Hey Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

How was your day? Enjoy the sun a bit? I had a good day of sharing the gospel and Brian prayed with me to receive Christ as His savior. He did not seem to know how God took away his sin but given that he had attended the Christian Reform Church in Elmhurst he may have once known and forgot. He certainly was not trusting in Jesus to make him right with God. He was assuming he was good enough, and I think he was a good person. He said, “I made the best of my life, made good decisions and helped others. When there was a fork in the road I took the right path.” I mentioned the Robert Frost poem [The Road Not Taken] and he said, “Yeah like that.”

The Gospel seemed like news to him, I asked how God took away his sin and he said, “Forgiveness?”

“Well, yeah God forgives you but what is the big thing that happens to make it possible?” I asked him. And he had no guess so I said, “Well, it’s Jesus.” By the time I finished the gospel he of course recognized the story and prayed aloud to trust in Christ for the forgiveness of his sins. He said he had some atheist friends and we talked about the way the world can shift some people away from faith when something painful happened. He was a great guy. I gave him a Bible Study on the Deity of Christ and The Case for Faith so hopefully he’ll get a chance to take some of that in and grow. I gave him a card for a Church in Elmhurst that meets in the theater there so he might check it out.

The last conversation I had today was interesting. A staunchly committed Catholic guy in his 20’s who basically thought every sincerely religious person went to heaven, which actually is in keeping with Vatican II. He was a counselor, recently unemployed. I pointed out some of the ways in which other religion were a violation of conscience. He said, ‘Well that’s a Freudian term.”

I missed his point at first and said, “Well, Freud has been dismissed by most schools of psychological theory.” Then I realized he was attributing the term to Freud. “Well, the term is found in the Bible and that predates Freud by quite a bit.” He asked how many translations of the Bible there are and I said I did not know but I had about 35 back at my house on my shelf. He thought he had made his point and I said, “But the earliest are based on documents from 350 AD.” And then he was standing about to be late for an appointment. We parted amiably but it goes to show how easily knowledge is dismissed today. Even had Freud coined the term in English, and since it is in the King James Bible and Geneva Bible 1560 he did not, it seems to take one assumed fact to write off an idea for some, be it ad hominem in argument or any other number of fallacies. Now that the Movie Titanic has been re-released the internet is full of examples of Millennia’s who now for the first time realizes it is a true story. Truth it seems, historical factual and worst of all Biblical, has drained out of the bottom of our society. We are in trouble.

Thanks for your prayers for the ministry if you had a chance this week or for me today. God has blessed this year and this is why.

Blessings in Him,
Bob