The Case For Christ

equally exhilarating: there was the rush of reason.
Become
After taking that step, I knew from John 1:12 that I had crossed
the threshold into a new experience. I had become something
different: a child of God, forever adopted into his family
through the historical, risen Jesus. Said the apostle Paul,
"Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old
has gone, the new has come" (2 Cor. 5:17).
Sure enough, over time as I endeavored to follow Jesus' teachings
and open myself to his transforming power, my priorities, my
values, and my character were (and continue to be) gradually
changed. Increasingly I want Jesus' motives and perspective to be
my own. To paraphrase Martin Luther King Jr., I may not yet be
the man I should be or the man, with Christ's help, I someday
will be-but thank God I'm not the man I used to be!
Maybe that sounds mystical to you; I don't know. Not so long ago
it would have to me. But it's very real to me now and to those
around me. In fact, so radical was the difference in my life that
a few months after I became a follower of Jesus, our five-yearold
daughter Alison went up to my wife and said, "Mommy, I want
God to do for me what he's done for Daddy."
Here was a little girl who had only known a father who was
profane, angry, verbally harsh, and all too often absent. And
even though she had never interviewed a scholar, never analyzed
the data, never investigated historical evidence, she had seen up
close the,influence that Jesus can have on one person's life. In
effect, she was saying, "If this is what God does to a human
being, that's what I want for me." Looking back nearly two
decades, I can see with clarity that the day I personally made a
decision in the case for Christ was nothing less than the pivotal
event of my entire life.
REACHING YOUR OWN VERDICT
Now to you. At the outset I encouraged you to approach the
evidence in this book as a fair and impartial juror as much as
possible, drawing your conclusions based on the weight of the
evidence. In the end the verdict is yours and yours alone. Nobody
else can cast the ballot for you. Perhaps after reading expert
after expert, listening to argument after argument, seeing the
answers to question after question, and testing the evidence with
your logic and common sense, you've found, as I have, that the