So, now we come right down to it. With the preponderance of evidence in favor of the Gospels, and with the undeniable fact that Jesus existed, we have to face the question that everyone who dealt with him in person had to face: “Who is this man?” (Mt. 8:27, Mk. 6:1-3, Lk. 7:49, Lk. 9:9, Jn. 4:28-29ff, etc.). Especially in light of his claims to be God incarnate—the Lord of Heaven and Earth—every person in all of time must answer the question for ourselves: “Who do I believe that Jesus is?”

Josh McDowell has spent his career writing evidences materials, and he’s been saying for fifty years that, “Jesus claimed to be God. He did not leave any other options. His claim to be God must be either true or false.” Others have insisted that it is foolish to say Jesus was just a great teacher nothing more. Because with the claims that he made about being God, Messiah, and master of other’s lives; he must have been either a blatant liar, a delusional lunatic, or truly the Lord of Creation.

If he was a liar, he was one of the most dastardly liars of all time, because he claimed that others could trust him with their eternal destiny while knowing that he could do nothing for them. Does that fit the Bible and all the evidence?

If he was a lunatic, then was paradoxically the most grounded, rational, and sane lunatic to ever exist. We would need some way to explain how his teachings can be so deep and so perfectly suited to reality if his mind was so broken that he would believe a delusion. Such a paradox is too great to even be considered plausible.

If he is the Lord—God come in the flesh—then he not only demands, but deserves the devotion of our hearts and souls. Obviously, this kind of belief may be long in coming for many people, but it is the only reasonable conclusion about him. And more than that, it’s the only option for a soul-saving conclusion. Peter said that he believed Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Mt. 16:16). What do YOU believe about him?

- Dan Lankford

Recently, while visiting a church like ours, I heard a brother speak the following prayer: “Lord, we pray that you would not hold our sins against us. Please ignore our failings of the past.”

While I’m sure that most of you immediately realize the problem with that request, I feel compelled to point it out so that we can all learn from it. The problem is this, and it’s a serious one: God forgiving a sin is not nearly the same thing as his simply ignoring it. Ignoring means just pretending that a thing never happened, while forgiveness is fully conscious of the sin that has been committed and is willing to pay the necessary cost of atoning for it. To think that God simply ignores our sins is to cheapen the high cost that Christ paid for our forgiveness—the cost of his own life.

Brothers and sisters, let’s be impressed with two important takeaways from this: First, that our choices of words in worship to God matter a great deal, and we’d better speak truth when we speak on behalf of God. And second, that we owe an incalculable debt of gratitude to God, our Father—not for simply ignoring our sins, but for paying the price to completely, truly, graciously forgive them.

- Dan Lankford, minister

“The reason that no one should believe in miracles—especially the miracle of resurrection—is because it can’t be tested by the scientific method.”

The Scientific Method is the technical term for the type of empirical measurement and testing of certain behaviors based in the natural world. Its key to success is its dependence on repeatable scenarios—testing, observing, and documenting the behaviors of substances, animals, weather patterns, etc. in the natural world. And we would do well to be magnanimous: We owe much of the modern world’s convenience and safety to the scientific method and the findings that have been wrought through it. But its dependence upon repeatable scenarios is a double-edged sword: it leads to greater reliability but is also a limitation that we must acknowledge.

The trouble for Christian apologetics is not with the Method itself, but with those who see it as a universal template for determining all knowledge and reality. When we believe that “science” is what will make humanity whole and essentially *save* us, we have put far too much faith in it. This is the problem of those who make the claim from this article’s first sentence: It is that when we approach the Bible’s events, we are dealing with historical people (which, by definition, are not repeatable) and supernatural scenarios (which, by definition, cannot be measured empirically).

As a general rule, Christians would do well to temper our faith in “science,” so far as that is defined by a naturalistic worldview. It’s certainly not always a bad thing, but we must realize its limitations. Believers ought to read with a discerning eye when anything claims that “science” has discovered the key to something which the Method cannot sufficiently explain. For some examples, consider some magazine and online article headlines: “Science discovers why we’re unhappy,” or “Science discovers why some people are good parents and others aren’t,” or any such thing. Likewise, we ought to temper our faith in its promises for the future, especially when we are told that it will make humanity whole. For some examples, consider promises like these: “Someday, science will help us stop every disease and injury from happening,” or “With enough scientific advances, we’ll be able to stop all wars, because all the resource and commerce problems will be solved.” Only when Christ is fully accepted by faith in every believing heart can we expect to see the world saved in such ways. It won’t be “science” that saves us; it will be God, through his Son Jesus of Nazareth.

