Bible Lesson #1 – Somebody Bigger Than You And I.

TouchPoint 1

Hello new friend! My name is Mic, and I call what you are reading just now a TouchPoint. I’ve named it TouchPoint because this reading, and the others that go with it, are an important place where you and I can connect with things that matter in your life and mine.

Let me raise a few questions that I’ve heard many people voice to show why TouchPoints are so crucial. Read them as if you are asking them yourself:

What is the meaning of life?
What is my place in life?
Does my life make any difference to anyone else?
Why is there evil in the world?
Why is there evil in me?
Is there anything that can be done to stop evil in the world or in me?
What are my responsibilities as a citizen of this world?
What are my responsibilities toward my family and friends?
Why are so many people so lonely?
Why do I often feel restless or unsatisfied

The First TouchPoint

If you are reading this TouchPoint right now, perhaps it’s because you are a person who is looking for answers. Or maybe you have a curiosity about spiritual things and have probably begun to feel a longing to be connected in ways that transcend what most of your relationships can do for you now.

If that describes you, I’m going to make a statement that may be startling because it may have never occurred to you before: You are longing to be connected to God. And as we’ll see in a later TouchPoint, that longing was deliberately placed in each one of us, so that we will search for God, so that He can satisfy our thirst to belong, and answer ur deepest questions.

The First Question

To the contemporary mind, the very first question that must be dealt with is the very existence of God. For millennia people have wrestled with this issue, and many have walked away discounting the possibility of a real-live God because He could not be proved in the ways that they felt He must be proved. They really wanted to believe that there is Somebody bigger than you and I out there somewhere, but without proof, they could not afford to believe it was true.

Let’s face it. We are people who are willing to be convinced when there’s evidence to support it. We like logic. We like tangible things.

We can decide to buy life insurance because the sales person can ask us a few questions about our financial realities, plug those numbers into some equations, and out comes a recommended level of insurance based on actuarial tables and years of statistical research.

We can diagnose many illnesses just by looking at blood samples and analyzing the microscopic things found there.

But God does not plug into formulas or match physical modeling and analysis. There is only one realm in which He can be understood and proved:

“People without the Spirit do not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to them, and they cannot understand them, because they are spiritually discerned.” 1 Corinthians 2.14, New International Version (modernized by me!)

That quotation comes from the New Testament of the Bible, the book Christians accept as the history of God’s encounter with humanity, and that reveals His plan for dealing with the present and the future.

The Paradox

But how can we accept the Bible if we’ve not yet proven God exists? If that’s what you are thinking, you have a point! It does create a paradox, unless you are willing to make one basic decision.

Let’s use our old high-school geometry class as our TouchPoint to get us beyond this paradox. One of the theorems of geometry is that the sum of all the internal angles in a triangle is always 180 degrees.

That statement, printed in my textbook, required me to accept it, but then allowed me to spend all the time I wanted in proving it to be either true or false. While there were may ways I could prove it, I had to prove it true within the confines of geometry, because that’s where the truth of the theorem applied.

When I first looked at triangles, I couldn’t visualize how this theorem could possibly be true when I saw all the possible sizes and shapes of triangles in my textbook. It wasn’t until I took my trusty protractor out and measured the angles and added up the numbers did I begin to see the truth in the theorem.

What I’m asking of you in this TouchPoint is to accept the theorem for now that comes from the Biblical text in 1 Corinthians 2:14: spiritual things are spiritually discerned.

What does that mean? It means that in order to prove God or his word, you will need to step onto his ground, into his playing field, experiment in his realm. That is the realm of spiritual life. As you start to spend time with your spiritual protractor measuring God’s claims, I believe that you’ll not only find him proven true over and over again,
you’ll even find that the God of the Bible invites us to prove his veracity and his faithfulness.

From Theory to Reality

If any of this is to be any good to any of us, we have to be able to move from theory to reality. It has to work in real life – your life. If God is truly alive, what He claims can happen in the lives of people must happen in your life.

In fact, I’ve heard it said that the only real proof of God’s existence is the changed life. And you have probably met some people like this. People who have a peace about them in the face of grave illness. People who can offer forgiveness even when acts of criminal violence have been committed against them. People who can live in joy even when their finances are a mess. People who love in the face of hatred and betrayal.

My personal invitation to you is to test the theorem that you will learn things about spirituality in God’s realm of spirituality. I have no doubt but that your own life will become part of the proof that God is alive, personal, and always close.