Embracing the Whole Bible: A Path to Truth

Welcome to Spring Creek Church! We are so excited that you are with us today. If you're new and you'd like to find out more information about our church, all you have to do is text 'new' to 96995. Also, if you'd like to find out all the things that are happening at our Garland campus and the things that are happening online, all you have to do is visit us on our website, springcreekchurch.org/events for all the things that are happening here.

Thank you, guys! I hope that you enjoy the service. My name is Kathy Simpson, and I've had the privilege of working here at Spring Creek for over 20 years and attending for over 30 years. Part of my job is to process the weekly deposit, so I see how the money comes in. Another part of my job is benevolence, assisting people with financial needs, so I see where the money is needed. I've witnessed firsthand the profound impact our benevolence program has on the lives of those in need within our church community and beyond.

Some of the stories we've heard are absolutely heartbreaking, and this is happening to families all around us. We've helped a single mom pay her rent. She was already struggling, and then she lost her job in management. She sleeps in the dining room so that her kids can have a bedroom. We've helped a family with their bills while their young mom is losing her battle with brain cancer. We've helped a grandmother who's raising her five grandchildren, including a newborn, because her daughter is dealing with an addiction. We've helped many people find transitional housing after living in their cars. Several were families with children.

The impact of giving extends far beyond material provision. It's an invitation to participate in God's redemptive plan for humanity, to really be his hands and feet in a broken world. It's an opportunity to demonstrate his love and mercy to others, sharing the hope that is found in him. Giving is an expression of our love for God, an act of worship, and it demonstrates our obedience to God's word. We have been called to sow seeds of compassion, kindness, and generosity, knowing that our giving goes far beyond our earthly existence. It's a kingdom investment.

If you've never given or if you're not a consistent giver, I challenge you to try. When you give, you are not only transforming someone else's life, you will transform your life by experiencing the profound joy and fulfillment that comes with aligning yourself with God's heart. I pray that we are always a church obedient to God's command to love our neighbors as ourselves. Let our giving continue to unite a hurting world.

It is so good to be back with you today. I've been away for a little bit. Brenda and I got to go and celebrate our 40-year anniversary, taking a trip of a lifetime to Scotland, where we had just a wonderful time together. I'm grateful for Dr. Jessica, for Jared, and for Laura and the panel that met last week as they discussed this idea of what it means to share your faith with other people. I'm sure you got a lot of good out of it, like I did too.

Today I'm beginning a brand new series that I'm calling the Story of the Bible. In today's message, we're talking about whether or not we can trust the Bible. People say familiarity breeds contempt, meaning the more we get to know a person or thing, the more we tend to notice its flaws and imperfections. But after nearly 50 years of reading and studying the Bible, my passion and desire for the Word have only grown. I'm still captivated by the Bible's message, and I'm amazed at how intricately interwoven it is. I still make new discoveries in its pages and find layers of truth embedded in stories that I'd never noticed before.

Spending time in God's Word has never lost its luster for me. I'm still exhilarated when I sit down to read it, and when I teach, I try to share that excitement. Studying scripture is like turning a diamond underneath a bright light - its beauty is reflected in every facet of the diamond. It makes me marvel at the God who inspired the very words of scripture.

Unfortunately, we're at an all-time low in Bible reading and Bible knowledge in America. Many who claim to know the Bible only know what they've heard other people say - their knowledge of scripture is second hand at best and not the result of digging into the Word for themselves. This is why so many are so easily deceived. At the same time, we have more information at our fingertips than ever before. We're regularly exposed to ideas and theories that either affirm our faith or contradict it. Someone has said the speed and volume of information we access today is inversely proportional to the depth of knowledge. In other words, we often think we know something when we really don't. We've lost our critical thinking skills, and our knowledge of a subject is about a mile wide and an inch deep. We're exposed to so many new ideas without a process as to how to evaluate whether those ideas are even true. Instead, we just go.

Today I find myself countering ideas that I heard debunked 30 and 40 years ago back when I was in Bible College and Seminary. Things like you really can't trust the Bible, or it's not inspired, or it's been changed and added to by every generation. One that's really popular today is that I only believe in the red letters of the Bible. Now, in case you weren't aware, there are some Bible translations that highlight the words of Christ in red to make them distinctive from the other words of scripture. In fact, there's an entire organization today that's called Red Letter Christians. Just to be clear, that's not what they believe; that only the red letters can be trusted. But a lot of people have mistakenly got that idea that that's what Red Letter Christians are all about.

Now I'm personal friends with the former executive director of Red Letter Christians. I've traveled with him to Africa, I've listened to him teach, and he's listened to me teach on more than one occasion. We've had numerous theological discussions. Red Letter Christians aren't saying that only the red letters matter, or that only the red letters are inspired. They're simply saying what I've said for years: that Jesus is the clearest representation of God we've ever seen. So if you want to understand the rest of the Bible, you need to read it through a Christological lens or a Jesus-centered approach, and I totally agree with that idea. Jesus is the lens through which I read and understand the rest of scripture, but the whole Bible is the voice of God - the red letters and the black ones too. Neither is more inspired than the other.

When you treat the red letters more seriously than you do the black ones, you muzzle the Son of God who speaks in all of them. Jesus once said this to the religious leaders of his day: "You study the scriptures diligently because you think that in them you have eternal life. These are the very scriptures that testify about me" (John 5:39). Now, the scriptures Jesus is referring to here are the books of the Old Testament, and he said those scriptures are all about him. This is what I mean by reading the Bible through a Christ-centered lens. The Old Testament testifies about Jesus, and you won't see that unless and until you read it through the lens of Christ. So, by extension, if you want a thorough knowledge of Jesus, you need to know and understand what the Old Testament is all about.

Now here's something else: did you know that one-tenth of everything Jesus ever said were quotations from the Old Testament? Jesus believed in the Old Testament scriptures; he quoted them, he treated them as authoritative. If you say you only believe the red letters of Jesus, yet Jesus endorsed the Old Testament as being about him, it makes no sense that you wouldn't want to know more about Jesus through the Old Testament. Or, like Dr. Timothy Keller once said, "We cannot in the end follow Jesus without adopting his loyalty to the Old Testament."

If you only believe the red letters of Jesus, then surely you believe what he said in John 16. Jesus has a lot more to say to us than we were able to hear in the moment. He promised to reveal even more truth through his Apostles and through his Spirit. The ministry of Jesus marches on through the ministry of the Apostles. Paul is just one example of this.

When someone disparages the Bible, claiming it to be untrue or choosing only to believe the parts they like while disregarding all the rest, they are actually saying that their opinion is higher and more authoritative than the Bible itself. If there really isn't an objective standard of truth, then there is just my truth. In other words, I get to determine what's right and wrong for me, and I only accept what God says if I agree with it.

If I had to depend on my own sense of what was right and wrong or good and bad for me, I can't even imagine the mess my life would be in right now. God's idea and direction for my life has always been counter to the selfishness that persists in me because that's the human condition. That's what it means to be a sinner. I want what I want, and I don't care what God wants. That's what needs to be redeemed.

Let me also say if you believe only in the red letters of the New Testament, you need to include the red letters not just in the Gospel of John but also the other book that John wrote called The Book of Revelation. In chapters 2 and 3 of that book, they are filled with what Jesus had to say to seven churches of Asia Minor. In that teaching, you see another side to Jesus that includes correcting bad teaching and addressing illicit sexual behaviors. That's Jesus speaking too.

The Bible is unique among other religions and their sacred writings because of its sheer number of historical markers. This makes it easier to fact-check its record. In a courtroom drama, lawyers ask witnesses a ton of detailed questions to establish whether or not they are telling the truth. This is because it is almost impossible to establish a lie in the midst of a well-known history. The truth is supported by numerous incidental details, and lies tend to break down because they didn't happen.

The same principle applies to the Bible. Throughout its pages, there are hundreds of government officials named, times and places marked, and events described. This makes it harder to establish a lie in the midst of a well-known history. The heart of the Christian faith is a series of events recorded in time and history. As soon as you say, "during the reign of this King in this city a man named Jesus said this," you are making a claim about history. These historical markers have helped to prove the reliability of the Bible because we can determine whether or not those people, places, or events are actually real or actually happened.

Today, we are left with the big question: can the Bible be trusted? What tests might we administer to it that would give us solid reason or evidence to trust its message? I have six tests that I'd like to share with you. Elevate this broken part of humanity, the part of us that wants our own way and wants to be our own God as if it were the most important thing about us. But today, let us remember that the Bible has healed in me.

Skeptics often use the analogy of the telephone game to describe how the Bible came down to us. They say that, just like the game, each generation heard the message, then added to it, distorted it, or took something away, so that now what we have is hopelessly flawed and nothing like it was when it started. Now, you've probably heard people say things like, "Don't you know every generation has added whatever they wanted to the Bible?" Now you should know this objection has been around for years and years. I encountered it 40 years ago in Bible College and Seminary, but most people who raise this objection simply don't know the facts. And the facts are clearly on the Bible's side.

First, the telephone game doesn't accurately capture the manner in which the Bible was transmitted to us. Like, for one, the message was not transmitted orally, which admittedly is a mode of communication that's very easy to distort. The Bible was handed down in writing. Second, there wasn't just one line of communication. Instead, there was one letter that was copied by hand multiple times by many different people over many different years, eventually resulting in a host of manuscript copies. Third, historians don't rely on the last person in the chain as the best representation of the message, but they look to the earliest sources we can find, those closest to the original source, to determine what the original message was.

Believe it or not, when it comes to historical documents like the Bible, there are some established protocols that scholars have used for years to determine whether or not a document is reliable and has been faithfully transmitted over time. These protocols not only apply to the Bible but also to other books written in ancient times. So, what I'd like to do for you in the next several minutes is not try to prove to you that the Bible's the word of God. Instead, I'd just like to examine whether or not what we have is an accurate representation of what the authors originally wrote.

One of the first factors to keep in mind when it comes to ancient literature is simply this: books in antiquity were written on perishable materials. Simply put, the medium they used to write on had very little hope of lasting for two thousand years. Just consider this simple fact: do you know how long it takes for a modern piece of paper to break down in a landfill? Studies show it takes between 5 to 15 years for paper to break down in the landfill. Imagine the unusual circumstances needed for an ancient piece of paper to survive for two thousand years or more. Consider the fact that the last book of the Bible was written 1300 years before the invention of the printing press. In those centuries, several of the world's great libraries - Alexandria, Constantinople, and Rome - were all burned as hordes of Barbarians swept through the lands where copies of scriptures were kept. Invaders looted and destroyed the temples and synagogues where ancient copies of the Bible were housed. Jerusalem itself was conquered 47 times between 1800 BC and A.D. 1948. For this reason, none of the original documents of the books of the Bible exist - we don't have any; all we have are copies of copies of copies.

Papyri, which is the form of paper they used, was made from the reed plant, and it simply can't last that long. So, as documents began to decay, a new copy was made, and the old one was either buried or destroyed.

So, what are the protocols for evaluating ancient writing and their reliability? It really comes down to two questions: one, how many ancient copies do we have? In other words, the more ancient copies you have, the higher likelihood you can determine what the original set. Two, how big is the time gap between the original and the copy? Obviously, the shorter the time gap between the oldest copy and the original writing, the greater confidence that it's unadulterated.

When it comes to ancient Greek and Latin literature, the work with the second highest number of manuscripts is Homer's Iliad, and we have 643 manuscripts for that. Those are the top texts. But, like I said, Homer's Iliad is just number two. Here's the number one source - the New Testament of the Bible - we have 24,633 manuscripts. Honestly, the number of manuscript copies of the New Testament is mind-boggling. In Greek alone, we have more than 5,800 copies consisting of 2.5 million pages of text. If you laid the surviving copies of Aristotle on top of one another, it would barely make four feet. If you do the same with the surviving copies of the New Testament, the stack would be a mile. No one doubts the historical importance of Aristotle's works, which have been studied for centuries. We have substantially what Aristotle wrote, but the Bible surpasses Aristotle in accuracy, quantity, and quality. Real documents exist, some of which are on display at the British Museum in London, the National Library in Paris, and the Beatty Museum in Dublin. In terms of the number of manuscripts, nothing comes close to the New Testament.

The second protocol is the time gap, which is the comparison between when a manuscript was originally written and the time of the earliest copy in existence. For example, Caesar's Gallic Wars was originally written between 144 BC and the earliest copy we have is 900 AD, a gap of 1000 years. Plato's tetralogies was written between 427 to 347 BC, and the earliest copy we have is 900 AD, a gap of 1200 years. Aristotle was originally written between 384 and 322 BC, and the earliest copy we have is from 1100 AD, a gap of 1400 years. Homer's Iliad fares better with only a 500-year time gap, as it was originally written in 900 BC and the earliest copy we have is from 400 BC.

