Gooding, David: 2 - Do All Religions Lead to God?

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, sir, for those kindly words of introduction, and welcome to all of you to tonight's discussion. The topic you have proposed that I discuss with you this evening is, do all religions lead to God? And I shall do my best to stick to your question and to answer it, eh, as clearly as I possibly can and as fairly as I possibly can. Let me simply draw your attention to the way you have worded the question. It is, do all religions lead to God? And that is the question I shall seek to answer. There is a slightly different question that I shall not be answering. That is, many people feel that the true purpose of religion has very little to do with the topic whether there's a God or not. They say it would be better for religion to forget all what they call this transcendental nonsense and concentrate on the true purpose of religion, which is to help people lead good and moral lives, do you see? And there they contend that if you do that, all religions are concerned with the same thing. That is a somewhat different question from the one you have asked me to answer this evening. If you want that one answered, well, with courage in both hands, I suggest you'll have to invite me to come again and specify exactly what it is you wish me to answer. But our topic tonight, as far as you have given me, is do all religions lead to God? I shall try to answer it at two levels. One, the level of theory, and secondly, the level of experience. Now, you will have known, of course, when you asked me to come and discuss this matter, that I am a convinced Christian. And so I'm going to, by your permission, to read a passage from the New Testament. Uh, it is part of the Christian gospel, and you will be able to see as I read it what my presuppositions, and if you care to call them such, my prejudices are, do you see? I would not wish to fly under false colors. I am a Christian. I shall attempt to critique other systems fairly and true to what they believe, but I am a Christian. And as to the question, uh, of leading us to God, I would simply read this passage. If you have a New Testament at hand, the reference is the epistle to Romans chapter five, and beginning at verse eight. But if you haven't a New Testament at hand, never mind, just sit back, if you please, and listen. For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. For one will scarcely die for a righteous person, though perhaps for a good person one would even dare to die. But God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Since therefore we have now been justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God by the death of his son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. More than that, we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation. So our topic then is, do all religions lead to God? Some people seem to think, and it's a very attractive theory, that all religions lead to the same goal, whatever their particular doctrines are. So that the best way to think about religion is to neglect the particular doctrines that mark the distinctions of any one religion and go for the goal it is aiming at, and that is to bring us eventually to God. To use the old Chinese proverb, there are many ways up a mountain. You can start from very different points, you can follow different ways up the mountain, but if you persevere on the particular way that you have chosen, and everybody goes his own way and her own way up the mountain, you will eventually all reach the top. It doesn't matter, therefore, what the particular doctrines of any one religion are, so long as people faithfully follow those doctrines, they will all, whatever religion they follow, they will all arrive at the top that is God. But to talk like that seems to me, uh, to be somewhat shallow, if I might so say, and neglects what the major religions in fact hold, and what they hold to be the goal of religion. So let's start off with a very ancient form of religion, namely animism. That is the form of religion in which people feel that there's a spirit or a god, however you call it, in trees, in stones, in mountains, in rivers, and so forth and so on. Now, you might be inclined to think that that's a very primitive religion, but of course, one of the most sophisticated nations on Earth, namely the nation of Japan, still tenaciously holds the doctrine of animism. And if we respect their culture, and we do respect their engineering and their science, of course, and technology, we shall try to understand their religion. So when I was in Tokyo at one stage, friends of mine took me to an animist shrine. It was most beautifully kept. It was a shrine dedicated to the spirit of a famous emperor of Japan. So I went along and observed the beauty of the place and its architecture and the gardens around it. And I arrived, a young man was conducting a service for businessmen, and when it was finished, I asked my friends who had taken me if the dear priest would allow me to come and question him a little, and they thought he would, so I was allowed to speak to the priest, and a very gracious young man he was, uh, a young man that you could have forthwith and immediately respect. I said to him, you know I'm an Englishman, and I've never seen anything like this before. Might I ask you some questions? He said, certainly, sir. And he was joined forthwith by another young priest. I said, tell me, is your shrine a place where I could come and get forgiveness