Category Archives: Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Out of Ivory Palaces

December 17, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Impossible to miss in any mall, grocery store, elevator, or voice mail system, Christmas music is as ubiquitous as snow in Alaska. I have yet to walk into a store this Christmas season that wasn’t playing “It’s the most wonderful time of the year.” I’m sure you are familiar with the song and can hear the tune in your head: With kids jingle belling/and everyone telling you/”Be of good cheer,”/It’s the most wonderful time of the year. With this music all around me, I can’t help but begin to hum along, and feel uplifted as if it truly is the most wonderful time of the year.

And yet, for many individuals, Christmas is anything but wonderful. In fact, the joviality, décor, and the music simply strike dissonant chords because of the memories, emotions, and experiences associated with this season. Families in Sandyhook, Connecticut and Arapahoe County Colorado in the United States feel the emptiness of loss, the hemorrhage of violence, and the undertow of grief as a result of two random shooters. I suspect this will mark their Christmas seasons for the rest of their lives. There are many who also grieve the loss of a loved one—not necessarily from armed violence—but from the violence of a body turned against itself through cancer or some other debilitating or destructive disease. For them, Christmas reminds them of yet another empty chair. Others experience joblessness or underemployment, numbing loneliness, disappointed expectations, ruptured relationships, and rejection that twist and distort the joy of the season into a garish spectacle. Instead of uplifting them in celebration, the most wonderful time of the year seems a cruel mockery.

For all of these, and many others, the Christmas season seems more like the opening verse of Christina Rossetti’s haunting Christmas hymn, “In the Bleak Midwinter.”

In the bleak midwinter, frost wind made moan,

earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.

All the excitement, anticipation, and beauty of the season can easily be frozen by pain, disappointment and grief; instead of singing songs of joy, a bitter moan emanates like the cold, frost-bitten wind.

Into this world—the world of the bleak midwinter—God arrived. Not sheltered from grief or pain, God descended into a world where poverty, violence, and grief were a daily part of God’s human existence in the person of Jesus. Joseph and Mary, barely teenagers, were poor, and Mary gave birth to the Messiah in a dirty barn. Herod the Great used his power to slaughter all the male children who were in Bethlehem under the age of two. Shepherds slept on grassy hills, their nomadic home. Even in Jesus’s public ministry, his cousin, John the Baptist, would be beheaded. Jesus would experience rejection and eventually die a criminal’s death, with only a few, grieving women remaining at his side. The old hymn, “Out of the Ivory Palaces” said it well:

Out of the ivory palaces, into a world of woe,

Only His great, eternal love, made my Savior go.

Into this world—our world of bleak midwinter—God arrives. God arrives in the midst of pain and suffering, doubt and disappointment, longing and loneliness to make a home with us, to be alongside of us because of “great, eternal love.” The gospel of John tells us that God did not stay removed from us or from our sufferings, but that “the Word became flesh and dwelt among us” (John 1:14). For those who find the Christmas season far from the “most wonderful time of the year,” Immanuel, God with us, comes to be our consolation.

And those who celebrate this season as the most wonderful time of the year can demonstrate its beauty, joy, and celebration by reaching out to those in bleak midwinter, doing our part, giving our all, sharing our hearts.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A World Off Balance

December 16, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Once and a while a friendship is forged that seems to surprise everyone but the two who are in it. In a story that first circulated in 2006, Zookeepers at Tokyo’s Mutsugoro Okoku Zoo couldn’t agree more. Gohan and Aochan had been living side by side for months, at times even curling up next to one another as they sleep. Such behavior is, perhaps, natural among creatures sharing habitats—except that Gohan and Aochan should have naturally been predator and prey. Gohan was a three and a half inch dwarf hamster, and her companion, Aochan, a rat snake. The hamster, who was jokingly named “meal” in Japanese, was originally given to Aochan as dinner after the snake refused to eat frozen mice. But instead of dining, Aochan decided to make friends. Much to the zookeeper’s surprise, the two began sharing a cage. Their comfort around one another was most peculiar, with Gohan able to climb over Aochan like he was part of the furniture or recline on his coiled back and take a nap.

The thought of such a relationship is one that fascinates in its complexity (if not an accident waiting to happen). Though the friend who first sent me this story assured me that unusual bondings have occurred throughout the animal kingdom without bad endings, I still find myself leery of the snake’s intentions. Can a snake really surrender its natural instincts to hunt? What happens when Gohan gets in his way or makes him mad, or when the zookeeper is running late feeding the reptiles? Can the nature of a snake remain reversed because of a relationship?

In a significant prophecy of the coming Messiah (literally, anointed one) and his ensuing reign, Isaiah describes a scene full of similarly unusual relationships: “The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the hole of the cobra, and the young child put his hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:6-9).

On many levels it is a scene that is unimaginable. We would no sooner trust the cobra than we would trust the one who suggests we allow a child to play near it. Yet the vision speaks of a dramatic change in nature throughout God’s kingdom, where the aggressiveness and cruelty that are so much a part of our world will be forever changed. We will look at the relationship of Gohan and Aochan and not fear the hamster’s trust of the snake. With good reason, we ascribe such a reality as something God promises in the future, in heaven, when nature as we know it has passed away. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain; the wolf will live with the lamb and the leopard will lie down with the goat, for the old order of things will have passed away. I believe this is indeed an image of things to come. Could it not also be something more?

What if there is something about the coming of the Messiah that brings this scene to life even now? What if the Incarnation—the coming of Jesus onto a first century scene—caused things on earth to be turned upside-down ever since? Like the brutal outlaw in one of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, the Misfit, recognizes, there is something about the Incarnation that has “thrown everything off balance.” The mere presence of the source of all matter in our very midst, the Incarnate Christ coming to us in flesh and blood introduces a possibility of grace that changes the nature of everything. “If He did what He said, then its nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow him, and if He didn’t, then its nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best you can—by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him.”(2) Isaiah depicts a world where lions and vipers will not kill; young lambs will rest peacefully beside predators, “for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:9). It is unnatural for a wolf not to harm a defenseless lamb or a snake not to bite the hand that invades its nest. Is it any more natural that you or I should be able to defy our human nature? That we should claim the old has gone and left a new creation in its place? That we should find ourselves born a second time from above?

Yet to bow before the person of Christ—in life, in prayer, in relationship, in community—is to lay our lives at the feet of the one who is both Lamb and Lion in a way that overturns these very notions of nature. In his work Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton finds fault with the way this is often envisioned. “It is constantly assured,” he writes “…that when the lion lies down with the lamb the lion becomes lamb-like. But that is brutal annexation and imperialism on the part of the lamb. That is simply the lamb absorbing the lion instead of the lion eating the lamb. The real problem is—Can the lion lie down with the lamb and still retain his royal ferocity?”(1) This, somehow, Christ achieves. To know him is to cling to the fierce hope of transformation and the gentle assurance of new life—on earth and as it will one day be in heaven. He alone can reverse the nature of the snake; he is both Lamb and Lion.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 105.

(2) Flannery O’Connor, “A Good Man is Hard to Find, Complete Stories (Franklin Center, Pa.: Franklin Library, 1980), 151.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Real Person

December 13, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There are times when it is worth wondering with the professor from The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe where logic has gone from the world’s curriculum.

Peter and Susan had come to him concerned about their younger sister Lucy’s outlandish tales of a land hidden deep within an old wardrobe. The professor listened carefully as they reasoned it out before him, admitting their bewilderment with Lucy’s strange behavior and their confusion over how to deal with her. Sighing, the professor lamented, “Why don’t they teach logic at these schools?” Either Lucy is telling lies, he explained, or she is mad, or she is telling the truth. But since she is obviously not mad, nor is she the one among the Pevensie children known for her propensity to lie, her vivid descriptions are not so easily dismissible. In fact, it is most likely that Lucy is telling the truth. “Nothing is more probable,” said the professor, as he muttered to himself, “I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.”(1) Logic, it seems, has fallen out of fashion.

A lawsuit in Italy was once brought against a priest accused of unlawfully misleading the public by presenting Jesus in his parish newsletter as an historical figure. “Christ never existed, but is an invention of the Church,” said the man who attempted to bring this case to trial in 2002.(2) A professed atheist himself, the accuser claimed the priest violated an article under the Italian penal code, which under the term “abuse of popular gullibility,” sanctions people who mislead others. A judge earlier refused to take up the case but was overruled by the Court of Appeal, which held the accuser had a reasonable case for his allegation.

