I was praying recently, and said something to God like, it’s difficult to believe what we can’t see, but . . . . I can’t help but believe it! And for many of the reasons I argue here. Then something different came to mind, an apologetic I don’t believe I have ever appealed to: changed lives. Evangelical Christians, a description I embrace for myself, are familiar with Christians using their testimony as a means of sharing the reality of their faith with others. I’ve always shied away from this as an apologetic, as a defense for the truth of Christianity, because it seems subjective, and I want to root that defense in the objective, in things that are real and substantive, like evidence, Scripture, history, archaeology, logic, philosophy, etc. What came to my mind is a saying of Jesus from John 3, and I realized just how powerful is the evidence God has given us for his existence and spiritual reality in the lives of his people:
7 You should not be surprised at my saying, ‘You must be born again.’ 8 The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit.”
We can’t see wind, but we can see and feel its effects. We don’t have to prove the reality of wind because it’s obvious wind exists, even though we can’t see it. Likewise, we cannot see the Spirit of God, but the proof, the seeing and experiencing of the Spirit’s existence, is in the effects he has on and in those born again.
I wrote recently of the short life of Jim Elliot, a missionary who was killed in 1956, along with four friends, by Indians in Ecuador trying to bring the gospel to those unreached people. Because of the recent anniversary of their death, I watched a movie inspired by the young martyrs called The End of the Spear (read the story of the man, Mincaye, who killed him, and eventually became a Christian). The gospel never ceases to blow me away, with its power to transform the lives of every kind of person, in every time and in every place. As Tim Keller argues in his Reason for God, Christianity is the only truly multi-cultural religion. It appeals to, and transforms, the least educated to the most, the least sophisticated to the most, the poor and the rich, and everyone in between, from every language and culture. It really is remarkable. Does an mere idea do that? Certainly no other religion does or has.
This was also brought home to me by another movie I recently watched about the founder of Voice of the Martyrs, Richard Wurmbrand, called Tortured for Christ. I tremble to think what I would do in such circumstances. I’ve been getting their magazine, and reading the stories of those who once persecuted Christians becoming Christians and themselves being persecuted for Christ, a la the Apostle Paul. Does a mere idea do that? No! Only the power of the Spirit of God can transform a human soul from night to day, darkness to light, death to life. And how about Kanye! He told his pastor, Adam Tyson, just weeks weeks after it happened, that he had been “radically saved.” Everybody was skeptical. Kanye West a Jesus freak, a Christian, for real? Listen to him talk, and listen to his album, Jesus is King, and it most definitely is for real. The Spirit of Almighty God does that, the invisible made visible in the lives of his people!
I’m going to do another post related to this from Romans 12 with some thoughts why I believe the apologetic for Christianity in the lives of God’s people is so powerful.
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