As I discovered when I set out as a young man to refute Christianity and the Bible, those facts can be investigated—and verified. And those facts, those objective criteria, represent our best hope for coming to a meaningful conclusion about right and wrong, good and evil, as they point us to God and his Son, Jesus, whose nature and character define truth. Thomas Aquinas wrote, “There is within every soul a thirst for happiness and meaning.” As a teenager, I exemplified that statement. I wanted to be happy and to find meaning for my life. I wanted the answers to three basic questions: Who am I? Why am I here? Where am I going? These are life’s tough questions. I would estimate that 90 percent of people age forty and younger cannot answer those three questions. But I was thirsty to know what life was about. So as a young student, I started looking for answers. Where I was brought up, everyone seemed to be religious. I thought maybe I would find my answers in being religious, so I started attending church. I got into it 150 percent. I went to church morning, afternoon, and evening. But I guess I got into the wrong one because I felt worse inside church than I did outside. About the only thing I got out of my religious experience was seventy-five cents a week. I would put a quarter into the offering plate and take out a dollar so I could buy a milkshake! I was brought up on a farm in Michigan, and most farmers are very practical. My dad, who was a farmer, taught me, “If something doesn’t work, chuck it.” So I chucked religion. Then I thought that education might have the answers to my quest for happiness and meaning. So I enrolled in the university. What a disappointment! You can find a lot of things in the university, but enrolling there to find truth and meaning in life is virtually a lost cause. I was by far the most unpopular student among the faculty of the first university I attended. I used to buttonhole professors in their offices, seeking the answers to my questions. When they saw me coming, they would turn out the lights, pull down the shades, and lock the door so they wouldn’t have to talk to me. I soon realized that the university didn’t have the answers I was seeking. Faculty members and my fellow students had just as many problems, frustrations, and unanswered questions about life as I did. A few years ago I saw a student walking around campus with a sign on his back: “Don’t follow me, I’m lost.” That was how everyone in the university seemed to me. Education was not the answer. Prestige must be the way to go, I decided. It just seemed right to find a noble cause, give yourself to it, and become well known. The people with the most prestige in the university were the student leaders, who also controlled the purse strings. So I ran for various student offices and got elected. It was great to know everyone on campus, make important decisions, and spend the university’s money doing what I wanted to do. But the thrill soon wore off like everything else I had tried. Every Monday morning I woke with a headache because of the night before. My attitude was, Here we go again, another five boring days. Happiness for me revolved around my three party nights: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Then the whole boring cycle started over again. I felt so frustrated, even desperate. My goal was to find my identity and purpose in life. But everything I tried left me empty, without answers. About that time I noticed a small group of people on campus— eight students and two faculty members—and there was something different about them. They seemed to know where they were going in life. And they had a quality I deeply admire in people: conviction. There is a certain dynamic in the lives of people with deep convictions, and I enjoy that dynamic. But there was something more about this group that caught my attention. It was love. These students and professors not only loved each other, they also loved and cared for people outside their group. They didn’t just talk about love; they got involved in loving others. It was something totally foreign to me, and I wanted it. So I decided to make friends with this group of people. About two weeks later I was sitting at a table in the student union, talking with some members of this group. Soon the conversation got around to the topic of God. I was pretty insecure about this subject, so I put on a big front to cover it up. I leaned back in my chair, acting as if I couldn’t care less. “Christianity, ha!” I blustered. “That’s for the weaklings, not the intellectuals.” Down deep, I really wanted what they had. But with my pride and my position in the university, I didn’t want them to know that I wanted what they had. Then I turned to one of the young women in the group and said, “Tell me, what changed your lives? Why are you so different from the other students and faculty?” She looked me straight in the eye and said two words I never expected to hear in an intelligent discussion on a university campus: “Jesus Christ.”

