Episodes

  • William

    William
    Dec 16 2022
    William Episode 27: Hello, thank you for joining us today! It takes a near act of God for someone to stand back and view themselves, and their culture with a wide angle lens - To rise above their own time and view things from an eternal or heavenly perspective. Everyone can and usually does critique history  quite well when they look back on time… But it’s something special and rare for one to do it in real time and space with grace and with truth. It is nearly impossible for people to internally realize the their own personal short comings, or their blind spots, and then to recognize it externally, in their own time and culture, without having adopted it, or more often, become complacent to it. Above this, it is even more difficult to not only see the changes that need to be made but then do the hard work in implementing them - to actually change the cultural and political norm of one’s day. To try this and fail, and get up and fail again, time and time again…..To get back up and try over and over…. until your life is spent….with no promise of success. This is what we’ll look at in today’s narrative.I was going to say that this is “a” story…. but really, due to its immense scope, its nature, and its extreme rarity, this is “the” story of a man’s life given to change a worldwide and institutional practice, so openly accepted and ingrained in cultures times-past, that to identify it and capture it, would be like trying to separate the air surrounding you from the air inside your lungs…. Slavery was normal. It was in the air that all people breathed. Although practiced by all people in all of history, the very small framed William Wilburforce determined to change that. By the grace of God, William would spearhead the movement that would change the world forever.Eric Metaxas wrote, that “[William] Wilberforce overturned not just European civilization’s view of slavery but its view of almost everything in the human sphere; and that is why it’s nearly impossible to do justice to the enormity of his accomplishment: it was nothing less than a fundamental and important shift in human conscience.” Intro XVLet’s look into William’s life and times and ask God to give us clarity, and vision for what He may have for us in our life and times today.……Episode 27, William, starts now.William Wilberforce was born on August 24th, 1759. He was an abnormally small and fragile boy — in fact he would never grow taller than 5’ 3”. From his childhood, William would suffer from a weak and sickly constitution accompanied with poor eyesight. So, with the recent death of his eldest sister and his father, the young and ill-looking eight-year-old, William, felt even smaller. On top of this all, William’s mother was becoming very sick. With her nearing the verge of death, his relatively comfortable world that he had known was crashing down around him.As a result of losing his father, sister, and now, possibly his mother, little William was forced to move from his small town of Hull close to the large city of London with his Aunt Hannah and Uncle William. Not only was he moving to a completely new environment, with a new school, and new caretakers, but his Aunt as Uncle were Methodists.The new break off sect of the Church of England started by John Wesley nearly three decades before was largely viewed with contempt. At the time, Methodists were considered to be religious radicals - fanatics who took the gospel of Jesus seriously and passionately in a time where Bibles were only opened on Sunday mornings and where Christian teachings stayed safely within church walls. Both Anglicans and non-religious people frowned upon Methodists and their zeal of God. Later, William wrote about this time in his life saying, “It’s impossible for you to have any idea of the hatred in which the Methodists were then held. I cannot better explain it to you than by than saying that it is more like the account given in Ivanhoe of the persecutions against the Jews, than anything else I know.” (Metaxas, p. 12).At the time, the prospect for the small and fatherless boy seemed overwhelming. Yet, this was the plan of God for William, without which he would never be the same - nor would the world.___________________________________________________________________________William’s Aunt and Uncle had a profound influence upon the young boy — and it was precisely because they were not, what William’s mother had hoped, just nominal Anglicans. Besides being extremely wealthy, and befriending many notable people in both the church and state, it was from them that William truly saw the Christian faith put into everyday practice. His Aunt and Uncle were also friends with some of the most dominate Christian figures of the century, namely, John Newton and George Whitefield.Whitefield had traveled to America several times and was on his 13th and last trip to America when William came to live with his Aunt ...
