Jesus Skeptic - Jesus, You, and Experiential Evidence, Part 2

Have you ever had an experience change your opinion or attitude on something? I mean, you thought you knew all the facts and considered every angle until you personally went through a situation that completely changed your mind. Well, join me as we hear two powerful stories of people who thought they had everything in their lives figured out until they didn't.

You're not going to want to miss this. Thanks for joining us for this Edition of Living on the Edge with Chip Ingram. I'm Dave Druey, and as many of you know, Chip's our Bible teacher for this daily discipleship program.

But for this series, he's passed the mic to his longtime friend, John Dickerson. John's the lead pastor at Connection Point Christian Church and is also an award-winning investigative journalist. In just a minute, John will pick up where he left off last time in his series Jesus Skeptic.

As a quick reminder, if you miss any portion of this program, you can always catch up through the Chip Ingram app. With that, here's John with the second half of his talk, Jesus, You and Experiential Evidence. Could Jesus give you a peace, a peace that is with you in your young years when you're looking for a spouse or those early fulfillment things, a peace that's with you in your retirement years when you're searching for identity and purpose, a peace that's with you even when you face the end of your life?

You'll never know unless you try it. I want to tell you two stories, true stories of people who gave everything they had in the pursuit of fulfillment. And as a reporter and a journalist, I had a front row seat to both of these stories. Now when I would get assigned a profile like this at the point I was at in my career as a journalist, I would spend months, sometimes three to six months working on one story.

It was very in-depth reporting. So when I was assigned a profile on a person, I kid you not, I would visit their childhood home. I would talk to friends they had in high school, talk to their ex-wives. I would talk to their business partners, to their neighbors.

I want a 360-degree view. I had people I profiled where I would sleep on the couch in their living room so that I could document their morning routine. That's how messed up of a workaholic I was. But I found these two different guys who were both seeking fulfillment as much as you ever could. The first is a man named Scott Coles. Scott is a man who built a fortune of nearly $1 billion. Now if you need a math refresher, you hear so much billion, trillion, million stuff in the news, what does it all mean anymore? Okay, here's a billion million. I just want you to imagine for a moment that I give you a million dollars today. You're welcome.

Come back next week, okay? A million dollars, multiply that by a hundred. You're set for multiple lifetimes now. Multiply that by 10, now you're talking about a billion dollars. At age 42, Scott Coles had amassed a fortune of $1 billion. He had homes in Phoenix, in Aspen, in San Diego. Most of these homes were compounds, really. In Phoenix, for example, the wealthiest area is called Camelback Mountain. And Scott would buy up neighboring mansions on Camelback Mountain and he would tear them down so that he could build, and he did build, an 18-hole golf course in his front yard.

I saw Scott Coles' garage, Rolls Royce, Bentley, Ferrari, I'm talking vintage Ferrari, my goodness. He had a beautiful wife, he had healthy children. And then as they got into their early 40s and he wanted a more beautiful wife, he went to Las Vegas and he picked the prettiest showgirl that he could find. And he divorced his wife and he married the prettiest girl he could find.

Anything that a person would ever think, that might make me happy, that could make me happy. He did it, he tried it, he amassed it. And at age 42, in the prime of his life with beautiful, healthy kids, having everything that so many people think brings joy, Scott Coles ended his own life intentionally. He just couldn't go on living.

And as I interviewed his kids and his ex-wife and his high school friends and they said he was a nice guy, he was a caring guy, he was a generous guy, it led me to this conclusion. Many roads marked fulfillment turn out to be life-devouring dead ends, or worse, drop-offs. That's why my heart for you in this series, even if you don't believe in God yet, is this, be intentional about the currents that you place yourself in in life.

Don't be random about it. Don't just step into the currents that are closest to you. Look at where the current leads other people. And I remember I was still driving the press cars at that time and thinking, oh my goodness, if that guy got all those things and felt like life wasn't worth living, then I probably shouldn't get in the current of thinking that material things will bring me ultimate fulfillment, because I'll never get a fraction of what that guy had. And if that didn't work for him, it's clearly not gonna work for me. I've never been the same since seeing firsthand a man who had everything that people would think brings happiness, or at least some sense of peace, but he was so hopeless that he ended his own life.

What a tragedy. It led me to ask about my life. What am I really hoping will carry me to fulfillment? Maybe this will be a life-defining moment for you wherever you are in your journey to just kind of zoom out from social media and family drama and workplace drama and everything else in the news and just think about your life.

