Awakenings

Best-selling author Arthur C. Brooks is an expert on happiness research. But he also honestly shares about his own struggle with finding true satisfaction in life:

I have fallen into the trap of believing that success would fulfill me. On my 40th birthday I made a bucket list of things I hoped to do or achieve. They were mainly accomplishments only a wonk could want: writing books and columns about serious subjects, teaching at a top school, traveling to give lectures and speeches, maybe even leading a university or think tank. Whether these were good and noble goals or not, they were my goals, and I imagined that if I hit them, I would be satisfied.

I found that list when I was 48 and realized that I had achieved every item on it. But none of that had brought me the lasting joy I’d envisioned. Each accomplishment thrilled me for a day or a week—maybe a month, never more—and then I reached for the next rung on the ladder.

I’d devoted my life to climbing those rungs. I was still devoting my life to climbing—working 60 to 80 hours a week to accomplish the next thing, all the while terrified of losing the last thing. The costs of that kind of existence are obvious, but it was only when I looked back at my list that I genuinely began to question the benefits—and to think seriously about the path I was walking.

And what about you? Your goals are probably very different from mine, and perhaps your lifestyle is too. But the trap is the same. Everyone has dreams, and they beckon with promises of sweet, lasting satisfaction if you achieve them. But dreams are liars. When they come true, it’s … fine, for a while. And then a new dream appears.

In her book Atheists Finding God: Unlikely Stories of Conversions to Christianity in the Contemporary West, Jana Harmon explored why atheists came to faith in Christ. One big factor included the kindness of Christians. Harmon writes:

Nearly two-thirds of the former atheists I spoke with thought they would never leave their atheistic identity and perspective. They were not looking for God or interested in spiritual conversations. So, what breached their walls of resistance? ... Something [disrupted their] status quo.

She shares one story about how some Christians became the catalyst that disrupted the atheistic worldview by Christlike kindness:

Jeffrey became an atheist following a childhood tragedy where he lost two brothers in a house fire. His deep pain fueled a vitriolic hatred against God and instability in his own life. During the next 20 years, he developed strong arguments to support his emotional resistance to belief. When his wife unexpectedly became a Christian, his anger against God only grew.

One evening his wife called and asked him to pick her up at the home of the Christians who had led her to Christ. Jeffrey was expecting a heated exchange, but instead received warm hospitality. Feeling valued, he was drawn back again and again toward meaningful conversation. Over time, his walls of resistance began to melt, friendship and trust developed, and intellectual questions were answered. Eventually, he lost his resistance to God and found the peace and joy that had long eluded him.

The popular series The Chosen features an actor named Jonathan Roumie. He has the audacious task of playing Jesus on the series. In an interview for The New York Times Roumie said:

Very often, I don’t feel worthy of playing Jesus. I struggle with that a lot. But I also acknowledge what God has done for my life as a result of playing Christ and how God has changed my life.

On set in Season 1 — it was the first time in the series where I actually started preaching directly from Scripture as Jesus — I was standing at a doorway looking onto a crowd of about 50 extras, dressed as people coming to hear the teacher. This overwhelming anxiety swept over me. I had to tell Dallas Jenkins, the creator of our show, “Hey, man, can we stop for a minute?” He said, “Why?” I said, “Because I don’t feel worthy to be saying these words right now.” He pulled me aside and said, “Listen, man, none of us are worthy to be here doing this, but God has chosen you and I and everyone else here to tell this story at this time. So, know that you are meant to be here.”

A recent Aperture video gives a concise overview of absurdism: the philosophical theory that existence in general is absurd. It begins with the Greek mythological story of Sisyphus. The gods were displeased with his arrogance and punished him with the futile task of pushing a rock up a hill, then having the rock roll back down every time he reached the top.

Classical interpretations of the myth view it as an allegory for the futility of trying to escape death. No matter how powerful or clever a person is, we're all doomed to meet the same fate. More modern audiences have found something more relatable about Sisyphus' struggle: seeing it not as a simple parable about the inevitability of death but more like a metaphor for the drudgery and monotony of their own lives.

Every day we wake up, make coffee, take commute to work, stare at a computer for hours, get yelled at by our boss, stare at the computer some more, then travel back home, binge Netflix or YouTube while eating dinner, go to bed and then wake up and do it all over again. Just like Sisyphus we seem condemned to repeat the same meaningless tasks over and over and over.

