Gospel.com Blog

Do you feel distant from God?

Chances are good that feeling of distance didn’t develop overnight. When we drift away from God, it’s a slow and steady process. It might happen over a period of months or years, but all of the sudden we realize that we’ve been pushing God away rather than running towards Him. The devotional today from Strength for the Journey describes how we fall into this pattern and also gives us great advice for avoiding it in the future:

Satan’s opening volley was not a blistering attack on God; it was a simply a question that he wanted Eve to think about. “Did God really say, ‘You must not eat from any tree in the garden?’” (Genesis 3:1). Actually, God had said that she could eat of every tree but one. But Satan twisted the facts to suit his purposes and to lead Eve’s mind to the conclusion that God was not the generous God she had known Him to be, but rather a stingy, restrictive, joy killer. Once she had let her heart drift to the wrong conclusion, it was easy for her to believe Satan’s lie that God just wanted to keep her from being as knowledgeable as He is and that the threat of them dying was just God’s way of scaring them into compliance with His stingy ways.

Satan still sets us adrift by planting doubt about God’s Word and spinning the facts to his own evil advantage.

Once we begin to suspect God instead of trusting Him, we inevitably drift away from Him. So, beware! Your life is full of scenarios where Satan can put his deceitful twist on your experiences. He is the spin-doctor of hell, and as Jesus said, “When [Satan] lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies” (John 8:44).

Read the rest of the devotional at RBC.org.

Have you recently found yourself becoming distant with God? What’s stopping you from moving back towards Him?

If you’ve spent time interacting with atheists in person or online, you have probably heard of the “Flying Spaghetti Monster.” The Flying Spaghetti Monster is an intentionally ludicrous imaginary creature that is used to challenge believers with the apparent irrationality of their belief in God. “How does believing in God make any more sense than believing in the Flying Spaghetti Monster?” goes the question.

Although the imaginary is silly, it isn’t easy to know how to respond to this challenge. Is this a fair objection to Christianity? Is it really any more reasonable to believe in an unseen, all-powerful God than it is to believe in aliens, fairies, or airborne pasta beasts?

In this Slice of Infinity devotional, Jill Carattini offers a serious response to the Flying Spaghetti Monster argument:

Where the Flying Spaghetti Monster attempts to shake belief and dissuade certainty, it holds no power as an analogy for belief in God because it misses the very heart of why so many people intuitively believe. This was illustrated recently in a debate between Richard Dawkins and Christian mathematician John Lennox. Dawkins referenced the illustration of a person walking through a forest and finding a beautiful garden. He asked, “Isn’t it enough to appreciate the beauty of the garden without having to believe in invisible fairies hiding behind the flowers?” Lennox’s reply demonstrated the fallacy in this analogy. He said, “Of course you wouldn’t have to believe in fairies in the garden, but you would assume there was a gardener, wouldn’t you?” You would believe in a gardener even without seeing him or her because it is the only way to make sense of a garden. Otherwise, how would you distinguish between the garden and the rest of the forest you were walking through? A garden is only a garden if it was planted and cared for on purpose. The God of the Bible is not comparable to any of the funny invisible internet deities, but He is quite like the gardener. He makes sense of the world and He assures us that we are not here by accident, but that we were created on purpose and for a purpose.

Do you find this rebuttal convincing? How do you respond when the Flying Spaghetti Monster is invoked in discussions with atheists?

It’s time for another entry in our series of posts about common objections to Christianity. In each post, we present an often-heard objection to the Christian faith and ask for your response, in your own words.

Imagine that a friend has challenged you with this objection, and that you don’t have access to any books, sermons, or other publications to which you can refer them. They want to hear your response, in your own words!

How would you respond to this statement:

The archaeological evidence for much of the history of the Old Testament is shaky—archaeologists are divided about whether the evidence supports the Exodus, the Israelite campaign against Canaan, and other key points of Biblical history. And anytime somebody claims to have find archaeological evidence for a miraculous item or event like Noah’s Ark or the Resurrection, the evidence turns out to be mistaken or fabricated. If the Bible’s account of history were really true, there would be definitive evidence for it.

Previous posts in this series:

The church is full of hypocrites!

Does prayer really work?

Why does God allow Hell to exist?

Did God endorse genocide?

This is the fourth in our series of posts about common objections to Christianity. In each post, we present an often-heard objection to the Christian faith and ask for your response, in your own words.

Imagine that a friend has challenged you with this objection, and that you don’t have access to any books, sermons, or other publications to which you can refer them. They want to hear your response, in your own words!

How would you respond to this statement:

Everyone knows that the church is full of hypocrites who preach Christianity but don’t live Christ-like lives. If the Christian message isn’t compelling enough to change the hearts of even self-professed Christians, then it has nothing real to offer me.

Share your response!

Previous posts in this series:

Does prayer really work?

Why does God allow Hell to exist?

Did God endorse genocide?

This is the third in our series of posts addressing common objections to Christianity. As we stated in the first post in the series, we’re looking at common, real-life objections to Christianity and asking how you would respond to them.

Imagine that a friend has challenged you with this objection, and that you don’t have access to any books, sermons, or other publications to which you can refer them. They want to hear your response, in your own words!

How would you respond to this statement?

