Practical Living

Dale O'Shields: Thank you for joining us for today's Practical Living broadcast. I pray that through this message, you will learn how to apply God's Word and truths to any situation in your life. Stay with us as we discover God's truths that will transform us.

Today we continue a series of messages entitled "Lifequakes." This is the 19th message in the series. Only the Lord knows when we will be completed with this series. We are continuing on with this process. I think we are coming really close to the longest series I’ve ever done in the life of our church. I did one other series many years ago that I think was 20 messages. Next weekend, I will tie my all-time record of 20 messages in a row on one particular topic.

We’ll see how far we go and how long it lasts, but I’m trying to follow the lead and the unction of the Holy Spirit in regards to this. I want to continue to talk today about dealing with doubt in your life. This is part two. There will be another installment of this particular message next week, a part three, as we are talking about lifequake moments.

What is a lifequake? A lifequake is anything that shakes up your life. It is something that comes into your world, perhaps something that happens suddenly and is like a storm that comes in and really rattles your cage and knocks you off your equilibrium. Sometimes these lifequakes come in the form of something that is far more subtle. It’s not necessarily a big rattle moment, but little by little, something sneaks into your world, and before long, you find something happening in your soul and you are shaken on the inside. Many times it happens through life transitions. We all go through different seasons of life, and when we are transitioning seasons, it can be shaking for us. It can be something that we are stepping into that is new to us and maybe intimidating to us. All of these represent lifequake moments.

Sometimes we tend to think that lifequake moments only come to the bad people, but Jesus made it clear that lifequake moments come to everybody. No matter what your relationship is with God, if you are close to Him or far away from Him, the reality is all of us experience storms in life. It’s just the reality.

In fact, Jesus gave us a wonderful story in Matthew chapter 7 where He talked about two men building houses. One man, a righteous man, built his house on a rock with a good foundation. Another man, who represents someone who was not righteous, someone who was not seeking God, built his life on sand. It was not a good foundation for his house. The Bible says Jesus made it clear that the storms of life came to both men, not just to the man whose house was on sand, but to the man whose house was on the rock and the man whose house was on the sand.

There is a difference, however. The difference is the fact that when the storm came to the man whose house was built on the rock, that house stood firm. That is part of my goal in this series, to help all of us as we go through the inevitable lifequakes. The things that will come our way, no matter who or what we are in life, the troubles that we face in life, that we will remain firm, solidly upon the rock of God's Word, foundational upon our relationship with Him, and that nothing can shake you to the degree that you lose your faith or you lose your confidence in God.

There are many kinds of things that shake us. We've talked about a number of them: grief, disappointment, and discouragement. We've talked about lots of different things that come our way. We are focusing right now in this series on one little word, and that’s the word doubt. Doubt, although it’s a small word, can have a very big impact upon your life. Last weekend, I talked about some things relative to doubt: the importance of not being surprised by it. Everybody experiences it. Doubt is in the Bible. People go through doubts at times, and we see people navigating doubt. Many great men and women of scripture had to go through seasons of doubt and they came out positively on the other side.

We talked about accepting the reality of unknowns, that sometimes in life you’re not going to know everything. Doubts can arise when you expect to know everything in life. You’re not going to know. Certain things are mysteries. Certain things you will never know until we all get to heaven. At that moment, we’ll begin to understand things that we can't understand in the here and now. Then I talked last weekend about determining the ultimate source of truth. The reason this is important is because when you're doubting, you need an authority. You need a source of truth in your life that you can always go back to.

It’s really on this last point, determining your ultimate source of truth, that I want to build today’s message and next weekend’s message as well. I want to talk about that source of truth. The one primary point that I want to give you, and we’ll come back to this very same point next weekend, is the fact that you and I need to be confident in some things. When it comes to a source of truth, we need to be confident in three very important things: God's existence, confidence in God's Word, and confidence in Jesus Christ, God's Son. These are three points of confidence that you need.

