This past Sunday, I began a new preaching series I’m calling Why Believe? in order to address some of the biggest objections people have to faith in God and belief in the God of the Bible.  I began with the central question of Christianity – did God raise Jesus Christ from the dead? – which also required a brief treatment of the question of the reliability of the New Testament gospels and the question of whether miracles can happen.  If you weren’t there on Sunday, I would encourage you to listen to the sermon on the website, which includes a powerful personal testimony by Maggie Proulx.  Over the next four weeks, I’ll be dealing with the following objections:

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And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins.  Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead…

1 Corinthians 15:17-20 

I’ve written many words on this blog over the last year on many different topics.  Some have probably challenged you; others have angered you.  Some have increased your love for God and other people; others have left you scratching your head.  This week, I want to leave all the other issues on the periphery, where they belong.  Only one thing truly matters, as Paul wrote in the verses above:  If Christ has not been raised from the dead, our lives are pitiful; all my pontificating and sermonizing has been “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”  But if Christ has indeed been raised from the dead…

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If you get The Hartford Courant at home, you probably saw the grim-faced couple on the front page, with the headline underneath that read “What Was He Thinking?”  Above the picture, it read “Experts Struggle to Understand Spitzer’s Alleged Romp with Call Girl.”

My initial reaction, to be honest, was to laugh.

Now, don’t get me wrong – I certainly wasn’t laughing at the fact that Eliot Spitzer, Governor of New York, got caught soliciting a prostitute, Read more »

As I prepare for the upcoming “Why Believe?” sermon series, one book I’ve been reading is UnChristian:  What a New Generation really thinks about Christianity…and why it matters by David Kinnaman and Gabe Lyons.  It is a book done with extensive research by the Barna Group, a Christian organization that does research on many different spiritual and moral issues in America.  The book begins with the provocative line “Christianity has an image problem” and goes on to discuss some of their findings regarding how people between the age of 18-29 view Christians, Christianity, and Jesus.  For an idea of some of their findings, take a look at the graph below, which answered the question: “Here are some words or phrases that people could use to describe a religious faith.  Please indicate if you think each of these phrases describes present-day Christianity.”  The bars represent the number of respondents who said that these words described present-day Christianity “a lot” or “some”:
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