Although he comes to a conclusion that most would find unreasonable (the historical evidence that Jesus was a real figure is nearly undisputed), the accuser in this case is right in saying that it is a question the world—many Christians included—takes for granted. Was Jesus of Nazareth a real person? Did the one who many call the Christ ever really exist? As absurd as some find the accusations in this case, it is a question worth asking often and anywhere: Are there historical proofs behind the remarkable presence of this first century Jewish rabbi?

“[O]n the question of the existence,” notes R. Scott Appleby, professor of church history at Notre Dame, “there is more evidence of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth than there would be for many other historical people who actually existed. Not only did Jesus actually exist, but he actually had some kind of prominence to be mentioned in two or three chronicles.”(3)

In addition to the massive archives provided by each of the four gospel writers, the life of Jesus of Nazareth and the extent to which he created a stir far beyond the land of his birth are chronicled by Christian and non-Christian writers alike. Jewish historian Flavius Josephus is considered by scholars to be the most important non-Christian source on Christ’s existence. Also archived in history are the writings of Pliny the Younger, who in the early second century described a policy of executing Christians who refused to curse Christ, as well as Tacitus, another historian of the same period who wrote that Jesus was executed under the authority of Pontius Pilate.

The historical evidence of the existence of Jesus cannot be erased from any reasonable history book. There is a solid basis upon which one can intelligently believe in Jesus as a person who actually existed. The Incarnation is not just a story told in Christmas carols and nativity scenes. Jesus cannot rationally be exposed as a myth. What this means for those who will reason is that a real person from Nazareth, born in Bethlehem, left a sizable mark on history and started a chain of events moving well beyond his 33 years on this earth. The next question was posed by Jesus himself: “But who do you say that I am?”

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) C.S. Lewis, The Chronicles of Narnia, “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” (New York: HarperCollins, 1956), 131.

(2) “Italian Lawyers Asked to Prove Jesus Existed,” Associated Press, January 21, 2006.

(3) Ibid.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Yesterday and Today

December 12, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In their 1965 album Help, the Beatles sang, “Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away. Now it looks as though they’re here to stay. Oh, I believe in yesterday…”

Our temptation to live in the “good ole’ days” is captured well in this song. It is not surprising, therefore, that the song has more cover versions than any song ever written—over 3000! For some of us, yesterday always seems to enamor. Somehow it seems the weather was better, the pressure lesser, the prices lower, the traffic slower, the currency stronger, the trees greener, the atmosphere cleaner, the youth kinder, the music softer, the world safer, and the trousers longer! “Oh, I believe in yesterday,” we hear ourselves sighing.

By contrast to the Beatles, country singer Don Williams sings, “Don’t think about tomorrow, it don’t matter anymore. We can turn the key and lock the world outside the door.” While the Beatles voice the temptation to live in our yesterdays, Don Williams voices the temptation to forget our tomorrows. Between or apart from the wishful romanticizing of our yesterdays and the hasty dismissals of our tomorrows, is there a life worth living?

In her novel, The Namesake, Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri tells the story of Gogol who is named after his father’s favorite author. But growing up in an Indian family in suburban America, the boy starts to hate the awkward name and itches to cast it off. In 1982 on his 14th birthday, his father presents him a specially ordered copy of The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol. He tells him how he felt a special kinship with the author and that it had taken four months for the book to arrive from Britain, specially ordered for the occasion. To young Gogol the sentiments were not palpable. Time moves on. Gogol’s life moves on. His father dies unexpectedly. The story captures his efforts to reinvent his identity by embracing a new name, exploring meaning in relationships, an education, and a career. For all those years his father’s gift was set aside. But pain has a way of bringing back more than memory. The story ends in the year 2000 when Gogol is 32, divorced and pondering. It is then that he picks up the gift that his father gave him at age 14 and starts to read.

There are some things in life that are irreversible. Had Gogol wished then to start life all over again, there was no way of going back to when he was 14, or spending time with his father once again. Sadly for some of us, there are no replays in real life.

If this was an option the day after the crucifixion, the apostles would have certainly requested a replay. How much they would have desired to go back! Not only that they might be with Jesus, but that they would be right with him. Remember the time you vowed to live a certain way only to break the promise a few days later? Peter felt the same. For those of us who feel like we are the only ones who fail, the gospel writer has a word about the commonness of our humanness: All of the disciples deserted Jesus and fled from him. The problem with the Christ was not that he had asserted a demand, but that he had gently solicited their support. To think that a king would speak in such a fashion to his subjects is beyond imagination. Returning to his disciples in his hour of anguish, he repeatedly found them sleeping. “Could you men not keep watch with me for one hour?” he asked.

How much he had likened himself to us in order to bear away sin. How much he had bent towards humanity, giving visibility to the psalmist’s ascription of “God our Savior who daily bears our burdens for us” (Psalm 68:19). He had given them so much. He had asked for so little. Yet, they had failed him. And still, the great hope of the Christian faith is that, even knowing every past denial and every coming failure of humanity, Jesus comes near today on our behalf.

With the Beatles, one can sing, “I believe in yesterday,” with Don Williams, one can sing, “Don’t think about tomorrow,” but it is only with Jesus the suffering servant, the risen Savior that one can sing, “Because he lives, I can face tomorrow.”

Arun Andrews is a member of the speaking team with Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Bangalore, India.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A God Who Descends

December 11, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The first time I walked through the crowded, pungent streets of Bethlehem, I was struck by the disparity between what I was seeing and “the little town of Bethlehem” I had spent my life imagining in manger scenes and songs. The harsh reality of God becoming a child—not in a sweet and sentimental village somewhere far away, but in the midst of this cold and dark world I knew myself—suddenly seemed a blaring proclamation indeed. The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. It is little wonder that some of the most theology-rich hymns are Christmas carols that have at heart the Incarnation. In a darkened world not unlike this one, two thousand years ago, God came in person.

Almost immediately after his Christian conversion, Charles Wesley took to hymn writing as a way to capture the hope of God’s nearness persistently stirring in his mind. Though a few of the words have long since been changed, one of his 6,000 hymns is a widely beloved declaration of this Incarnation. Seeking to convey in pen and ink a Christmas story both familiar to our hearts and startlingly unfamiliar in its wonder, Wesley wrote:

Hark, how all the welkin rings,

“Glory to the King of kings;

Peace on earth, and mercy mild,

God and sinners reconciled!”

Joyful, all ye nations, rise,

Join the triumph of the skies;

Universal nature say,

“Christ the Lord is born to-day!”

The Christ child in the manger is forever an indication of the great lengths God will go to reconcile his creation, a savior willing to descend that we might be able to ascend with him. “Welkin” is an old English term meaning “the vault of heaven.” In this dramatic word, Wesley illustrates the crux of Christian theology: All of heaven opened up for the birth of a king and the rebirth of humanity. The vault of God was thrown open to make way for the one who was coming and all that would come as a result of it.

Hail, the heavenly Prince of Peace,

Hail, the Sun of Righteousness!

Light and life to all he brings,

risen with healing in his wings.

Mild he lays his glory by,

born that man no more may die;

born to raise the sons of earth;

born to give them second birth.

The Incarnation is the jarring reminder that God speaks and the world is moved. While the Christmas story reports the massive hope that God came near, the ordinary and incredible signs of redemption show that God has chosen to remain. Wesley saw this intimate connection between God’s nearness and the transformed likeness of our humanity. Where God comes near, countenances themselves are changed.

Come, Desire of nations, come,

fix in us thy humble home;

rise, the woman’s conquering Seed,

bruise in us the serpent’s head.

Now display thy saving power,

ruined nature now restore;

now in mystic union join

thine to ours, and ours to thine.

The startling hope and mystery of the Incarnation is that it reorders the world we know—visually, physically, restoratively, eternally. Where there is despair, where there is joy, where there is need, Christ is living in its midst. Where there is a heart that prepares him room, the Spirit has already transformed life in his image. Come, Desire of nations, come; fix in us thy humble home. These cries have been heard. The vault of heaven is open.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Out of the Depths

December 10, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Dr. Gabor Maté is a controversial figure in the world of medicine. Maté, a private family practice physician for over twenty years, and the coordinator of the Palliative Care Unit at Vancouver hospital, now helps addicts as a staff physician at the infamous Portland Hotel. The Hotel is the only supervised, safe injection site in North America for IV drug users. Many of his patients, in addition to being hard-core drug addicts suffer from mental illness and HIV. For their care, nurses supervise their drug use by providing antiseptic, clean needles, water, showers and other basic services. He has written about his experiences working with addicts in his book In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts.

