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In this podcast, we share our sermons and teaching from our Sunday Celebrations + some other additional teaching content.
00:05
We sang a few moments ago, the King is coming back again, a reign of love that will never end. Do remember singing that?
00:20
It's glory when we can sing something like that, but do you know what? It's one thing to praise God, it's another thing when it's tough going and you praise God when that hurts to sing something like that. Worship offered through tears is a deeper and richer thing.
00:42
I've titled what I'm going to say today, Ask Jesus Anything, because I think that's God's posture. I think that's how God is coming to us. I think that's the heart of God.
00:59
Look around the room. I know we're meant to look forwards, but look around the room a little bit, even turning around fully. uh Just notice other people. Every single person that you're looking at in this room goes through moments of doubts, moments of questions, moments of needs, moments of longing that they experience. We might be Christian, some of us, but we still go through questions, doubts, needs and longings. We still experience these things.
01:26
We all have unanswered questions. Every single one of us in this room, I've got unanswered questions. Part of why I'm doing the doctorate that I'm doing is because I've got this big unanswered question. I found some answers, but I also have some unanswered questions. If you have questions here this morning, in other words, if you're here alive and breathing, you are not alone. And nobody should have to face life or questions on their own.
01:55
I'm so glad you're here with us this morning. I'm so glad you found this group of people, this church, where you can share your questions. Sometimes when we talk about our questions, we're left with more confusion than when we started. And you might feel after half an hour of listening to a guy who likes philosophy from Oxford, that you walk away this morning not just with questions, but with added confusion.
02:22
I hope that's not the case. I hope that's not the case. But maybe you just feel you've got a question and you don't feel you've got an answer to that question. I want to encourage you, if you know what your question is, if you know what your need is, if you've identified it, then you're halfway to the answer. You're not nowhere. You're halfway to the answer.
02:45
There can be a bit of a puzzle though around faith. And I started to encounter this and I'm going to tell a bit of my own story this morning. There can be a bit of a puzzle with faith. It can be that people use the word faith to talk about something that you just, you're really saying, I hope everything's going to be okay. If you look on social media, if you look on TikTok, Instagram or Twitter, if you look at what people say about faith, they kind of, they're kind of saying, I hope everything's going to turn out all right.
03:14
doesn't really necessarily tie into someone that strengthens that faith or supplies something. So therefore, faith is something that in society and in culture we largely understand is something that doesn't involve...
03:30
science, evidence, reason or logic. If you're a person of faith in our modern world, sometimes you tend to be somebody who just is sort of hoping it's true or hoping that you'll be okay. Faith is not seen as something that involves thinking or evidence, it's involved, perhaps we see it as more of a matter of the heart, the emotions rather than the head. So when somebody's a scientist or when let's say they're a science teacher,
03:57
and they're a strong Christian, people look at them a bit like they've just seen the last living unicorn, or they've just met a vegetarian butcher or something like that. How do you do it, they wonder? How do you make the square circle? How is it possible? This view of faith that doesn't involve thinking, that it doesn't involve evidence, is very widely held.
04:23
but completely wrong when it comes to Christian faith, completely wrong, completely mistaken. Let's turn to the story of Jesus meeting a man with leprosy in Mark chapter one. Open your apps or your Bibles and dig in with me into this story of a man born with leprosy, or a man who catches leprosy.
04:48
He comes to Jesus right at the beginning of Mark's eyewitness testimony. Look with me. A man with leprosy came to him and begged him on his knees. If you're willing, you can make me clean.
05:10
Filled with compassion, Jesus reached out His hand and touched the man. I am willing, He said, be clean. Immediately the leprosy left him and he was cured. Jesus sent him away at once with a strong warning. See that you don't tell this to anyone, but go and show yourself to the priest, offer the sacrifices that Moses commanded for your cleansing as a testimony to them. Instead, he went out and began to talk freely, spreading the good news, we're told.
05:39
I mean, it'd be quite hard not to, wouldn't it? As a result, Jesus could no longer enter a town openly, but stayed outside in lonely places, and yet the people still came to him from everywhere. In the ancient world, leprosy was a death sentence to die alone in pain or in deep sort of suffering.
