Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Turning Away
By Ramone - April 28, 2008
I was finishing reading former Chicago Tribune journalist Lee Strobel's book, "The Case for Christ" when I saw this picture. Strobel had been a content atheist until much to his irritation, his wife became a Christian. Instead of becoming a "sexually repressed prude" as he feared, he saw her become more confident and her character became more attractive to him. Eventually Strobel set off to investigate the historical evidence for the existence of Christ, the claims of whether or not the New Testament was preserved or selected by powermongers, and finally the claims of Christ about Himself. To make a long story short, at the end of Strobel's investigation, he confessed, "The atheism I had embraced for so long buckled under the weight of historical truth."
Staring at the evidence he was faced with an unexpected decision... "Now what?" As the evidence overwhelmingly supported the reality of Christ and the purity of the preservation of His words, likeness and character, Strobel had to take a hard look in the mirror. And what he saw was a journalist who had been living a self-centered, backstabbing, deceptive and immoral life. Finding that the Bible passed the test, he now looked with new eyes at how it said his sins separated him from God:
"Certainly God, whose existence I had denied for years, seemed extremely distant, and it became obvious to me that I needed the cross of Jesus to bridge that gulf. Said the apostle Peter, 'For Christ died for sins once for all, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God' (1 Peter 3:18). All this I now believed. The evidence of history and of my own experience was too strong to ignore."As I read this I was stopped on the cross---how the death of God's Son is a bridge for us, a bridge to life, and how choosing to stay on the other side is choosing death. This is the picture I saw with much grief, and that I get grief in the Spirit with now as I write about it. It's a picture of what it means when we turn away from that bridge and say, "No, God, I don't need You." It's a picture of us shunning the cross that was given to give us life.
Lord, I don't know what to pray. But I pray that You help people see what You have offered us, and that none turn away. In Jesus' name, amen.
# posted by Ramone @ 12:27 PM 
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