Sermon Tone Analysis

Intro

Prayer

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It’s not really about evidence, it’s about sin.

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No matter how much evidence a person is given, if they don’t want to repent, they won’t.

Believing in God is not like believing in atoms.

Does it matter if atoms exist?

Absolutely!

They hold everything together.

Is your life affected by whether they exist or not?

Absolutely!

If atoms cease to exist, so do you.

But whether you believe in their existence or not makes no real difference in your life.

Nothing changes, and you’ll never find yourself in a situation in which your belief or disbelief in them will actually impact your life, but belief in God is not like that.

Does it matter if God exists?

Absolutely!

The Scripture says Jesus holds everything together.

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Is your life affected by whether God exists or not?

Absolutely!

If God ceases to exist, so do you.

But whether you believe in God’s existence or not will make a huge difference, not just in this life, but for all of eternity in the life to come.

What does it cost you to believe in atoms?

Nothing.

You can live your life however you want, it makes no difference.

What does it cost you to believe in God? Everything.

You can’t live your life however you want.

You have to submit to God as your Lord.

He has commanded us to repent of sin to be forgiven, and after He rose from the dead He said we are to go and preach repentance for the forgiveness of sins to all the nations.

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People love their sin, and don’t want to give it up.

People don’t want to repent of sin, and they don’t want to be told that they have to.

John chapter 3 tells us this.

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People reject God because it will cost them.

They love their sin and God demands that they give it up.

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God commands all people everywhere to repent, He does not want anyone, anywhere to perish.

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Even though God doesn’t want anyone to perish, and He does want all to come to repentance, He still gives us free will to chose what we will do.

Jesus is very clear that if you do not repent, you will perish.

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We all have sinned

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And the punishment for sin is death.

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But God offers us the free gift of salvation, complete forgiveness of our sins, something that we did nothing to achieve or earn.

Jesus did it all.

He lived a perfect sinless life which enabled Him to be a perfect acceptable sacrifice.

By submitting Himself to death, which He did not deserve, because He did not sin, He can legitimately take the place of someone who does deserve death.

We can not die in someone else’s place because we have earned the death penalty ourselves for our own sin.

But Jesus can.

And He didn’t just die for one person, He died for the entire world.

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And this is why some of the Jews did not believe in him after he rose Lazarus from the dead but instead went and told the Pharisees what He had done...

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Jesus told a parable about a rich man and a poor man named Lazarus:

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And they were not persuaded when Lazarus rose from the dead.

They knew he rose from the dead, but this is what they decided to do in response.

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They didn’t believe that Jesus was the Messiah when Lazarus rose from the dead, they decided to kill them both.

It’s not about how much evidence someone is given.

I can give you all the evidence anyone could reasonably ask for, historical evidence, archaeological evidence, scientific evidence, but none of that matters if someone doesn’t “want” to believe.

If they don’t want to, they won’t.

Jesus called Martha to believe.

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And then it said:

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Jesus calls everyone to believe in Him.

Some do, and some don’t.

And this passage teaches us that it’s not about how much or how little evidence someone has, it’s really about whether or not people are willing to count the cost of following Jesus and decided if they are willing to pay that price.

To follow Jesus we must repent of sin.

We must decided to turn from sin, once and for all, and most people are not willing to do that, so they reject Him.

Jesus said their are four types of soil