David Wood - From Atheist to Christian Part One

maybe you're going to struggle every single day of your life with the situation that you have but maybe you wouldn't yell at your kids but you got them it's like and now instead of judging when you believe the Bible and the Bible alone I said that's what we live for is just this one all right good morning good morning for those of you that are in Phoenix we are super glad you're here today joining us for our truth matter series for those of you that are watching us online apps Roku YouTube any way you found us we are super glad you're joining us also if you want to know more about our ministry go online to women's Bible study com there you can normally get handouts for lessons but there is no handouts today so you can catch up on all our past lessons we have guest speakers every so often today being one of them so today we are continuing on with our truth matter series and we want to talk about why truth matters in regards to Islam now here is the premise to our series there has to be one truth in this world there just has to be it's not like you have your own truth and I have my own truth and it's just we just all have our own truths like somewhere there has to be this this baseline for truth when we had Josh McDowell here he he gave this really great definition of truth and he said truth is something that is the same as the original and that's how you know so for us we know that the Bible has to be our final authority it has to be the final truth everything that the Bible says because it's given us where we came from how we were created why the world isn't a mess with sin what God did for us by sending Jesus to die on a cross to rise from the dead so that he can reconcile us to him so all of those things happen we know that so there so the the baseline for truth would be what the Bible has to say now Jesus says this in John 14:6 I am the way the truth and the life and no one comes to the Father except through me we live in a world where people want to join this religion and and I just a good person and and we have all these other ways of getting to God and yet their ways that are untruth ways and so that's why we're doing this series and I realized that we as Christians need to know we brought in Lynn Wilder she spoke about Mormonism we're bringing in Davis so you can talk about Islam because we need to know what other religions believe so that we can have an answer for them just like David had when he would when he shares what he knows David is my hero he doesn't know that but and the reason for it is because most of you we talk a lot about in here in Nabeel Qureshi the bill the author of seeking all of finding jesus we've talked about a lot about him in Bible study the most amazing thing about David is that and he'll share this in his story but but if you look at nabeel's life and the amount of people that came to know Christ through Nabil it all started because David would actually took the time to spend four years sharing the gospel with him and and working with him I don't have that much patience so that's why I'm like you don't want to come to Jesus today well I'm on to the next thing okay David does not like that he studied with him and he worked with him and so we are so excited to have David here please welcome mr. Dave good morning this is uh this is actually my first women's Bible study in my entire life one of the interesting things I learned from this first women's Bible study is is how many guys come to women's Bible studies that says something about the women's Bible study if guys are like I'm going to the women's Bible study I don't care care about my own Bible said I'm gonna the women's Bible study I mean it's there there must be some awesome awesome work going on here anyway I'm going to set this up with a an anecdote this was a got boy number five on the way and my second son who's who's named blaze after Blaise Pascal the he's the one who likes to read a lot and so he would he would he would read books as fast as I could buy them so I would take him to Barnes & Noble get him a stack of books and and then he would read them and I would tell him whenever he's finished I'll take him back and get him more so we used to go to Barnes & Noble once every week or every other week and this one time we go he's I don't know seven years old or something at this time and I go to stand in check-out line and he ends up running all over the store playing tag and stuff which which would have been embarrassing but I was thinking like well no one knows that's my kid right so do whatever he wants but he's he's really I keep seeing him like just running full-speed around there and and he knows I don't like that but then all of a sudden I'm I I get up I put the books down in front of the cashier and I look and I see him flying towards me he's about to run right past me so as he's about to go right behind me I reach back and I snatch him right and then I just I hold him there and then he starts doing something crazy he starts trying to pull away from me right and I don't know I don't know how parenting works out here in Arizona um we're from the Bronx so I got this special trick you you can wind your hand up into kids t-shirt right and that makes it extra tight right you start winding your hand in it and it makes it super tight in any Kenny way so I start winding my hand up in blazes t-shirt and other than that other than that I'm just acting like everything is normal with the with the cashier and like yes I am a member here's my card doing everything one hand in right and all the sudden this woman comes up and she comes up and leans over and starts staring at me alright and so I look back like go back to your pita meeting it's my kid let me alone right and then but she sits there looking staring right in my face and I'm like what is wrong with this woman so and at first I didn't care but then I was like I wonder if everyone else is worried about me having my kid in this death grip right here so I turned to the other side to look at the line see if the people in line are looking at me and then I look over and they're at the end of the store I see my son blaze and then everything starts to make sense right now this isn't some weird woman this I have her kid okay now at all met now it all makes sense so so I turned in and I say you know his little kids same height as my son same hair color I call everything perfect little match and so on and so I get down get down with the kid and he's terrified oh I'm sorry I thought you were my son look there's my son he looks exactly like you and so on and I'm thinking oh I'm so going to jail no but the woman was nice she she calmed our son down and stuff and took off and and uh when that was over I realized that that was the the exact same feeling I had when when I had become a Christian right that that feeling of I was clinging so tight to something