Before we get into the definition of these three, two of them particularly today, I want to bring you back to the definition of doubt. Let's put this definition up on the board again. You can read it together with me aloud and loudly this morning, and then we'll break it apart and see if you can't better understand it. What is doubt?

Doubt is a state of uncertainty, hesitation, or lack of confidence regarding something that is believed, hoped for, or claimed to be true. So what is doubt? Doubt is when you get to a point where you're uncertain about something. You were certain before, but now uncertainty is in that realm of your thinking. You're hesitating about a commitment that you made. You're doubting your commitments, or you've lost a bit of confidence in something that you believed, because you can't have doubt until you first believed something. Faith really is first before there is doubt. It's something you've hoped for or something that has been claimed to be true.

The antidote for doubt is always confidence, faith, or confidence. I'm going to use those words synonymously today, faith and confidence, because when you have faith, you have confidence. Faith or confidence that overcomes doubt is you know what you believe in. There's a solidity to your confident faith that says, "I know what I believe." The doubts are there, but I go back to something that is solid in my life.

Everyone of us here, as we talked about last weekend, all of us have a source of truth that when you're going through anything in life, you go back to something to try to give you reassurance. We talked about different aspects of that in people's lives. Some people go back to themselves. They become their own source of truth. They begin to define truth on the basis of culture. If culture says it's okay, then it is okay with them. They use a variety of things to kind of lean back on, and many times these things we lean back on are not solid. They're not sure. In fact, oftentimes the things that we claim for truth for our own lives are really untrue themselves.

We are actually basing our life on false confidence. You and I need to have confidence in what is really true. You will never get through doubt unless you have faith or confidence in something that is solid, because knowing truth is your weapon when you doubt. You’ve got to know the truth. There are three kinds of truth that every believer, actually every human being, needs if you're going to be solid through any kind of doubting season of your life.

As I mentioned last night, I wanted to bring three big granite blocks up on the platform today. It would have been a great mental picture, but just picture today that we've got three big granite foundational blocks of stone on the platform this morning. You need to have these rocks in your life, these big stone points that you stand on in your life. Number one, you have to be convinced and confident that God exists. You’ve got to know that. That God is not the figment of an imagination. It's not some kind of myth that's been built up or that people sort of religiously believe in something just in their minds, but it's not true. No, you have to really believe that God exists.

Second of all, you have to believe that the Bible is true. You have to have a solid—that's your second rock. So picture with me, I'm standing on the rock that God exists. I stand on the rock that the Bible is true. Then I stand on the rock that God's Son is the Son of God, Jesus, the redeemer of the world. I have to have those three foundational stones in our life. If you don't have those, you're going to be subject to all kinds of doubts that will come your way and you will not know how to properly handle them.

I’m going to focus today on two of those three stones. I'll focus on the third one next week. You don't want to miss next weekend as we talk about having confidence in God's Son. Today, I want to talk to you about confidence in the existence of God and confidence in the truth, the reliability of the Bible. Let's start with the existence of God.

In Psalm chapter 14 verse 1, the psalmist makes this declaration, a very powerful declaration. He says, "The fool says in his heart, 'There is no God.'" In other words, David says writing here as the psalmist, it is really foolish for anyone to say there is no God. It's the opposite of wisdom to declare that I don't believe there is a God. The Bible is very clear about the reason for this, and part of the reason is because if we're going to come to God, as Hebrews 11 verse 6 says, notice this verse: "And without faith, it is impossible to please God, because anyone who comes to him must believe that he exists."

If you're going to come to God and have a relationship with God, you'll never have a relationship with someone you don't believe exists. You have to believe that He exists, but it goes on to say in that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him. This is essence to who we are in our relationship. To build a relationship with God, you’ve got to believe that there is a God.

It's foolish to say there is no God. Why is it foolish? It's foolish because there's so many proofs that God actually does exist. A lot of people will say, "Well, prove to me that God exists." This morning, I'm going to do that. I'm going to prove to you all the different proofs of scripture and not only just scripture, but our observation of the world around us. I'm going to give you seven ways that you can know that God exists, because if you don't have this rock in your life, you're going to be in really big trouble.

