Gooding, David: Why I Believe the New Testament is the Word of God

It is a great pleasure for me, ladies and gentlemen, to be asked to speak to you on a topic that lies very near to my heart, and that is to give you some of the many reasons why I believe the New Testament to be the word of God. I suppose I ought to tell you from the very start, because you may well be wondering. I might as well tell you from the very start that I, my parents, were believers in Jesus Christ. There are those who argue, are there not, that if your parents were believers in Jesus Christ, then as a s- child of theirs, you will automatically become a Christian. And thereafter, all the reasons you give yourself why you are a Christian are merely rationalizations of what is an instinctive belief. You may well decide that that is my position. I was so heavily indoctrinated as a child that the effect has lasted on, and I have merely rationalized it. The argument isn't very strong, is it? Because you could say the same thing about atheists and agnostics. That people whose parents were atheists or agnostics and were brought up in that tradition, if they are agnostics today, their agnosticism is only a rationalization of what they were earlier taught as children. And of course, that would cancel the whole argument out, and we have to try to think more deeply. Sure, we are heavily influenced by our upbringing. Each of us ought to try and face that as honestly as we can. And if you are an agnostic and atheist tonight because you were brought up by such parents, then of course, doubtless you will have tried seriously and painstakingly to examine the beliefs you were earlier taught to see whether, in fact, they are valid or whether they are merely your traditional beliefs. Now, I do believe the New Testament to be the word of God. There are many people who think that in order to believe that, you have to commit intellectual suicide. Well, I do believe it, and of course I naturally do not think I have committed intellectual suicide. What your opinion will be at the end of it, I do not know. At least I hope to show you that I have tried to think, and I have not lived in a university without being obliged to think about the basic claims of my Christian faith. Perhaps I ought just to emphasize what our chairman said. I am not a professional theologian. You will soon gather that as I proceed, but I mention it now. I am not a professional theologian. I was a classicist all my days. I taught Greek and Latin language and literature. I specialized in Greek tragedy, and I also taught some Greek and Latin philosophy from a historical point of view. One cannot do that kind of thing and teach it professionally without being made to think about the basis of Christian belief and to examine it as thoroughly as one can to see whether it is indeed valid and why one believes it. Let me first deal with a very small matter, though to some people, admittedly, it looms large in their thinking. The popular press in our part of the world is liable from time to time to have an excess of blood rushing to the brain, and in those moments they're liable to tell the public that you cannot trust the New Testament because it has been copied out so many times. It really is a stupid argument, and those who advance it make it obvious that they have not studied the facts. It is, of course, the fact that for the first thirteen hundred years and so, every copy of the New Testament had to be copied out laboriously by hand. It is also true that some copies were well done and accurately, and some were very hastily done and poorly done. The result is that when you compare these manuscripts of the Old Testament, you will find many, many disagreements among them. Let me tell you that, please observe that it's I who am telling you that, I who do believe in the New Testament as the inspired word of God. It's I that telling you that. I'm not ignorant of it. I am not, strictly speaking, a New Testament textual critic. I spent my research life as a textual critic of the Old Testament, trying as best as we can by scientific methods to determine the text of Old Testament. But, now that we have mentioned this fact in the New Testament that there are, if you compare the manuscripts, many differences between them, nevertheless, it does not in any way undermine the essential validity of those manuscripts, nor shake my faith in any way, that in these New Testament manuscripts we have what the original writers intended us to have. There is first the fact that we have many hundreds of New Testament manuscripts. Some of them are very early, and we shall come to that in a moment. We can, in actual fact, be very thankful that the early copies of the New Testament were indeed copied by hand, and for this reason. Suppose you got a copy of your national newspaper one morning, and as you were reading it through, you felt that somewhere in one paragraph or so, something had been left out because it didn't really make sense as it stood. Well, it's no good, if that is so, going to your next door neighbor and saying, let me have a look at your newspaper, because his newspaper will have come off the same printing press as your newspaper. The only way you could find out what the editor intended was yourself to get back to the editor's own copy. Now, if the New Testament, uh, copies were originally printed, and we suspected that in some of them there were mistakes, then would we be in a helpless position and unable to get back to what was originally written? The fact that the copies were made by hand means this, that while many of them have many mistakes in them, they don't have all