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    45 mins
  • Patricus - The Saint of Ireland

    Patricus - The Saint of Ireland
    Jun 22 2022
    Deep feelings and endless thoughts of revenge captivated the young man’s mind. For two weeks now, all he had thought about was the retribution he would inflict upon his captors when he got free, if he ever got free — something he knew would never happen.Just a fortnight ago the sixteen-year-old had been enjoying his fairly sheltered life as a Roman citizen on the west coast of Britain near the small town of Bannaventa Berniae. From all the comforts that came with having a father who was a local magistrate and living in a country villa with servants to do most of the work, mindlessly playing on the beach close to his home was only one of many leisurely activities. But in a flash without any warning, all the happiness and comforts were replaced by fear and hardship when Patricus was attacked by a gang of professional Irish slave raiders.It was efficient, violent, and traumatic.Rome had begun its decline a decade before; as a consequence its ships no longer secured the Western Sea surrounding the Celtic Islands. Without Roman rule, other ships were free to sail unmolested. As such, no political authority was concerned about Irish kidnappers. During the one-day journey across the sea, and now in iron shackles, all Patricus could think about were the stories he had heard as a child concerning the heathen culture of the Irish. While he never thought they were all true — how they would eat human flesh, shamelessly commit incest, and smear the blood of slain victims on their faces — he now seriously questioned them. As his kidnapping alone revealed, the Irish were not considered barbarians for nothing. And although Patricus claimed to be an atheist or just apathetic to Christianity, he couldn’t help harboring bitterness towards his Christian parents and ironically, their God. The timeless question swirled in his maturing mind: How can a loving God allow evil things to happen? The fear of being forsaken incessantly bore upon his fragile conscience too, for Patricus really was alone. Most of the slaves taken by the Irish were women and children as most men were not easily secured. Patricus wasn’t a boy, but he wasn’t quite a man. And yet, it was in this time of his life, against the backdrop of Irish captivity, that God would forge something powerful within him — something so unexpected and so beautiful that it would not only change his destiny but the destiny of an entire pagan country.______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________But that was in the future. In the present, the very start of the the 3rd century, the only destiny Patricus was in charge of was the one hundred sheep he was made to shepherd in a cold and wet place somewhere on the west coast of Ireland. In coming to this new land it was like traveling back in time four hundred years. Although the primitive accommodations were difficult to get used to, it wasn’t long after arriving that Patricus’ anger surprisingly simmered down into a place somewhere between ambivalence and acquiescence. In the many days and nights that Patricus spend alone, the growing boy began to consider God, His will, His plan, and His love for the lost. But as he drew nearer to God, the shame of his past sins weighed heavily on him. One sin grieved Patricus in particular. With some time, though, he finally arrived at being at peace with God. He wrote about this process, “After I came to Ireland I watched over sheep. Day by day I began to pray more frequently — and more and more my love of God and my faith in him and reverence for him began to increase.”After six years of captivity, the twenty-two-year old was now a young man and had been forged into someone new. He was a new creation of sorts; the faith of his parents and grandparents had become his own. Fasting and praying were regular practices in his new life as a Christian. Looking back, Patricus wrote, “God used the time to shape and mold me into something better. He made me into what I am now — someone very different from what I once was,… before I was a slave, I didn’t even care about myself.”And then on one unspectacular night, as Patricus was falling asleep, God clearly spoke to him in a dream saying, “You have fasted well — soon you will be going home.” Confused by this, as Patricus knew it was nearly impossible to escape and that the New Testament taught slaves to be obedient to their masters, he didn’t immediately respond. But the next night God spoke again saying, “Behold, your ship is ready.” Putting aside all the questions and difficulties surrounding how a successful escape could actually happen, and there were many, Patricus succumbed to the conviction of God’s leading. Simply put, if God spoke, then Patricus had to obey.But because no ships sailed to Britain from the west coast of Ireland, he would have to make the the 200 mile trek across the island. The arduous journey would take over a...
