Thursday, September 20, 2007

My Blog is about TRUTH John 14:6

Ravi Zacharias Testimony:

My own personal story and it is this: I was a teenager in Delhi on the verge of suicide. I had no hope; I had no meaning. I had no promise for the future, for my life. I was lying in a hospital bed when a man walked in and wanted to speak to me. My mother told him that he couldn’t speak to me—I was in intensive care, I was dying. He gave me a little New Testament and asked my mother to read it to me. Her English wasn’t very good, but in that King James language, he turned to the fourteenth chapter of John and read it to her and asked her to read it to me. And there as I laid dying, I heard the words of Jesus saying, “I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life, no one comes unto the Father except through me.” I prayed a simple prayer and I said, “Jesus, I really don’t know much about you, but if you are the way, you are the truth, and you are the life, enter into my life and change not only what I do, please change what I want to do.” I need to tell you that not a few hours before my suicide attempt my father looked me in the eye and said to me, “You’re going to make nothing of your life; you’re an embarrassment to me.” My dad was a highly placed government officer having served under Prime Minister Nehru, and then under a personal friend of Gandhi. He was powerful and he saw my life heading nowhere, and said those words that I know he himself regretted later. So I asked myself, “Why live?” No hope, no meaning, no truth, until I heard the words of Jesus, “I am the way, the truth, the life, no one comes unto the Father except through me.”
Ladies and gentlemen, in the simplicity and the complexity of that room, I invited Jesus Christ into my life. He changed not only what I did; He changed what I wanted to do. He changed my heart to the profoundest depths of human experience. Why do I see Him as the way, the truth, the life? Listen carefully. There are four questions in life—origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. When you look at the person of Christ, you’ll find all of those answered.
Consider these four pillars—eternity, morality, accountability, charity. Jesus said this: that He was with the Father from the beginning. He was uncreated. This Old Testament prophet said, “Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given.” Notice the words. He didn’t say the son is born. The son never was born; the son eternally existed, and came as a child of a virgin birth. And then in His perfect life, His death and His resurrection, He embodied what it meant to be moral, for what evil is to life, contradiction is to reason. When an argument is contradictory, the argument breaks down. When evil enters your life, life breaks down. He embodied that which was purity without sin. Accountability said, “I’ve come to do the will of my Father.” And Charity went to the Cross. Even Mahatma Gandhi said this, “Of all the dispositions and teachings of thinkers and ethicists, the one doctrine that I have no sufficient counter for is Jesus on that Cross.” Think about it. He offers it to you and to me. To give us a sense of the eternal, to give us the moral, to give us the accountable, and to give us the charitable. And He arose again from the dead to guarantee that.
Here is my closing illustration, and thank you so much for giving me a hearing. It is a parable that comes from the east of a man who owned a lot of paintings, a very wealthy man who had a son. The son used to go into the city streets and would often talk to a beggar. The beggar took a liking to this young man and one day gave this young man a portrait he’d painted of him. So the young man took it to his father who was an art connoisseur and the father thought to himself, “Well, it’s not a very good painting, but we’ll hang it up in the gallery because it’s supposed to be of my son.” Many, many years went by and the young lad stopped coming to visit the beggar. And the beggar finally went to the gates of the palace and said, “I don’t see that young man anymore.” The palace guards said, “Well, he died very suddenly.” The beggar was very unhappy to hear the news and he said, “Can I see his father?” And they said, “Yes.” The beggar said to the father, “I have done another picture of your son, just like the other one. I want you to have it.” He gave it to the father and the father, of course, hung up the painting beside the other one.
Not long afterwards, the father suddenly passed away too, and the beggar heard about it. He also heard that all the art in the palace was going to be auctioned. So he asked if he could go in. An auctioneer came and saw all the paintings on the walls, and the connoisseurs were there and they were all going to bid on them. There in the middle of this collection were hanging the two paintings of his son done by this beggar that were not very good at all. The auctioneer said, “We’re going to have an auction, but the first paintings to go are the ones of the young lad here and then we’ll proceed with the rest.” They said, “We’re not interested in them, just get on with the….” He said, “No, no, we must begin with these.” But nobody bid. So the beggar put his hand in his pocket and took out a handful of pennies, and said, “I want to bid on the young man’s paintings.” And nobody else competed for the few pennies, the gavel was sounded, and he got the son’s portraits.
As the beggar took them and was about to leave, the gavel sounded again and the auctioneer said, “I have some news for you. Behind the paintings of this young man are the words, ‘Whoever bids on these gets the whole gallery.’” He who got the son got everything that the father had to give. I present to you the very Son of God, the Lord Jesus Christ, who gives you all that His Father has to offer: eternity, morality, accountability and charity. When you know Him, you know the truth and that truth will set you free indeed, for you will live for it, present it, and this generation will listen. May God richly bless you.

http://www.rzim.org / Ravi's Website

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