“Jesus Christ?” I snapped. “Don’t give me that kind of garbage. I’m fed up with religion, the Bible, and the church.” She quickly shot back, “Mister, I didn’t say ‘religion.’ I said ‘Jesus Christ.’” Taken aback by the woman’s courage, conviction, and forthrightness, I apologized for my attitude. “But I’m sick and tired of religion and religious people,” I added. “I don’t want anything to do with it.” Then my new friends issued a challenge I couldn’t believe. They challenged me, a pre-law student, to examine intellectually the truth claim that Jesus Christ is God’s Son. I thought it was a joke. These Christians were so dumb. How could something as flimsy as Christianity stand up to an intellectual examination? So I scoffed at their challenge. But they didn’t let up. They kept challenging me day after day, and finally they backed me into the corner. I became so irritated at their insistence that I finally accepted their challenge, not to prove anything, but to refute them. I decided to write a book that would make an intellectual joke of Christianity. So I left the university and traveled throughout the United States and Europe to seek the evidence that Christianity was a sham. One day I was sitting in a library in London, England, and I sensed a voice within me say, “Josh, you don’t have a leg to stand on.” I immediately suppressed it. But just about every day after that I heard that inner voice. The more I researched, the more I heard that voice. I returned to the United States and to the university, but I couldn’t sleep at night. I would go to bed at ten o’clock and lie awake until four in the morning trying to refute the overwhelming evidence of the three pillars of the Christian faith:

1. Jesus Christ is God’s Son.
2. The Bible is God’s personal revelation and is accurate and trustworthy.
3. The resurrection of Christ on the third day was a true historic fact.

I began to realize that I was being intellectually dishonest. My mind told me that the claims about Christ, the Bible and the Resurrection were indeed true, but my will was being pulled another direction. I had placed so much emphasis on finding the truth that I wasn’t willing to follow it once I saw it. I had sensed Christ’s personal challenge to me in Revelation 3:20: “Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with him, and he with me” (NIV). But becoming a Christian seemed so ego-shattering to me. I couldn’t think of a faster way to ruin all my good times. I knew I had to resolve this inner conflict because it was driving me crazy. I had always considered myself an open-minded person, so I decided to put Christ’s claims to the supreme test. One night at home in Union City, Michigan, at the end of my second year at the university, I became a Christian. Someone may say, “How do you know you became a Christian?” I was there! I got alone with a Christian friend, and I prayed four things in response to God’s invitation for me to trust him. In doing that, I established my relationship with God. First, I said, “Lord Jesus, thank you for dying on the cross for me.” I realized that if I were the only person on earth, Christ would have still died for me. You may think it was the irrefutable intellectual evidence that brought me to Christ. No, the evidence was only God’s way of getting his foot in the door of my life, of getting my attention. After being convinced that Jesus is God’s Son, that the Bible is true and trustworthy, and that the Resurrection actually happened, what brought me to Christ was the realization that he loved me enough to die for me. Second, I said, “I confess that I am a sinner.” No one had to tell me that. I knew I was doing things that were incompatible with a holy, just, righteous God. The Bible says, “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9, NIV). So I said, “Lord, forgive me.” Third, I said, “Right now, in the best way I know how, I open the door of my life, and I place my trust in you as Savior and Lord. Take over the control of my life. Change me from the inside out. Make me the type of person you created me to be.” The last thing I prayed was, “Thank you for coming into my life.” After I prayed, nothing happened. There was no bolt of lightning. I didn’t sprout angel’s wings. If anything, I actually felt worse after I prayed, almost physically sick. I was afraid I had made an emotional decision I would later regret intellectually. But more than that, I was afraid of what my friends would say when they found out. I really felt I had gone off the deep end. But over the next eighteen months, my entire life changed. One of the biggest changes occurred in how I viewed people. At the university I had mapped out the next twenty-five years of my life. My ultimate goal was to become governor of Michigan. I planned to accomplish my goal by using people in order to climb the ladder of political success because I figured people were to be used. But after I placed my trust in Christ, my thinking changed. Instead of using others to serve me, I wanted to be used to serve others. Becoming other-centered instead of self-centered was a dramatic change in my life. Another area that started to change was my bad temper. I used to blow my stack if somebody just looked at me wrong. I still have the scars from almost killing a man during my first year in the university. My bad temper was so ingrained that I didn’t consciously seek to change it. Then one day I was faced with a crisis that ordinarily would have set me off, but my bad temper was gone. I’m not perfect in this area, but the change in my life has been significant and dramatic. Perhaps the most significant change has been in the area of hatred and bitterness. I grew up filled with hatred, primarily aimed at one man whom I hated more than anyone else on the face of the earth. I despised everything that this man stood for. I can remember as a young boy lying in bed at night plotting how I could kill this man without being caught by the police. That man was my father. When I was growing up, my father was the town drunk. I hardly ever knew him sober. My friends at school joked about my dad’s lying in the gutter downtown, making a fool of himself. Their jokes hurt me deeply, but I never let anyone know. I laughed along with them. It was a very secret pain. I would sometimes find my mother in the barn, lying in the manure behind the cows, where my dad had beaten her with a hose until she couldn’t get up. My hatred seethed as I vowed to myself, “When I am strong enough, I’m going to kill him.” When Dad was drunk and visitors were coming over, I would grab him around the neck, pull him out to the barn, and tie him up. Then I would park his truck behind the silo and tell everyone he had gone to a meeting so we wouldn’t be embarrassed as a family. When I tied up his hands and feet, I looped part of the rope around his neck. I just hoped he would try to get away and choke himself. Two months before I graduated from high school, I walked into the house after a date to hear my mother sobbing. I ran into her room, and she sat up in bed. “Son, your father has broken my heart,” she said. Then she put her arms around me and pulled me close. “I have lost the will to live. All I want to do is live until you graduate, then I want to die.” I graduated two months later, and the next Friday my mother died. I believe she died of a broken heart. I hated my father for that. Had I not left home a few months after the funeral to attend college, I might have killed him. But after I made a decision to place my trust in Jesus as Savior and Lord, the love of God inundated my life. God took my hatred for my father and turned it upside down. Five months after becoming a Christian, I found myself looking my dad right in the eye and saying, “Dad, I love you.” I did not want to love that man, but I did. God’s love had changed my heart. After I transferred to Wheaton College, I was in a serious car accident, the victim of a drunk driver. I was moved home from the hospital to recover, and my father came to see me. Remarkably, he was sober that day. He seemed uneasy, pacing in my room. Then he blurted out, “How can you love a father like me?” I said, “Dad, six months ago I hated you; I despised you. But I have put my trust in Jesus Christ, received God’s forgiveness, and he has changed my life. I can’t explain it all, Dad, but God has taken away my hatred for you and replaced it with love.”

