In the first sixteen years of my life I went to three different grade schools. I changed high schools immediately before my ninth grade year and again immediately after my junior year. I left home at seventeen and traveled to Duke University where I earned a Bachelor of Science and Biomedical Engineering. I stayed on there, working in the Graduate Departments of the Medical School in Physiology and Biochemistry

Glenn bids farewell to his friend Paul Pew

An opportunity became available for me to study at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland. Beth and I married. We'll have been married thirty years this August. We traveled to Dublin as newlyweds. We concluded the work there and returned to the United States.

I earned a Doctor of Medicine degree at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. I joined the U.S. Army as an unobligated volunteer. I entered as a Captain. They sent me to Madigan Army Medical Center. I did a pediatric residency there. The Army sent me back to Walter Reed Hospital at the Army Institute of Research, and then to the IAH campus in Bethesda where I studied for my Neonatal Fellowship. Then they moved me back to Madigan Hospital to staff the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

I was working at Madigan when my current colleagues recruited me to help them run the Nursery at Tacoma General Hospital NICU. The four of us in that nuclear group have been providing care for over a quarter of a century.

For over thirty years, I've either been a student of science, a practicing physician, or a neonatalogist. I want to share a few things with you this morning that are my observations about the way the world is – what is true for me about the world.

One of the legacies that my father left me is the indelible impression that I should strive not to make errors in things that count. Dad let me know that errors kill. They kill pilots, they kill patients. That legacy from my childhood has made me a difficult husband and father to live with. There are parts of that that I need forgiveness for, but it is part of my legacy. The things that I'm going to assert to you now I offer as a kind of old-fashioned testimony. They come to you as a consequence of part of my legacy, from a man who has spent all of his life in science and a man who has tried not to make too many errors.

There are five things I want to share with you.

First of all, God exists. Jesus is God. The scriptures that we own and know are the infallible, inerrant word of God. That word tells us that we are sinners in need of a Savior. We are promise breakers, but God is a promise keeper. All of the supposedly philosophical arguments to the contrary, it's logically inescapable that God exists. Christian literature is full of very persuasive lines of reasoning regarding this, but I just want to give you some common sense observations this morning. If you look around yourself in this world and try to intellectually account for the existence of anything – the chair you're sitting on, yourself, the planet you live on – there are only two ways to account for what you see. Either the things you're observing and commenting upon are the derived dependent contingent secondary consequence of an antecedent (something that preceded it), or that thing has been eternally self existent. There is no such thing as self creation. Even though a lot of the theories about the "big bang" sound as if they have an element of mysticism to them, self creation is nonsense. In order to be self-created, something would have to exist and not exist at the same time and in the same relationship. You don't have to be a philosopher or scientist here today to know that is nonsense. If there were ever a time where nothing existed – that absolutely nothing existed – the one certainty you could have is that nothing could possibly exist now. The old adage is true: from nothing, nothing can come. Look around and see objects. Even Mt. Rainier, which my daughter and I summitted two weeks ago, does not have the characteristics of immutable, unchangeable eternality. The sciences tell you that the mountain itself, as sturdy and big as it is, is in a state of decay and change. The cosmos in which we live is changing also. You can't nominate anything else to be that eternally self existent being. You have to acknowledge the logical necessity of that. As difficult as it is to imagine a being without beginning and with out end – as difficult as it is to get our minds around that – as soon as you acknowledge the necessity of that you're no longer talking about "whether" God is. You're just in comparative religious arguments about what you're going to name Him and what He's like. So the first point is that God exists.

The second point is the fact that we can know a great deal about what this God is like because Jesus is God incarnate. The generalities of his life are not debated by historians or scholars of any repute whatsoever. What is highly debated is "Who is this person? Is He God or was He just a wise prophet and moralist?" The catch here is that Jesus's life itself will not allow you to believe the doubters. You read the things that He says and you can only conclude that He's a delusional mad man, a liar, or He is in fact who He said He was. This is a man who said "I and the Father are one. Before Moses was, I am. Whoever believes in me will not die. If you eat my flesh and drink my blood you will have life everlasting, and I will raise you up on the last day. No man cometh to the Father but by me. Tear down this temple (meaning his body) and I will raise it up in three days." You are not allowed to just rest in the assumption that this man was a wise prophet and a moralist. He was either deluded or he was precisely who He said He was.

The third point is that our scriptures are the inerrant, infallible word of God. If you're here and you're a believer, I'm going to talk specifically to you on this line of argument. If you're not a believer yet, I would have to approach it differently. But for you this morning who are believers, it's illogical for you to not to believe that the scriptures we have are the inerrant, infallible word of God. Following simple reason, Jesus taught a very high view of scripture. Over and over He said "It is written". He used the scriptures as his reference base for his assertions of truth when He was teaching. Jesus didn't just have the idea that the word of God was inerrant or infallible or literally true. Jesus had what I would call a "jot and tittle" view of inspiration. What He said about the word of God was that "Heaven and earth will pass away but not one jot or tittle of the scripture will pass away until all is fulfilled." Jesus says to Nicodemus in John 3 "You're a teacher in Israel and you don't understand these things. If you can't believe me when I tell you about earthly things, how are you going to believe me when I tell you about Heavenly things?" If you're here today as a believer you're counting on Jesus Christ to be your Shepherd through this life and to take you safely through the veil of death into the next life. If you don't truly trust Him when He tells you on his authority as the Son of God that this word is inerrant, infallible communication to us, in my judgment you're being theologically misguided and eternally illogical. So there are the first three points.

Now what does this inerrant, infallible word tell us? It tells us that we are promise breakers in need of a savior. The clear testimony of the scriptures from Genesis to Revelation is that we are not sinners because we sin. We sin because we're sinners. What I mean by that is that we don't become sinners by committing that first act of sin. We commit that first act of sin because we're sinners by nature. We're born that way. That's our lot apart from Jesus Christ. The scripture is very clear about this. "There is no one who is righteous, no not one! There is no one who understands. There is no one who seeks after God. There is no one who doeth good, no not one." This is referring to our status before God in our unregenerate, sinful selves. Perhaps you think that this is just an example of New Testament ramblings of a pharisaic convert, the apostle Paul. Maybe you think these words are the mutterings of a juvenile, not quite grown up Yahweh who still hasn't gotten over his anger. Let me tell you how the tender, compassionate Jesus that we turn to for consolation puts it.

There were worshiping Jews in the Temple, just as we're here this morning at Church. Soldiers slaughtered them at church. Their blood mingled with the sacrifices that they were offering. The people went to Jesus and asked "How can this be? What's going on? Where is God in all this? How can God allow this to happen?" Jesus looked at them and effectively said "You’re asking the wrong question. You should be asking why the tower hasn't fallen on you! Why wasn't your blood spilled there?" He said "Do you think those Galileans were worse sinners than all of the others? I tell you no! Unless you repent you shall all likewise parish!" That's the bad news, folks, and it's bad news from the lips of our Savior.

Finally, the good news. Our God is a promise keeper who has provided a way out of this situation. If you want a life verse that you can cling to and really hold on to, go to the 15th chapter of Genesis, the 17th verse. It says "And it came to pass when the sun had gone down and it became dark, behold a smoking oven and a lighted torch passed among the pieces." If you don't know what that's referring to, you go back and you read that passage. That's a statement about a mysterious appearance of God in a certain form to Abraham at the time He struck a covenant. It was God condescending, coming down to Abraham and saying to him (as Paul explains to us later in the book of Hebrews) "Since God had no one else that He could swear to greater than He, He made an oath and swore by Himself. Our God is a promise keeper.

I'll close by giving you the good news that comes not from the New Testament but from the Old Testament: Zachariah 3. This is Yahweh speaking to us through his prophet Zachariah in a vision: "Then he showed me Joshua, the high priest, standing before the angel of the Lord and Satan standing at his right side to accuse him. The Lord said to Satan 'The Lord rebuke you, Satan. The Lord who has chosen Jerusalem, rebuke you! Is not this man a brand plucked from the fire, a burning stick plucked from the fire?'" Do you see the imagery there? The fire's been lit and the flames are licking upward. God reaches down and picks out this twig from the top that's singed and smoldering, just about to catch fire. God rescues it. That twig is you and it's me; that's the good news. Joshua was dressed in filthy clothes as he stood before the angel. The angel said to those who were standing before him "Take off his filthy clothes." Then the angel said to Joshua, "You see, I have taken away your sin and I will put rich garments on you."

If you're here this morning and you know yourself to be forgiven, then you know that you're living your life in this congregation, not as a righteous person but as a sinner who's been forgiven. The only thing that makes those of us who are redeemed different from those who are not is that our sins have been forgiven. We have that hope to cling to. It's the only reason that we can go to bed at night with our spouses and our children and ask for forgiveness. It's the only reason we have hope that tomorrow does not have to be like today. We are a forgiven people. We're not living our lives telling other wicked, sinful people how to repent. We are sinful people ourselves. We hate our sins. We're trying to do better, but we are sinful people who ought to be in the business of telling other sinful people where they can find forgiveness for their sins and clean garments to clothe their guilt and their nakedness. We should be telling them how they can be prepared to stand before the throne of God. If you're here this morning and you don't know that you're forgiven, I have a question for you. How will you escape if you ignore so great a salvation? All have sinned and come short of the glory of God. The wages of sin is death. It is appointed unto man once to die, and then the judgment.

My dad spent his whole professional life trying not to make lethal errors. I've spent most of my professional life trying not to make lethal errors. If you're here today and you don't know that you're forgiven – if you don't understand how God's provision of the sacrificial, perfectly lived, obedient life of his son, Jesus Christ, and the Son's sacrificial death on the cross makes forgiveness possible for you, you need to speak to someone about that. You can talk to one of your Christian friends here; you can talk to the pastor; you can talk to the elders – Tom Herron is here; Jim Hughes is here; you can come and talk to me after this service is over. I can tell you precisely what I believe and precisely why I believe it. I can tell you why it's true. I know the Christ, and I'm utterly persuaded that He's able to keep everything that I've committed – my very soul – unto Him against the day of his great and glorious reappearing in power and judgment. These are the things that I can testify to you. Amen.