3rd Generation Atheist Meets Jesus, Gets Shown The Door

my parents and my family going back three generations were atheists my parents were actually very left-wing as was my whole family also going back three generations and my parents were had been members of the American Communist Party in the 30s and part of what they believed was that religion was a terrible thing and Christianity was among the worst of all the religions and so I grew up uh in an a religious household anti-religious household I should say um we didn't celebrate any holidays we didn't celebrate Christmas we gave each other gifts on New Year's Day because that's what was done in Russia at that time and um I just had the sense that Christianity was one of the great evils in the world and uh that that whole ideology stayed with me through my youth through my childhood and youth into my early adulthood and at the same time I was feeling a sort of a hole of something missing in my life I didn't know what it was I think I think it it was some sense of spirituality which was completely you know not there in my upbringing no aspect of spirituality was considered uh appropriate and in fact my father was a scientist he's a chemist and he was very materialistic and didn't hold with anything like he didn't even believe in Psychology or anything unrelated to uh very tangible materialism and um I grew up pretty much the same way uh but I did feel this sense of something missing until I started studying science I I started with chemistry in college taking after my my old man and then I went to biochemistry in graduate school and at that point I felt that what I had been missing was something like that and and it kind of filled that Gap a science is just a wonderful thing uh I felt and I still do uh it's it's exciting it's uh transformative and it it's true which is you know it's demonstrably uh valuable I mean look at all that we've accomplished with scientific uh discoveries and technological uh applications of science so I felt pretty good about that and uh really enjoyed science and loved the idea of being a professional scientist uh however there was an unexpected twist to that which was that some of the science that I was learning especially in physics I didn't quite jive with the strictly materialistic and reductionist view that I had been taught so for example in quantum mechanics we have a great deal of probability rather an uncertainty it's not possible to know some things about you know particles and electrons and you have to sort of get a probability distribution of where an electron is it's not in a particular place and and quantum mechanics gets quantum mechanics gets really weirder than that even I mean there's there's um lots of things which I won't go into but superposition and things which are just you know strange and nobody denies this everybody agrees that it's strange but it's also absolutely true and it works um better than you know anything else that's I mean to many decimal places the the calculations of quantum mechanics fit reality so that was a a puzzle for me because I couldn't understand you know how reality which I thought more of a classical sense the kind of the the Clockwork universe everything is predictable everything can be uh uh understood in in detail the way we understand mechanics regular mechanics and that's not the case it turns out that reality is really very strange and very well you can almost say spiritual in a way and that recognition that awareness was spreading through the culture when I was when I was a graduate student and things became very things like new age stuff became very popular uh there were a lot of people in my generation who were non-religious much as today uh and uh we're looking for something and they found lots of interesting ideas most of which I discarded because they were to me they were clearly false and weren't going anywhere and I'm talking about things like pyramids and crystals and all kinds of new age kind of things most of which I've forgotten about now but I did look into it because I was curious uh I wasn't anywhere near um thinking about God however I I that was still something that I completely rejected in in any sense on the other hand what I now know is that God was calling me at that point I had no idea but there were several incidents that occurred in my early life that I couldn't make sense of and I dismissed because I couldn't make sense of them but I now know that they were related to uh being called by the Holy Spirit and as time went on uh I had especially I had some dreams uh which I described uh in detail in my book which is called The Works of his hands scientist's Journey from atheism to Faith and those dreams were very baffling to me they they I didn't know what they meant although now they're quite clear and I also ended up going to a church for the first time in my life this is by then I was already in my 40s I was an active working scientist very busy moderately successful I guess and uh last thing I wanted to do was think about anything like God or you know anything spiritual uh however um I did agree to go to the church with a friend of mine who was a Catholic and I went to a Catholic church and was quite worried about what would happen I'd heard so many bad things about Catholicism that I thought they would probably Stone me at the door or something but anyway I went and uh I was pleasantly surprised by what happened which was nothing bad the priest gave a sermon about love and everybody shook everybody's hand and wished them the Peace of Christ and it was fine it was pleasant and at that point I began to realize that a lot of the things that I'd heard about the horrors of Christianity might have been exaggerated maybe more than that uh so I uh my curiosity was peaked and I started even reading a little bit of the gospels which the main impression I got from reading what I read which was the Book of Matthew and the book of Acts was that this was not made up which was one of the things I had believed I as we often hear from atheists today uh Jesus was not real it was a religion made up by I don't know the Romans or by Paul or by somebody and none of this stuff actually happened but when I read the book of Acts that didn't strike me as as possible I I'm very interested in history I've done a lot of historical reading and the book of Acts read like a historical document it didn't read like anything that somebody had made up and um The Book of Matthew I found interesting but and in some parts of course The Sermon on the Mount very inspiring but uh a lot of it I didn't understand and at that point ah I had gone further in my journey with respect to science and I was now finding things not only in physics but in biology which was my field I my degree was in Biochemistry and I worked in a biological systems and there were also things in in Biochemistry that certainly made very little sense to me from a purely scientific background uh and some of that is very technical and I I can't really go into much detail about it but things like the very complicated biochemical systems it had to be present at the very