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    31 mins
  • The Return of the Christmas Bells

    The Return of the Christmas Bells
    Dec 25 2021
    While the coming of December once evoked warm sentiments for the upcoming celebration of the birth of Christ, it had been overshadowed by the harsh weather that was only going to get colder. “One of the season's jokes was that Dante had been wrong, and that hell was not hot at all, it was, in fact, as cold as a Romanian apartment in winter.” (1) But, even if the apartments were warm, Christmas was not celebrated, and even though ninety percent of Romanians belonged to the Christian Orthodox faith, church bells did not ring. By the 1980’s, the most celebrated day in Romania was no longer the birth of Jesus the Christ, but under compulsion, the birth of its  dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu - who was aptly nicknamed, the antichrist. (2) But as 1989 was coming to a close in mid December, as we all know now, the people of Romania were unknowingly on the brink of not only openly celebrating the birth of their Christ, but the death of their antichrist. But what many don’t know, was that this Romanian Revolution all started by the humble but powerful convictions of a Hungarian pastor named Laszlo Tokes.Only Romanians forty-five years and older could remember the sweet sounds of church bells ringing! For under Nicolae Ceausescu’s Romanian Communist Party, they were no more. Romania had been in the grips of Communism for some time, but by the 1980’s it had become intolerable. Despite the country being very fertile, like most Communist countries food was scarce and people were starving. Most of the nation’s raw materials were being exported to foreign creditors to pay off debts that Nicolae had accumulated. Because of this debt, Nicolae’s aim was to strengthen the work force, causing Romania to reach a population of 100 million. To do so, he outlawed abortion and contraceptives.And in massive block apartments that housed the growing nation, hot water was only available one day of the week and the electricity only worked when the government wanted it to. Every winter, hundreds of people froze to death in their apartment or died from “asphyxiation as gas stoves were shut off, only to be then turned back on without warning, filling sleeping apartments with gas.” (3) Meanwhile, the secret police, the Securitate, had made Romania into a police state.  It is believed that one in four citizens would alert the Securitate of anyone suspected of being un loyal to the Government. Actions, speech, and even opinions that did not approve Nicolae were strictly forbidden. Because of the overwhelming numbers of the police state, organizing dissent was nearly impossible, and “Even by Soviet Bloc standards, the Securitate was exceptionally brutal.” (4)But on December 16th, in the western city of Timisoara a public protest was being held in response to the government’s crackdown against the Reformed church pastor, Laszlo Tokes. He had been critical of Nicolae’s government - mainly that the people of Romania not only, could not exercise their God-given rights, but did not even know what they were. The Romanian Communist Party charged the pastor with enticing ethnic hatred and sought to have him forcibly removed. But his parishioners, (who just two years before only numbered a few dozen had now grown to nearly five thousand), protected their pastor and his pregnant wife Edith by surrounding their church with a human shield. Tokes knew of the plan for his capture so he encouraged his church a few days beforehand stating, “I have been issued a summons of eviction. I will not accept it, so I will be taken from you by force…They want to do this in secret because they have no right to do it. Please, come… and be witnesses of what will happen. Come, be peaceful, but be witnesses.” (5)And the church came in numbers. So much that their collective resistance rendered the Securitate unable to remove the pastor. And as the hours past into nightfall, more and more people from other churches joined the protest into the next day. By now, many other supportive spectators had joined the cause and began to take the message further. Within a day the demonstration for the pastor sparked a protest in the city. And within a few more days the protest in the city would in turn spark a wild fire of dissent among a brutalized nation.Pro Romanian chants and songs that had long been outlawed, broke out among the people. The crowd grew so large and cantankerous around the church that a large portion decided to take their protest to the central square of Timisoara. This was when the Securitate made their move. In the pre-dawn hours of December 17th, the secret police burst through the crowd, broke the church door, and captured Tokes and his wife. Just as fast as they came, the secret police then disappeared into the darkness from where they emerged.But as the sun began to rise the public outcry was only beginning.By early morning the central square of Timisoara was filled with protestors confronting the Securitate with candles of...