the same mistakes. So if you've got one manuscript and you think there is a mistake in it, you can take it next door, so to speak, and find somebody who has another manuscript or another museum that has another collection of manuscripts, and you can compare them. And by dint of comparison, the experts in this field can work back to what was originally written. And experts that have given their lifetime to the intense study of the New Testament manuscripts have given it as their opinion that when all is said and done, less than two percent of New Testament contents are open to uncertainty as to what was originally written, and of that less than two percent, uh, the majority concerns tiny matters of grammar where the alternative readings do not substantially alter the sense. And there is, of course, the third observation, that the great doctrines of Christianity don't depend upon a comma here or a little bit of vocabulary there. They are stated time and time again throughout the whole New Testament, and as far as any essential belief of Christianity is concerned, nothing stands in doubt because of the incidental mistakes in the cr- in the manuscripts. And then there is the other consideration, the sheer number of the manuscripts of the New Testament that we possess, compared with the manuscripts of the classical authors of the ancient world. Some of our best known classical authors have only survived in a mere handful of manuscripts, and manuscripts that are, as we call them, very late, eighth or ninth century AD. Yet no classical scholar known to me would question that we have in those manuscripts what the original classical author intended we should have. Compared with them, the New Testament is a riot of hundreds of manuscripts, and some of them go back very early indeed. In the city of Dublin, in the Chester Beatty Library there, there is a collection of some of the New Testament books, being ep- epistles of Paul and the epistle to the Hebrews. They are dated at the very latest as being written two hundred AD. Now pause, if you will, a moment to consider the implications of that fact. Here are manuscripts in Dublin, they themselves written two hundred AD. They have lasted down to nearly two thousand AD. They are therefore about eighteen hundred years old themselves. They are not the original autographs that Paul himself wrote. They are copies of earlier manuscripts. And I want to put it to you to ask yourself, how early were those manuscripts from which these others were copied? They were copied two AD. They were copied from earlier manuscripts. How old were those earlier manuscripts from which they were copied? And the answer is that they could have well have been almost contemporary, if not completely contemporary, with the Apostle Paul himself. I do not choose to stay longer on that matter. It is important in its way, but for our purposes tonight, it is of somewhat secondary importance. My claim is that as we read the New Testament, even in our modern translations, we have substantially what the early writers intended. But there is a bigger question, isn't it? Suppose we could get the very first manuscripts that they ever wrote. We should still be faced with the bigger and basic question. This figure, this person of Jesus Christ that appears in the New Testament writings. What are we to make of him? Are the New Testament writers describing for us a real historical person who actually made these astounding claims that they put upon his lips, that he was God incarnate, God in human form. Are the New Testament gospels, for instance, reliably telling us that these are the historical facts. Or is it that the writers of the New Testament, and of the Gospels in particular, invented this figure, Jesus Christ, out of their fertile imaginations, and that the whole business of Jesus Christ is but a myth and a legend invented by people who concocted the New Testament documents. Sooner or later, of course, we've got to ask ourselves that question, haven't we? And tonight, to those of you who are not Christians, I would ask you to notice my basic belief and where it stands. I do not believe that Jesus is the Son of God because the New Testament says so. That is not the way round of my belief. With me, my belief is the other way round. I believe the New Testament because I first believe Jesus Christ. Of course, I do believe the Bible is the word of God, but I'm emphasizing now the logical order of my belief, and I want to make that clear from the beginning. For as we come to consider the person of Jesus Christ, many of you may feel that Christians are being very arbitrary. How do I know that Jesus Christ is a historical figure, is true, and that he is the Son of God? And perhaps Christians seem to you to be saying, well, first of all, you've got to start by be believing the Bible is the word of God, and then you'll believe that Jesus is the son of God because the Bible says so. But what if you can't start by believing the Bible is the word of God? You say, if I could believe that, I'd believe anything. Uh-huh. So where do we start? And I want to say to you, if you are agnostic and humanist, I'm not asking you first to grant that the Bible is the word of God. I ask you simply to begin by reading it. Read it, if you must, as you read any sensible, reliable newspaper. When you pick up your daily national newspaper, you don't, of course, begin by saying, well, now I'm going to believe that everything the newspaper says is true. You reserve your critical judgment, don't you? And you read it, and you say, yes, that seems true, this other bit here doesn't, and you make up your mind. But you