Hey Sisters and Brothers in Christ,

I hope you had a good day walking with God in Christ. I had a good day on campus walking with Him there and Jose and Brandon each prayed to receive Jesus today. They were both very thankful. Their stories are below if you have some time. Please pray they grow in faith.

 Jose was sitting on the floor leaning against the wall just west of where you enter the tunnel to get over to the PE building. He was a good-looking Latino guy with a mustache and a goatee under his chin, a line going up to his mouth. He had a slight triangle nose and a curly mop of hair short on the sides. Sharp features, he might have been 5’10” and wore a red hoodie with black sweats. I asked him if he wanted to do a student survey and he said he’d already done one by the front doors. I said this was a little different and said the big question was, “You are walking down the road and you get hit by a bus. So you’re dead. And you stand before God and He asks, ‘Why should I let you into Heaven?’ what would you say?” “That’d be hard,” he replied. “Would you like to hear the Bible verses that tell you how you get into Heaven?” I asked. “Sure,” he replied so I sat on the floor with his backpack between us and wrote down his name and the reply and began going through the Gospel. I told him God, created him, loved him and had a plan for him. Jesus said Eternal life was knowing God and that meant God lived inside him. The problem was sin, God can’t be in the same place as sin so He takes away your sin so he can live inside you. “So do you know what the big thing was that Jesus did to take away your sin, like what they might have said at Church or something?” I asked. “It’s been a minute,” he said with a smile, meaning been a while since he went to church. “Yeah no worries this is how it works,” I said and began to explain the blood of Jesus cleansed him from his sin. “Life is in the blood and Jesus is the source of all life so when He pours out his blood it pays God back for all the imperfect things we have done that we owe God something perfect for,” I explained, having told him that when we sin we damage what belongs to God. We effectively take life from people when we sin against them so the life in Christ’s blood pays for what we did. I explained the righteousness of God Jesus earned by perfectly keeping the Law in the Old Testament. God then gives this righteousness to us when He adopts us, we’re clothed with Jesus. I said we have to receive Jesus believing in His name, in His reputation. Believing, “He is God, died for your sins and rose from the dead.” So if someone asked you why God should let you into Heaven you’d say, “Because Jesus died for me.” I said his good stuff would not fix his bad stuff But God can make bad into good. I asked if he would want to be forgiven trusting in what Jesus had done of if he thought something else. “Be forgiven,” he replied. So I said if he wanted to be forgiven there was a prayer he could pray. I talked him through the prayer and asked, “It says here, ‘Does this prayer express the desire of your heart?’ Would you say it does?” He nodded. Well if you want to you could pray it silently right now, I wouldn’t hear you but God would hear and you’d know you were forgiven. Wanna do it?’ I asked. He said, “Yeah.” I handed him the booklet and he said, “Thank you.” He prayed then to receive Jesus. When he finished I began to go through the Christian life with him. He didn’t have a Bible so I gave him one explaining the study helps. I wrote his name and the date and “forgiven!” in the front and handed it to him and he said “Thank you.” I gave him Bible Promises for You and The Case for Christ Answer Booklet telling him there was some stuff on Easter in it and he might have time over Spring Break. I gave him a Bible Study too. He thanked me again for all of it and I told him I would pray a Bible verse for him each day asking God to bless him from now until Spring and one year after. I got up to go and he stood with me and reached out to shake my hand and said, “Thank you so much.’ I said, “Have a good one.” “Thank you,” he said again and he headed into the tunnel. I passed him later walking with his girlfriend and said Hey and we both waved.

