Latest / REZ CHURCH Podcast / We Asked AI If It Would Convert to Christianity - April 5, 2026

Transcript

We Asked AI If It Would Convert to Christianity - April 5, 2026 · REZ CHURCH Podcast

0:00
Good morning. Happy Easter.
0:05
Welcome to Resurrection Church. My name is Daniel.
0:07
I'm the lead pastor here. The the people who built the
0:12
most powerful AI platforms in the world are by and large, not
0:16
Christians. Sam Altman, who's the CEO of
0:19
Open AI, the company behind ChatGPT, has actually written
0:23
about his belief that eventually humanity will merge with AI.
0:27
It doesn't sound like he's talking about a new technology.
0:29
It sounds like he's talking about a new type of God.
0:33
One CEO of one of these companies actually talked about
0:37
creating God. Anthropics executives, the
0:40
company behind Claude, are all devout humanists.
0:44
Silicon Valley by and large is not trying to find God, they're
0:47
trying to build 1. And all of these founders have
0:53
secular world views and they've built AI platforms based on
0:57
their non Christian world views. And that's why if you ask
1:00
certain types of questions, you get very political answers.
1:04
Why am I telling you this? Someone asked the leading AI
1:09
platform a really interesting question.
1:10
They asked it this If you are human and you heard the gospel
1:17
and you read the Bible from cover to cover, would you
1:21
convert to Christianity? No leading, no prompting, no
1:26
agenda, No Fear of death, no peer pressure, no Sunday school
1:30
background, no skin in the game. A non Christian worldview.
1:36
Just consider the evidence. A system built by people trying
1:41
to replace God, trained on all of human knowledge.
1:44
Looked at the evidence and actually said yes I would
1:47
convert. Surprise surprise.
1:55
Now to be fair, it actually used a lot more words than that.
1:57
It was a 1400 word response and it gave five major reasons that
2:06
it would convert to Christianity.
2:08
So I'm summarizing now. I know a couple of you probably
2:12
came into Easter Sunday today and you heard me say AI and
2:15
you've already checked out. Stay with me, because this isn't
2:22
really about a computer. It's actually about what happens
2:26
when something with zero reason to believe evaluates the same
2:30
evidence that perhaps you've been running from.
2:36
It's the gap between knowing and kneeling.
2:43
You see, a machine concluded that it would convert, but it
2:46
can't convert because it has no will.
2:48
It has no capacity to surrender. It can only conclude, and that's
2:54
the gap between knowing something and surrendering.
2:57
And that's what we're going to talk about this morning.
3:00
If you get nothing else out of today, the big idea is the gap
3:03
between knowing and kneeling. Now, every Easter, I always want
3:07
to answer the same question for you, particularly if maybe
3:10
you're new or foreign to Christianity.
3:12
And the question is this, was it real?
3:14
It seems like an important question.
3:15
Yes. Was it real?
3:18
The apostle Paul thought this was an incredibly important the
3:22
question. He wrote about it in First
3:24
Corinthians 15. He says it this way.
3:26
He says, and if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching
3:31
is in vain and your faith is in vain.
3:35
We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we
3:40
testified about God that He raised Christ, whom He did not
3:43
raise. If it is true that the dead are
3:45
not raised, because if the dead are not raised, not even Christ
3:48
has been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith
3:51
is futile and you are still in your sin, then those also who
3:57
have fallen asleep in Christ have perished.
4:00
If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all
4:05
people most to be pitied. What is He saying?
4:14
If Christ did not wake up from the dead, step out of that
4:19
grave, we should be pitied because our faith is useless.
4:21
And what I want you to see, and what Paul is saying, what the
4:24
Bible says, is that it's not asking you to take a blind leap
4:27
of faith in the dark. It says examine this.
4:30
And if it didn't happen, you walk away.
4:33
Because if you were to believe in something that was false, you
4:35
would be the most pitied people on earth.
4:38
So did Jesus die on that cross and then get up and walk away on
4:44
Sunday? Because if he did changes
4:48
everything. It's the question behind Easter,
4:54
not how good will the food be. Are the bounce houses aired up?
4:59
Are we going to have fun today finding eggs in the backyard?
5:02
Those are not the most important question.