beginning of Life uh because without those systems you can't have Evolution and without Evolution there's no life so that was very curious to me and I and it kind of chipped away much further at that wall of disbelief that I had to the point where I actually started thinking that maybe I'm not really an atheist maybe I'm more of an agnostic I just don't know I don't know how I don't know how life could have originated I don't know how the universe nobody knows how the universe originated uh and you know how can we rule out God I guess was my was my view but I certainly did not feel a sense of belief and it was at that point that um I'm I I had a dream that was um quite uh shocking to me and surprising and by this time since I was no longer a strict atheist I pretty much knew what it meant and in this dream I was uh walking around a Walled Garden trying to get in and the problem is the wall was very high and it was very smooth and I and I tried climbing up and I couldn't get more than a couple of people so I kept walking around to see if I could find a place where they might be an easier way to get up on to the wall and climb over it but I couldn't find one and I was getting quite frustrated and then I I ran into a man who was standing there outside the garden and he asked me what's my problem why am I upset and I said I'm trying to get in and I and I can't get over the wall and he said well and he pointed and he said why not use the door it's open so I went over and there was a door which I had not seen and I opened it and went in and then woke up and um when I woke up unlike The Purge stream which I'll talk about in a few minutes I knew what that one was about that that was Jesus Christ and he was telling me to go that it was easy to go into the garden I didn't have to struggle and climb over the fence I just had to walk in and that was a revelation to me because up until then I had thought that if you wanted to be a Christian if you wanted to be religious if you wanted to acknowledge the existence of God you probably had to take a test and pass it you probably had to do a lot of work it was not going to be easy it was going to be very difficult and instead what I learned from that dream was that that was wrong you have to open up and just go home just do it just walk through the door and the way I talk about it later was faith is a gift and all you have to do is accept it and that's not easy to do sometimes we don't want to accept gifts that we we're suspicious about them we don't know where they come from maybe they're some you know hidden obligation it's not a pure gift maybe you have to pay somehow it's going to cost you something that's how I felt uh uh and and this dream told me no it it's just easy the gift is free all you have to do is take it and at that point I was feeling very ready uh to accept the idea of believing in God but I couldn't quite get there and the reason I couldn't get there and this has to do with the first ring which I've had many years earlier I don't know exactly when but I was definitely still an atheist and that dream was really a nightmare it started out with me holding on to the edge of a clip dangling off the edge and since I'm afraid of heights that was a very scary dream uh and then what happened was I I started calling for help but I didn't know to who I just I was just you know saying help help help and then I Heard a Voice somewhere saying just let go which made no sense to me because that's what I was afraid of it but I was like oh I would fall down but the voice repeated that several times and uh at some point I actually I realized well I can't hold on anymore anyway so I just let go and instead of falling what happened was as soon as they let go the whole world turned 90 degrees so that instead of being vertical I was now horizontal lying on the ground and I was perfectly fine and I looked up and there was a man standing there whose voice I heard I had no idea who that man was and when I woke up from that dream I uh I I didn't know what I had no idea what it meant uh let go what does that mean and later at the point that I'm after I had that second dream I understood what Letting Go meant it meant let go of everything that's holding me back all the training I'd had as a child all the stuff I had learned not just communism but atheism and the idea that God is can't be real and just let that go and it was hard to do I wanted to because I knew that much of what I had what I had been taught was false and I in several ways that I knew that but it was still very difficult to do I knew that that was my goal and I felt that if I could let go of all of that that wall which was still there crumbling but it was still there uh I I might be able to to you know join those people who I was now envying I was now starting to Envy the people who had Faith who could believe I couldn't and uh I don't know that that situation was where I was for a few years and I guess the Holy Spirit had mercy on me and um which I don't know why but one day I um I was driving my car on uh alone on an Intercity trip it was a long trip six hours and I was listening to the radio and I heard a Christian radio station come on with a very good preacher who really had a great style speaking and I I thought gee that you know I admire that that's I wish I could speak like that and I turned off the radio and I started thinking about what would it be like if I tried to preach or give a sermon which of course was was crazy I mean the last thing I ever thought of but what happened was uh something came over me which I can't explain or describe it was just a feeling of some some kind and I decided to pull the car over and and I kind of had this image Vision whatever imagination of of addressing a crowd of people outside and words just came to me and um I began preaching a sermon it didn't come from me many of the words that I used were not words I was familiar with and what I think I really was happening was I was preaching the sermon to myself and what I said in that sermon was speaking to this crowd I said um I know that Jesus Christ loves you because he loves even me and The Sinner that I am and I went through all the ways that I had rejected God and Jesus and all the ways I had mocked as followers and you know the things that I had done the persecutions I mean almost like Paul but not quite and um when I said that and then I said if Jesus could love even me who would he not love who could he not want and at that point I I kind of woke up I began crying in a way that I I hadn't ever before and I said out loud I believe and that was it and I immediately felt this amazing blood of relief Joy freedom everything good it was I had taken the wrapping off the gift I had taken the gift and accepted it and it was the best gift I'd ever gotten in my life and I've been a Believer ever since

Channel: Echoes Of Clarity

Views: 774,777

Keywords: nde, near death, experience, death, died, god, jesus, heaven, die, coma, spirit, stories, spiritual, hell, saved, where, go

Id: 4CcchmbsTu0

Length: 19min 11sec (1151 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 27 2023