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    19 mins
  • Charles, Billy, and the Bible

    Charles, Billy, and the Bible
    Dec 1 2021
     Charles - Part 1Charles Templeton was born October 7th, 1915 in Toronto Canada. With four other siblings in the midst of the depression, the family learned to adapt on meager wages. Everyone in the family had to do their part. Young Charles, picked up drawing and was quite talented at it. So, after failing to pass the 9th and 10th grade, he pursued his knack of drawing sketches, hoping that someone might find value in his work and purchase them. Charles was pleasantly found right - the 17 year old artist was hired onto the Toronto Globe as a sports cartoonist.Overnight, the teenager was making good money and was thoroughly enjoying his job. Charles found himself in the very midst of the sports news world, and everything else associated with it. Notoriety, late night drinking, and fawning women were all bonuses. He would later write about this time in his life, “To a boy in his late teens, it was the best of all possible worlds.”But after four years, the underbelly of his envied job and lifestyle began to show. Returning home one morning at 3:00 a.m. from a party, the young man feeling quite depressed looked into a mirror. He didn’t like the reflection. As he walked to his room his mother heard him in the hallway and called out to him. She talked to him about her own faith in Christ.Charles would later write about this event: “As I went down the hall, I was forming a prayer in my head, but as I knelt by my bed in the darkness, my mind was strangely vacant; thoughts and words wouldn't come to focus. After a moment, it was as though a black blanket had been draped over me. A sense of enormous guilt descended and invaded every part of me. I was unclean. Involuntarily, I began to pray, my face upturned, tears streaming. The only words I could find were, "Lord, come down. Come do[wn]. Come down. . . .”______________________________________________________________________________Billy - Part 1At this same time, in the United States near Charolette North Carolina, Billy Graham had just graduated from high school. As he struggled through school being the son of a Dairy Farmer, his graduation was a feat that many questioned. And while the young man had grown up in a godly and Christian environment he had just made a personal commitment to Jesus during a revival two years earlier, under the preaching of Baptist evangelist Mordecai Ham. Like his future friend and preaching partner, Charles Templeton, Billy was also convicted by his sin and his need for forgiveness. That night at the diner table, Billy stopped to inform his family that he had been saved that day.While he first enrolled at Bob Jones College in Cleveland Tennessee, since it was closet to home and less expensive than Wheaton, he quickly felt the school too legalistic and rigid. So, after only one semester, and racking up nearly enough demerits to be kicked out, he transferred to Florida Bible Institute. And it was there in 1937, that Billy would begin to preach.Having become mentored by the academic Dean of the school, John Minder, Billy joined him to attend a Baptist conference in Palatka Florida. When Minder was asked to speak that night to a small church of Baptist preachers, he politely declined saying that Billy would be pleased to preach in his place. So, with no real choice in the matter, the 19 year old awkwardly preached for the first time - it was a mixture of four different sermons he had memorized from Moody Press. He would later remember that the sermon was very “Raw”.  The next few years in Billy’s life would be transformational. He was baptized on December 4, 1938 in Silver Lake, Florida, ordained to the ministry in a Southern Baptist church a year later, and graduated from Florida Bible Institute in 1940. And so began his humble and long journey into becoming one of the most influential evangelist in America. But there was another great evangelist being formed in Canada - and the two were soon to meet and unite their passion and calling to preach the truths of the Bible to a world on the brink of another World War.  ______________________________________________________________________________Charles - Part 2By this time, Charles had left the Toronto Globe to enter the ministry and to give himself fully to the preaching of the gospel. He had evangelized all over - Michigan, New York, Indiana, Illinois, and even further south, probably very close to where Billy was himself beginning his career as a preacher. Charles had met his wife in Grand Rapids Michigan and the couple was married 6 weeks later. But soon after in 1941, in the midst of starting a new church with his new wife, Charles read a number of books written by famous secular authors. And for the first time in his short life as a follower of Jesus, his faith in the veracity and miraculous claims of the Bible was challenged. But Charles soon stuffed these troubling questions behind the success of becoming one of North America’s top evangelist and so, he ...
