Perhaps you think you cannot believe. If you want to believe, God will help you to come to faith.
A young atheist felt the emptiness in his soul. He saw a church and went in, where he observed pious worshippers.
He began to speak to God in his own way.
God, if you exist, and I don't believe you do, then I don't think it's my duty to believe in you. On the contrary, it is your duty to reveal your existence to me. If you exist, then let me find you.
In a remote village lived an old man who loved Jesus. He prayed for years that God would help him bring a Jew to faith.
One day, the young atheist, who was Jewish, was going on a journey. He looked for accommodation in the village and the old Christian welcomed him.
He gave him a Bible to read. As the young man read the Testament, he felt the love of God like fire in his heart and he believed.
The young atheist was of Jewish origin, but only when he met Jesus as his Messiah did he find the God of Israel.
Are you Jewish, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist? It doesn't matter. Jesus was born a Jew and lived on earth as a Jew, but he died on a cruel cross to suffer the punishment for our sins.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life. Jn 3:16 NIV
Friday, December 20, 2024
An Atheist Finds God
Saturday, September 21, 2024
Friendship with God
The friendship of the LORD is for those who fear him, and he makes his covenant known to them. Ps 25:14 NRSV
There are Christians who do not take God's holiness seriously, but they approach Jesus as if he were their mate who should tolerate all their excesses.
Real friendship with God looks very different. Jesus said we must trust God like little children.
A Jewish girl grew up in a strange family. Her parents were active in a conservative orthodox synagogue. Her father behaved like a devout Jew, but at home he was a dogmatic atheist.
This was difficult for the girl to understand, but God had a plan to reveal his love to this girl. The girl had a secret. Even her parents didn't know about it.
This girl had secret conversations with her invisible friend. She believed her friend was God.
In her adolescence, she experienced traumatic disappointments, and she no longer believed in God.
As a teenager, she loved horses, but she experienced a tragic accident. The horse she was riding fell on top of her and crushed her.
She had a near-death experience and her soul left her body. In the heavenly world, she met Jesus, who spoke to her with love. She recognised him as the secret friend from her childhood. When doctors revived her, she remembered her encounter with Jesus, and she firmly believed.
Jesus wants to be your friend, but not your mate, who is comfortable with the bad stuff in your life.
We all have serious faults. God loves you anyway, but he wants to restore and purify your life. He doesn't want to condemn you, but like a real friend or therapist, he wants to help you so that God's image can shine through in you.
For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Jn 3:16–17 NIV
Thursday, September 5, 2024
An Atheist had a Near Death Experience with Jesus
What this atheist experienced on the other side devastated him.
He was 54 years old, an American professor on an educational trip to Europe with some students.
On the last day of his trip, he was in a hotel in London when he was attacked with terrible stomach pains.
An ambulance rushed him to the hospital, and he expected a quick emergency operation.
But then he heard his death sentence.
No surgeons were available until the following morning. For hours he suffered with panic-stricken fear.
He had been an atheist for so long.
He lived only here and now, and was content with his academic success and with his beloved wife.
He had believed in Jesus as a child but then he had become wise in his own eyes and believed only in himself.
But now he was dying and he began to question everything.
‘And what if it's not over after all, if there is a heaven and a hell, what then? Where will you go then, Simon?’
He felt that his time had come and he said goodbye to his dear wife, who was sitting next to his bed.
He closed his eyes and fainted. But that was not the end of him.
Suddenly he was fully conscious and without pain, but no longer in his body. It was simply incomprehensible to him. Despite his doubts, he thought like an atheist, and the experience of being a soul without a body completely contradicted his concept of reality.
Then it got even stranger. He found himself in a pitch-black room and was totally helpless.
He was surrounded by cruel spiritual beings. They hated him and attacked and tortured him without mercy and without ceasing.
He didn't know where he was. It was neither hell nor heaven, but it was a terrible place in the invisible world, and he was helpless.
He was still an atheist, but in his despair he began to pray.
