I’ve recommended this book to and purchased it for people who want to know more about the Christian faith. Here’s a nice excerpt I re-read this week that speaks to me. I’m going to reflect on these ideas (and others) as I deliver my upcoming four-part sermon series on salvation.
This message [of the gospel of Jesus Christ, though, is so utterly unlikely and extraordinary that you can’t expect people simply to believe it in the same way they might believe you if you said it was raining outside. And yet, as people hear the message, at least some find that they do believe it. It makes sense to them. I don’t mean the kind of “sense” you get within the flatland world of secular imagination. There the only things that matter are what you can put into a test tube or a bank account. I mean the kind of sense that exists within the strange new world which we glimpse, even if only for a moment, in the way we glimpse a whole new world when we stand in awe in front of a great painting, or are swept off our feet by a song or a symphony. That kind of “making sense” is much more like falling in love than like calculating a bank balance. Ultimately, believing that God raised Jesus from the dead is a matter of believing and trusting in the God who would, and did, do such a thing.†
† N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense (New York: HarperOne, 2006), 207.