What current are you in? What do you think will bring fulfillment? Because we all think something will, but we rarely sit down to actually write it out. And if you were to write it out, you might be surprised. Well, as I was wrestling with this for my own life, having seen the intellectual evidence of Jesus and having seen followers of Jesus changing the world, I profiled another person who had given everything in the pursuit of happiness and fulfillment. This guy had a totally different life. Grammy-winning musician. I spent about three months interviewing him and his daughter.

During that time, his videos, music videos were still playing on MTV. He had millions of dollars in the bank. He had had investments all around California, but he described to me that his life had been completely miserable. In fact, while I was profiling him and spending that time with him, he described to me in detail different times where he and his wife were both high on meth.

And they would get into these violent physical altercations while they were under the influence of that drug. He described to me a time where he looked down at his knuckles and he saw his wife's blood on his own knuckles because they had been fighting so aggressively. He described another time where a number of famous musicians and artists had come over to his house for a huge party and there was a lot of drugs and a lot of pleasure.

And he woke up in the morning and he went out to the pool and his two-year-old daughter was curled up on a towel right by the edge of the pool and she had slept there all night. And even through the drug brokenness of his mind, he just realized my life is a mess. But he had gotten there by going after fame, getting it, fortune, getting it, achievement, getting it, possessions, got it, experiences. He tried it all and it just led him lower and lower into this darkness. There was a key moment in Brian's life story where on an Easter Sunday morning, he walked into a church a lot like this near Bakersfield, California. His brain's still half functioning from drug addiction, broken in life from the pursuit of fulfillment, currents that had beaten him up. And he doesn't remember everything from that Easter message, but he remembers these words of Jesus where Jesus says to you and me, come to me, all of you who are weary and all of you who are burdened and I will give you rest.

What a claim from the guy who claims to be God, the guy who claimed to knit you together in your mother's womb. And here's why Brian's story has such a different ending than Scott Cole's story. See, Scott Cole's never gave Jesus a try. From all the people I talked to, he just never considered it. He ridiculed it from the riverbanks like I used to do, but he never tried it for himself.

Brian said, hey, I've tried everything else. I might as well try this Jesus thing. And on that Easter Sunday, he chose to give it a try. And he called out a prayer, God, if you're there, I believe. Jesus, if you're there, I need this. You say you give rest to the weary, you help the burdened.

If you're there, I need that. And all he did was, I mean, a childlike mentality through that brain confused by drugs to God, if you're there, I want your help. Jesus, if this is true, I need you in my life. And part of Brian's story is that then, within about two months, after having been a drug addict really since high school, he had started with marijuana in high school, and it had just kept leading him deeper and deeper all the way to heroin and meth. He'd been a drug addict for more than 10 years, and within three months, he was sober. And that's the part as a journalist when I heard that, I thought, no, no, that does not happen.

I'm gonna spend three months with this guy, and I'm gonna find out the truth. And the truth, as I hung out with Brian and his daughter, who was in late elementary at that time, was that he had totally transformed, that he had changed from the inside out. He had intentionally given away a lot of the wealth.

He didn't need that stuff anymore. Brian Welch found in Jesus something that he couldn't find anywhere else, and I saw firsthand with my own eyes, what a contrast from the billionaire who didn't have Jesus and ended up taking his own life. One day, Brian and I were at a P.F. Chang's in Scottsdale, Arizona, and he looked across the table at me, and this is what he said.

I had my tape recorder rolling. He said this, I had $3 million in cash sitting in the bank. All the cars I wanted, a $200,000 pool, I don't know how that's even possible, but apparently it is, nannies, the nicest house, real estate in California, and I was miserable.

I mean, just think about that for a moment. Nothing wrong with a $200,000 pool if you have the money and you wanna spend it that way, but if you think it's gonna bring you fulfillment, be smart enough to look at other people who've gone down that current. What a shame it would be to work your entire life and get into your 60s or 70s or 80s and look back and be like, I gave everything. I only got a fraction of what these other guys got, and I could've known from the beginning that wasn't gonna fulfill me, but I love what Brian said after that. He says, then I found God and was like, this is all I've ever wanted. I didn't find what I was looking for in all that stuff. If you're seeking fulfillment and inner rest, you're the kind of person who Jesus invites and helps.

And I wanna be clear, there's nothing wrong with these other things that can fulfill to a level. God wants you to have a rich and full life, but the deepest fulfillment isn't found in getting outside things and bringing them in. It's found in connecting to the creator of the universe internally, and then having a source of joy and fulfillment that kind of bubbles up from within through all the different seasons of life, through all the economic ups and downs and relational ups and downs. And I just wonder, where have you been exhausted in your hunt for fulfillment? Where have you maybe been let down in your quest or your search for fulfillment?