At the end of the day, our acceptance or rejection of the Bible’s history comes down to faith. Do we have faith in the Scientific Method to tell us all that is real in the world? Or do we have faith in the One who created the world which the Method can only measure? The Bible’s miracles, and especially the resurrection, must be accepted by faith (see Jn. 20:30-31’s emphasis on belief). But with the preponderance of other evidence for Christianity and the Bible, we have all the reasons necessary to put our faith in them.

- Dan Lankford, minister

What gives your life purpose and fulfillment? What is your basis of meaning and joy, and what do you consider a successful life? Is that thing substantive, real, and permanent? Or is just a veneer of joyfulness that’s installed over a life of emptiness?

When we serve ourselves and seek to fulfill our own desires, we end up with treasures that waste away in one way or another. When we desire fame, money, love, influence, thrill, reputation, power, and pleasure… we may gain them, but eventually we’re left grasping for handfuls of dust as they blow away. We build what looks like a fulfilled and satisfied life, but with a little reflection, we realize that it’s phony—a flimsy veneer used to hide the emptiness that is the real story.

I recently began thinking about this as I combed thru some famous songs of yesteryear. One that caught my attention was Rhinestone Cowboy by Glen Campbell. As I listened, I realized just how ironic the song’s message is. It’s about a country singer who wants to become famous, and his obsession with that goal robs him of the good life again and again. But he he does eventually get the fame that he seeks, and when he does, he describes it this way: “Like a rhinestone cowboy, riding out on a horse in a star-spangled rodeo… getting cards and letters from people I don’t even know.”

To me, that doesn’t sound like much of a reward for all the compromises he’s had to make along the way. A rhinestone cowboy’s life sounds like a sham, because everything in it lacks substance. Rhinestones have no value in the real-world experience of cowboys; they’re just delicate decorations—all for show. And the relationships that he celebrates aren’t actually meaningful; they’re just letters from people he doesn’t even know.

There’s no substance to a life like that. There’s nothing real in a life with shallow relationships and a lack of true, God-centered fulfillment. James said it this way: “You do not have, because you do not ask. You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions.” (Jas. 4:3-4) And Jesus told it to us this way: “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all [the things that you really need] will be added to you.” (Mt. 6:33) And there could be quoted countless other places where the Holy Spirit clearly communicates the same concept: that If our desire is for God, we can have him, and he is enough, and we will not lose him. Once that relationship is in place, our lives will have substance and we will gain fulfillment that cannot be taken away or ruined. And it will be more than a facade of satisfaction; it will be the real thing in such abundance as to make others ask about the reason for it (see 1 Pt. 3:15). Only a theistic worldview offers this. And only a worldview in which we put our faith in a God who loves us offers it so deeply.

I wonder if the songwriters behind Rhinestone Cowboy meant for it to ironically portray a life of emptiness. I’m not sure, but I’d bet that most people who’ve heard the song over the years have failed to see thru the facade. As Christians, though, we see with eyes of faith that penetrate human thinking and help us realize that all self-serving desires will ultimately leave us empty when we pursue them. But when we pursue the reign of God and his righteousness, we can be assured that everything we need will be added to our lives. And when our focus is on him, we will find real purpose and fulfillment that last through this life and through eternity.

- Dan Lankford, minister

All of Christianity’s most essential teachings center on the person of Jesus Christ. His divinity, incarnation, doctrine, life, death, and resurrection are The Gospel. But if you had to boil it down to the single most essential and distinctive belief among those, it would have to come down to his resurrection. C.S. Lewis observed from the book of Acts that for the apostles and early saints, “to preach Christianity meant primarily to preach the resurrection.” It was that message, more than any other, that they proclaimed to a lost and dying world, and it turned the world upside-down.

Skeptics and opponents of the faith have long been aware of the importance of this doctrine too. Many have denied its existence, even in the face of compelling historical evidence. One notable, extreme example, a bishop in the Anglican church, is notorious for publicly disbelieving that Jesus rose. He has written somewhere, “That the apostles had a transformative experience of some kind is evident, but it had nothing to do with the resuscitation of Jesus’ body.” This is, of course, tantamount to denying the entire Christian faith, as Paul said: “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins.” (1 Cr. 15:17)

And so the resurrection is the greatest among God’s many important miracles. And the evidence for it stacks up strong: there is a bank of prophecy behind it, a cadre of witnesses concurrent to it, a multitude of converts following it, and a host of martyrs clinging to it for eternal hope. Many people—on one occasion, more than 500 of them—saw him. Others touched him. Others watched him eat meals. The deniers never revealed his “stolen” body to disprove the resurrection story, and even the false testimony of its disappearance corroborates what really happened. The bottom line is this: It happened. He rose from the dead. And that matters.

It matters because the resurrection is the core belief by which we receive salvation from him. We are saved by grace through faith in who he really is: the crucified and resurrected Savior and Messiah. And even in the saving act of baptism, we are buried with him and raised with him to new spiritual life (Rm. 6:1-5). The resurrection is the place where the discipline of apologetics overlaps the most with the discipline of evangelism, because “if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile, and you are still in your sins… [and] we are of all people most to be pitied.”

- Dan Lankford, minister

Christians talk frequently about being awed by the created universe all around us. And it’s right that we would do that; the writers of the Bible often talked about the same thing (see Psa. 8, Rom. 1, Psa. 148, etc). So here’s the question: What is it that we appreciate? Is it the beauty of all that’s here? Or is it the intricacy and perfection of its workings? Is it the vast, enormous scale of it all? Is it nature’s power and the fear that causes in us? What one element of creation causes us to feel awe? It’s not one thing; it’s all of it.

When we understand God himself, we ought to be inclined toward the same kind awe. This is right, and it’s important that we have the humility to be properly wowed by him. But what is it about him that helps us with that? Is it his perfection and holiness? His goodness? His power and ability to destroy that instills fear in us? Is it his intense, burning, relentless love for us? Is it his humility and willingness to sacrifice himself for us? Is it his eternal nature—that exists outside the bounds of time? ls it the intellectual brilliance of his plan throughout all of history? What one element of God’s existence causes us to feel awe? It’s not one thing; it’s all of it.

Awe is a crucial emotion for an emotionally healthy person, and especially for a Christian. The awe that we sense upon knowing God is a powerful connection to him. It’s a bit of a struggle for us to wrap our minds around the totality of his existence and nature, but that struggle is not the problem—it’s the point. If we’re going to appreciate him as he truly is, then we’d better have our minds as open as possible to the depth and breadth of his whole nature.

“He who is the blessed and only Sovereign, the King of kings and Lord of lords, who alone has immortality, who dwells in unapproachable light, whom no one has ever seen or can see. To him be honor and eternal dominion. Amen.” (1 Tim. 6:15-16)

In the past 10 days, I’ve been involved in or overhearing close friends in conversations on the following topics: Pride Month, atheism-vs-Christianity, modesty, depression, Christians and martial struggles, Catholicism-vs-Biblical Christianity, and the current state of the Israel-Hamas war. I know I’m stating the obvious here: any conversation on those subjects has the potential for argument, tension, and hurt feelings. They are all places where emotions run high and opinions grow strong.

The combination of all of those has reminded me of the importance of our words. When we speak as Christians, we are called to always speak graciously, with words “seasoned with salt,” so that we have the wisdom to answer each person appropriately in a given situation (Col. 4:6). We’re told that having the thoughtfulness to say the right thing at the right time is like giving the gift of fine jewelry (Prv. 25:11-12). We’re told that speaking the right word at the right time will bring us joy (Prv. 15:23), and that refraining from speaking when it’s right to do that will help us just as much (Prv. 21:23). In any and every situation, Christians are called to be thinking people, so that we will answer in a way that gives true benefit to everyone who hears it.

I’ve been encouraged by the Christians that I’ve heard in these conversations this week. I’ve heard believers speak their convictions, respect the convictions of others, admit mistakes they’ve made, and resolve conflict in healthy ways. I’ve heard them speak up for the truth to others who were holding to spiritual and religious errors. I’ve heard them have the humility to say, “This is what I think, but I could be wrong” when it came to some of the topics listed above. I’ve been encouraged by their examples to speak with wisdom all the time.

I hope and pray that I’ve handled the conversations where I was involved with the grace and wisdom that I should have. And I pray that for all of us—that our speech will always be the kind of gracious, wise, truthful words that Christ himself would speak.