We talked for nearly an hour, then he said, “Son, if God can do in my life what I’ve seen him do in yours, then I want to give him the opportunity.” He prayed, “God, if you’re really God and Jesus died on the cross to forgive me for what I’ve done to my family, I need you. If Jesus can do in my life what I’ve seen him do in the life of my son, then I want to trust him as Savior and Lord.” Hearing my dad pray that prayer from his heart was one of the greatest joys of my life. After I trusted Christ, my life was basically changed in six to eighteen months. But my father’s life was changed right before my eyes. It was as if someone reached down and switched on a light inside him. He touched alcohol only once after that. He got the drink as far as his lips, and that was it—after forty years of drinking! He didn’t need it anymore. Fourteen months later, he died from complications of his alcoholism. But in that fourteenmonth period, more than a hundred people in the area around my tiny hometown committed their lives to Jesus Christ because of the change they saw in the town drunk, my dad. You can laugh at Christianity. You can mock and ridicule it. But it works. If you personally trust Christ, start watching your attitudes and actions because Jesus Christ is in the business of changing lives. But Christianity is not something to be shoved down your throat or forced on you. You have your life to live, and I have mine. All I can do is tell you what I have learned and experienced. After that, what you do with Christ is your decision.

The man or woman who personally receives Christ as Savior and Lord is assured of everlasting life with him in heaven. And he or she will also discover that a relationship with Jesus Christ gives life purpose and meaning. For years I searched for the answer to the question, What will bring happiness and meaning to my life? Who or what can answer my questions about truth? Is there a God? Is he personal? Can I know him? How can I know right from wrong, good from evil? I thought I would find the answer in organized religion, education, and prestige, but I always ended up disappointed and unfulfilled. Ultimately, I discovered that the answer could only be found in the Lord Jesus Christ. I trust that you will begin the journey to make this discovery of truth in your own life. And if today the truth became clear to you and you made the decision to trust Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord, let me be the first to welcome you into the family of God! I heartily encourage you to attend and participate in a church where the Lord Jesus Christ is glorified, where the Holy Bible is honored and taught in a practical way, and where believers love, encourage, and pray for one another. Study God’s Word regularly, and apply it to your daily life. Share his love with your family, friends, and neighbors.

Culled from "Knowing Good from Evil" by Josh McDowell

Thanks for this

UceeGod, I though this was your personal testimony. I'll return to it after church. Very powerful...