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Crucial to a Gospel Presentation: Explain Belief (part seven)
part one part two part three part four part five part six
When I preach the gospel to someone, I explain (1) that he is sinner; he’s not a good person, (2) that he deserves a penalty for sin: death (physical, spiritual, and eternal death), (3) that Jesus died for him, and then (4) that he must believe in Jesus Christ. Where I left off on number four, part of what it means to believe in Jesus Christ is to repent. How do I explain that?
Jesus, Not Me
You cannot believe in Jesus Christ and in yourself both. Sin is against the glory of God (Romans 3:23), so against God Himself, like David confessed in Psalm 51:4, “Against thee, thee only, have I sinned.” Sin is my will, not His will be done. The root of sin is self over God and wanting what you want instead of what God wants. This relates to the first and the tenth commandments of the ten commandments.
Breaking the first commandment puts another god before God and violating the tenth means coveting. Paul in Colossians 3:5 says covetousness is idolatry. Disobeying the tenth commandment is also disobeying the first.
Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” He is the way. To take His way, you’ve got to leave your own. This is to deny self and follow Him, which is repentance. Repentance, life faith, is not a work. Acts 11:18 says, “Then hath God also to the Gentiles granted repentance unto life.” God grants repentance, just like He grants faith (2 Peter 1:1, Philip 1:29). “No man can say that Jesus is Lord, but by the Holy Ghost” (1 Cor 12:3).
No Longer in Rebellion Against Him
No one believes in Jesus Christ and remains in rebellion against Him. He turns from his way to God’s way, from self to God, and from his sin to Jesus Christ. The Apostle Paul writes in 1 Thessalonians 1:9, to turn to God from idols to serve the living and true God. Rather than worshiping the creature, his self, He worships the Creator (Rom 1:25). The Father is seeking such to worship Him (John 4:23).
In Luke 13:3, 5, both verses, Jesus commands, “Except ye repent, ye shall all likewise perish.” In John 3:16, Jesus says, if you believe in Jesus Christ, you won’t perish, and in Luke 13:3, 5, he says, if you won’t repent, you will perish.” Faith and repentance are two sides to the same coin. To turn to Jesus Christ, which you do when you believe in Him, you must turn from something — your will, you way, and your sin. Paul represents the two in Acts 20:21 in his preaching:
Testifying both to the Jews, and also to the Greeks, repentance toward God, and faith toward our Lord Jesus Christ.
Repent and Believe
A couple of other places put the two together:
Mark 1:15: “And saying, The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent ye, and believe the gospel.”
Matthew 21:32: “For John came unto you in the way of righteousness, and ye believed him not: but the publicans and the harlots believed him: and ye, when ye had seen it, repented not afterward, that ye might believe him.”
Repentance is that moment when someone relinquishes control of his life. This is seen in the sequence that Jesus preaches at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount in Matthew 5. Someone recognizes his own spiritual poverty, he mourns over his sin, and then he is meek, that is, he gives God the charge of his life. The word translated “meek” was used of the horse that was broken. He now becomes useable. This is your life, God, take and use it. This is believing in Jesus Christ.
More Than Intellect, Also the Will
Faith that saves is more than just intellectual assent to facts. It involves the will. God knows when you have relinquished your self, your way, your life to Him. Many will say, Lord, Lord, Jesus says at the end of the Sermon on the Mount. He will say, Depart from me, I never knew you. It is he who does the will of the Father who is in heaven. Someone who keeps going the same direction has kept his life for himself and will lose life as a result.
More to Come
Where Does the Bias Toward Alien Life Come From?
I was watching an Olympic event this week and a commercial came on screen for Netflix with an alien on its craft, watching a stream of shows from space. Some might say it was just a joke, except that it isn’t for many, many people. It works as a concept because people think life out there is paying attention to what’s happening on earth. It’s a tolerable option now pushed by multitudinous science fiction productions.
Richard Dawkins said publicly in 2008, caught for the film Expelled, that since we don’t know how life originated in the first place, an “intriguing possibility” is that alien civilization evolved elsewhere and then “designed” and “seeded” the first life on earth. He may have taken that idea from a scientific paper in 1973 by Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel, which they called “directed panspermia.” Crick later revised this position, but these speculations highlight the trouble with the existence of evidence of design in the massive amounts of genetic information in DNA, what Dawkins, the famous atheist scientist, slipped out as an apparent “signature of some kind of designer.”
I actually hear often the alien explanation for life on earth when I’m out preaching the gospel. People know it isn’t an accident that we got here or that we are who we are with all of our complexity. They are unwilling to say it’s because of God, but they also don’t accept that we evolved at least here on earth from a common ancestor.
Are aliens a good answer for the existence of the colossal and labyrinth of complicated information at the core of human existence? Where does that bias toward alien life come from? Is it scientific?
The reach for alien life as an explanation for human origins defers to intelligent cause. The presence of the functionally specified digital explanation in DNA infers intelligent design. Are aliens an even reasonable explanation as the designers behind life on earth? Are aliens an adequate cause with the known power to produce the kind of effect of large amounts of specified information?
In the search for extraterrestrial intelligence scientists start with presupposition then of specified information contained in electromagnetic signals coming from space. However, radio astronomers have never yet found such information bearing signals. All of life on earth does have such information inscribed even in its simplest living cells. No evidence exists that infers anything from space is the causal agent for life on earth.
The speculation of alien origin of life on earth springs from a bias against a divine causal agent. It isn’t science. No science backs alien origin of life on earth.
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