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    36 mins
  • John

    John
    Jul 28 2021
    John Gresham Machen was born on July 28, 1881. It was prosperous time - the gilded age of America. Skyscrapers were going up as well as wages. The Machen family was affluent.  John’s mother Mary came from a wealthy family and was a devote Presbyterian. She was a voracious reader and had even published a work on the Bible and poetry. She was 21 years younger than her husband, Arthur Webster Machen, a successful lawyer and an Episcopalian. But despite the couple’s different Christian affiliations, Mary taught John along with her other two sons, the Westminster Shorter Catechism from an early age. The family attended Franklin Street Presbyterian Church, and in time, John came to make the Presbyterian Church his own. But in a twist of fate as only God could know, much of the Presbyterian church would one day make Machen their own.  As an adolescent, he received a classical education and was taught in Greek and Latin. It would serve as formational to his future career as a New Testament scholar. At seventeen years of age, John enrolled at the newly founded, John Hopkins University where he excelled in his studies. In 1901 he decided to pursue Theology at Princeton University.After four years there, John found himself doing his post study in Germany - the very home of Protestantism. It was there that John learned under Professor and Lutheran Theologian,  Wilhelm Herrmann. For better or worse, Herrmann was one of many Theologians in Europe greatly influenced by Immanuel Kant. In general, Herrmann’s Theology viewed God as an ultimate power and source of goodness, but was less concerned with the accuracy or the inherency of the Christian Scriptures, or even the historicity of the person of Jesus. To make things more confusing for young Machen, Herrmann was a passionate and devoted Christian whose preaching deeply moved John’s heart. Because of this, the young theology student had a hard time reconciling a real Christian faith that was not built upon historical and biblical truths. To Machen, Herrmann’s philosophy of Christian faith was a bit illogical. John knew that a substantial and vibrant faith in Jesus should not be separated from what the Bible clearly revealed. History and Doctrine must be integrated.  He would later write, “Christ died"--that is history; "Christ died for our sins"--that is doctrine. Without these two elements, joined in an absolutely indissoluble union, there is no Christianity.”(J. Gresham Machen, Christianity and Liberalism)While it tested his faith, it would seem that John’s time in Germany only strengthened his convictions that modern or liberal theology was not just a different form of the historic Christian  faith, but a growing threat to it. But even by this time in John’s young life, he still seemed to be somewhat aimless concerning his career. In letters written to his parents, John conveyed that he found many fields of study to be intriguing and worth engaging in. He loved sports as well. Thus, the young, wealthy academic was not convinced that the life of a Theologian / Teacher or Pastor was a life he really wanted to pursue. But upon his return to the states in 1906, Machen had decided on a career having joined Princeton Seminary as an instructor in New Testament studies. And so began for John, not only a personal and spiritual struggle against the rising tide of Modernism’s influence of Theology but an academic and vocational one as well.As the years past, Machen was becoming a notable New Testament scholar and one, even more rare, that could post a solid intellectual, historical, and exegetical defense for the foundations of the Christian Faith against the progressive theology that had spread and was continuing to infiltrate academia and churches all across America. And While Machen’s influence and controversy became more widespread and although the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America (PCUSA) was growing more tolerant of Modernism, John was promoted as Princeton’s Assistant Professor of New Testament studies in 1914 - on  the eve of WW1.So just as soon as he advanced in Princeton, Machen left to help the war efforts in France. John didn’t want to serve from the guarded position of a Chaplain, so he chose to work though the YMCA as a secretary. But for all practicality, he was a literal waiter, making and serving hot chocolate to the soldiers all day and night. While John was located near the front lines of the war, and was never in combat, he was close enough to the action to see death and suffering firsthand. Thankfully the war was relatively short lived and John left for home. But upon his return, another war was in full swing - a theological one in John’s mind, that while it didn’t destroy the human body, had every potential to destroy the soul. There were clearly two camps of Protestants now, each preaching two different and oppositional interpretations of the gospel. And in May of 1922, Baptist and modernist preacher...
