By Lance Lefler
Lead Pastor, Anchor Church
When my wife and I were first married, it was before the days of Netflix. We had a couple of babies and I was in grad school. And we were broke.
Whenever we wanted to watch a movie, we had to go to Blockbuster (kids, ask your parents about this), searching for a VHS cassette that had a movie on it. A lot was riding on this decision, since videos were $4.00 a pop.
After we blew through all the movies we knew about, we started asking friends for recommendations. Some were good, but a lot were terrible.
So, when it came to movie night, my wife and I would look at each other, and one of us would say, “I heard such-and-such movie is good.”
The other would respond, eyebrow raised, “Who told you that?” Because some people were not cut out to be movie critics!
So, we developed a short list of friends who could tell the difference between a good movie and a dud.
If you think about it, this is how we live our lives: we exercise faith to do the simplest of tasks—all the way down to sitting in a chair we’ve never sat in before—but we don’t do it without good reason.
So, how on earth did Christianity get the reputation for being something you “just have to believe” without evidence??
At some point in our collective past, somebody suggested that authentic faith meant taking a blind leap in the dark. And for some reason, that notion caught on.
But for someone like me, who came to Christianity as a skeptic when I was 19, this made no sense! I needed reasons to believe that Jesus existed, that he rose from the dead, etc.
You can imagine my joy when I found out that the Bible doesn’t compel us to take a leap of faith.
At the end of the John’s Gospel in the New Testament, after he as an eyewitness had recounted the miracles Jesus did—including rising from the dead—the Apostle tells us that he wrote these things “so that you would believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of
God, and that by believing, you may have life in his name” (John 20:31, ESV).
If you have avoided Christianity because you thought you had to assassinate your brain to do so, here is good news: God knows we live our lives by evidence, whether it’s evaluating movie recommendations, trusting the food in a new restaurant, or considering the claims of Christ.
We don’t place our faith in something without assessing whether there is a good reason to do so. Why would we make a decision that might just affect our eternal destiny without evaluating the evidence??
So if you have doubts or questions, or if you think Christians are nuts, then join us at Anchor as we explore the claims of Jesus together.
Anchor Church meets at 11:00 am on Sundays at 103 Ponferrada Way (the campus of Christ Lutheran Church). We have Sunday school for ages 0-8 years.
Lance Lefler
Lead Pastor, Anchor Church