Most of us do this every day for the rest of our lives as though we're sleepwalking, never waking up or stopping to ask why. For some of us, one day we're standing on a street corner preparing to go to work, when in an instant we're struck by the strangeness of it all. Suddenly nothing appears to have purpose. Life is haphazard and meaningless. You look around and you whisper to yourself: Why are all of these people even in such a hurry? For that matter, why am I? What's the point of all this? Why am I even alive?

You can watch the video here (0-1 min. 57 sec.).

Evangelicalism is now the largest religious demographic in Central America, according to a poll of about 4,000 people in five countries. More than a third of people from Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica told researchers that they are evangelical, while another 29 percent said they are “nondenominational believers.”

Only about a third of people in the region said they were Catholic—down from about 60 percent in the 1970s. Some scholars have attributed the shift to internal Catholic conflict and the long fallout from the church’s political affiliations on the extreme right and left, along with the disruptions of urbanization.

Evangelical theologian Samuel Escobar, noting the trend in an interview in 2006, said Catholics who moved to Central American cities found empowerment in their evangelical conversion. He said, “Their decision to accept Christ meant a change in patterns of behavior which helped people to reorient their lives.”

In his recent book, Paul Tripp describes a trip to the see world’s tallest skyscraper:

Wherever you go in Dubai, you are confronted with the Burj Khalifa the world's tallest building. Impressive skyscrapers are all around Dubai, but the Burj Khalifa looms over them all with majestic glory. At 2,716 feet (just over half a mile) it dwarfs buildings that would otherwise leave you in mouth-gaping awe. As you move around Dubai, you see all of these buildings and you say to yourself again and again, "How in the world did they build that?" But the Burj Khalifa is on an entirely other scale.

Even from far away, it was hard to crank my head back far enough to see all the way to the top. The closer I got, the more imposing and amazing this structure became. As I walked, there was no thought of the other buildings in Dubai that had previously impressed me. As amazing as those build­ings were, they were simply not comparable in stunning architectural grandeur and perfection to this one.

When I finally got to the base of the Burj Khalifa, I felt incredibly small, like an ant at the base of a light pole. I entered a futuristic looking elevator and, in what seemed like seconds, was on the 125th floor. This was not the top of the building, because that was closed to visitors. As I stepped to the windows to get a feel for how high I was and to scan the city of Dubai, I immediately commented on how small the rest of the buildings looked. Those "small" buildings were skyscrapers that, in any other city, would have been the buildings that you wanted to visit. They looked small, unimpressive, and not worthy of attention, let alone awe. I had experienced the greatest, which put what had impressed me before into proper perspective.

By means of God's revelation of himself in Scripture, we see that there is no perfection like God's perfection. There is no holiness as holy as God's holiness. If you allow yourself to gaze upon his holiness, you will feel incredibly small and sinful. It is a good thing spiritually to have the assessments of your own grandeur decimated by divine glory.

By 2018, country artist Walker Hayes had gotten sober but then tragedy struck. He and his wife, Laney, lost their seventh child, Oakleigh, at birth. It's a moment he now recognizes as a "real test down here on earth." He described it by saying, "Just holding a lifeless child. It's indescribable. I can't imagine a worse pain." He admits that for a moment, his sobriety was in jeopardy. "I'd been sober for three years when we lost Oakleigh. I was ready to not be. As soon as that happened, I was like, this is why you drink."

The loss of Oakleigh is what Hayes credits with helping him find his faith. He said, “When we lost Oakleigh, I would have called myself an atheist.” Hayes said that he grew up in a Southern Baptist church but that as a rebellious child he did not connect with religion. He grew to resent it. But when faced with a kind of grief he'd never experienced before, things began to change. "I think I found out in a roundabout way that I was screaming at somebody. I would have called myself an atheist, but I was looking for someone to blame."

But it wasn't just one thing that suddenly brought him to church. Laney had befriended a fellow mom and that mom invited the family to her and her husband's new church. Hayes said that although he went in kicking and screaming, he suddenly felt the opposite of how he'd felt in church before.