that I thought was the right thing to be clinging to and oh my goodness I've been clinging to the completely wrong thing and now I'm in a lot of a lot of trouble here that was the feeling I had when when I became a Christian I've been an atheist for uh for uh for all my life and so well I'll talk about that for a few before we get into Islam my sort of path towards Christ started when I was about five years old I had a little dog since my entire time I was growing up I had a little dog named Goliath this little raggedy mutt who would just attack anything cars buses didn't matter but one day my mom gets a phone call and my mom starts crying and she turns to me with tears in her eyes and she tells me that Goliath had been run over by a bus and I look back at her and I thought so what it's just a dog and I couldn't figure out why my mom was was crying I mean she hated my dog I hated her cat she hated my dog but she's crying over my dog and I couldn't figure out why she would cry over to a dog like don't don't you know that thing's gonna die someday and so I thought at that point there was something wrong with my mom and but later as I as I got older had other friends in there their pets would die and then they would uh they would all cry and so it's like at first it was like whoa this is spreading whatever this is whatever this disease is it's spreading everyone's crying over animals don't they know that there are billions of animals around the planet dying all the time what's what's wrong with these people now I didn't find out until a while later that I had the same reaction if it's a if it's a human being I was sixteen years old and my best friend um when I was growing up he's a guy named Jimmy Lindholm and he the whole time we were growing up he always said he wanted to go parasailing and he finally went parasailing his harness broke and and he died and so I heard that I walked over his house and that's when I found that out and I walked away and as I was walking away I was thinking wow I really don't I really don't care here and at that point it was like well it seems like that is a situation where you should care that someone that someone died so at that point I was starting to think that that there was something wrong with me I didn't find out until years later after being evaluated by psychiatrists that that I have antisocial personality disorder that's what that's what Psychopaths and sociopaths have they don't form a normal emotional attachments to other people but you don't know that when you're young so you have to figure it out on your own you don't know oh this is a problem that there are lots of people in the world who have this problem all you know is hey I react very differently to all these different situations that we're in and so I had to think through that I had to think through why why I don't have these normal reactions and I concluded at the at the end of trying to figure this out that I had evolved to a higher stage of humanity right so you have you know animals and then human beings and for a time human beings need emotions for the benefit of the species but now we keep evolving and now we've reached a stage where people can just operate on pure logic and reason and not need all of these emotional issues to to hold them back so I concluded that I'm like the new pinnacle of humanity and when you start thinking like that you start thinking well I kinda don't have to follow the the rules that other people follow right because I'm I'm beyond I'm beyond those kinds of things why would I let other people tell me what I can and cannot do so long story short I ended up behaving accordingly and one night in the middle of the night I was running from the police I had broken in to a place and stolen some stuff in I was running from the police and they had me surrounded on three sides so there's a hill here on one side that has a road I'm on a set of railroad tracks and there's the Monongahela River beside me and so police are at the road and they're running down the hill and they end up getting behind me on the railroad tracks there in front of me on the railroad tracks and they're beside me so when the first police officer showed up he he points a flashlight on me and he'll stop you'll know I started running but then they uh they had me surrounded so the only way out was the Monongahela River so anybody jumped in the river and swam across and actually beat them beat them across they had to go across the bridge I swam across I made it across the river and started working my way up a hill on the other side got up the other side and eventually I came out and of the of the patch of woods I was running through I came out and find myself in there myself in the back of someone's yard and in front of me there was this this beautiful garden and just from habit I started to walk around the garden but then I stopped to philosophize I thought why am i walking around the this person's garden I don't care about this person I don't care certainly don't care about this person's vegetables so why am I being so courteous here and I concluded that well that the reason is that that these people have for brainwash me since birth into behaving in certain ways and to to doing what they want me to do so as I sort of stomped my way through that person's garden I got this incredible rush of freedom like I've been forced and held down in Chains and a collar or leash all my life and that I could finally just do what I wanted and after a while I kept chasing that right there's a good feeling it's good for you like someone says don't do something and then you go and do it anyway and then realize you've just sort of broken free from something that people were using to control you but if you it's like drugs start taking drugs then you've got to keep taking more right and then higher doses and so on so eventually decided to kill my dad this is after studying bombed building and everything thinking about all the different things I could do and eventually decided to kill my dad so this is a women's Bible study with some young people in there I'll leave out the horrible details you can you can check those out on online or get the police report if you want but I tried to kill my dad with a hammer hit him in the head seven or eight times and I thought that this was like going to be the final the final metamorphosis once I stripped off every last I mean once you've done that there's nothing there's nothing left to do as far as breaking free from what people have been telling you all your life that you have to do so I attacked my dad left him for dead and got in my truck and drove away and felt absolutely nothing there was no reaction but at this point it wasn't it wasn't a good feeling like that that rush of freedom it was just a dead feeling like there's nothing that matters right now I don't have any feeling about anything good or bad just the kind of