of sins? He said, what kind of sins are you thinking of? I said, well, suppose I had engaged in a lot of fraudulent cheating in business or something, or told a lie or committed immorality. Could I come to your shrine, and could you show me how I could forget, how I could get forgiveness? No, he said, we don't, we don't deal with that kind of thing, uh, you'll see. We deal with spiritual sins. For that kind of thing, you'd have to go to the authorities, to the government. I said, I see. I said, what are spiritual sins then? Well, he said, you know, if you came in contact with a dead body, you would be defiled, wouldn't you? Or a woman after childbirth would be defiled. And before you could come and stand before the great spirit in this shrine, you would need to be cleansed. I said, is that so? And one thing borrowed another. I said, uh, tell me, why are you two fellows doing all this? What is the point of it? He said, we hope to make ourselves good men, better men. I said, what do you think's going to happen to you after you die? They said, we don't know. Our priests tell us, well, it's perhaps like a tree that's cut down and then grows again. Perhaps there's a paradise a long way off, but nobody knows. In that moment, I must say I felt a great compassion for those young men. Delightful young men they were, sincere as sincere could be. But as for their religion leading them to God, well, according to their own confession, not so. I went to another animus shrine in another part of the country in Japan. It was a magnificent shrine where the emperor himself goes. And a priest came to show me and explain to me the various things. I said, tell me, do you as a priest get called out when people are dying to bring them a message of hope? No, he said, no. No. Uh, I come after they're dead, after they're dead, he says, and I con- I I conduct the funeral. I happen to know the funeral would cost a lot of money. But as for having any hope for men and women on the border of eternity, he self-confessedly had none. Finding myself once, some years ago, in Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, walking down a main street when I came across what then would was called a death shop. This was a club to which people belonged, and the idea of it was this, that if your loved one was now fatally ill and is going to die, you wouldn't necessarily want your loved one to die at home because the spirit would defile the place. And so rather being thrown out on the street, they belonged to this club where they could go and die. So I asked permission if I might go in, and yes, I was welcomed in, and I saw what went on. It's vivid in front of my mind just now. As I went down into the basement, there were three bodies. One all wrapped up in newspaper, another in a coffin. And on the floor sat two women, and they had a tin can, like an old petrol can, and in it was a flame. And they had money, not real money. When I got a look at it, it said it was hell money. And they were burning this money at the foot of the corpse. What for? Because they believe that after death, the person goes down into the shadowy underworld, and there they will need support, they will need to buy things for themselves, and so on, and they were putting them on burning the money as one means that they believe would transport it somehow, that money, down to their loved one in the world beyond. I was told that some people, the more wealthy, would pay hundreds of pounds for beautiful models to be made of aeroplanes and cars and luxury yachts, and they would burn them likewise, to put them down below, so to speak, for the benefit of their loved ones. I remember at that time, when I got back to Belfast, I had a number of Chinese students, and the father of some of them came across at their graduation, a proud father that he was, and took us all to lunch, you see, and a sumptuous lu- lunch it was too. So for something to say, I told him I'd been to KL recently, and this is what I had seen, you see. And was it true that people did this, and would he as a businessman do that? He said, well, I can't explain it, he said, but yes, I would, just to make sure, said he. Do all religions lead to God? Well, that didn't, on their own confession. A Jew will protest to me, doubtless, and say, but you're not being fair, Mr. Preacher. You'll see you're citing these super- the superstitious end of that religion, and that's not fair. You could easily cite the superstition end of, uh, Christendom, where all kinds of superstitious practices are performed by people to help them somehow into the other world, and your point is a real point. Yes, that's perfectly true. So let's go to the other end and talk now about the theory and the doctrine. And let's start, shall we, with Buddhism. Is it true that all religions lead to God and that Buddhism leads to God? Well, it would depend, wouldn't it, on what kind of Buddhism you are talking about. If you are talking about original Buddhism, that the Budd- Buddha taught after his enlightenment, then by definition, of course, it doesn't lead to God, for the Buddha expressly says so. Original Buddhism is not to do with God whatsoever, and he warned people against treating him as a god. What he thought he had discovered was merely a psychological way of manipulating one's human desires. He concluded, as he sat under his tree, that the trouble with us humans is our desires that push us here and prompt us there and make slaves of us, and our desires not being satisfied bring us much dissatisfaction. He