The New Testament was originally written between 40 and 100 AD, and the earliest copy we have is 125 AD, a gap of only 25 to 50 years. Dr. Dan Wallace, one of the foremost manuscript authorities in the world, said that the earliest confirmed copies of the New Testament scriptures date back to 114 AD, meaning the gap between the earliest copy and the date of the original writing is at most 50 years. This makes the Bible the most historically reliable book of antiquity that exists, as the gap between what we have and what was written is short when compared to other Greek works from around the same time. Josh McDowell has said that there is more evidence for the reliability of the New Testament than for any other 10 pieces of classical literature put together.

In 1947, this belief that every generation freely added to and changed the Bible to fit with their own preconceived notions was put to the test. In 1947, one of the most important archaeological finds of our age was made. Muhammad Abdib, a 12-year-old boy, was trying to find a lost goat about 10 miles east of Jerusalem in an area called Qumran. He tossed a rock into a cave hoping to startle the goat in case it had wandered into the cave, and instead, he heard a jar break. Once he entered the cave, he discovered that the jar he'd broken contained a manuscript, and in the cave, there were many more jars. Over the next several years, more than 20 caves full of old scrolls with leather backing were found. In total, they discovered more than 950 documents and text fragments of the Bible. Most of these copies dated from the 3rd Century BC to the middle of the First Century A.D. Because the manuscripts were stored in jars and away from the elements in a cave, the manuscripts were miraculously preserved.

So, get this: the Dead Sea Scrolls are the oldest manuscripts of the Old Testament that we've ever discovered. Before they were found, the oldest manuscript we had of the Old Testament was from a thousand years later. A thousand years separated what we had versus what we found, but one of the most amazing finds of all was the book of Isaiah. It was among the best-preserved manuscripts they discovered. So now, we could finally test this theory with a thousand-year time gap separating the copy of the book of Isaiah we had from the one we found in the Dead Sea Scrolls. We could finally determine whether or not people were constantly changing and adding to the Bible. With Isaiah's book showing signs of alteration, I mean this is the perfect test. Imagine all the changes that could occur over a thousand-year time span.

So when they compared the two copies of Isaiah, they found only 17 letters were different, none of which had any impact on the meaning of the text. In a thousand years of copying a book containing tens of thousands of letters, only 17 letters in the entire book were found to be different. So much for this idea that the Bible's been constantly changed by every generation. I mean, people couldn't believe it, but you know why it wasn't changed? Because people believe the Bible to be the word of God, and you're not free to tamper with the word of God however you'd like. You're not allowed to change it or add to it or take from it simply because you don't like what it says. By the way, even the most skeptical critics acknowledge this. Bart Ehrman is a famous biblical scholar. He's not a Christian, and he's very critical of the Bible in many ways, but even he said most of the changes found in our early Christian manuscripts have nothing to do with theology or ideology. Far and away, the most changes are the result of mistakes, pure and simple: slips of the pen, accidental omissions, inadvertent additions, misspelled words, and blunders of one sort or another. Frankly, people who assert that the Bible's constantly been changed and revised are people who really don't study these things for themselves. They just parrot what they hear.

It's not unusual to hear people say that the Bible is just a bunch of made-up stories of people who never existed. But the truth is there's considerable documentation from people who weren't Christian, people outside the Bible, and in some of the cases, these people were adamantly opposed to Christianity that confirm different aspects of the Christian message. Norm Geisler said there's more evidence that the Bible is a reliable source than there is for any other book from the ancient world.

There are other ways to answer the question, "Can the Bible be trusted?" One way is to find outside observers. By outside observers, I mean people outside the Bible itself that lend credence to the things it says. You can find these people both inside and outside the church. For example, the early church fathers are one such group. All these men wrote within the first 150 years of the church. Did you know that even if we lost all the manuscripts of the New Testament, they all disappeared magically, we could still reconstruct almost the entire New Testament, all 27 books, just from the many places they quoted them? By the way, this is yet another way we can verify how accurate the manuscripts are that we presently have. We can compare them to the quotations in the writings of men like Ignatius, Popius, Justin Martyr, Irenius, and Polycarp and others because they preserve for us the Bible in their writings, their commentaries, and their sermons. One scholar who researched this discovered that these quotations in the writings of the church fathers roused his curiosity. As he possessed all the existing works of the fathers of the second and third centuries, he commenced the search, and up to this time, he has found the entire New Testament except 11 verses. If you'd like to read the church fathers for yourself, their writings are compiled in a set of books about the size of an encyclopedia and, by the way, a very expensive set of books. Dr. Dan Wallace reminds us that to date more than one billion quotations of the New Testament by the fathers have been recorded.

