Looking for answers?
Looking for answers to life's big questions? Like: "Where did we come from?" or, "What is life all about?" or, "What happens to us when we die?"
We all have big questions at some stage of our life, when the brevity of life, or the hopelessness, futility and dishonesty of our secular media and society, or the shallowness or brokenness of our relationships, or the deep dissatisfaction, even of our worldly success, seem to hit us and wake us up. "There must be more!"
Don't ignore the questions or bury them behind our busy lives. Look into them, honestly, diligently, without the bias imposed by our intolerant secular media, government or society. There is too much at stake to let them prevent your honest investigation.
But where to start? Well, go to the Source. Ask God, directly, to help you. Just say to God something like, "God, please reveal yourself to me, help me, guide me. If the only way to you is really through Jesus, then in Jesus name please reveal yourself to me."
Then read the book He has given us, so that you can get to know Him as He has revealed Himself, rather than trusting men (priests, politicians, the media, man-centred, man-exalting religions) and the way they would like God to be. Men often make the Bible and religion confusing and complex and dependent on man to understand. It is not.
That is one reason God gave us the Bible, so that we could have a trustworthy source to go to to find out about Him.
Widely acknowledged as the foundation of Western civilization and its initial success, Christianity, and its source document the Bible, is far too important to ignore. It has been under intense attack from forces opposed to it for thousands of years now, yet it continues on unhindered. That is because it is true, it provides the answers, the hope, it has power to save souls and change lives.
Don't trust those who say there is nothing out there, no hope, no meaning, no answers. Look into it yourself. To ignore Christianity, to revise history to write its influence out, is to be dishonest and is detrimental to a genuine education, to your true wellbeing and mental health, and to your earthly and (most importantly) your eternal life.
I encourage you to investigate Christianity honestly and as well as reading the Bible for yourself, I recommend some resources here for you:
To help your investigation, here is an answer to the question: What is Christianity all about?
Who is Jesus Christ? What is Christianity? - YouTube
A short blog titled: Does God Exist?
Watch this short video: Two ways to live.
An easy to understand message to watch: Billy Graham - Is the handwriting on the wall, America? - YouTube
A good friend of mine Rev. Bill Medley has put together some helpful short videos too, as follows:
Video FAQ:
The Bible
How reliable are the source documents of the New and Old Testament?
If God wanted to give us a message why didn't he just tell us?
Other Religions
Aren't there thousands of religions and possibilities?
Isn't it arrogant to say Jesus is the only way? Couldn't God have used others?
Could Jesus have been a reincarnation of other enlightened teachers such as Buddha?
Why couldn't you apply the logic of Lord, Liar or lunatic to other great religious teachers?
God & Jesus
If God is a God of love, why is there a hell with weeping and gnashing of teeth?
Why didn't the Jews believe in Jesus if he was their Messiah?
Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, how is that a claim to be God?
The Church
I try to be as good as people who go to church. Aren't there a lot of hypocrites in churches?
Source
If you have any questions please find a Bible believing, Bible preaching church to attend or feel free to email me and I will try my best to provide some answers or point you in the right direction.
There is real hope. There is more to this life and much more for eternity. There is an answer to your loneliness, despair, heartache, sickness and sadness. It is an answer which is available free of charge to you. You can find this answer in this great book the Bible. (Look up Acts 4:12 for the short answer).
Keep in mind what famous thinker Blaise Pascal basically concluded: There is nothing to lose by asking and investigating the big things of life but there is everything to lose if you don't and you eventually find that God is real. Whichever way you bet, at least do some homework to see if there is any evidence to show that God does exists, find out more about Him and have a read of the book he has given us so that we could come to know him truthfully rather than make him up to be as we would like him to be.
May God richly bless you as you start your investigation.
Craig Manners
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.' (Matthew 7:7-8)
"But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul. When you are in distress and all these things have happened to you, then in later days you will return to the Lord your God and obey him. For the Lord your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you , (Deuteronomy 4:29-31, NIV)
"Let us acknowledge the Lord; let us press on to acknowledge him.
