Starting Point: Don’t Stop Believing

Three observations about faith:

1. The ability to believe is the most powerful force at mankind’s disposal.
   1. Examples. People believed diseases could be eradicated, and they are. Civil rights were believed to be equal and for all, and we celebrated MLK jr’s birthday.
   2. It is behind everything good and everything bad. It is like a weapon. You just point and things happen. You don’t believe me? Just look at how the United States came to be.
2. If you believe deeply enough in anything, it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
   1. People call this this Oedipus effect.
      1.                                                     i.     Let me tell you how it works in mythology: There was a man who overthrew his brother, who was the king. He believed that one day that his nephews would kill him and overthrow him. So he put the boys in a basket and threw them into the Tiber River. The problem was that a wolf found them and raised them. Then a shepherd found them and took care of them until they were teenagers. Then they killed their uncle.
      2.                                                    ii.     Better example would be Sleeping Beauty. The witch, Maleficent curses the king by saying that Princess Aurora will die by pricking herself on a spinning wheel, so the king moves Aurora to the middle of a forest to live with the fairies and sleeping beauty falls in love with a prince Steve and pricks her finger anyway. Don’t worry, true love’s kiss breaks the curse.
   2. Things happen because we believe that they will happen.
3. We constantly look for evidence to support what we believe to be true.
   1. This is especially true if you’re republican…. And democrat… and Korean.

Let me tell you why I believe in Jesus. It’s not because the Bible tells me so. It’s because somebody told me about Jesus and shared the reason he believes in Jesus. In fact, when we read the Bible, we find that the reason a lot of the disciples believe in Jesus after Jesus died was because he came back to life and they heard about it and then witnessed Jesus come back to life. It’s amazing. Let’s pick up the story in Acts 17. In Acts 17, we find Paul, telling people in Athens about what he believes and why he believes it.

¹⁶ While Paul was waiting for them in Athens, he was greatly distressed to see that the city was full of idols. ¹⁷ So he reasoned in the synagogue with both Jews and God-fearing Greeks, as well as in the marketplace day by day with those who happened to be there. ¹⁸ A group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers began to debate with him. Some of them asked, “What is this babbler trying to say?” Others remarked, “He seems to be advocating foreign gods.” They said this because Paul was preaching the good news about Jesus and the resurrection. ¹⁹ Then they took him and brought him to a meeting of the Areopagus, where they said to him, “May we know what this new teaching is that you are presenting? ²⁰ You are bringing some strange ideas to our ears, and we would like to know what they mean.” ²¹ (All the Athenians and the foreigners who lived there spent their time doing nothing but talking about and listening to the latest ideas.) ²² Paul then stood up in the meeting of the Areopagus and said: “People of Athens! I see that in every way you are very religious. ²³ For as I walked around and looked carefully at your objects of worship, I even found an altar with this inscription: to an unknown god. So you are ignorant of the very thing you worship—and this is what I am going to proclaim to you.

For a lot of people, we just don’t ever think about what we believe or who we believe in. We just accept it. This is a problem because then we go on believing everything and anything, and then we just look pretty silly. I would tell you horrible stories about why it’s never good to believe something you don’t know about, but I’m going to let you make your own decisions on that when you read the news about how people get tricked. Christianity, what we believe, it’s not a trick. I want you to write this down: God doesn’t want you to be ignorant of why you believe in Him.  This is what Paul is saying to the people of Athens in verse 23, “you people don’t know what you’re doing, so let me explain it to you.” Let’s keep reading.

²⁴ “The God who made the world and everything in it is the Lord of heaven and earth and does not live in temples built by human hands. ²⁵ And he is not served by human hands, as if he needed anything. Rather, he himself gives everyone life and breath and everything else. ²⁶ From one man he made all the nations, that they should inhabit the whole earth; and he marked out their appointed times in history and the boundaries of their lands. ²⁷ God did this so that they would seek him and perhaps reach out for him and find him, though he is not far from any one of us. ²⁸ ‘For in him we live and move and have our being.’ As some of your own poets have said, ‘We are his offspring.’ ²⁹ “Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill. ³⁰ In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent. ³¹ For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to everyone by raising him from the dead.” ³² When they heard about the resurrection of the dead, some of them sneered, but others said, “We want to hear you again on this subject.” ³³ At that, Paul left the Council. ³⁴ Some of the people became followers of Paul and believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.

This, “proof” is the reason we read the Bible. We don’t read the Bible because there are cool stories in there about magical things. We read the Bible because people decided that they needed to write about why they believe in God. Not only that, we read the Bible because people thought about how they witnessed God do the very things written in the Bible. The twelve disciples went into hiding after Jesus died. They lost their faith. Their savior was dead. Three days later they witnessed Jesus. They then hung out with Jesus for 40 days after he died and came back to life. They told people about it. Paul was telling people about it here in Athens. He wasn’t telling them stories about sticks and stones, but about something that really happened and to a real being. He witnessed it. People are going to tell you that believing in Jesus is silly. But you will know that the reason people keep believing in Jesus is not because the stories are cool or because the Bible is well written; but it’s because God gives us proof of Jesus’ death and resurrection throughout our lives and He allows us to see it. Let’s pray.