thought he saw the cure. Get rid of your desires. And how do you do it? Well, he suggested certain psychological, uh, uh, uh, uh, techniques for getting rid of one's desires and therefore leading a life of peace and serenity, but nothing to do with God. Do all religions lead to God? Well, not original Buddhism. But of course, there are many, many forms of Buddhism, are there not, in the popular mind? Do you see? And Buddhism, uh, acknowledges so many different gods that it would be difficult in one short moment to pass a true, uh, comment on them, would it not? But if you take the more elevated forms of Buddhist theory and you ask them, what is God like? Or what is the supreme being like? Buddhists will tend to answer like Hindus do, because after all, Buddhism is an offshoot of Hinduism. So together with Hinduism, Buddhism will answer the, uh, great source of everything there is. They call him in s- in uh, in Hinduism, Brahm, or in English, the One. And they worked out what the One is like, by their sheer dint of philosophical thought, like the Greeks and Aristotle did. What is the One like? The One that is the source of everything. And they have decided, of course, that he is absolute perfection. He is so perfect that, as they would explain it, he has no duality. There's no two-ness in him. You say, what on earth does that mean? Well, let me explain. Uh, you're a human being, yes? And if I said, have you got a personality? Yes, you you'd say, yes, I'm a human person. I agree with that. And you're conscious, yes? Yes, you say, of course I'm conscious. How can you be a human being? How can you be a personality without being conscious? But Hinduism and Buddhism replies that the one from whom the whole universe has sprung cannot be a person. He's not even conscious. Why not? Because if you are conscious, there are two things. There's you who are conscious, and then there's something that you are conscious of. And that makes two things. And according to their philosophy, that is utterly impossible. He is so perfect. Therefore, he is not a person. He is not conscious. We have come from him somehow or other, or should we say from it, because he's not a person. Simply, they explain as sunbeams from the sun. The sun is so mighty and powerful that every day it gives out sunbeams, you'll see. But the sun doesn't know it's giving out sunbeams, does it? And the one from whom the whole universe has come, from which we have come, from which you have come. Is not conscious of you. Is not aware you exist. And cares nothing for you whatsoever. That is Hinduism. That is Buddhism. You will see, perhaps in the tone of my voice, my Christianity making its protest. What a God. If that's what Buddhism leads us to. It's not just Buddhism, is it? The ancient Greek philosophers argued what God must be like, and the great and famous Aristotle, the pioneer of the study of biology in Europe, he will tell you in his work that the supreme God is so perfect. He is absolute, uh, un- one unit, one thing, there's no duality in him, and therefore he is not concerned about you. It's like a wom- a a a woman so beautiful that lots of men are attracted to her. But she doesn't care anything. She doesn't care tuppence for any of them. That's the wisdom of the Greeks, or some of the Greeks, Aristotle, for instance, as distinct from Plato. What a God. You'll say to me, of course, you're prejudiced. Yes, I am indeed, you see, because I'm a Christian, you see. And I believe that the God from which we come so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish. Infinitely great, yet the Son of God said of the Father, even the hairs of your head are numbered. A personal God. And a God who knows us. And a God who personally loves us. But I must not let my Christianity intrude, uh, too soon at any rate. Do all religions lead to God? Well, you'd have to ask then what kind of a God they lead to, if you're asking about Hindu philosophy, Shankara's philosophy, for instance, or the Hindu religion, or Buddhism. Yes, but if this God isn't interested in us, is he concerned whether we lead a moral life or not then? That is a difficult question both for Buddhism and for Hinduism, because they hold that everything comes from this source, and not only comes from it, but everything is God. The sunbeams coming from the sun are part of the sun, aren't they? And in the same way, these people hold that everything in the universe is part of God, or put it another way, they are God. God is everything. The technical term is pantheism. As you say, half a moment. We can think that good is God, but what about evil? Yes, but evil is God as well, they will say. The wise man is God. The ignorant man is God. Really? It's a really big moral problem, that is, isn't it? You see, Buddhism and Hinduism in particular holds that inside everybody, inside you, for instance, is your soul, your Atman, as they call it, and your soul is God. And the biggest old criminal walking on the streets of Belfast, his soul is God, and all comes from God, and ultimately all is God. That is pantheism. Do all religions lead to God? Well, we should need to ask what kind of God, shouldn't we? But as I say, do they exhort us to live good lives? Well, yes, they have a doctrine that says we shouldn't do bad things in this life. Because if we do bad things, then we load ourselves with the consequences. The old law that what you sow you reap. So if you do bad things, what you get is a load of what they call karma, do you see? And the only way you get rid of that