Stories of Faith - Episode 13

Culled from http://www1.cbn.com

Reinhard Bonnke is the son of a German pastor. He gave his life to the Lord at the age of nine and heard the call to the African mission fields before he was a teenager. After attending Bible college in Wales and pastoring in Germany for 7 years, he began his missionary work in Africa. Reinhard began holding tent meetings that accommodated 800 people. As attendance steadily increased, larger tents had to be purchased. In 1984, he commissioned the construction of the world’s largest mobile structure -- a tent capable of seating 34,000. This tent was destroyed in a wind storm just before a major crusade. There was a question as to how to proceed. The team decided to hold the crusade “open air.” Instead of the expected 34,000 attendees, the event saw over 100,000 people, significantly more than the tent would have allowed. Crowds have been exceeding “tent” size ever since.

When Reinhard tells of God calling him to a life of evangelism, he speaks easily about a dialogue they had. It seems God laid out for him what would be expected. And Reinhard told God that he would obey and follow what God was asking of him. Before this extended conversation ended, however, God told him, “You weren’t my first choice.” Reinhard listened. “You weren’t my second choice either.” Later on there was a time when Reinhard hesitated to schedule a specific crusade. He says as he wavered, “God said, ‘You drop the vision and I drop you.” The evangelist attributes the tremendous responses he sees in ministry to simple obedience to what God requires.

Stories of Faith - Episode 9

Culled from Workplace Grace: Becoming a Spiritual Influence at Work

“Dave and I hit it off during a business negotiation. Over time, Barb (my wife) and I became close friends with Dave and his wife, Ann. We spent time together carpooling kids and watching soccer games. Barb and Ann led our daughters’ scout troop.

Dave and Ann were not believers, and they had encountered more than a few aggressive, hypocritical Christians, which made Dave wary. But the more we got to know each other, the more my faith seemed to intrigue him.

After a year, over lunch I told Dave how I came to believe in Christ. He listened with interest and asked questions. Eventually, he and Ann accepted an invitation to attend a Bible study at our home. Ann told Barb that she was interested in a personal relationship with Jesus, but she didn’t want to take this step without Dave.

For months, I communicated the gospel to Dave in every way I knew. Yet in spite of all my efforts, Dave’s heart seemed impenetrable, and I became discouraged.

I met with my spiritual mentor and recounted my frustration. In response, he asked me two tough questions.

“Wait, do you really care about these people, or are they just a project?”

Embarrassed, I had to admit that persuading them to make a decision to trust Jesus had become more important than being a friend.

“How often do you and Barb pray for Dave and Ann?”

I hung my head. “I really don’t pray for them very much at all.”

He reminded me that Dave and Ann faced the toughest, most important decision of their lives – and that praying for them would do more than all our efforts. So Barb and I began to pray every day for Dave and Ann as we continued to cultivate, plant, and love them.

Almost seven years after our friendship began, God answered our prayers. Dave and Ann both decided to become followers of Jesus.” – Walt Larimore

Stories of Faith - Episode 4

Narrated by D.E. Winget, a University of Texas Astronomer. Originally published on www.cru.org

I was raised in the church. On Sundays, we went to church in the morning and evening. We went to Wednesday night prayer meetings, too.

By the time I went to high school I began to resent going to church so often. Reluctantly, my loving and devout parents stopped insisting that I go. I began to drift away from the church. I only continued to drift further and further away from my “Christian” upbringing.

When I was 16, I started at the University of Illinois. As a very young child I knew I wanted to be a scientist, and specifically an astronomer. So when I began attending college, I chose to pursue science academically and I looked here for the answers to the mysteries of life.

When I studied Anthropology at the university I began to get a broader perspective on world religions. I began to feel the only reason I was a “Christian” was because of an accident of my birth. If I had been born in Japan or China or anywhere else – I thought – whatever my family there would have believed would have been I would believed, too.

I began questioning my understanding of “Christianity” and looked at all the religions of the world. They all claimed to be correct and I thought, “Christianity can’t be the only truth. Or maybe it’s not true at all... All these different ‘truths’ that people hold are contradictory to each other, so this can’t be the one truth.” 

Over time, I eventually landed at atheism.

I started out arguing and then debating. I studied the Bible quite a bit as a child. I knew Scripture, and that made me dangerous in debates. I had a list of 50 examples where I thought the Bible was contradictory that I would use. I would often bring these up and considered myself a “fire-breathing atheist.”

I needed a moral compass

My wife and I had 5 kids. She was a cultural Christian and when I challenged her faith, she became an atheist.

But sometime later, it became obvious to us that our two oldest boys didn’t have any real spiritual or moral compass. My wife and I spent a great deal of time talking and worrying about this.

Neither of us gained a spiritual or moral compass at school – that happened by going to church in our childhood. Because of this, we decided that we needed to find some religion of the world and use that to guide our kids and get involved. We didn’t want to just dump them and drive off. We realized, though, that we would have to find some place to get connected.

In our minds, this religion had to at least be plausible. So once again, my wife and I both started investigating different world religions. With my background in anthropology, what we were looking for was a religion that wasn’t archeologically falsifiable.

In the midst of this search, we began looking for places for our youngest son to go to daycare. The only one we found that would take him was a Christian church. When we ran into the pastor, we realized that this is someone we could talk to about Christianity.

He began to meet us for coffee, and each time we met he encouraged us to go a step further. He recommended a few books to read: Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis and Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ. What was interesting to me in Lee Strobel’s book was that he dealt with archeological and extra biblical evidence for Christ.

One by one, all the objections I raised debating as an atheist for many years fell away.

“Are you a Christian?”

We went to Nashville over spring break to visit one of my former graduate students and discuss our scientific collaboration. I was caught off-guard when he noticed books by C. S. Lewis and Philip Yancey in my car and suddenly asked me in an uncharacteristically aggressive tone, “Are you a Christian?”

I steeled myself for an intellectual attack, the kind I had dealt out so many times myself, but I found myself compelled by the example of Peter to say, “Yes, I am a Christian.” He was shocked I was a Christian, but the attack never came. He, too, was a Christian.

I was more shocked than him, however, because I had reached a decision. I knew that I believed in Christ as my Savior.

In that instant, I discovered that it took more faith to disbelieve than to believe.

If I were to deny Christ, I might as well argue that gravity didn’t exist, or that he Earth was flat. But Jesus did exist – and He still does. To place my faith in Him used to seem like the dumbest thing I could do, but now I know the truth – I would be a fool not to.