Is there more to life than this? The Alpha Course

Hi, I’m Nikki. Welcome to Alpha. Life is busy. Every day we ask so many questions. What should I wear? What’s the weather going to be like? What’s happening today? How am I going to fit everything in? But then there are those bigger questions like why am I here? Where am I heading? Is this it? Is there more to life than this? These are life’s big questions. But there’s rarely enough time to think them through properly. We all have different perspectives on the meaning of life and faith. And Alpha is an opportunity to explore life’s big questions. This is a great place to come together and talk about them openly and honestly. I’m Gemma. I’m Toby. And this is Alpha.

Where do I go when I have big life questions? That’s hard. Sometimes Google. Mostly on Google. I steer away from Google generally. Each other. Him. I go to TikTok, talking to my friends about it, usually to the studio and just record something. I go to my grandpa. I’d say my parents, a mentor, someone who’s a bit older, someone who’s a bit more experienced. Probably my mom, my grandparents, and then my school tutor. Probably each other, I’d say. I would say I would talk to my brother. My brother’s a very intelligent person. We’re both interested in philosophy. Probably some really close friends or a book. I guess I go inwards. I think I definitely withdraw and take time to pray about it. I would first go to my family. My parents. Husband first, Instagram second, and then Google and then mom and dad.

I wonder how she feels, how her parents feel about being number three in that list. Good morning. My name is Daniel, and welcome to Alpha. We always say on the first week of Alpha, congratulations for making it. We know it’s a difficult thing to try something new. This is the first time as a church we’ve run the first session of Alpha in a service. We know it’s a really daunting thing to go to a program like Alpha, meeting new people. We know it’s a really daunting thing if you’re not used to going to church to go to church. I don’t know which one is more daunting. Probably the answer is they’re just both really hard. So, if you’ve come here for Alpha, good job on making it.

One of the guys who’s on the Alpha team, Charlie Massie in the UK, says at the start of Alpha, he always remembers the fact that his first Alpha he lasted seven minutes before he left. He left Alpha after seven minutes and went down to the pub. So if you’re here still at this point, good job. You’ve made it past that. He went down to the pub and decided, “I’m just going to have a drink.” Some of his friends were there and they said, “Oh, where have you been?” And he said, “Oh, I went to this religious thing.” They said, “Did they have guitars?” And he said, “They did.” They said, “Ah, it’s definitely a cult then.”

People have different perspectives of what it might be, and it is difficult and confusing. Charlie’s attitude at the time and his friend’s attitude was he dodged a bullet. He got out of there before the cult locked him in for a lifetime. His attitude towards faith was that it was something that had just been made up. It was created just to placate people who feel like, what does it mean to be a human? We need to have some answer for it. So we’ll make up this created faith. Maybe that’s something that you think as well. One of the biggest phrases I hear, the pop phrase at the moment on social media, is the “sky daddy.” This made-up sky daddy that people think is up there somehow. Sometimes faith is pictured like that and lots of people have that feeling. That was certainly Charlie Massie’s thoughts when he was engaging with Alpha for the first time. Maybe it’s that it’s something created.

Or maybe your thought towards religion is, doesn’t Christianity just make life harder? It’s just this list of things we have to do. I heard this great story about a kid who was in church and the minister up the front said, “Let’s all pray together and confess our sins.” The child said to his dad, “Oh dear, what did the priest do that he needs to confess his sins?” And the father said to him, “Oh, no, no, no. It’s not him. It’s all of us.” The kid was called Monty. Monty left to go to the bathroom, a very young kid. As he came back from the bathroom, he walked back into the back of the room, looked around, and then went, “Naughty, naughty, naughty, naughty. Everyone here has sinned.” Maybe there’s that attitude that faith or Christianity or Jesus just makes us feel more guilty about things. Isn’t life hard enough as it is without putting more guilt on us for the things that we feel like we’ve done?

Or doesn’t suffering itself disprove a loving God? Surely there can’t be a loving God if we look at so much suffering in the world. Once again, this was one of Charlie Massie’s thoughts in his days of processing faith. He says that he went to Africa on a trip and he stayed with a family, a very poor family, and on their wall was a poster, an artwork that said, “I’m the bread of life,” quoted by Jesus. It just said that. He said he remembers just thinking how ironic it was that here they got these people who barely have bread for themselves and they got this poster on the wall that says they believe in Jesus as the bread of life. At some point, he just asked them about it. He said, “It’s just interesting to me that you have so little, and yet you have this poster that says Jesus is the bread of life.” He says the lady just explained it to him as, “Oh no, that’s not, we don’t believe that he’s giving us physical bread to eat. It’s a spiritual thing.” Then she said this. She said something like, “In your culture,” referring to the UK, “in your culture you read a lot, you learn a lot, and you fill your heads with a lot. I just wonder what you fill the rest with. What do you hunger after?”

Charlie reflected on that and his real thought was that this is just, she just doesn’t know better. She’s just hanging on to whatever she can. The reality is while the argument of suffering is a difficult one and many wrestle with it, the biggest catalyst to atheism is not suffering. The biggest catalyst to atheism around the world is wealth, consistently around the world. The most atheistic countries are the wealthiest countries. Now, you could say it’s not wealth, it’s education, because with wealth comes education. So the wealthier countries are just more educated and therefore they know better. Certainly, there is a wrestle with that idea and what that means.

I think there’s a couple of thoughts that certainly other great minds have thought. Christopher Hitchens famously is one of them. He says, “Religion has run out of justifications thanks to the telescope and the microscope. It no longer offers an explanation of anything important.” That may be something that you resonate with. There still is a question there though. If that’s true, if education has answered all the questions, why do we still have some? Why do we still wonder, is there more? Are we satisfied with the answer that’s it? That’s all life has to offer. Is there more?

I would say the answer to that question is not religion. Maybe that’s a surprising thing for a minister of a church to stand at the front and say the answer to the meaning of life is not religion. But I think it’s right to say that religion is a list of tasks that we do that just add more and more to our plate and just heap guilt on top of us. The answer of the Bible is not religion. Steven Fry says this about religion: “After all, what is a halo? It’s just one more thing to keep clean.”

The answer isn’t religion. I do believe the answer is Jesus, and that is what Alpha really wants to wrestle with. Alpha, the name is just based on the Greek letter alpha. It just means the first things, the beginning. That’s what Alpha seeks to do, is wrestle with these questions because I think the Bible opens up opportunities. I think learning about and discovering Jesus opens up opportunities to explore this. There’s a book in the Bible called Ecclesiastes. The name just means the speaker, the preacher. Ecclesiastes. Ecclesiastes 3:11 says, “God has planted eternity in every human heart.” There is a longing for more. We just read from the Bible. Jesus uses these words. He says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” The answer isn’t religion. The answer is Jesus.

We’re going to watch a bit of the Alpha video. Alpha videos, each session normally goes for about 25 minutes. I’ve used up the first part of that. So, we’re going to watch 15 minutes of an Alpha session, give you a taste of what those videos look like and other information that’s in them, and then I will return shortly. But we’re going to keep processing the question, is there more to life than this?

Something Was Missing

For much of my life, I was not remotely interested in Christianity. In fact, I don’t think I’d ever come to something like Alpha. I was not brought up as a Christian. My father was a secular Jew. He was an agnostic, and my mother didn’t go to church. I had no interest at all in Christianity. First of all, I just thought it was so boring. Everything to me about church, Christianity, religion was just dull and dreary. It kind of made me feel a little bit guilty. I didn’t know why, but I just didn’t want to have anything to do with it. I also thought it was untrue. I thought I’d sort of thought it through and I’d come up with these intellectual objections. I called myself, very pretentiously, I called myself a logical determinist, and I quite enjoyed arguing with people who called themselves Christians. At university, I had a bit of a reputation for being an argumentative atheist. I also thought it was irrelevant to my life. I couldn’t see how someone who’d lived 2,000 years ago, 2,000 miles away could have any relevance to my life today. It just seemed outdated and irrelevant.

But at the same time, looking back now, I would say something was missing. I say that because I don’t think I was living in the moment. I was always looking forward to the next thing in life. So when I was at school, I was thinking when I finished my exams, maybe that will be when I’m going to really start to enjoy life. I finished my exams and then after about three weeks, I started to think there’s got to be more to life than this. I thought, well, maybe when I’ve left school, that will be what life’s all about. Then I left school and after about three weeks, I started to think there’s got to be more to life than this. I thought, well, maybe the answer is to get a girlfriend. Somehow, I don’t know how I managed it, but I managed to find a girlfriend. After about three weeks, I think there’s got to be more to life than this. There was something missing. I was longing for more.

The actor Jim Carrey once said, “I wish everyone could get rich and famous and have everything they’ve ever dreamed of so they would know that’s not the answer.” Some people dream of having their name in lights, of fame and fortune. Some people dream of finding happiness through relationships, careers, money, whatever it may be. But do you ever get that niggly feeling that as good as those things are, there must be more to life? All too often life just doesn’t turn out the way we think it should. Even when it does and we achieve our wildest dreams, it’s somehow never quite enough. It just doesn’t satisfy. It’s like there’s something missing.

The comedian and actor Russell Brand said, “Drugs and alcohol are not my problem. Reality is my problem. Drugs and alcohol are my solution to fill up a hole inside me.” And Jesus said, “I am the bread of life.” In other words, I’m the one who fulfills the longing that’s deep inside every human heart. Jesus claimed to be the one person who can satisfy that spiritual hunger.

Freddy Mercury, the lead singer of the rock group Queen, had amassed a huge fortune and attracted millions of fans. But he admitted in an interview shortly before his death, that he was desperately lonely. He said this, “You can have everything in the world and still be the loneliest man, and that’s the most bitter type of loneliness. Success has brought me world idolization and millions of pounds. But it’s prevented me from having the one thing we all need, a loving ongoing relationship.”

Ultimately, there’s only one relationship that is totally loving and goes on forever, and that’s a relationship with God. And Jesus said, “I am the way to that relationship.” Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.”

What makes you happy? Oh, friends and music, I reckon. Food, freshly washed hair, eating a bowl of pasta on the couch. It’s the way to go. Ice cream. Mint chocolate ice cream. I think when people are around, we get happy. Hanging out with my friends and watching cricket. My family and being on country. Babies with the boys. Cool. Alcohol. My dog makes me really happy.

Is there more to life than this? Oh, yeah. Definitely. I think so. I guess I’d hope so. I think I’m here for a reason. I think we all are. I don’t know. Oh, yeah. I definitely think there’s, I don’t know what it is, but I don’t believe like once my physical body’s gone that that’s the end of it.

Jesus Is The Way, The Truth, And The Life

When I was about 17, I was sitting having a burger with two friends and we were looking out the window and commenting on a few of the stores across the street. I suddenly realized that I couldn’t read any of the signs, even if I squinted. So, I asked if I could borrow one of my friend’s pair of glasses. As soon as I put them on, I realized I could see everything: colors, shapes, words. I was amazed at how everything was so clear. I could see before, but now I could really see. To me, that’s the best way to describe the difference that Jesus makes. Jesus is the lens through which we see God. He’s also the lens by which we see the world in a totally different way.

I Am The Truth

Jesus said, “I am the truth.” Some people’s response to a Christian might be, “Well, it’s great for you. You found meaning and purpose in your life, but it’s not for me.” But when you think about it, that’s not actually a logical position because if Christianity is true, it’s of vital importance to every one of us. If it’s not true, it’s not great for us because it means we’re deluded.

C.S. Lewis was one of the great intellectual giants of the 20th century, probably best known as the author of the Chronicles of Narnia. He said this:

Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.

C.S. Lewis

I come from a family of lawyers. So naturally, I wanted to look at the original documents and sources. I never really looked at the evidence before. I was astonished at how much evidence there is for the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. For me, it was through reading these documents that we find in the New Testament that I came to the conclusion, it’s true. One of the last cases I did as a lawyer was in the court of appeal in front of Lord Denning, an absolutely brilliant mind, perhaps the greatest judge of the 20th century. He said on one occasion that his Bible was his most tattered book in his library. He’d examined the evidence really carefully and he came to the conclusion, it’s true. One former professor of history at Oxford University described the resurrection as the best attested fact in history.

I hadn’t realized how many of the pioneers of modern science were believers: Descartes, Newton, Kepler, Galileo, Locke, Copernicus, Faraday, Kelvin, Pasteur. Francis Collins, one of the greatest scientists of our time, was director of the Human Genome Project, mapping the three billion letters in the human DNA, considered by many to be the most significant scientific undertaking of our time. He describes how he encountered Jesus and came to believe in the truth of Christianity.

In the home where I grew up, faith was not something that was talked about very much. My father was a professor of drama, my mother a playwright. When I went to college and those discussions in the dorm late at night about religion began to occur, I had no particular reason to attach value to a faith system. It had never been something I was familiar with or had internalized at all. I assumed that any religious feelings that anyone held must be on the basis of some emotional experience, and I didn’t trust those, or on the basis of some childhood indoctrination, which I felt I was fortunate to have missed.

I loved the experience of learning about the human body and all of the components of that, and I particularly loved being introduced to genetics. But then I ended up in the medical school curriculum sitting at the bedside of patients with diseases. This was no longer an abstract study of molecules and organ systems. These were real people. One afternoon, one of my patients, a wonderful elderly woman, much like a grandmother, who had very bad heart disease, she had a particularly bad episode of chest pain while I was with her. She got through it and at the end of that explained to me how her faith was the thing that helped her in that situation. She realized that the doctors around her weren’t really giving her that much help, but her faith was. After she finished her own very personal description of that faith, she turned to me, and I had been silent, and she looked at me quizzically and she said, “What do you believe, doctor?”

Ultimately I had to admit to myself that her question had made me realize that I had arrived at an answer to the most important issue that we humans ever deal with: Is there a God? I had arrived there without ever really looking at the evidence. I was supposed to be a scientist. If there’s one thing scientists claim they do is to arrive at conclusions based upon evidence. I hadn’t taken the trouble to do that. I was greatly assisted by a pastor who lived down the road who I went and asked about all this and who gave me a copy of C.S. Lewis’s wonderful book Mere Christianity because here was an Oxford scholar, a prodigiously developed intellect who had traveled the same path. Within those pages, I realized for the first time that one can come to belief on a rational basis and that in fact, given the many pointers that one sees around oneself in terms of the universe and it having a beginning and its fine-tuning, in terms of the way in which all those constants that determine the behavior of matter and energy seem to have been set just in a certain very precise range to make life possible, and many other things including my beloved mathematics and why they actually work anyway to describe the universe. Something that makes you think the creator must have been a mathematician.

That brought me then to the person of Jesus Christ as a person who was historically extremely well documented. That was news to me. I thought Christ was as much myth as history. I realized after reading more about it, this was a historical figure upon which we have a great deal of evidence for his existence and his teachings and even his rising from the dead in a literal way. That day at my patient’s bedside started a journey for me. A journey that I was reluctant to begin but I felt I needed to. A journey that I thought would result in strengthening my atheism, but to my surprise resulted in my conversion.

If you could ask God one question, what would it be? Oh, that’s a good question. Why are spiders so scary? I don’t know. I’d probably say like, is the Loch Ness monster real or something like that. Man, it would be the one thing that I feel like everyone asks is why do bad things happen? Why there has to be so much hurt and why people have to suffer so much. Why create the world? I think I’d be like, why is humanity so flawed?

There’s a difference between knowing facts about someone and really knowing them personally. Now, I’ve known my husband, Phil, for three years now, but suppose if before we met, I found him on a website called The Amazing Man. There’s no doubt I would have looked at him and thought, “Okay, I’m intrigued.” But what if each page was dedicated to his amazing abilities, his sparkling personality, his tender heart, his extraordinary intelligence, and his cooking abilities? Well, I would think, “Wow, he does sound like an amazing person.” But that’s head knowledge. But I also have the privilege of being married to him. I know that he’s an amazing person, which is knowledge that comes from experience of relationship. That’s heart knowledge.

When Jesus said, “I am the truth,” he was talking about more than just a kind of intellectual truth. The Hebrew understanding of truth was truth as experienced. There’s a big difference between a kind of intellectual knowledge and a personal knowledge, between your head and your heart. So when someone says, “I know Jesus is the truth,” they’re not just talking about being convinced of the evidence. They’re also talking about experiencing a relationship with the risen Jesus Christ.

I Am The Life

So Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth,” and lastly, he said, “I am the life. I have come that you may have life and have it to the full.” Jesus came to deal with the things in our lives that stop us from enjoying life to the full, the things that spoil our lives.

I hate shopping. I loathe it. I think I’m allergic to shopping. But occasionally my wife Pippa persuades me to go shopping. Just after Christmas, it was the sales and she persuaded me to go shopping. We went into the shop and we bought this very nice new sweater, same color as all my other sweaters. We left the shop and we went to buy a present for her and we went into this ghastly shop. It was so crowded. It was unbelievable. Even Pippa had had enough and she said, “Okay, we’re leaving.” So, we went to leave. As we left, the security alarm went off. The security guys moved in very quickly and they stopped us all from leaving. The crowd that was trying to leave was stopped and the crowd that was trying to come in was stopped. We were there right in the middle. The six of us who were going through the security at that one time were all taken off and sectioned off from all the rest and they wanted to see which one of the six of us had set off the alarm.

So they sent one of them through and that was fine. They obviously hadn’t set it off. Then they sent the next one through. They obviously hadn’t set it off. Then the third, then the fourth. None of them set it off. So it was left with Pippa and I standing there and I thought, “Oh my goodness, I’m married to a shoplifter. It must be Pippa who’s set off the alarm.” So they sent her through and she didn’t set it off. So I thought, “Oh my goodness, I’ve obviously got something. Someone must have planted something on me. I’m going to be arrested. I’m going to be sent to prison.” All the crowd were watching, both sides. They were just watching this criminal who’d been caught going through. So I went through and as I went through, the alarm went off. They took me to the side. They opened up my rucksack on my back. There they found this sweater from the other shop with the tag still on it.

I felt so guilty. That was false guilt. I also sometimes experience true feelings of guilt because I do things that are not right, that are not good. This is the wonderful news that God loves you and he loves me. God came in the person of his son Jesus Christ to die for you and for me. On the cross, he took all of your guilt, all of my guilt, everything you’ve ever done wrong, everything I’ve ever done wrong, said wrong, thought wrong, and he died in our place in order that we could be forgiven. Forgiveness, C.S. Lewis said, is like a recording of our life wiped completely clean. When we receive that forgiveness, we find life and life in all its fullness. That’s what Jesus wants for you and for me. Life in all its fullness. Life at its very, very best.

More Than A Coloring Competition

I think as we engage with what it means to understand who Jesus is, sometimes it can feel like life is trying to color inside the lines, desperately trying to make sure that we get the picture right, try to stay in the lines as much as possible. If you ever see those, like at Bunnings, sometimes they have a coloring contest or something like that, a kid will have that kind of experience, try to do their absolute best coloring in. Just recently we bought a cheap version of some high-quality alcoholic coloring pens. They are amazing. They just bleed into the paper and blend the colors in a way that you don’t get the lines and you don’t get the scribbles in the same way that you do with other things, and you get this much more significant quality picture.

I think the difficulty is if we come to life with that kind of attitude, we know we’ve already colored outside the lines. Once you’ve done it, once the picture goes outside, what do you do about it then? If life adds up to you aiming for the coloring competition and you’ve got to be good enough that you get the prize, if that’s what faith is about, then I think we recognize many of us are in trouble. There are other people in the world that have stuck inside the lines better than we ever have.

If instead of a coloring in competition, the message of Jesus is the parent who takes a coloring in picture from their child. It’s a completely different image of what it means to color in that picture, isn’t it? Because you put that up on your fridge, on your wall, not because they got it perfect, but because of who they are and your relationship with them. You’re not walking around picking up other kids’ artworks and going, “I’ll put that one up. At least then it looks like I’m a good parent.” You do it because it’s your child.

When Jesus says he’s the way, the truth, and the life, we get that same picture that this is about relationship. The Alpha course is all about wrestling and discovering and working through that. I want to say if you’ve never experienced it before, I’ve never experienced anything like Alpha. The opportunity to just share what we think, what you think, freely. The goal of our Alpha sessions is not for the program to tell you what you have to think. The opportunity is to hear what the Bible teaches of who Jesus is and wrestle with that yourself. Everyone I’ve talked to that has done that and talks about the opportunity of just hearing what people think is really great.

Today we’ve listened to the talk and normally at an Alpha session, so starting next week, there will be a talk like that but there’s also an opportunity for some discussion time. That in itself can be quite daunting, I understand that. You don’t have to say anything. You’re welcome to come along to Alpha and just listen to what other people think or you’re welcome to put your thoughts out on the table and wrestle with them as loud as you’d like. We watched the story of Junior. I remember when Junior was at Alpha. He’s got a very loud voice. The whole room heard Junior and the things Junior was wrestling with. It was a bit of a joke. Junior thought that was quite funny himself. That’s what Alpha is. I want to encourage you to try Alpha if you’re interested. If you got a contact card when you came in, there’s just a tick box on there that says, “I’d like to know more about Jesus.” That’s it. You tick that and we’ll make sure we get Alpha information to you and make that opportunity for you to come as easy as possible. Otherwise, there’s a signup sheet at the back before you leave today. Try Alpha. Here’s a final video.

Welcome To Alpha

I used to think Christianity was boring, untrue, and irrelevant. But when I read about Jesus, I realized he was anything but. Jesus said he’s the way to God. He’s the one who brings meaning and purpose to your life. He said he’s the truth. He said he’s the life. That true fulfillment is found in a relationship with God through him.

Alpha is a place where you can be yourself. You can say what you think and challenge everything. No question is too complex or too simple. What your point of view is is as important as anyone else’s. Over the weeks ahead, we are going on a journey together, an adventure to explore the questions of life, faith, and meaning.

Think of it this way. If you live to be 70, you’re going to spend 20 years and 3 months asleep, 10 years and 5 months watching TV, 5 years and 9 months in some form of transportation, 7 years and 6 months eating and drinking. You have approximately 570,000 hours left to live.

So why not spend less than 24 of them asking life’s biggest questions. Welcome to Alpha.