06:03
So this man comes to Jesus, he kneels down in front of him and he says, if you're willing, you can make me clean. And Jesus moved with compassion, we're told, reaches out, touches him and says, I am willing, be clean. And immediately the leprosy leaves him. I want you to notice this man comes to Jesus with four things at once, and he even discovers some of those things as he's asking Jesus.
06:31
He comes first of all with a need, a body that's failing him, a life that's been taken from him. He comes with questions too. Who is this Jesus? Will he see me? Can he do anything? Will he even let me near him?
06:46
And he comes with longings too, to be whole, to perhaps be allowed back in with others, to be accepted. The longing perhaps that there might be somebody in this world who would not flinch when they noticed that he was close to them. Someone who come into all of that, what that man was experiencing and meet him in it. And notice as well the shape of his request as well. It's not if you can, it's if you will, if you're willing. He doesn't, I think, doubt the power.
07:17
He doubts the willingness. Do you ever feel like that?
07:24
He doubts the goodness and the question he's really asking here is not whether or not Jesus is able, but whether or not Jesus actually cares. And notice Jesus' answer, before any healing, Jesus says, I will, I will. The willingness comes first. In fact, it was there before the man ever asked him. Then he does something that the people watching must have caught their breath out. He...
07:52
moves into contact with the man. He's not afraid of what's broken in him. And Jesus' wholeness reaches out to him. And instead of running the other way, like everybody else does, it's the leprosy that goes. So the man is asking from his doubts, can you heal me? But underneath that, he's asking, will you have me? Will you meet me?
08:21
Sometimes I don't know what my real questions are and what my needs are until I start asking and pushing into them a little bit. Our questions might be about the evidence and the truth of the Christian faith and we might be sort of playing along but actually underneath it we might have questions about those things. When somebody asks us, why do you really believe it's true? We might say, well, I don't know, I'm not quite sure.
08:47
Then there might be questions about the ethics, the morality of Christian doctrine, the behavior of the church sometimes more broadly. um you know, Christians might have done things that have hurt you or hurt people around you. There might be questions about the relevance of Christian faith. Does religion really connect with life in 2026? Isn't it about out of date? Or there might be questions or...
09:12
concerns or worries at the level of the heart, like this man had. Do you see me? Do you want me? Are you willing? Do you forgive me? Let me tell you a little bit of my own story.
09:27
I used to be a person who would only believe in what I could immediately see, touch, and prove. I was definitely on the scientific side of things. I was pretty skeptical. I was an atheist, agnostic. Forgive me for being little bit rude here. I thought that Christianity was for people who were too afraid to ask questions and not sharp enough to use logic and ask good questions. I'd somehow got myself into university after dropping out of school. I'd got...
09:54
some sort of odd routine where I'd taken about eight gap years, my father had gone completely bald, I'd got myself into university to do computer science and it was Christmas Eve and I was due to start studying in the summer of the following year. My mum had cooked a early Christmas Eve meal. Now you know before all the feasting of Christmas starts you sort of have something moderate on the Christmas Eve lunchtime. Well not as far as my mother's concerned it seems. She'd cook Cumberland sausages and mashed potato and
10:24
proper gravy with onions and you know it was delicious. We were sitting there round the table, my uncle was there, he'd come on his own for Christmas, he was in his 70s, he was a bit of a legend in our family as I'll explain in a moment. But suddenly things became very serious very quickly, he started choking, he went purple while he was eating, he was clutching his throat.
10:46
Somehow, I managed to spring into action. I ran around the back of him, and I patted him on the back a couple of times, but I ended up doing the Heimlich maneuver on him. I've never done the Heimlich maneuver on anybody before in my life. I did it on him. I saved his life. A whole sausage came out of his mouth. What? I've never heard of somebody trying to commit suicide by eating a sausage, but there it was in front of me. I mean, what was he thinking? It was crazy. He was utterly delighted, as you would imagine.
