The verse that really surprised me a lot is Isaiah 9:6: “For a child is born to us, a Son is given to us; dominion on his shoulders and his name will be called: Wonderful, Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace.”
It is possible to believe that the Messiah is God, and you can come to that on the basis of a verse from Isaiah.
I grew up in a Jewish family. I was somewhere in the middle between fearing God and longing to know God. But I remember when I was about 4 years old, I didn’t want to be 5 because that would bring me a year closer to death.
My mother believed in God, but it was such a vague faith. My father was an atheist and an agnostic. And at a certain stage, I came to the conclusion that being born into a certain belief system is not enough to stay in it.
Since I was a child, my parents had housekeepers. And when I was 10 years old, they hired a housekeeper and a cook named Bel. She loved God—she read the Bible all the time and was always by my side. I don’t know what made me do it, but I asked her if I need to believe in Jesus to spend eternity with God. And she said, “Yes.” I have never forgotten this conversation.
My best friend was a girl named Crystal. She lived two houses from us. I think we were both in a state of searching, each in our own way. Her family attended the Methodist Church. Her level of religiosity was similar to mine and we tried to think about the beginning of all beginnings and we did not succeed. Our brains just boiled.
After I finished my sophomore year of college, Chrystal and I met up again. And she told me about the guys she made friends with at school – they believed in God in a different way, in a way that she had never heard before. It just seemed like this group of guys had something different. They talked about a personal relationship with God.
And when I went to my new school, I came across a group of students who believed the same way. Basically, they told me how to ask Jesus to come into my heart.
Part of me wanted to believe, but I didn’t want to believe just because of the other person’s words. I wanted the truth. I wanted to know if God is real and if He is real. And my friend said: “Why don’t you just ask God to show you if it’s true?”
And it sounded very fair to me. If this is true, it will change everything. It will be the most beautiful thing that can happen to me.
Basically, I prayed and asked Jesus to come into my heart, forgive my sins and show me in my own experience if He is real and true. And I decided to just wait and see what happens. But I continued to attend Bible study classes.
This group of students was so loving and accepting and I have never experienced such a level of love and acceptance before. Tom was the student leader of our Bible study on campus and he shared his love for people and his desire for people to know God, who loves them so much. His eyes radiated encouragement.
And I don’t know what was so special about it – it sort of brought it all together for me – and all of a sudden I just said in my heart: “This is real. It’s really real.”
When I look back on all of this and when I look forward, I know that my life would have been very different without God. And I am so grateful that I have come to know my Messiah Yeshua and that my life has changed not only in this life, but in eternity.
Source: https://ieshua.org/marion-uells-oni-verili-v-boga-kak-to-inache.htm
I heard this moving story firsthand in the summer of 1983 at a large gathering of Christian believers. .....
Andrea, a podcast listener, writes in to ask: “Pastor John, I struggle a lot with having a negative .....
Here is someone who doubts God, doubts in His plan. But the Holy Spirit tells you: "Do not .....
Even in dark days, when the future seems the least promising, let us have faith in God. He .....
His body is made of 37 trillion cells which are interconnected into a single system that functions as .....
It was the first year of the reign of Darius the Mede, the son of Ahasuerus, who became .....
I’ve seen dozens of doctors over the past two decades. To make these medical appointments more valuable, one .....
I sometimes wonder if my life is so small and slow and ordinary that it’s inconsequential. My family .....
At first, it seems a little thing, A want unmet, a prayer unwinged. Voiceless, it interrogates the King, .....
This is an excerpt from The Gospel Project for Adults Bible Study from LifeWay. The Gospel Project is .....