Does God exist? Let me give you seven good reasons to believe that God exists. Number one is what I'm going to call the undisputed principle of cause and effect. We know that God exists because the world in which we live in is an effect of a cause. It didn't just pop into existence. There had to be a cause for it to be in existence. In all of life, none of us would dispute the reality of cause and effect. If I have a stack of dominoes here and they're all lined up and I want the dominoes to fall, you know that for all the dominoes to fall, a preceding domino has to fall first that causes all the other dominoes to fall. There is a cause and there is an effect. The first one falls first and that creates an effect upon all the others.

We think about a building, for example. You walk into this building, you don't walk in and say, "I wonder how the building got here." You walk into the building and you say, "I wonder who the construction firm was. I wonder who built the building." Anything that you see that exists, you realize that it came into existence by a cause. Something brought it into existence. The universe exists. We all acknowledge the fact that the universe exists. We live on planet Earth. We live in the solar system. We live in a world that exists. Therefore, if the universe exists, it has to have a cause. It has to have a reason why it exists, because it can't exist without some cause. That's the principle of first cause. Just logic alone, that when we look at the world, the Bible says the heavens declare the glory of God.

Number two, the second way that we know that God exists is the presence of order and design in the universe and in all creation. Not only does the world exist, but the world is an orderly place. It is a designed place, and you cannot have design without a designer. It's impossible to have a design without a designer. There's a second law of thermodynamics that's called the law of entropy. The law of entropy says this: that everything is always moving from a state of order to disorder. That's the law of entropy. We understand that. You know that at your house. That's why you have to keep cleaning your house, because you get it all orderly and what happens? The next day it's all messed up again. It's called entropy. The order degenerates into disorder. Chaos and order descend into chaos.

Notice this: chaos never ascends into order. Order descends into chaos; chaos never ascends into order. It never happens without some kind of intervention. We see in the world in which we live that there is design and there is order. Let's talk about the solar system in which we live, how the world revolves and how the sun and all the stars are in order and how there's a predictability to everything. When you wake up in the morning, you're not wondering, "I wonder if the sun's going to come up in the east or the west today." Will it come from the north or the south? No, there's order in this world in which we live. We know that every day the sun will rise in the east, it will set in the west. We can predict certain seasons based upon just the order of the universe. The same is true atomically in terms of atoms. Atoms are perfectly balanced, and without balance in the functioning of an atom, the world would fall apart. So there's order and there's design.

Third reason that we know that God exists is by reason of the complexity of the universe and of all creation. The world that we live in is not only a designed world, but it's a world that's very complex, extremely complex. Scientists have been studying it for millennia now and they still haven't figured everything out. It is so extremely complex. Think with me for a moment, what if our Earth were just a bit closer to the sun? What would happen to us? We'd all be fried bread. Or maybe fried meat would be a better way to say it. If the Earth was just a bit further away from the sun, what would we be? Ice-sickles. But the Earth is called a habitable planet because it's located in our solar system just the right distance from the sun so that we're not destroyed by the sun and we're not destroyed by freezing cold weather. Uniquely placed. Again, the complexity of the design of the system in which we live.

Let's talk about the DNA in your body. Did you know that your DNA is extremely complex? In fact, I was reading something about this recently and I found this fact to be absolutely incredible: that if you were to take all the cells of your body and extract the DNA from all the cells of your body and put them in a line of all the code of the DNA of your body, it would be 67 billion miles long. 67 billion miles long just the extracting of the DNA of your body in terms of a strand. That's about 374 trips back and forth to the sun. That's you. We're talking about the complexity of God's creation.