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    37 mins
  • Jordan

    Jordan
    Apr 26 2021
    In February of 2020, the man slowly awoke from a deep sleep. Not a deep sleep like he had been out all night, but a deep sleep like he had been in a coma. Actually, a medically induced coma that lasted for over a week. The fifty-seven year old man had been completely unconscious for nine days. And if he was arousing from a nightmare, the reality he awoke to was much worse. As his eyes opened, the man noticed he couldn’t move. Not because his body wasn’t working, but because his body was strapped down to the patient bed with six large leather straps in an ICU room that didn’t quite look familiar.If this wasn’t enough to strike serious fear into his already anxious mind, he noticed the nurses surrounding him were speaking a foreign language. Last the man remembered, he was in a hospital in Toronto, with his family nearby. But now, (whenever ‘now’ was) he was in a totally different hospital - in a totally different country strapped down to bed with the only people around him speaking Russian.These were the confusing and dire circumstances the man awoke to, quickly escalating his anxious and fragile thoughts to anger, fear, and unadulterated panic. Confusion, dreadful apprehension, and hopelessness had been his unwanted companions - and yet despite his best efforts, they were only gaining in size and scope. As he began wrestling with thoughts of self-harm the man could only describe this decent in madness as a trip to Hell.This was not the life of someone who had 1.4 million twitter followers, 1.3 million Instagram followers, 860,000 Facebook followers, 207,000 Reddit followers, and who the New York Times would proclaim as being “The most influential public intellectual in the Western world right now” - Especially for someone who had dedicated his life and career to better understand the human mind, and to practically help others with psychological disorders.But it was painfully obvious now - Jordan B. Peterson, the famed Canadian professor of psychology, clinical psychologist, and Youtube personality, couldn’t keep his own mind from fracturing. Like the most broken and miserable of people, he too was at a total loss. And after months of entrusting his mental and physical health to psychologists, psychiatrists, and the best that medicine could offer, he was now completely dependent upon the only two forces that mattered in his life. His family and his faith in God. The former, were un-mistakingly known and present. But the latter was invisible, nebulous, and shrouded in deep mystery. No matter how much Dr. Peterson relied upon his close friends and family, they were only human, and could only provide so much. Jordan needed healing and relief that his family - indeed, humanity could not fully provide.Who and what God and faith were to Jordan was unclear. But that he wanted and was desperate for him, now more than ever, was definitely not.  JORDAN’S LIFEJordan Bernt (Bair-ent) Peterson was born June 12th, 1962 in Edmonton, Alberta Canada, and grew up in the nearby small town of Fairview. His mother Beverly, was a librarian at the campus of Grande Prairie Regional College. His father, Walter was a school teacher. The small framed Jordan would be the eldest of his parent’s three children.With nothing much to do in the small town, everyone knew each other quite well. Jordan became friends with a girl across the street named Tammy Roberts. She was only eight years old, but it seemed they had a crush on each other. The 11 year old Jordan would tell his father that he was going to marry her one day. But first, he had to finish high school in which he started in 1975.When he graduated from Fairview High School four years later, Jordan entered the college that employed his mother to study political science and English Literature in hopes to one day become a corporate lawyer. But during this time, he read George Orwell’s “The Road to Wigan Pier” - a book that wrestled with the bleak life of those working in the industrial age of north England and the place that Socialism could have in alleviating their miserable circumstances. Orwell’s book impacted Jordan greatly. He would later transfer to the University of Alberta and graduate in 1982 with a B.A. in political science. Just after this, Jordan visited Europe for a year where he took a studious approach in understanding the psychological origins of recent European totalitarianism. This led him to not only become a student of history but of psychology where he delved into the writings of Jung, Nietzsche, and Dostoevsky.Two years after receiving his first B.A., Jordan then received his second from the University of Alberta in psychology in 1984. He then moved to Montreal for further schooling at McGill University. And it was during this stint that Jordan married his lifelong friend and neighbor, Tammy shortly before earning his Ph.D in clinical psychology in 1991. The newly weds soon welcomed their first child and daughter Mikhaila in ...