On first glance, many might find his work unethical. How could he assist drug users in perpetuating their addictions? In a recent interview, Maté discusses why he provides a safe space for those who are the most hopeless and helpless: “Childhood trauma is the universal template for severe addiction. These drug addicts all began life as abused children. Finally they have a place where they feel accepted and safe for the first time in their lives, so it’s a beginning of the possibility of treatment.”(1)

Maté provides what many consider a more holistic model for treating addicts because he believes their underlying emotional and psychological damage fuel their addictions. Attending to these needs—even in the midst of addiction—provides a crucial key for long-term healing. The Portland Hotel, in Maté’s view, is often the first place for which attending to the emotional and psychological needs occurs for many. “The essential point to grasp,” Maté argues, “is that in neither case are we dealing with conditions that are written in genetic stone. Therefore they are reversible. We have to ask ourselves what conditions we need to provide in order for people to develop…If you’re a gardener and your plant is not developing properly, you ask yourself what condition does that plant require? It’s the same thing with human beings.”(2)

Regardless of how one might view Maté’s unconventional treatment philosophy, his deep concern for the entire emotional landscape of these hard-core addicts should not escape notice. In addressing the deepest emotional wounds of his patients, he is able to recognize their humanity even as most of these addicts seek to destroy themselves. He is able to honor dignity and worth even as these addicts view themselves as worthless. By seeing their addiction as a symptom of a larger emotional neglect, he gets to the heart of what human beings require to thrive: to be recognized, to be known and to be loved as unique human beings.

Maté’s work came to my attention as an unusual coalescence with the Ignatian practice of the conscious examen. In this traditional Christian practice, a person simply reviews the events of the day to see where God was present. But it goes beyond factual recounting to examine feelings and desires that bring both consolation and desolation. The conscious examen invites the individual to look beyond “symptoms” of daily events to see the ways in which God was present in the deepest aspects of one’s life. All that which produces joy or sorrow are fertile places for God’s activity. Ignatius expected that God would be revealed in our consolation and our desolation because he believed that God would speak through our deepest feelings and yearnings.

This gave me great hope as I wrestled with those parts of my story that are filled with desolation. How can it be that plumbing the depths of despair could actually produce consolation? Not the kind of consolation that covers over dark feelings in an attempt to supplant them, but a consolation that emerges as a result of knowing that God can be found in the depths of my own despair? Just as Dr. Maté understands that exploring the deep wounds of emotional and physical abuse hold the key for the treatment of drug addiction, so too the possibility of discovering God in the midst of our complicated humanity.

Scholar Walter Bruggemann says it this way: “[T]he way God’s word impinges upon human history is concrete talk in particular circumstances where the large purposes of God for the human enterprise come down to particulars of hurt and healing, of despair and hope.”(3) In the same way that Dr. Maté believes the emotional and psychological story of his clients holds the key to treating their addictions, so too our deepest longings and desires, our lived experience in this world, no matter how mundane or seemingly trivial, no matter how awful and dark, no matter how joy-filled and hopeful open a door to the presence of God. Nothing is excluded from telling the story of who we are and of how God is at work in the events of our lives.

Oh God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid. Oh God, you have searched me and known me….You know it all. Where can I go from your Spirit? Where can I hide from your presence?

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Terrence McNally, “Why Do People Become Addicts?” Interview with Dr. Gabor Mate, AlterNet, October 19, 2011.

(2) Ibid.

(3) Walter Brueggemann, Texts That Linger, Words That Explode (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2000) 44, emphasis mine.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Breaking Silence

December 9, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There are those who say that lukewarm acceptance is more bewildering than outright rejection. I always wonder if they have ever heard the story of the Syrophoenician woman.

Jesus was on his way to a place where no one would recognize him. From the chaos of Jerusalem and the crowds of Galilee he withdrew to the region of Tyre. According to one of his disciples, when he had entered a house, he wanted no one to know of it. Yet, he did not escape notice. A Gentile woman of the Syrophoenician race immediately fell at his feet and began to cry out, “Have mercy on me, Lord, Son of David; my daughter is cruelly demon-possessed.” But he did not answer her a word.(1)

In the lives of those who believe in God, sensed rejection is a difficult pill to swallow. Likewise, many former believers tell stories of a silent or unconcerned God on whom they eventually gave up. Even if we can reckon that God is not rejecting us personally, it is hard to square, “whoever comes to me I will never drive away” or “whatever you ask for in my name, I will do” with the barren silence of years of praying for a child; or the slamming of a door that held a real and certain hope; or the wordless dismissal of a mother brought to her knees. The rejection is indeed personal.

But this woman at Jesus’s feet did not turn away at the first sign of his refusal. She was not deterred by the disciples’ request that she be sent away, nor was she convinced to cease her plea after the harsh words that finally broke Jesus’s silence: ”I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel.” Being a Gentile, this meant she was not one of them. Lesser rejections have certainly brought me to crumbled mess. Yet even this was not a thought that would dissuade her. Speaking again, she pled once more, “Lord, help me!”

This is precisely the place in the interchange where I can no longer remain comfortable, imagining what it feels like to be truly helpless before someone you know can help you, imagining what it feels like—even then—to be told “no.” Still, Matthew recounts the story: “And Jesus answered and said, ‘It is not good to take the children’s bread and throw it to the dogs.’ But she said, ‘Yes, Lord; but even the dogs feed on the crumbs which fall from their masters’ table” (15:26-27). Her persistence, her vulnerability—her desperation—is more than most typically give anyone.

There is a line in the book of Hosea where God laments the presence of those who wail upon their beds but do not cry out to God from their hearts. In the brave voice of woman silenced by the world around her, I wonder if she is not the answer to this lament. If prayer is the pillar of a relationship that is built with one who knows us better than we know ourselves, how deeply rooted are the pillars of hope and love that have never been driven again and again into the ground? Perhaps there are times when rejection drives us deeper and we plunge further into faith, into the sheer earnestness of our request, into the presence of the God who hears it.

I don’t know why there are some prayers we seem to need to repeat exhaustively. I don’t know why there are some who seem to live lifetimes marked by the sting of rejected pleas. But I know that it is often the one who has learned to wrestle through denied petitions who also seems to exhibit a tender depth in her relationship with the one who hears; the one who God has given a chance to speak, to know her own voice and to be heard, who comes to value the conversation. I know that somehow even in sensed rejection, or the undesirable command to wait, is the hope of something understood.

At the close of the Syrophoenician woman’s final petition, Jesus turned to her with a response that overfilled the depths of her own rejection with the certainty of a relationship: “O woman, your faith is great; it shall be done for you as you wish.” And her daughter was healed at once.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) The story of the Syrophoenician woman is told in Matthew 15:21-28 and in Mark 7:24-30.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Awakenings

December 6, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Few of us would be able to recollect from our childhoods the moment when self-consciousness first came into being and the process of waking to self began. For most of us, awareness broke through in pieces. We found ourselves then as we continue to find ourselves now: at times stirringly wakeful to what it means to be human, aware of self and lifetime, and startled by the abruptness of its end. Essayist Annie Dillard articulates the progression of consciousness with stirring lucidity:

“I woke in bits, like all children, piecemeal over the years. I discovered myself and the world, and forgot them, and discovered them again. I woke at intervals until, by that September when Father went down the river, the intervals of waking tipped the scales, and I was more often awake than not. I noticed this process of waking, and predicted with terrifying logic that one of these years not far away I would be awake continuously and never slip back, and never be free of myself again.”(1)

Dillard describes the rousing of self as strangely recognizable—”like people brought back from cardiac arrest or drowning.” There is a familiarity in the midst of the foreignness. We wake to mystery, but so somehow we wake to something known.

We find ourselves jarred awake in a different way to the idea of death, this unsettling notion of forever falling asleep to the life we have known. But even here there is a curious sense of vigilance we carry with us into death. Spanish philosopher Miguel de Unamuno once observed that human beings are distinguished from other creatures in that we have the unique practice of burying our dead. In our funeral preparations, we make the dead ready for another stage; we make ourselves ready to continue on, our eyes further open to the weight of life. We stand ceremoniously present; we speak words over the dead body. Professor James Loder points out the rebellion inherent in these preparations: “We will not let death have the last word. This is a mark of the human spirit that something in us knows we can overcome this thing.”(2)

Into this mysterious world of life and death, the Christian voice calls the world to the wakeful awareness of this spirit, to the story reaching beyond self, beyond our lifetimes and our deaths, speaking words where death stings and tears flow: “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken… They will see the Son of Man coming on the clouds of the sky, with power and great glory. And he will send his angels with a loud trumpet call… when you see all these things, you know that itis near, right at the door” (Matthew 24:29-33).

