And God said, "Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the sky." So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living and moving thing with which the water teems, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, "Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth" (Genesis 1:20-22).

"Therefore everyone who hears these words of mine and puts them into practice is like a wise man who built his house on the rock. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house; yet it did not fall, because it had its foundation on the rock. But everyone who hears these words of mine and does not put them into practice is like a foolish man who built his house on sand. The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash" (Matthew 7:24-27).

A sufferer's primal need is to hear God talking and to experience him purposefully at work. That changes everything. Left to ourselves, we blindly react. Our troubles obsess us and distract us. We grasp at straws. God seems invisible, silent, far away. Pain and loss cry out loud and long. Faith seems inarticulate. Sorrow and confusion broadcast on all the channels. It's hard to remember anything else, hard to put into words what is actually happening, hard to feel any force from who Jesus Christ is. You might mumble right answers to yourself, but it's like reading the phone book. You pray, but your words sound rote, vaguely unreal, like pious generalities. You'd never talk to a real person that way. Meanwhile, the struggle churning within you is anything but rote and unreal. Pain and threat are completely engrossing. You're caught in a swirl of apprehension, anguish, regret, confusion, bitterness, emptiness, uncertainty (in John Piper and Justin Taylor, eds. Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, p. 149).

What makes it hard for us to hear? There are times we have a hard time slowing down to listen. There are times we simply don't want to listen. There are times we are busy listening to ten thousand other voices, including our own. There are times we feel so weary and disheartened that we don't feel up for listening. But whatever the particulars, our essential problem is deafness to God's voice. We become absorbed in the world of our own experiences, thoughts, feelings and opinions. The early church used a wonderful phrase to capture the essential inward-turning nature of sinfulness: curvitas in se. We curve in on ourselves. Sin's curvitas in se pointedly turns away from God. When you or others suffer, you experience or witness the strength of this incurving tendency. It's hard not to be self-preoccupied (Suffering and the Sovereignty of God, p. 155).

Do not merely listen to the word, and so deceive yourselves. Do what it says. Anyone who listens to the word but does not do what it says is like a man who looks at his face in a mirror and, after looking at himself, goes away and immediately forgets what he looks like. But the man who looks intently into the perfect law that gives freedom, and continues to do this, not forgetting what he has heard, but doing it--he will be blessed in what he does (James 1:22-25).

The "works" that emerge through the testing of our faith are intrinsic to the very nature of faith itself. We believe that God is good, and in the midst of life we have the opportunity to act on that belief. We believe that the crown of life awaits the faithful, and in the midst of life we must decide whether that crown is more valuable than the things of this world. Sanctification is not an extra benefit/obligation tacked onto faith; sanctification is faith becoming itself. This perspective can be difficult to see if we assume (which James does not) that "faith" is simply "believing that Jesus is the Christ." Under that assumption, it might seem logical to argue that there is no connection between belief and sanctification. But to James, believing that Jesus is the Christ means believing that His kingdom will truly come to pass and that citizenship there is valuable beyond anything else. Such a faith confronts the believer with a choice that cannot be avoided: Do you believe that Christ's kingdom is the treasure God says it is? That choice is made in the midst of real life situations.

We will take Scripture into our thinking, submit our minds to it and formulate our beliefs by what it says. We will make decisions by Scripture - about how we will respond to trials, what goals we will pursue, how we will spend time and money, how we will use our tongues. We will dare to live by the word of God (Stulac, James, p. 81).

If anyone considers himself religious and yet does not keep a tight rein on his tongue, he deceives himself and his religion is worthless. Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world (James 1:26-27).

How do you, when you want to decide if someone's testimony or witness is true? You weren't there. There were no videos. There was no recording. And you have to decide whether what he's saying happened actually happened....

So when I'm reading the Bible, whether it's the Gospel of John or Romans, I'm asking the question, "How can I credit what's here, both the testimony of the man and the portrait of Jesus?" And I think there is a light that stands forth from the text of the truthfulness of Jesus that is self-authenticating. And there is a kind of character for the writers that stands forth that is authenticating of their solidity and truthfulness, confirming that they're not lunatics or liars.

If somebody said to me today, "Just tell me in 30 seconds why you're a Christian," I would say, "The portrait that I see of Jesus Christ in the Gospels is self-authenticating to me. I cannot meet this man and have him speak like nobody else spoke and not believe him. He wins my trust."

And then if they say, "Ah, but how do you know that that person is not being created by somebody else?" Then I would say, "Then the person creating him is just as phenomenal, and they win my trust. And if they win my trust then they're not lying to me." The Apostle Paul is not a lunatic. I cannot read the 13 letters of Paul and think he's crazy or a liar.

