morality. And actually what I think is interesting is that they all have something to say about Jesus. I think that’s interesting. Buddhism says that Jesus is a great moral teacher and he elevated himself above suffering. Jesus said otherwise, but that’s what they say about him. Hinduism says that he is an avatar, that Jesus is a representation, a depiction of God or one of the gods and a great moral teacher. But again, that’s a claim that Jesus seems to say something different. Judaism would call Jesus a blasphemer. They would call him a false prophet. And there’s Islam.
Actually, Islam is interesting because in the Quran it writes extensively about Jesus. Actually, this is the picture of the dome of the rock. I’ve been there in Jerusalem. When you kind of round the hill, it is this towering. It’s on the highest point of Jerusalem and it’s just this towering piece of architecture in the landscape. And it’s like this golden dome just draws your eye to it. It’s kind of the image of Jerusalem if you just Google it. And the dome of the rock is built on the third holiest site of Islam and the holiest site of Judaism where the temple Holy of Holies used to be. And so it’s a very contested piece of property. Everybody wants to claim it. But what’s so interesting to me is that you got the Dome of the rock and then written outside on the inscription on the dome of the rock, we can zoom in. There is an excerpt from the Quran and they’re building this beautiful structure like centuries ago, and they build this. And so what they decided to write on the outside of it, this is an excerpt from the Quran that says that Jesus is just a prophet and he is not the son of God.
That’s what they chose to write outside the dome of the rock in the city of Jerusalem. It’s so fascinating to me. But then you get to Christianity that would say, no, he’s more than a moral teacher. He’s more than a prophet. He’s the son of God. And we kind of find ourself back at the same place. How are you supposed to evaluate all of these religions? We, we’ve talked about what happens if there’s no religion. We’ve tried to summarize all religions and group ’em all together, and then we looked at their differences and we’re no closer to an answer. How can there only be one true religion? Is it really? Just pick one and hope? Is this the lottery that we’re playing now and the interest of our time together? I do want to say one thing that I don’t know. I don’t think it’s fair to put Jesus I in the box. I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t think it’s a correct way to evaluate Jesus. And here’s why.
THE CLAIMS OF JESUS
There are a lot of religions that say there was God on the earth. Caesars thought they were God, pharaohs were worshiped. Emperor Hirohito and World War II is were worshiped by the Japanese. Actually in Mormonism, Mormonism, when you die, you become a God and you inherit a planet. So that’s kind of fun. And Jesus is not the only one to claim that. He is the one who can offer you salvation. There’s a lot of other religions that have done that saying, I can give you salvation. Just follow me, David Koresh, Jim Jones, just to name a couple, right?
22 “The Son of Man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.” Luke 9
But there is one claim that Jesus makes that stands above them all. It’s one claim that separates him from all other religions. And it’s a claim that when we hear it, we kind of like, oh yeah, okay, because we know how the story goes. But when he first said it, this claim, it was so shocking. We read about it like in Luke nine, and Jesus said, the son of man, he’s referring to himself. He’s like a fulfillment of a prophecy about God. “The Son of man must suffer many things and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests and the teachers of the law, and he must be killed and on the third day be raised to life.”
When Jesus said this, people were appalled by it. In fact, Peter the apostle Peter, when he first heard this, he said, never, Lord, this will never happen to you. And Jesus responded and said, away from me, Satan, you do not have in mind the things of God. And just so he was clear, Jesus repeated this prophecy about his resurrection. He made this claim about the resurrection just a few more times. It’s the central claim of Christianity ity. It’s the hinge on which every other claim that Jesus made hangs. In other words, if he rises from the dead, everything he claims is true. And if he doesn’t rise from the dead, none of it is true. You’re wasting your time. You should go home.
It’s the linchpin. Everything hangs on this. Every claim he made, claims about God, claims about himself, claims about heaven, claims about the scripture, claims about salvation, claims about you, claims about sin. All of it hangs on his claim that he will die and rise from the dead. And if it’s not true, none of it’s true. And actually you can see this after Jesus makes this statement, he’s killed. And when Jesus dies, the Jesus movement dies with him. It is over. There are no Christians, there is no Christianity. Jesus is dead, and all of his followers are running and hiding and pretending they never knew the guy, it’s over.
THE EVENT OF THE RESURRECTION
But then on that Sunday morning, he steps out of the tomb and the church is born. It begins at that moment and the people who were in hiding suddenly run around fearlessly telling anyone and everyone who will listen the news of an event that their God, they saw him ride from the dead. Every world religion, every single one of these starts with somebody having an idea about God, an epiphany about God, a revelation, an enlightenment Buddha sitting underneath the tree, Joseph Smith discovering golden tablets in a field. Abraham hearing the voice of God, all of them start with an idea about God, but the followers of Jesus did not run around telling everybody, Hey, I’ve got a new idea. Hey, we’ve got a new morality. Hey, we’ve got a new thought process and an idea of God. That was not their message. Their message was we saw a man rise from the dead and it informed everything else.
INTOLERANCE
And over history, millions of Christians have lost their lives, been martyred for their belief that he rose from the dead, except the first followers of Jesus. All of the apostles except one were killed, not because they wouldn’t stop talking about an idea or a doctrine or a belief, but because they wouldn’t stop about an event what they saw. And no other religion in the world begins with an event that people saw called the Resurrection, and you can disagree with what they say, but they refused. They laid down their life. They gained nothing because they had to tell people about what they saw and they were told, don’t talk about it anymore. We will arrest you. We will kill you. And again, and again and again. Their response was the response that we see from Peter and Acts four when he says, we cannot help but speak. We cannot stop speaking about not what we think, not an idea. We can’t stop speaking about what we saw.
It’s the difference of Christianity. And if you’re here today or you’re watching online or you’re listening to the podcast later on and you’re examining and trying to understand all of these religions, I commend you for it. It’s hard work. But as you consider Jesus and look into him, my suggestion to you is it’s not appropriate. It’s not right to start thinking about Christianity by looking in the box. If you’re going to investigate Christianity, you have to begin by thinking outside the box. It didn’t begin with an idea, it began with an event. Everything I believe about Christianity is because of the resurrection, believing the Red Sea parted, believing in heaven and hell or forgiveness of sins, good and evil. Everything I believe is because of the resurrection. Let’s put it another way. I don’t believe in the resurrection because I believe the Red Sea parted, I believe the Red Sea parted because I believe in the resurrection that a man stepped out of the tomb and everything you believe, all the questions you have about God or at least about Jesus, they all come down to the first question about the resurrection.
And there’s a lot more I could say about this, but we need to move on. We’ve got a lot to get to. I want this to be a conversation. I’ve been holding the microphone for quite a bit here, and I want to give you guys a chance to respond as well. We’ve got a text number set up through an app that we’ve got where you can text in your questions, I want this, you’re smarter than me on some of this. Maybe you’ve researched a particular religion more than I have and I miss something, or I misrepresented something, or maybe I made a logical step that was too far and I need to fill in some of the gaps. Or you just have a question or you disagree with something. So I’d love to hear your question so we can have a conversation like we’re having a cup of coffee and you’re like, yeah, but Chris, wait, how come?
PHONE NUMBER
So, if you have any questions, text your questions to 269- 448 -4747, 269-448-4747. I don’t even know my voice changes when I say the phone number. I don’t try to do it, but I’ve done it every service. Now it’s really hard. It’s like a commercial or something. Anyway, so go ahead and text your questions to that. We’re going to pray and then we’re going to say the words of Apostles Creed. And the reason we do that often is because that’s the summarizing thing of what we believe. But you’ll notice even in the Apostles creed that’s thousands of years old and we just say it with church present and past, you’ll notice that the resurrection is even in there. So, I invite you to pray with me and then we’ll say those words.
PRAYER
Heavenly Father, I thank you for just this conversation and for anyone in the room who’s struggling, God, trying to understand what is the truth.
I pray selfishly, Lord, that you would show them your Son is the way, the truth and the life. And God faith comes by hearing your word and by your Holy Spirit. So pour out your spirit upon us now and give the gift of faith. And we thank you God for just being a safe place to have this conversation and that you would just continue to guide us all towards the truth. In Jesus’ name as we say together, the words of the apostles creed, I believe in God, the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth. And in Jesus Christ, his only son, our Lord, who was conceived by the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate was crucified, died, and was buried. He descended into hell. The third day, he rose again from the dead, and he ascended into heaven and sits at the right hand of God, the Father Almighty. From then he will come to judge the living and the dead. I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Holy Christian Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting. Amen.
QUESTIONS
All right, let me get to some of these questions here. Got to unlock my iPad. Alright, refreshing and yeah, try to keep your questions limited to religion and other religions that today’s a conversation. Let’s see what we got here.
Okay, so what do we do? Like many different countries of story about a God visiting a mortal woman and a demi God being the offspring. How can we know the story of Jesus is any different? Yeah, there’s similarities that you can say, and some of these are a little bit more exaggerated through time and stuff that have been, or some of the similarities have been exaggerated. Kind of like if you’ve ever seen those posts on Facebook comparing other religions and origin stories, that doesn’t really shake me very much that there’s origin stories that might be a little bit different or share a lot of similarities. Again, so much of it comes back to the resurrection for me.
I don’t mean to punt this question too much, but I’m just going to put a pin in that one. And on the last week of the series, I think it’s February 23rd, we talk about how I can trust the Bible and this kind of gets into that territory. And so just going to table that a little bit until then, we will talk about that day some of the similarities in different faith texts and stuff. So I don’t mean to be dismissive, I want to give it full due diligence and stuff. So just tune in on the February 23rd week.
Yeah, this is a question about differences between denominations, Catholics, Baptists, what do you do with all these denominations? Okay, so it’s a great question. I got this question also at the nine 30 service. Do you know how many different Christian denominations there are? About 4,000, right? So I guess about the same number, right? Actually, do you know how many churches are in Battle Creek? Take a guess. How many churches are in Battle Creek?
One. One. Jesus says, I will build my church. And I say this at the newcomers lunch. So the people who are just at it were like, I know the answer to this one, but one, everybody who’s on team Jesus actually for centuries now, they’ve used the Apostles creed as like the rule of thumb. Can you confess the Apostles creed? It was developed to who’s in and who’s not in this thing called the Christian faith. And the Apostles Creed has been used for centuries to describe who are Christians. And so the reason we do that is not to be rote. It’s to help us remember what is the foundational primary things. Everything else is secondary. And so this denomination thing, so we talk about here at St Mark, we talk about Christian membership and then in just a moment, communing membership, people who confess and believe what we say about communion.
And then there’s another voting membership, which is people who confess and believe the entirety of what we say about the faith. When I describe Martin Luther, the reason we talk about Martin Luther’s teachings or we have the word Lutheran outside, is because it helps us better understand Jesus. We think it’s a right understanding of Jesus and who God is. And so all these different denominations, and there’s a lot of them, I get it. What it should make you do is run to the word of God. What it should make you do is investigate and read different things. Read what the Presbyterians say, read what the Catholics say, read what the Lutherans say and evaluate it for yourself. And honestly, I want St. Mark to be a place where you feel comfortable being here, even if you’re still trying to wrestle with some of these ideas.
I’d rather you ask the questions in here than not in here. And so with the question of denominations, man, it’s like let that draw you into his word for the secondary things, but remember what the primary things are and yeah, that’s just kind of my take on it. It’s not everyone’s, take another denomination question.
What if someone doesn’t believe Jesus rose from the grave? What’s our evidence for it? Man, what a great question. There is a resource I would recommend to anybody who’s asking this question. I kind of feel like I preach the same Easter sermon every year, but it’s called the Case for Easter, the case for Easter by Lee Strobel, and he examines a lot of these things. It’s a very approachable book and it addresses the resurrection in particular. I will say this, the resurrection is not blind. Faith. There is incredible evidence to suggest that the resurrection is one of the explanations of what happened on that Sunday morning.
But don’t take easy answers on what happened that Sunday morning on Easter, like, okay, here’s just a few of them to wrestle through. Well, what if they stole the body? Well, would you give your life and die willingly for what you knew to be a lie? Or what if they were hallucinating? Okay, that’s cool. But what do you do with people who see Jesus who are in different places and at different times, or people who say they touched him? What do you do with an enemy of Jesus like the Apostle Paul who suddenly sees Jesus and he has no grief in his heart that would make him want to hallucinate this thing, but he goes from murdering Christians proselytizing about Jesus, and the list goes on Every alternative explanation, you come up with a resurrection, has some complications and problems with it, and eventually you sit there and go, man, this is worth considering. And so I highly, highly recommend that book. Everything that you can think of, an alternative theory. It’s been asked about, it’s been asked and it’s been researched, so I would highly recommend that book to you or to whoever. How many people saw Jesus after his resurrection? The apostles saw him in Corinthians, it talks about a few hundred who saw him at one time, probably at a worship service where they were all gathering to talk about the resurrection, which is what it was.
Other denominations are Jews in heaven, questions about heaven and hell, I’m going to refer you to wait. I do not want to even touch that subject with oversimplification. We are going to talk about the idea of hell on, it’s on the front of your bulletin. What week is that? I forget. February 9th. February 9th. So February 9th. We’re going to cover that one. So just make sure you tune in for that. Yeah, you know what? I think I got this. I’m looking at the clock. I got to get us going here. Lemme see if I can handle one more here.
This is actually a good one. Is there a difference between following a church and following Jesus? And it kind of gets back another one with the denomination question. I picture us a church is, the word is not a building in the original language. The church is just a gathering of people. We are not sitting in a church. We are a church. And so is there a difference between being a Christian and following Jesus? No. That’s why I don’t use the term religion. I don’t use the term religious to describe myself. I don’t think it’s helpful because it puts people back in the box of religion. I think it’s helpful to talk to people about the person of Jesus.
And we had a question I thought was a really good one at the 9:30, and I’ll wrap up with this. Talking about your faith with other people. How do you share your faith with other people, especially people who might be Hindu or Muslims or whatever it might be? How do you do that? My suggestion to you is to earn the question, what do you believe? Earn that question. That’s the best way to do this. I’ve never argued anyone into the faith. I’ve never done it. I think we should defend our faith, absolutely. But I’ve never argued anyone into the faith. Into the faith. I think a better way to do this is to earn the question. Earn it by being a good person, loving them, serving them. Wow, why did you do that than you get an opportunity to share your beliefs or ask them about their faith. Everyone loves sharing their opinions and their ideas. That’s why we have social media. So earn the question to ask them about their faith, their ideas. You’ve got this thing called the resurrection that you’re kind of like, okay, I got to square that with this. And so you sit down with a person, have an honest conversation, listen and earn that question, and then let God handle it from there. So alright, we’re going to celebrate communion. Jack the floor is yours.