But the final push came while reading a book late one night on his tour bus. "By the grace of God somebody recommended a book to Laney called Secrets of an Unlikely Convert by Rosaria Butterfield. This woman's testimony, it's exactly like mine except I hadn't surrendered yet … I wolfed this book down. I finished it by the time the sun came up.”

Hayes explained that he didn't "come to Christ" that morning but rather he bought a Bible and began to read on his own and learn. Slowly, his faith was restored. But he is confident that the catalyst for this huge awakening in his life was a direct result of immeasurable loss. He said, “I know for some reason losing Oakleigh led me to Christ. I would not know Jesus if I had not known the loss of my daughter. That's what it took for me.”

The popular Pursuit of Wonder's video considers whether everything happens for a reason. In a fictional piece, a young man contends he has led a good and decent life, but in an instant an earthquake collapses his home and he is hospitalized with serious injuries. He is at a loss as to why.

"I wonder, as I lie here dying in this seemingly reasonless way, what this means. If, I’ve never done anything deserving of such a tragedy, how then could there be any good reason for this event occurring onto me?" He admits his prior beliefs were wrong:

That every time I said, “Everything happens for a reason.” Every time I heard it and believed it. Every time I seemingly found a reason for why something happened to me … I meant that it happened for a good reason. A just reason. I meant that there was some considerate order to the universe, and everything in my story was placed there to allow me to become the winner of it. But how foolish was I to think this? That I was somehow special. Somehow important. And that somehow the universe agreed and gave me immunity from the fact that no one wins this thing.

In spite of life's chaos and tragedies, the narrator still chooses to believe everything in his life happens for a reason. However, one day the reasons will dry up. "And when this moment comes, there will be no ink left to write a reason for running out of ink. And so, until then, I say I will lie here writing in this hospital bed, revolting against the hopelessness, creating every last reason I can."

You can watch the video here (3 mi. 13 sec. - 6 min. 16 sec.).

Possible Preaching Angle:

The universe can be a frustratingly random place where “accidents happen.” Like Job, people struggle to find meaning in evil events. However, only the Christian has a Father in heaven who “causes everything to work together for the good of those who love God and are called according to his purpose for them. (Rom. 8:28)”

Joy Davidman was a Jewish American atheist poet who as a young woman became a communist to satisfy her thirst for justice. She married a fellow writer, Bill. (After Bill’s death she married C.S. Lewis.)

At one point she said, “Of course, I thought, atheism was true, but I hadn't given quite enough attention to developing the proof of it. Someday, when the children grow older, I'd work it out.” But between marrying Bill and meeting C.S. Lewis, Joy met Jesus.

Bill was a workaholic, an alcoholic, and unfaithful. One day he called Joy from his New York office and told her he was having a nervous breakdown. Then he hung up. There followed a day of frantic telephoning. By nightfall Joy recalls, there was nothing to do but wait and see if he turned up, alive or dead. She put her children to sleep and waited. And in that silence, something happened:

For the first time in my life, I felt helpless; for the first time my pride was forced to admit that I was not calm after all, the master of my fate and the captain of my soul. All my defenses … all the walls of arrogance and cockiness and self-love behind which I'd hid from God … went down momentarily, and God came in … There was a person with me in that room, directly present to my consciousness—a person so real that all my previous life was by comparison, a mere shadow play, and I myself was more alive than I had ever been; it was like waking from sleep.

Kathy Troccoli has been a successful Christian singer, songwriter, author, and speaker for over three decades. She also found success in secular music through hits on the Billboard charts, and a collaboration with the legendary group, The Beach Boys.

Kathy initially grew up in a family that wasn't too religious and once said, "The Bible in my family was a book on the end table that was never touched." However, in 1978, while working during the summer at a local pool, Kathy's spirituality was challenged when she noticed a co-worker faithfully reading her Bible during her lunch breaks.

As Kathy began to talk to her colleague about her love for the Bible, the friend began to answer her questions in a way she had never heard before. Kathy said, "I never heard about Jesus in the way she described Him to me.” The co-worker subsequently gave Kathy a copy of the New Testament to read, and invited her to church, where she committed her life to Christ.

Today, Kathy has found success as a Christian artist and received many awards which includes Dove Awards, besides Grammy nominations. But her journey in the Christian faith began because a co-worker served faithfully as a witness for Jesus.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Like Kathy's co-worker friend, let's be a faithful witness for the Lord, wherever he may place us. Who knows what impact our life may have?

In his book With, author Skye Jethani describes the mausoleum of Galla Placidia in Italy:

Fifteen hundred years ago, the emperor of Rome built a tomb for his beloved sister. The small building was designed in the shape of a cross with a vaulted ceiling covered with mosaics of swirling stars in an indigo sky. The focal point of the mosaic ceiling was a depiction of Jesus the Good Shepherd surrounded by sheep in an emerald paradise.

The mausoleum of Galla Placidia still stands in Ravenna, Italy, and has been called “the earliest and best preserved of all mosaic monuments” and one of the “most artistically perfect.” But visitors who have admired its mosaics in travel books will be disappointed when they enter the mausoleum. The structure has only tiny windows, and what light does enter is usually blocked by a mass of tourists. The “most artistically perfect” mosaic monument, the inspiring vision of the Good Shepherd in a starry paradise, is hidden behind a veil of darkness.

But the impatient who leave the chapel will miss a stunning unveiling. With no advance notice, spotlights near the ceiling are turned on when a tourist finally manages to drop a coin into the small metal box along the wall. The lights illuminate the iridescent tiles of the mosaic but only for a few seconds. One visitor described the experience: “The lights come on. For a brief moment, the briefest of moments—the eye doesn’t have time to take it all in, the eye casts about—the dull, hot darkness overhead becomes a starry sky, a dark-blue cupola with huge, shimmering stars that seem startlingly close. ‘Ahhhhh!’ comes the sound from below, and then the light goes out, and again there’s darkness, darker even than before.”

The bright burst of illumination is repeated over and over again, divided by darkness of unpredictable length. Each time the lights come on, the visitors are given another glimpse of the world behind the shadows, and their eyes capture another element previously unseen—deer drinking from springs, Jesus gently reaching out to his sheep that look lovingly at their Shepherd. After seeing the mosaic, one visitor wrote: “I have never seen anything so sublime in my life! Makes you want to cry!”

Possible Preaching Angle:

It is difficult to experience the glory of God in our daily lives and when we do, it is only for brief moments. Yet, there are time when God breaks through the darkness of this world and reveals himself for a brief moment. Like Isaiah’s experience (Isa. 6:1-5), these moments should be life changing.

The 2010s were a tipping point for global Christianity. Now, in 2020, more than half the world’s Christians live in Africa and Latin America, according to a new report from the Center for the Study of Global Christianity. The portion of Christians in Europe has also fallen below 25% for the first time since the Middle Ages.

The change was predicted by historian Philip Jenkins, among others. Jenkins wrote in 2007, “We are living through one of the transforming moments in the history of religion worldwide, as the center of gravity in the Christian world has shifted inexorably . . . southward.” The demographic trends are expected to continue into this decade.

Percentage of the world’s Christians 2010 compared to 2020:

USA & Canada: Down from 12% to 9%

Europe: Down from 25% to 23%

Asia: Up from 15% to 16%

Latin America: Up from 24% to 25%

Africa: Up from 22% to 26%

Physicist Alan Lightman is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is known for specializing in the intersection between science, philosophy, religion, and spirituality. He writes about a profound, transcendent experience in his life:

It was a moonless night, and quiet. The only sound I could hear was the soft churning of the engine of my boat. Far from the distracting lights of the mainland, the sky vibrated with stars. I turned off my running lights, and it got even darker. Then I turned off my engine. I lay down in the boat and looked up. A very dark night sky seen from the ocean is a mystical experience.

After a few minutes, my world had dissolved into that star-littered sky. The boat disappeared. My body disappeared. And I found myself falling into infinity. A feeling came over me I’d not experienced before. ... And the vast expanse of time — extending from the far distant past long before I was born and then into the far distant future long after I will die — seemed compressed to a dot. I felt connected not only to the stars but to all of nature, and to the entire cosmos. I felt a merging with something far larger than myself, a grand and eternal unity, a hint of something absolute.

