‍Jo Vitale [00:00:35] So welcome to the podcast where we invite you to Ask Away.

Hi everyone, I'm Jo Vitale. Welcome back to Ask Away. One of the things that Vince and I are most grateful for is being given opportunities to engage with those who aren't sure what they believe about life's big questions. It's particularly encouraging to us when we see individuals with perspectives and beliefs that differ greatly from one another, coming together on university campuses in a shared pursuit of truth. In fact, it was in that kind of context that Vince came to faith when he was in college. This week's Ask Away episode engages with the question, is it crazy to believe in a virgin birth and a resurrection from death? Vince gave this talk at Stanford University, and it led to some wonderful conversations with curious questioners that lasted well into the night. We hope it proves to be a thought provoking episode for you too. 

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Vince Vitale [00:01:41] To be honest, when I first started thinking about questions like this, that was about as irrational as I thought faith could get. I thought that was about as good of an argument as you could come up with. I thought faith meant that you weren't thinking hard enough. I thought faith had to be blind. I thought it meant that you weren't smart. I was studying philosophy at the time, an undergrad at Princeton. And two teammates of mine, soccer teammates-- actually, I know there's a few soccer players in the room today. And two soccer teammates challenged me to read the Bible and to actually read the claims of the Bible before I made a decision about faith. And I wasn't that interested, but I was always up for a challenge. I began to read through, and I would cross things out, and I would add things, and I would actually write a big BS in the margin wherever I disagreed. And Christians would sort of look over my shoulder and say, "Vince, why do you have a BS in the margin of your Bible?" And I'd say that verse makes for a great Bible study. And that was my starting point. But things changed because I did, I took the challenge. I continued reading first. I just found myself deeply drawn to the person of Jesus. I found myself deeply drawn to the way he carried himself, the way that he treated people. Especially the way he treated people on the margins, the people that others didn't have the time of day for. Reading about a woman who was caught in adultery and everybody wanted to stone her, and Jesus says, "You who are without sin, throw the first stone." And one by one each of them walked away. 

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[00:03:16] Jesus is saying, do to others as you would have them do to you. Love your enemies. Pray for those who persecute you. And I'm reading these lines and I'm going, that's not what's in my heart about my enemies. But there's something deep down that makes me feel like maybe that's what's supposed to be in my heart, but I knew that it wasn't. So I'm reading through the scriptures, I kept reading, pretty quickly I realized that Jesus made some very big claims about himself. He claimed that he existed before Abraham, who existed thousands of years ago. He claimed to be able to forgive people's sins-- not just sins against him, but in general, that he could just pronounced that someone's sins were forgiven. He said, I am the resurrection and the life. The one who believes in me will live even though they die. That's a big claim. If I stood up here right now and made a claim like that, you'd be going, right, if you believe in me, even though you die, you're going to live? He said to have seen him was to have seen God. And he said Him and God were one and the same. And I'm thinking, who is this guy? Because when someone makes those sorts of claims about himself, there's only so many options in terms of what you say about him. I mean, you could say he's just a liar, but then he's a really vicious liar because his friends are getting persecuted and ultimately killed for the things that he's saying to them. Was he severely deluded about these things? Did he actually believe all these crazy things about himself mistakenly? I'm reading through and I'm looking at the way he lived his life, the composure he had to his life, and I'm thinking that really doesn't seem likely, but could he actually be telling the truth? 

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[00:04:54] I kept reading, I got to the book of Acts. It's about the early church, like a history of the early church. I started to come across all sorts of words that as a philosophy student, I never expected to see in the Bible. Words like examining and explaining and debating and persuading and even proving. I read that the Bereans, this one people group, it says they were more noble than this other people group. Why? Not because they had blind faith. But it says because they examined the scriptures daily to determine if what they were being told was true. And I thought to myself, eventually, this is not a God who's asking me to just drop my brain at the door as I walk in. As Professor Hong said to us, yes, that God is asking me to love him with all my heart, soul and strength, but also with all of my mind. And I can remember reasoning to myself, if God made me and he made me with this brain, with this mind, then he would want an honest or sincere intellectual search to point in his direction. But then I kept reading. Eventually I got to this point where it says God has provided confirmation for all by raising Jesus from the dead. And that might seem like a crazy idea to you. The idea of a man literally physically rising from the dead, that sounded crazy to me. I can initially remember feeling disappointed that the Bible makes claims like this. Because I was being drawn to the person of Jesus, I thought, this is the sort of person that I want to learn from, the person I'd want to follow, too bad something as irrational as this needs to be believed in order to do so. 

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[00:06:42] But I want to invite us the next few minutes just to at least be open to the possibility of the miraculous. Because if you assume at the outset, like if you assume right now, a miracle can't happen, well, then of course you're going to inevitably come to the conclusion that a miracle didn't happen. But is that really the rational assumption to make? When is the last time you took a moment to just step back and just think about how incredible it is, how supernatural it is that we are even here right now as conscious beings. Even thinking about miracles, we just walk around each day like life is just normal. It's just humdrum. We're sitting on a rock right now that's rotating at a thousand miles an hour. It's flying around the sun at 67,000 miles an hour, part of a galaxy being hurled through the universe at over a million miles an hour, all with laws so orderly that human life exists. Life's so intricate. If you took the DNA strands from your 37 trillion or so cells and laid them end to end, they'd stretch to the sun and back hundreds of times. It's ridiculous that we're even sitting here thinking about this stuff. Utterly remarkable. Consider with me for a moment. Big picture explanations of the universe. There are only so many. Just a question, why are we here? One answer is that God made it. And as a Christian, I'm willing to put my hand up and say, that's extraordinary. That's remarkable. That's a miraculous explanation. You should have some questions about that. But there are only so many options. Option number two, the universe popped into existence from nothing for no reason. That is also a remarkable answer to the question. 

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[00:08:45] The physical stuff in our everyday lives doesn't generally just pop in and out of existence. If the chair you're sitting on just popped in and out of existence, you'd have a problem. But you'd also be really surprised. If not now, why should we think that's what happened at the beginning? Or a third explanation, we say the universe has always existed, or maybe some series of universes extending infinitely back in time, but again, without any explanation. Then maybe you can explain each part of the universe by a part that came before it, but you still have absolutely no explanation for why there is a universe at all. And I think that's utterly remarkable, too. And even if you look at all three of these options and say, yeah, you know what, they all look pretty wacky. I'm just going to remain agnostic on the issue. I'm not committing myself to any of those. Well, I think logically it still follows that one of those three things is true. And even that's utterly remarkable. I call that the normalcy of the supernatural. And these three options, I think they exhaust the relevant alternatives. And every single one of them is utterly remarkable. And sometimes I think we just get into the habit. We just wake up, we go through our day, we go to sleep, we wake up, we go through our day, we go to sleep. And we just don't step back and just say, hey, this is a crazy universe that we're inhabiting. Maybe there's some crazy claims that are true that explain that. 

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[00:10:02] The conclusion I came to is that we live in a miraculous world. Whatever beliefs you came in here with today theist, atheist, agnostic, I don't think any of us can get around that fact. I was reminded of this some years ago. I was emailing back and forth with a friend of mine, retired Princeton professor, history of science. And at this point I had actually come to faith and we were emailing back and forth, and he was detailing some of his objections to the Christian faith, and he had several objections. And then at the end of his email, in his last line, as if to trump all arguments, he just said, "Nor can I believe in a virgin birth." And there was no further argument, just sort of as if to say it'd be crazy to believe in such a thing. And it really stuck with me. And I remember starting to draft an email back about why maybe he could consider believing in a virgin birth. And then it sort of dawned on me, maybe he already does. Maybe all of us believe in a virgin birth, whether we realize it or not. Christians believe in the virgin birth of God Himself as Jesus. And, again, I'm willing to put my hand up and say, that's an incredible claim. But maybe Christians aren't the only ones who believe something like that. Take the brilliant Cambridge physicist, the late Stephen Hawking. Okay, here's an attempt to propose an atheistic birth of our universe. Summarizing his ultimate position, he says the universe can and will create itself from nothing. 

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[00:11:35] Spontaneous creation is the reason there's something rather than nothing. Why the universe exists. Why we exist. I'm not arguing for against that right now, but I'm just saying that sounds quite a lot like a virgin birth to me as well. Maybe Christians aren't the only one who make claims that are that extraordinary. Or consider the words of the atheist philosopher Quentin Smith. A prolific guide, 12 books, about 150 peer reviewed articles through his career, and this is the best explanation that he can offer. He says the fact of the matter is that the most reasonable belief is that we came from nothing, by nothing and for nothing. We should acknowledge our foundation in nothingness and feel all at the marvelous fact that we have a chance to participate briefly in this incredible sunburst that interrupts, without reason, the reign of non-being. And again, I thought to myself, that also sounds quite a lot like a virgin birth. And I came to that same conclusion. We live in a mind blowing universe. There's no getting around that. Maybe it's not a matter of whether we believe in a virgin birth. Maybe it's a matter of which virgin birth we choose to accept. Is Christianity crazy? Maybe. But we live in a crazy world. Every person has to wind up believing some extraordinary stuff. And I think the question is, do we have good reason to believe it? So what of Christianity's most extraordinary claim? Perhaps the resurrection of Jesus. 

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[00:13:04] When I first began to be encouraged to look into this, and then when I first didn't look into this first as an undergraduate student, I remember just being blown away, astonished that you even could look into it. There was even history to consider that could point in one direction or the other, let alone what I believe I came to find was that there was an incredibly strong case for the fact that this miracle actually happened. It's strong, I think, for a number of reasons. I just want to focus on one of them with our time. But we can talk more during the time of Q&A discussion if people want to dig deeper. But this reason focuses on a passage of the Bible in 1st Corinthians. It's a letter written by the Apostle Paul. Paul was actually a persecutor of Christianity initially. He's literally going around killing Christians. But he actually changed his mind and became a follower of Jesus because a few years after Jesus had died, he became convinced that Jesus had actually risen from the dead. And here's what Paul wrote in this passage in one of his letters. He says, "From what I received, I passed on to you as of first importance that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas [sp] and Peter, and then to the 12. After that he appeared to more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, and then to all the apostles. And last of all, he appeared to me also." Now, a common scholarly estimate for when this letter is from, is about 55 AD, and puts it about two decades after Jesus's death. With already from a historical perspective, makes it a very early attestation to the death and the resurrection and appearance stories of Jesus. 

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[00:14:50] But it's actually earlier than that, because scholars have approached a consensus-- not just Christian scholars, but scholars on the whole-- that the core beliefs in this passage are actually part of an earlier creed that at least much of this predates the letter of First Corinthians and was first in a creedal formula. And there's a lot of reasons that they think that we can go into a lot of detail, but this has poetic meter in the original language. There's a number of phrases and words that Paul uses here repetitively that he doesn't use anywhere else in his letters. Peter's name Kepha, it's the Aramaic for Peter. So this may initially have been an Aramaic creed that was then translated into Greek. At the beginning there what I received I passed on to you. We see that in other places, including other places in the Bible, where an older tradition is being handed on. That specific technical language [inaudible] received and passed on for when an older tradition is officially being passed on in the rabbinic tradition. So there's lots of reasons why people have come to the conclusion across the scholarly community that at least much of this and the core beliefs of this is an earlier creed. So how much older? When did Paul receive it? Very likely no later than three years after Paul's conversion, because in another letter Paul says, after three years, I went up to Jerusalem to get acquainted with Peter and stayed with him for 15 days. So Paul has his conversion like 1 to 2 years after Christ Jesus death, and then three years later, he goes and he spends 15 days with Peter, one of the people who was closest to Jesus when Jesus was alive. 

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[00:16:33] What did they do during those 15 days? One scholar said it's pretty safe to assume they didn't spend the whole time talking about the weather. He would have asked. He would have asked first and foremost about the resurrection. When did it happen? Where did it happen? Who saw it? Who was actually there? And in fact, this is what Paul implies to when he says to get acquainted there. The actual word for that is historical. So it's the word that we get history from. He's literally saying that he went to get a historical account from Peter, and it's very likely that that is when Paul received-- or at least no later than that, that Paul received this creed that's in his letter to 1st Corinthians. Which means that even before that, these beliefs actually had to become established and circulated and formulated into a creed that then could be passed on. Here's the amazing result of all this. It has become the scholarly majority that the core beliefs of this creed, which claims that all of these people that Jesus appeared to them after he clearly had been killed-- here it even says, including more than 500 of the brothers and sisters at the same time, most of whom are still living. As if to say, if you don't believe me, go out and ask them. That this goes back incredibly close to the actual events. And so the question I remember asking this question as a non-Christian was what can account for this? What can bridge the gap between, in a sense, the history of Christianity, part one, where Jesus had this following. And Jesus as the Messiah was understood that he was going to become this powerful earthly king, rescue the Jewish people from the heavy hand of Rome and then he die. It should have been movement over. 

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[00:18:24] And then we skip over the history of Christianity part two. The History of Christianity part three, we have the eruption of the Christian faith. The apostles, the disciples are dejected and defeated when Jesus dies, and now all of a sudden, they're utterly convinced that they've spent time with this man who clearly had been killed, so convinced of it that they're willing to die for it. What can account for that? We have these amazing historical accounts from the time. This is Pliny the Younger, a Roman governor at the time, what's now in northwest Turkey. He says this, he says, "I ask if they are Christians and if they admit it. I repeat the question a second and a third time with a warning of the punishment awaiting them. If they persist, I order them to be led away for execution." Those who walked this earth with Jesus went from dejected and defeated to being willing to give their lives rather than deny him. And I find it so amazing when I read that because I think all they had to do was deny him in word. To just say, fine, I don't believe. And then go home and just continue praying to him, continue worshiping him in the privacy of their own homes. But even for their lives, they couldn't deny him. Where did that transformation come from, that every one of them would be willing to give their life? Those apostles over the coming decades, not one of them denying him, despite this sort of persecution and threats and torture and execution. 

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[00:19:54] Here's the thing. Something happened. Something happened. That sort of transformation doesn't come out of nowhere. The bare minimum facts of history demand that something extraordinary happened in the lives of these disciples. And if it wasn't the resurrection, then what was it? What was it? Because criticism without alternative is empty. It's a line that's become important to me. I found that there were many people who were telling me that the resurrection was crazy, but they had no alternative to put in its place. And there's a huge hole. If you don't believe in the resurrection, there's a huge hole in history. And if it's not filled with the resurrection, it has to be filled with something else. And as I began to struggle to think of any other plausible explanation, and I was thinking, were they just lying about it? Well, for what purpose? They weren't benefiting from it. They're being killed for it. And I'm struggling to think of any alternative hypothesis. I arranged meetings with two non-Christian professors in the religion department at Princeton, and I put this to them. I said something happened that brought about this transformation from people where the movement should have died with Jesus's death. And then all these people walking around utterly convinced that they had spent time with this man who clearly had been killed, what explains that? And I went to my two professors and I asked them, if not the resurrection, what explains that? 

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[00:21:33] One of them glanced towards a sort of mass hallucination theory, but without conviction or defense of it. It's a theory that has a lot of problems to it. People don't see the same hallucination any more than you dream the same dream as me. And even the evidence that we have within the Bible, it's not just kind of one appearance. It's appearances to individuals and to groups over a period of weeks, to both friends and to enemies in different geographical locations. You can't account for that by a single mass hallucination. The other professor told me that as a historian, he simply wasn't interested in the question. And I've never been able to understand why he felt he could make that assumption at the outset rather than following the evidence wherever it led. A conclusion that at some point I came to the question that I felt I had to ask myself, is could it really be the case that despite 2000 years of historical scholarship and speculation, there's not a single other remotely plausible alternative explanation for the eruption of one of the greatest movements of all time? Probably the most influential British philosopher of religion of the last 50 to 70 years is Richard Swinburne. He held the head post at Oxford for many years. In 2003 he wrote this book, The Resurrection of God Incarnate, and in that book he argues that on the available evidence today, he says that he or he suggests it's 97% probable that Jesus literally, physically, bodily rose from the dead. Now, look, he's not asking us to take the exact number or percentage too seriously. He works with Bayesian probability theory, and so he's plugging in what he takes to be sort of conservative estimates at each point in the argument. But he's saying even if you just take kind of just reasonable assumptions, he's like, that's the number that comes out at the end of the calculation. 

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[00:23:31] And I'm not saying you should agree with him on the exact number. But I do think the fact that someone of his intellectual credibility can make that claim, make it in print have to be published by Oxford University Press and then ably defended at top academic conferences around the world, as I've seen him do, speaks to the fact that there's something significant here in terms of the rationality of this claim. Assume for just a second to Swinburne. You may totally disagree with that, and I'd love to talk about that more after this time. But assume for a second that he's right. I still don't think that settles, in a sense, the most significant question. Even if you do believe that the demands of rationality are met by the Christian faith, I think there's still a question of but should I trust Jesus even if he is who he claimed to be? Should I trust him? Is he someone worth following? I know for me I needed to answer the question. Not just is it rational to believe in God, but this person that I'm reading about, is this someone worth staking my life on? And to just begin to explore that question, I just want to rewind briefly and consider not Jesus is rising from the dead, but how he died in the first place. Someone once suggested to me that when you are pushed to your visceral limit, the real you comes out. When you're at that point of frustration, when you're under pressure, when you're stepped on, when you're shamed, sometimes there's something that just leaps out of us in those moments and it tells us something. Maybe not everything, but it tells us something about what's really in our hearts. 

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[00:25:26] I know in those moments, oftentimes what comes out of me is not very attractive. Okay. What came out of Jesus was love, compassion, forgiveness. They beat him. They spat on him. They strung him up on a cross to die. One of the most brutal deaths possible. And Jesus did three things while he was hanging on that cross. And the first was that he looked down at the people who were killing him. And he prayed, "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do." And I just find that remarkable, because if I try to transpose myself into that situation and the pain, excruciating pain that I would have been experiencing, and to see myself looking down at those who are my enemies, that is not what would have come out of my heart. And what came out of his heart was, "Father, forgive them. They know not what they do." And I think that should confirm for us that there's nothing that Jesus won't forgive if we are willing to humble ourselves and to ask him for that forgiveness. The next thing Jesus did was he looked at his mother. His mother was standing there. And what a terrible scene. And his mother was standing there and he turned to his mother and to his best friend. And he said to his best friend, "Your mother." And to his mother, pointed to his friend. And from that day forward his friend took his mother into his home. Even as Jesus is hanging there on the cross, his first concern is not for his own life, but for his mother's life, and for making sure that she would be cared for after he was gone. 

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[00:27:22] And then this person who was being executed next to him, a criminal who was on a cross next to him, began to hurl insults at Jesus, began to mock him. And then the criminal on the other side of Jesus, who was also being killed, he rebuked him. He said, this man has done nothing wrong. He said, "We are being punished justly. But this man, Jesus, has done nothing wrong." And then he said, "Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom." And Jesus answered him, "Truly I tell you, today you will be with me in Paradise." And the final thing that Jesus did on the cross, as he's struggling to take his last breath, was to love the man next to him a criminal, and to promise him salvation in response to his repentant heart and his trust in him. And then it says, when the centurion, when the soldier who stood there in front of Jesus saw how he died, he said, "Surely this man was the Son of God." When they saw how Jesus died, they knew that he was the Son of God. Because when you're pushed to the limit, the real you comes out. And what came out of Jesus when he was pushed to his absolute limit was absolutely divine. Blaise Pascal, he once said-- I'm just paraphrasing here, but he said about the Christian faith, he said there is enough evidence to believe rationally, but not so much that we can believe based on reason alone. Rings true to me. Really interesting quotation. And you might ask the question like why would God do it that way? 

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[00:29:13] Surely, if he wanted, he could just bust straight through this roof and just show himself right now. And maybe sometimes he does, and some people have experienced that. But why would it be the case that often times there seems enough evidence to believe in him rationally, but not so much that we can believe based on reason alone. And I think that maybe the answer is because God is not interested in us merely believing in him based on the theoretical evidence. He wants us to not only believe in him, but trust him because of the dynamic relationship that Professor Hong was talking about. G.K. Chesterton put it this way. He said, there's two ways to choose a coat. To see if a coat fits you, he said you can pick up the coat. You can look at the measurements, you can see its size and maybe the inseam of the arm. You can see if the dimensions of the coat fit you. He said, or you can take the coat off the rack and you can try it on. And I actually think both are important because for someone like me, wired like me, philosophically minded like me, I never would have picked the coat up and tried it on unless I could look at the dimensions of history and philosophy and science and sociology and say, yeah, that looks like it fits. That looks like it's in the vicinity of rationality. But nothing substitutes for actually taking the coat and putting it on. [Inaudible] talks about clothing yourself in Christ. 

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[00:30:53] It talks about tasting and seeing that the Lord is good. At one point Jesus says, "I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person and they with me." It's not just an invitation to believe some new things. It's an invitation into dynamic relationship and it's hard to explain the experience of coming to know God personally. Even just this morning at our small little church, some of the people in this room were with me. And we were singing together and we were praying together, and we were eating together, and we were in the presence of God. And it's hard to explain that. But we weren't just talking about God; we were talking with God. We weren't just singing about God; we were singing to God. And we knew that with conviction deep in our hearts, not something we can manifest, but it is a gift that God can give. So hard to put it into words. I always think of one guy who I met on a college campus. He had been journeying, asking lots of questions about faith. He had been examining the dimensions, the philosophy and the history and the science. He had come to that point where he said, this is rational, but I want more than that. I'm not content to just believe some things because it's more probable than not. I want to test this dynamic relationship. Is there actually something concrete, tangible, real that I can step into? 

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[00:32:27] And he decided that he wanted to pray in that moment, to tell God that that's what he wanted, and to say, Jesus, if it's true that you gave everything for me, that there was nothing you wouldn't give, that you would give your whole life for me on that cross; if that's true, and you confirm that in my heart, then I'm willing to give my life for you. Everything. No conditions. And I sat there and watched him speak those words to God. And as soon as he finished praying, he said the word Amen. He looked up and the first words out of his mouth he said, "I've always felt alone and like I had to wear a mask. But now this is the first time in my life that I can take off that mask and be fully myself and fully alive." And I just don't know anything other than Jesus that can bring about that sort of transformation. I don't know any philosophy that can do that. I don't know any worldview that can do that. But I have seen the person of Jesus do that in my own life and in the lives of so many others time and time again. Let's say Swinburne is way off with his 97%. Way off. What percentage would it take for you to pick up the coat and try it on? What percentage would it take? If there was a 1% chance right now that there was $1 billion treasure through that door, would you go back to your room this evening without checking what was in that door? No. If you knew right now that there was a 1% chance that there's $1 billion in that room, no one would be listening to me speak. You would get out of your chair and you would sprint to check. 

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[00:34:32] What if there is a 1% chance that there is a God who chose you specifically before the foundation of the world because he loves you. Because he loves you so much that he was willing to give his life for you. What if there's a 1% chance that there's someone in this universe who knows you in absolute fault? Not a single thing is hidden from him, and yet his delight in you and his love for you is extravagant. What if there is a person in this universe who looks at all those things in your heart that you know shouldn't be there and says rightly, justly, you've hurt people. I've hurt people. There should be consequences for that. Justice is important. What if there's someone who loves you so much that says, I'll take the demands of that justice. That's what I was doing on that cross. That criminal was right when he said, "My punishment is just, but this man has done nothing wrong." What if he took that for us? What if the anxiety that you know could be replaced with a peace that transcends all understanding? What if the times where you find your most cowardly, all of a sudden there's courage? What if you knew freedom in every time in life where right now there's fear? That's the promises of the Christian faith. Not just we believe some new things, but that God spirit comes to dwell within us and he transforms us from the inside out. What if there's a 1% chance that that's true? Would that be enough? Would that be enough to take a step toward relationship? What does that look like? 

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[00:36:23] To tell you my story, for me, the starting point, I started to pray a prayer as an agnostic. I started saying, "God, I don't know if I'm talking to anyone, but if I am, and if you really are this person, if you really are that loving, I really want to know about it." The way you explore any relationship is by talking with the person. You can't just observe from a distance. You have to actually take that risk. You have to take some sort of step. I remember myself thinking, as soon as I get it all figured out, as soon as I read all the books, do all the calculations, as soon as I'm absolutely certain, then I'll step into relationship with God. But what I found was that the confidence that I so desired was only possible through an act of personal vulnerability and personal commitment. But I just want to give each of us a minute in this very noisy, distracting world. We never get any time of just silence to ponder the deepest questions of life. And just to ask yourself, for some of us, this may just be it's nice to have a minute of silence in the craziness of this world. But for some of us, and maybe the unpersuaded that there's a 1% chance here, maybe more. And if that's the case, I'm going to take a risk. I'm going to explore this relationship. I'm going to say, "God, I don't know if I'm talking to anyone, but if I am, I'd really like to know about it." And it might even be that there are people here today who want to say more than that. Who, even as I've been speaking, as you've been pondering, you haven't just been hearing intellectual arguments up here, but in your heart, in that dynamic relationship sort of way, you've known the truth of who Jesus is and what he's done for you and amazing people right now who want to say, "Jesus, if you've given your life unconditionally for me, then I want to give my life unconditionally for you." So I'm just going to give a minute, wherever you are on that spectrum, on your journey right now, just give a minute for us to have some silence and the opportunity to say to God, just in the quietness of our own hearts, anything that we want to say to him. 

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Jo Vitale We’re so glad you joined us for Ask Away.

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Vince Vitale If you have a question that needs answering, we’d love to hear it.

Send us an email at askawayquestion@gmail.com or call and leave a voicemail at 321-213-9670.

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Jo Vitale Ask Away is hosted by Vince and Jo Vitale, and produced by Studio D Podcast Production.

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