11:16
Later that evening, uncle, Uncle Layton, as we called him, he was sitting at the kitchen table. I came back from the pub late that night, I wasn't a Christian, and he said, he's sitting at the kitchen table and he said, would you like a drink? And I sat down with him and he started to tell me about his career. He was the lawyer for Jimi Hendrix and the Beatles.
11:39
He asked me about my life. He asked me what I was doing with my life. I told him I was going to university to do computer science. And he said, well, maybe you should do some philosophy as well. You might enjoy that. It helped me in my career. Foolishly, I agreed. Late that night on Christmas Eve, Uncle Leighton's slightly inebriated advice, I decided I would ...
12:03
changed my degree and I would do computer science with philosophy. So I started doing computer science and philosophy later that year. I went to a lecture in that first year and the lecture was on AI. It was back in 2000. The lecture was on AI and one of the questions at the center of the lecture was, can we make computers think like human beings can? I mean, do we talk about anything else now? I mean, this is one of the major questions of our age. Can we really make an AI?
12:32
I sat in the lecture, didn't feel the answer was terribly clear, so I waited till the end of the lecture. I went up to the professor who delivered this brilliant lecture, and I said to him, he's head of computer science, said to him, Professor Megson, do you think that we can make a computer think like a human being? He said, well, it all depends. Do you think that a human being is just a complicated biomechanical machine, or do you think that there's something else to a human being?
12:59
Is there a soul, a spark or something more as well as the biochemical organism? oh I said, that sounds like a philosophical question, doesn't it? He said, yes. Unfortunately, you're doing a computer science degree, aren't you? I said, no, I'm doing a philosophy degree as well. So then suddenly, I was able to see the genius of my uncle Leighton.
13:23
I had the other half of my degree to begin to explore that question. I was still skeptical. I still didn't think there was going to be a supernatural religious type of answer. I was...
13:34
expecting as I started to look at things and that question, what is a human being? I was fully expecting to find like an old boxing match where the old champ has been tempted back into the ring for a uh ridiculous sum of money and they're not really at their best, but the younger champ of science I thought would be about to knock out the old religious champ and win the day in all of the philosophical arguments and discussions. Philosophy, I should say, is the area of uh study and the area of thinking.
14:04
where they put really big questions. What's life all about? Where does goodness come from? What's justice? What's the nature of the universe? What's the nature of reality? So I was intrigued by some of these conversations because I saw that actually there were really good reasons to have a religious belief. And I saw professors at a number of different universities who were exploring and thinking about religious faith themselves.
14:31
And here's what I began to be impressed by as a non-Christian, as a skeptic, as an atheist, really. I was impressed by something called cosmic fine-tuning, the ways in which the laws of physics and forces of physics have been so finely tuned for life that the chance of life happening...
14:51
and being life permitting is like watching somebody in a poker game play 25, 30, 40 royal flushes in a row. You have to say there's something else going on here than just blind chance. I was intrigued by ethics, by the idea that some things are really wrong and some things are really right. I watched as other philosophers floundered with attempts to ground ethics without any reference to God.
15:20
I was intrigued by patterns in human imagination, how film, literature and stories contained a search for a hero, the search for a rescue, the hope that stories will end in peace and reconciliation. I was intrigued by detective fiction, stories like Luther and Morse and all of the other stories where there's a truth to be found, someone's hiding it and maybe justice will come if the detective can get to the truth. I was also struck by what
15:50
C.S. Lewis called the unmet desires of the human condition, the way in which there is a desire in each of us, and I dare say in each of you, that nothing in this world has been able to satisfy. No food, no experience has been able to satisfy. And yet we ask ourselves, is there not something more? Lewis says, was I not made for more than this?
16:13
And then I found myself beginning to be impressed by the case that Jesus was a real actual person in history. I found myself at the threshold of faith, not believing it, saying, actually, there's some reasons for this. These guys aren't crazy. There's actually really good reasons to be a religious believer, to be a Christian.