Where has your soul been full of anxiety rather than rest? You can come to Jesus today in the same simple way that Brian Welch did on that Easter Sunday. Well, I wanna tell you about just one other person. This is a skeptic, and it's a totally different personality profile, because you might be listening and thinking, okay, John, interesting stories, helpful to know, but I really don't expect millions of dollars or worldwide fame to make me happy. Maybe you're more like me.

Those things have never been options for me, okay? But I'm a pretty good guy. Part of my story before I became a fully devoted follower of Jesus, I didn't go on some drug binge. I graduated from college early, and I worked hard, and I did all the right things. But I found that still I was lacking something, and so wherever you find yourself on that spectrum of what you're pursuing for fulfillment, I've found the same thing to be true that I found in Jesus something that's not available anywhere else.

And this next guy I wanna talk to you about is a person who maybe you can relate to because he was a good guy. He kept most of the rules. He wasn't addicted to anything. He even believed that Jesus existed. In fact, he'd seen Jesus with his own eyes. But this whole thing that Jesus is God and could meet his deepest needs, he was not buying that.

He was a skeptic in that sense. In fact, this guy got so annoyed with Jesus claiming to be God that he would make fun of Christians. He would even harm Christians.

He would go around and mess with the Christians. This guy, his name was Saul, but eventually he would have an encounter with Jesus where Jesus showed himself to be God. And it so transformed him that he then became a follower of Jesus. And he then went around telling everyone, even when he would get imprisoned for it or whipped for it or beaten for it, Jesus is God.

Jesus is the fulfillment that you seek. And here's how we put it in one of his letters, which is recorded in the New Testament. He says in Romans 1 16, I am not ashamed of the gospel. What's the gospel? Very simply, it is the good news that the God who made you loves you, that he came into this world as the person of Jesus, and he willingly died on the cross to pay the penalty for your mistakes in mind. And that you can be made right with God, not by doing a bunch of good things, but by simply believing and admitting your need that you need Jesus' help. And if you believe in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, you will be saved. That's the gospel. And this guy who was a skeptic, a hardened skeptic, and who hated Christians, would become so transformed that he wrote, I'm not ashamed of the gospel.

Why not? Because it's the power of God. And that's what I've found in my life. The good news of Jesus connects you to the actual power of God. You can have the power of God in your life. And it's a power that leads to salvation, so that you know when your body dies, you're gonna spend eternity in heaven with God. But not only that, it leads to freedom in this life and fulfillment. And this path, this current, it's available to everyone. God so loved the world that he sent his only son, so that whoever believes in him will be saved.

It's available to you today. But the question for you is this, will you try it? Will you get in the current? Because it brings salvation to everyone who believes. From my own experience, I would say, and I think from Saul the skeptic's experience, your belief does not have to start out as a perfectly mature, fully formed belief. That's not how we're born, right? Wouldn't that be the weirdest thing?

Like you're looking on Instagram and some mom has a baby and she's holding this like 48 year old dude with a beard, right? Like we start as babies and we grow and we mature. You don't have to have every question about the history of the universe and every book of the Bible. You don't have to have all that stuff answered to say, God, I believe that you love me and you made me and I want this fulfillment. I want this relationship with you. You start there and then he feeds you and he grows you.

That's been my experience anyway. Jesus invites you to find fulfillment and rest in him. He invites you to find something that you can't find anywhere else. And that's why I love that verse, Jeremiah 29, you will seek me and you will find me when you seek me with all your heart. So if you're here and you're considering what do I believe or what am I looking to to fulfill me in life?

Have you maybe just been sampling the things that are around you rather than being intentional to say, where will this path take me? Have you forgotten Jesus in your search for fulfillment? Maybe you were raised as a Christian, you've even been coming to church and you're like, yeah, I'm a Christian, but have you ever actually really said, this is what I'm putting my faith in to fulfill me? Have you ever really tried it for your fulfillment and more importantly, for your eternal life? Maybe you're here and you're a believer and you just needed this reminder today that all those other things and they might not be bad things, but they're not gonna fulfill you the way that Jesus can. I've noticed that most of the people who are the most critical of Jesus have never tried it.

And I was there for a while on those river banks making fun of the people in the current. But once I actually tried it, this claim of Jesus, come to me all you who are weary and burdened and I will give you rest. It turns out to be true. But you've gotta come to him. You've gotta give him a try. The fulfillment of Jesus is found in the space between religion and relationship. That really was my journey. I grew up with a religious teaching about Jesus and then I went full circle away from it and I studied just Jesus himself and I came all the way back. And I wanna encourage you, if you've cast off Jesus because of his followers, to look at him himself.

