Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
As we close out one year and enter into another, I want to extend to you an Invitation into Faith.
Truly FAITH IS the HEARTBEAT behind this Substack publication and all of my public activism. My chief motive is to put my faith in God into action beyond the walls of our home and the Church – to stand on and speak God’s truth, to honor Him in the public square. I realize that some of you might share this motivation, while others of you might be motivated to take action for many other reasons, which is understandable.
However, before we enter into 2024 — which promises to be a tumultuous year with the 2024 election season, as well as the 2024 legislative session — I want to offer you all an invitation into faith – whether you have faith, do not have faith, or have lost faith.
Let me invite you to take a BIG step back to consider the amazing world that we live in. When we study the intricate details of the natural world around us, three truths become clear.
Consider the perfect design of the Milky Way Galaxy – how the Earth is placed at the precise distance from the Sun necessary to sustain human life. If the earth was any closer to the sun, we’d burn up. If the earth was any further away, we’d freeze.
Consider the irreducible complexity of the human cell. Each part of a single cell is simultaneously needed for it to exist. The protective cell membrane, the nucleus containing DNA, which provides the blueprint instructions for the ribosomes to build proteins, as well as the energy producing mitochondria, etc. are each simultaneously needed.
Like the cell, there are many other examples in nature of life’s “all or nothing design.” This irreducible complexity points to the reality that everything that exists was intentionally designed. It simply could not have existed in the first place, nor survived if only evolved by happenstance. If there is an intentional design, then there must be an Intelligent Designer who is far greater than we ourselves.
Thus, nature itself proves to us that God exists.
Looking beyond nature’s function, nature’s beautiful, beneficial design also proves to us that God is good. We see evidence of His goodness in the amazing, and precise way our bodies function; the beauty of each sunrise and sunset; the amazing provision of the oxygen humans need to breath being supplied by all the green trees and vegetation around us. Out of all of the colors, God chose to color the sky blue – a soothing color associated with peace, relief, truth and wisdom – and He chose to color all of the earth’s trees and vegetation with green – a calming color associated with contentment, harmony, growth and healing. In all of this we see the goodness of the Creator displayed towards us, toward mankind, the crown of His created world.
Nature proves to us that God exists, and God is good.
Now, let us for a moment pause to consider our own human nature. If we introspect our human hearts and scan the annals of human history, we readily see that people have a great capacity to choose to love and to accomplish tremendous good, yet we also see that people have a powerful ability to choose to hate and to accomplish profound evil. The history of mankind is chock full of atrocities – with one group seeking to conquer, enslave, or even annihilate each other.
Left to our own abilities and motives, mankind is lost. We are sinful, and we cannot save ourselves.
This is where the hope of Christmas enters the scene…
Christmas marks the day when our perfect, beneficent Creator voluntarily entered into His own Creation to intersect with broken humankind, offering a way for our hearts and our world to be healed, a way for us each to be forgiven and saved. “The Word became flesh and dwelt among us…” John 1:14a.
No matter where you are at in your journey of faith today, Jesus came for you. Just as the people on earth at the time of Christ’s first coming had a choice, so we each have a choice before us today.
“He came to that which was His own, but His own did not receive Him. Yet to all who did receive Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God.” John 1:12
This same invitation to RECEIVE and to BELIEVE is available to you and I today. We cannot hope to stand against the darkness of our own human hearts, nor remedy the darkness of our world without Jesus Christ – “In Him was life, and that life was the light of all mankind. The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it.” John 1:4-5.