Melissa the Hopeful🏠Homemaker@BiblicalBeauty
Oxford professor John Lennox on testing the reality of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ:
"Now, my final point is this. I'm a scientist of sorts, and people say to me, 'Come on. You can't believe this stuff.' Because in science and practical science you do experiments. You test your hypothesis. Christianity is not testable. Isn't it? Isn't it?
You see, the difference between the two last things I read were the difference between seeing something, those grave cloths, and working out an intellectual conclusion that something utterly remarkable has happened. That's not quite the same thing as meeting the risen Jesus. And you see, ladies and gentlemen, if it is true that Jesus rose from the dead, then He's still alive, and it's possible to meet Him.
Now, you can do an experiment, and it's this—this Jesus who claims to be risen tells us that if we're prepared to trust Him, repent of the mess we've made of our own lives, and the lives of other people, and we're prepared to receive Him as Lord and Controller of life as the risen Son of God, then He will give us forgiveness. Does the word forgiveness mean anything to you? He'll give us new life and a new power...
Now, ladies and gentlemen, this is the test...When you see people with narcotic or alcohol dependence, and they've no food to put on the table in front of their children, and you meet them then a year later, and something has happened. You say, 'What's happened to you?' and they say something like, 'Well, I met Jesus,' or 'I became a Christian,' or they'll put it different ways. When you see that again and again, you add two and two to get four.
I wouldn't sit here for a nanosecond if I didn't believe that not only is the resurrection of Jesus intellectually credible, but I believe it's existentially credible because the center part of my life and that of my wife and family is to walk with Him from day to day. Now, that may sound absolute jargon and mumbo-jumbo to you, but we're living in a universe where we discover that we are persons, and every analogy we know tells us that our origin cannot be sub-personal. It's supra-personal. And if we enjoy human friendship, what a magnificent thing it is if God makes a way where we can through faith in Christ become His sons and daughters and enjoy the biggest friendship and the most exciting friendship in the universe, and that is friendship with the risen Christ."