don't say, because I can't, uh, first of all, come to believe that every word in the newspaper is true, I won't read the newspaper, do you? That would be rather stupid. So it is with the New Testament, if you are atheist and agnostic, it doesn't make a lot of sense to say, well, I can't believe it's the word of God, so I shan't read it. If we are intelligent folks, we shall say that these are ancient documents, they were contemporary with Jesus Christ. Let's read them and see what they say, see whether they commend themselves to us as being truthful. And in the very first place, let us consider this person, Jesus Christ, that these documents present, and make up our minds about him. Does he ring true? For the central message of the New Testament is the person of the Lord Jesus. And long before there was a New Testament, the early Christians were going out to the world, flooding the world with their testimony to Jesus Christ, and bidding men and women make up their minds primarily about this. Who is Jesus Christ? And that's how I come at it. And my first question is this. This Jesus Christ that is presented to us in the New Testament and is found claiming to be our God and creator in human form, is he the invention of the writers of the New Testament? And the answer, as far as I can see, is almost immediate. Obviously not. Obviously not. And how would you determine that? Because as you consider, at least as I consider, the person of Jesus Christ presented in the New Testament, I find that he was nobody's hero. Jesus Christ did not fit in, in his day when he lived here on earth, to any idea that people had of a hero that they could respect. Certainly the early Christians did not invent his character. You will find, if you read the New Testament writers, that they openly confess, with a certain amount of embarrassment, that when it came to one fundamental, crucial element in the teaching of Jesus, they diametri- diametrically disagreed with him. And when he persisted in standing for what he stood for, they all with one accord forsook him and fled. The issue, of course, was over first his claim to be Messiah, and then the fact that as Messiah he didn't attempt to defend himself, but allowed himself to be arrested and crucified and killed. Let's take then the average Jew and his idea of a hero. The average Jew was looking for a Messiah who would be a political leader in the form of the ancient Maccabees that were the heroes of every Jewish schoolboy. Men, powerful men that would rise up to initiate guerrilla warfare and then raise armies in Israel and attack the imperialist Roman overlords, and in the end boot them out of the country and gain freedom for the nation of Israel. That was the average concept of the Messiah in the mind of hundreds of Jews. Many of the New Testament writers themselves tell us that when they first followed Jesus, that was what they were expecting him to do. One of them said afterwards, we expected that it was he that should liberate Israel, and he meant it liberate them politically. But he didn't. And when it came to the crunch in the garden of Gethsemane, and the crowd, the arresting soldiers came to arrest our Lord Jesus, the apostles drew a sword and attempted to defend the Lord Jesus. And the Lord Jesus rebuked his apostle and told him to put the sword into its sheath. And when he did that, the apostles were so dumbfounded, it so contradicted their every concept of a Messiah, that there and then they said, this is absurd. A man that claims to be the Messiah and yet hasn't got the courage to stand and defend himself, how would he ever liberate Israel? And they forsook him and said he wasn't their kind of hero. And you would have never have had any gospels written by those same apostles, had it not been that subsequently the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead transformed what they thought of the Messiah and proved to them that Jesus was indeed the Messiah. And you'll see, if we inquire of the ancient Greeks what their idea of a hero was, if we inquire at least of the Greek philosophers, we shall find that Jesus Christ didn't fit into their categories either. Some of you, I'm sure, will have read that very moving document of the last days of Socrates, written by his pupil and admirer Plato, one of the great literary documents of mankind. The moving story how Socrates was condemned for death, to death for his philosophical views and ordered to drink the hemlock. And when the hour came in perfect calmness and equanimity, he called his disciples round him and rebuked them for starting to break down and weep, and took the hemlock in calm philosophical mood, confident that he had all his life sought the truth and was now dying for the truth and prepared to do so. That was an ideal that many Stoics thereafter took up and admired Socrates as their philosophical ancestry. How different was Jesus Christ? The Gospels don't pretend otherwise. When he came to the Garden of Gethsemane and to face death, he didn't come in calm, philosophical mood. The gospel writers tell us that he was prostrate in agonized prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane, so agonized that he sweat, as it were, great drops of blood falling to the ground, crying to God, if it be possible, take this cup, pass, let this cup pass from me. And to the embarrassment of the early Christians, when it was actually happening, when Christ was hanging on the cross, he was heard to cry, my God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? I tell you this with some confidence, surely, that the early Christians didn't invent that bit. As you imagine, the early