Good morning. Happy Easter.
Welcome to Resurrection Church. My name is Daniel.
I'm the lead pastor here. The the people who built the
most powerful AI platforms in the world are by and large, not
Christians. Sam Altman, who's the CEO of
Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, has actually written
about his belief that eventually humanity will merge with AI.
It doesn't sound like he's talking about a new technology.
It sounds like he's talking about a new type of God.
One CEO of one of these companies actually talked about
creating God. Anthropics executives, the
company behind Claude, are all devout humanists.
Silicon Valley by and large is not trying to find God, they're
trying to build 1. And all of these founders have
secular world views and they've built AI platforms based on
their non Christian world views. And that's why if you ask
certain types of questions, you get very political answers.
Why am I telling you this? Someone asked the leading AI
platform a really interesting question.
They asked it this If you are human and you heard the gospel
and you read the Bible from cover to cover, would you
convert to Christianity? No leading, no prompting, no
agenda, No Fear of death, no peer pressure, no Sunday school
background, no skin in the game. A non Christian worldview.
Just consider the evidence. A system built by people trying
to replace God, trained on all of human knowledge.
Looked at the evidence and actually said yes I would
convert. Surprise surprise.
Now to be fair, it actually used a lot more words than that.
It was a 1400 word response and it gave five major reasons that
it would convert to Christianity.
So I'm summarizing now. I know a couple of you probably
came into Easter Sunday today and you heard me say AI and
you've already checked out. Stay with me, because this isn't
really about a computer. It's actually about what happens
when something with zero reason to believe evaluates the same
evidence that perhaps you've been running from.
It's the gap between knowing and kneeling.
You see, a machine concluded that it would convert, but it
can't convert because it has no will.
It has no capacity to surrender. It can only conclude, and that's
the gap between knowing something and surrendering.
And that's what we're going to talk about this morning.
If you get nothing else out of today, the big idea is the gap
between knowing and kneeling. Now, every Easter, I always want
to answer the same question for you, particularly if maybe
you're new or foreign to Christianity.
And the question is this, was it real?
It seems like an important question.
Yes. Was it real?
The apostle Paul thought this was an incredibly important the
question. He wrote about it in First
Corinthians 15. He says it this way.
He says, and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching
is in vain and your faith is in vain.
We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we
testified about God that He raised Christ, whom He did not
raise. If it is true that the dead are
not raised, because if the dead are not raised, not even Christ
has been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith
is futile and you are still in your sin, then those also who
have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all
people most to be pitied. What is He saying?
If Christ did not wake up from the dead, step out of that
grave, we should be pitied because our faith is useless.
And what I want you to see, and what Paul is saying, what the
Bible says, is that it's not asking you to take a blind leap
of faith in the dark. It says examine this.
And if it didn't happen, you walk away.
Because if you were to believe in something that was false, you
would be the most pitied people on earth.
So did Jesus die on that cross and then get up and walk away on
Sunday? Because if he did changes
everything. It's the question behind Easter,
not how good will the food be. Are the bounce houses aired up?
Are we going to have fun today finding eggs in the backyard?
Those are not the most important question.
The most important question, is this true?
Now here's what I want you to know before we we look at this
and before we go any further. The AI answer had five reasons
for its justification. But the interesting thing about
those five reasons is that they're not new reasons.
Men and women have wrestled with them for generations.
Sceptics have tried to dismantle them for over 2000 years.
Every serious person who has sat down with this question of is it
real? Believe it or not, has had to
reckon with the same 5 pressure points so so the AI didn't
discover anything, it just processed what was already there
and came to the same place that serious thinkers have been
arriving at for centuries. The evidence isn't hiding, it's
been sitting in plain sight for over 2000 years.
The other thing I want you to see today is that these
arguments have faces because real people have struggled over
these questions, these five major things, and it has
converted them. Here are the five things #1 the
story of the Bible #2 the coherence of the Bible #3 the
evidence of the resurrection #4 observed nature of humans, and
#5 the fruit of Christianity historically.
