November 9, 2021 – Click here to listen
What are the reasons that so many reject God? Speaking for myself is all I can offer. At one point in our lives, both my mother and I were both atheists. Later in life, we both turned to God and became solid believers. I cannot speak for others including my mother, but I can tell you what changed my mind.
- I became deeply involved with witchcraft in my youth and became acutely aware that another dimension, or spiritual world, exists, and that Satan and demons inhabit it. I was deeply scarred from my abusive father and terrible upbringing. I was angry, bitter, and full of resentment during my childhood through my early twenties I blamed God for my “tragic” life and did not embrace or even like God, I thought He was mean. But I realized if Satan and his demons exist then God had to exist too.
- I had never read the Bible and had no training and thus knew little to nothing about Jesus or His life. I was stuck in a hospital for months as a result of a car accident and one day decided to read the Bible for myself and disprove it. I started reading the Old Testament and found it boring and was going to abandon the project, but I flipped through a Bible that had been loaned to me by a nurse and saw she had underlined a great many verses in the New Testament. When I read it, I discovered that Jesus was nothing like I had envisioned Him. He was full of love, compassion, mercy, and did not condemn like the few Christians I’d encountered. No one in my life had ever told me they loved me, but that is all Jesus talked about.
- When I got out of the hospital, I continued reading the Bible over, and over, and over again. It changed me in a million ways. By the time I was 24 I had been an alcoholic for about 11 years. I had been a meth addict for close to 7 years. I smoked 2 packs of cigarettes per day and had done so since the age of 12. I would fight anyone, anywhere, anytime regardless of any consequences. I was a loner with not one friend and was homeless and conducted a life filled with crime to exist. After I accepted Christ as my Savior, I gave up drugs and alcohol without going to rehab or any program, I desperately wanted to change my life. I quit fighting, smoking cigarettes, married my wife of fifty years, got a menial job and was promoted 8 times in two years, and then became an entrepreneur and built several multi-million-dollar companies. Today I have three married sons and seven grandkids, all of whom are Christians. I also have friends all over the world. God transformed my life!
- I have no idea what the odds of such a dramatic transformation would be, but suffice it to say I should be dead, in prison, or in an insane asylum, and but for the grace of God I would, but I’m not. Today fifty some odd years later I still begin each day reading and studying the Bible.
My Bible study has revealed that I am not alone in being transformed by God. The Disciples of Jesus, to a person, were cowering and ran away like scared rabbits and hid when He was taken to be crucified; however, when He appeared to them after His resurrection they became as bold as lions and preached God’s Word fearlessly. Eventually, they were martyred and persecuted in the cruelest fashion for preaching the Gospel. The Apostle Paul was rounding up Christians and having them beaten and killed until he met Jesus on a dusty road to Damascus. After that, he followed Jesus, boldly preached the Gospel, and endured the worst persecution imaginable, and ended up writing 1/3 of the New Testament prior to being martyred.
There are many reasons that some people reject God. Some had a bad experience with someone in a church. Others experienced tragedy and blame God, some let a “woke” professor tell them that God is not real. I have followed Christ since 1970 and can tell you that God changed my life dramatically. I have lived through many tragedies since becoming a Christian including my beloved brother’s suicide. I didn’t get mad at God for those tragedies, I got mad at Satan and the sin that he spawned. God helped me get through it all. God loves us all the time and though we are far inferior intellectually and don’t have a clue why some things happen, we can be assured that God, who did not spare His own Son in order that we might live, is good all the time. God knows grief and has seen His Child suffer too.
Don’t reject God and His blessings will endure within you forever! In this world, we will have trials and tribulations and though we might not see it at the time, God has a purpose for our lives and along the way, the things we encounter are ultimately for our own good. Have faith my friends.
1 Peter 2:1
So put away all malice and all deceit and hypocrisy and envy and all slander. Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into salvation — if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good. As you come to him, a living stone rejected by men but in the sight of God chosen and precious, you yourselves like living stones are being built up as a spiritual house, to be a holy priesthood, to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ . . .