AP

Psalm 42:10   My bones suffer mortal agony as my foes taunt me, saying to me all day long,  “Where is your God?”

One Sunday morning I was talking to a young overseas post-graduate student who had come to our church for the first time (and, it seems, for the first time to any Christian Church). The previous Thursday our church had set up a hospitality hub, and this young man had decided to avail himself of our hospitality and one of our members (also a student) had struck up a conversation with him and invited him to church.  He came, and in my conversation with him at morning tea after church he declared himself to be a committed intellectual atheist who could not possibly believe in the existence of an all-powerful, all-loving God when there is clearly so much suffering in the world.  The God we believe in and worship either can’t do anything to rectify things (therefore is not all-powerful) or doesn’t want to (therefore is not all-loving).

The interesting thing was that he wanted to come to church the next week, and possibly keep coming, simply because he felt a strong attraction towards the way we Christians seem to be so enthusiastic about singing praise to our God, cheerfully trusting in him in every difficult or painful situation, and loving and caring for one another in community.  He wasn’t really interested in my trying to ‘solve’ his philosophical problem by human logic, he was just fascinated by the way I spoke about God and what he means to me in my personal daily life in the face of the challenges my wife and I are facing at present.

We don’t have an evening service at our Church, so on Sunday nights my wife and I go to another denomination because it is just around the corner from where we live.  That Sunday, the sermon was on 1 Corinthians 15:50-58, and the preacher stressed the importance of Christians living every part of their lives as if they really do believe in the Resurrection, and that Jesus our Saviour really IS alive and that his victory over death has truly been won.

All the events of that Sunday have confirmed to me that the most powerful and effective evangelistic tool we have is not intellectual, logical argument, but the testimony of a truly changed life!  Let’s never underestimate the way the Holy Spirit can use our personal testimony to break through seemingly impenetrable barriers at an academic level.  The whole Bible story is the most logical and reasonable explanation of life the way things are in our world, and should be convincing to other people by logical argument.  But the upshot of my conversation with my new-found friend confirmed by the preacher on Sunday night, forces me to realise that I have been going about things the wrong way.  May the all-powerful Holy Spirit use our lives, as much as our clever, ‘water-tight’ logical intellectual arguments, to bring people to faith in the Saviour whom we serve!

– Bruce Christian