When Jesus appeared on the scene of a people who had lived with God’s silence for hundreds of years, there were some who were ready and alert and others who had fallen asleep to the possibility of a God who speaks. The story of Christ’s coming, the Incarnation of hope and light, is a reminder that wakefulness is a worthy posture. The one who invites us to “come and see” has come near enough to show us for himself. Like children waking to consciousness, what if something in us knows that Christ is near, right at the door, longing to show us even now. It is worth being found awake, ready for something new and something we have known all along. For the Christian, this mystery is our consciousness. Christ has come. Christ has risen. Christ will come again.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Annie Dillard, An American Childhood (New York: HarperCollins, 1988), 11.

(2) James E. Loder, The Logic of the Spirit (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1998), 4.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Evidence

December 5, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

A charge that some people make is that religion in general and Christianity in particular are irrational. It’s ridiculous to believe in God, they say; there’s no evidence that God even exists! Richard Dawkins, in his best selling book The God Delusion, makes this very claim, saying that faith in God is just like belief in Santa Claus!

But of course, there’s a major problem with comparing faith in God to belief in Santa Claus. I don’t know anybody who came to believe in Santa Claus in adulthood. Yet I know many Christians—often former atheists—who discovered God as adults. This alone should tell you that God and Santa are utterly different. (If they weren’t, one wonders why Richard Dawkins didn’t write “The Santa Delusion.”) Furthermore, thousands upon thousands of great thinkers— now, and throughout history, have believed in God. That alone suggests that belief in God is hardly “irrational.”

But what about the other claim: “You can’t prove God exists!” What might a believing person say to skeptics? Well, I might start by gently pointing out that there are many good arguments that, whilst not proving God exists, certainly suggest God’s existence is extremely likely. There are philosophical arguments, such as the cosmological argument: (i) everything that begins to exist had a cause; (ii) the universe began to exist; (iii) therefore the universe had a cause. Most philosophers would say that’s a powerful argument.

There are also arguments from design. The universe and the laws of nature look, as one physicist once put it, suspiciously like a put up job. Or we might talk about the purpose that seems to be inherent in life. Most of us intuitively know that life has meaning and purpose. Indeed, a question one might fire back at our atheist friends concerns this very point: how does the atheist avoid nihilism, the view that life is meaningless, pointless, and nothing really matters. The question for the nihilist becomes “Why not suicide”?

The Christian would also want to point out that the deepest things that matter to us as humans all lie beyond the physical and the material: morality and meaning, love and friendship, beauty and truth. All of these don’t fit happily with atheism: “Darwinian mistakes,” Richard Dawkins once called them. That to me is tragic.

But perhaps the most powerful evidence for God is the one the Bible uses most consistently. The Bible doesn’t offer an argument for God, rather it points to God’s involvement in the world. Most significantly, that would be how, in the person of Jesus Christ, the God who created the world took on flesh and stepped into our world to rescue and save it. This is not a distant, remote, theoretical God, but a God who is very much alive. That’s a quite different proposition—and if that God exists, that changes everything. C. S. Lewis put it this way: “I believe in Christianity in the same way as I believe that the sun has risen. Not because I see it, but that by it, I see everything else.”

Andy Bannister is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Toronto, Canada.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Incarnate

December 4, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola is one of the world’s largest maximum-security prisons, an eighteen-thousand acre habitat to people who have committed horrible crimes. It houses roughly five thousand inmates, more than half of which are serving life sentences. Death looms large at Angola; ninety-four percent of inmates who enter are expected to die while incarcerated. The fear of dying alone in prison, coupled with the reality that for many inmates their first encounter with death was committing murder, makes death a weighted subject, often locked up in anger, guilt, and dread.

For a few, however, the Angola Hospice volunteer program has drastically changed this. In 1998, equipped with a variety of staff trustees and inmate volunteers, the LSP hospice opened its doors to its first terminally ill inmate. Today it is recognized as one of the best programs of its kind. Giving inmate volunteers a role in the creation of the hospice and in the primary care during the dying process, inmates find themselves in the position to tangibly affect the lives of others by being present, by giving a hand, by offering dignity to the dying. Reckoning with death as a fate that awaits all of humanity as they care for dying friends and strangers, the men often gradually let go of hardened demeanors. As one man notes, “I’ve seen guys that used to run around Angola, and want to fight and drug up, actually cry and be heartbroken over the patient.”(1) Another describes being present in the lives of the dying and how much this takes from the living. “But it puts a lot in you,” he adds. A third inmate describes how caring for strangers on the brink of death has put an end to his lifelong anger and helped him to confront his guilt with honesty.

It may seem for some an odd story as a means of examining the story of Christmas, but in some ways it is the only story to ever truly introduce the story of Christmas: broken, guilty souls longing for someone to be present. As martyred archbishop Oscar Romero once said, it is only the poor and hungry, those most aware they need someone to come on their behalf, who can celebrate Christmas. For the men at Angola who stare death in the eyes and realize the tender importance of presence, for the child whose mother left and whose father was never there, for the melancholic soul that laments the evils of a fallen world, the Incarnation is the only story that touches every pain, every lost hope, every ounce of our guilt, every joy that ever matters. Where other creeds fail, Christmas, in essence, is about coming poor and weary, guilty and famished to the very scene in history where God reached down and touched the world by stepping into it.

The Incarnation is hard to dismiss out of hand because it so radically comes near our needs. Into the world of living and dying the arrival of Christ as a child turns fears of isolation, weakness, and condemnation on their heads. C.S. Lewis describes the doctrine of the Incarnation as a story that gets under our skin unlike any other creed, religion, or theory. “[The Incarnation] digs beneath the surface, works through the rest of our knowledge by unexpected channels, harmonises best with our deepest apprehensions… and undermines our superficial opinions. It has little to say to the man who is still certain that everything is going to the dogs, or that everything is getting better and better, or that everything is God, or that everything is electricity. Its hour comes when these wholesale creeds have begun to fail us.”(2) Standing over the precipices of the things that matter, nothing matters more than that there is a loving, forgiving, eager God who draws near.

The great hope of the Incarnation is that God comes for us. God is aware and Christ is present, having come in flesh, and it changes everything. “[I]f accepted,” writes Lewis, “[the Incarnation] illuminates and orders all other phenomena, explains both our laughter and our logic, our fear of the dead and our knowledge that it is somehow good to die,…[and] covers what multitudes of separate theories will hardly cover for us if this is rejected.”(3) The coming of Christ as an infant in Bethlehem puts flesh on humanity’s worth and puts God in humanity’s weakness. To the captive, there is no other freedom.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Stephen Kiernan, Last Rights (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2006), 274.

(2) C.S. Lewis, The Complete C.S. Lewis (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 282.

(3) Ibid.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Waiting

December 3, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In the world of quirky factoids and interesting anecdotes, I have often heard that if one lives to be seventy years old, one will have spent three years of her life just waiting. Waiting in line at the grocery store; waiting in the doctor’s office; waiting in traffic; waiting for lunch to be ready; waiting for recess time at school; waiting. In his book, Oh, the Places You’ll Go, children’s author Theodor Geisel, or “Dr. Seuss,” describes a place called “the waiting place.” It sounds like the place most of us inhabit. He describes it as a useless place where people are just waiting.

Waiting for a train to go

or a bus to come, or a plane to go

or the mail to come, or the rain to go

or the phone to ring, or the snow to snow

or waiting around for a Yes or No

or waiting for their hair to grow.

Everyone is just waiting.

Sometimes waiting feels useless and futile. We are waiting around for what, exactly? More than this, waiting is difficult. It is difficult to have patience. It is something we admire in others, but find difficult for ourselves. Patience is something I can admire in the driver behind me, for example, but not in the one ahead of me!

The patience required by waiting is counterintuitive in our busy, fast-paced world. When our daily lives are made up of high speed Internet, instant messaging, and fast food, waiting for anything seems like an eternity. Moreover, in a world where so much beckons us, waiting asks us to be still and this can feel meaningless. English poet John Milton once wrote that those who serve stand and wait. Indeed, waiting asks us to be disciplined, self-controlled, and emotionally mature as the world speeds by us. Waiting requires an unshakeable faith, hope, and love that will trump all the action done for the sake of expediency. Waiting is often our best, hard work.

Waiting comprises a large part of the Christian worldview. But it is not the useless waiting of “the waiting place” that Dr. Seuss writes about, nor is it simply waiting for certain things or events, a trip or a raise, or even fulfillment. Christians await the return of Jesus in glory.

The season of Advent that precedes Christmas is a season of hope-filled waiting. Advent looks forward in anticipation of Christ’s return, but also remembers all those who awaited his arrival into our world more than two thousand years ago. Advent is a season of stillness and reflection and as such, it is the antithesis of all the busyness and chaos of the Christmas shopping season.

