Dear Friends,
This week two men prayed with me according to the pattern of Luke 18:13 & Romans 10:9.
The first was a middle-aged Japanese chef living in California. Single, no children, never married. He wrote:
Subject: Regarding resurrection of Jesus
Hi, I’m __________. I enjoy your knowledge and content. I’m ordinal Japanese and grew up in Japanese customs and morals, a combination of Shinto and Buddhist background when I was younger. Therefore, I don’t even know or find it difficult to understand what other fundamentally different beliefs others have. However, interestingly enough, I feel strongly that I agree with what you say and many things. I’m very curious to know about Christianity.
I replied:
Dear _____, do you believe that Jesus rose from the dead?
Jim Tour
Hello, I’m not sure if this is really you. If so, this is awesome to hear from you. Honestly, I don’t know. I feel bit uncomfortable to believe something I don’t know. However, I don’t mind if it were true. Everything what I see is miracle to me. It sounds a bit intimidating to me, though I’d like to hear and explore the World of Thought with pure curiosity. I’m in the PST time zone. Regards,
We met, and this Japanese chef was very open. He became introduced to my content through my videos on Origin of Life. But now he listened intently about the resurrection of Jesus. After readily accepting, I asked, what made you so ready to receive this message. He replied, “Because of you. I believe because I believe you. You have so much logic and knowledge and you believe.” He is in daily reading of the scriptures and in Bible study with Mike Jackson.
There are many examples in the New Testament where a respected person gets saved, and then those who respect that person likewise get saved:
- Acts 28:7-10 with Publius in Malta
- Acts 16:25-34 with the Philippian jailer
- Acts 10:44-47 with Cornelius the Centurion
- Acts 16:13-15 with Lydia the businesswoman
- Acts 18:8 with Crispus the synagogue official
These illustrate the sphere of influence that a believer’s life can have upon the unbelievers around them.
The next was a PhD neuroscientist, living in the Midwest, and coming from a Hindu background:
Subject: Don’t believe in resurrection?
Dear Dr. Tour, I am an admirer of your lectures and the perspectives you express. I have watched some of your conversations and debates, and I am always moved by your combination of gentleness and rigor. I have heard the story of your conversion (if I can call it that) to Christianity in your youth, and it resonated with me. I was myself an atheist in my teens and twenties, and found my faith when I was in my thirties, and became a believer. It was a long and painful process, full of anxieties and depression, bliss and euphoria. While I found my way back to faith in a higher power, I’ve been unable to return to any religion, either my own faith such as Hinduism, or any other. But I am open and eager to learn from all faiths and wisdom traditions. I was educated in a Catholic school and am familiar with the teachings of Christ, deeply admire his words and teachings, whatever little I’ve read. I am a practicing meditator, which has been my central spiritual practice for many years. However, I do not find either the story of the virgin birth nor the resurrection of Christ convincing, nor do I think them necessary to the teachings and the wisdom. Not that I have seriously looked through the evidence, but since I cannot verify nor invalidate the facts, I do not consider those details to be essential. I harbor no perceptible bias towards either possibility, whether it was a true event or a mycological overlay, and would like to hear more from an interested and informed person such as yourself. And so, I would love to have the honor to speak with you on this subject and hear what you have to say. This email is a response to your offer posted in the following video on Instagram. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you for reading my email.
We met. He told me that he was distraught with life to the point of utter confusion. Like many that have tasted of the truth and then set it aside to embrace intellectualism, he had dried up in his relationship with God. So that results in restlessness, discontentment, defeatism, and unhappiness. Like a typical scientist, he super-analyzed every statement that I made. However, in the end we prayed. I instructed him in careful and slow daily Bible reading, and set him up with for Bible study.
After two days, he wrote to me, thanked me for my time, but said he was unprepared to follow the exclusivity of Christ—as is a common struggle of Hindu converts to Jesus. How can a scientist think that he would get a different result when repeating the same experiment that he formerly conducted, which had led to his despair? I told him so.
Proverbs 26:11 “Like a dog that returns to its vomit is a fool who repeats his folly.”
Pray for this man that he would be disgusted with his own vomit.
God bless,
Jim Tour