So today, for Easter, for just a moment, let's take a look at
these things, the story of the Bible.
Have any of any of y'all ever actually read the Bible cover to
cover? Anybody in here?
OK, if you've read the Bible cover to cover before, here's
you. You've probably already noticed
this. And if you haven't, I'm about to
inform you. It's really messy.
There are. There's a lot of evil in there,
a lot of mistakes and fallen heroes and moral failures.
It's just riddled with them. It's full of rebellion.
This book is nobody's wish fulfillment.
You've probably heard before that religion is just a crutch,
but to be honest with you, anybody that was fabricating A
comforting religion would not write this book.
It tells you that your heart is deceitful above all else.
It tells you that the path to salvation is narrow and few find
it. It tells you that if you're a
believer, you're probably going to suffer.
It tells you that the Son of God himself sweated blood in the
garden, begging for a different way and didn't get one.
Nobody invents that because it's not attractive.
In fact, when Jesus was explaining to his disciples what
it would look like to follow him and how difficult it would be,
they literally looked at one another and was like bro for
real not exactly like that. In in John 6 verse 60 he
explains what it looks like and and the disciples says.
When many of the disciples heard it, they said this is a hard
saying, who can listen to it? That's 1st century Aramaic for
bro. For real.
No one invents the story. It's not tidy enough.
It's not sexy enough. It's not attractive enough.
It's not comforting. There's a man named CS Lewis.
He was an Oxford professor. He's one of the sharpest
literary minds in the 20th century.
He's a committed atheist. He described himself as the most
reluctant convert in all of England.
He didn't walk into the faith, he was dragged into it.
He said he came to Christianity not because it felt good, but
because he kept running out of objections.
He spent years trying to punch holes in it, and he couldn't.
He didn't find Christianity comforting.
He found it unavoidable. If this book were invented to
make people feel better about themselves, Lewis would have
found it. He tried, and yet he converted,
wrote one of the most impactful books in all of Christianity.
The coherence of the Bible. You know, the Bible was written
across 1500 years, dozens of authors, 3 different languages,
multiple continents, and yet somehow there's one story arc
across the entire thing. You can't plan that.
The Passover lamb, the bronze serpent, these symbolics,
symbolic links hundreds of years apart, all pointing in the same
direction. Isaiah 53, written 700 years
before the cross, somehow describing the crucifixion with
surgical precision. These aren't vague Nostradamus
like predictions. They're specific, falsifiable,
and they've been confirmed. Imagine someone describing that
the twin towers were going to be destroyed by planes flying into
it. Except they prophesied that in
the 1300s Impossible. Impossible.
Listen to this little excerpt from Isaiah 53 about Jesus. 700
years before the cross. He was despised and rejected by
men. A man of sorrows, and acquainted
with grief, and as one from whom men hid their hide, their faces,
He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.
Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we
esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed
for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement
that brought us peace, and with His wounds we are healed.
All we, like sheep, have gone astray.
We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid
on him the iniquity of us all. That's not a coincidence.
Jesus alone fulfills over 300 prophecies.
There are 48 explicit prophecies about Christ that we can match
detail for detail from hundreds of years before.
Those are impossible odds. They're so impossible that a man
named Frank Morrison, who was an English lawyer, a skeptic, A
rationalist, a man who loved science and admired Darwin, he
set out to write a short paper called Jesus the Last Phase.
His goal was to legally and historically disprove the
resurrection and specifically to dismantle the prophetic claims
that he said they were too convenient to be real.
So he applied a lawyer's eye to the evidence, and he expected to
close his case quickly. His investigation led him
somewhere he didn't expect. He scrapped the paper and
instead wrote a book called Who Moved the Stone?
One of the most compelling historical defenses of the
resurrection ever written. The man who went in to disprove
the prophecies came out defending the resurrection.
How about the resurrection that Paul says?
Everything hinges on the evidence for the resurrection.