numbness so after that I got stuck in a psychiatric hospital and that's where they gave me a couple of diagnoses but the relevant one there was any social personality disorder and ended up there for a while in the psychiatric hospital and then to jail where I was found guilty of malicious wounding which is that's what it sounds like malicious wounding because my dad survived it would have been it would have been murder but but he survived they one of his friends found him took him to a hospital and the hospital there said he'll die here they had a world-champion neurosurgeon in another city they took him there guy had two patches skull back together and so I was found guilty of malicious and I was there in the jail and just did not care right knows about why why would I ever want to follow this normal pattern that people follow where you go to school until you're 18 and then maybe you go to college and then you get a job and then you work at that job for 30 or 40 years and then you retire and then you sit around watching telly why am I going to do that what's the point of doing that rather than just doing whatever you happen to feel like doing which I can always do right here in jail so didn't really bother me that I was in jail and it was there in the jail that I met a Christian named Randy christen named Randy found out from having conversations with him that Randy was in there for turning himself in for twenty-one felonies he became a Christian and went and told the police everything he'd ever done and they said all right we've got information for 21 felonies that were charging her with he's found guilty of all 21 felonies but uh Randy was a was an interesting fellow there would be a fight in the dorm the dorm that we were in and Randy wouldn't watch the fight wouldn't look so I would start going up to him hey hey did you see that fight between between Kevin and so and so and he go no I earned away I was praying that it would stop what is wrong with this guy right we have one form of entertainment in there which are fights right and this guy's praying that our only form of entertainment stops something strange going on with this guy so um anyway one day Randy was up on his bunk reading his Bible which he would do a couple hours a day it's up on his bunk reading his Bible and I walked up to him and I said hey you know what you're reading the Bible reading the Bible because you're born in the United States you've been born anywhere else you believe in something else if you've been born in China you'd be a Buddhist if you've been born in India you'd be a Hindu you've been born in Saudi Arabia you'd be a Muslim because people like you believe whatever you're told to believe now that was interesting because uh what did I believe well I believe that the universe formed on its own and life formed on its own out in the ocean and I believed all these things where died I heard them in my high school biology class and things like that and I just believed them and never thought never occurred to me to really question them so in other words I believed everything I was taught to believe very rare to find someone who just comes up with a completely new belief that no one has ever thought of before but I'm sitting you're pointing a finger at him you just believe what you're taught to believe and whereas I of course did as well but something strange happened there Randy actually put up a fight and I had never seen that before every Christian I'd ever messed with or tried to start an argument with or told him he was stupid they would always they could kind of tell I was about I was just gonna go full force argument and they would hey you know hey we don't wanna cause a scene here I don't wanna cause a scene here so you know I'll just I'll just pray for you brother that sort of situation right and Randy he just starts challenging everything I say and that is a annoying habit start questioning everything someone says and that is by the way that is a good habit to get into I would I would make some claim oh come on Oh scientists say really all scientists you know what all scientists say on it I had no clue what I was talking about I was just taking what I believe and then saying all scientists agree with me right but he he kept doing that I would say oh I would make some claim about Jesus or about the universe or about life and he would just Oh where'd you get that I'm thinking no idea where I got that from maybe I heard it maybe I saw it on TV maybe I thought about myself I don't know right but anyway whose making is making me uh making me very uncomfortable by challenging all these beliefs that I'd held is obviously certain and then just by asking me some simple questions I start realizing very quickly that I have no clue what I'm talking about in a lot of these issues still believed I was right but I realize a lot of what I believe are just I have no idea where I got that and so uh found out after several attempts to argue with Randy and this is a guy he did not he was not some world champion scholar or anything like that so it wasn't he didn't just happen to know much more than me he was just good it's getting me to realize that I didn't know much about what I was talking about and so I kept trying to argue with him and he kept defeating me which is weird right because why you can mine I'm the pinnacle of humanity remember everyone else is inferior to me especially some Christian in a jail who's so incredibly dumb that he turned himself in for a bunch of crimes and won't watch fights was the last person in the world who should be winning an argument against D would hear couldn't beat him in arguments I realized that after many exchanges so I started trying to beat him in other ways I would I can't repeat a lot of the things I would say because I you know if you see someone's weakness then you can say something and you can start trying to trying to go after their weakness I saw him in the in the in the visitation room one day with his sister he had a twelve-year-old sister so start saying things about his sister finally got him upset and he yelled at me and I go look at you yelling at me you call yourself a Christian right and so but I would find his weaknesses as we went on and I would attack him there I told everyone he's gay and things like that and I kept trying to beat him that way and eventually I found out how I could beat him that's something Randy would fast for long periods of time I had never seen someone fast seven days on nothing but water before I would talk to him and ask him why and he would say well you know once I get released I'm not gonna have the opportunity to do long period fasting you can't do that while you're you know you have a job and so so here I'm going to use this time to do long-term fasting because the only time I'll ever be able to do this sort of thing so Randy went seven days on nothing but water I know because he gave me all these meals after a while I thought I'm gonna go ten my first fat now you're looking at me now and you're thinking David you've obviously never fasted a day in your life no this is that's now this is back then my first fast the first time I ever fasted I went ten days on nothing but water and I was messed I was like falling over and stuff and but I did it I did it just to meet the Christian and so we we go back and forth we go back and forth heat fast in the night fast and heat fast and ight fast and he asked me he goes David how come every time I fast you fast like two or three days longer I don't know it's just a coincidence man eventually Randy went 40 days told me that Jesus had done it anyway he went to be clear he went 32 days on nothing but water and then for the rest for the for the for the rest of the time he drank kool-aid to sort of prepare his body for food again but then again there again he gave me all his trays so he had water for 32 days and then kool-aid and then did that for 40 days and I said all right going 40 to beat you and Jesus so it's on the eleventh day when I passed out and busted my head and they stuck me in a camera cell they thought I was trying to kill myself right they saw I have been to two mental hospitals and they they they thought I'm trying to star myself I'm trying to beat the Christian they think I'm trying to murder myself in a really really slow silly way so I stick me in a camera cell or have a camera watching me in the entire time so that so that so they can make sure I don't you know hang myself or something like that back there in the camera cell I thought you know this is a perfect opportunity the only reason Randy has been beating me in these discussions is that he just happens to know a lot more than I do about the Bible and so on so I'm back here I'm gonna study I'm gonna learn all new arguments and then once they put me back in there then I can crush him and you'll see that I'm right and he's wrong so I got these I got Bible studies from the chaplain and so on got a head of Gideon's Bible and then stacks of Bible studies from the chaplain I I start reading I had read a Matthew and Mark before then but the Bible series was on the Gospel of John and so I start going through I start going through this series and I continue fasting back there and I get really really sort of pathetic looking if you're looking at me now I'm about 250 pounds I got down to 150 there there in the jail and and 150 is perfectly good weight for most people if you're if you're six foot three you're looking pretty pretty pretty pretty sad their skin turned yellow got this rash all over my body it was a it was pretty horrible put them back there back there one that keeps me going so I got to beat this Christian or I gotta learn this stuff I'm sitting there I'm sitting there and when I got that I got that Gideon's Bible and I wrote all over it I am the master of my life I don't need blah blah blah and sitting there reading going to the Bible studies and then it started feeling like the Bible was mocking me right but something would happen and then I would read I would read a Bible verse and it would uh it would seem to connect like I was I started getting tunnel vision where I would only see like this much and for some reason I have no basis for thinking this but I thought that that tunnel is gonna get smaller and smaller until it was just dark and that's when I was going to die right so I would be thinking something like this and then I would do my my Bible lesson for the day these were graded you had to send them and send them out and then people grade them and then send them back to you and so on I was pacing everything but uh sitting there doing this Bible study and I'm thinking wow once that once that tunnel vision gets down to nothing that's when I that's when uh I died and then I would read I'm the resurrection in the life he who comes to me will live even though he dies you don't know what you're talking about what you're talking about Jesus or I be thinking it's kind of funny these guys bring me three meals a day and I'm starving I'm actually I'm starting to death back here and these guys bring me food everyday and then I would read I'm the bread of life he who comes to me will never go hungry making stuff up now right so I kept reading and so on and eventually three things started started bothering me as it's going through these I'm going to the Bible studies and then just thinking about things want one I was just one day I was just lying on my back and I was too tired to do anything and I was looking at the wall I was looking at the bricks that are arranged in the cell and I thought you know someone told me that these bricks went into this order by chance or erosion or something like that I would think that it's a stupidest thing I'd ever heard in my entire life and yet I believe that life formed just by a bunch of random things coming together when life is vastly vastly more complicated than a bunch of bricks stacked on top of each other why would I think it's completely idiotic to say it about the wall but I won't even question whether that's what happened with life and so this didn't convince me that the God existed but it took me back to that maybe I haven't thought through these things enough and maybe this is that things are actually pointing in a different direction that was the first thing that started bother maybe the next thing was uh was the resurrection I had always believed that I had an explanation for the origin of Christianity disciples went out preaching that Jesus rose from the dead why they go around preaching now well it's actually very simple Jesus died his followers wanted to keep the message going you really want to keep your message going make up a story about your guy rising from the dead then that's going to convince more people that they need to pay attention to a brilliant plan and it worked we see how Christianity has spread all over the world they came up with a plan and it worked and I found out from Randi and then from from reading more that Jesus apostles died in some horrible awful ways these guys went to some horrible bloody deaths proclaiming that Jesus is the risen Lord who had appeared to them and I sat there and I tried to think of anyone in all of history who had died for something that he had made up and I couldn't think of one person lots of people die for something that's a lie when Terrace crashed planes into buildings they're dying for something that's not true but when a terrorist crashes a plane in new building that tells me he really believes what what he's dying for he really believes it he's not making this up he's taking this very very seriously and so that showed me that the disciples really believed what they were dying for and therefore they weren't willingly making it up so how else can I go on to explain this because notice the