A Skeptic’s Quest – My Testimony Part 12

I used to think all Christians were ugly. I did. I figured if you could not make it anywhere else in the world, you became a Christian. This one young woman was really cute, and that kind of threw me a little bit. I kind of leaned back in my chair, and I tried to act totally disinterested. I looked over at the young lady. In a rather flippant way I just said, “Hey, tell me, what changed your lives? Why are you so different from the other students, the leaders, the professors on campus?” I couldn’t believe it. She looked me back eye-to-eye with a little smile. She said two words I never thought I would hear in the university as part of the answer. She just looked back at me and said, “Jesus Christ.” I said, “Oh do not give me that garbage.” I said, “I’m fed up with religion, the church, the Bible. Don’t give me that garbage about religion.” All I know is that she had a lot of courage or a lot of convictions. In fact, on the farm we used to call it guts. She shot me back eye-to-eye, and she did not even smile this time. She said, “Mister, I did not tell you religion. I told you the person of Jesus Christ.”

Well, I felt bad, because I had really been rude, and my parents did not raise me to be rude, so I apologized. I said, “Please forgive me for my attitude.” But then I just had to add, “But I am sick and tired of religion and religious people. I don’t want anything to do with it.” Then, I couldn’t believe it. Right there in the university, these students and professors challenged me as a pre-law student, now get this, to intellectually use my mind to examine the claims of Jesus Christ as God’s Son. Now I thought that was a joke to do that intellectually. Do you know what I believed? I believed that Christians had two brains--one was lost and the other was out looking for it. I really believed that if a Christian had a brain, it would die in isolation. You kind of took your brains and shelved them and then ran on vacuum when you followed Christ. But they just kept challenging me over and over and over. In fact, they simply irritated me. Have you ever had someone so challenge you in something that you get mad about it? That is what happened to me. I got so irritated I wanted to silence them. So I accepted their challenge, but I did not do it to prove anything. I did it to refute them.