Seeing the World as a Christian

I delivered this message for Grace Foursquare's Youth Group this past Christmas. I scribbled out these notes in preparation. I hope you can understand the argument. It's a message that has been brewing in me for a long time.

You’re growing up and you guys are beginning to see the world in a completely different way. The simple answers that you had when you were children just don’t cut it anymore. How many of you used to believe that Santa Clause placed those presents under the tree. How many still believe in Santa Clause? Why not? You can’t see him, right? It seems too obvious.

Now you guys are pondering more important questions. “Who am I?” “Why am I here?” “Is there a God?” And Like Santa Clause you're thinking of chucking the latter. Why? Because you can’t see God. You can’t touch God. You can't hear God. You can’t smell or taste Him. You're thinking, “I’d believe if I could see him.”

The established elite, scientist, artist, and educators, today almost unanimously teach that what we can, see, taste, touch, smell and hear is all there is. There is nothing outside this material world.

• Scientist teach Evolution - In its broadest sense, it is the attempt to explain everything through tangiable existence and thus without God.


• Artist teach Subjectivism. There is no meaning beyond the physical/tangible work of art. There is only opinions, no right and no wrong. There is only painting, the dance, the sculpture and nothing more. There is no God


• Educators teach us tolerance - Tolerance today is not about accepting the God given right of individuals to disagree but a mandate to recognize that intangible beliefs do not have a tangible existence and thus cannot be regarded as True. Thus there is no God

Thus, we live in a world that denies the existence of God. So why should you or I believe that He exists?

I'm going to tell you up front tonight that I’ve never seen God. Never heard God nor have I smelt him or tasted him. I’ve never experienced God with my five senses. In fact even the Bible clearly says, “No one has ever seen God.” (John 1:18) So where does that leave us? God doesn’t exist, right? Wait. Let's think about where that leads us.

Our eyes only see objects. They cannot see meaning. If we abandon God based upon empirical criteria we must also abandon such notions as love, beauty, morality, justice, hope and equality. For like God, these ideas are immaterial and cannot be verified through empirical experience.

I can't empirically verify you as a person either. The philosopher Descart argued, "I think therefore I am" I know I think and possess feelings. But do you? I can't honestly say. You may simply be a robot, an animal, or a figment of my imagination. Sorry, your movement, speech and actions doesn't compare to the the empirical evidence I have for my own existence. I know that I feel pain. I experience it. But I don't know if you feel pain. I can't experience it for myself.

But even if I could come to believe that you exist, empirically I know even I won't exist forever. Because I can see in the experiences of others that this physical life will come to end. We will die. You know whats even more scary, all the things we do in this life won't matter a bit. Because we will all be forgotten. We will die and we will be forgotten. How do I know this? How many of you know your grandparents? How many know about great-grandparents? How many know about your great-great-great-great-great-grandparents. If you being the children of your parents do not know the people who lived, laughed, struggled and died so that you may exist how is your memory secure?

It was this very notion that lead the writer of the book of Ecclesiastes to despair "meaningless, meaningless, all is meaningless" We will die and everything we have been and done will be forgotten (Ecclesiastes 1:1-11). In his despair he sought...

• pleasure, riches and fame (2:1-11)
  
• education (2:12-16)

But in the end, he recognized, death, the limits of this physical world, will overtake us and destroy any meaning that we vainly create.

I've seen the sorrow in this perspective. The first funeral I ever attended was in my sophomore year of high school. A long time fellow student of mine, Holly Phillips, had been killed tragically in a car accident. She was beautiful and now she was dead. I attended the funeral more to support my fellow students then to morn the absence of Holly. But as I sat near the back watching the people in the dark sanctuary, I realized for the first time what life is apart from God. Except for the uncontrollable wailing of Holly's mother at the front of the room, everyone sat in uncomfortable silence listening to her pain. Students unaccustomed to death fidgeted in their seats. Holly's mother was alone. She was divorced and now her only child was dead. Her wailing was the guttural response to a future without hope or meaning. All that she had was gone and she had nothing, nothing, nothing tangible to hold on to.

If there is nothing outside the physical world, then life is like a board game without an object or a point. We run around seeking a goal that does not exist, a point that is beyond recovery. No wonder that suicide is the third leading cause of death for 15-24 year olds. The only logical response to a world like this is to kill oneself. We all die. Only the smart one ends it sooner rather than later.

BUT ITS NOT LIKE THIS. I don't want you to despair. There is life. There is more than what we can see taste touch smell and see. Their is something beyond the limits of our physical senses.

Let me give you a little bit of philosophy. The greatest of all the Greek philosophers was a man nicknamed Plato. In his book the Republic, he offered a picture to illustrate the world in which we find ourselves. We are like prisoners in a cave, Plato said. All our lives we have been chained to face the wall. without the ability to turn around. Behind us, men travel back and forth on a walkway and a fire behind them casts shadows on our wall. Because of our limited perspective we tragically mistake the shadow for the reality. This allegory is a great illustration of Plato's theory of the forms. Plato believed that reality is eternal, true, invisible and unchanging. Material things as we can see from our experience quickly fade away and die. But true things remain forever. 1+1 will always equal 2. It was that way before man existed. It will be that way when we are gone. A particular horse is only a concrete representation of the idea of the horse. When that particular horse is gone, when all horses are gone, the idea of the horse will still remain. It is an eternal truth that man can recognize or choose to ignore. It does not need him to be true.

