Proof 50: Ask Jesus to Appear

At a close friend’s wedding, I met her grandfather. He told me that he met God personally, and that God had spared him from an early death in order to tell everyone he met what he saw in that encounter. To meet this man and hear his story, there is no doubt that he is sincere, that he is rational and sane, and that he truly believes that he had an encounter with God.

It is my sincere belief that Marshall Brain would blow this story off as a hallucination, or something similar. Why? Because it contradicts the point of his final proof–that Jesus doesn’t appear to anyone today. This is simply false–Jesus can and does appear to a select few people in each generation.

In the first few chapters of The Purpose Driven Church, pastor Rick Warren emphatically states several times that God “spoke to him.” By reading the story of the early beginnings of Saddleback Church, there is no doubt that Rick Warren was moved by something special to build the largest church in the United States. Rick Warren, like my friend’s grandfather, had a personal encounter with God.

No doubt Marshall Brain would dismiss this as well, even though the story of Saddleback Church’s beginning would have too many coincidences to be anything but divine intervention.

My own wedding came together in less than a month. Most weddings take a year or more to plan. We were able to have the wedding of my wife’s dreams, planned an executed within a month. Now maybe everything that came together did so by coincidence, but that is an awful lot of coincidences. My wife and I began our marriage with a personal encounter with God.

Despite having fertility problems and being ill during ovulation, my wife and I were able to conceive our daughter on the first try. Could this also be a coincidence? Sure, but an awful lot of things had to work in our favor in order for that to be mere coincidence. I believe that it is another personal encounter with God.

Jesus may not physically manifest himself in our presence and speak to us, but he makes himself known in other ways, as I have illustrated above. We encounter him through the circumstances and people in our lives. We see his work through the church.