If You Don’t Believe God Exists — Morning Devotions

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Transcript

I like the story about the man who went to the barber to have his hair cut and he needed his beard trimmed. And as the barber started to work, they began to have this good conversation, as often happens in these places, and they talked about all sorts of things. And one of the topics was God. And the barber was quite emphatic. I don’t believe that God exists, he said. Why do you say that? Well, you just got to go out on the street here to realise God doesn’t exist.

Tell me, he said, if God existed there, would there be so many sick people, would there be abandoned children? If God existed, nobody would be in want. There’d be no suffering or pain, after all, he said, I can’t imagine a loving God would allow these things.

The customer thought about this for a minute, but didn’t respond, he didn’t want to have an argument there in the shop. The barber finished his job, the customer left the shop and just as he was walking down the street, he saw a man with long stringy hair, untrimmed beard, and he looked a bit unclean.

Then the man had an idea. He turned and went back into the barber shop, you know, he said, barbers do not exist. How can you say that? said the barber. I’m, I’m a barber. I’m here. I’ve just cut your hair. No, he said, barbers don’t exist because if they did, there’d be no people out there with dirty long hair and untrimmed beards like that man. Ah, yeah, but the barbers do exist, he said. That’s, that’s just what happens when people don’t come to me.

Well, the customer made his point exactly, he said. God exists as well. That’s what happens when people don’t go to God and don’t look to Him for help.

Now I think that’s a very simple illustration, but it reminds me that God can be found by anyone who is looking for him. Do you know the Bible has an amazing verse. It’s an Old Testament verse in Deuteronomy 4:29.

And it says this, you will find him if you seek him with all your heart and all your soul. Great verse. You’ll find him. That’s God, if you seek Him with all your heart and all your soul. Maybe that’s why surveys have shown, you know, that 97.5% of the world’s population believe in a higher power, and that leaves only 2.5% of our population as atheists with Sigmund Freud, he reckoned that what people call God is simply their own wishful thinking projected outside themselves.

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Well, I don’t accept that at all.

Seeking God

But in many respects of our lives we require hard evidence because we’ll say, look, I’ll believe in that if I can see it. For example, what about the air that we breathe? We really can’t see that. We keep breathing, we believe it’s there, but we also believe that love exists because we feel it towards another person.

We can’t point to a physical object of love and say there it is, that’s how I know love exists.

Well, there are many religious people who will say that they know God exists. Why? Because the Bible tells me so. In many ways that can be a very simplistic answer. Two people can read the same words in the Bible and come to a different conclusion. One will say that they believe these words, and another says, No, I’m just reading a book.

So what I’m saying is that God exists when we say that it’s more than simply reading the words.

If you can’t see God, how can you believe in him? There are lots of things, as I said, that we believe we can’t actually see, I believe in gravity. You say, you can say, you do not believe in that, but if you jumped off the top of the Sydney Harbour Bridge, you would be in big, big trouble.

Some people assume that in order to believe in God that you’ve got shelve your brains, as it were, don’t use your brains, just take a blind leap of faith. Well, God has never asked us to take a blind leap of faith. Come, he said in his word, let’s reason together. So we can’t draw a picture of God for that atheist or sceptic, but we can give them some logical proof.

You know, some of the things, you know, it’s creation, every time you see it, you know it has a creator. Art. What about the pieces of art? You know there’s been an artist. Design, for example, your wristwatch has a design. Order. Every time you see order, you know, there has to be someone who put it together. They’re very simple illustrations about the facts of God.

So we see creation, we see a designer, we see God, the one who orders our world, and we thank Him for it.

Let’s Pray

Well, dear Lord, we thank you for our world. There are times, Lord, when we’ve been ungrateful, we’ve had bad thoughts towards other people, and you know that when we complain about life, Lord, it doesn’t help us. But we thank you for you as our loving God who created our world. Amen.

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