The fourth reason we know that there's a God is because of human consciousness and the desire for and the pursuit of meaning. By human consciousness, what we mean by that is you're able to think about you. You're aware of you. You're conscious of you. You're aware of a certain aspect that the world exists around you. You have the capacity to create, the capacity to think, the capacity to actually process and meditate and contemplate things. God has made us in His own image and His own likeness, that we have the capacity to have a consciousness that no animal else has. We have a beautiful little dog at our house, but I assure you he doesn't sit around and meditate. If he thinks about anything, he thinks about, "When are you going to feed me? And when are you going to take me out?" He has no consciousness because he's of a different order. We're created in the image of God, so we have this consciousness and we're always pursuing meaning. I would imagine that every person in this room at some point in time you've asked yourself the question, "What's the meaning of life? And what is my meaning in life?" You're searching for this understanding. Why is that there? Because you are a creation of Almighty God. It points to the fact that there's something unique about humanity.

Number five, the intrinsic sense of morality and conscience in people. That's how we know that God exists, because inside of every culture, regardless of culture, regardless of language, regardless of geography, regardless of historical time frame, people have always possessed and do possess an innate sense of some things are right and some things are wrong. Some things are just and some things are unjust. Some things are good and some things are evil. Where does this come from? It comes from the imprint of God upon us. We are unique in that regard, that God has marked us with the fact that we understand something about right and wrong. We don't always define it appropriately, but we're aware that some things are right and some things are wrong.

Number six, the universal expression of worship in all cultures for all recorded history. Anthropologists have never discovered a human culture that had no religious practice. Every culture they've ever studied, they've found that that culture worshipped something or someone. They may have worshipped nature, they may have worshipped the river, they may have worshipped the sun, they may have worshipped spirits that they envisioned, they may have worshipped all kinds of things, but there's never been a culture studied by anthropologists that was not some aspect of worship. Where does this come from? The Bible says that God has placed eternity in the heart of every human being. There's a desire to know God, and where does this come from? It comes from the fact that we're marked by our creator. We know that God exists.

Number seven, how do we know that God exists? The testimony of human experiences with the divine and divine manifestations to humanity. Billions and billions of people across all of history have encountered God. They've had experiences with God and their testimonies—you can't take billions of people who've had encounters with God, you can't just summarily dismiss all of their experiences. You can't say, "Well, none of those are real." No, if it were one or two people, maybe you could summarily dismiss one or two people saying they'd had an experience with God, but there are billions of people. There are people in this room right now, in fact I would say the majority of us in this room, if not all of us, have at some point in time had an experience with God. We noticed that it was something beyond a human interaction. It was something that was supernatural, and that is a testimony to that reality.

Paul the apostle makes this very clear in Romans chapter 1 verse 20: "For ever since the creation of the world his invisible attributes, God’s invisible attributes, his eternal power and divine nature have been clearly seen, being understood through his workmanship." All His creation, the wonderful things that He has done, this is workmanship. "So that they who fail to believe and trust in Him are without excuse and without defense." Paul says when every person stands before God, they will not have an excuse or defense to say, "God, you didn't exist," because God made Himself real to every human being by the world in which we live and by the manifestations that He's given us, the assurance that God exists. It is wise to believe in God.

I would encourage you today to reaffirm deeply in your life, "I believe in God." Would you say it together with me? "I believe in God." And when doubts come up, what do you go back to? You go back and you get on that rock. You stand on that rock and say, "No matter what happens, one thing I know for sure: I believe in God." Say it again with me today: "I believe in God." And that's how you are able to overcome doubt when it comes your way. It’s the stone that you stand on, a rock in which you build your life.

Now, since God exists—not if God exists, since God exists—there's a next question that we have to answer. Since God exists, how does He actually communicate with us? And how do we know and have confidence in His communication with us? We see very clearly that God has uniquely communicated with us through a book called the Bible. This book is not a book that is written by human beings. It's not some organized author that put it together other than God Himself. This book needs to become a very special understanding in your life that you recognize that this is the infallible Word of God. That God who created us gave us this beautiful wonderful gift called the Bible.

How do we know that we now can trust the Bible as the Word of God? I'm going to give you eight reasons now that you can believe in the Bible as the Word of God. I realize that today's teaching is a little different than what I normally do, but it's my job as your pastor to try to help you to have a firm, solid foundation in a world of all kind of voices coming at you, that you understand God exists and God's Word is reliable and it's true. Take good notes, you can go back and study this on your own. I'm only going to cover it in somewhat of cursory manner today because I don't have enough time to cover it. I would except I have two more services after you guys today or else I would keep you until at least noon, but I'm not going to do that today.

How do you know that the Bible is a reliable, infallible Word of God? Number one, through what I will describe as miraculous manuscripts. A manuscript is an autograph or it's an ancient writing that reflects another writing, a manuscript of something. Manuscripts are extremely important when it comes to the Bible, and I'll tell you why, because and it's really important for any ancient document. A manuscript is the ability to go back as close as possible to the original document and to see that there's integrity from the original document all the way through other documents that come down through history. That's really what a manuscript is. So the goal is to try to get as many manuscripts as you possibly can get to an ancient document and to get them as early as you can to the time that that original document was written so that you'll have confidence in the integrity of whatever it is you're reading.

When you study the Old Testament, the Old Testament manuscripts, I'll come to that in a moment through the Dead Sea Scrolls and I'll describe that. But let me go to the New Testament just for a bit. When it comes to the story of Jesus, the New Testament manuscripts, we have more manuscripts by far more manuscripts of the New Testament than any other ancient writing at all. Do you know that there are at least 25,000 plus manuscripts of the New Testament? The next one that I could find in terms of manuscripts was the Iliad, Homer the Iliad. His only had 400 manuscripts. So we have 25,000 manuscripts or portions of the New Testament that we can go back and look at and compare in terms of integrity. Are they always saying the same thing? That's what you want to find out. Are they always saying the same thing or do they begin to vary over time and over history? We have 25,000 manuscripts of the New Testament or portions thereof. The earliest portion of a manuscript dates back to 125 AD. It was from the Gospel of John, a portion of the Gospel of John that was discovered in Egypt, and it goes all the way back to 125 AD, which by the way, John the apostle who would have been the author of that particular portion of the manuscript of the New Testament, he lived to about 100 AD himself. So somewhere between 20 and 30 years after John's death, we have the closest original documented manuscript for the New Testament, which they all, as you read throughout history, they all compare favorably and with integrity to one another, often times just with the modest aspect of punctuation and things of that nature.

Let's talk about the Old Testament. The Old Testament was reinforced—the legitimacy of the manuscripts of the Old Testament were reinforced through something called the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in Israel. If you've ever traveled to Israel, I've taken groups there before, you go to a place called Qumran, and in Qumran there are caves there where a Bedouin little shepherd boy happened to throw a stone into one of the caves one day and hears a kind of clink sound and discovers it's a clay jar that has been broken by his rock that has been thrown in. So they begin to research it more and discover all these incredible manuscripts of the entire Old Testament. All the books of the Old Testament were in the Dead Sea Scrolls with the exception of Esther. That’s the only book that wasn't included in the Dead Sea Scrolls. The most incredible discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was the full manuscript of the prophet Isaiah. And that manuscript was a thousand years older than any manuscript we had at the time of Isaiah. A thousand years older than any manuscript we had in 1947. A thousand years older than that. As they took the thousand-year-older manuscript and compared it with the more current manuscript that we had from which we get our English Bibles, the book of Isaiah and other translations as well, there was almost no difference between the manuscripts, maybe some punctuation difference and so forth. What I want to say is that we have solid manuscript reliability for this book being very full of integrity for each one of us. That's number one.