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    56 mins
  • Ravi - His great and tragic legacy

    Ravi - His great and tragic legacy
    Mar 15 2021
    At seventeen years old, the young man, depressed by his grades in school, and his average ability in playing Cricket found himself contemplating suicide. He didn’t know that the maximum number of suicides in India occur just after school examinations, but he definitely felt the weight of having never attained academic excellence and the shame it would surly bring to his family. He simply didn’t care and he didn’t want to live anymore.Although his parents were Christians and he went to church with them fairly regularly, nothing about the Christian faith became real to him. He had never even opened a bible on his own initiative. As such, the young man thought there was no real difference between himself and an atheist. Maybe that softened his conscience as he was about to become another sad statistic of youth suicide. At his parent’s home in New Delhi, the depressed boy having no hope for the future in this life and no idea what awaited him in the next, ingested the poison, closed his eyes and waited to die.But the boy didn’t die. As he slowly and painfully awoke hours later confused and dehydrated in a hospital bed, the he realized that his plans were thwarted. A servant from the house had found him passed out and rushed him to the closest hospital. Not long after becoming responsive, laying in the hospital bed with his mother standing nearby, did a man walk into their room. The stranger was not a Dr. and was not invited in, so his presence was a bit curious. The man had a little red Gideon’s New Testament Bible and he offered it to the young patient.  Seeing that he was too weak to reach out and take it, the man opened it up to read its words aloud. The boy’s mother gently tried explaining to the stranger, although his intentions seemed good, that her son needed rest and privacy at the moment. The unknown man, aware that the boy had just tried to commit suicide, politely replied that her son needed to hear God’s word more than anything else.With that, he opened the New Testament to the gospel of John and read from the fourteenth chapter - "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.” It was those words from verse nineteen that resonated with the boy. “Because I live, you also shall live.” That promise of Jesus seemed to bring life into the boys poisoned body and purpose into his broken spirit. Upon hearing these words in Red, the boy who just previously didn’t want to live, having no reason to live, now believed that if Jesus himself was alive, then he too wanted to alive. And not just live - but live in God, and for Christ. The young man purposed in his heart to leave no stone un-turned in his pursuit of truth - that is to say, his pursuit of God.Laying in the hospital bed that day in 1963, this young man’s life was forever transformed by hearing Jesus’ words. And in turn, God would use him to transform many other lives for the kingdom of Heaven. The stranger with the bible was named Fred, and the boy he read the gospel to was seventeen year old Ravi Zacharias.Within just eight years of his unsuccessful suicide attempt, Ravi had become a passionate preacher - He spend the summer in Vietnam preaching the gospel to both US soldiers and VietCong members. Soon after that, in 1972 Ravi married his once  youth group friend, Margaret Reynolds. They would remain together until the end. Upon graduating from Ontario Bible College in Canada, Ravi soon began preaching for a Christian Missionary organization and was sent to Cambodia for a short time. After being ordained by the same organization in 1980, Ravi began teaching at it’s affiliated Seminary as a professor of evangelism. It was during this stint, that the relatively young 37 year old Ravi, was invited to speak in Amsterdam at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. This placed him on a global pedestal as a leading international evangelical preacher.Between teaching in class and guest speaking for large events, Ravi found himself sharing the gospel message back in his homeland of India. And it was there where he really saw the need for an apologetic ministry - to preach not only to one’s heart, but one’s mind as well. This was a ministry of teaching using logic, reason, intellect, and science to persuade even hardened skeptics.  So in August of 1984, Ravi  started  Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) in Toronto, Canada. This platform served his desire to remain a classical evangelist, but “in the arena of the intellectually resistant.”The timing of Ravi’s apologetic ministry heartened many Christians and challenged many atheists. At the time, ardent atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, were gaining popularity and Ravi was one of few Christians taking their arguments not only seriously, but humbly as well. This kind and intelligent approach to answering ...