The Bible teaches that prayer is effective (James 5:16) and promises that God will give believers anything they ask for in prayer (Matthew 21:22). Yet many Christians, even the most devout and faithful, have earnestly prayed for something and not received it. This means that either God doesn’t really answer all prayers, or that prayer simply doesn’t work.

Share your response!

Previous posts in this series:

Why does God allow Hell to exist?

Did God endorse genocide?

Earlier this week, we highlighted a devotional about effective prayer. But what about prayers that God doesn’t seem to answer at all? Are those “ineffective” prayers? When we call out to God for help or when an injustice happens, why doesn’t He always appear to set things right? Why doesn’t He do something?

That’s the question asked in this devotional at Lifetime Guarantee Ministries. Anabel Gillham wonders about God’s apparent silence:

Why does He wait and wait and wait when we so desperately are begging Him to “do something?” Why? Because God is omniscient. He knows everything. He has His plans all drawn up and we cannot grasp His ways. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts (Isaiah 55:9 NAS). We didn’t know what God had in mind that dark day on Calvary’s hill. He was fulfilling the plan that had been set in motion before the foundation of the earth. He was redeeming mankind. He was making a way for us to regain our fellowship with Him. He was opening Heaven’s doors for His children. Reconciled at last!

And we can say, “I see that was necessary for His plan to be carried out! But why war, why tragedies, why suffering?” Because He is fulfilling the plan that was set in motion for you and me before the foundation of the world. God has a plan for my life as surely as He had a plan for Jesus.

Read the full devotional at Lifetime Guarantee Ministries.

Have you ever wondered why God remained silent and inactive in spite of your prayers? How do you respond when God’s response to prayer or needs in your life isn’t what you hoped for?

We’re continuing our “Common Objections to Christianity” series of posts today with a question about Hell.

As Andy stated in the first post in the series, “Our intent isn’t to play devil’s advocate, but to let you share how you would respond when your faith is challenged.”

To reiterate, we want to hear how you would answer this question. Try to think how you’d respond if a friend asked you this question in a coffeeshop. You don’t have access to any books, sermons or publications to show them. Your friend doesn’t want a reading list—they want to hear your response!

How would you respond to this statement:

“Christianity purports to be a religion based on love. The New Testament writers regularly state that God is a loving God. However, they also state that many people will suffer in Hell. How could an omnipotent, loving God allow the existence of a place of eternal torment?”

Share your response!

We’re going to try something new here at the Gospel.com blog: periodically, we’ll post a “common objection to Christianity,” and we want to hear how you would respond to that objection if somebody challenged you with it. Our intent isn’t to play devil’s advocate, but to let you share how you would respond when your faith is challenged.

If it helps, imagine that a close, non-believing friend is raising the objection, and that referring them to a book, sermon, or publication is not an option. They want to hear your answer, in your own words!

Without further ado, here’s the first “objection.” How would you respond if a friend made this statement:

“Passages like Deuteronomy 20, 1 Samuel 15, and Exodus 12 depict God ordering the death of many innocents along with the guilty—including countless children. This shows that God can be cruel and bloodthirsty, and disproves the Christian idea that He is a God of love.”

How would you respond to this objection?

Share your response!

What’s it like to feel your faith slipping away? Christianity Today published an interview with David Bazan, a well-known musician and the former frontman for the indie rock band Pedro the Lion. Bazan is a former evangelical Christian who no longer counts himself as a believer, but he continues to speak (and sing) about God and the doubts that led him away from the Christian flock.

Bazan’s departure from Christianity was a sad and reluctant one, and his former faith continues to haunt him, as this quote illustrates:

Christian spirituality has played a huge part in your music. Will it continue to play a role?

In some ways, I hope not. But I can’t imagine that it won’t. It’s still the central question of my life. I read a lot about theology and church history. I’ll never get a vacation from this. I’m not kidding when I say that this is the central question of my life.

Bazan is certainly not the only person to abandon the Christian faith; but the circumstances of his departure make for an edifying read. Bazan didn’t reject his faith to become an angry, bitter atheist; nor did he simply drift away from Christianity due to apathy or a lack of commitment. Rather, his departure was prompted by, among other things, a sense that the Christianity he practiced was actually interfering with the ethics he wanted to pursue.

The interview doesn’t get too specific about those obstacles, but one obvious question that occurs to me is whether the hurdles that drove Bazan from the faith truly were fundamental elements of the Christian faith, or if they were human “additions” to the faith. It’s also interesting (and a little disturbing) to see the powerful role that fear played (and continues to play) in his spiritual life.

What’s your reaction to the interview? What might you ask or say to Bazan if you had the chance to talk to him about Christianity?

The book of 1 Corinthians gives Jesus one of the most unusual titles you could ever imagine being applied to a religious figure: stumbling block. The point (as I understand it) is that one of the hardest things to accept about the Gospel message is the person of Jesus Christ himself. The person and meaning of Jesus defy human learning and logic; the fact of the Messiah trips up and confounds those who approach Christianity from a human-focused perspective.

In your religious journey, have you encountered what you would describe as a stumbling block? If you’re a Christian, was there one particular issue or demand that you bumped up against time and time again before you finally made the choice to follow Christ? What ultimately helped you to make it over that obstacle?

Share your thoughts!