In common parlance we say a man commands confidence. We do not trust a man simply because we have willed to, or even because we desire to. And we cannot distrust a man simply because we wish or will to do so. We trust a man because we have evidence that to us appears sufficient, evidence of trustworthiness. When to our apprehension a man presents evidence of trustworthiness we cannot but trust him, even though we hate his trustworthiness and would wish the opposite to be the case. His trustworthiness may be the ruin of what we think to be our interests, but we cannot but trust him.... We cannot but believe in his reliability and truthfulness (Collected Writings of John Murray, 2:237).

"A counterfeit god is anything so central and essential to your life that, should you lose it, your life would feel hardly worth living."

"But counterfeit gods always disappoint, and often destructively so."

"Perfectionism, workaholism, chronic indecisiveness, the need to control the lives of others - all of these stem from making good things into idols that then drive us into the ground as we try to appease them. Idols dominate our lives."

"The only way to free ourselves from the destructive influence of counterfeit gods is to turn back to the true one. The living God, who revealed himself both at Mount Sinai and on the Cross, is the only Lord who, if you find him, can truly fulfill you, and, if you fail him, can truly forgive you."

Luke was the author of a two-part work: the Gospel of Luke and the Acts of the Apostles. These are really one work and are separated in our Bibles only because the church grouped the gospels together in the New Testament. Luke is the gospel writer who writes most self-consciously as an historian. In the preface to this work he writes:

"Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed."

This preface is written in classical Greek terminology such as was used by Greek historians; after this Luke switches to a more common Greek. But he has put his reader on alert that he can write, should he wish to, like the learned historian. He speaks of his lengthy investigation of the story he's about to tell and assures us that it is based on eyewitness information and is accordingly the truth.

Now who was this author we call Luke? He was clearly not an eyewitness to Jesus's life. But we discover an important fact about him from the book of Acts. Beginning in the sixteenth chapter of Acts, when Paul reaches Troas in modern-day Turkey, the author suddenly starts using the first-person plural: "we set sail from Troas to Samothrace," "we remained in Philippi some days," "as we were going to the place of prayer," etc. The most obvious explanation is that the author had joined Paul on his evangelistic tour of the Mediterranean cities. In chapter 21 he accompanies Paul back to Palestine and finally to Jerusalem. What this means is that the author of Luke-Acts was in fact in first hand contact with the eyewitnesses of Jesus's life and ministry in Jerusalem.... Who were some of these eyewitnesses? Perhaps we can get some clue by subtracting from the Gospel of Luke everything found in the other gospels and seeing what is peculiar to Luke. What you discover is that many of Luke's peculiar narratives are connected to women who followed Jesus: people like Joanna and Susanna, and significantly, Mary, Jesus's mother.

Was the author reliable in getting the facts straight? The book of Acts enables us to answer that question decisively. The book of Acts overlaps significantly with secular history of the ancient world, and the historical accuracy of Acts is indisputable. This has recently been demonstrated anew by Colin Hemer, a classical scholar who turned to New Testament studies, in his book The Book of Acts in the Setting of Hellenistic History. Hemer goes through the book of Acts with a fine-toothed comb, pulling out a wealth of historical knowledge, ranging from what would have been common knowledge down to details which only a local person would know. Again and again Luke's accuracy is demonstrated: from the sailings of the Alexandrian corn fleet to the coastal terrain of the Mediterranean islands to the peculiar titles of local officials, Luke gets it right. According to Professor Sherwin-White, "For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming. Any attempt to reject its basic historicity even in matters of detail must now appear absurd." The judgement of Sir William Ramsay, the world-famous archaeologist, still stands: "Luke is a historian of the first rank.... This author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians." Given Luke's care and demonstrated reliability as well as his contact with eyewitnesses within the first generation after the events, this author is trustworthy.

Creatures are not born with desires unless satisfaction for those desires exists. A baby feels hunger: well, there is such a thing as food. A duckling wants to swim: well, there is such a thing as water. Men feel sexual desire: well, there is such a thing as sex. If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If none of my earthly pleasures satisfy it that does not prove that the universe is a fraud. Probably earthly pleasures were never meant to satisfy it, but only to arouse it, to suggest the real thing (Mere Christianity).

"If you don't live for Jesus you will live for something else. If you live for career and you don't do well it may punish you all of your life, and you will feel like a failure. If you live for your children and they don't turn out all right you could be absolutely in torment because you feel worthless as a person.

If Jesus is your center and Lord and you fail him, he will forgive you. Your career can't die for your sins. You might say, 'If I were a Christian I'd be going around pursued by guilt all the time!' But we all are being pursued by guilt because we must have an identity and there must be some standard to live up to by which we get that identity. Whatever you base your life on - you have to live up to that. Jesus is the one Lord you can live for who died for you - who breathed his last breath for you. Does that sound oppressive?

