A Ready Defense

The Best of Josh McDowell

Josh McDowell

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780310139911
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Be prepared "in season and out" with this handy reference book of faith. Timely and biblically based, Josh McDowell's work offers defenses in 60 of the most-challenged areas of faith. All in one easy-to-reference volume, this book will strengthen your commitment and help you stand firm against challenges to the truth.

1

HE CHANGED MY LIFE

(C/117-28)

Jesus Christ is alive. The fact that I’m alive and doing the things I do is evidence that Jesus Christ is raised from the dead.

Thomas Aquinas wrote: “There is within every soul a thirst for happiness and meaning.” As a teenager I wanted to be happy. There’s nothing wrong with that. I wanted to be one of the happiest individuals in the entire world. I also wanted meaning in life. I wanted answers to questions like, “Who am I?” “Why in the world am I here?” “Where am I going?”

More than that, I wanted to be free. I wanted to be one of the freest individuals in the whole world. To me, freedom is not just going out and doing what you want to do. Anyone can do that, and lots of people are doing it. Freedom is “having the power to do what you know you ought to do.” Most people know what they ought to do but they don’t have the power to do it. They’re in bondage.

So I started looking for answers. It seems that almost everyone is into some sort of religion, so I did the obvious thing and took off for church. I must have found the wrong church though. Some of you know what I’m talking about: I felt worse inside than I did outside. I went in the morning, I went in the afternoon, and I went in the evening.

I’m always very practical, and when something doesn’t work, I chuck it. I chucked religion. The only thing I ever got out of religion was the twenty-five cents I put in the offering and the thirty-five cents I took out for a milkshake. That’s about all many people ever gain from “religion.”

I began to wonder if prestige was the answer. Being a leader, accepting some cause, giving yourself to it, and “being known” might do it. In the first university I attended, the student leaders held the purse strings and threw their weight around. So I ran for freshman class president and got elected. It was neat knowing everyone on campus, having everyone say, “Hi, Josh,” making the decisions, spending the university’s money, the students’ money, to get speakers I wanted. It was great but it wore off like everything else I had tried. I would wake up Monday morning, usually with a headache because of the night before, and my attitude was, “Well, here goes another five days.” I endured Monday through Friday. Happiness revolved around three nights a week: Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Then the vicious cycle began all over again.

Oh, I fooled them in the university. They thought I was one of the happiest-go-lucky guys around. During the political campaigns we used the phrase, “Happiness is Josh.” I threw more parties with student money than anyone else did, but they never realized my happiness was like so many other people’s. It depended on my own circumstances. If things were going great for me, I was great. When things would go lousy, I was lousy.

I was like a boat out in the ocean being tossed back and forth by the waves, the circumstances. There is a biblical term to describe that type of living: hell. But I couldn’t find anyone living any other way and I couldn’t find anyone who could tell me how to live differently or give me the strength to do it. I had everyone telling me what I ought to do but none of them could give me the power to do it. I began to be frustrated.

I suspect that few people in the universities and colleges of this country were more sincere in trying to find meaning, truth, and purpose to life than I was. I hadn’t found it yet, but I didn’t realize that at first. In and around the university I noticed a small group of people, eight students and two faculty members, who had something different about their lives. They seemed to know why they believed what they believed. I like to be around people like that. I don’t care if they don’t agree with me. Some of my closest friends are opposed to some things I believe, but I admire a man or woman with conviction. (I don’t meet many, but I admire them when I meet them.)

That’s why I sometimes feel more at home with some radical leaders than I do with many Christians. Some of the Christians I meet are so wishy-washy that I wonder if maybe 50 percent of them aren’t masquerading as Christians.

But the people in this small group seemed to know where they were going. That’s unusual among university students.

The people I began to notice didn’t just talk about love. They got involved. They seemed to be riding above the circumstances of university life, while it appeared everybody else was under a pile. One important thing I noticed was that these people seemed to have a happiness, a state of mind not dependent on circumstances. They appeared to possess an inner, constant source of joy. They were disgustingly happy. They had something I didn’t have.

Like the average student, when somebody had something I didn’t have, I wanted it. That’s why bicycles at colleges have to be locked up. If education were really the answer, the university would probably be the most morally upright society in existence. But it’s not. So, I decided to make friends with these intriguing people.

Two weeks after that decision several of us were sitting around a table in the student union, six students and two faculty members. The conversation started to get around to God. If you’re an insecure person and a conversation centers on God, you tend to put on a big front. Every campus or community has a big mouth, a guy who says, “Uh . . . Christianity, ha, ha. That’s for the weaklings. It’s not intellectual.” (Usually, the bigger the mouth, the bigger the vacuum.)