16:39
Which faith? Which religious belief? And I started to keep coming back again to this claim that Jesus made, that He was a real person, that there were sources inside of the Bible and outside of the Bible, Jewish, Roman, Greek sources, which recorded Jesus, the things He did, that He was killed on a cross, that something happened after His death that caused this incredible growth of the church and transformation of these...
17:08
disillusioned and broken individuals who had been around Him in the beginning. It saw the conversion of a huge part of the world. And I watched as senior professors in the department I was studying in, as they became interested in the person of Jesus as well, and as they gradually moved towards Christian faith. Now none of these clues, cosmic fine-tuning, right and wrong, ethics, none of these clues for me were a knockdown proof. None of them sort of did everything.
17:38
But they got me to the point where I said, is reasonable. And I think even if you're skeptical and you're on a journey thinking about these questions, you've at least got to say that, that there are some really strong reasons to be interested and to lean in further.
17:56
Then I started to think through and I became worried by some of the moral objections, how the church has been involved in the treatment of people from different nations, how women have been treated, scandals that haven't always been properly addressed or have been covered up, the church's view on sexuality. And I started to work through and puzzle over some of these issues because I thought I might have intellectually come to the belief that this is reasonable, but I'm now finding there's a sort of moral worry. I've got this ethical worry. As I work through them, I found, yes, there were real mistakes. There were some unwise things.
18:25
that needed to be taken responsibility for, but I also found coming from the Bible, coming from God, was this voice crying out for justice, for equality, for proper status for people, and I found some clear and some well-nuanced, careful answers. That's not to say that the church hasn't done hurt, won't do hurt, we need to do better, but I also found that just as the intellectual questions had answers, so did the moral questions. They began to find I had the
18:55
that they had answers to. Then I became worried about the nature of faith itself. People said, well, faith is something you can't really be sure of. That's the nature of faith, isn't it? And that blocked me from growing because I was growing through asking questions and exploring my faith. And instead, I discovered, actually, that the view is different and that Christian faith is rooted in evidence and data.
19:20
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians that if the event of the resurrection has not taken place,
19:31
then the gospel is untrue and we are to be pitied. The whole thing I began to realize hinged upon this historical event of the resurrection. And then I saw, if you dig back into the Old Testament,
19:47
What did the prophets turn up and say to the people of Israel? They said, remember the God who called you when Israel was sort of going off the map and wandering off God's plan and making golden calves. The prophets turned up and they said, remember the God who called you, who revealed himself to you. Remember the God who called you out of Egypt and heard your cry. Remember the God who provided for you in the wilderness, who spoke to you through Moses and the other prophets. This is the God who showed you who he is. Put your trust in him.
20:17
In other words, God pointed to the great things He'd done in history as the point of recognition for the Israelites to come back to Him as well.
20:29
And then I found that, you know, I couldn't avoid the conclusion. God isn't standing behind the dark curtain as I'd often thought that God might be. Just take your best guess. I might be here, I might not, you know, take a gamble on God. I didn't find that that was what I was being presented with here. Instead, what happened was I saw that the curtain had been pulled aside, and the Christian claim at its center was that Jesus had stepped out of the curtain
20:57
and into history and said I'm here, I'm real. Do you see?
21:05
Jesus steps into human history and starts doing things that reveal what God is like to us. In other words, it's an evidential, real, grounded faith. The Bible knows nothing about a leap in the dark faith. Faith is not a religious hoping in spite of the facts. Faith is a kind of knowing that results in doing.
21:34
Now there is an act of faith where we stand on that faith, on that knowing. Like Abraham stood on knowing that God is real, knowing that the promise was true. As he went up the mountain with Isaac, he knew that the promise was true, that somehow Isaac had to survive.
21:51
but he walked forwards. Back to my story. I'd come to the view that this was all beginning to make sense. I was fascinated by how many people and so many different stories people told when they kept coming back to Jesus. And I started to read through because I was...
22:09
little bit cautious about sort of moving towards Christian faith at this point. And I thought, well, maybe it's sort of spirituality. Maybe I'm going to sort of go down this spiritual road. I don't have to believe in a concrete faith. I can sort of believe in all of it. I'm going to be a spiritual person. So I started to read James Redfield. I read Paolo Quello, Deepak Chopra.