The consumer mentality overwhelms and demands a fever pitch of activity. Sadly, any waiting one might do is more likely waiting for Christmas to be over. And rather than being filled with hope and joy, we wait in a state of anxiety, or cynicism, or harried indifference toward the miracle that is upon us. In all of our busyness, we miss the gift of waiting with hope and expectation.

Yet, the Advent season extends an invitation to do just this: to watch and wait for the coming of the King, to wait for the Christ who comes in new ways into the very messy stuff of our lives—not just one season a year. But we cannot hope to catch a glimpse of him without the hard waiting for him to show up.

Of course, there are those who feel they have been waiting so long for God to show up in the messy details of their lives. Giving up on waiting seems to hold the promise of rest, as the work of waiting is wearisome. Just as there were those in the early days of the Christian movement who began to ask “Where is the promise of his coming?” and those who mocked the divine silence of inactivity, it is not difficult to understand how those who wait for answers—for an end to suffering, for reconciliation, for transformation—are tempted towards cynical despair.

Is there hope in remembering that Advent invites us to wait for the God who shows up? Can encouragement be found in the celebration of Christmas, a celebration proclaiming that God has come and that God will come again in the waiting of today? Is there reason to watch and wait for a God who arrives in ways we could not expect?

Advent invites the world to examine these things with courage. The very act of waiting opens eyes, hands, and hearts to receive this most precious gift.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Enough

December 2, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Black Friday is the name Americans have given the day after Thanksgiving, though the concept is catching on in Canada and Europe. It is called “black” because store-keepers know it as the time of year when sales move further into the black and farther into profit margins. Cyber Monday is a clever addition to the frenzied consumer holiday, luring black Friday shoppers and their less adventurous counterparts to continue their purchasing online. Evoking both buyer and seller competition, steep sales and loud advertisements make for frenzied scenes and the need for stamina. Those who watch as bystanders still sense the fervor that begins on Black Friday and continues in a hectic race until Christmas. When everyone around you seems to be running, standing still is easier said than done.

Each year the commencement of the Christmas shopping season overshadows the commencement of a far quieter season. The season of Advent signals the coming of Christmas for Christians, though not in the way that Black Friday signals the coming of the same. “Advent is about the spirituality of emptiness,” writes Joan Chittister, “of enough-ness, of stripped-down fullness of soul.” It is a far cry from the hustle of the holidays that is a race for storing things up. Speed-hoarding through the days of Christmas preparation, Christmas itself even becomes somewhat anticlimactic. “Long before December 25th everyone is worn out,” said C.S. Lewis more than 50 years ago, “—physically worn out by weeks of daily struggle in overcrowded shops, mentally worn out by the effort to remember all the right recipients and to think out suitable gifts for them. They are in no trim for merry-making… They look far more as if there had been a long illness in the house.”(1) Quite the opposite, Advent is a season meant to slow us down, to open windows of awareness and health, to trigger consciousness. It is about finding the kind of quiet mystery and the sort of expectant emptiness that can offer a place for the fullness of God as an infant among us.

Of course, for even the quietest of hearts, this God who becomes human, the incarnate Christ, is still a mystery. But mystery, like beauty and truth, is well worth stillness, wonder, and contemplation. And this mystery—the gift of a God who steps into the world he created—is rich enough to make the most distracted souls bow. “Let anyone with ears listen!” said Jesus repeatedly throughout his life on earth. “But to what will I compare this generation?” he added. “It is like children sitting in the market-places and calling to one another, ‘We played the flute for you, and you did not dance; we wailed, and you did not mourn’” (Matthew 11:15-17). You and I can open our minds to hear the great and unsearchable things we do not know, things like the Incarnation that we may never fully understand but are always invited to know further. Or we can simply look and act for all of Christmas to correspond with societal whims and unconscious distractions—fighting to be heard in the cultural debates about what we call or don’t call the season, arguing about public billboards and private mangers.

Christ will come regardless. The hope of Advent is that it is always possible to make room for him. I’m reminded of Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who composed a remarkable series of journals in the darkest years of Nazi occupation before being sent to Auschwitz, where she died in 1943. In one of her entries, Etty wrote, “[S]ometimes the most important thing in a whole day is the rest we take between two deep breaths, or the turning inwards in prayer for five short minutes.”(2) Advent can be this simple; the invitation of Christ is this simple. Let anyone with ears open them. Contemplating Christmas need not mean defensive words, Christmas wars, lists and budgets, endless labor, and fretful commotion.

Advent, after all, is about the riches of being empty-handed and that is an abruptly countercultural posture; empty-handed, so that we can fully hold the mystery before us and nothing less; empty-handed, like the God who came down from heaven without riches or power, but meek and small—full, expectant, and enough.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Etty Hillesum, An Interrupted Life: The Diaries 1941-1943 (New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1983), 93.

(2) C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2001), 305.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Accolades of Worth

November 29, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

There are a great many companies that think very highly of you and all that you deserve. You deserve the best. You deserve a vacation. You deserve to splurge on this because you’re worth it. Even in the midst of economic downturn, flattery remains one of the most effective psychological drivers that compounds debt. In a HSBC Direct survey during one such downturn, forty-two percent of the consumers interviewed said they had splurged on themselves in the past month despite hardship. Twenty-eight percent cited their reason for the splurge as simply “because I deserve it.”(1)

Of course, each of us who has ever bought into the idea that L’Oreal thinks I am worth it or BMW believes I deserve the ultimate driving experience probably realizes that we have done exactly that: we have bought the idea, paid for both the product and the flattering suggestion. No one is giving away these things because they think we are worth it; their flattery is quite literally calculated. In effect, it’s not that they think so highly of us, so much as that they want us to think highly of ourselves. Whether we see through the empty sycophancy or not, Geoff Mulgan believes it is working: “‘[B]ecause you’re worth it’ has come to epitomise banal narcissism of early 21st century capitalism; easy indulgence and effortless self-love all available at a flick of the credit card.”(2) The enticing words are an invitation to reward ourselves, and it just so happens we agree that we’re worth it—and they are glad.

There is of course much that can be drawn from reflecting on the intemperate desires of a consumer culture, and the Christian season of Advent, as some attempt to consider desire and its delay, provides the space and invitation to do so. The days before Christmas present the world with an opportunity to question the psychological drivers of empty flattery and consumer seduction. And while the worldview of a consumer may not be as easily kept in check as our shopping lists, the message of the incarnation gives a startling commentary on a similar kind of compliment, but a very different transaction. Choosing to become human, Christ has indeed proclaimed our worth. But there is nothing required to accept the unfathomable gesture of a God who takes on flesh.

Accepting the accolade proclaimed in Bethlehem does, however, confront the very banal narcissism that epitomizes our numbed consumer hearts. When it comes down to it, we may find that we in fact prefer the consumer transaction that tells us that being human is about what we can buy. We may find that there is something comforting and familiar in paying for our sense of worth and value. We might find it baffling to accept the idea that something deemed a gift could come to us fragile and broken. Or maybe it is the personal nature of his humanness that we find altogether unnerving—namely, he was not simply born a child in first century Bethlehem, he was born a child in first century Bethlehem for you. It is far easier to accept an empty compliment.

Yet in these days of Advent, we are given good reason to try out the harder road. With the worth of the world in mind, Jesus was born of a peasant girl in a poor manger. He became a human child, who would become a man, who would be put to death. It is strange to imagine a God who would concede to such a plan. God could have instead come down in glory and power for all to see. It would have silenced the crowds, forced them to look; it would have proved that he was no mere human to look us eye to eye. And it would have made him a God to whom we could not say no, even if it was only to say yes out of fear or force. No instead, he was mindful of us; he became one of us. When we turn to him with nothing to give but love, we know why.

It is a declaration of human worth that makes every other seem empty, narcissistic, or fleeting at best. And it is worth expending everything to consider what his humanity has to say of our own. What are mere mortals that you should think of them, human beings that you should care for them?

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) “Making Peace with Your Plastic,” The Wall Street Journal, Sept 8, 2008.

(2) Geoff Mulgan, “Because You’re Worth It,” guardian.co.uk, June 12 2006, accessed March 1, 2009.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Indignity of Giving Thanks

November 28, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

The spirit of thanksgiving runs against the temptation we face as human beings to assert our self-sufficiency. Few of us enjoy the feeling of indebtedness; a fact easily demonstrated by our oft-unsolicited readiness to return a favor once someone has expressed kindness to us. I owe you one, I will return the favor, and I am in your debt are some of the ways in which we express this attitude. Such responses, together with the more modest one, please let me know what I can do for you, allow us to express gratitude without acknowledging the chronic shadow of dependence that so rudely dogs our entire threescore and ten.