The apostle Paul in First Corinthians 15 that we read
earlier said all of Christianity stands or falls on the
resurrection. The creed that was developed for
First Corinthians 15 that we see when we read it, actually came
about about three to five years within the resurrection.
That means there were still people alive who could have
disproved it. There could have still been
contradictions and people who would have pushed back against
this if it were not real. The disciples who ultimately
died for this claim did not die for a belief.
They died for a claim about something they said they had
personally witnessed with their own eyes.
People will die for things they believe to be true, but nobody
dies to protect a lie they invented.
Listen to the apostle Paul explain this in First
Corinthians 15 verse 3. For I delivered to you as the
first importance what I also received, that Christ died for
our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried,
that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the
Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas.
That's Peter. Then to the 12.
Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most
of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.
Then he appeared to James that was Jesus half brother who
didn't believe he was the son of God when he was alive.
Somehow he believes now. Then to all the apostles and
last of all as to 1 untimely born, he appeared also to me.
What's Paul saying? You don't believe me?
Go check. There's 500 witnesses, go ask
them. Don't take my word for it.
Most of them are still alive. Go look at the evidence.
There's a man named Lee Strobel. He was the legal affairs editor
at the Chicago Tribune. He was Yale Law trained,
committed atheist. And then his wife became
Christian and he did not take it well.
So he launched A2 year investigation not to find God,
but to rescue his wife from what he assumed was a cult.
He applied his journalistic and legal training to the
resurrection case. He interviewed historians,
scholars, archaeologists, medical experts.
He analyzed the evidence the same way he would build a legal
case. And he came to 1 conclusion.
It would take more faith to stay an atheist than to believe.
And he wrote a book about it. It's called The Case for Christ.
The man who went in to destroy the case for the resurrection
built the strongest version of it instead. 4th what we see
about human nature. I want to Why don't you take a
step back and think about this for just a minute.
Everything you you, you've seen in your life about human nature.
You see, the Bible's description of human nature is the most
accurate one on the table. And let me explain what that
means. And I want you to think about
what you know about humanity for a minute.
We launch ships into the stars. We write symphonies.
We run into burning buildings to rescue strangers.
We are capable of breathtaking love and sacrifice and
ingenuity. And in the same century we
invented the Holocaust and murdered millions.
We are simultaneously the most magnificent and the most
horrifying creature on the planet.
Only Christianity looks at both sides of what we actually
observe and says both of those things are true at the same
time. And here's why.
I am a glorious ruin made in the image of God.
That's the glory. Fallen, broken, catastrophically
selfish. That's the ruin.
And I cannot fix myself. That matches what we observe
about humans more precisely than any other scientist or religion
has ever offered. Consider that the Bible would
say both of these things in Genesis 127.
So God created man in his own image.
In the image of God. He created him, male and female.
He created them. Glorify beautiful Romans 323 For
all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, made in the
image of the Creator, lost and cursed in rebellion to him.
Both are true. That's you and that's me, and
that's everyone in this room. Francis Collins was the director
of the Human Genome Project, the man who led the effort to map
and sequence human DNA. He's one of the most decorated
scientists in the world and a committed atheist, and he
decided at some point that intellectual honesty required
him to actually study the best arguments for the faith before
dismissing them. What broke him open wasn't
cosmology or biology. It was moral law.
This universal human sense, that of right and wrong, that shows
up in every culture across every century, defies evolutionary
explanation, and that points to something written into us from
outside of us. He later said that moral law was
the strongest signpost of God he ever encountered.
The man who mapped the human genome concluded that the most
remarkable thing he found wasn't in our DNA at all, and he wrote
a book about it called The Language of God.
And 5th, The Fruit of Christianity.
Historically, maybe some of you are familiar with William
Wilberforce. He abolished slavery in England.
He did so on Christian conviction against enormous
economic interest against the most powerful empire in the
world at the time. It was Christians that built the
1st hospital system. Before Christianity, if you were
sick and poor, you died alone. Christians ran toward plague
victims when everyone else ran in the other direction.