He prayed out loud, and again and again. The demons kept backing away. They couldn't bear to hear the word ‘God’.
He had been an atheist for forty years, but here on the threshold of hell he remembered the faith of his childhood.
God never forgets if you have ever loved God and believed in Jesus.
Let us continue to pray for our children and brothers and sisters who have strayed from God. I prayed for forty years for my parents, who believed in Jesus shortly before they died.
Finally, the sadistic spirits left him and he was all alone in the darkness.
His pride was gone now. He was humiliated. He recognised his bad, selfish character, and he knew that this suffering was totally deserved.
He began to see a kind of vision of himself as a child loving Jesus and singing about the love of God.
Despite his doubts, he now wanted to believe again.
The vision disappeared, but he began to pray again.
‘Jesus, please help me, please save me, please!’ And right at that moment, after I had spoken the last word, I saw a very small, bright light.’
Suddenly he was in the direct presence of the Son of God. He was immersed in heavenly light and Jesus began to heal all his wounds.
Simon was no longer the proud professor, and he felt unworthy to be saved by Jesus in this way.
Then he wanted to stay with Jesus in the heavenly world, but Jesus had other plans for him.
He had to return to his wife and children and live as a completely new person with God's love for his neighbour.
‘Then suddenly I opened my eyes and saw a doctor massaging my heart.’
We know Simon's story because God sent him back. Simon is now a man who lives very differently than before.
If you really know Jesus, you have to become different. Jesus wants to transform my life and your life completely.
Do you want to be transformed by Jesus?
For this is the will of my Father: that everyone who sees the Son and believes in him will have eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day.” Jn 6:40 CSB
Then Jesus told him, “Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed.” Jn 20:29 NIV
Sunday, September 22, 2013
THERE MUST BE SOMETHING MORE
“Is that all there is?”
Here and there some light bursts through the clouds of routine life and daily frustrations. Music lifts you up; a friend cheers you up; you enjoy some breakthrough or achievement; you fall in love or you have a baby.But then the daily wear and tear returns and in some quiet moment the voice inside whispers again:
- “Is that all there is?”
Where does this question come from?
- Where did you get the idea that there could be something far better than what you experience and what you see around you?
Every day you see unbearable tragedy. It is on the TV news every evening. You watch it but you only feel a little of the agony. We are numb. Death is always there but we push it away. It is somewhere else. It is someone else.
From time to time we go to a funeral.Somehow we feel there must be another world. That loved one must be somewhere up there looking down. It is so hard to believe in a final end.
“Dust to dust, ashes to ashes..” and that little voice asks again,“Is that all there is?”
Some people try very hard to believe there is actually nothing more.
They make up a new religion called “ATHEISM.” That means NO-GOD-ism.
- It is so hard to believe in nothing but atoms and things, so hard that those people cannot find words to define their belief without using that word GOD, the God who loves them, the God they don’t want to believe in.
There was a young Jewish man in Romania. He was an atheist.
The faith of his forefathers made no sense to him. But he had an empty place in his soul. He had a spiritual hunger inside. One day he saw some traditional Christians in a church service and something inside him was drawn like a magnet. He joined the praying believers out of curiosity, or so it seemed to him.
Then he prayed, if you could call it prayer.
- “Oh God. I don’t believe you exist but if you do exist, it is not my duty to believe in you but your duty to make yourself known to me. If you exist, please show yourself to me.”
He went his way, with his lonely heart still unsatisfied. That question was at the back of his mind.“There must be more than this. Is this life all there is?”
He didn’t hear the voice but somewhere in his unconscious mind he felt it.One day he was on a journey in the country. He stopped in a village and looked for a place to sleep. He asked an old man who invited him to stay with him.
This old man deeply loved Jesus and for years he had cried out to God. He had prayed over and over for the blessing of leading a Jewish man to faith in the Jewish Messiah.- When he discovered his young guest was Jewish, he burned with excitement. He treated his guest with the respect and kindness due to a king or to his own son. Then he gave the young man a Bible to read.