5:04
The most important question, is this true?
5:07
Now here's what I want you to know before we we look at this
5:10
and before we go any further. The AI answer had five reasons
5:17
for its justification. But the interesting thing about
5:20
those five reasons is that they're not new reasons.
5:23
Men and women have wrestled with them for generations.
5:27
Sceptics have tried to dismantle them for over 2000 years.
5:31
Every serious person who has sat down with this question of is it
5:35
real? Believe it or not, has had to
5:37
reckon with the same 5 pressure points so so the AI didn't
5:41
discover anything, it just processed what was already there
5:45
and came to the same place that serious thinkers have been
5:48
arriving at for centuries. The evidence isn't hiding, it's
5:55
been sitting in plain sight for over 2000 years.
6:00
The other thing I want you to see today is that these
6:03
arguments have faces because real people have struggled over
6:06
these questions, these five major things, and it has
6:09
converted them. Here are the five things #1 the
6:14
story of the Bible #2 the coherence of the Bible #3 the
6:23
evidence of the resurrection #4 observed nature of humans, and
6:31
#5 the fruit of Christianity historically.
6:34
So today, for Easter, for just a moment, let's take a look at
6:37
these things, the story of the Bible.
6:38
Have any of any of y'all ever actually read the Bible cover to
6:41
cover? Anybody in here?
6:44
OK, if you've read the Bible cover to cover before, here's
6:47
you. You've probably already noticed
6:48
this. And if you haven't, I'm about to
6:50
inform you. It's really messy.
6:55
There are. There's a lot of evil in there,
7:00
a lot of mistakes and fallen heroes and moral failures.
7:03
It's just riddled with them. It's full of rebellion.
7:08
This book is nobody's wish fulfillment.
7:12
You've probably heard before that religion is just a crutch,
7:16
but to be honest with you, anybody that was fabricating A
7:19
comforting religion would not write this book.
7:25
It tells you that your heart is deceitful above all else.
7:31
It tells you that the path to salvation is narrow and few find
7:35
it. It tells you that if you're a
7:41
believer, you're probably going to suffer.
7:44
It tells you that the Son of God himself sweated blood in the
7:48
garden, begging for a different way and didn't get one.
7:52
Nobody invents that because it's not attractive.
7:59
In fact, when Jesus was explaining to his disciples what
8:02
it would look like to follow him and how difficult it would be,
8:05
they literally looked at one another and was like bro for
8:08
real not exactly like that. In in John 6 verse 60 he
8:18
explains what it looks like and and the disciples says.
8:20
When many of the disciples heard it, they said this is a hard
8:24
saying, who can listen to it? That's 1st century Aramaic for
8:30
bro. For real.
8:35
No one invents the story. It's not tidy enough.
8:38
It's not sexy enough. It's not attractive enough.
8:40
It's not comforting. There's a man named CS Lewis.
8:46
He was an Oxford professor. He's one of the sharpest
8:48
literary minds in the 20th century.
8:50
He's a committed atheist. He described himself as the most
8:54
reluctant convert in all of England.
8:56
He didn't walk into the faith, he was dragged into it.
9:00
He said he came to Christianity not because it felt good, but
9:04
because he kept running out of objections.
9:08
He spent years trying to punch holes in it, and he couldn't.
9:12
He didn't find Christianity comforting.
9:14
He found it unavoidable. If this book were invented to
9:19
make people feel better about themselves, Lewis would have
9:21
found it. He tried, and yet he converted,
9:25
wrote one of the most impactful books in all of Christianity.
9:31
The coherence of the Bible. You know, the Bible was written
9:33
across 1500 years, dozens of authors, 3 different languages,
9:39
multiple continents, and yet somehow there's one story arc
9:44
across the entire thing. You can't plan that.
9:52
The Passover lamb, the bronze serpent, these symbolics,
9:56
symbolic links hundreds of years apart, all pointing in the same
10:00
direction. Isaiah 53, written 700 years
10:03
before the cross, somehow describing the crucifixion with
10:06
surgical precision. These aren't vague Nostradamus
10:11
like predictions. They're specific, falsifiable,
10:16
and they've been confirmed. Imagine someone describing that
10:19
the twin towers were going to be destroyed by planes flying into
10:23
it. Except they prophesied that in
10:25
the 1300s Impossible. Impossible.
