What would happen if we suddenly discovered that there was more to reality than you had previously experienced? Would this be seen as a revolutionary breakthrough or as a threat?

Once Square met Sphere, he would never be the same. Having lived in a two-dimensional world all his life, Square could not even conceive of a third dimension. When he was selected by the messianic Sphere to experience space and then proclaim freedom from flatness to his two-dimensional world, Square returned from Spaceland filled with joy. But he was promptly imprisoned and his message of freedom stifled. The rest of Flatland just couldn’t handle the truth . . . . . . Edwin A. Abbott’s story Flatland

Christianity sets us free to truly experience its fullness.

J. R. R. Tolkien persuaded C. S. Lewis, it is the great myth that has come true. It brings reality into focus in a new way—not only the outer world of society with its laws and structures but also the inner world where we long for healing and wholeness. In Christianity we find something to believe in that is worthy of our faith. We find a proclamation of hope that reaches across all times and all cultures. Suddenly a dimension of aliveness has been added to our existence.

But proclaiming the truth of Christianity is threatening to many, just as spheres, cones, and cylinders were a threat to a world that had known only circles, triangles, and squares. Will we continue to proclaim it anyway?

Evolutionist Paul Amos Moody affirms, “The more I study science the more I am impressed with the thought that this world and universe have a definite design—and a design suggests a designer. It may be possible to have design without a designer, a picture without an artist, but my mind is unable to conceive of such a situation.”

Robert Jastrow. After completing a Ph.D. in theoretical physics from Columbia University, Jastrow became one of the first employees of NASA, chairing the committee that outlined the scientific goals of moon exploration. It was because of Jastrow’s extraordinary credentials and stellar career that the scientific community was so startled when he concluded:

At this moment it seems as though science will never be able to raise the curtain on the mystery of creation. For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountains of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.

Robert Jastrow, God and the Astronomers

“Astronomers now find they have painted themselves into a corner because they have proven, by their own methods, that the world began abruptly in an act of creation to which you can trace the seeds of every star, every planet, every living thing in this cosmos and on the earth. And they have found that all this happened as a product of forces they cannot hope to discover. That there are what I or anyone would call supernatural forces at work is now, I think, a scientifically proven fact.”― Robert Jastrow

C. S. Lewis frames this “excuse removal” like this: Suppose there were no intelligence behind the universe. In that case nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. Thought is merely the by-product of some atoms within my skull. But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true? But if I can’t trust my own thinking, of course, I can’t trust the arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I can’t believe in thought; so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God. 42

Even Charles Darwin recognized the problem faced by adherents to atheistic, naturalistic explanations of mind: “With me, the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any

It is foolish to listen to Handel’s Messiah and picture evolving monkeys making music.

In 2009, the critical atheist Christopher Hitchens was interviewed by a minister named Marilyn Sewell. Trying to exempt herself from Hitchens’s criticisms of Christianity, Sewell said, “I’m a liberal Christian, and I don’t take the stories from the scripture literally. I don’t believe in the doctrine of atonement—that Jesus died for our sins.

Do you make a distinction between fundamentalist faith and liberal religion?” Hitchens replied, “Well, I would say that if you don’t believe that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ and Messiah, and that He rose again from the dead and by His sacrifice our sins are forgiven, you’re really not in any meaningful sense a Christian.”

Interesting: an avowed atheist can see this simple truth and a self-proclaimed minister cannot.

Carl F. H. Henry, “the divine source of revelation and the divine content of that revelation converge and coincide.”

1 Timothy 1:12–17

12 I give thanks to Christ Jesus our Lord who has strengthened me, because he considered me faithful, appointing me to the ministry—13 even though I was formerly a blasphemer, a persecutor, and an arrogant man. But I received mercy because I acted out of ignorance in unbelief, 14 and the grace of our Lord overflowed, along with the faith and love that are in Christ Jesus. 15 This saying is trustworthy and deserving of full acceptance: “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners”—and I am the worst of them. 16 But I received mercy for this
reason, so that in me, the worst of them, Christ Jesus might demonstrate his extraordinary patience as an example to those who would believe in him for eternal life.

The meaning of Christmas is that what is good and precious in your life need never be lost, and what is evil and undesirable in your life can be changed.