As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.” (Hosea 6:3)
As King David said to his son Solomon: "If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will reject you forever." (1 Chronicles 28:9)
A bit more on the Bible for you from a longer article:
Do we trust God or man as authoritative? Jesus is our highest authority (Eph. 5:20-23) if we claim him as Lord we must submit to his authority. “When we receive Christ by repentance and faith, we receive the truth about him as the Word of God.”[41] In the final analysis, the rejection of the authority of God’s written word appears to stem from a desire to maintain human autonomy. [40] It is idolatry and elevates man above God.
As Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones once said so well, referring to Romans 3, “A very good way of testing any view that you may hold is to ask, ‘Is this view humbling to me and glorifying to God?’ If it is, it is probably right. You will not go far wrong if whatever you are holding is glorifying God and humbling man. But if your view seems to glorify you and to query God, there is no need to argue or to go into details – it is wrong.”[42]
What comes from shifting authority from God to men? We only have to look at recent human history to see some of the fruit of undermining confidence in God and the Bible.
Way back in 1965, Lloyd-Jones noted that, "I have no hesitation in saying that the main factor in the lowering of the moral tone and life of this country has been the loss of authority of the Bible. The Bible has been riddled with criticism - there is no authority here any longer. Modern theologians have simply put up their own suppositions, theories and speculations." [43]
Often men and women complicate things and take things too far in their ultimately pride driven pursuits. Like a wife constantly criticizing her husband, belittling him, ridiculing him, comparing him poorly to other men, and demonstrating publicly her lack of confidence in him, so modern scholars have done to the Bible. This undermining results in the children having reduced confidence in their father, and the congregations having reduced confidence that the Bible is true and can really help them. It is the children and the congregations who suffer greatly from this tragedy.
The good news is that God is sovereign. He is authoritative. He has given us his trustworthy word in the Bible. He has given us his Son Jesus, that "whosoever believes in him has eternal life and shall not perish" (John 3:16), he has given us his Holy Spirit to guide us.
Read the Bible for yourself. Don't listen to the critics, they ultimately offer no help, no hope. They, along with any men or women who lead you away from God cannot help you, they have no power to save souls, they have no power to change lives.
Trust God. He alone can help you.
Ps. Feel free to watch the short YouTube message from Billy Graham:
We all have big questions at some stage of our life, when the brevity of life, or the hopelessness, futility and dishonesty of our secular media and society, or the shallowness or brokenness of our relationships, or the deep dissatisfaction, even of our worldly success, seem to hit us and wake us up. "There must be more!"
Don't ignore the questions or bury them behind our busy lives. Look into them, honestly, diligently, without the bias imposed by our intolerant secular media, government or society. There is too much at stake to let them prevent your honest investigation.
But where to start? Well, go to the Source. Ask God, directly, to help you. Just say to God something like, "God, please reveal yourself to me, help me, guide me. If the only way to you is really through Jesus, then in Jesus name please reveal yourself to me."
Then read the book He has given us, so that you can get to know Him as He has revealed Himself, rather than trusting men (priests, politicians, the media, man-centred, man-exalting religions) and the way they would like God to be. Men often make the Bible and religion confusing and complex and dependent on man to understand. It is not.
That is one reason God gave us the Bible, so that we could have a trustworthy source to go to to find out about Him.
Widely acknowledged as the foundation of Western civilization and its initial success, Christianity, and its source document the Bible, is far too important to ignore. It has been under intense attack from forces opposed to it for thousands of years now, yet it continues on unhindered. That is because it is true, it provides the answers, the hope, it has power to save souls and change lives.
Don't trust those who say there is nothing out there, no hope, no meaning, no answers. Look into it yourself. To ignore Christianity, to revise history to write its influence out, is to be dishonest and is detrimental to a genuine education, to your true wellbeing and mental health, and to your earthly and (most importantly) your eternal life.
I encourage you to investigate Christianity honestly and as well as reading the Bible for yourself, I recommend some resources here for you:
To help your investigation, here is an answer to the question: What is Christianity all about?
Who is Jesus Christ? What is Christianity? - YouTube
A short blog titled: Does God Exist?
Watch this short video: Two ways to live.
An easy to understand message to watch: Billy Graham - Is the handwriting on the wall, America? - YouTube
A good friend of mine Rev. Bill Medley has put together some helpful short videos too, as follows:
Video FAQ:
The Bible
How reliable are the source documents of the New and Old Testament?