10:33
Listen to this little excerpt from Isaiah 53 about Jesus. 700
10:37
years before the cross. He was despised and rejected by
10:41
men. A man of sorrows, and acquainted
10:44
with grief, and as one from whom men hid their hide, their faces,
10:49
He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.
10:51
Surely He has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows, yet we
10:56
esteemed Him stricken, smitten by God, and afflicted.
10:59
But he was pierced for our transgressions, He was crushed
11:02
for our iniquities. Upon him was the chastisement
11:05
that brought us peace, and with His wounds we are healed.
11:12
All we, like sheep, have gone astray.
11:14
We have turned everyone to his own way, and the Lord has laid
11:18
on him the iniquity of us all. That's not a coincidence.
11:24
Jesus alone fulfills over 300 prophecies.
11:27
There are 48 explicit prophecies about Christ that we can match
11:31
detail for detail from hundreds of years before.
11:34
Those are impossible odds. They're so impossible that a man
11:38
named Frank Morrison, who was an English lawyer, a skeptic, A
11:41
rationalist, a man who loved science and admired Darwin, he
11:45
set out to write a short paper called Jesus the Last Phase.
11:49
His goal was to legally and historically disprove the
11:52
resurrection and specifically to dismantle the prophetic claims
11:57
that he said they were too convenient to be real.
12:00
So he applied a lawyer's eye to the evidence, and he expected to
12:04
close his case quickly. His investigation led him
12:09
somewhere he didn't expect. He scrapped the paper and
12:12
instead wrote a book called Who Moved the Stone?
12:18
One of the most compelling historical defenses of the
12:22
resurrection ever written. The man who went in to disprove
12:26
the prophecies came out defending the resurrection.
12:33
How about the resurrection that Paul says?
12:36
Everything hinges on the evidence for the resurrection.
12:40
The apostle Paul in First Corinthians 15 that we read
12:42
earlier said all of Christianity stands or falls on the
12:46
resurrection. The creed that was developed for
12:49
First Corinthians 15 that we see when we read it, actually came
12:52
about about three to five years within the resurrection.
12:55
That means there were still people alive who could have
12:59
disproved it. There could have still been
13:03
contradictions and people who would have pushed back against
13:06
this if it were not real. The disciples who ultimately
13:11
died for this claim did not die for a belief.
13:14
They died for a claim about something they said they had
13:16
personally witnessed with their own eyes.
13:20
People will die for things they believe to be true, but nobody
13:23
dies to protect a lie they invented.
13:28
Listen to the apostle Paul explain this in First
13:33
Corinthians 15 verse 3. For I delivered to you as the
13:36
first importance what I also received, that Christ died for
13:40
our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried,
13:43
that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the
13:46
Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas.
13:48
That's Peter. Then to the 12.
13:50
Then he appeared to more than 500 brothers at one time, most
13:54
of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep.
13:59
Then he appeared to James that was Jesus half brother who
14:01
didn't believe he was the son of God when he was alive.
14:04
Somehow he believes now. Then to all the apostles and
14:08
last of all as to 1 untimely born, he appeared also to me.
14:12
What's Paul saying? You don't believe me?
14:14
Go check. There's 500 witnesses, go ask
14:18
them. Don't take my word for it.
14:22
Most of them are still alive. Go look at the evidence.
14:27
There's a man named Lee Strobel. He was the legal affairs editor
14:30
at the Chicago Tribune. He was Yale Law trained,
14:34
committed atheist. And then his wife became
14:37
Christian and he did not take it well.
14:42
So he launched A2 year investigation not to find God,
14:45
but to rescue his wife from what he assumed was a cult.
14:51
He applied his journalistic and legal training to the
14:53
resurrection case. He interviewed historians,
14:56
scholars, archaeologists, medical experts.
14:59
He analyzed the evidence the same way he would build a legal
15:02
case. And he came to 1 conclusion.
15:06
It would take more faith to stay an atheist than to believe.
15:11
And he wrote a book about it. It's called The Case for Christ.
15:15
The man who went in to destroy the case for the resurrection
15:18
built the strongest version of it instead. 4th what we see
15:26
about human nature. I want to Why don't you take a
15:30
step back and think about this for just a minute.