Christians in their early, what you would call their propaganda, going out to the world and telling them that their Jesus admitted on the cross that he had been abandoned by God. I repeat, the early Christians didn't invent that bit. If they tell us that that is what Jesus said, they tell us that in all honestly be- honesty because that is what he said. If that is what Jesus Christ said upon the cross, he certainly wasn't a Greek hero, was he? No Greek would have invented the story. If you say to me now, well, how on earth now will you come to think that Jesus was the savior of the world if he himself admitted that he was forsaken of God, then I'll promise you in a few moments to come back to answer your question. I just want to conclude this bit of the argument by pointing out that Jesus Christ was no hero among the Romans either. The records tell us that when the Romans and then that Herod got hold of Jesus Christ and took him into their judgment halls, they asked him whether he was the king of the Jews. And the soldiers catching on to this made a game out of it, didn't they? They clad him in a purple robe, they put a reed in his right hand, they crowned him with a crown of thorns. They said, if you want to be king, old fellow, you can be king. They'd never heard of anything so screamingly funny as a man who claimed to be king, who was about to be crucified on a gibbet. I tell you straight again, Jesus Christ was not the hero of any Roman. He was nobody's hero. And I find it powerful evidence to think that this great figure that stands before us in the New Testament was not the invention of the writers of the New Testament. They are but recording what he was and what he said, and admitting that at first they did not believe him and were only convinced that he was true when he was raised from the dead. And there is this other interesting thing, isn't there? If Jesus Christ is the invention of the gospel writers, then you would have to conclude that the gospel writers were absolute geniuses, wouldn't you? You will have some experience of literature. You will know how difficult it is for a writer to create a fictional character that wasn't real, but so create him as to make him appear to be a real figure. That is a tremendous accomplishment of literary genius. It has rarely been achieved by normal human authors. And yet in the Gospels we have a figure who has not only lived and struck millions of people as a real living savior, but a figure for whom, to this very day, millions of people would gladly lay down their lives. Well, if this figure is a literary invention upon the part of the writers of the Bible, then I don't know what, but what we ought to bow down and worship the writers of the Bible, for they were such geniuses then as to be absolutely incomparable. And it doesn't even seem to me rational to suppose it. Jesus Christ, no invention. Why do I believe his claim that he is the Son of God? For a number of reasons. The first is, and this may well shock you, I believe it because he says it. Uh, that isn't quite, uh, rational, is it, and logical? Do you just take him at his word? Well, actually, I do. You'll find out why later, of course. But you'll see, I come at it this way. Jesus Christ did in fact claim to be our creator, God in human form. If I'm to decide what I make of his claim, I first must decide what I shall make of him. Let me put it this way. If I were wanting to know about music, I should go to the greatest musicians that I've ever heard of. If I could resurrect Chopin or Tchaikovsky or Brahms, I would go to them. I wouldn't necessarily go to the boy on the street corner who plays his guitar in the underground railway passages or something like that. I'd go to the tip-top experts, of course I would. If I wanted to, uh, to consider morality, I should want to go to the world's leaders in morality. Then who should I go to? Well, I should certainly decide to put it at the very lowest, that if I wanted to talk to the world's absolute leaders in morality, the first one I should go to would be Jesus Christ. His statement of morality, as we find it in the Sermon on the Mount, stands out amongst all the world literature, like the snows of Mount Everest stand above the dry plains of our torrid World. world. It was who taught us to love our enemies. It was who taught us the absolute sacredness of truth. And thus and thus. If I wanted to know about morality, then I should go to him. You say, what's that got to do with it? Why this? On the one hand, I find Jesus the supreme exponent of morality and truth, and it is this Jesus who claimed to be God incarnate. He, if anybody, would have known that if that claim were not true, it was the most horrible blasphemy. The most objectionable deceit ever to be practiced on mankind. And I have to ask myself what I think about the character of Jesus Christ, who on the one hand could preach absolute truth, and on the other hand claim to be the Son of God if he wasn't, then he was the most execrable liar and deceiver and hypocrite that has ever walked the face of the earth. We have to make up our mind, don't we? Is it possible that he whose teaching on morality has contributed so much to what purity there has been in the West, was himself actually a deliberate and filthy hypocrite? I cannot bring myself to it. By all my standards of the judgment of men, as I listen to this Jesus Christ, his very honesty lays hold on me. And if he said he was the Son of God, then for that reason, I begin to believe it. But there is another reason that makes me believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, is who he claims to be. And that is the