Universities like Yale, Harvard, Oxford all started to train
ministers. The abolitionist movement, the
civil rights movement, the Underground Railroad, driven by
people who believe that every human being bore the image of
God and therefore mattered. The greatest social movements in
our history are from Christianity.
We should judge a tree by what it grows when people actually
follow it. It's actually a biblical concept
that Jesus says in Matthew 7. He says you will recognize them
by their fruit. Are grapes gathered from thorn
bushes or figs from thistles. So every healthy tree bears good
fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.
A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree
bear good fruit. This is what Christianity has
produced. Now some of you may rightly be
thinking, what about the atrocities?
What about the Crusades or the Inquisition?
I'm not dismissing that. But people acting against
Christ's teaching is not an indictment of Christ's teaching.
Judge a tree by what grows when people actually follow it, not
when they betray it. The Crusades were Christians
acting against everything Jesus said.
The hospitals, the abolitionist movement were Christians acting
according to it. It's a man named Peter Hitchens
burned his Bible at 15 years of age in the schoolyard, A
deliberate and ceremonial act of rejection.
He became a Russian revolutionary.
He's the brother of Christopher Hitchens, probably the most
famous atheist of the last generation, the author of a book
called God is Not Great. Two brothers, same upbringing,
same rebellion. Peter spent years as a foreign
correspondent inside the Soviet Union.
He watched from the inside what a civilization built without God
produces. He watched the moral collapse.
He watched the institutionalized cruelty.
He watched the way a society behaves when there's no
transcendent value anchoring human dignity.
And what he saw there didn't just change his politics, it
sent him home. The man who burned his Bible at
15 came back after watching what the world looks like without
one. He wrote a book about it later
called The Rage Against God. How Atheism Led me to Faith.
We judge trees by their fruit. 5 unavoidable arguments and five
notable atheists with stories about wrestling with these same
things. Now, that's not to say there
aren't reasons to struggle. The problem of suffering is
real. The exclusivity claim of
Christianity is hard. No worldview resolves every
difficulty. The question is whether
Christianity answers the most important ones like who am I,
what's wrong with me, and what's been done about it more honestly
than anything else. I think the biggest question of
the day is not whether or not it's real.
It has nothing to do with the evidence that I just gave you
because all of these men, these notable scholars who all
converted, I don't think that your problem is an evidence
problem. Even the leading AI platform in
the world created by unbelievers evaluated the evidence and
conclude concluded it would convert to following Jesus
Christ, but it didn't convert. It can't.
It's not human. It can only conclude.
And you see a lot of you people here today or listening online,
I think you're in the same position.
You've heard the evidence, you might even believe it, but you
haven't moved, you haven't surrendered.
See, the Bible actually says that this is the real problem.
It's not a lack of evidence in Romans one.
The Bible states it this way. For the wrath of God is revealed
from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness
of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the
truth. For what can be known about God
is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and His
divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the
creation of the world. What is he saying?
Look around at what has been created and know there is a God,
because in the things that have been made we are without excuse.
The problem isn't that people can't see it.
The problem is that people suppress it.
That's what the Bible says. It's not a knowledge problem,
it's a surrender problem. Here's what I will tell you
after years of doing this. Evidence can get you to the edge
of the water, but only the Spirit of God can make you jump
in. So we've been praying all
morning for you to jump in. I know because this is exactly
where I found myself in college. I knew God was real, I just
didn't want to surrender. I knew it so well that in the
middle of my rebellion, drinking and partying and chasing a
horrible lifestyle, I actually LED my boss to Christ on the
floor of a warehouse office one night after work drinking beer.
Yes, the Holy Spirit works on dirty warehouse floors just like
He works in dirty centers like me.
I had not even surrendered, but I knew enough that God would use
me to reach someone else for Christ.
His name is Scott Desheno. He messaged me this week on
Facebook. He said, man, thank you so much.