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    36 mins
  • Whittaker

    Whittaker
    Feb 12 2021
    It was no joke, on April 1st, 1901 Jay Vivian Chambers was born in Philadelphia on a cold early morning with snow blanketing the ground; a blizzard was soon to come. Weighing 12 pounds and measuring 12 inches across the shoulders, his birth nearly killed his mother Laha. An artery was torn and baby Jay had to be removed with instruments. It was sad but fitting that Jay was born in this fashion, difficult and dangerous; his birth would serve as a type of foreboding for the remainder of his life. He was an abnormally large  newborn, and he’d grow to live an abnormally large life.Young Jay was named after his father Jay Chambers. His middle name, Vivian was the last name of one of his mother’s lifelong friends. As a child and young adult, he despised his first and middle names and vowed to change them as soon as he was able. While he didn’t know it at the time, he would live to have multiple first and last names - most of them assigned to him. Eventually, Jay would take his mother’s maiden name for his first, and keep his father’s surname, going by who the world now knows him as, Whittaker Chambers.Young Whittaker grew up in Lynbrook, New York State. His family moved there in 1904 just after Whittaker’s little brother Richard was born.  As Whittaker became a child and began to understand and compare his world with that of others, he became keenly aware of the dysfunction that he was continually surrounded by. Both of his parents, Jay and Laha came from the world of art as they were both thespians in their young life. They loved the stage and continued to act even after having their two boys. More so Jay - He was truly an artist and viewed himself as much. He didn’t care for the comforts of a middle class family. This was made apparent by withholding any money for his wife to beautify or to just repair their humble home. Nor did he pay any attention to his son’s overall health - Both Richard and Whittaker often suffered tooth aches to no relief from a dentist. As Jay submerged himself in his work as an artist for the local paper, and took a liking for the opera, and all things “culture”, he became completely absent from the family. He would come home in the middle hours of the night, almost always drunk. For this, and many other reasons, young Whittaker regrettably, but honestly lacked any respect for his father (p. 142).Jay’s absence and lack of engagement made Laha become Whittaker’s favorite parent, even if it was by default. Their shared sentiments regarding Jay, drew them into a close relationship. But Laha struggled with her own demons. She became dependent upon her young boys and could be described as acting somewhat neurotic at times. For some reason she felt the need to frequently remind Whittaker of how much pain his delivery had caused her.  Understandably, he resented this. Yet, despite all of her faults and problems, Laha loved her two boys and they became her life and her world. The small family even tried attending an Episcopalian Church for a time. But without reason, the boys were suspected of passing the whooping cough to another attendant. That ended their three month trial - as such religion played no part in their home. Whittaker would later write, “What I knew as a child about religion, I did not know as the result of any instruction. I knew it as a result of something I heard by chance, or that happened to me, and that touched something that was already in me.” (p. 116).Whittaker might not have needed religious education, but he would need all the hope and grounding he could get because the tenuous marriage of his parents rapidly dissolved when Whittaker and Richard were still young. Jay had his own life outside his family and simply solidified this by moving out. He would send the family 8 dollars a week, which at the time, Laha and her two boys managed fairly well. But Whittaker knew they were poor and would understand later that Jay could have given more in alimony, seeing as he had a steady and relatively good paying job. The good part of Whittaker’s father being gone was that their home became a much happier place. His father’s absence at home lightened the usually oppressive atmosphere.But it wasn’t long before Jay had moved out, that Grandma Whittaker would move in. And she was anything but a calming presence in their house. With early dementia, Grandma Whittaker would lock herself into her room and light little fires “cooking” something. The family learned to disregard her insistent self ramblings as well as the smell of smoke coming from her room. There were several times when Whittaker, being the largest in the family, would have to intervene - whether it was breaking down a door to see what was aflame or wrestling scissors or knives from her clinched fists, Grandma being at the house, in addition to the old tensions, was like having a demoniac presence sitting in the heart of their home. (p. 169). Whittaker would later write, “I ...
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    46 mins