Burky's Blog

Because I had no belief in God, I had no real moral framework for my life. I made up my morality as I went along. My number one value in life was to bring myself maximum pleasure. This is embarrassing to talk about, but I came here to tell you the truth. I lived a very immoral and drunken and profane and narcissist and self-destructive kind of a life. I mean that's who I was. I had such rage in myself. I think it was because I was always looking for that perfect high. I was always looking for that ultimate experience of pleasure and nothing ever quite measured up. So, I had a lot of anger.

I remember one day I was in an argument with my wife and I just reared back and I kicked a hole in our living room wall, just out of raw rage. In fact, I will tell you the ugliest truth about me. When my little girl was just a toddler, if she was alone in the living room on the floor playing with some toys and she would hear me come home from work through the front door, she would just quietly gather her toys, go in her room, and close the door. Is he going to be drunk again? Is he going to be kicking holes in walls and yelling and screaming? Friends, that is the ugliest truth about me.

I married a woman who was agnostic. Through a relationship with a friend, she went on a spiritual journey and came to the point of putting her trust and faith in Jesus Christ, which I thought was the worst possible thing that could happen. Yet, I began to see positive changes in her character, her values, and in the way she related to the children and me. In the ensuing months, it became winsome and attractive. So one Sunday she invited me to go to church and I decided to go.

I heard this young preacher, a guy by the name of Bill Hybels, another of the "America's Television Church" pastors, give a message on basic Christianity and I walked out saying, number one, I was still an atheist but, number two, if this is true, this has huge implications for my life.

So I decided on that day to use my legal and journalism training to investigate systematically whether or not there was any truth to Christianity or any other faith system. I launched on what turned out to be a two-year spiritual investigation. Let me summarize for you the key elements of that investigation.

I determined very quickly everything revolves around whether or not the resurrection of Jesus Christ is actually true, because anybody can claim to be the Son of God. You could. I could. Nevertheless, it was Jesus who claimed to be the Son of God. So what? Well, he not only claimed it, but then he returned from the dead. That's pretty good evidence that he is telling the truth. That's why the Apostle Paul says, "If Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; and you are still in your sins" (1 Corinthians 15:17, TNIV).

And so for those of you who are even now like I was, a spiritual skeptic, but also for you who are spiritual seekers or already followers of Jesus - here's a framework that you can share with friends and family about why Christians believe what they believe.

I can summarize the evidence for the resurrection very quickly using four words that begin with the letter E.

The first E stands for the word Execution. The following proves that Jesus was dead after he was crucified. I used to think that maybe Jesus survived the cross, and that maybe there was no resurrection because He lived through it. Yet, as I traveled the country and interviewed scholars and historians, I quickly learned that among historians in the field - and this included atheists, skeptics, agnostics, and believers - all of them believed that the death of Jesus Christ on the cross is as solid of a fact as you are going to find from ancient history. There's no dispute on this among scholars in the field.

Not only do we have multiple independent reports of the death of Jesus on the cross in the documents that make up the New Testament in the Bible, reports that are based on eyewitness testimony that go right back to the first century. We also have five sources outside the Bible that confirm the death of Jesus on the cross. We have Flavius Josephus, a first century Jewish historian who confirms it. Cornelius Tacitus, another early historian who confirms it. Ask an atheistic New Testament scholar like Gerd Lüdemann or an agnostic New Testament scholar like Bart D. Ehrman and they will tell you that the death of Jesus Christ by crucifixion is a historically indisputable fact. To take a contrary position would get you laughed out of the academic world.

So, the first E stands for Execution, Jesus was dead.

The second E stands for Early Accounts.

We have early records about the resurrection. Why is that important? Because, at one time, I thought the resurrection was merely a legend and it takes a long time for legend to develop. So I thought maybe a hundred, hundred and fifty years after the life of Jesus, people made up these stories, these legends about him returning from the dead. That's what I thought until I did the research and interviewed the scholars.

What I learned blew my mind! Because what I found is that we have had preserved for us a creed that the earliest Christians would recite based on what they knew to be true. The Apostle Paul preserved this creed in First Corinthians 15, verses 3 and following. This creed contains the essence of Christianity that Jesus died. Why? For our sins. And that He was buried and resurrected from the dead.

Then it mentions specific names of eyewitnesses, including skeptics whose lives were changed a hundred and eighty degrees because they encountered the resurrected Jesus. But get this - this creed has been dated back by scholars from a wide range of theological belief to as early as 2 to 8 years after the life of Jesus. Therefore, the beliefs that make up that creed go back even earlier, virtually to the cross itself. So, we don't have some huge time gap between the death of Jesus and some legend developing a hundred years later about the fact that he returns from the dead. No, we have a news flash from ancient history.

One of the greatest classical historians who ever lived was A.N. Sherwin-White of Oxford University. He studied the rate at which legends grew in the ancient world and he determined that the passage of two generations of time is not even enough for legend to grow up and wipe out a solid core of historical truth. We don't have two generations of time passing here, we have something that goes right back to the event itself. Friends, it would be unprecedented in the history of the world for a legend to grow up that fast and wipe out a solid core of historical truth.

So not only do we have an E for Execution, Jesus was dead, we have Early Accounts that show this cannot merely be a legend.

The third E stands for the Empty Tomb.

