I Told God I Didn’t Believe and He Spoke to Me

Intellectual vs. emotional faith

Photo by madeleine ragsdale on Unsplash

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:

1. Matthew did not write Matthew
2. the end of Mark’s gospel was missing
3. Matthew and Luke copied from Mark
4. John’s view of Jesus was completely different from the other three gospels
5. the birth narratives in Matthew…