June 19 2017 – Click here to listen
I read an interesting book about atheists last night entitled, 8 Absurd Things Atheists Must Believe Before Breakfast.
The 8 impossible things atheists must believe are as follows:
- Nothing created everything
- Chaos created order
- Non-life created life
- Non-consciousness created consciousness
- Non-personal created personal
- Blind created vision
- Deaf created hearing
Having once been an atheist I can say that I didn’t think of any of these points at the time. They are powerful, yet even if I had read them and agreed that atheism is absurd, I would not have turned to God because of it.
I know this because I came to believe in God when I was about 20 years old. After several powerful encounters with the spiritual (demonic) world while practicing black magic. I saw it work with my own eyes in commanding – potent ways and realized that spiritual entities exist in a separate realm which is unseen. Logically I deduced that if Satan existed in that realm, so did God.
However, that did not make me love God and I did not immediately turn to Him; in fact, just the opposite. Due to growing up in a chaotic, unstable, situation devoid of love, I’d become bitter and angry and felt God was responsible for all the bad things in my life, and consequently I disliked Him immensely. It was only after reading the Bible that I realized how wrong I’d been, and that God is love, and Satan is hate and the one responsible for my misery.
As I look at the haters in our world I can relate more than most. They need love in their lives. They rarely smile and one can sense their misery.
So how do we reach the lost? Interestingly I rejected God all the more because of Christians. They did not exhibit love towards me, rather revulsion and hatred. All the Christians I’d ever encountered up to that time were self-righteous people who judged and condemned me strictly by my appearance. I wasn’t the only one that felt that way either. Legendary guitarist Jimi Hendrix sang a song in 1967, If 6 was 9, with these lyrics:
White collared conservative flashing down the street,
Pointing their plastic finger at me.
They’re hoping soon my kind will drop and die,
But I’m gonna wave my freak flag high, high.
I never forgot those lyrics because I could relate. When I was judged by “white collared conservatives,” it just made me more resolute to be even more rebellious and even teach them a lesson.
I walked by a street preacher in New Orleans one day and when he looked at me he pointed his finger at me and screamed, “If you don’t change your ways, you’re going to hell!” I knocked him off the crate he was standing on and put a gun right between his eyes and cocked the trigger and told him through clenched teeth that if he ever said that to me again I’d kill him. And I very nearly murdered that man for screaming at me like that.
Had that well-meaning preacher said, “Hey you look like you have something on your mind, can I get you a cup of coffee?” or “Can I pray with you?” I would have responded far differently.
The hate we see today in our divided country cannot be resolved by trying to shout the other side down. It will only be resolved through love. That means our nation must return to God, who is the personification of love, and those who already profess to be with God must understand that God is love and He wants us to be the same. Admittedly it is difficult to love someone who hates everything you stand for and the God you love, but Christians must be different than the world, just like Christ is different.
John 13:34
“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.”