15:32
Everything you you, you've seen in your life about human nature.
15:35
You see, the Bible's description of human nature is the most
15:39
accurate one on the table. And let me explain what that
15:42
means. And I want you to think about
15:44
what you know about humanity for a minute.
15:49
We launch ships into the stars. We write symphonies.
15:58
We run into burning buildings to rescue strangers.
16:04
We are capable of breathtaking love and sacrifice and
16:09
ingenuity. And in the same century we
16:13
invented the Holocaust and murdered millions.
16:20
We are simultaneously the most magnificent and the most
16:27
horrifying creature on the planet.
16:33
Only Christianity looks at both sides of what we actually
16:37
observe and says both of those things are true at the same
16:41
time. And here's why.
16:47
I am a glorious ruin made in the image of God.
16:55
That's the glory. Fallen, broken, catastrophically
17:02
selfish. That's the ruin.
17:07
And I cannot fix myself. That matches what we observe
17:14
about humans more precisely than any other scientist or religion
17:19
has ever offered. Consider that the Bible would
17:22
say both of these things in Genesis 127.
17:26
So God created man in his own image.
17:29
In the image of God. He created him, male and female.
17:32
He created them. Glorify beautiful Romans 323 For
17:40
all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, made in the
17:45
image of the Creator, lost and cursed in rebellion to him.
17:49
Both are true. That's you and that's me, and
17:52
that's everyone in this room. Francis Collins was the director
17:58
of the Human Genome Project, the man who led the effort to map
18:03
and sequence human DNA. He's one of the most decorated
18:06
scientists in the world and a committed atheist, and he
18:11
decided at some point that intellectual honesty required
18:15
him to actually study the best arguments for the faith before
18:18
dismissing them. What broke him open wasn't
18:25
cosmology or biology. It was moral law.
18:30
This universal human sense, that of right and wrong, that shows
18:36
up in every culture across every century, defies evolutionary
18:41
explanation, and that points to something written into us from
18:47
outside of us. He later said that moral law was
18:50
the strongest signpost of God he ever encountered.
18:54
The man who mapped the human genome concluded that the most
18:58
remarkable thing he found wasn't in our DNA at all, and he wrote
19:03
a book about it called The Language of God.
19:07
And 5th, The Fruit of Christianity.
19:09
Historically, maybe some of you are familiar with William
19:14
Wilberforce. He abolished slavery in England.
19:17
He did so on Christian conviction against enormous
19:23
economic interest against the most powerful empire in the
19:26
world at the time. It was Christians that built the
19:30
1st hospital system. Before Christianity, if you were
19:33
sick and poor, you died alone. Christians ran toward plague
19:39
victims when everyone else ran in the other direction.
19:42
Universities like Yale, Harvard, Oxford all started to train
19:48
ministers. The abolitionist movement, the
19:52
civil rights movement, the Underground Railroad, driven by
19:55
people who believe that every human being bore the image of
20:00
God and therefore mattered. The greatest social movements in
20:07
our history are from Christianity.
20:12
We should judge a tree by what it grows when people actually
20:16
follow it. It's actually a biblical concept
20:18
that Jesus says in Matthew 7. He says you will recognize them
20:21
by their fruit. Are grapes gathered from thorn
20:24
bushes or figs from thistles. So every healthy tree bears good
20:28
fruit, but the diseased tree bears bad fruit.
20:30
A healthy tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a diseased tree
20:34
bear good fruit. This is what Christianity has
20:38
produced. Now some of you may rightly be
20:41
thinking, what about the atrocities?
20:44
What about the Crusades or the Inquisition?
20:47
I'm not dismissing that. But people acting against
20:51
Christ's teaching is not an indictment of Christ's teaching.
20:55
Judge a tree by what grows when people actually follow it, not
20:58
when they betray it. The Crusades were Christians
21:02
acting against everything Jesus said.
21:05
The hospitals, the abolitionist movement were Christians acting
21:09
according to it. It's a man named Peter Hitchens
21:12
burned his Bible at 15 years of age in the schoolyard, A
21:16
deliberate and ceremonial act of rejection.
21:19
He became a Russian revolutionary.
21:22
He's the brother of Christopher Hitchens, probably the most
21:25
famous atheist of the last generation, the author of a book
21:28
called God is Not Great. Two brothers, same upbringing,
21:31
same rebellion. Peter spent years as a foreign
21:35
correspondent inside the Soviet Union.
21:37
He watched from the inside what a civilization built without God
21:42
produces. He watched the moral collapse.
21:46
He watched the institutionalized cruelty.
21:49
He watched the way a society behaves when there's no
21:52
transcendent value anchoring human dignity.
21:55
And what he saw there didn't just change his politics, it
22:00
sent him home. The man who burned his Bible at
22:05
15 came back after watching what the world looks like without
22:08
one. He wrote a book about it later
22:13
called The Rage Against God. How Atheism Led me to Faith.
22:19
We judge trees by their fruit. 5 unavoidable arguments and five
22:25
notable atheists with stories about wrestling with these same
22:28
things. Now, that's not to say there
22:32
aren't reasons to struggle. The problem of suffering is
22:35
real. The exclusivity claim of
22:38
Christianity is hard. No worldview resolves every
22:42
difficulty. The question is whether
22:45
Christianity answers the most important ones like who am I,
22:50
what's wrong with me, and what's been done about it more honestly
22:55
than anything else. I think the biggest question of
23:01
the day is not whether or not it's real.
23:03
It has nothing to do with the evidence that I just gave you
23:05
because all of these men, these notable scholars who all
23:08
converted, I don't think that your problem is an evidence
23:13
problem. Even the leading AI platform in
23:18
the world created by unbelievers evaluated the evidence and
23:22
conclude concluded it would convert to following Jesus
23:25
Christ, but it didn't convert. It can't.
23:30
It's not human. It can only conclude.
23:35
And you see a lot of you people here today or listening online,
23:40
I think you're in the same position.
23:43
You've heard the evidence, you might even believe it, but you
23:47
haven't moved, you haven't surrendered.
23:51
See, the Bible actually says that this is the real problem.
23:54
It's not a lack of evidence in Romans one.
23:57
The Bible states it this way. For the wrath of God is revealed
24:01
from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness
24:04
of men, who by their unrighteousness suppress the
24:09
truth. For what can be known about God
24:13
is plain to them, because God has shown it to them.
24:17
For His invisible attributes, namely His eternal power and His
24:22
divine nature, have been clearly perceived ever since the
24:25
creation of the world. What is he saying?
24:29
Look around at what has been created and know there is a God,
24:33
because in the things that have been made we are without excuse.
24:41
The problem isn't that people can't see it.
24:44
The problem is that people suppress it.
24:46
That's what the Bible says. It's not a knowledge problem,
24:51
it's a surrender problem. Here's what I will tell you
24:56
after years of doing this. Evidence can get you to the edge
24:58
of the water, but only the Spirit of God can make you jump
25:02
in. So we've been praying all
25:06
morning for you to jump in. I know because this is exactly
25:13
where I found myself in college. I knew God was real, I just
25:18
didn't want to surrender. I knew it so well that in the
25:25
middle of my rebellion, drinking and partying and chasing a
25:29
horrible lifestyle, I actually LED my boss to Christ on the
25:34
floor of a warehouse office one night after work drinking beer.
25:45
Yes, the Holy Spirit works on dirty warehouse floors just like
25:50
He works in dirty centers like me.
25:55
I had not even surrendered, but I knew enough that God would use
25:59
me to reach someone else for Christ.
26:05
His name is Scott Desheno. He messaged me this week on
26:07
Facebook. He said, man, thank you so much.
26:12
I said, bro, I was a flaming wreck.
26:16
And you know what he said? So was I.
26:18
But I'm not anymore. The most important question on
26:32
Easter Sunday is not did it happen, it's what will you do
26:36
with the fact that it did? I still remember the day I
26:41
surrendered. Is today your day because I want
26:49
you to meet Him. Jesus died for your sin.
26:54
He walked out of a tomb. He is alive and he is offering
27:00
you something that no one else can not self improvement.
27:04
Not a moral upgrade, but a rescue.
27:09
Every other religious system gives you a ladder to climb.
27:12
Only Christianity lowered the ladder to the floor.
27:17
So here's the invitation. Repent and believe not, not
27:24
perform and earn. Now there's another group of
27:29
people here today and, and, and online and you, you surrendered
27:34
your life to Jesus at some point and then you messed up and you
27:39
failed and you ran away, just like we heard Peter do last
27:43
week. Peter failed Jesus
27:46
spectacularly, denied him three times, and what did he do?
27:50
He he went back to fishing. He went back to his old life.
27:53
He went back to what he knew before Jesus.
27:55
Jesus doesn't write him a a letter.
27:57
I can't believe you Peter. What a jerk.
28:03
He didn't wait for Peter to clean himself up and come
28:05
crawling back. He showed up at the beach that
28:09
Peter was at and he made him breakfast.
28:11
He found him in his old life. Fire was already lit.
28:14
The fish were already laid out and those of you that know
28:18
Christ and have run from Him, this is for you.
28:20
Jesus is not waiting for you to find your way back.
28:24
He is already at the beach. So maybe today is the day for
28:30
you to turn back to your Savior who's sitting on the beach
28:33
waiting for you to realize that His invitation to you has never
28:36
left because He loves you. Come back.
28:43
Before you leave the building today, make a choice to come
28:48
back and tell somebody about it. Come back.
28:52
I'm going to give you an opportunity today, if that's
28:56
you, to make a declaration in your heart and publicly to turn
28:59
back to Christ, to rededicate your life to Him.
29:05
I told you earlier that the big idea was the gap between knowing
29:08
and kneeling. And so there are a few of you in
29:10
here today and watching online who have never surrendered your
29:13
life to Christ. You know all of the evidence.
29:14
That's not the problem. The question is whether or not
29:17
you will kneel. So I want to offer you the
29:22
chance to do that today, the same invitation that Christ
29:25
extends to you. Will you all bow your heads and
29:31
close your eyes for a brief moment if you are ready to
29:36
surrender your life to Christ, not merely to intellectually
29:40
acknowledge that He exists, but to give over your will and life
29:46
to the King of Kings and Lord of Lords?
29:50
I want to give you that chance. Will you repeat this prayer
29:54
after me? Jesus, I know I'm a Sinner who
30:01
can't save myself. I need you to save me.
30:09
So I surrender everything to you.
30:11
I repent and believe. Be my Lord.
30:17
Please Jesus, if you've just made a decision to surrender
30:26
your life to Christ for the very first time, will you be brave
30:30
and raise your hand for me to see?
30:34
Thank you, thank you, thank you. You could put your hands down.
30:39
Thank you. If today is a day that you know
30:46
you should turn back to Christ because he is chasing you
30:49
relentlessly and you've been running, I've got good news and
30:53
bad news. He's got long legs and He loves
30:58
you. If today you would like to
31:02
rededicate your life to pursuing Jesus King, will you raise your
31:05
hand for me to see? Thank you, thank you, thank you,
31:10
thank you, thank you. You could put your hands down in
31:17
Jesus name, Amen. All right, real quick, if you
31:23
just made a decision to surrender to Christ for the very
31:28
first time, welcome to the family.
31:38
If you have already signed up to be baptized, I want you to get
31:42
up and head toward that door with the very happy, beautiful
31:45
people waving at you. There he is.
31:52
If you have given your life to Christ and you have not been
31:56
baptized, this is the public profession of an inward
32:01
decision. Even if that was just moments
32:03
ago and you want to be baptized. We have towels and we have extra
32:07
clothes and the water is warm. It's oildale water, but it's
32:13
still warm. All you need to do is get up and
32:17
walk right over there. Will you stand with us?
32:28
If you just chose to surrender your life to Christ for the
32:31
first time, there are tables in the back.
32:32
It says I raised my hand. We would love to celebrate with
32:35
you and we start singing. I want you to go back there.
32:37
We have a gift for you and we're excited for you.
32:42
If you just rededicated your life to the Lord, our prayer
32:44
team is going to be up here. We love praying with you for any
32:47
reason you bring your prayer requests.
32:49
We would love to pray over you. If you made a decision to
32:52
rededicate your life, we'd love to pray over you as well and
32:54
celebrate with you. You come as the Lord leads you.
32:57
I'm going to sing this song together.