 Brandon was sitting in the hallway just a little west of the doorway to the bookstore. He was from NJ. He had his brown hair combed back in a pompadour it was short on the sides something of a fade at the temples. He had boyish sharp features, was clean-shaven with a slight build. He was dressed in a black Marine emblem hoodie and black sweats. He looked pretty young but had already been a corporal in the Marines and had recently reenlisted in the reserves. He’d been a rifleman but it seemed like he was returning to a logistics position and was moving back to an M4 from the H&K416. I had on my H&K hat so we talked a bit about guns. I asked him what he would say to God to get into Heaven and he said, “I wouldn’t give him a reason—I’d say it’s up to you. I wouldn’t define what I’d done in the past, good and bad. It’d up to God.” I asked him the likelihood he would get into Heaven. “I’m not a perfect man, I’ve done some bad and some good, nothing egregious.” I began to go through the Gospel with Him. Saying God wanted to live inside him. He talked about his grandmother and mother’s religious views. They condemned their Catholic roots but he felt it was really about men. His grandma was into crystals and Tarot cards. She had given him a crystal saying she wanted him to wear it but he said he’d only put it on his desk. “They want to condemn organized religion, they say they are spiritual,” he said he thought it was the same thing and I agreed. I went on and explained all I usually do about the Gospel, the cleansing blood and righteousness of Christ allowed God to live inside him and that God adopted him and gave him the rights of a child of God when he believed. I asked if he would want to be forgiven or thought something else. I mentioned Islam as another view and Buddhism. He reflected over them a bit rejecting Islam for its treatment of women and the Buddha as his world was illusion and asked about Judaism. I said they had changed to a God not found in the Bible in the Old Testament which was in 2 powers there’s was now more like Islam and tribal. “It would seem that Christianity was the best choice,” he said finally and I agreed. I said if he wanted to be forgiven there was a prayer he could pray and talked him through it asking if it expressed what he thought. He said it did. I said he could pray it silently and he said “OK.” He took the booklet and prayed aloud to receive Christ. We were alone in the hall as it was later in the afternoon. I began to go through the Christian life with him. He said he had his Grandfather’s Bible back in NJ so I said he could read the Bible on line at Bible Gateway they would send him a daily verse or reading on his phone. I said everything in Christianity was “By the Spirit’s Power. Inside Out.”

We talked about astrology as his grandmother was into it. He said he’d told his grandmother it was what science believed until they decided it was wrong. I explained the impossibility of checking what it would say as credible. It was possible that the planets had some effect on us but how would anyone prove what it was. I told him I was born at 2AM on September 4^th. But even if you could collect all the people born in the Chicago area at that time, how would you discover what the effect had been of the moon or the planets. People born a bit later—the planet or moon would be in a different place or if born on the other side of the earth a completely different star chart would exist. But how could you check effects. You could only guess and people born on the same day, in the same year were just as likely to have nothing in common, in how they were seemed fated in life, as several things in common. But even were you to find this out you could never demonstrate a near planet had been the cause and it was not something else entirely. Effectively I was making the case it was all made up. I pointed out CERN the Hadron Collider made statements they had opened another dimension. But how would you know you were in another dimension if you arrived there. All your instruments were designed for this dimension, if they continue to work that would be evidence you had not left your own dimension, if they failed you’d be unable to say why, knowing nothing. I think it was Socrates who said you can’t find the truth if you know nothing, as you would not know you had found the truth when you did—if you do not know what you are looking for. You have to be guided into the truth by others who already know it. I gave him the larger book The Case for Christianity Answer Book and The Case for Christ Answer Booklet as he said he liked to read. I gave him the Rose Publication “100 Prophecies fulfilled by Jesus” and a Bible Study and a book of Pocket Prayers by Lucado. I also wrote his name and the date and “forgiven!” in the front of Bible Promises for You. It just did not seem like he had had a lot to go on coming from where he did and he was a reader. We talked nearly 45 minutes I think. He had a Rosary a Chaplain had given him overseas. I said, “I seemed like praying to Mary would make it impossible for her to hear you. She was the greatest woman in the Bible but she was still just a woman, it would seem she could only listen to a couple people at a time. I said I had a friend who prayed with beads and if they helped you focus that was fine. I told him I would pray for him each day through Spring and one year after. I said the likelihood he would now go to Heaven was 100% as God would not look at what we’d done but what Christ did for us. He stood up and shook my hand as I got up to go in thanks and I said I’d see him in Heaven.

 So thanks for your prayers for the ministry and for evangelism today if you had a chance. God truly blessed.

 In Him,

Bob