I said, bro, I was a flaming wreck.
And you know what he said? So was I.
But I'm not anymore. The most important question on
Easter Sunday is not did it happen, it's what will you do
with the fact that it did? I still remember the day I
surrendered. Is today your day because I want
you to meet Him. Jesus died for your sin.
He walked out of a tomb. He is alive and he is offering
you something that no one else can not self improvement.
Not a moral upgrade, but a rescue.
Every other religious system gives you a ladder to climb.
Only Christianity lowered the ladder to the floor.
So here's the invitation. Repent and believe not, not
perform and earn. Now there's another group of
people here today and, and, and online and you, you surrendered
your life to Jesus at some point and then you messed up and you
failed and you ran away, just like we heard Peter do last
week. Peter failed Jesus
spectacularly, denied him three times, and what did he do?
He he went back to fishing. He went back to his old life.
He went back to what he knew before Jesus.
Jesus doesn't write him a a letter.
I can't believe you Peter. What a jerk.
He didn't wait for Peter to clean himself up and come
crawling back. He showed up at the beach that
Peter was at and he made him breakfast.
He found him in his old life. Fire was already lit.
The fish were already laid out and those of you that know
Christ and have run from Him, this is for you.
Jesus is not waiting for you to find your way back.
He is already at the beach. So maybe today is the day for
you to turn back to your Savior who's sitting on the beach
waiting for you to realize that His invitation to you has never
left because He loves you. Come back.
Before you leave the building today, make a choice to come
back and tell somebody about it. Come back.
I'm going to give you an opportunity today, if that's
you, to make a declaration in your heart and publicly to turn
back to Christ, to rededicate your life to Him.
I told you earlier that the big idea was the gap between knowing
and kneeling. And so there are a few of you in
here today and watching online who have never surrendered your
life to Christ. You know all of the evidence.
That's not the problem. The question is whether or not
you will kneel. So I want to offer you the
chance to do that today, the same invitation that Christ
extends to you. Will you all bow your heads and
close your eyes for a brief moment if you are ready to
surrender your life to Christ, not merely to intellectually
acknowledge that He exists, but to give over your will and life
to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords?
I want to give you that chance. Will you repeat this prayer
after me? Jesus, I know I'm a Sinner who
can't save myself. I need you to save me.
So I surrender everything to you.
I repent and believe. Be my Lord.
Please Jesus, if you've just made a decision to surrender
your life to Christ for the very first time, will you be brave
and raise your hand for me to see?
Thank you, thank you, thank you. You could put your hands down.
Thank you. If today is a day that you know
you should turn back to Christ because he is chasing you
relentlessly and you've been running, I've got good news and
bad news. He's got long legs and He loves
you. If today you would like to
rededicate your life to pursuing Jesus King, will you raise your
hand for me to see? Thank you, thank you, thank you,
thank you, thank you. You could put your hands down in
Jesus name, Amen. All right, real quick, if you
just made a decision to surrender to Christ for the very
first time, welcome to the family.
If you have already signed up to be baptized, I want you to get
up and head toward that door with the very happy, beautiful
people waving at you. There he is.
If you have given your life to Christ and you have not been
baptized, this is the public profession of an inward
decision. Even if that was just moments
ago and you want to be baptized. We have towels and we have extra
clothes and the water is warm. It's oildale water, but it's
still warm. All you need to do is get up and
walk right over there. Will you stand with us?
If you just chose to surrender your life to Christ for the
first time, there are tables in the back.
It says I raised my hand. We would love to celebrate with
you and we start singing. I want you to go back there.
We have a gift for you and we're excited for you.
If you just rededicated your life to the Lord, our prayer
team is going to be up here. We love praying with you for any
reason you bring your prayer requests.
We would love to pray over you. If you made a decision to
rededicate your life, we'd love to pray over you as well and
celebrate with you. You come as the Lord leads you.
I'm going to sing this song together.