The second thing is the miraculous internal consistency of the Bible. Very important. The Bible has about 40 plus different authors. Now when I say authors, the reason I struggle with that is because they're really not the authors, they're moved on by the Holy Spirit, but these are the people that were used by God to pen the pages of scripture. By the way, the Bible is 66 books. Not 67, not the Bible plus anything else. 66 books of the Bible. 40 different authors over somewhere between 1,500 and 1,600 years that penned these words. Coming from three different continents, writing in three different languages: Hebrew, Greek, Aramaic. And yet, and also let me say this, they were from all kind of backgrounds. You had kings writing, you had fishermen writing, you had farmers writing, you had shepherds writing. You had one doctor that we know that wrote a portion of the Bible that was used as an author, Luke himself. So they're all kind of backgrounds of these people, again 1,500 years, 40 different people, three different continents, three different languages. And yet when you read the Bible, the message is consistent all the way through. Now if I were to take even today and assign a writing assignment to 40 different people across three different continents speaking three different languages and I say, "Okay, I want all of you to write something about God," can you imagine what kind of mess we would have? But here we have the internal consistency.

Number three, how do we know the Bible is true? Because of the archaeological confirmations in scripture. Now we don't need archaeology to confirm scripture, but it does. Archaeology is the study of ancient histories through excavations, through studying artifacts and things of that nature. Archaeology has time and time again confirmed people. People like David have been confirmed, King David. People like Pontius Pilate. Many other people have been confirmed as having existed as the Bible said they did. Places have been confirmed as they've done excavations. Places like Jericho, and places like Megiddo, and Capernaum. I've taken many people to Capernaum, the northern part of Israel, the ancient home city of Jesus Himself, and you can go there and actually walk through the ruins and see the synagogue where Jesus would have preached there. The house of Peter is still there to this very day in terms of excavation. Caesarea is another example of it. We see cultures: Hittite culture has been affirmed, the Egyptian culture, the Assyrian culture, the Babylonian culture, the Roman culture, all these things, the Jewish culture, have been confirmed by archaeology.

Number four, prophecy accuracy. The Bible offers literally hundreds of specific prophecies, many of which have already been fulfilled in an amazing accuracy. Now the prophecies of the Bible are not kind of general prophecies: "Thus saith the Lord, you're going to have a good day." No, it's not stuff like that. It's very specific kind of things. Prophecies related for example to where Jesus was going to be born, the very city He was going to be born in. Prophecies related to the fact He was going to be born of a virgin. Prophecies that spoke of the fact that Jesus would be betrayed with 30 pieces of silver. Prophecies about His crucifixion, Isaiah chapter 53. Many of these prophecies were spoken 700 years—we'll get more into this next weekend—and many as far past as a thousand years before Jesus comes on the scene, but fulfilled in accuracy and many more prophecies that are being fulfilled day in as we live our lives now until the future when Jesus returns again.

Number five, confirmed repeated and validated eyewitness testimonies. How do you know the Bible is true? Because we have confirmed, repeated, validated eyewitness testimonies to the stories and the truths found in scripture. Not just people that heard something about this, these were eyewitnesses. Matthew, he was one of Jesus' disciples, he was there with him. John, one of Jesus' closest disciples who was right there with him, actually at the cross when Jesus passed away, when Jesus gave His life for the sins of the world. Peter, who was an eyewitness right there with Jesus, and he writes about these things. Luke, who carefully investigated and studied the story and life and testimonies of those who knew Jesus. Mark, who recorded for us Peter's testimonies of the life of Jesus. Paul, who encountered Jesus on the road to Damascus. These are eyewitness testimonies and they're validated time and time again.

How do we know that the Bible is real? Additional confirming historical writings. How do we know, for example, that Jesus existed? How do we know he was a real man? We know he was a real man not only because the Bible says so, but there are also extra-biblical historical facts. Tacitus, who was a Roman historian who lived somewhere between 56 and 120 AD, writes about Jesus. He writes about the fact that Jesus was a real man, he was executed by Pilate. We have a historian by the name of Josephus, perhaps some of you heard of Josephus before. He was a Jewish historian for the Roman government and he refers to Jesus on at least twice in his writings. And again, historically he had no dog in this fight. He was simply recording history. Pliny the Younger was a Roman governor and also jurist, a great lawyer in Rome at that time. In his writings, he references when he's writing to the Emperor Trajan, he references this Jesus. He talks about Jesus and how to handle Christians, how to handle these new believers who were following this Christ. The Babylonian Talmud, for example, which is a rabbinic writing for the rabbis in the Jewish religion. They refer to Jesus, sometimes in derogatory sense trying to diminish Him in some manner, but they do talk about His existence, His miracles, and His execution. So you see not only in the Bible but there are external sources out there that confirm the reality of what the Bible is telling us.