is to suffer. There is no forgiveness. You've done bad? Anything bad? Ever? Well, now you'll reap what you sow. And if when you die, you haven't suffered enough to get rid of this karma that you have deserved, instead of being merged with the great one, their God, you'll have to come back again in life to be reincarnated so that you can suffer and get rid of your karma. And if, of course, when you come back, you should do some other sins, well, that will but add to your karma. And if need be, you'll have to come back thousands of times to get rid of your karma. Can I be certain when I die then that, um, all my bad deeds have been suffered for and they're gone, so I shan't have to come back? No, you can't. And then the doctrine has some horrendous implications. Here's a little baby, and it's born deformed in some fashion, or with a disease. Why? And they will say because in the previous incarnation that was a child or a grown-up person that sinned and did wrong. It has now to be born into this world so that it can suffer for the sins it did in the previous incarnation. You say this little baby here sinned in the previous incarnation. What sins? They can't tell you. And how many reincarnations has it's been through? They can't tell you. And how many incarnations will it have to go through before it's quit? They can't tell you that either. Said a more, uh, a later representative of this sort of thought, Plotinus the Greek, if a woman gets raped, she deserves to be raped. Why? Because in a previous carna- incarnation, she was a man who raped a woman. Now that man is reborn, reincarnated as a woman and deserves to be raped. And if you find people suffering, it's because of their karma, you see. It's pointless you're trying to help them. The only way they can get rid of their karma is themselves to suffer. Hence the vast poverty and the hardness of heart in some countries that hold this doctrine. I want to say as a Christian, it strikes me as exceedingly cruel. Though it appeals to some. I met a senior policeman in this province once at a study group, and he affirmed to me afterwards he thought Hinduism was far superior to Christianity. I said, why was that? Well, people have to suffer for their own sins, he says, and there's a chance if you don't suffer enough in this life, you get another chance to come back again. And to some people it seems attractive, because the Christian gospel says, doesn't it? It's appointed to us once to die, and after death, the judgment, and that decides our eternity. What about our sins? Oh, we'll come to that in a moment. That lies at the heart of the Christian gospel and the love of God in giving his son to suffer the penalty of our sin, that we might be forgiven and reconciled to God. But there's no forgiveness in some forms of Buddhism. I remember years ago, I was asked by some of my colleagues in the chemistry department at Queen's, would I be prepared to have a a Buddhist from Thailand come to visit me and ask me questions? I said, certainly, be delighted. So she came. She was a postdoctoral researcher in chemistry, a very able woman, of course. As she came and sat down, she said, look here, I'm a Buddhist. I want to ask you, if I may, about what Christians believe. I am not going to get converted, says she. I'm not asking you to convert me. I shan't get converted. I simply want to know what, uh, Christians believe, do you see? So I did my best to tell her what Christians believe and how through Christ and his death upon Calvary, we can have complete forgiveness given us by God. God doesn't say our sins didn't matter. He required the penalty, and the penalty has been paid, and therefore God is perfectly just in granting us forgiveness. And I added, you see, not only are we given forgiveness through faith in Christ, but here and now in this life, we may be utterly sure that we have forgiveness and be sure that we shall not come into condemnation, but have passed from death to life, do you see? And thinking to illustrate the point, do you see, I said to her, for instance, if you had a a little daughter, yes, and the daughter had done something wrong, really, and uh you had to uh rebuke the child and show your disapproval, and the child came and said, I'm sorry, mommy, do you see? You would forgive her, wouldn't you? And you would make it clear to the child, leave the child no no doubt that you, the child had been forgiven, you see. You wouldn't say, well, you've done wrong. I'll see one of these days whether I can forgive you, but I'm not telling you now you're forgiven. You must wait and see. You wouldn't say that, would you? You'll forgive the child and assure the child that you had forgiven her. No, I wouldn't, she said. I said, pardon? No, I wouldn't. Who am I to forgive anybody? I can't forgive anybody. Parents can't forgive their children. No one can forgive you. There isn't anyone there to forgive. Because the Supreme One couldn't care less about you. Doesn't even know you exist. There's no forgiveness. She just has to bear her karma, that's all, said the Thai Buddhist to me. Do all religions lead to God? Well, we must ask that that case, you'll say, what kind of a God do they lead to? But let's leave that kind of religion and come to the three great monotheistic faiths, the religions that believe in one God as distinct from multitudes of gods. Namely, of course, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Do they all lead to God? They all believe in the one God. In what sense do they all lead to God? Well, let's take Judaism first. Christianity, of course, believes with all its heart, Orthodox Christians at any rate do, the Jewish Old Testament. They believe it's inspired of God. They believe, moreover, that God did choose Abraham, father of the Jewish race, and raised him up as a protest against the idolatrous explanations of the universe that were to be found in pagan society. They believe in the prophets of Judaism, and as I shall explain in a moment, especially one prophet. And they believed that the Old Testament pointed forward to the coming of the Savior, the Messiah, who would deal with our basic human problem, which is the problem of our sin and guilt as responsible men and women before God, our Creator, and that God would send his son. For all we like sheep had gone astray, turned everyone to our own way, and the Lord laid on him, that is on the Messiah, the iniquity of us all. His soul was made an offering for sin, and so forth. But of course, modern Jews, and Jews in general for many centuries, will not accept that Jesus is the Messiah, or that he's the Son of God, or that he rose from the dead, and they refuse to believe that his death is a sacrifice for sin. And if there is no sacrifice for sin, how can a religion bring us to God? Years and years ago, I was delivering some lectures in University of Cambridge on behalf of a Christian union there, and they had asked me to expound one and two Kings in the Old Testament, you see. I did my best. And after one of the sessions, a student came to me and asked if he might speak. I said, yes, certainly. He says, you know, it moves me very deeply to hear you expounding my Old Testament. I said, yes, well, I'm pleased to hear that. Uh, you are a Jew? Yes, he said. I said, but don't your rabbis expound this, this, the Old Testament to you? Well, not very often, he says. I said, what a pity. Why don't they get up on their hind legs, I said, these rabbis of yours, and begin to preach to us Gentiles? I mean, great chunks of Isaiah, for instance. Surely they could preach that to us, where God denounces idolatry. I said, our modern world is full of idolatry of every kind. Why don't your rabbis get up and expound Isaiah to us? Well, he didn't know why they didn't. Well, anyway, he came to dinner once or twice. And I found opportunity to say, you know, I am impressed by your Old Testament. To say, I'm impressed by your law, the law of God through Moses, and its standards, still relevant. I said, and the next thing that impresses me is that under your old system, God not only gave the law, but when people broke that law, God did not say it doesn't matter. You see, if I get drunk and drive my car and knock your daughter down and kill her, will you turn around eventually and say it doesn't matter? You won't, will you? You will say I jolly well ought to be punished, and so will the law of the land, and so will God. And if I don't repent of what I've done to your daughter, God will have it against me for all eternity, for the simple reason that he loves your daughter and cannot begin to say that sin against your daughter doesn't matter. I said, therefore, I have great respect for your Old Testament, not only its law, but that series of sacrifices that you were told to offer in the Old Testament. When you broke God's law, you had to offer sacrifices, didn't you, to get forgiveness? He said, yes, we did. I said, tell me a thing. Do you think those sacrifices of those animals did anything really to put away sin? He said, no, I don't. I don't think that at all. How could it? How could the blood of an old cow atone for human sin? Cows don't know anything about sin. Not normal cows, anyway. And I, I, I, I, I said, you see, they were symbols then, those sacrifices. Yes, he said, they were symbols. I said, symbols of what? No, he says, no, no, no, no, don't, don't press that, he said, you'll spoil our friendship. Because he sends immediately what I was going to say, that those Old Testament sacrifices were kind of symbols in advance, picture language that would point to the coming of the one whom the New Testament calls the Lamb of God, who died for the sins of the world. You'll see. Yes. I said, but I don't want to spoil our friendship. I said, it's the historic fact, isn't it, that when Christ offered himself to the nation, to the Jewish nation, as the one come to die for their sins, and Israel rejected it and rejected him, God gave them forty years to repent and change their mind. And when they wouldn't, God allowed the Romans to raze their temple to the ground, with the result that the Jews still has his law, but he's not allowed to offer any sacrifices, for the only place he could offer sacrifices was at the temple at Jerusalem, and now that's gone. Judaism has no answer to the necessary atonement for sin. And what about Islam? You say all the th- is one of the three monotheistic faiths. Yes, that's right. It worships one God. Yes, that's true. Yes. Does it lead to God in the same way that Christian gospel leads to God? Well, one thing Islam will not have, it believes a lot of things. It believes that Jesus is the Messiah, Isa, they call him. They believe that he was born of a virgin. They believe that John the Baptist was a prophet who told us to behold the Lamb of God, you'll see. They believe that Jesus is now in heaven, whereas Muhammad is in his grave, of course. They believe that Jesus is coming. Do Muslims? But they hold that when he comes again, he will tell the world that Muhammad is the true prophet, you see. I see. What they will not have is that Jesus died on the cross. A Muslim will get very upset if you insist that Jesus died at Calvary on the cross. They will say, no, he didn't. At the last minute, God substituted somebody else, but they can't tell you who else it was, do you see? And because they will not have that the Savior died for them, they have no other Savior. Whereas Christians will sing to themselves, what can wash away my sin? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. What can make me whole again? Nothing but the blood of Jesus. God's answer to the predicament of human sin. A Muslim has no answer. In that sense, he has no savior. I was in Jordan a few years ago and was asked to dinner by a gracious bunch of Jordanians. One was an architect and others were medical professors of various kinds, you'll see, and very friendly and gracious they were. And after dinner, when conversation came round, as conversation will, do you see, they said to me, you know, all this strife between Christians and Muslims, it's all stupid, they said, all unnecessary, because we all believe the same thing, do we not? You see? So why can't we acknowledge we all believe the same thing and have done with all this terrorism and bombings and strivings and so forth and so on? I said, I understand what you're saying. Yes, we all believe the same thing, they said, except this. I said, what's that? Well, you Christians have changed the Bible, you see. I said, he said so. I, I wasn't aware we had. Yes, you've changed the Bible to make it say that Jesus died on the cross, you see, when he didn't die. I said, that's extraordinary. We've changed the Bible. I had in my pocket a little, um, uh, pocket Bible, you see. I said to these dear men, I said, do you mind if I read you something? No, carry on, they said. So I said, well, I'm going to read you. What I read you here was written some seven or more centuries before Jesus Christ was born, and we Christians didn't write it either. It was the Jews that wrote it, and we certainly haven't changed it. May I read it to you? So I said, yes, carry on. So I read those famous words. He was wounded for our transgressions, bruised for our iniquities, the chastisement of our peace was upon him, and by his stripes we're healed. All we like sheep have gone astray. We've turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all. He was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth. Please the Lord in God's good determinate will to bruise him. He has put him to grief. When thou shalt make his soul an offering for sin, he shall prolong his days, and the pleasure of the Lord shall prosper in his hand. By his knowledge shall my righteous servant justify many. That's it, you're going to say that's Jesus, aren't you? I said, well, yes, yes, I will eventually say it was is Jesus, yes, of course. But uh, uh, just for the moment, I'm not saying it. All I'm asking you to to realize is that that was written seven hundred years before Jesus Christ was born. And I believe that when Christ came, he fulfilled it. We haven't changed it. We didn't write it as Christians. We certainly haven't changed it, but we believe it happened, and that Jesus Christ is that one of whom Isaiah fifty three prophesied, and he has become our savior. Do all religions lead to God? Depends what you mean by leading to God. But if you mean bringing a man or woman into reconciliation with God, into the wonder of forgiveness, the joy of acceptance, the peace of mind, peace with God, justification, and the absolute sure hope of heaven, and the present gift even of eternal life. If you're asking about those things, then in my experience of many different religions, I now do publicly claim that Jesus Christ is the only one in the running. Excuse my putting it that way, but ma'am and you sir. There is no one else I know of, in the whole of history, in all the various religions. There is none other like Jesus Christ, who will come alongside of you and say to you, I am your creator, incarnate. And you have sinned and broken God's law. You deserve its penalty. But I love you with a creator's love, and rather than that you perish under the penalty of sin, I gave myself for you. I died your death. I bore your punishment. And now, if you will accept me, risen from the dead, as your Lord and Savior, I have authority to give you forgiveness and peace with God. The present enjoyment of eternal life. And the sure hope of heaven. That is my case. Do all religions lead to God? The only one I know who can bring you into reconciliation with God like that is the only one in the whole of history who died for you personally, the just for the unjust, that he might bring you to God. Forgive me for any inexactitudes in describing other religions. I've done my best in the short time to be exact. But do pray consider. For we all face the question, how amidst the thousand and one voices can we recognize the truth? The true God is the one who would give himself for you, that you might be saved. Shall we pray? Our Father, from all the claims of this world, both ancient and modern, we now come to thee. We have thought about these sundry claims of different religions, but we pray now that thou wilt take thy word about thy dear Son, whom thou hast given as the Lamb of God to take away the sin of the world, and speak it to all our hearts, in such way that our faith shall rest, not in the cleverness of argument, but rest in discovering the living God through Jesus Christ our Lord. Hear us, we pray, for his name's sake. Amen.