difference whether a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew or a Republican or a Democrat or whatever when someone dies for what they believe in and you ask why did they believe that well it's they heard some message from someone else and they agreed with it and they agreed with it so much that they're willing to die for it that happens the disciples weren't dying for something that they heard from someone else that they believed with such confidence that they're willing to die for they were dying for something they said they saw and so that left me with a little puzzle what could convince all these guys but they had all seen a man risen from the dead and appearing to them what could account for that and I couldn't think of anything other than Jesus actually appearing to them so there was that problem and the final thing that started bothering me is you read about Jesus in Jesus pretty cool guy and I couldn't help but admiring him and how he would handle certain situations in the Gospels as I was reading about him now why is that a problem well if I believe that I'm the pinnacle of humanity and this guy really seems cooler than I am then I've got a that sort of undermines my entire belief about about myself but I eventually ended up with a kind of dilemma because I held two beliefs simultaneously which which did not fit together one is that everything is ultimately meaningless we're insignificant you've got this entire universe and our galaxy is just this pathetic little speck and our planet isn't even more pathetic speck and then we're these little blobs of cells crawling around on this little speck of dust thinking that what we do is so important there's all meaningless eventually we're all gonna die the universe is gonna die a heat death none of it really matters nothing we really do if you spend all your life killing people that's not much different from spending all your life helping people doesn't make any difference in the long run so there is no real right and wrong it's just the way things seem to us I believed that believe that from the time I was a teenager on but I also believed and the greatest most important human being who has ever lived now what sense does it make to say to believe I am the greatest most important completely meaningless sack of cells crawling around on this pathetic insignificant piece of dust it doesn't you got to drop one of those if the universe is really meaningless then I am no more important than anything else and if I am more important than everything else then there's some sort of standard here of what is really great there's some sort of standard if there's a standard I'm in trouble because if there's really a standard of right and wrong what business do I have thinking that I'm the top of it and not not someone like Jesus so my moral foundations came crumbling to the ground and sitting back there in the cell thinking about all of this and by the time I gotten down to 150 pounds and skin had turned yellow couldn't stand up without falling over and so on I was just thinking you know I got into a fight I mean I got a lot of fights but there was this one particular fight I was thinking of where I got in the fight with with seven guys I'm not saying that to sound tough they day they got me on the ground took turns soccer kicking my head for a while got one of them got one of them at the beginning and then all his buddies got me way worse anyways I had a flashback to that fight and I was thinking you know that time those guys held me on the ground and kicked me in the head over and over again that was really bad but I went to the hospital afterwards they put my arm in a sling I had some scratches I had a headache but I was fine the next day I thought this right here this is not going away this is way worse this is way worse right now what what what what I'm going through in this cell is way worse than just you know getting stomped into the ground by a bunch of guys this is this feels like I've been stomped in the ground by like a size infinity boot and right when I thought that I had another flashback to walking home from my friend Steve's about your to earlier and I got just walking home and everything is nice and calm and all of a sudden massive thunderstorm lightnings lightning bolts are going all around me and so on and just not even taking anything seriously I looked up and I go come on if you want me to believe in you're gonna have to come down here and beat me into the ground and make me believe and I just I just kept walking and but I was remembering that wait a minute I told God I'm gonna have to beat me into the ground and make me believe in him and I just thought to myself it feels like I've been stomped into the ground by a size infinity boot that didn't convince me but that got me that kept me really thinking and then just in the course of assessing my situation the situation I was in I went from thinking that I was the best person in the world to thinking I was the worst person in the world right I mean I'm sitting in here starving to death I'm covered in a rash I fall over if I get up I'm in here for trying to bludgeon my dad to death all I sit around here thinking about all the people I'm going to torture if I ever get a chance it's not that I mean there are people who have problems in various ways but I'm like the mother lode of awful horrible problems here and so I went from thinking that I was the best person in the world to thinking I was the worst person in the world and that's that can actually be a very good thing because if you if you think you're the best person in the world well it's not much they can shake your spirit you think that you're the worst person in the world then you start thinking there are two possibilities here either I'm the worst person in the world and I'm stuck like this and this is just the way things are and I'm a horrible horrible person and I've ruined my life and that's all there is or you think maybe there's someone out there who helps people like me and once you start thinking like that I'd say you're about an inch away from becoming a Christian because you can look all the way down through history and when you look and ask who out of anyone ever who had a reputation for being able to take emotionally and spiritually and psychologically and physically shattered people and give them new life you get a list of one there was only one person on that list and ain't Mohammed any Buddha it's none of those guys you get a list of one that's Jesus and so at that point I wasn't convinced yet but I was to the point where what else what have I got to lose here what if I bow down and pray and nothing happens well it's not like I'm going to be worse off right it's not going to make me worse already as bad as I can be so after thinking through this for a while what have I got to lose I bowed down and I prayed and I said God don't know if I'm gonna believe in you tomorrow but I'll believe in you right now you can do anything with me welcome to it and then just based on the Bible studies and the memory verses and so on they did a kind of sinner's prayer that they give you and remember I sat up sat up from that prayer and everything had somehow changed colors like I was seeing everything in some colors that I've never seen before and some people describe like a weight being lifted off them and so on first of all don't face don't base your your faith on feelings they feelings can lead you astray but people want to know what I felt so I tell them but I had a slightly different feeling I felt like I had been fighting and I don't mean figuratively fighting I mean I felt like I had been physically in a gladiator ring for the past 20 years of my life so much so that I didn't know any other existence you didn't even know what was going on and that after 20 years of non-stop endless physical fighting all of a sudden everything just goes quiet and stops and I can sit down and that's what it felt like to whoa everything just got calm and so that was uh that was about a year into my sentence I had many more years to serve in uh in in prison and spend a lot of that time studying the Bible and eventually studying apologetics I don't know what apologetics was back then was actually an old man in the jail came up to me with Josh McDowell's more than a carpenter and he comes up to me he goes my daughter sent me this seems like something you'd be more interested in and so he gave me more than a carpet and that's first time I was reading apologetics realizing there was apologetics I had read some apologetics before but I didn't know what apologetics was I just thought I was reading books about Christianity so started a study studying apologetics there and for a long time I still thought of myself as like worse person in the world in fact once at one but right before I uh a little several months before I became a Christian I was in a psychiatric hospital and they had me there for a few weeks and I was just babbling on one day and one of the administrators there goes if you actually think like that then they have got you in the right place here that's not a great that's not very encouraging but that's what that's what he said to me so fast forward a few years to where I still think I'm like that that's in my that's ingrained in my brain now that I'm like awful horrible person who just happens to have been saved by grace and one day there was this out guys name was in the dorm his name was Floyd walls he's sweeping and I'm walking and walking by him and he goes uh he goes wood I don't mean to pry into your business but some of us are wondering what you did to get in here and so we're thinking but maybe you were walking down the street and had your girlfriend there someone disrespected or pushed her we punched him to defend her and then you got locked up for that's the only way we can see someone like you getting locked up in a place like this and also no saying wait you think I'm good you guys think you guys think I'm a good guy now like you guys wait a minute this was very confusing to me right like you guys think that the only way I could end up in prison is if I was defending a woman's honor and so that's when it kind of oh I guess I've been changing and not and not really realizing it along the way and so that's the that's the that's the impact of just spending spending a lot of time in the Bible was was having on me over the years and I didn't I didn't realize until people started bringing these kinds of things up so uh wasn't long after that that I was released and when I went I'd filled out the paperwork to go to school before right before I got out I went to Old Dominion University and just to bring it up to where you guys have been there I wanted to learn to debate in case uh it was ever helpful for apologetics and so got on the Speech and Debate team and went on a trip once because you'd go to other schools to compete and went away to another school and had to share a hotel room with another guy on the team and I thought it was cool because he had a Muslim name named Nabeel Qureshi I was thinking well it doesn't tell you much right could be totally liberal could be very conservative have no idea just based on his name but we go up into the room and I put my stuff away and then I'm sitting down on the bed and I'm reading my I'm reading my Bible in a year I was in Isaiah at that point and I seem to be of putting away his prayer rug I was thinking ah well he's at least devout enough that he brings a prayer rug on a school trip for for a weekend so he's at least that devout then I'm sitting there and in prison I had had tons of very interesting interactions with Muslim friends so I had uh I'd studied a little bit in prison those didn't always end well because like like one of the main guys that I would have discussions with was my weightlifting partner and he was he was the mom there in in the prison and so we would be arguing Christianity and Islam and lifting weights and it was not pretty it was not a pretty sight right because you know yeah all your tests Ross and all your testosterone firing on all cylinders and then you're arguing about Christianity Islam so we ended up not liking each other and so Nabil was in here and I've learned lessons from from those kinds of interactions over time and I'm with Nabil I'm like you know I don't want to start arguing and yelling at each other to where we don't get to continue the situation there are a lot of people saying Oh David would such a jerky he he went after this Muslim and attacked his faith so I pray and I said God if you want me to have a conversation with this guy please just let him start it let him start the conversation and after that I'm reading and all the sudden I hear so are you a hardcore Christian I said yes I am and that was uh that was that was the starting and over that uh over that that weekend Nabil told me all about all about how Islam is proven true by history and science and mathematics and logic and every everything you could you could study find out that it's Aslam is proven true by all of these things and the Bible's been corrupted and Jesus never made the claims that Christians think that he made and he didn't even died on the cross so he didn't rise from the dead and so Nabil took me through everything he believed and at the end of it all and I said okay well thank you for explaining what what you believe and you know now I know what you believe but I have a question for you if you're wrong about any of that do you want to know it or would you rather go on believing it anyway that's important question to ask because I would say I would say about a third could I that pretty regularly if someone starts off the conversation that is an important question to me because some people say no usually atheists usually atheist I say okay so you've told me you know you don't believe in God because of such and such and such and such and you know your grandma died and stuff like that but if you're wrong about God would you want to know it and I've seen a lot of atheists say no I would rather go to hell than believe in your God now keep in mind these are the people who always just go where the evidence points right the atheist they just go at the evidence points but for some odd reason they tell me now if I was wrong I wouldn't to know it but I asked to build this question because if someone says now okay well fine let's talk about something else he just admitted that if you were wrong you still wouldn't care so let's talk about something else cuz the truth doesn't matter obviously but I was talking to Beal and the Beal said yes and no he said yes I would want to know the truth about God but no because it would it would destroy my family and that's those two dual loyalties that were inside a Nabeel that's what I saw battling for the next four years right his loyalty to God he wants to know the truth about God he wants to do what what God wants him to do but he loves his family so much that he does not he doesn't want to hurt them he doesn't want to hurt them and that that is tough to watch like my family I could have walked in and said mom I've decided to become a Martian Buddhist if it keeps me out of trouble my mom would be fine with it wouldn't matter right long as it's long as it's keeping me out of trouble Muslim families not so much different story different story there and Nabil had the closest family I'd ever seen in my life now I grew up in West Virginia trailer park so it's it's non-stop dysfunctions dysfunction this trailer it's dysfunction that trailer it's dysfunction of the next trailer no one is normal and then so sitting there watching the Beal and his family we went on that first trip we were gone for two or three days we came back and his mom hugged him in the parking lot for ten minutes I was thinking my mom didn't hug me for one minute when I got out of prison what's going on here right that's the relationship that Nabil had with his parents and that something I had to watch because I'm the one telling him hey you need to follow Jesus we didn't we didn't end up here in this room together for coincidence three possibilities either I'm right and you're wrong or you're right and I'm wrong or we're both wrong can't both be right so if one of us is right and the other is wrong we need to take it as a very serious possibility that God has set this up and that the one who's right is here to show the one who's wrong what's right and so we could sort of agreed on that as as we went on but at the same time I have to think wow I'm telling this guy every day the meaning needs to believe in Jesus and I'm looking at his parents it's awesome parents and thinking if this guy ever listens to me I am ruining this that is all gonna be ruined that's all gonna be horrible gonna be a horrible situation and after four years that did happen so we spent about the first I don't know two and a half years talk focusing mostly on the Bible and the deity of Christ and Jesus death and resurrection and so on and then we change somewhere along the lines to focusing mainly on Islamic issues the reliability of Muhammad the reliability of the Quran talked about that for a while and eventually in the deal started getting dreams and visions and so on telling him to convert and he did and then I got to see what what that did to his family and I've seen that repeated in many families over the years and there unless it's a totally liberal Muslim family those do exist and be a totally liberal Muslim family where the parents are fine one of one of those was a guy who sent me a message saying he's gonna chop my head off right the Muslim said he's gonna chop my head off and and then he sent me another message saying he's gonna hand me over to Palestinians to let them kill me so I messaged him back well which one is it you're gonna chop my head off you can hand me over to Palestinians filming and then I sent him a follow-up message and I said it's gonna hand you over to Palestinians is that gonna be like over here somewhere or do I have to get a plane ticket and fly over there and go over there and then you'll hand me over to them which one is it cuz you know I'm not understanding what you're saying here and then after after just a little bit of interacting like that he said he apologized he said I'm sorry I was just very angry that you humiliated our debater and it was it I was trying to figure out which debate he was talking about when I found out I thought it was one of the debates where I I was one of my weaker debates right I've done about 60 debates with mostly Muslims but but some atheist and I thought this was one of my one of my weaker debates and but he said I made him angry because I humiliated his debater in that debate and and I said hey you know I know what you're feeling like right now because I used to argue with the Christian to when I was an atheist and he made me really mad so mad that I end up doing a lot of stupid things just to try and just to try and win over him so I understand where you're coming from I understand that but once you realize that hey you know this anger is coming from being challenged in this way and so on maybe you should look into this a little more and here's my story and I sent him I sent him like I sent him a testimony video anyway ten days later ten days later I get a message and he says hey I watch your testimony and I've been talking to a Christian here and just want you to know that Jesus is Lord and I believe in him now and so on so he sent me that message which you can't take entirely seriously at that point right because some people will pretend to be Christian for one reason or another but I looked at where he's from from a city in India and I know someone from a city in India like on Facebook so I sent a message and I said hey I got this message from this guy says he lives in your city and he goes yeah I know I grew up with him I'm the one who told him to watch your videos I've been sending him your videos and I said oh well he told me he's become a Christian and he said yeah he told me the same thing can you find out he y'all go ask his mom and so uh so he messages me the next day yeah I asked his mom he said he told his mom that he's a Christian now and she said that's okay whatever helps him be a good boy and so anyway the point point of all that was there are families like that or a mom a Muslim mom can say okay you know he's fine cuz they're just thinking hey because before he's I want to chop your head off okay that's a that's a that's your you want your boy to to have a better life than that right so she was fine with that but you the other reactions you have for more devout Muslims is there are lots of families will just