Outside of the church fathers, there are other outsiders who lend credence to the Christian message. The Roman historian Thallus, who lived around 50 A.D., described the daytime darkness that fell over the country when Jesus was being crucified. The Jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who lived around 80 A.D., wrote his history of the Jewish War. His works mentioned Jesus as a wonder worker, he talks about Christ's crucifixion, and he talks about Jesus and his founding of Christianity. The Roman historian Tacitus is the one who told us about Nero's attempt to make someone look guilty for the burning of Rome. He wrote, "Hence to suppress the rumor, he falsely charged with the guilt and punishment with the most exquisite tortures the persons commonly called Christians."

The existence of Jesus Christ was recorded by many non-Christian sources, such as Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, the Talmud, and Lucian. Oxford University Professor Christopher Tuckett said that the fact that Jesus existed and was crucified under Pontius Pilate seems to be a part of the bedrock of historical tradition.

To further prove the Bible's trustworthiness, we can examine physical evidence. Archaeological discoveries have confirmed biblical events, such as the fall of Nineveh, the fall of Jerusalem to Nebuchadnezzar, and the fall of Babylon to the Medes and Persians. Since 1990, numerous finds have proven bits and pieces of the gospel story, such as the pool of Siloam, a house from Jesus' hometown Nazareth, and an early first-century synagogue on the lake Galilee. Critics have often seized on Bible characters who surround Jesus in the gospels and claimed that they never existed, but archaeological evidence has proven otherwise.

Caiaphas was a well-known political and religious leader in Jesus' day. He presided over Jesus' trial, and critics said there was no record of him outside the Bible; he couldn't be found on any buildings or anything else, and was just a made-up character and story. In 1990, workers building a water park in Jerusalem broke through the ceiling of a hidden burial chamber from the First Century A.D. Inside, they found a box that identified the person inside as Caiaphas the high priest. The critics then said, "Never mind."

What about King David? Critics alleged that he was too flamboyant to be true, with stories of adultery and murder, yet there was no mention of him outside the Bible. It became fashionable in academic circles to dismiss David's stories as mere invention, a kind of folklore to give the Jews a narrative to back up their dynasty.

In 1993, workers at the Tel Dan excavation site unearthed a shattered monument called the Tel Dan Stele, with an inscription referencing the King of Israel and the House of David. This was shocking news, making the cover of U.S. News and World Report. Critics insisted that the find was phony or that the inscription had been incorrectly translated, but a year later archaeologists found even more fragments of the monument with additional inscriptions referencing David. Today, the new scholarly consensus is that David was real, not because the Bible says so, but because archaeology has proven it.

The New Testament also tells us the story of Pontius Pilate, who was a Roman governor of Judea at the time of Christ and oversaw Jesus' trial and sentenced him to death by crucifixion. For years, critics insisted that Pilate was just a legend. In 1961, archaeologists were digging in Caesarea on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea in Israel and found evidence that Pilate was real. An archaeologist made an astonishing find while clearing away sand and overgrowth from a jumbled pile of ruins of a Roman Theater. It was called the Pilate Stone, a limestone block that had actually been repurposed, and it bore an inscription in Latin dating to the early part of the first century that mentioned Pontius Pilate, prefect of Judea. This inscription verified that Pontius Pilate was an actual historical person, that he reigned in the same position described in the gospels and as prefect.

Recently, something really cool has happened in regard to Pilate. His ring was actually found 50 years ago, but nobody knew it was Pilate's ring until just five years ago. This was largely due to advancements in cleaning methods and advanced photography, which allowed archaeologists to examine the ring more closely and determine that the inscription on the ring was Pilate's personal name. Both the Bible and archaeology back up the story of Pontius Pilate, providing external witnesses to the truthfulness of the Bible.

The Bible's trustworthiness can be tested by considering its uniqueness. The authors of I'm Glad You Asked say that the scriptures have survived through time, persecution, and criticism. Numerous attempts have been made to burn, ban, and systematically eliminate the Bible, but all have failed. The Bible has been subjected to more abuse, perversion, destruction, destructive criticism, and pure hate than any other book, yet it continues to stand the test of time while its critics are refuted and forgotten. The Bible is the best-selling book of all time, holding the world record for the greatest number of books in circulation in the history of the world. Somewhere between five and seven billion copies have been copied and translated more extensively than any other book in human history into 1900 languages.