Not only does this inability to express gratitude without our own autonomy stealing the show sometimes rob of us of the joy of affirming the contribution of others to our wellbeing, it also shrivels up our desire to worship God. An unexamined sense of self-sufficiency instills in us a subtle but false attitude of entitlement, thus making it difficult for us to accept the sense of vulnerability that is part of true gratitude. Ever since the tempter said to Adam and Eve in the Garden, “You will be like God,” human beings have never given up the temptation to either elevate ourselves to the level of God or pull God down to our level, so we can deal with God as equals. We are always looking for a chance to say to God, “I can take it from here.”

Such an attitude of entitlement, I believe, occupies a central role in the story of the ten lepers in Luke 17. While all ten are healed by Jesus, only one of them returns to express gratitude. In his editorial comment, Luke informs us that the one who returned to give thanks was a Samaritan, and Jesus refers to him as a foreigner. Undoubtedly, this implies that the other nine were Jews. Could it be that the Jewish lepers felt entitled to the services of this Jewish prophet and their God? If God were to begin to right wrongs in the world, wouldn’t the most logical place to begin be among his own chosen people? Judging by Jesus’s expression of surprise in the passage, it seems the only words one would have expected from the mouths of the nine lepers would have been, “It’s about time!” Without a clear sense of how little we are entitled to, we cannot really come to terms with the need for gratitude—for an attitude of entitlement is an effective impediment to gratitude.

But everything we know about ourselves and our world speaks loudly against this tendency to self-sufficiency. As human babies, we all begin our lives at the highest level of dependence, and none of us really outgrows all degrees of dependence. We depend on parents, teachers, peers, coaches, and others to open doors for us in life. Even in places where commitment to personal autonomy is likely to produce more martyrs than religious conviction, dependence on others is still a living reality whose attempted concealment is gradually unveiled by the onset of old age. From the inventions that give us comfort in this world to the young soldiers who give their lives in the battlefields to protect our livelihoods, an unobstructed view of our lives reveals the fact that we all owe debts that we can never repay. We will never begin to worship God until we recognize that we are bankrupt debtors, for an attitude of gratitude is an indispensable impetus to worship.

Like skilled gourmet chefs spicing up their delicacies, Scripture writers sprinkle their words with admonitions and exaltations regarding gratitude, frequently tying it together with worship. For example, in the midst of a dark catalogue of humanity’s journey away from God, the apostle Paul lays the blame on our unwillingness to glorify God or give thanks to God. Similarly, the author of Hebrews grounds our worship of God in gratitude. He writes, “Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom that cannot be shaken, let us be thankful, and so worship God acceptably with reverence and awe” (Hebrews 12:28). It is impossible to worship God without gratitude, and it is impossible to be grateful while clinging to self-sufficiency and entitlement at the same time. Yes, there is some vulnerability in gratitude sincerely expressed, but that is because we are relational beings whose deepest needs can only be met in partnership with others and ultimately with God. While an attitude of entitlement is an impediment to gratitude, an attitude of gratitude is an indispensable impetus to worship. Show me a person whose life is characterized by gratitude, and I will show you a person whose soul is poised to worship God.

J.M. Njoroge is a member of the speaking team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Appetite of Infancy

November 27, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

I have never been so tired as I was when I stepped on that plane; neither have I been so happy for so many empty seats. I was dreaming of a two-hour nap before I even found my place. Of course, as is usually the case in situations like these, when one is intent on being anti-social and insistent on having earned the right to be so, I found myself not only with a companion, but with an animated, loquacious, first-time traveler. The young woman beside me had been a child as she watched the events of September 11th unfold and had determined then never to travel by airplane; that is, until today, when events reared a need to break her own rule. She was terrified and excited and inquisitive all at once. She also noticed things I’m fairly certain I have never noticed in all my years of travel, commenting with elation, curiosity, or confusion on every single one of them. By the time we landed, I not only had a new friend, I was wide awake to the disheartening reality of all I fail to see around me.

It would seem that repetition has a way of lulling us to sleep; monotony a way of robbing us of sight, or else leaving us in the stupor of disinterest. Real life examples are readily available. How many news stories do we need to hear about violence or suffering, racial oppression or injustice, before we fail to hear them at all? For that matter, how many stories about something small but positive do we really take in before we respond in boredom? How many times do we need to sit on an airplane or see the bird outside our window before the marvel of flight simply goes without notice? Like most adults, we learn to tolerate the repetitious by learning to operate on auto-pilot.

And yet, I am certain, even among the most skilled of auto-pilots, there was a time when we found ourselves, like every child, delighting in the monotonous, longing for another minute with grandpa, another page of the story, another trip down the slide. The incongruity is unmistakable. How can our failure to see be blamed on monotony, unconscious living attributed to the repetitive, when at one point monotony and repetition were not only tolerated but invigorating? Blindness can easily be blamed on the world around us—and there is certainly reason to consider the daily effects of all that bombards our senses—but perhaps this is too easy an answer. Perhaps the scales on our eyes are multiplied not by the many repetitions in life, but by our failure to see life in the many repetitions around us.

Jesus spoke of the kingdom as belonging to the likes of little children, and many have speculated the child’s ability to see the world with wonder as one of the reasons for it. G.K. Chesterton saw the child’s ability to revel in the monotonous as another. The children’s cry for more, reasoned Chesterton, is a quality of the very God who created them. “It is possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.”(1)

For the child on the slide or the toddler with a story, “Do it again!” is far from a cry of boredom or routine, but a cry for more of life itself. This is likewise the joy of the psalmist, the cry of the prophets, and the call of Christ: “Consider the lilies, how they grow…if God so clothes the grass of the field…how much more will he clothe you?” (Luke 12:27-28). Jesus asks the world to consider the kingdom around us like little children, and thus, something more like God—finding a presence in faithful recurrences, grace in repetition, an appetite for an incredible world in the ordinary one around us. Here, even those within the most taxing of life’s repetitions—the daily care of an aging parent, the constant burden on the shoulders of those who fight against injustice, the labor of hope in a difficult place—can find solace. “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope,” said Jeremiah in the midst of deep lament. “The steadfast love of the Lord never ceases, his mercies never come to an end; they are new every morning…’ The Lord is my portion,’ says my soul, ‘therefore I will hope in him’” (Lamentations 3:22-24, emphasis mine).

Morning by morning, the daily liturgy of new mercies comes with unapologetic repetition to all who will see it, the gift of a God who revels in the creation of yet another daisy, the encore of another sunset, the discovery of even one lost soul.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 65-66.

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Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Is the Nature of Faith?

November 26, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

What is the nature of faith? Is faith the sort of thing that is like an impenetrable fortress? Is it a sense of absolute certainty, as is found in mathematical formulae, with consistent and guaranteed results? Or is the nature of faith like the feeling one gets when barely hanging on—fingers fatigued, sweaty, and slowly slipping off of whatever prop, cliff, or ledge that holds one from falling into the abyss of disbelief?

I wonder about the nature of faith as I encounter so many different perspectives and experiences with faith. After profound loss, for example, many individuals suffer what is described as a ‘crisis of faith.’ All that seemed a sure foundation before the loss crumbles under the weight of crisis. For others, faith seems a swinging pendulum that vacillates between certainty and doubt. The poet Emily Dickinson wrote that “we both believe and disbelieve a hundred times an Hour…”.(1) Still for others faith is a constant assurance, a sense of strength and repose regardless of the assaults to it.

Of course, to ask about the nature of faith is to inquire about the nature of trust and belief. As such, it is not simply a conversation among religious adherents, but a real question over which humans wrestle whether they acknowledge it explicitly or not. We make decisions each and every day about whether or not we will trust the bus driver and the bus to get us to work. We make decisions to trust other drivers on the highway that they will keep their vehicles under control and not careen into our lane of traffic. We make decisions to trust individuals—spouses, children, friends, employers. The exercise of trust is a basic requirement for relationships and for living in this world.

This is why it is so interesting to me that talk of ‘faith’ is often relegated to the margin that is religious discourse. To have ‘faith’ or ‘trust’ or ‘belief’ in scientific studies is simply assumed because science has become the standard by which truth is measured. And yet, even scientists exercise ‘faith’ in a relationship to a tradition of knowledge. Assumptions, assured findings from the past, and the methods of science all become a part of the relationship between faith and knowledge. Sometimes, even this relationship comes under testing when what were once considered ‘true’ results are called into question by new assumptions and new data.(2) Relationships are dynamic; going through ebbs and flows, ups and downs, changes and stasis. As such, it seems a complete category mistake to speak of faith and certainty in the same sentence-even in the realm of science. As author Philip Yancey asserts about the necessary uncertainty of faith, “Doubt always coexists with faith, for in the presence of certainty who would need faith at all?”(3)

It is reasonable, then, to wonder aloud about the nature of faith. One ought to be wary of arriving at a simple definition. For C.S. Lewis, one of the great spokesmen on behalf of the Christianity, the nature of faith was complicated and something that was not easily understood. In his heart-wrenching memoir, A Grief Observed, Lewis writes: “You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you. It is easy to say you believe a rope to be strong and sound as long as you are merely using it to cord a box.”(4) I believe Lewis articulates a profound dynamic of faith—one never really knows what it is until it is tested. Yet, once tested the true nature of one’s faith is revealed-even when it is revealed to be wanting. In these times, we can reflect honestly about that in which we’ve placed our trust and whether the subject or object of trust is warranted.