22:30
And again and again I found that they kept coming back to Jesus. They tied him into their perspective. And I knew enough about what I'd read in the Bible and when I looked back in their references, is this what Jesus really taught? I found that Jesus was saying something completely different from what they were saying. But I was intrigued by how everybody wanted to call Jesus in on their side. I found that fascinating.
22:57
Jesus stood out from all of it. He stood out from the evidences of philosophy. He stood out from the ethics that I was taught. He stood out from my searches in spirituality. He stood out among the different religious claims and leaders of the world. Jesus stood out head and shoulders above anyone else.
23:20
One of the most famous philosophical doubters of the last hundred years was a man called Anthony Flew. Anthony Flew debated C.S. Lewis in Oxford and was thought perhaps to have got the better of him. Flew was really the godfather of philosophical atheism along with Bertrand Russell for the last hundred years.
23:42
Later in his life, when he was a professor at Reading, which is where I was, Flew announced that he'd had a change of mind. After being an atheist for his whole life, he published his last book titled, There Is A God. And he said this in that book.
24:04
No other religion enjoys anything like the combination of a charismatic figure like Jesus and a first-class intellectual like St. Paul. If you are wondering if God has set up a religion, this, it seems to me, is the one to beat. This is where to look, in other words. I think Anthony Flew was right, in his own way of putting it. I think he was right.
24:29
One person who stands out in 60 billion is worth a second glance. H.G. Wells called him the most dominant figure in human history. It's interesting, isn't it? We have no concrete record of his date of birth, yet the world's chronology is dated to it.
24:54
He never wrote a book, yet more books have been written about him than anybody else in history. He never composed any music, yet nobody's life and teaching have inspired more plays, poetry, songs, and artistic outputs.
25:10
right at the heart of Jesus' mission.
25:15
was the claim that He was God in human flesh. And Jesus didn't sort of say, oh, let's keep this quiet. He sought to back this up. He sought to verify this perception. Demonstrations of supernatural power surrounded Him, like the leprosy story. It wasn't...
25:43
the time to bring direct challenge. So that's why he said to him, keep it quiet for now. But I think Jesus knew that he would find it difficult to keep it quiet. Jesus caused people's withered limbs to grow back in plain sight of everybody. He knew people's deepest secrets. He stilled storms showing that he had power over the natural world and physics.
26:10
Prophecies from outside of his control were fulfilled like the manner of his death and the place of his birth. But Jesus doesn't ask people to just naively trust him. He points to the things he is doing as evidence. In John chapter 10, verses 37 and 38, he says this,
26:38
unless I do the works of my Father. But if I do them, even though you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may know and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father." In other words, look at what I'm doing, only God can do this.
27:01
Remember that man with leprosy? He came to Jesus with a need, a doubt, a question, a longing. Jesus didn't turn him away, did he? He said, I'm willing.
27:15
He didn't shame the doubt. He didn't guilt trip him about having the question. He answered the if before he answered the disease, I am willing, and then he stretched out his hand and he touched him. Jesus met the deeper longing to not just to be healed at a safe distance, but to be received, to be reached for.
27:40
What Jesus offers in the end to you and to me is not just an answer, Jesus offers himself. He offers relationship with God.
27:52
We're in a bit of a situation, those human beings. I wonder if you've noticed. We've made ourselves the center of reality.
28:01
We've actually now made ourselves and the inward journey, the discovery of my hidden self, the discovery and expression of my authentic self, the ethical center and the empowerment center of modern living. It's great to be empowered. It's great to be self-aware. But I'm not sure that looking inside to my own resources, to your own resources is going to solve every challenge.
28:30
The baptism that we witnessed this morning was somebody saying, I can't do it on my own. I'm reaching out to you, Lord Jesus.
28:42
We all have tendencies and we all have behaviors that we are aware that we need to think about. We get it wrong. The Bible says that in our hearts when we compare ourselves to the Holy Living God.