Number seven, how do we know the Bible is real? Careful canonization. The word "canon" is an important word to understand as Christians. The canon of scripture. Now as soon as I mention the word "canon," most people think of the kind of stuff on a pirate ship. What do you mean? You mean the cannonballs coming from scripture? No, that's not what we're talking about. The canon is a word that means the rule or measuring rod. That's what the word means: rule or measuring rod, the canon of scripture. And how do we know that the 66 books of the Bible are the inspired Word of God? How did we get to the place that we have these 66 books that we recognize, and what rule or what measure was used to help us to know that these are the true books of the Bible and God's Word to us? Well, the Old Testament was confirmed far before even Jesus came on the scene because Jesus Himself referred to the Old Testament time and time again, quoting from the Old Testament as being scripture itself. So through a rigorous process of acknowledging and seeing the divine nature of these writings in the Old Testament, the Jewish nation affirmed the fact these are the words of God to us. In the New Testament, this was a process that occurred beginning in the early first century. As the apostles began to write different letters, and the letters began to circulate among churches, and Paul's letters would circulate different places, the Gospels started to be circulating, and people began to sense these are divine writings. So the establishment of our canon of scripture, these 39 books of the Old Testament and 27 books of the New Testament, really were an affirmation of what people already accepted as being the writings.

I'll use an example this way. Think of a jeweler with me for a moment. When you walk into a jewelry store, does a jeweler create a diamond? Well, maybe in today's world they might. But generally speaking, if it's a legitimate diamond, not a lab-grown diamond, can a jeweler create a diamond? No. But what can a jeweler do? A good jeweler can recognize a diamond, right? Can't create a diamond, but a jeweler can recognize it. They can put their little deal on, whatever those things are called, they can peer down. They recognize it. This is exactly what happened with the 27 books of the New Testament. It wasn't as though somebody said, "Well, let's create a New Testament." What they did is they recognized the books that were already being properly circulated with divine apostolic authority upon them and that the churches were already using as the Word of God, and they began to simply bring together those books that had already been affirmed as being the Word of God. So the canonization of scripture, the New Testament, was not something that happened by reason of just a group of people saying, "I wonder what should be in the Bible." No, it's the acknowledgment of what was already established. It was the fact that all they were doing was say, "Yep, that's the diamond. That's the diamond." That's what it is.

Last point I'll give you today, and that's the miraculous impact of the Bible's content on human lives. How do you know the Bible is real? You know the Bible is true and valid, infallible, because of its miraculous impact on human lives. I would ask you this morning, how many of you have ever been impacted by a Bible verse? My life has been changed by a Bible verse. And there are stories after stories after stories—we could be here the rest of the day talking about testimonies of people who've been impacted just by picking up and reading this book. Stories, for example, a great organization called the Gideons International, and their job or their mission assignment is to get the Bible into as many places as possible. That's why when you go into a hotel, many times you'll open up one of the drawers, there's a Bible there placed by the Gideons. Many times—I'm not sure if they do it anymore because of some of the regulations that exist in our world today sadly—but I know when I was growing up, the Gideons would show up at my school and they would hand me a New Testament. All the students would receive a little Gideon New Testament. Anybody remember those little Gideon New Testaments that you would receive? There are other people that have been involved in distributing the scriptures, the power of the scriptures to change lives. Stories of people who will end up in a hotel room and be in great desperation, pull out a Bible, begin to read and meet Jesus in a personal way. People who will receive a Bible in prison, read just a passage of scripture and their life is radically transformed by being in that moment.

