A Case For God: Why The Christian Worldview Makes Sense Iii by Pastor Dolapo Lawal: MP3 Download & Sermon Notes

Christianity Is the Only Religion Where God Comes to You

In every other religion, the worshipper must travel to where the god is said to dwell. Christianity is unique — the God of Christianity comes to you, not just to visit, but to journey with you so you can be with Him. The idea has never been to arrive as you are and stay unchanged, but to come as you are and not remain the way you came.

You will be a banker, a lawyer, a parent for a number of decades — but you will spend eternity for eternity. That imbalance in weight is what theology calls wrong valuation: failing to put the appropriate premium on the one decision that determines your eternal destination. The greatest expression of love is the cross of Jesus — and by implication, the greatest expression of love you can offer someone else is pointing them to that same cross.

Archaeology Keeps Confirming What Critics Called Myth

For centuries, critics dismissed parts of the Bible as fiction, and archaeology has repeatedly proven them wrong. The Hittites, once dismissed as a fictional people, were later confirmed as a real historical civilization. Pontius Pilate's existence was doubted until a stone inscription bearing his name and title was discovered. The Pool of Bethesda in John 5, once assumed to be purely symbolic, was excavated and found exactly as described, including its five porches. The Tel Dan inscription confirmed the historical House of David.

An agnostic Egyptologist who studied ancient history at University College London, after extensive archaeological research, concluded that the Bible is the most authentic historical document surviving from its era — even while stopping short of calling it the word of God. On manuscript evidence alone, no other ancient document comes close to the New Testament, now supported by more than 25,000 authenticated manuscripts, both in quantity and in how close those copies date to the events they describe.

Even Skeptics Concede the Historical Jesus

A well-known classical historian, no follower of Christ himself, stated plainly that he knew of no respectable critical scholar who still argues Jesus never existed. A German liberal theologian who spent his career questioning the Gospels nonetheless conceded that Jesus performed deeds that both he and his contemporaries understood as miracles — healing the sick and casting out demons.

The earliest known non-Christian reference to Jesus comes from a historian writing around 52 AD, who tried to explain away the supernatural darkness reported at Jesus's death as merely a natural eclipse. That very attempt to explain it away confirms the event was already publicly known and being discussed within a generation of it happening. A Jewish historian writing around 93 AD — just sixty years after the crucifixion — twice referenced Jesus in his historical works, including a mention of "James, the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ," a detail that lines up precisely with Matthew 13:55, 1 Corinthians 15:7, and Galatians 1:19. A Roman historian writing around 116 AD recorded that Christ "suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of Pontius Pilate."

In historiography, varying detail across independent sources actually validates that an event happened, rather than casting doubt on it — different numbers or details usually mean different oral traditions were independently recorded, which means multiple people were genuinely present. The death of Jesus isn't seriously disputed by historians, believing or not. The real argument has always been about the resurrection.

The Transformation Argument

Nothing has transformed the human mind the way scripture, genuinely received, has. It has broken addiction cycles that therapy alone could not touch. It transformed a violent persecutor like Paul, a coward like Peter, a doubter like Thomas, and sinners of every kind into people willing to die for what they had witnessed. It produced hospitals, universities, and the abolition of slavery — ideas that were largely foreign to the ancient world before biblical influence took hold. A corrupted book, from a corrupted source, could not consistently produce transformed lives across every culture and century the way scripture has.

1 Peter 3:15 — "sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and be ready always to give an answer to every man that asketh you a reason of the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear." Apologetics is not just about winning an argument — it's paired, in the very next verse, with having a good conscience, so that anyone who observes your conduct is put to shame by their own accusations rather than confirmed in them. The evidence matters, but the life that carries it matters just as much.

A Church Only Grows as Far as It Keeps Evangelizing

A season of thirty to forty days of deliberate daily evangelism once produced roughly seventy percent growth in one month — not because the people reached that month came in immediately, but because a spiritual technology had been switched on, one that, once understood, can be taught and repeated. Growth eventually plateaus once a congregation has exhausted its own existing relationships — everyone has already invited whoever they were willing to invite.

The only people positioned to keep bringing genuinely new people in are new converts — people who still have relationships outside the church that longtime believers have since let go of. If you're living double-standard Christianity, your old circle already knows you well enough to know the faith isn't fully real to you, and that awareness quietly disqualifies you from being able to reach them. That's part of why the gospel spread the way it did — from Jerusalem, to Judea, to Samaria, to the ends of the earth: it kept moving into fresh relational ground rather than only deepening the same one.

You Cannot Stay Where People Only Know Your Past

If you are not influencing the people around you, they are influencing you — that is simply the law of power. If you stay in your hometown, among people who only remember who you used to be, they will convince you — not maliciously, but through sheer familiarity — that you don't carry the anointing you actually carry, when the real problem is their own unbelief, not your calling. There must be a distinction people can see: if someone who knew you years ago sees no change at all, real transformation likely hasn't taken root yet. Separation from old company isn't a punishment — it's often the very thing that makes room for what God wants to do next.