Yet, even here where one’s faith might be revealed for what it is and what it is not, there is room for growth and for hope. Philip Yancey reflects that,

“What gives me hope, though, is that Jesus worked with whatever grain of faith a person might muster. He did, after all honor the faith of everyone who asked, from the bold centurion to doubting Thomas to the distraught father who cried, ‘I do believe, help me overcome my unbelief!’”(5)

The true nature of faith is inextricably bound to relationship. As such, it is subject to all of the intricacies and complexities of relationship. At times unshakable and strong, and at other times revealed to be flabby and weak, the nature of faith is dynamic. But entering into a relationship of trust with the God revealed in Jesus of Nazareth assures me that despite the complexities, and despite my often small offering of faith, I am welcomed into a relationship anyway. And as my faith is tested, its true nature is progressively revealed.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) From a letter to Otis Lord, April 30, 1882; Thomas H. Johnson, ed., The Letters of Emily Dickinson (Cambridge: Belknap, 1958), 728.

(2) As is seen in the recent studies that showed a new gauge for cholesterol was flawed. Cardiologists learned that a new online calculator meant to help them determine a patient’s suitability for cholesterol treatment was flawed, doubling the estimated risk of heart attack or stroke for the average patient. See Gina Kolata, “Flawed gauge for cholesterol risk poses new challenge,” NY Times, November 18, 2013.

(3) Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God: What Do We Expect to Find? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2000), 41.

(4) C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperCollins ebooks, 2009), loc 326-329.

(5) Philip Yancey, Reaching for the Invisible God: What Do We Expect to Find, 40.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Truth on Its Head

November 25, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

G.K. Chesterton took the word “prolific” to a level that, as a writer, simply makes me feel tired. In his lifetime, Chesterton authored over 100 books and contributed to 200 others. He penned hundreds of poems, five plays, five novels, and some 200 short stories, including the popular Father Brown detective series. He wrote over 4000 newspaper essays, including 30 years worth of weekly columns for The Illustrated London News, and 13 years of weekly columns for The Daily News. He also edited his own newspaper, G.K.’s Weekly.

As one can easily imagine after such an inventory, G.K. Chesterton was always writing—wherever he found himself, and with whatever he could find to write on. So, in the tearoom he scribbled on napkins. On the train, in front of a bank teller, or in the middle of a lecture, he was known to jot hurriedly in a notebook, or even on the cuff of his sleeve.

Chesterton’s eccentric approach to writing, in fact, matched his eccentric approach to life in general. His public image was one out of a Shakespearean comedy. If he were not recognized in the streets of London by the flowing black cape and the wide brimmed top hat he always wore, he was given away instantly by the clamoring of the swordstick he always carried—for nothing more than the romantic notion that he might one day find himself caught up in some adventure where defending himself might become necessary.

He rarely knew, from hour to hour, where he was or where he was supposed to be, what appointment he was to be keeping, or lecture he was to be giving. The story is often told of the time he telegraphed his wife with the note, “Am at Market Harborough. Where ought I to be?” His faithful wife, Frances, wired back, “Home,” knowing it would be most promising for all involved if she could physically point him in the right direction. Chesterton seemed to live out one of his own clever paradoxes: “One can sometimes do good by being the right person in the wrong place.”

In fact, paradox, in more ways than one, is an ample word for G.K. Chesterton. It was one of his favorite things to point out, stir up, and call to mind. He described paradox as “truth standing on its head to gain attention,” and often evoked such jestering truisms throughout his dialog. With declarations bizarre enough to escape defensive mindsets, but with a substance that could blow holes in fortresses of skepticism, G.K. Chesterton, as absentminded as he may have appeared to be, challenged the world to think. With humility, wonder, and genius, Chesterton taught us, in the words of Father Brown, that often it isn’t that we can’t see the solution; it’s that we can’t see the problem.

In his disarming manner, such that even his opponents regarded him with affection, Chesterton exposed the inconsistencies of the modern mindset, the unfounded and unnoticed dogmatism of the unbeliever, and the misguided guidance of the cults of comfort and progress. He marveled that religious liberty now meant that we were no longer allowed to mention the subject, and that “there are those who hate Christianity and call their hatred an all-embracing love for all religions.” To the convicted agnostic he said, “We don’t know enough about the unknown to know that it is unknowable.” To the social Darwinist he said, “It is absurd for the Evolutionist to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”

And to all who would listen, Chesterton devotedly pled the case for Christ: “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”

To everyone his life affected, and continues to affect, G.K. Chesterton, with and without words, made a boisterous point about delighting in life to the fullest; life that is fullest, first and foremost, because there is someone to thank for making it full. He writes:

You say grace before meals.

All right.

But I say grace before the play and the opera,

And grace before the concert and the pantomime,

And grace before I open a book,

And grace before sketching, painting,

swimming, fencing, boxing, walking, playing, dancing;

And grace before I dip the pen in the ink.

Chesterton was a man alive with the gusto of resurrection, the marvel of truth, and the thankful foresight of a coming King among us.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Ugly Truth

November 21, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

In the movie A Few Good Men, we get the iconic line from Colonel Nathan Jessup (Jack Nicholson) under cross examination in a trial by Lieutenant Lionel Kaffee (Tom Cruise): “You can’t handle the truth!” The phrase jars us even as it resonates. In John’s gospel, Jesus taught that we would know the truth and the truth would set us free. However, herein lies the challenge: Truth can set us free, but we can’t always handle the truth!

What does that mean? An old preacher used to say that God cleanses sin, not excuses. Yet as I study the human condition, I find that excuses are our specialty. When someone is caught in some wrong doing, when we are exposed in a hypocrisy, when facts speak for themselves, we often find elaborate (and contrived) rationalizations or denials: “You don’t understand…” “It was more complicated…” “They brought it on themselves…” Or, as we find in the first book of the Bible, “The woman you put here with me—she gave me some fruit from the tree.”

I have read many books on the Nazi period and those who seemed unable to come to terms with the evil to which they contributed. I have recently been reading a book by Jean Francois Revel exposing the intricate webs of truth avoidance by the French Socialists and Communists in regards to the evils by and under existing communism. Men and women of eminent credentials, from significant educational institutions, employ the most mind-bendingly silly arguments to justify evils committed under their preferred system, whilst simultaneously demonizing those of their clearly defined enemies. We don’t need to look to foreign countries or history for example; there is always recent evidence that this is a human issue, and not a political, racial, historical, or geographical one.

It is not a pleasant thing to contemplate, but it is real: this self-justifying mechanism, this denial system, this hidden factor that makes me quick to judge others for infractions against me or my view of morality, but which equally quickly grants allowances, justifications, rationale for my own failings, errors, or wrong doings.

When Jesus said that we would know the truth, part of this truth is that we would know ourselves. That is, who and what we are, that something is indeed wrong, that something is wrong with us! We need help, we need healing, we need something to intervene in our lives to address the broken aspects. Sin is the biblical condition named to define this issue. The Greek word often used is hamartia, which means to miss the mark, as when an arrow misses the target. Something in space and time has happened that has disrupted and disordered reality. Though we often see the truth and maybe even at some level want the truth, we indeed cannot always handle it—at least, not without grace.

On the contrary, Jesus knew what was in men and women. He came as God’s means of renewal and redemption. He came as light, and he came as the door to another kingdom where light, life, and hearts are exposed. As the door, a way is opened to new life, and Jesus beckons, “Come unto me.” So, where are you today? Making excuses, justifying behavior, rationalizing attitudes, or seeking grace to be different? God loves us as we are, but loves us too much to leave us as we are. If we can handle it, the truth will set us free.

Stuart McAllister is regional director for the Americas at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Commending Christ

November 20, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

Author John Stackhouse describes apologetics as the Christian work of commending the faith as much as it is about defending the faith. Commending the faith, he argues, is something the Christian community does wherever it is—with one another, with neighbors, with the world. Consequently, it is also something the Christian community does whether they are aware of it or not.