absolute uniqueness of the salvation he preached. I was in Japan not so long ago, and there came to me a Buddhist woman at the end of a Christian study session, and she said, you know, I like your Jesus Christ very much, but why do you Christians say that Jesus is the only way to God? Well, I said, madam, for me, I, I, there's a short answer to that, she'll say. And I tell you what it is, madam. I personally have a problem. When I study the major religions of the world, I find they all have this in common, that one and all they exalt us to do our best to improve ourselves, to be good, to work at our personal salvation. I said, Madam, you know, actually, I don't really need anybody to tell me to be good, actually. I know I ought to be. My personal problem is that I haven't been good. And that's where I start. I have broken my own standards, let alone the objective standards of, say, the Sermon on the Mount. And my problem is this. How can I find forgiveness in such a way that will maintain my own moral standards, let alone anybody else's moral standards. You see, there are some people, are there not, that will say, oh, forget it, old boy, you've got a neurosis surely about guilt and sin and all those things. You must, uh, you must forget it. You must learn to be adult, you know. Put it under the carpet and, uh, try to heal your guilt complex by forgetting it all. That will hardly do, will it? You see, if I will get drunk and drive my car being drunk, and eventually I run over your child and kill her. I've got to ask myself, haven't I, does it really matter? Or shall I say, well, it's happened now, isn't it? Uh, so let's be adult. I, I killed your daughter. Well, too bad. She was a nice girl, of course, but it's, it's no good going through life regretting things that have passed. Now learn to forgive yourself, old chap. And what will you say, madam, if it's your daughter I killed. To take the view that it didn't really matter after all leads to the absurdity that human beings don't matter. And I shall find it very difficult to accept from you if you try to tell me that my sin doesn't really matter. For what if I, what I do doesn't matter, what I am in the end won't matter either. And if what I do to you doesn't matter, then you don't matter. And I have sinned. I sinned against man, I sinned against God. How can I find forgiveness, I say, of such kind as will allow me to maintain my own standards, let alone God's. And turning to my Japanese friend, I said, and you see, madam, that's why Jesus Christ is not the only way to God, as I say, he's the only one in the running, isn't he? Because I don't find any other major religion offering me forgiveness. There is no forgiveness in Buddhism, is there? Nothing but action and inevitable reaction, your karma and your punishment that you must bear and try to lessen by accumulating merit. And in most forms of Hinduism, there is no forgiveness either. Jesus Christ it is that comes alongside me, I said, madam, is the only one I've ever found to do it, and said, look here, I have come not primarily to tell you to be good, I have come to deal with your basic problem that you have not been good. This is the weight of guilt that hangs on humanity's conscience. Christ came, so he said himself, primarily for this. And when he died, he left his disciples a little ceremony by which to remember that this was the central point of his mission here on earth. He came to give his blood a ransom for many. This was God the lawgiver, the ultimate authority behind morality, coming to deal with the human problem of guilt and himself bearing the penalty of sin that his own law had imposed. To show that God is just, he is not saying that sin does not matter. Sin must be punished, but at the same time saying that God is love, and rather than that the sinner perish, God would provide himself a sacrifice for human sin. That, I find, meets my need, and I think I'm safe in assuring you too, that Jesus Christ is the only one that will ever come alongside you and say, I am your creator incarnate. I made you. I love you. You have sinned against God, and your first and basic problem is this, how to find forgiveness and to be reconciled with God. I am your God incarnate. Come to deal with that problem, that you may be forgiven the guilt of sin and be reconciled to God. How do I know all that is true? Well, finally, because he rose from the dead. And I have not the time here to discuss the great and to me overwhelming evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. I simply must content myself with urging you to read it seriously with an adult mind, if you have not read it ever seriously yet. But perhaps some of you are saying, but you see, that's impossible. How could I possibly believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ? Because such a miracle would go against all the laws of science, and I am a scientific man, and I live in a world of science, and I could not possibly bring myself to go against the laws of science and believe in this Christian idea as a body came out of the grave and was resurrected. To that I would like a brief reply. Where did you have the idea that the resurrection of Christ was against the laws of science? I wasn't myself aware that it was so. The universe, the very scientists themselves tell us, don't they? The universe, thermodynamically, is running down. Sun up in the sky is running down. Entropy increases. The deduction that most people make from that is at one stage, therefore, it must have been run up. Can't have been running down for, for everlasting infinite time, can you? We now know, of course, so the scientists