- Dan Lankford, minister

The ancient city of Philippi was in northern Greece, but it was an outpost of Rome. I was a colony, designed and built by Rome with the architecture, customs, taxes, hierarchies, rulers, and laws of Rome. Everything about Philippi looked and felt like a mini Rome. The people who lived there were not considered Greek citizens. They were Romans, and they were proud of it (see Ac. 16:21).

Knowing that makes it all the more poignant when Paul and Timothy tell the Christians there, “our citizenship is in heaven” (Ph. 3:20). The people who heard that first were living in Greece, and their citizenship was in Rome. In the same way, Christians are living on Earth, and our citizenship is in Heaven. The citizenship doesn’t remove us from the place where we live, but it reminds us that our allegiance, our culture, and our identity are centered somewhere else. More than that, the apostle is reminding them that there is a highest citizenship—one that matters more than all others, and one that overrules all others. Even with the laws and blessings of being Roman, there were more important laws and blessings for those brothers—the ones that God gave.

The same ought to be true for us too. We are Christians, and our citizenship is also in heaven. We are similar to what has been called “third culture kids” — those who have been raised bouncing back and forth between two different countries, making them a child of both cultures in part, but neither culture fully. Our countries are the world and heaven. We are of this world because we’ve never lived anywhere else, but our heavenly citizenship contrasts heavily with our worldly identity. And we are living a heavenly lifestyle, but we must still interact with the world every day. We are spiritual “third culture kids.”

And yet, one of those citizenships defines us much more than the other. The Philippians were more Roman than they were Greek, and yet Paul called them to be more heavenly than either of those. And we must answer the same call: to live in both cultures simultaneous, but with our truest identity being the heavenly one, calling us to live for Christ as we wait for his return.

- Dan Lankford, minister

In 1 Kings 13, God himself instructed a young prophet to travel across his country’s border and deliver a hard message, then return home without stopping. While he was there, an older prophet found him, lied to him by saying that God had changed his instructions, and in so doing, led the man to his death. It might not have even raised any alarm bells for the young prophet, but it came down to one crucial thing: He had heard the truth from God himself, but instead of staying faithful to that word, he heeded the voice of man who claimed to speak a word from God.

In our pursuit of what is right, we would do well to be aware of the same threat. We would do well to be so attuned to God’s words that even when men claim to speak from him, we can tell the difference and choose to follow him. We would do well to know the Bible thoroughly enough to test men’s ideas against it.

Paul once encountered a group of Jews who willingly listened to his preaching from the Old Testament, and their trust in the Scriptures was so strong that they, “examined the Scriptures daily to see if these things were so” (Ac. 17:11). And the anonymous writer of the letter to the Hebrews knew the importance of paying “much closer attention to what we have heard” (Hb. 2:1).

This kind of thinking requires us to have a high level of Bible knowledge and strong sense of Biblical discernment. Since we live in a time and culture where we have the ability to read and study the word for ourselves, we must each be committed to obedience to God’s word—not only what a man may claim to be true about his word. Our trust is in God; not in ourselves or other people. Let us not be deceived. Let us listen to his voice above all others.

- Dan Lankford, minister

The first commandment in God’s top ten was: “I am the Lord the your God. You shall have no other gods before me.” (Ex. 20:2-3) It told the people that God comes first. Period. Obviously, that means that we must never choose that which is evil over God’s things. It also means that we must not allow even the morally good things in our lives to become gods that our hearts are devoted to more than they are to God.

Sometimes, we give far more of our hearts’ energy to the things that God has given us than we do to God himself. Like the Israelites of old, we need to occasionally be reminded not to let all the blessings that he has given us cause our hearts to be lifted up so that we “forget the LORD your God, who brought out of slavery” (see Deut. 8).

I recently heard a preacher and his wife describe the beautiful love that they share by saying, “It’s because we aren’t the most important people to each other. Her love isn’t the thing that fulfills me, and my love isn’t the thing that fulfills her. We love God most, and we’re each totally filled with his love. So it’s like when you go to a buffet and you’re completely full, then you can enjoy something sweet without the pressure of needing it.”

Would that we could think of all of our blessings that way. Would that our hearts were wholly devoted to God, so that whether we have blessings or not, we still feel that we have all we need. Would that we would never need anything more than we need God himself. Would that we would never seek anything other than him to fill our hearts and bring us true happiness.

- Dan Lankford, minister