Let me tell you one story that's been widely circulated. Everything that I can tell, I can validate this story as far as that I know. It's a story of the General Secretary of the Bible Society in Zimbabwe, Africa. He tells the story going back to probably about the mid to early 1990s, I should say. He was doing a conference somewhere and actually was giving out Bibles on the street, as far as I understand the story. He comes across a particular man, he says, "I want to give you a New Testament." The man was resistant. He didn't want a New Testament. "I don't want to read it. I don't want it. Don't believe in God. I’m not going to take it." And the man said, "I really would encourage you to take it. Just take it. All I'm doing is asking you to take this as a gift." And the man responded, "No, if I take it, I'm just going to take the pages of it and tear the pages out and I'll use those as rolling paper for my cigarettes." And so the wise General Secretary of the Bible Society in Zimbabwe, Africa said, "That's fine. With one exception: all I ask you to do if you'll take this book, you can use it for your cigarettes if you want to, but the one thing I want you to do is read it before you smoke it." Just read it before you smoke it. Will you do that? Will you read it before you smoke it? And the man agreed to that. I guess he gets some pile of rolling papers, I suppose. So he agreed to read it.

As the story goes, as the man tells the story later on, he begins to smoke his way through Matthew. He smokes his way through Mark. He smokes his way through Luke. And he starts to smoke his way through John until he gets to the third chapter of John, and as he's reading he discovers these words: "For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have everlasting life." And his heart was touched by that one verse. He said, "I'm not going to smoke anymore, I'm going to read some more." And he began to read, and according to the man's own testimony, he gave his heart and life to Jesus. This man from the Bible Society met him a year or so later, and this man was preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Why? Because there is power in the Word of God.

So what I say to you this morning, as we're going to wrap up with this: what do you do with doubt? How do you deal with doubt? You better have some foundation stones in your life. You better step on that stone that says, "I believe God exists." Nothing can shake me from my belief and confidence that God exists. Then I'm going to step on this stone and I'm going to say, "I believe that His Word is true and His Word never fails." That's what you need to deal with doubt. Let's bow our heads together as we pray.

Father, we thank You this morning for Your Word. We're grateful for the opportunity we've had to study. We pray that You will seal deep in our heart the confidence, Lord, that You exist, that You are. And confidence in the fact that You have given us the supernatural book called Your Word, the Bible. And may we use these foundational points of confidence and belief to ward off and fight off every doubt that comes our way. We trust You with this in Jesus' name, Amen.

I would like to close today by giving you an opportunity to ask Jesus to be the Lord of your life. Would you pray with me right now? Right where you are, just simply bow your head with me and I'm going to give you a prayer to pray. You can simply speak this prayer out, whisper this prayer out, and from the sincerity of your heart call upon God, and I promise you that He will hear and answer you. So let's pray together. Start by simply whispering the name Jesus. Let there come from your heart just the declaration of His name. Say:

"Jesus, I know that I am a sinner, that I have fallen short with You. I'm sorry for all of my sins. Jesus, I believe in You. I believe that You are God's Son. I believe that You are the savior of the world. I believe that You died on the cross for my sins. And I believe that You rose from the grave, that You are alive today. Lord Jesus, come into my heart. Come into my life. Forgive me of my sins. Give me a new start in You. I commit my life to You in Jesus' name, Amen."

Now if you prayed that prayer with me, I want to encourage you with a promise from God's Word that says that when we call upon God's name, we call upon the Son of God, there is salvation that comes to our lives. He changes us from the inside out and you become a new creation. Old things pass away, all things become new. And that's exactly what has happened to you today. Your next step really is to make sure that you get into a good Bible-believing church and you begin to study God's Word. Get God's Word in you and make sure that you get a copy of the Bible if you don't have one and begin to read it. Spend some time every day in prayer. And I would encourage you also to check out the resources on our website that will help you to get going in your relationship with Jesus. You can find them at church-redeemer.org. Get those into your hands. Get started in your new life with Jesus Christ. Thanks again for joining us today, may God bless you, and we look forward to seeing you next time.