The message of God to you this Christmas is that whatever is good and precious in your life need never be lost. No beauty, no pleasure, no love, no skill that is good and precious need vanish forever from you. It can all be saved. The Christmas message is that even when you feel them slipping between your fingers, God can catch them all and restore them to you again. Not one of you needs to live in fear or anxiety that what is good and precious in your life will be lost. “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save it for you, not to destroy it.”

Christ. As John Stott said, “Christ is at the center of Christianity; all else is circumference.”

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16). Other religions may offer advice on how to search for God, but Christianity turns that search on its head; God is the One getting in touch with us.

When people say they can’t believe in God because he has not shown himself, they are overlooking a critical fact: this is exactly what he has done. The problem is not a lack of visible evidence; the problem is an unwillingness to see.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in her poem “Aurora Leigh,”

Earth’s crammed with heaven, And every common bush afire with God:

But only he who sees, takes off his shoes, The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries.

Not only that, the message of Christmas is that whatever is evil and undesirable in your life can be changed. Wherever people say about their bad habits, “That’s just the way I am; you’ll have to get used to it,” the message of Christmas has been rejected

1 Timothy 1:15 is a great summary statement of Christmas good news: “The saying is sure and worthy of full acceptance, that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners

Paul’s own personal testimony of how he had been changed.

V13: “I formerly blasphemed and persecuted and insulted Christ.”
Why did Christ choose the chief persecutor of the church to become the chief missionary of the church?

The answer to that question is given in verse 16: he did it so that we would grasp the message of Christmas—that no one who trusts Christ is beyond the reach of change.

Christ picked the chief of sinners to demonstrate to us today what his mercy and power can do in ur life. Don’t belittle the mercy of God by saying that you cannot be changed!

Jesus met Paul on the road to Damascus in a post-resurrection appearance. And when Paul, who was then called Saul, saw Jesus, he asked Him the two greatest questions that anyone can ever ask.

“Who [are you], Lord?” (Acts 9:5)

“What [would you] have me to do?”

What does it mean a blasphemer? One who slanders God. One who overtly openly slanders God, speaks evil of God. In Acts 26:11 he says, “I punished them … meaning Christians … often and compelled them to blaspheme

He came into the world. That statement is a very important statement. It does not say He came into existence. It does not say He came into being. It does not say He was created. It does not say He was made. It implies not only His incarnation but His preexistence. He came into the world. He was somewhere else and He came into the world, the preincarnate Christ.

The world, of course, has to do with our sphere of existence, the Earth, but more than that it speaks not of the of the Earth as a geographical entity but the world of men, the world of mankind, the world of humanity, the human race, blind and lost and condemned and damned to hell, hostile to God, engulfed in fallenness and evil

His testimony here is that God can save the world’s worst sinner.

The whole purpose of this epistle is to charge Timothy with the task of leading the church at Ephesus and the surrounding churches to reject false teachers who are preaching a false gospel. And so what he is saying in his testimony here is “I am a true teacher who has been touched by the true gospel and who has taught the true gospel,”

Paul presents himself as a humble defiled base sinner who must fall on the grace and mercy of God. a testimony that Timothy needs to pass on to the people in that church so they can see the power of the true gospel, as over against the impotence of the false gospel being articulated by the false teachers.

Acts 26:19? “When I saw Christ on the Damascus Road,” he says,

“I was not disobedient to that heavenly vision.” When I saw the truth I believed it,
” When I saw the truth I believed it, I saw my sin. Remember Romans 7, I thought I was alive, here I was a Pharisee of the Pharisees, perfect as concerning the law, circumcised, he goes all through that in Philippians 3, and all of those things but when I saw the law of God in its reality I died, he says, I was devastated. I was not disobedient to the heavenly vision.

The power of grace is this, beloved, that it doesn’t matter how wretched the sinner is, grace is powerful enough to transform the sinner if the sinner sees the sin as sin and believes the gospel. The power of grace to bring mercy to a willing heart, willing to do what is right and believe the truth.

God came in the flesh in the person of Jesus Christ. He can in the flesh, in order to save sinners, that is all of us.

Will we see Christ Jesus as God?

Will we trust Him?