Lightman is in awe of nature but is unsure where that should lead him:

It is almost as if Nature in her glory wants us to believe in a heaven, something divine and immaterial beyond nature itself. In other words, Nature tempts us to believe in the supernatural. But then again, Nature has also given us big brains, allowing us to build microscopes and telescopes and ultimately, for some of us, to conclude that it’s all just atoms and molecules. It’s a paradox.

Possible Preaching Angle:

God offers unbelievers opportunities to consider the meaning of life, eternity, and their place in it. Some, like this professor will taste and then turn away (Heb. 6:4-10), while others will recognize the hand of Almighty God and bow before him (Ps. 8, Ps. 19).

As of May, 2021, the US earthquake early warning system can issue earthquake alerts to cellphone users in California, Oregon, and Washington. The MyShake app is an early warning system that aims to let people know about incoming shaking, so they can have at least a few seconds to find a safe spot to ride out the earthquake. The alert system is successful because communications systems are now faster than the speed of shaking waves moving through the ground.

The earthquake early warning system could also give residents in the Pacific Northwest as much as 80 seconds of warning ahead of shaking from a magnitude nine earthquake along the Cascadia Subduction Zone. This is a monstrous fault zone off the West Coast. This fault last ruptured in such a quake on Jan. 26, 1700, and sent catastrophic tsunamis not only to the Pacific Northwest, but thousands of miles away to Japan.

The earthquake early warning system got a bit of a test run in Los Angeles County last September when a magnitude 4.5 earthquake hit the South El Monte area. This triggered an alert which was sent to 2.2 million mobile devices.

Possible Preaching Angle:

The Bible is an early warning system for the devastating judgment about to jolt the entire world. Those who listen can take shelter before it strikes (Mark 13:8; Luke 21:11).

Jeanne Pouchain knows she’s not dead. But she has to prove it in court. The 58-year-old French woman was declared dead by a court in 2017 during a decade long legal case. An employee Pouchain had fired years ago sued her for lost wages and told a court that Pouchain was dead after she stopped responding to the employee’s letters.

Without evidence, the French court accepted the allegation and levied a judgment against Pouchain’s estate. The court’s decision set off a chain reaction in France’s bureaucracy, which scrubbed her from official records and invalidated her identity cards and licenses.

Pouchain recently told The Guardian, “I have no identity papers, no health insurance, I cannot prove to the banks that I am alive … I’m nothing.” Pouchain’s attorney then presented an affidavit to the court from her doctor attesting to her continued existence. Her former employee says Pouchain had been pretending to be dead in order to avoid paying the court-mandated damages.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Christians can also appear to be dead if they let their spiritual life lapse. This is true in church membership (Rev. 3:1) and also in the lifestyle they choose if they fall into worldliness (Eph. 5:14-15; Rom. 13:11).

While teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Dr. Tony Campolo once turned an ordinary lecture into an unforgettable lesson. He asked an unsuspecting student sitting in the front row, "Young man, how long have you lived?" The student answered his age. Tony responded, "No, no, no. That's how long your heart has been pumping blood. That's not how long you have lived."

Tony Campolo then told the class about one of the most memorable moments of his life. In 1944, his fourth-grade class took a field trip to the top of the Empire State Building. It was the tallest building in the world at the time. When nine-year-old Tony got off the elevator and stepped onto the observation deck overlooking New York City, time stood still. He said, "In one mystical, magical moment I took in the city. If I live a million years, that moment will still be part of my consciousness, because I was fully alive when I lived it."

Tony turned back to the student. "Now, let me ask you the question again. How long have you lived?” The student sheepishly said, “When you say it that way, maybe an hour; maybe a minute; maybe two minutes.”

According to psychologists Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, the average person spends 46.9 percent of their time thinking about something other than what they're doing in the present moment. We're half-present half the time, which means we're half-alive.

Devin Kelly looks forward every year to meeting his running friends at Farmdaze. Every February at a farm in Brooklet, Georgia, a 24-hour ultra-marathon event is run. Along with the pig roasts and folk music, some runners cover up to 100 miles in a single day, others a fraction of that. Farmdaze is a place of grace:

… a place that calls itself a race but is really everything that a race isn’t. (It is) an event that lets people give up if they want, that doesn’t shame them for it. (It) lets them become present in the story that is, simply all of us trying to love all of us …

Originally, Kelly ran competitively for personal pride and for his father, who would travel long distances to see him and his brother run. He loved running because it always meant something.