tell us, that the universe is not infinite in time, even if it is infinite in space, it is not infinite in time. And if the universe, thermodynamically speaking, is running down, then there must have been a time when it was, so to speak, wound up. And if it was wound up once, and that didn't contradict the laws of science, how say you that it would condic- contradict the law of science if God wound up a bit of it again? That is what the New Testament is saying, that in the person of Jesus Christ, God intervened into our cosmos and raised the dead body of Jesus from the dead as the first part of God's intended restoration of the whole universe. I cannot myself see the force of the argument that simply supposes that the resurrection of Christ is contrary to scientific law. That said, as I say, I must content myself to urge you, if you have never done it, seriously to investigate the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus Christ. But in all this, there is another route to believe. Jesus Christ said, I am the light of this world. How would you discover whether his claim is true? You could discover that by a very simple experiment, if you are of the type that's willing to do an experiment. Suppose we were standing in pitch darkness outside a closed door in a building that had no windows. And I said to you, I'm telling you, my good sir, that inside that building there is a light. And you said, prove it to me. Well, how should I prove it to you? I should be a stupid fellow, shouldn't I, to stand outside and argue the pro- probability statistics as to whether there would be a light inside or not, when all the while there was open to you a simple experiment to discover where there was a light inside or not, that's simply to open the door and walk in. And suppose, uh, you walked in and you said to me, um, are you saying that that thing up there is a light? And I said, yes, that's what I'm saying. You said, prove it to me. I think I shouldn't try. As you say, the man that, uh, asked that question is missing a little bit somewhere in his common sense, if not in his logic. How would you know it is a light? Because as you came into it, you would begin to see things about your environment, about yourself, that you didn't see before. Jesus Christ said, I am the light of the world. There is a very simple experiment that we can all make to discover whether he is true or not. Come, friend, and spend the next six months walking close to Jesus Christ and see what happens. You say, I can't do that kind of thing. I'm a busy man, and why should I read the New Testament? I see. Well, of course, that is part of the trouble, isn't it? And I must here tell you how the New Testament diagnoses our human trouble. It says it's not lack of brains that we don't find God. It is a much deeper concern. There is none, says Scripture, that seeketh after God. And that, ladies and gentlemen, when you consider it, is an extraordinary phenomenon. We live in a fantastic universe. Many a modern physicist, to go no further, will say nowadays, there must be an intelligence behind our world. How comes it that many a man and woman can live in a world of such fantastic interest and not be concerned rigorously to seek out whether there be a God or not. It is a mark, says the Bible, of a fundamental malaise in the human heart. The people can be so obscurantist, not even to seek, not even to study the evidence as to whether there be a God and whether Jesus Christ is his son. It does little credit to our scientific principles, if that be so. It says a lot about our moral condition. But tonight I put the experiment to. Jesus Christ himself is on record as saying this, if any man is willing to do God's will when he knows it, then God guarantees, says Jesus, to make himself known to that person directly through Jesus Christ. I therefore commit and commend the experiment two. If you would know whether Jesus Christ is the light of the world and is the Son of God, and therefore come to believe that the New Testament is God's word, I commend the experiment too. There is one of the gospels that is written for this very purpose. It is the fourth gospel in the New Testament. It is written that you might come to believe, on the basis of its evidence, that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of the living God. And then, convinced of that, take that next step, which is personally to commit yourself to him and to receive from him the gift of eternal life, which is the gift of the ability to know God personally in your own experience. Try it, friend. Take your fourth gospel. Read it as seriously as you would study your physics. Follow it as studiously as you study your computers. It is life's most important question, isn't it? Open the door and come into the light and see whether it is indeed a light, and that in the light of Jesus Christ and what he said and taught, to what he did and how he died and rose again. See if you do not to find out certain things about yourself that you didn't see before, and find out about God what you didn't know before, not only by theory in your head, but by practical personal encounter with the living Son of God. These are some of my reasons. I claim to have found his claim true, and to know him personally, and to have been introduced to God by him. I commend it to you. I have reasons galore and further reasons, but these are enough for this evening, and I thank you for your patient listening. God give you the courage to make the experiment, and Jesus Christ is guaranteed that whoever comes to him like that shall be shown the truth, and the truth shall make him or her eternally free.