By Phil Sanders

I know there are brethren who are weak, foolish, selfish, legalistic, progressive, lazy, rude, and given to fleshly lusts. I know there are some slow to forgive and quick to divide the church. I know there are some who have remained immature and have caused harm in the church. I know there are wolves in sheep’s clothing, people who have taken advantage of the church, and I also know the Lord loves every faithful member of the body of Christ and every member who is trying to walk worthy of his calling. I know Christ does not want any brother or sister to perish but for all to come to repentance.

If the Lord could love a person as weak as me, could willingly forgive me, could see something good in me, and is willing to mold me into the man I ought to be, I reckon I should be able to see something lovely and worthwhile in my brethren. I know there are some who need to grow in Christ, but I also see my own shortcomings. I need to extend grace to others, just as the Lord extended grace to me. I believe it is high time we loved each other and loved the brotherhood. What is right with the church…

1. The church of Christ has the right LORD.
2. The church of Christ rightly belongs to the LORD Jesus and not to man.
3. The church of Christ believes the one, true Gospel (Gal. 1:6-9).
4. The church of Christ expects people to believe in Jesus, repent of their sins and to love the LORD. We expect people upon the confession of their faith to be immersed in water for the forgiveness of their sins.
5. The church of Christ worships in spirit and in truth (John 4:23-24). It observes the instructions of the New Testament concerning giving, communing, praying, singing, and in hearing God’s Word. It has not gotten lost in the present culture.
6. The church of Christ is still made up of autonomous congregations led by Biblically qualified elders and served by faithful deacons.
7. The church of Christ has not forgotten the Great Commission. Flavil Yeakley says we are still the sixth fastest growing religious group in America. Our congregations in India and Africa are booming.
8. Studies indicate that churches of Christ ranks first in these areas:

• Our people attend better than any religious group in America.
• We have the fourth most congregations of any religious group in America. We are the best distributed for our size.
• Barna found that churches of Christ gave at a greater rate than any religious group in America.
• org found in the 2008 US Religious Landscape Survey that churches of Christ have 22 percent of its adult members ages 18-29. This is two percent above the national average and the highest of any major religious group in America.

9. The church is keeping 67 percent of its young people. At age 30 they are still attending faithfully (according to a study by Flavil Yeakley).
10. God is still in charge of the church. He still prunes us to make us grow. He still loves us. The Lord Jesus is preparing a home for us.

Daniel 2:44, “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.” Fulfilled in the 1^st century, recorded in Acts 2, existing today.

–submitted by Jerry Sturgill

“Knowing this first, that there shall come in the last days scoffers, walking after their own lusts, And saying, Where is the promise of his coming? for since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of the creation.” 2 Peter 3:3-4

By inspiration Peter foretold that scoffers (mockers) would come in the last time. These would poke fun at Jesus’ promise to come again, citing the long-standing constancy of the created order as purportedly proving the possibility of a final day as ridiculous.  However, it is evident that the universe had a starting point, when the eternal Creator brought it into existence; there is no excuse for failing to recognize this truth from creation (Romans 1:20).  Just as the universe had a starting point, it will have an ending point.  Observation is all that is required to see that the physical world is wearing out, or winding down from its original state of creation.  Unlike God, the world has an expiration date, “And, Thou, Lord, in the beginning hast laid the foundation of the earth; and the heavens are the works of thine hands: They shall perish; but thou remainest; and they all shall wax old as doth a garment; And as a vesture shalt thou fold them up, and they shall be changed: but thou art the same, and thy years shall not fail” (Hebrews 1:10-12).

Peter goes on to tell us the attitude we ought to have based on this truth:  “Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?” (2 Peter 3:11-12). Instead of mocking, as those described in verse 3 do, we ought to take serious stock of our lives and prepare for the final day.

It is difficult to get some people to be sober-minded about anything. While there is time for joking, eternal spiritual matters are of great importance. Because these scoffers deny the Lord’s coming, they walk in lusts. They indulge the flesh because they do not consider the judgment of God a serious matter.  The devil wants us to dismiss the seriousness of the judgment. This is why people can recognize what the Bible teaches on how they are to live and turn from it — they focus on what they want now rather than preparing for later (2 Peter 2:21-22). But the dismissal or ridicule of the plain truths of the Bible will not make them go away. In chapter 2 of his second epistle, Peter had reminded his audience that God punishes sin. The angels that were not content to stay in their place were cast down to hell (2 Peter 2:4). The ungodly in Noah’s day were drowned in the flood (2 Peter 2:5). The ungodly practices of Sodom and Gomorrah, which are so glorified among many in our day, were the cause of their destruction by God (2 Peter 2:6). Because those cities would not repent of their fornication —going after “strange flesh” (Jude 7) — they were turned into ashes and stand as an example of God’s judgment on the ungodly.  We should take God’s attitude toward sin seriously and live right before it is too late!

