A Skeptic's Quest: How an Agnostic found God

So tonight I had the privilege to hear Dr. Josh McDowell speak.  He grew up not an atheist, but agnostic.  His opinion on religion was you're wrong and I don't want to hear anything about it.  Tonight he came to speak to kids on my campus about his journey to Christ and let me tell you, he did not have an easy upbringing.  He had an alcoholic father, two siblings run away from home (one he hasn't seen in 50 years), one sister commit suicide and his oldest brother sued his parents for everything they had.  Rough, right?  It really made me appreciate the family God gave me.  Any who, the whole reason he found Jesus was that he was in the process of writing a book trying to use solely intelligence to disprove the bible.  Little did he know that on his way to doing this he would find using intelligence how truthful the bible is.  He made a really good point tonight:

Why do Christians believe what they believe without truly understanding why they believe what they believe?

Makes you think, doesn't it?  I know that I'm not 100% fluent in the bible and everything it has to say, nor could I answer every question that someone could ask me about my faith, but I would like to think that I could back up what I believe with the truth that is they bible.  Not just to say I believe it "because I'm supposed to - it must be in the bible somewhere"  He really challenged me to spend more time in the bible so that I can really understand why I believe what I believe.  Did you know that there are over 24,000 manuscripts of the New Testament alone?  That's not including any manuscript of the Old Testament.  The next highest number of manuscripts found is 600 for the Iliad.    That's 40 times the amount of manuscripts.  The higher the amount of manuscripts there are, the more accurate you can believe what you're reading is - there is more evidence to prove that this is how it was written in the beginning.

Dr. McDowell told us tonight that about a month ago he just finished talking at a conference and as he was trying to hurry and leave to go catch his flight a student came up to him and asked if he could ask him a question.  Dr. McDowell said okay if you can walk and talk at the same time.  The student asked him - Why does it matter if it [the bible] is the truth or not?  Dr. McDowell said he stopped, turned and in response asked the student a simple question - Do you want the truthful answer or the false answer? He then turned and kept walking while the student just stood there with his mouth open not really understanding.

Makes you see how important the truth is doesn't it?

Have a great day!

MB