They were bothering me, so I finally looked over at one of the students, a good-looking woman (I used to think all Christians were ugly), and I leaned back in my chair because I didn’t want the others to think I was interested, and I said, “Tell me, what changed your lives? Why are your lives so different from the other students, the leaders on campus, the professors? Why?”

That young woman must have had a lot of conviction. She looked me straight in the eye, no smile, and said two words I never thought I’d hear as part of a solution in a university. She said, “Jesus Christ.”

I said, “Oh, for God’s sake, don’t give me that garbage. I’m fed up with religion; I’m fed up with the church; I’m fed up with the Bible. Don’t give me that garbage about religion.”

She shot back, “Mister, I didn’t say religion; I said Jesus Christ”

She pointed out something I’d never known before. Christianity is not a religion. Religion is humans trying to work their way to God through good works. Christianity is God coming to men and women through Jesus Christ, offering them a relationship with Himself.

There are probably more people in universities with misconceptions about Christianity than anywhere else in the world. Recently I met a teaching assistant who remarked in a graduate seminar that “anyone who walks into a church becomes a Christian.”

I replied, “Does walking into a garage make you a car?”

There is no correlation. A Christian is somebody who puts his trust in Christ.

My new friends challenged me intellectually to examine the claims that Jesus Christ is God’s Son; that taking on human flesh, He lived among real men and women and died on the cross for the sins of mankind; that He was buried and He arose three days later and could change a person’s life in the twentieth century.

I thought this was a farce. In fact, I thought most Christians were walking idiots. I’d met some. I used to wait for a Christian to speak up in the classroom so I could tear him or her up one side and down the other, and beat the insecure professor to the punch. I imagined that if a Christian had a brain cell, it would die of loneliness. I didn’t know any better.

But these people challenged me over and over. Finally, out of pride, I accepted their challenge. I did it to refute them. I didn’t know there were facts. I didn’t know there was evidence that a person could evaluate.

Eventually, my mind came to the conclusion that Jesus Christ must have been who He claimed to be. In fact, the background of my first two books was my setting out to refute Christianity. When I couldn’t, I ended up becoming a Christian. I have now spent fifteen years documenting why I believe that faith in Jesus Christ is intellectually feasible.

At that time, though, I had quite a problem. My mind told me all this was true, but my will was pulling me in another direction. I discovered that becoming a Christian was rather ego-shattering. Jesus Christ made a direct challenge to my will to trust Him. Let me paraphrase Him: “Look! I have been standing at the door and I am constantly knocking. If anyone hears Me calling him and opens the door, I will come in” (Revelation 3:20).

I didn’t care if He did walk on water or turn water into wine. I didn’t want any party pooper around. I couldn’t think of a faster way to ruin a good time. So here was my mind telling me Christianity was true, but my will was somewhere else.

Every time I was around those enthusiastic Christians, the conflict would begin. If you’ve ever been around happy people when you’re miserable, you understand how they can bug you. They would be so happy and I would be so miserable that I’d literally get up and run right out of the student union. It came to the point where I’d go to bed at ten at night and I wouldn’t get to sleep until four in the morning. I knew I had to get it off my mind before I went out of my mind! I was always open-minded, but not so open-minded that my brains would fall out.

But since I was open-minded, on December 19, 1959, at 8:30 P.M., during my second year at the university, I became a Christian.

Somebody asked me, “How do you know?”

I said, “Look, I was there. It’s changed my life.” That night I prayed. I prayed four things to establish a relationship with the resurrected, living Christ which has since transformed my life.

First, I said, “Lord Jesus, thank You for dying on the cross for me.”

Second, I said, “I confess those things in my life that aren’t pleasing to You and ask You to forgive me and cleanse me.” (The Bible says, “Though your sins be as scarlet they shall be as white as snow.”)

Third, I said, “Right now, in the best way I know how, I open the door of my heart and life and trust You as my Savior and Lord. Take over the control of my life. Change me from the inside out. Make me the type of person You created me to be.”

The last thing I prayed was, “Thank You for coming into my life by faith.” It was a faith based not upon ignorance but upon evidence, upon the facts of history and God’s Word.

I’m sure you’ve heard various religious people talking about their “bolt of lightning.” Well, after I prayed, nothing happened. I mean, nothing. And I still haven’t sprouted wings. In fact, after I made that decision, I felt worse. I literally felt I was going to vomit. I felt sick deep down. “Oh, no, what’d you get sucked into now?” I wondered. I really felt I’d gone off the deep end (and I’m sure some people think I did!).

I can tell you one thing: In six months to a year and a half I found out that I hadn’t gone off the deep end. My life was changed. I was in a debate with the head of the history department at a midwestern university and I said my life had been changed, and he interrupted me with, “McDowell, are you trying to tell us that God really changed your life in the twentieth century? What areas?”

After forty-five minutes he said, “Okay, that’s enough.”

One area I told him about was my restlessness. I always had to be occupied. I had to be over at my girl’s place or somewhere else in a rap session. I’d walk across the campus and my mind was like a whirlwind with conflicts bouncing around the walls. I’d sit down and try to study or cogitate and I couldn’t. But a few months after I made that decision for Christ, a kind of mental peace developed. Don’t misunderstand. I’m not talking about the absence of conflict. What I found in this relationship with Jesus wasn’t so much the absence of conflict but the ability to cope with it. I wouldn’t trade that for anything in the world.

Another area that started to change was my bad temper. I used to blow my stack if somebody just looked at me cross-eyed. I still have the scars from almost killing a man my first year in the university. My temper was such a part of me that I didn’t consciously seek to change it. Then one day I arrived at a crisis of losing my temper only to find it was gone! Only once in fourteen years have I lost my temper—and when I blew it that time, I made up for about six years!

There’s another area of which I’m not proud. I mention it only because a lot of people need to have the same change in their lives, and I found the source of change: a relationship with the resurrected, living Christ. That area is hatred. I had a lot of hatred in my life. It wasn’t something outwardly manifested, but there was a kind of inward grinding. I was ticked off with people, with things, with issues. Like so many other people, I was insecure. Every time I met someone different from me, he became a threat to me

But I hated one man more than anyone else in the world. My father. I hated his guts. To me he was the town alcoholic. If you’re from a small town and one of your parents is an alcoholic, you know what I’m talking about. Everybody knows. My friends would come to high school and make jokes about my father being downtown. They didn’t think it bothered me. I was like other people, laughing on the outside, but let me tell you, I was crying on the inside. I’d go out in the barn and see my mother beaten so badly she couldn’t get up, lying in the manure behind the cows. When we had friends over, I would take my father out, tie him up in the barn and park the car up around the silo. We would tell our friends he’d had to go somewhere. I don’t think anyone could have hated anyone more than I hated my father.

After I made that decision for Christ—maybe five months later—a love from God through Jesus Christ entered my life and was so strong it took that hatred and turned it upside down. I was able to look my father squarely in the eyes and say, “Dad, I love you.” And I really meant it. After some of the things I’d done, that shook him up.

Shortly after I transferred to a private university, I was in a serious car accident. My neck in traction, I was taken home. I’ll never forget my father coming into my room. He asked me, “Son, how can you love a father like m e?”

I said, “Dad, six months ago I despised you.” Then I shared with him my conclusions about Jesus Christ: “Dad, I let Christ come into my life. I can’t explain it completely but as a result of that relationship I’ve found the capacity to love and accept not only you but also other people, just the way they are.”

Forty-five minutes later one of the greatest thrills in my life occurred. Somebody in my own family, someone who knew me so well I couldn’t pull the wool over his eyes, said to me, “Son, if God can do in my life what I’ve seen him do in yours, then I want to give Him the opportunity.” Right there my father prayed with me and trusted Christ.

Usually the changes take place over several days, weeks, or months, even a year. My life was changed in about six months to a year and a half. The life of my father was changed right before my eyes. It was as if somebody reached down and turned on a light bulb. I’ve never seen such a rapid change before or since. My father touched whiskey only once after that. He got it as far as his lips and that was it. I’ve come to one conclusion. A relationship with Jesus Christ changes lives.

You can laugh at Christianity; you can mock and ridicule it—but it works. If you decide to trust Christ, start watching your attitudes and actions, because Jesus Christ is in the business of changing lives.

Christianity is not something you shove down somebody’s throat or force on someone. You’ve got your life to live and I’ve got mine. All I can do is tell you what I’ve learned. After that, it’s your decision.

Perhaps the prayer I prayed will help you: “Lord Jesus, I need You. Thank You for dying on the cross for me. Forgive me and cleanse me. Right this moment I trust You as my Savior and Lord. Make me the type of person You created me to be. In Christ’s name. Amen.”

The remainder of this book contains some of the most important facts I discovered when I originally set out to disprove Christianity and ended up becoming a Christian. Other clear evidence discovered since that time has also been included.

If you have not yet come to know Christ personally, consider—with an open heart and an objective mind—the information provided here. It is my prayer that you will make this greatest of all discoveries.

If you already have a personal relationship with Christ, be encouraged by what y...