28:56
who made us and love us, who loves us deeply. We're in a bit of a mess. This reminds me of a story of when my son Barney was younger, and we were trying to encourage him, when he was about three or four years old, we were trying to encourage him to make the move from the pull-up nappies to dry pants when he woke up in the morning, you know.
29:16
It's amazing transition if you get to that point with a kid. Those are the sorts of things you cheer. You cheer the first outputs when they go in the potty, and you cheer their own independence in these matters. I don't want to go too much into the details on a Sunday morning. But my son Barney is a clever little chap, and we said to him, look Barney,
29:38
We know you really want this Lego figure. If you can present us with a dry pull-up nappy tomorrow morning when we come to wake you up, we will give you this Lego figure. He's like, really? Yeah, you can get it. He's like, OK. And then we said, if you do it for a whole week, if you have dry pull-ups every morning for a week, you get this bigger box of Lego. And if you do it for two weeks, you could have this really big box of Lego. He's like, I really want the Lego.
30:08
Maybe there's a discussion there to be had about the things we want. But anyway, so we just thought this was great. It was all looking good. We went in the next morning, dry nappy, amazing. Went in the next morning, dry nappy. One week went by, he had the Lego figure, he had the small box. He was happy, he was doing well. We were celebrating. It was amazing.
30:29
We thought, how has this child just managed, we talked about it, how has he managed to just exercise this amazing control over himself? It's amazing. Well, another week went by, perfect performance. He got the big box of Lego. He's now made all the Lego. It's sitting there in his room on a shelf.
30:49
It's the glory of his achievement is looking back at him from that shelf. You know, he's done well. We've applauded him. Grandparents have sent in their congratulations, right? So then my wife's looking around his room and she notices right down tucked under his bed is a pile of wet, not soiled nappies, just wet nappies. So not as bad as it could be.
31:12
So we said to him, Barney, we got all of them out. There's this big pile in his room. We show him, Barney, what is this? And he says, oh, they're from before. They're from ages ago. You just didn't notice them. Oh my goodness. My child's going to be a lawyer.
31:29
So we said to him, we don't want to crush his little attempt. If they genuinely were there from before, and it's possible he did do that kind of thing before. So we don't want to say, OK, you're a liar. You haven't tried. Give us all the LEGO back into jail. We don't want to get strong about it. So we said to him, OK, fine. So we had a very good clean of his room and got everything out. And then we put exactly 10 dry nappies on the shelf in his room. Went out.
31:58
He went to bed, woke him up the next morning. He was like, oh, I'm so sleepy. Wakes up again, fully looking like he'd been asleep. And um he's got a dry nap. People are like, Barney, well done. You did it again. We look under the bed. There's a wet nappy there. He says, oh, no, you missed one. I noticed it. You missed one. He's going like, it could be a lawyer. So. um
32:22
Then we say to him, we actually um counted the number of dry nappies in here. Let's count how many. Then we go through one, two, and we get to nine. There are no more. He's caught. He knows. He says, you've got me. He admits everything. He takes responsibility as a four-year-old can.
32:44
What he'd been doing every morning is he'd been getting up with the wet nappy, taking it off, getting it under the bed, drying himself off a bit, putting on another dry one, getting into bed, lying there in bed, and pretending to be asleep. I mean, his acting was superb. He was, if you ask me, look, was he asleep when we walked in, 100 % he looked asleep.
33:11
So then he's like, oh, I'm so tired. Did you have a good night's sleep? Oh, joy nappy. Fancy that. What a little monster. He'll either be a lawyer or a criminal mastermind, perhaps.
33:29
Psalm 44 says, would not God discover this? God knows the secrets of our hearts. Is there a little bit of a Barney in each of us? Where we hide and minimize and self-deceive about what we're really like and what we do?
33:55
Jesus says that in our hearts come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false witness and slander. I've definitely got bit of Barney's criminal mastermind in my own heart. Where does it come from after all?
34:13
What Jesus does with the man who comes to him is he makes relationship possible. How? Because of the cross. The cross is where Jesus deals with the wet nappies. It's where he deals with our choices. It's where he deals with our tendencies. It's where he deals with what I'm really like and with what you're really like. The cross is the greatest judgment there could ever be over each of us. It's a cross.
34:43
in the margin of our moral activity and our own righteousness and our own goodness, what we bring. Compared to a holy God, the cross is a statement of God's judgment, but it is at the same moment the clearest statement of God's love, forgiveness, mercy, justice and grace.
35:08
Three days later, the tomb is empty. Jesus stood up alive in front of his friends. He ate fish with them, cooked them breakfast. They touched him. Hundreds of people saw him.
35:23
And then slowly that little band of terrified, frightened disciples turned the world upside down. Not because they were incredible orators or thinkers or scholars or scientists or world leaders, but because they were eyewitnesses to what had actually really happened and what God had done.
35:49
The resurrection is God's yes to everything that Jesus said and did. It is God's yes to who Jesus claimed to be. It is God's yes to Jesus' diagnosis of what is wrong with the world. It is God's yes to the way that Jesus reaches out and says, am willing.
36:15
The relationship with God is real, alive, and on offer right now.
36:24
It's the resurrection actually that makes Christian faith historical rather than just big ideas and philosophy. It's not, wouldn't it be nice if there was a God? It's this man in this place on this day walked out of his own grave. Either he did or he didn't.
36:45
And as I mentioned, if he didn't, Paul says we are to be pitied more than anyone else because we've based everything on something that's untrue. I've got three kids. I've got Barney and two other little trouble makers. And if there's one thing I want them to know, and I'm sure if you're a parent, an uncle, an auntie, brother or sister, there's one thing you want people to know around you. You're on their team and you love them.
37:13
And when I say love, I think that you would give up everything to make sure that they're okay. That's what God is like and that's what's happening on the cross. That's what's happening on the cross. The cross and the resurrection are where God shows you that He is that kind of Father. You might not have had a Father who was like that towards you, but God...
37:41
is that way towards you. He's a good, good Father. That's who Jesus is. Jesus isn't afraid of our questions. That's what I found. Jesus is approachable. He's somebody who can meet us. He's somebody you can trust with your questions, with your needs, with your worries, and with your doubts.
38:04
You can have a real faith that still has questions, but you can still know that Jesus is real and put your trust in him. I think that's where many of us are. We still have questions, but we also know the answer to some of our questions. Skeptics and atheists, like I used to be, sometimes claim that religion is a leap in the dark.
38:27
But if you actually follow the evidence, turns out that Christian faith is more of a step, a reasonable step into the light. Christian faith is not unthinking. It's not a leap into the dark. It's a reasonable step into what's true and real. Once you've taken that step, you find somebody is there waiting to embrace you. So as I finish, I'm going to ask you a question, and I'd like this question to stay with you really for the next week or so, if it's possible for you to...
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Remember it and for it to stay with you.
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Do you know him? Do you know just the answers like I did at this point? Or did you, do you actually know him? Jesus didn't come to meet that man in that passage, that leper, and simply give him a worldview or a set of ideas or clever answers. He came to meet him. In fact, I think the thing was set up so Jesus could meet the man.
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to declare and to reveal God's love to him. Being in this building right now doesn't necessarily make you a Christian. Being in this building right now doesn't mean that you know God. Believing in God and going to church actually doesn't make you a Christian. Just believing that God exists doesn't make you a Christian any more than standing in a garage and believing there's a car makes you a car too.
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God's a person, not an object.
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And God's desire is that you would know Him, and that's been my discovery as well. We have to allow God to be a person, but that's costly, you know, because it's quite easy to keep God in a box as a concept or as something other. But if we allow God to be a person who's present to us, somebody who...
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can interact with us, can reveal himself to us, can meet us, can carry things with us, that we talk to him, then that's a different type of thing. The Bible is full of stories of people who know God in all kinds of different ways, but they know God, many of them. So for me, I got to the point where I thought it was probably true, but I didn't have a relationship with God. It was still out there.
