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Home » Why I am a Christian: John Lennox (Transcript)

Why I am a Christian: John Lennox (Transcript)

Full text of mathematician John Lennox’s talk titled “Why I am a Christian” at Youth Event in Perth, Australia in August 2014.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here:

TRANSCRIPT:

John Lennox – Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it’s an immense honour to be with you — all three of you — and it’s lovely to see such a crowd.

Now, I spent a lot of time in Russia, and in Russia, people lecture while they’re sitting, so I’m about to sit. And you will pardon me because I’m rather elderly, about twice the maximum age of anybody in this room, and therefore it is a much more pleasant thing for me, and I hope for you that I sit in this way before you.

I’ve been asked to address the question: WHY I AM A CHRISTIAN, and I’m very delighted that Dan preceded me because, ladies and gentlemen, here you have an example of a young man who, up until recently, found his world closing in on him, and suddenly, just over a period of time, something happens to him that begins to expand both his mind and his heart and changes his life fundamentally so that his songs are filled now with meaning.

And you know, if I were to summarize in just a few words why I’m a Christian, it’s because Christ gives me the biggest story to put my life into of any story that there is on offer. In other words, He solves for me the problem of meaning and significance, and that’s the question we ask all the time: Who am I? What is my significance?

And in the sea of humanity, we often feel so terribly small, and we feel so unsuccessful in life. We look around at those who are more talented, more beautiful, more able, more skilled, and we see the defects in ourselves, and we look back over a record of messing it up.