During his most recent race Kelly was gruelingly pushing himself to reach the 100 miles. He said he found himself alone, “under a field of stars, soaking wet, skin steaming. I tried to see the stars but my headlamp’s glare made it impossible. So, I turned it off and offered myself to the dark. What is the point of all of this, I asked myself, what is the … point?”

Suddenly, almost like a bolt of lightning, Kelly

… felt partly empty, without purpose. ... The truth is: I wanted to feel more. ... There was so much distance between what I felt and what I was supposed to feel. It made me sad … I had believed in what society told me would happen: that I would push through a challenge and emerge, new and strong, where love was. But I was left instead with the deep, profound emptiness knowing entirely for certain that what you were told by society was wrong. ... What happens if the stories we tell ourselves about our lives leave us lonely, wrestling with meaning? What then?

The 20th Century American Catholic writer, Walker Percy, wrote frequently about how life in the modern world alienates us from things that truly matter. His most famous book, The Moviegoer, describes a successful stock broker in his late-twenties. In the book, a man named Binx Bolling, hops from relationship to relationship and whose greatest happiness comes from watching movies. (Can any Netflix bingers relate?) But then something happens that makes him want more than the “everydayness of his own life.” The rest of the novel is about his search for things that truly matter.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Binx’ awakening sounds very similar to the experience of people today. “What is the nature of the search? you ask. The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life. To become aware of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” (Walker Percy)

For a summary of the book: click here.

There once was a time people were awakened, not by a cell phone or even an alarm clock, but by a “knocker-upper.” For many workers in early 20th century Britain, the daily alarm clock was a service worker. Known as the “knocker-upper” these predawn risers would pass by working-class buildings, rapping on the windows of those who need to get up.

Rural laborers, used to keeping time with the seasons, had relocated to manufacturing cities. They not only had to adjust to dangerous, fast-paced industrial work, but to new schedules. There were alarm clocks at the time, but they were expensive and unreliable.

Some workers might only find out they’d been called in for a shift from the knocker-upper that morning. Conditions could be cutthroat. Author Paul Middleton writes, “Life for the employed was forever balanced on a knife edge. Being late for work could mean instant dismissal and a speedy spiral for those workers and their families into poverty, homelessness and destitution.”

The job went obsolete around a hundred years after it was invented, as alarm clocks became more affordable and reliable and working conditions improved.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Employee; Work & Career – We should value the members of our church who work hard to earn a living. It is easy to demand too much of them as volunteers if we do not understand their labor. 2) End Times; Second Coming – As we near the end of the age, there is even a greater need for people to be awakened before it is too late (Rom. 13:11; Eph. 5:14)

The Spectator, one of Britain's leading weekly newsmagazines ran an article entitled "Amazing Grace," Journalist Colin Freeman wrote about his surprise at the large number of British Christian missionaries still working in foreign lands.

He noted the medical doctor David Donovan and his wife Shirley. They were kidnapped along with three other British missionaries on October 2017 for 22 days in Nigeria while doing medical work and preaching the gospel. Freeman describes them as "foot soldiers of a less fashionable and largely forgotten wing of aid work—Christian missionaries … it struck me that these were people of a sort I'd never encountered in two decades reporting on Africa and the Middle East. Here were white Christian missionaries, talking unapologetically about God."

Freeman had assumed, because of Britain's colonial past, these people were extinct. The chairman of Global Connections told him there are "several thousand British missionaries working through various church organizations worldwide today." Donovan had also been briefly kidnapped in 2009, their boats were stolen twice, and rats devoured their walkie-talkies. The writer summarizes their work in the rural community of Enekorogha, Nigeria:

Dangerous as it was, though, the work that the Donovan's and their companions did in Enekorogha made a difference. Prior to their arrival, the village had a child mortality rate of around 45 percent. When measles and cholera cases spiked, as they did at certain times of year, the resultant infant death toll was known locally as "the harvest." The missionaries helped reduce mortality to around two percent—a fact not lost on the local witch doctors, who had been hostile to the clinic when it first opened, but who ended up seeking treatment there themselves. The village idol keeper, a burly figure from whom local militants would ask for blessings, told the Donovan's "the god you serve is greater than the god I serve," and asked them to read the Bible.