In his sermon before the Areopagus, the apostle Paul commended the gospel with reason and rhetoric that would not have gone unrecognized. This is the “good news,” he professed, and the “good life” depends on it. To the Athenian philosophers, he commended the gospel in terms that mattered deeply to them. “Since we are God’s offspring,” he said quoting an Athenian poet, “we ought not to think that the deity is like gold, or silver, or stone, an image formed by the art and imagination of mortals.”(1) For on the contrary, he told them, the real and present Deity is now calling people everywhere to turn around and come near.

The apostle then followed this bold notion with a proof that would have caused as much, if not more, commotion in first century Athens as in hyper-rational modernity and cynical post-modernity. We know that God is the true creator, sustainer, and friend, he reasoned, because God “has given this proof… by raising [Christ] from the dead.”(2) Paul is telling the story of God in the world here, but he is also telling his own story. This Deity he commends to the Athenian philosophers is the risen Christ who appeared to him on Damascus road, who became ‘friend’ instead of ‘foe,’ and turned his own philosophy and consequently his life around.

Paul’s use of the resurrection as proof of all he has proclaimed to the Athenians is interesting on several levels. To begin with, while the apostle clearly sought to ground his Mars Hill message on a common foundation, he ended with a proof that must have seemed to some like a foreign tidal wave. For the Athenians, resurrection of the body was absurd and unreasonable, as much of an obstacle to them as the scandalizing cross to men and women of Jerusalem. While the philosophers of the Areopagus may have believed in the immorality of the soul, the body was what confined and imprisoned this soul. In their minds, there was a radical distinction between matter and spirit. Bodily resurrection did not make any more sense than a god with a body! For the Athenians, and indeed for all of us, this very proof required a radical turn of heart, mind, soul, and body. For some, this babbler’s new teaching was immediately labeled absurd. When they heard of this resurrection of the dead, reports Luke, there were scoffs and sneers.

Yet Paul’s apologetic, which was carefully researched, powerfully worded, and respectfully delivered, was not here ending on a careless note. On the contrary, he was ending with the chorus itself. For Paul, all of the words uttered up until this point would merely be noise had they not come from this very refrain. For if Christ has not been raised, both preaching and faith itself is useless, as he said elsewhere. Though it would have been a foreign language to the crowd at the Areopagus, Paul commended the resurrection as the very proof of his apologetic—for the entirety of his message was authoritative only and specifically because the resurrection had indeed occurred. Authors Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon note the central task of commending the Gospel: “Our claim is not that this tradition will make sense to anyone or will enable the world to run more smoothly. Our claim is that it just happens to be true. This really is the way God is. This really is the way God’s world is.”(3) For Paul, and for the apologist, the important Christian act of finding common ground must never involve burying what is real and living: Christ is risen from the dead.

This single event is the theological core of Paul’s identity and his highest apologetic. It is also the very pillar which makes abundantly clear that the true work of apologetics does not belong to Christians. Writes Stackhouse, “Spiritual adepts throughout the ages warn us that mere argument accomplishes little even within our own hearts.”(4) No one knew this better than the apostle Paul, who would never have otherwise considered Jesus anything more than one to despise. The work of conversion belongs to the Holy Spirit.

Thus, there were many at the Areopagus that day who sneered at Paul’s philosophical conclusions. There were also many who responded in the same manner they responded to any teaching considered at the Areopagus—namely, with fascination, with discussion, and with barren hearts and minds. But likewise, there were a number who believed. Among them was Dionysius, a member of the Areopagus, also a woman named Damaris, and a number of others.(5) By the grace of God, the risen Christ was commended and the clamoring alternatives were overcome.

Jill Carattini is managing editor of A Slice of Infinity at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Atlanta, Georgia.

(1) Acts 17:29.

(2) Acts 17:31.

(3) Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, Resident Aliens (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1989), 101.

(4) John Stackhouse, Jr. Humble Apologetics: Defending the Faith Today (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 82.

(5) cf. Acts 17:34.

Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Where Were You?

November 19, 2013 broboinhawaii Leave a comment

As a young girl, one of my favorite games was hide and seek. Gathering all of our friends from the street on which we lived, we played this favorite childhood game that offered the entire neighborhood as a hiding place. The familiar call “Where are you?” echoed down the streets as the seeker looked far and wide to find our hiding places.

A cosmic game of hide and seek is often how many view the search for God. “Where are you?” is the question that echoes throughout the ages as human beings seek for God in a vast universe often filled with inexplicable mystery.

This is no trivial game. Atheist Bertrand Russell was once asked what he would say if after death he met God, to which he replied: “God, you gave us insufficient evidence.”(1) While those who have found God quite evident would balk at Russell’s impudence, it is helpful to remember that theists often wrestle with a similar struggle. Many of the biblical writers themselves have depicted God as hidden. “Why do you stand afar off, O Lord? Why do you hide yourself in times of trouble?” (Psalms 10:1). Indeed, the psalmist accuses God of being “asleep” to his plaintive cries: “Arouse, yourself, why do you sleep, O Lord? Awake, and do not reject us forever. Why do you hide your face, and forget our affliction and our oppression?” (Psalm 44:23-24). Even blameless Job wondered aloud if in fact God viewed him as the enemy: “Why do you hide your face and consider me the enemy?” (Job 13:24). And from the place of his deepest suffering, Jesus himself cried out using the words of the poets of Israel, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

Clearly, the hiddenness of God is problematic for theists and atheists alike. Indeed, the belief in a God who can be easily found, and who has acted in time and space, makes the experience of God’s hiddenness all the more poignant and perplexing.

“Where are you?” serves as one of the central questions in the acclaimed film by Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life. The film explores the paradoxical experience of both God’s astounding presence and God’s apparent absence. The questions concerning God’s whereabouts are posed by an adult man in the throes of a life-crisis resulting from family tragedy. Through a series of cinematic visions, the man reflects back on his life as his question “Where are you?” sounds a thematic refrain when tragic events ensue. It is this question that takes the man on a search for God, not only through recalling the events of his childhood in a small Texas town, but also as he contemplates the grandeur of the cosmos at the dawn of creation.

As the film begins, we hear the voice of this man’s, mother extolling a life of grace, as opposed to a life lived according to nature, for the self alone. To the oft-repeated question, “Where are you?” the film suggests God resides in this life of grace. The life that is grace-filled lives for others, revels in the beauty and wonder of the created world, and extends a gracious forgiveness toward others. It is this grace-filled life that the now adult Jack remembers as a clue to where God may be found. The gracious way in which his mother lived, and the way his younger brother extended forgiveness to the young Jack after he viciously shot him in the hand with a pellet gun provide the first hints for God’s hiding place. Jack recalls, “Brother, mother, it was they who led me to your door.” In these grace-filled human encounters, the doorway is opened to God’s dwelling place.

This gracious way is set in contrast to the way of nature, which competes and wrestles for control of Jack. The way of nature seeks to make its way in the world forcefully; its acquisitive nature clawing after worldly success, fortune, and power. It is a battle waged within every human being, and the film suggests that it is a path that leads one away from God; it is the way that hides us from God’s grace and God’s presence.

For indeed, the game of hide and seek is not one-sided. The film opens with a quotation from the book of Job: “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth…when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” A cinematic kaleidoscope of those foundations—from a one-celled organism to the galaxies beyond invites the viewer to see the gracious hand of God touching all that makes up the universe. From the dawn of time to, by contrast, this seemingly insignificant family living in 1950′s Waco, Texas, the film shimmers with God’s presence. We often fail to accept the invitation, the film suggests, as we succumb to the way of nature—a way that reduces one’s vision only to self-interest. But God’s glorious grace is all around us. Sometimes abundantly obvious, sometimes subtle, God’s gracious presence beckons to us in this world and in our relationships with one another. “Always did you seek me” Jack recognizes as he wrestles with his own propensity to hide. Always do you seek for us—we humans who play hide and seek—from the very foundation of the world.

Margaret Manning is a member of the speaking and writing team at Ravi Zacharias International Ministries in Seattle, Washington.

(1) Cited in Dr. Paul K. Moser’s booklet Why Isn’t God More Obvious: Finding the God who Hides and Seeks (Norcross, GA: RZIM, 2000)1.

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Category Archives: Ravi Zacharias

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Out of Ivory Palaces

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A World Off Balance

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A Real Person

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Yesterday and Today

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – A God Who Descends

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Out of the Depths

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Breaking Silence

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Awakenings

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Evidence

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Incarnate

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Waiting

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Enough

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Accolades of Worth

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Indignity of Giving Thanks

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – The Appetite of Infancy

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – What Is the Nature of Faith?

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Truth on Its Head

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Ugly Truth

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Commending Christ

Ravi Zacharias Ministry – Where Were You?

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