These statistics are even more impressive when you consider the fact that of all the new books that are written and published every year, less than one percent are still being produced just seven years later. It seems that God has worked overtime to make sure this book is preserved, as Jesus himself once said, "Heaven and Earth."

Bernard Ram wrote that a thousand times over the century, the death knell of the Bible has been sounded, the funeral procession formed, the flowers ordered, the inscription placed on the tombstone, and the eulogy written, but somehow the corpse never stays put. If the Bible was just a fairy tale and is hopelessly flawed as some people allege, those people are just a tiny minority of people because there's something about this book that has catapulted it to the spheres of influence and notoriety that other books never achieve.

At this point in the message, we're probably all in serious danger of being on Egghead overload, so let me cut back to the heart of the matter. All these facts are great and certainly present such convincing proof that they simply can't be dismissed out of hand, but we're not done until we do step six: compare it to your experience. Facts and research are great, but there's also a very personal reason why I believe and trust the Bible. This book pointed me to Jesus Christ, and Jesus Christ changed my life and not just mine, but plenty of others too. There are many healed marriages in this church because of the truth taught in this book; there are addictions that have been shattered because of the Bible's truthfulness and the God who stands behind every promise we find in his pages.

People like me who know our lives will never be the same because of Christ and through his guidebook. I have healing, I have hope, and I know I have a future forever with God. People who've encountered Christ in the pages of this book often come away from such an encounter truly transformed. Dennis Prager, regardless of what you might think of him, he's a Jewish talk show host who once made a brilliant point in a debate with a skeptic. He said this: if you were stranded on a street alone at night, your car had broken down, say at 2 A.M. on a lonely street in Los Angeles, and the street lights were working, you'd get out of your car when suddenly you see 10 big burly men coming out of a house walking towards you, would it or would it not be comforting to you for you to know that they were coming out of a Bible study?

I can tell you this, even though I've read a lot of books and paper and have done tons of research, the most priceless data that I've learned from the Bible is quite simply this: Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. This is a book that has a message about someone who can change your life forever. This is a book, if you will trust its message, he is willing and able to do in, through, and for you what you cannot do for yourself. Honestly, if I didn't trust the Bible in its history and all the other things about which I can verify, why would I ever trust it about something I could never verify: that Jesus Christ is the way, that he died for me, that he made a path for me to know him? Why would I trust it there about something I could never know about? If the things I feel like I do know about are hopelessly flawed, I believe this Bible. I believe it can be trusted, and I believe that the Savior that it talks about, He can be trusted. Trust Him with your life today.

Let's pray. Father, thank you for this time that we have together to just kind of stop down and to look objectively at Your truth. To ask the more difficult questions, questions that seekers will often ask people who are outside the faith, people who've heard other people disparage or cause them to question whether or not the Bible is a reliable book. Today, I've done my best to try to lay out for our people and those who are listening what we do know from history, what we do know about the witnesses we have, what archaeologists have taught us, what we have learned from those who are in history, witnesses to what happened in Christianity. God, in all these things, we see that this is a very reliable book, that it's a trustworthy book, that in terms of its manuscript authority, we can have great confidence that what has come down to us has come down to us unadulterated. So, I thank You, God, for that confidence, but most of all, God, I pray that that confidence would lead us to the reality that Jesus, You came to die for us. You died on the cross, You rose again so that we might have life, and that You said that by believing in You, by trusting in You, to those who receive Him, He gives the right to become the sons of God. Thank God when we receive You as our Lord and our Savior, we become the children of God. So, someone today who, for the first time, maybe these questions have been taken seriously and answered in a substantive way that it clears the deck so that they can now trust who Jesus is and what He's done for them. I pray it in Your precious name, Amen.

You know anytime you're with us, anytime you make a decision, you have a question, we'd love to hear about that. If you want to know more about what it means to become a Christian, please text us, let us know, say, "Hey, I'm new here." You can text the word "new" to 96995 our text line, and someone will get back with you right away to let you know what it means to trust Christ as your Savior and Lord. I just thank you so much for being with us today. I hope it's a great week.