-Mark Day

Naturalism—the belief that only natural processes are and have always been at work in our universe—has serious implications in regard to free will. Dr. Sam Harris has a PhD in neuroscience and is an outspoken naturalist; in his 2012 book Free Will, Harris emphatically declares, “Free will is an illusion.”[1] Instead of regarding man as an immortal soul housed in a physical body, whose will is challenged, but not entirely overridden, by physical constraints, Harris only sees the physical constraints. As a proponent of naturalism, he must reduce every “decision” to a material cause, regarding measurements of neural activity as the key to determining what decision an individual will make. He says, “Consider what it would take to actually have free will. You would need to be aware of all the factors that determine your thoughts and actions, and you would need to have complete control over those factors.”[2] Herein lies the problem with Harris’ thinking, somehow because one does not have complete control over physical factors relating to actions, one does not have any control over one’s thoughts and decisions. One cannot make a decision above those influences for good or bad. However, C.S. Lewis points out the flaw in this thinking:

But at those moments when we are most conscious of the Moral Law, it usually seems to be telling us to side with the weaker of the two impulses. You probably want to be safe much more than you want to help the man who is drowning: but the Moral Law tells you to help him all the same. And surely it often tells us to try to make the right impulse stronger than it naturally is?….The thing that says to you, ‘Your herd instinct is asleep. Wake it up,’ cannot itself be the herd instinct. The thing that tells you which note needs to be played louder cannot itself be that note.[3]

In fact, people do have the capacity to choose what to believe and what to do. If not, then right and wrong are emptied of meaning. Morals have no significance if man is unable to choose differently from the course of action he pursues. The universal sense of justice—that we should be fair to fellow human beings—requires that when individuals are unfair they could have chosen to be fair. Instead of a might-makes-right worldview, we desire the scales to be balanced. The Bible’s teaching that beliefs and decisions having a bearing on this life and an afterlife gives life, morals, and justice meaning (Matthew 25:31-46; Acts 17:30-31; 24:25).

Naturalism is missing something. With its lack of free will, lack of foundation for right and wrong, and lack of an afterlife, naturalism ultimately leads to nihilism. In Ecclesiastes, Solomon considers what is the ultimate meaning in all that is done “under the sun”; thus, limiting his scope to just this life with no final judgment, he concludes, “Then I looked on all the works that my hands had wrought, and on the labour that I had laboured to do: and, behold, all was vanity and vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under the sun” (2:11). His only recourse from this despair was realizing man’s duty to God, the judge of the good and evil, “Let us hear the conclusion of the whole matter: Fear God, and keep his commandments: for this is the whole duty of man. For God shall bring every work into judgment, with every secret thing, whether it be good, or whether it be evil” (Ecclesiastes 12:13-14). This weekend, in our seminar with Dr. Jeff Miller, you have heard the evidence for God creating the universe and having a purpose for your life. Which will you choose?

-Mark Day

[1] Harris, Sam. Free Will. New York: Free Press, 2012. p. 5.

[2] Ibid. 13.

[3] C.S. Lewis. Mere Christianity. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. p. 10.

Most of us have gone through times in our lives where our faith in God and Scripture were shaken. Perhaps something was presented to us that sparked a question we had never considered—a question that we had no answer to, and which, we thought, possibly didn’t have a good answer. And yet, the question was so fundamental to the Christian worldview as presented in Scripture, that not having an answer to it kept us up at night, and kept us searching until we found an answer.

Many have yet to receive an answer to that question that plagued us. Perhaps over time other such questions were raised to them as well—slowly chipping away at their belief. Statistics indicate that 20% of the youth in the Church are becoming irreligious upon leaving home, in large part due to questions about the validity of biblical Creation—not having seen the evidences for Christianity that validate it.

How can I know that God exists when I cannot observe Him with any of my senses? Must I blindly believe in Him? If the Universe demands an ultimate Cause, why doesn’t the Cause also demand a Cause? What caused God? And even if a god exists, how can I know which God He (or she) is? Why is the Creator not Allah, Buddha, or some other supernatural Being? How can I know that the Bible, as opposed to the Qur’an or Book of Mormon, is from God? Does the Bible contradict solid science, as so many claim? Is the Bible merely a collection of ancient myths and fables, not intended to be taken literally (e.g., the “giants” of Genesis 6)? How can Creation be true in light of the evidence for Darwinian evolution? Can they both be right—does the Bible leave room for evolution? And what about the age of the Earth? Doesn’t the evidence from radiometric dating (e.g., carbon dating), ice cores, canyon erosion, sediment deposition, petrification, and dendrochronology indicate that the Earth is millions of years old? How can the Earth be as young as Scripture indicates? Is there evidence of a global Flood as taught in Genesis 6-9, or must Scripture be re-interpreted to accommodate a local Flood—or no Flood at all? How could the millions of species on the planet fit on the Ark? If there was a Flood, how did the animals get to Australia afterward? How does the evidence from geology (e.g., Pangea; plate tectonics; etc.) fit with the biblical claims? Doesn’t the fossil record support evolution rather than Creation? How does the evidence for an Ice Age fit with Scripture? How could dinosaurs fit on the Ark? And even if they could, why doesn’t the Bible mention them? In the discipline of archaeology, doesn’t the evidence indicate there were stone, bronze, and iron ages, with ancient documented civilizations that have an unbroken line that can be traced back to a time long before the Tower of Babel and even the Flood? Doesn’t that contradict the biblical timeframe? Is Creation scientific—able to make actual scientific predictions that have been verified? How can we see light from stars that are billions of light years away if it took billions of years to get here? Doesn’t that prove the Universe is billions of years old? How did all of the skin colors come from only two people?

This is a mere sampling of the questions many of us have had. Imagine never receiving answers to any of them. What would that do to your faith? Come to the “Christians Can Be Confident about Creation” seminar as we answer these questions and many others—and be sure to bring others who need answers.

-by Jeff Miller, Ph.D.