This is not difficult stuff.

Think of a symbol like the American Flag. We understand what symbols are – Symbols are intangible representations of intangible ideas. For the empiricist the American Flag is simply a multi-colored piece of cloth. But for the one who has eyes to see it is the tangible representation of the United States itself.

Like meaning, the modern empiricist is also unable to see design. He or she would be unable to distinguish between and Indian Arrow head and a rock. Although made of the same substance one is the creation of random events the other of purposeful design. Is it any wounder that many leading evolutionist can see no difference between a person and a fallen twig. To him both are objects and nothing more.

In both these examples there is a reality beyond surface appearance. It is true and eternal weather or not one recognizes it.

The reason I’m saying all this is because I want to bring clarity to how one comes to know God. I can’t see God but so what I can't see meaning, love, justice, hope etc. either. I still know they exist. I see a car and although I can't see the designer, I know that it was designed. I can't see the wind but yet I see the effects of the wind.

But there's more. God hasn't remained aloof, a distant and unexplainable force. The gospel of John tells us something good and true has occurred. John 1:1 “In the beginning was the Logos and the Logos was with God and the Logos was God. He was with God in the beginning.” The word Logos is an ancient word that Greek Philosophers used. It meant the Point, the Purpose, the Explanation for all that is.” It was the invisible and eternal creative force that brought everything into existence and held everything together. And the beauty of this is that John 1:14 states, “The Logos became Flesh and dwelt among us.”

Earlier I quoted you only part of the verse, “No one has ever seen God. The verse goes on to say "But God the one and only, who is at the Father’s side, has made him known.” This God is the man Jesus Christ

This magic eye picture is a good illustration of who and what Jesus is.

When you look at the picture
you may only see a repeating pattern of electronic art. But if you stare at it, meditate upon it an image begins to emerge. In the same way when some look to Jesus they see only a man. But for those who stare and reflect He is the image of God. In John 14:1, Jesus says, “He who has seen me has seen the father.”

One of the greatest "Christian films" that has ever been produced was neither written nor directed by a Christian. But the film illustrates the gospel so well I can not help but mention it here.

To the blind, The Shawshank Redemption is merely a story about prison. It is a story of a man named Red who befriends a man named Andy. Both Red and Andy are prisoners in Shawshank prison serving life sentences. Told from the perspective of Red, Andy is always offering his fellow inmates hope of the outside world. He provides them beer on a roof top, music in the rec yard, and a library stock full of books. You see the prison in which these men live is more than a building of stone. It is the world they know. It is a world they are surprisingly afraid to leave. Why? Because nothing exists for them on the outside. The world is Shawshank and nothing more. The fear and loneliness of the outside world is so great that it leads Brooks, a parole, to suicide. But Andy sees things differently. He reminds his fellow prisoners again and again of a world that exists outside the walls. And it is only in Andy's escape from Shawshank and the hope of seeing him again that Red finds life instead of death when he himself is paroled.

The Shawshank Redemption is a movie about Plato's allegory. Just as the gospel of John is in a small sense devoted to Plato's understanding of the world. But the Shawshank Redemption goes beyond Plato's allegory to answer the question that has troubled so many. How does a man escape and exist in that world outside our tangible experience? The Shawshank Redemption provides that same answer as John. We need a savior, a hero to rescue us from ourselves, a guide to point the way and go before us, and friend to wait for us there. Andy is Jesus. And we are Brooks or Red. To the first life is bleak and pitiful and unworthy to be lived. To the later it is full of beauty and wonder because their is friend who waits for us beyond.

The Shawshank Redemption not only illustrates the surface/subtext existence that we find ourselves in (the prison represents our tanigable existence while the outside represent the eternal world) it also symbolically points to our need for Christ. Thus the movie is a fitting picture of how Christians view the world. Just as surface plot of the movie is not blatantly about Christ or the material/immaterial devide, so this world in which we live does not blatantly reveal God. Meaning arises through reason reflection (sometimes called "faith." lol) We cannot see God with our natural eyes but we can and do see him in our immaterial existance (the life we live everyday).

Just because you can't see something dosn't mean its not there. Like the Shawshank there is meaning in the world we so often fail to see.

Only in seeing God do we have life. And only in Jesus can we see God. The second funeral I ever attended was for my cousin Nathan. In the summer before his senior year of highschool he developed cancer. The last time he ever walked was to receive his high school diploma. One month later he died. The funeral I attended was in stark contrast to the one I witnessed for Holly. It was a sanctuary full of believers. Sure there were tears but there was also a deep sense of hope and celebration. There is sadness at the funeral of Christians for sure. But the sadness is recognized to be temporary. I was sad that I would never see my cousin again in the life here and now. But I knew that I would see him again in that life to come. Thus we sang and clapped, thanking God for the wonders of his creation. We listened to songs about our future in Christ and invited others to be apart. Joy was present in difficulty because for both Nathan and his family because there is friend who sticks closer than a brother.