You may say, 'I see that Christianity might be just the thing for people who have had collapses in their lives. But what if I don't fail in my career and what if I have a great family?' As Augustine said, if there is a God who created you, then the deepest chambers of your soul simply cannot be filled up by anything less. That is how great the human soul is. If Jesus is the Creator-Lord, then by definition nothing could satisfy you like he can, even if you are successful. Even the most successful careers and families cannot give us the significance, security, and affirmation that the author of glory and love can.

Everybody has to live for something. Whatever that something is becomes 'Lord of your life,' whether you think of it that way or not. Jesus is the only Lord who, if you receive him, will fulfill you completely, and if you fail him, will forgive you eternally" (The Reason for God, pp. 172-173).

I am more and more persuaded that when we characterize the Bible as a book about spirituality, we do it and ourselves a disservice. The Bible is not a higher-plane tome about some mystical life of spiritual devotion. It does not teach blissful separation from the brokenness of everyday life. No, the Bible is a book about this world. It is a gritty, honest book. When we read Scripture, we face the world as it actually is, in big-screen, high-def detail. God doesn't pull any punches. He doesn't paint over any cracks. He doesn't flatter or avoid. There is no denial of what is real and true.

The sights and sounds of the Bible are familiar. They are the sights and sounds of the very same broken world you and I wake up to every day. Dirt and smoke are on every page. You can't read very far without your nostrils and eyes being assaulted by the acrid air of a world gone bad. Let's be straight here, the world of the Bible stinks in many ways.

"Sin isnʼt only doing bad things, it is more fundamentally making good things into ultimate things. Sin is building your life and meaning on anything, even a very good thing, more than on God. Whatever we build our life on will drive us and enslave us. Sin is primarily idolatry" (Tim Keller, "Talking About Idolatry in a Postmodern Age").

Do materialists really think that language just "evolved", like finches' beaks, or have they simply never thought about the matter rationally? Where's the evidence? How could it come about that human beings all agreed that particular grunts carried particular connotations? How could it have come about that groups of anthropoid apes developed the amazing morphological complexity of a single sentence, let alone the whole grammatical mystery which has engaged Chomsky and others in our lifetime and linguists for time out of mind? No, the existence of language is one of the many phenomena - of which love and music are the two strongest - which suggest that human beings are very much more than collections of meat. They convince me that we are spiritual beings, and that the religion of the incarnation, asserting that God made humanity in His image, and continually restores humanity in His image, is simply true. As a working blueprint for life, as a template against which to measure experience, it fits.

The fact that there are no other persons who have been raised from the dead may well make it more difficult to accept that Jesus was raised - but it also underscores Jesus' uniqueness. He, and he alone, was singled out in this way. He was not merely special - he was unique. What is it that distinguishes Jesus from Socrates, Mohammed or Gandhi? None but Jesus was raised from the dead by God - and it is this which leads us to take Jesus' teaching with the seriousness it deserves. After all, if you suspect that you are dealing with the Son of God, you will take his teaching more seriously than you might otherwise! For the New Testament, Jesus' resurrection clinches his identity - it proves that he was the Son of God (Explaining Your Faith, pp. 84-85).

Modern critics of the resurrection argue, it was easy for the first Christians to believe in the resurrection of Jesus. After all, belief in resurrections was a commonplace at the time. The first Christians may have jumped to the conclusion that Jesus was raised from the dead, when something rather different actually happened. Although the crude charges of yesteryear (for example, that the disciples stole the corpse of Jesus from its tomb, or that they were the victims of mass hysteria) are still occasionally encountered, they have generally been superceded by more subtle theories. Thus, to note the most important, the resurrection was really a symbolic event, which the first Christians confused with an historical event on account of their uncritical presuppositions.

In response to this, however, it may be pointed out that neither of the two general beliefs of the time bear any resemblance to the resurrection of Jesus. The Sadducees denied the idea of a resur­rection altogether (a fact which Paul was able to exploit at an awkward moment: Acts 23:6-8) while the majority expectation was of a general resurrection on the last day, at the end of history itself. The sheer oddness of the Christian proclamation of the resurrec­tion of Jesus in human history, at a definite time and place, is all too easily overlooked by modern critics, even though it was obvious at the time. The unthinkable appeared to have happened, and for that very reason demanded careful attention. Far from merely fitting into the popular expectation of the pattern of resurrection, what happened to Jesus actually contradicted it. The sheer novelty of the Christian position at the time has been obscured by two thousand years' experience of the Christian understanding of the resurrection - yet at the time it was wild: unorthodox and radical.