I appreciate all of your responses. They help me see where you guys are coming from.
It seems there are several general themes emerging…
-
It’s impossible to prove God exists and/or impossible to
understand God so the question is moot.
-
It would take a personal experience / encounter with God.
-
It would take God just making Himself obvious to me. He
has my number so He should do this.
-
It would take irrefutable miracles of some form or
fashion.
-
It would take observing the life of a strong Christian.
There may be more, but these are the five main ones that I can see anyway from this previous batch of responses.
For me personally, the ONE THING that I’ve ever seen in my life that convinced a skeptic of not only God’s existence but God’s LOVE for them … was # 5.
Rather than commenting on everyone’s individual comments, I would like to take note of things about these 5 themes.
-
I would submit to those who think it impossible to
prove God exists … that this cannot be true. There
are many, many people in the world today who did not
believe in God at one time in their lives, and they
are serving Him with a whole heart today. So God was
proven to these people in one way or another.
-
Regarding having a personal experience with God … this
to me is the end result God is after. The whole point
of WHY God pursues you so much throughout your life
is that He deeply loves you and wants a personal
relationship with you. But it rarely “just happens”.
See next point.
-
This is the one I really want to address. As far as I
know, God rarely works this way. He does woo you
and try to draw you and get your attention throughout
your life, but at the same time you must seek after
Him if you want to find Him. If you sit around
waiting for a Neon Sign in the sky, it’ll never happen.
‘And you will seek Me and find Me when you search for
Me with all your heart’ (Jer 29:13)
-
Actually, miracles are a pretty legitimate one. Seeing
a medically verifiable healing can be pretty convincing.
But EVEN that is probably not enough for most people.
I would tend to think there would need to be something
more although I could be wrong.
-
As I said, this is the one that really seems to work.
More below.
I’ve said several times on this board … if you want to check out Christianity, check out Christians. Check out real-life born-again believers and hang out with them for a couple of months in church groups. And make sure it’s a healthy church with Godly people.
You’ll find people that are imperfect for sure, but you will see love demonstrated that can only be described as supernatural. It’s NOT human!
The biggest things that give evidence of God in this life is when a human being reacts to a situation in a very Godly way that is not naturally human. For example, some of the best evidences of God to me are …
… when a Christian asks their Bible Study group to pray for good things to happen to their boss, who regularly curses and yells at them and treats them unfairly …
… when a Christian refuses to lie to a customer even though he knows it will cost him a multi-million dollar business deal …
… when a Christian man looks the other way when a woman in a slinky dress leans over in front of him …
… when a Christian goes through a horrific tragedy and still trusts God and makes a point of finding things to be thankful for …
That’s an extremely small sampling, but most of them are not nebulous. I had specific people in mind on each one of those I just listed except the second one.
Now here’s the thing. You can decide the glass is half empty or the glass is half full. In other words, you can look at Christian failures in these areas and say “A-HA! That proves Christianity isn’t real”, or you can take a look at those who ARE living it out, and realize they have found something truly astonishing and life changing.
So that’s my two cents worth. I realize not all of you want to find God if He does exist. But if you do … I sincerely hope that you will seek out Godly Christians and watch them for several months. Yes you will see imperfection but you will also see evidence of a very supernatural God operating in their lives.