STRONG EVIDENCE FOR BELIEVING IN GOD!

Ron Bainbridge

Today’s Message of Encouragement from

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(Ron Bainbridge Editor) (February 7th, 2020)

STRONG EVIDENCE FOR BELIEVING IN GOD!

Friends, in the midst of the sad, mad, bad world of His day, Jesus said to His followers, “see to it that you really do love one another warmly, with all your hearts” (1 Peter 1:22). On another occasion He said, “Your strong love for each other will prove to the world that you are my disciples” (John 13:35). I can’t think of anything more redeeming than experiencing what Jesus was talking about! Even to watch it going on the lives of others is redemptive.

However, what’s going on around us in this broken world is a different story. Who among us needs to be convinced that there’s evil in the world? Read the headlines, or listen to the news on just about any day; look out the door on your own street; reflect a moment on your own family life.

The crime rates are spiraling, the prisons are overflowing and nations are hacking each other to pieces. Children are being abused before they’re born as well as after they are born. Murderers become national heroes, art is steeped in filth, divorce is pandemic, cruelty is glamorized, and greed rapes the earth and its people.

Friend, “Love is . . .” all kinds of wonderful things; but in a world like ours, perhaps the most astounding of all the things about “Love,” is that it exists at all! -- Wouldn’t you think that in a world where the dog-eat-dog mentality is so prevalent there would be no self-sacrificing people? -- Wouldn’t you think that with so many takers in the world there’d be no givers?

Wouldn’t you think that in a world where “Don’t get mad, get even!” comes from the lips of even children that there’d be no forgiveness? -- And, aren’t you tempted to think that in a world that glorifies immorality and marital treachery there’d be no men or women who cherish purity and lifelong fidelity?

In a world of sleazy bars, porn centres, and drug barons, wouldn’t you be inclined to think that sober, clean, socially useful people would have gone the way of diplodocus? Especially when you’ve seen (in the corridors of power) the piggy little eyes of savage greed running from one trough to another, stripping, devouring, hoarding, have you never been tempted to think that no one cares? No one! Not anywhere?

The amazing news is that Love Exists! Whatever the reasons, it seems that love just can’t be killed. Because, as long as God gives us mothers, fathers, brothers, and sisters, as long as God gives us families and friends, love will not only survive---it will flourish. And just as sure as a universe of darkness cannot snuff out a single candle ablaze with light, ten thousand universes saturated with hatred and heartlessness cannot obliterate one loving act!

The astonishing thing is this, love doesn’t beg to be given room; it doesn’t grovel for permission to exist; it doesn’t apologetically hang around the fringes of life as if it had no right to be there. On the contrary, it makes room for itself, comes right into the middle of life.

In reality, love is no weakling, no poor pathetic emotion that will vanish if someone breathes on it too hard. Even in the filthiest ghettos, the vilest homes, the most discouraging environments, it survives!

It’s also true that pain can drive people to madness. Prolonged suffering, injustice, and brutality can rob us of our sanity. -- Elie Wiesel, in his moving rehearsal of life under the Nazis, tells of sons who insanely killed their fathers in order to get all the bread rather than share what the fathers eagerly offered them.

No doubt incidents like these could be multiplied by thousands, but even there---where love was damned and in a billion different ways was hounded right out of the compounds---even there, love kept returning to life! And for many people who were tormented with decisions no human should have to make, crying, cursing, almost despairing yet surviving, love remained stronger than torture and death, gentle as a lovely woman’s heart.

Perhaps you’re asking where did this love, under extreme circumstances come from? It certainly wasn’t born in those prison camps! It was only tested there---deepened and made stronger there, purified and made wiser there. But that same love existed in the lives of all those millions long before Auschwitz or Treblinka came to be. --- Parents didn’t begin to love their children in those hellholes!

You see, if those parents and children had not already loved one another, had not already been devoted to one another before they went to those damnable places, they never would have loved each other during their imprisonment and torture.

Friend, the kind of love that blazed so brightly in the death camps was the same love we see weeping in hospital waiting rooms or rocking in a chair, waiting, late into the night, for a teenage daughter to come home. -- When it found itself in Dachau or Siberia, it simply stepped up a gear. Lovers just held one another more tightly, watched out for one another more anxiously, longed after each other more tenderly, and defended each other more ferociously.

People often ask, how do you explain the evil in the world if a good God is in control? In response to that I ask, how do you explain the presence of love in the world?

It is true that a world with evil in it raises questions about a good God, but a world with Jesus Christ in it raises questions about no God. A world with Nazis in it raises serious questions for believers, but a world with sacrificial love raises serious questions for unbelievers.

The truth is, that as long as there is the historical and Divine Jesus; as long as there are loving friends, parents, husbands, and wives; as long as there are those who “do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly in this world” (Micah 6:8), I’d like to say there is strong evidence for believing in God!

Friend, if you would like to learn more about Jesus, our Redeemer, who is able to bring us into an intimate, personal, life-changing relationship with a relentlessly loving God, we invite you to write to us and ask for our FREE booklets titled: “Who is this Jesus?”, “How to find God,” and “The Relentless Love of God.” Our address is Discovering A BETTER LIFE, P.O. Box 1540, Albany, Western Australia 6331.