I Told God I Didn’t Believe and He Spoke to Me
Intellectual vs. emotional faith
Submitted by Gordon Ward
With tears streaming down my face, I walked to the front to accept Jesus as my Lord and Saviour.
I was 11 years old and I had just watched a film of a rally led by the wonderful evangelist, Billy Graham. He was a superb preacher and it had been easy to convince me that Jesus had died for my sins, that God loved me and that I should accept Jesus as my saviour.
When the minister of the church asked the people to come to the front, I couldn’t wait to get out of my seat.
Fast forward seven years and I was on my way to university to study theology with a view to becoming a minister in the Anglican Church. At university two opposite things happened — I became less and less sure of the intellectual basis of my faith, but at the same time I became more and more convinced of the emotional basis of my faith.
From my course I learnt that:
- Matthew did not write Matthew
- the end of Mark’s gospel was missing
- Matthew and Luke copied from Mark
- John’s view of Jesus was completely different from the other three gospels
- the birth narratives in Matthew…