say okay you're gone don't ever come back here until you're a Muslim again we never want to see you again until you're Muslim and the other common the other common response is well we're going to take you out we're going to take you around to a bunch of Muslim scholars and Muslim apologists to show you the right track and they'll try to win them back for six months or a year or something and that's what nabeel's dad did and started taking him to scholars across the u.s. over in Europe and so on and Nabil would go out there and say okay here's 60 pages worth of arguments against Islam that caused me to believe that Islam is false let's go through these and explain them they didn't want to talk to him very much after then and so what's interesting is that after Nabil became a Christian I thought cool I'm done with Islam because the only reason I was studying Islam was that my best friend was a Muslim if he'd been a Mormon I would have been studying Mormonism we've been a Buddhist I would have been studying Buddhism it's good habit to get into alright you have a friend who's something you want to have conversation with them good to start studying them so the bill that came a Christian cool I can get back to things that I'm more interested in which is you know philosophical issues and responding to objections of atheists I was more interested in that and then it was somewhere along the line watching the stand that Nabil took he did his first public debate and absolutely crushed a Muslim Imam within a year of his conversion and just watching what Nabil was going through in the stand he was taking I realize Muslims make really cool Christians and there's a reason for that there's a reason for their say we think you know unbelievers they're all you know they're prostitutes and drug addicts and we preach the gospel to them their lives are going to get better Muslim you preach the gospel to him is lives gonna get his life's gonna get a lot worse in a lot of ways and there are these obstacles that are in the way of Muslims right when one you've been told all your life that the worst possible sin the unforgivable sin is shirk associating a partner with Allah so if you say Jesus is Lord you've just committed the worst possible sin in Islam so they're told that all their lives too they understand that they will have to likely give up their families and if not completely give up their the relationship is going to be very strained forever but it's not going to be the happy relationship that you once had and not just your immediate you know mom mom and dad cousins aunts uncles that becomes a very those relationships all become very painful now if you're not completely shunned and three Mohammed commanded if anyone leaves his Islamic religion kill him it's not carried out it's not carried out generally in the United States and Western nations but you always have to wonder is someone ever going to actually carry out the Islamic penalty and chop my head off that's what Mohammed said does anyone ever could say no we're not doing it but ma is what Muhammad said to do so we preached the gospel Jesus loves you trust in Jesus died on the cross for our sins Muslims hearing okay believe this thing that is the worst possible sin and the one-way ticket to hell and on top of that I'm gonna have to give up my family in this life and then someone may chop my head off for you guys call that the good news but the good news because it sounds like the worst news ever people but there's a there's a flip side and the flip side is once a person has said you know I've been told all my life that this will get me sent to hell and I may have to give up my entire family and I may get beheaded over this but I don't care because I want to know Jesus that's someone who will lay down his life for Christ and that's why Muslims make really awesome Christians and so it was along that way watching the beale when I realize you know there are tons of Christian apologists who deal with atheism and Muslims make up 1.6 billion people in the world over a fifth of the world's population almost no one touches it almost no one touches it and so maybe I should be doing what's needed and not what I feel like doing so started focusing on Islam and along the way I realize hey I don't have to reluctantly do this I think we are actually in the best time in history for reaching Muslims I mean for most of history you had basically Muslims over here and Christians over here not a lot of interaction you wanted to go to the Middle East to preach the Muslims you got a pretty good chance of getting your head chopped off if you started being successful and people were converting you're going to get your head chopped off so it's only very recently that all the sudden we have lots of Muslims in the United States you can walk out and and you can walk out and talk to all Muslim today if you want but even more so technology right anyone in this room and pull out a phone out of their pocket and talk to a Muslim in Saudi Arabia right now if you wanted to for 14 centuries Muslim leaders have been able to keep people insulated from hearing any criticisms of Islam and from hearing alternatives to Islam and now now you can reach Muslims in any country in the world that has an internet connection without getting your head chopped off so we are actually in the best time in history for people who want to reach Muslims with the gospel 14 centuries of Christians couldn't have dreamed of these kinds of opportunities that that we have right now and so uh so at first I was kind of reluctantly studying Islam but now I think that we're we're here in one of the best times in all of history and I believe I believe that we're going to see more Muslims come to Christ in our lifetimes then all prior generations combined have seen because I believe that's what we're here for this purpose and that we've been assigned this purpose so I always say this I don't know how it changes us it just does the tragedy of the jack hit on drugs or whatever where two dots across and if he created us who created him and is that we tend to look at every battle and every problem in this natural realm like what I see I see feel but we don't get in here because we think Jesus asking them in our life just means I get to go to heaven

Channel: Women's Bible Study

Views: 70,173

Rating: 4.4539313 out of 5

Keywords: Bible, bible, women's bible study, womens bible study, bible study, bible study tips, bible study series, bible study for women, bible study for women 2018, bible prophecy, bible and islam, islamic talk, islamic true talk, bible reading, bible reading plan, bible verses, islam debate, origin of islam, women of faith, faithful, king james bible, word of god, who is god, jesus, jesus christ, bible vs quran, bible vs muslim, bible vs islam

Id: 7SrtFjD7inU

Length: 55min 28sec (3328 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 13 2018