The name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit. Amen. Within the last forty eight hours, I had an interview with a very serious minded gentleman who is trying to find his way to God. Well, the first point to remember is he doesn't have to find his way to God. God's with him.
It's just that we have to open our eyes and our minds and our heart to what is right here. It isn't a journey at all in a sense. In another sense, of course, it is, but not in any real sense. The thing first of all, religion, you know, gets lost in being religious. I mean, going through the motions that we call religion.
And I think from time to time we have to sit down quietly. You know, it's very difficult to find a quiet place. You can't even get on an elevator without having some piped in music. You can't be in a dentist chair or on the operating table, literally, without having some canned music in that beating on you. It's awfully hard to find sympology.
Silence, I you. We like to talk. Something to do or they like they like people to listen anyway. Someone said they keep talking to the extent of something to say. The first thing is there a there you see, to me, it's it's very very simple.
There is a god or there is not. And the way to say is not is ancient. Very simple. We are supposed to be sending the time. There is a god or there is not.
Yes or no? God became man, god became incarnate, or he didn't? Yes or no? That mean, no. It isn't.
Well, maybe or I well, maybe yes and maybe no. And, well, of course, there are good arguments here and good arguments there. And after all, you know, things aren't black and white. They're just gray. That's all of my dear and late friend CS Lewis would say, moon time.
But let me tell you, Martin Luther would have used a different expression having to do with the barnyard. He was very free with those expressions. So there is is a God or there isn't. He became man, God incarnate or he didn't. God incarnate founded a visible church, or he didn't.
That visible church exists, or it doesn't. And then the final question, where is it? It's very simple. And those questions demand yeses or noes. They it either is or it is not.
They're contradictory terms, and one has to be true and one has to be false. They both can't be true together and they can't be false Of course, you know right away people with a little bit of Oh, they'll say, That's old that old that's that old Aristotelian logic. Get rid of that junk. That's what we that leads you to be consistent. And you know consistency is a quality of the inferior mind.
You know, this is I'm this is the way it is today. People make a great deal of problems out of things which are not that that bad. And let me tell you one final point. At least in my lifetime, there has been a great deal of effort beginning with the detergent movement in about '9, well, you know, about after this began after the first world war. And I I I was part of it, and I'm all for it.
But remember that Christ came to save human beings, not a bunch of theologians or philosophers, not the literary or the literate. He came to save all human beings, the smart ones and the dumb ones, the learned and the unlearned, the educated and the uneducated. And if his church is going to save human beings notice I'm not using the word soul because we're talking about human beings. We're not talking about souls. We're not talking about pure spirits.
That church has to be within the grasp of all human beings. And I never will forget a line that I found in about Descartes, Rene Descartes, fourteen ninety six 1594 to 1650. Descartes is supposed whether we like it or not, Descartes is taken as the beginning of what we call modern thought, modern philosophy. He is the beginning. Of course, you notice that century, the seventeenth century, the century of and the of the and the fifteenth of revolution and reformation.
Now, when he died, it was it was tried to for years, I mean right down to to my lifetime, it it has been tried to make him out to be a Protestant. That is in the sense in which he rejected the church. And let me tell you that just is not so. Nobody of any scholarship admits that today. He is reputed on good authority on his dying bed to say, I am dying with the faith of a washerwoman.
The faith of a washerwoman. Not the learning, knowledge, not the information, and he was he was pretty much advanced in science and math, as you some of you know. I die with the faith of the washer woman. It's the faith of the washer woman who's who's which is behind most of our martyrs, not the learning of books or the lore of philosophers or of theologians, let me hasten to add. You're never going to explain a Joan of Arc in terms of a philosophy and theology or theologians, or a courier of ours even.
But that's he's been the object of a lot of exaggeration. So we have to think about these things. There is a God or there isn't. And that inexpressible, unmentionable, undescribable, unthinkable, you can't think of God, became a baby in the womb of a woman and was born a man who died on the cross. That's either true or it's false.
And if it's false, it's worse than moonshine because it has misled millions of people in two thousand years. And if that is the way God treats human beings, it's a heinous joke. And so let us think about this. Wherever you are, you're in the presence of God. You don't have to run after God, but you have to search him out in the sense of trying to bring home to yourself the conviction that there is a God, he became man, he founded a visible church, and that that church is discoverable today.
Now that's where some effort comes in. You can't sit back and say, well, he established a church of faith. Nonsense. That's been disproved pragmatically pragmatically. We don't have to theorize about that at all.
And so we come back to the core of this matter. There is a visible, tangible, audible church of Jesus Christ existing today going right back to him, going right back to his heavenly father, or there is not. And if there isn't, fiddlestick. Don't waste your time and your money and your effort. But if there is, then it's all that matters.
If we choose Christ, we choose everything. And that's what he expects us to do. Nothing less. In the name of the father, of the son, holy spirit. Amen.