Look at his words for yourself. And by simply praying to him, God, I wanna find my fulfillment in you. Show me what to do with my life. Show me which path to take.

Catch me up in your current. So if you're listening to this and you're feeling like you wanna give Jesus a try, I wanna share a promise that God gives to you. He says, if you seek me, you will find me if you search with all your heart. And I just wanna encourage you today, search for God with all your heart. No matter what you're going through, no matter what's going on in your life today, you can find God if you will search for him with all your heart. In fact, I'd love to lead you in a prayer.

The words of this prayer are not magical, but what God describes is a movement of our heart to receive the gift of salvation. It's a free gift. You don't have to earn it. You can't earn it.

You don't have to pay for it. In fact, scripture tells us that if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, if you believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. And I just wanna lead you in a prayer where you can say to God that you want Jesus to be your savior. So if that's you, right now, would you just from your heart, repeat these words after me, not to me or anyone else, but to God saying, Jesus, I believe you're the one true God.

Jesus, I believe you died on the cross for my sins and you rose from the dead. Jesus, I know I've sinned. I know I've fallen short and I ask you to forgive my sins. I ask you to adopt me into the family of God. Jesus, I receive your forgiveness and I now wanna live as your son or your daughter. Jesus, fill me with your spirit.

Help me to live a new life. If you've prayed that today, God says that you've been transferred from a kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light. He says that the chains of sin that enslaved you have been broken. He says that you know for sure that you have eternal life in heaven.

You have a new identity, a new name. You have so much to discover now as a loved and adopted child of the living God. And I'm so proud of you if you've prayed that today. If you prayed with John, we'd love to put a resource in your hands.

It's called Starting Out Right, and it's absolutely free. This tool will help you gain a clear biblical understanding of what it means to put your faith in Jesus. And that's our whole mission here at Living on the Edge, helping Christians really live like Christians. So let us help you get started in your faith journey. You can request this resource by calling us at 888-333-6003 or by visiting LivingOnTheEdge.org, then clicking on the New Believers button.

That's LivingOnTheEdge.org, or call 888-333-6003. Well Chip joins me in studio now, and Chip, I'm sure we all know someone who's skeptical or even a bit hostile towards Christianity and the claims of the Bible. How can this series and especially John's book help us better defend our faith? Well Dave, John comes from a background actually where it was a very religious background and pretty rigid in some ways.

And he actually went through his own season of, I don't know if I can believe all this. And he happens to be very smart, decided to take up a life as a journalist, and actually won the Brokaw Award, very prestigious of the top investigative journalist in America. And it was on that journey that John decided, I'm not going to take other people's word for things. And so first-hand research, he doesn't look at the quotes in the back of books.

He goes and reads the very first-hand research, or he goes to the actual places. And so I found this young friend who was a millennial, who was very, very smart, who'd done a lot of research. And what I realized was, as I listen to the world that I'm in, and I go to a church with a lot of very, very young people, and I see their worldview, I recognized John basically is speaking their language and answering the questions that they have.

And some of our history is just completely buried, or part of what the Bible says has been really, what can I say, it's been tilted in ways and bent in ways to make it sound very ugly and very unlike Jesus. And so my heart's desire was that people would get to know someone who is smart, who's academic, who's an absolutely committed Christian, who did the first-hand research, and I will guarantee this. This is the kind of book that you need to sit down with the younger people in your life, read together and have a discussion.

And I think all parties concerned, young and old, will have a number of aha moments and realize the power of love and truth and justice and compassion that we take for granted that we're all birthed out of a Christian framework and worldview. So I'm very, very excited about people listening to the series, and I can't imagine not buying this book. It is a great work.

Thanks, Chip. Well, to order your copy of Jesus Skeptic, visit livingontheedge.org or call 888-333-6003. Through this book, John reveals the convincing evidence for Jesus and opens our eyes to the tremendous influence Christianity has had on history.

So to get your hands on Jesus Skeptic by John Dickerson, go to livingontheedge.org or call 888-333-6003. Tap listeners, tap special offers. Well, just before we close, I want to thank each of you who's making this program possible through your generous giving. 100% of your gifts are going directly to the ministry to help Christians really live like Christians. Now, if you found this teaching helpful but you're not yet on the team, would you consider doing that today? To donate, just go to livingontheedge.org, tap donate on the app, or give us a call at 888-333-6003. And let me thank you in advance for doing whatever the Lord leads you to do. Well, until next time, for everyone here, this is Dave Druey saying thanks for listening to this Edition of Living on the Edge.