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So I knelt down in my room, just on my own, and I said out loud, I said, I think you're here. I think you're real. It was the first time I'd sort of verbally acknowledged that I'd come to believe in God. I think you're here, and I think you've been with me in these questions, but there's one thing that I know about you that's utterly clear to me. You are holy and pure and clean, and I'm not.
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You are pure God. And had this really strong impression that God was pure and clean. And I had a strong impression of myself and I already knew it quite clearly that I was not clean. And so my prayer was very simply, will you clean me? That's really the prayer of baptism. Will you clean me? Will I give testimony to how you are cleaning me in a relationship with me?
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There's a difference between acknowledging that God exists and acknowledging that I needed forgiveness from Him. And I think that's the step that I made at that point, that I needed Him. I couldn't bring Him my good deeds, my good works, my good actions, my giving or any of it that would in any way contribute to how He saw me. It was just me saying, I can't do it. And I think that's where Christian faith begins.
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I want to offer a moment now as I finish where we just pause. I've been talking about longings and doubts and questions and needs. I just want you to reflect just quietly on your own. What would your doubt, your question, your longing, your need be? What's the biggest challenge in your world at the moment? Just reflect on that. Hopefully it doesn't get you down too much, but just reflect on that quietly for a few seconds.
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And I want you to ask yourself this question, have you asked for God's help with it? Have you brought Him into it? It might be a really like workplace thing, like I need to reconcile these formulas in this spreadsheet, or I need to fix this thing, or I need to help somebody realize something. But have you asked God into that?
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because that's the sign of whether or not you're actually in a living relationship with because we invite God into the things we go through. Perhaps it's something in your heart.
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a worry, a doubt, a hurt that you carry. Maybe it's something else. Whatever it is that God's Holy Spirit, I believe that God's Holy Spirit can prompt and bring things to our minds, bring things to our awareness. Has there been something that God's Holy Spirit has been stirring in your heart over the last week, the last few days, or even just this morning? Why don't you take a moment?
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to ask God for his help with that thing that he's been bringing to mind. I'm not going to ask you to stand up and declare it, that would be terrifying. But I'd ask that you would invite God in the quiet of your own heart into it. He's big enough. He can deal with it. He's willing, he's strong enough to carry you and he's loving enough to know exactly where you are.
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to still forgive you and still accept you. Are you willing to accept his help? I don't want you to miss the opportunity to make a decision with God here to involve him and invite him in. So I'm gonna pause for about 30, 40 seconds. I'm just gonna give you a moment of quiet just to think about where you are with these things.
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And then I'm gonna pray, and if you'd like to pray, you can pray along with me in your own heart. I'm just gonna pray, I want you to ask me, I want you to ask you to help me with these things, I want you to help me with my questions and doubts, and I want to ask you for forgiveness for what I've done wrong, and I want to follow you. That's all I'm gonna pray, it's just a simple prayer. But I'm gonna give you 30 seconds or so of quiet now.
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God, I want to ask you to help me with this thing. I ask for your help with all the stuff, with the questions, with the worries, with the doubts. I want to ask you for forgiveness for what I've done wrong. I want to ask you to help me think about my faith and to involve you in things. And I want to trust you. And I want to follow you.
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Help me grow in my faith, help me find answers to these things. But I want to put it all into your hands because your hands are trustworthy and you're willing and you're good. In Jesus' name, amen.
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Maybe some of that has connected with you. I think there are moments sometimes, defining moments in our lives where God just breaks through the everyday. And sometimes it's a different voice bringing something that can do that. I'm sure that it's okay for me to offer. I'd love to pray with people afterwards. I'd love to have the opportunity to listen to some of your questions if you'd like help with questions.
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But ultimately, I hope that you will continue this week to think about that question, do you know me? Sometimes that's a question that we're resistant to. And it might be that one moment later this week, you say, actually, I've been keeping the door shut a bit.
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And it's time to unlock the door and open the door. And I hope that maybe one evening this week, maybe as you fall asleep, maybe a quiet moment this week, you might ask yourself that question. Do you know him? Are you willing to let him into all the stuff? May God bless you and might see some of you later. Thank you, Harry.