If God wanted to give us a message why didn't he just tell us?
Other Religions
Aren't there thousands of religions and possibilities?
Isn't it arrogant to say Jesus is the only way? Couldn't God have used others?
Could Jesus have been a reincarnation of other enlightened teachers such as Buddha?
Why couldn't you apply the logic of Lord, Liar or lunatic to other great religious teachers?
God & Jesus
If God is a God of love, why is there a hell with weeping and gnashing of teeth?
Why didn't the Jews believe in Jesus if he was their Messiah?
Jesus claimed to be the Son of God, how is that a claim to be God?
The Church
I try to be as good as people who go to church. Aren't there a lot of hypocrites in churches?
Source
If you have any questions please find a Bible believing, Bible preaching church to attend or feel free to email me and I will try my best to provide some answers or point you in the right direction.
There is real hope. There is more to this life and much more for eternity. There is an answer to your loneliness, despair, heartache, sickness and sadness. It is an answer which is available free of charge to you. You can find this answer in this great book the Bible. (Look up Acts 4:12 for the short answer).
Keep in mind what famous thinker Blaise Pascal basically concluded: There is nothing to lose by asking and investigating the big things of life but there is everything to lose if you don't and you eventually find that God is real. Whichever way you bet, at least do some homework to see if there is any evidence to show that God does exists, find out more about Him and have a read of the book he has given us so that we could come to know him truthfully rather than make him up to be as we would like him to be.
May God richly bless you as you start your investigation.
Craig Manners
“Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.' (Matthew 7:7-8)
"But if from there you seek the Lord your God, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and with all your soul. When you are in distress and all these things have happened to you, then in later days you will return to the Lord your God and obey him. For the Lord your God is a merciful God; he will not abandon or destroy you , (Deuteronomy 4:29-31, NIV)
"Let us acknowledge the Lord; let us press on to acknowledge him.
As surely as the sun rises, he will appear; he will come to us like the winter rains, like the spring rains that water the earth.” (Hosea 6:3)
As King David said to his son Solomon: "If you seek him, he will be found by you; but if you forsake him, he will reject you forever." (1 Chronicles 28:9)
A bit more on the Bible for you from a longer article:
Do we trust God or man as authoritative? Jesus is our highest authority (Eph. 5:20-23) if we claim him as Lord we must submit to his authority. “When we receive Christ by repentance and faith, we receive the truth about him as the Word of God.”[41] In the final analysis, the rejection of the authority of God’s written word appears to stem from a desire to maintain human autonomy. [40] It is idolatry and elevates man above God.
As Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones once said so well, referring to Romans 3, “A very good way of testing any view that you may hold is to ask, ‘Is this view humbling to me and glorifying to God?’ If it is, it is probably right. You will not go far wrong if whatever you are holding is glorifying God and humbling man. But if your view seems to glorify you and to query God, there is no need to argue or to go into details – it is wrong.”[42]
What comes from shifting authority from God to men? We only have to look at recent human history to see some of the fruit of undermining confidence in God and the Bible.
Way back in 1965, Lloyd-Jones noted that, "I have no hesitation in saying that the main factor in the lowering of the moral tone and life of this country has been the loss of authority of the Bible. The Bible has been riddled with criticism - there is no authority here any longer. Modern theologians have simply put up their own suppositions, theories and speculations." [43]
Often men and women complicate things and take things too far in their ultimately pride driven pursuits. Like a wife constantly criticizing her husband, belittling him, ridiculing him, comparing him poorly to other men, and demonstrating publicly her lack of confidence in him, so modern scholars have done to the Bible. This undermining results in the children having reduced confidence in their father, and the congregations having reduced confidence that the Bible is true and can really help them. It is the children and the congregations who suffer greatly from this tragedy.
The good news is that God is sovereign. He is authoritative. He has given us his trustworthy word in the Bible. He has given us his Son Jesus, that "whosoever believes in him has eternal life and shall not perish" (John 3:16), he has given us his Holy Spirit to guide us.
Read the Bible for yourself. Don't listen to the critics, they ultimately offer no help, no hope. They, along with any men or women who lead you away from God cannot help you, they have no power to save souls, they have no power to change lives.
Trust God. He alone can help you.
Ps. Feel free to watch the short YouTube message from Billy Graham: