Waking slowly, I could have sworn I was looking at the corpse of a badly-mauled leopard on the floor by the bed. Yep, that’s a dead leopard alright—how it got in here is a mystery—little Albert’s more powerful than I imagined. Waking more, to my relief I now can make out that it is just a throw blanket that must have fallen off the bed during the night. Whew, that was close!

  Ever had one of those days when you slowly wake from sleep to discover your dreamy world must now be re-interpreted in the light of morning? The thing is, our minds are hardwired for patterns and meaning. We create meanings where none truly exist. Like looking at the dots of ceiling tiles or watching fluffy clouds on a sunny day. We don’t see chaos; we see rabbits, sheep, or Uncle Milton’s profile. We can’t help it; our minds are designed to see patterns wherever there is chaos. Put anyone in a pitch-black room and before long they’ll be seeing things—ghosts and hallucinations—because we are made to see order where there is none.

Google has produced an Artificial Intelligence software called “Deep Mind” that recognizes faces and animals in photos, just like we do. The results look oddly like those waking-from-dream images that you and I experience naturally.  Opponents of Christianity try to say that all faith is like this—just the imposition of patterns on the chaotic world. They are largely correct. There are strains of Christianity that insist that all of our life’s little events are actually episodes in God’s pre-determined plan for us. There are others who engineer powerful emotional experiences in order to “prove” God. Many Christians authenticate their faith by the memories of such powerful, personal experiences as reminders that God loves them and touches their hearts from time to time. While we shouldn’t doubt that God does in fact touch individual hearts and lives from time to time, we should also be clear that the faith handed to us in scripture is not at all about precious, subjective experiences, but entirely about real and historical events that have occurred in this real world.

We come to Christ not out of a feeling, but out of the acknowledgment that the witness of scripture is simply true. That is true, not helpful, useful, healing, or beneficial—just true.  Over the years, evangelists of all denominations have—knowingly or unknowingly—deployed tricks of the mind, imagination and emotions to “seal the deals” in trying to turn non-believers into believers.

Faith-healers may first come to mind, but they aren’t much different from any who manipulate emotions and the mind’s propensity to project meaning over chaos. Powerful emotional experiences prove nothing, and trying to shoehorn nonbelievers into special experiences in order to “convert” them is really just another trick among tricks. No, the baseline has to be the simple truth: that Jesus was truly raised from the dead. All else is fluff and frosting.

In our desire to be witnesses to Jesus’ resurrection, we need not depend upon whatever grand feelings we may have had on our journeys, but we must depend—100%—on the clear, factual testimony that Jesus is who he claimed to be and his resurrection verifies all. It is in fact a gift to us that we can’t personally experience it, because all things within us can be dismissed as tricks of the mind.  Our evangelism must not be one of scheming or emotional manipulation—including the orchestration of events designed to amaze us—but of rightly representing the good news as it has been handed down to us. The facts—just the facts.

He is risen. He is risen, indeed. That is the truth we are here to proclaim.

Feeling God’s love is a bonus, not the center, and for all the things we might like to see God do, we must be clear to proclaim nothing new, lest we forsake the gospel truth for the excitement afforded us by seeing bunnies in the clouds or leopards on the bedroom floor. †