History tells us that Jesus' body was laid in a tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea. It was sealed, it was placed under heavy guard, and yet it was discovered empty on that first Easter morning. The most powerful fact of all about the truth that the tomb of Jesus was empty is that there was nobody in the first century who was claiming it was anything but empty. In other words, even the opponents of Jesus implicitly admitted that the tomb was empty. I mean they made up the stories. They tried to bribe the guards to say that the disciples stole the body while the guards were sleeping, which makes no sense. The disciples didn't have the motive, the means, or the opportunity to steal the body. They weren't going to steal the body and then, what, live a life of deprivation, and be tortured to death for a lie? I don't think so.

But get this - implicit in making up a cover story is that you're trying to cover something up. Why make up a cover story if the body is still in the tomb? Implicit in making up this cover story is the fact the tomb is empty and they tried to come up with some explanation that didn't hold water then and it doesn't hold water now. The question has never been, "Was the tomb of Jesus empty?" Everybody can see that it was. The question is, "How did it get empty?"

The Romans weren't about to steal the body; they wanted Jesus dead. The religious leaders weren't about to steal the body; they wanted Jesus to stay dead. The disciples weren't about to steal the body; why, so they could knowingly and willingly to be tortured to death for a life? Friends, liars make bad martyrs. No, I think the evidence is that the tomb of Jesus was empty.

The reason for it is that he physically returned from the dead, especially when you couple that with the fourth word that begins with the letter E, which is the word Eyewitnesses.

Not only was Jesus' tomb empty, but over a period of time Jesus appeared alive a dozen different occasions to more than 515 individuals, to skeptics and doubters as well as to believers. To men and to women, to groups, to individuals, indoors and outdoors, they touched Him, they talked with Him, and they ate with Him.

When I was legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, I never covered a trial where there were 515 eyewitnesses. If we were to create a witness stand and call people to the witness stand who encountered the resurrected Jesus, and then cross-examined them and questioned them for just 15 minutes each, and if we sat here around the clock, we'd be sitting here for five straight days. How many of us, after listening to more than a 128 straight hours of eyewitness testimony would walk away saying, "Ah, I don't believe it."

As a skeptic, I had to come up with a way around this. I thought, "Well, wait a minute, maybe these were just hallucinations. Maybe they hallucinated these appearances of Jesus." But you know what? I'm a journalist, too, so I check things out. I interviewed a scholar, a leading expert on the topic of hallucinations, and asked, "Wouldn't you agree that these people merely saw hallucinations?"

He looked at me and said, "Lee, that would be impossible. You have to understand that hallucinations are individual events. They don't spread like a cold virus. They're like dreams. They're individual experiences. You can't wake up your spouse in the middle of the night and say, 'Honey, I'm having a great dream about a vacation in Hawaii. Why don't we both go back to sleep, we'll have the same dream, and we'll save all the airfare? It'll be great!' We can't do that, unfortunately."

Then he said something I'll never forget. He said, "Lee, if 515 people had the same hallucination at the same time, that would be a bigger miracle than the resurrection itself." And then he said something else interesting. He said, "By the way, if these were merely hallucinations, then the body is still in the tomb, right? Oops, the body is gone."

Friends, these appearances of Jesus were not hallucinations and they were not legends or mythology. They were real events of history that revolutionized the lives of the disciples who were despondent and depressed after the death of Jesus. History shows they proclaimed that Jesus proved he is the Son of God by returning from the dead. They proclaimed that even to their death, not because they just had faith that it was true, not because they just believed that it was true, they proclaimed to their death that Jesus returned from the dead and proved he's the Son of God because they were there. They saw it, they touched him, they talked to him, and they knew it was the truth. And knowing the truth, they were willing to die for it.

I spent two years of my life investigating this stuff. Then, finally one day, it was a Sunday afternoon and I began to look at all of this evidence I'd amassed and I realized that, in light of this avalanche of evidence that pointed so powerfully toward the truth of Christianity, it would have required more faith to maintain my atheism than to become a Christian. Because I realized that to maintain my atheism in the face of all of this evidence would be like swimming upstream against a torrent of evidence flowing in the other direction. I couldn't do that. I was trained in journalism and law to respond to truth. And so I believed. Based on the evidence on that day, I concluded that Jesus, who claimed to be the Son of God, proved it by returning from the dead.

Then I didn't know what to do. I remembered somebody had pointed out a verse to me in the Bible earlier, so I looked it up - John 1:12-12 (TNIV) - and it says "Yet to all who did receive him, to those who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God."

I looked at that and I noticed that verse forms an equation that spells out with specificity what it means to become a child of God. "Believe" plus "receive" equals "become." And, based on the evidence, I realized that I did now "believe" that Jesus had proved that he is the Son of God by returning from the dead. But I also realized that was not enough. According to that verse, I had not only to believe, I had to "receive" Jesus Christ. I had to receive this free gift of forgiveness and eternal life, that Jesus purchased by his death on the cross when He died as my substitute to pay for all of the wrongdoing I'd ever committed. And when I received, as a gift of his grace, his forgiveness and eternal life, I would "become" a child of God forever.

So I got on my knees and I poured out a confession of a lifetime of immorality that would make your hair curl. And, at that moment, I received complete and total forgiveness through Jesus Christ and I became a child of God.

My very first thought was, "Hey, I should probably tell my wife Leslie. She probably would like to know about this."

So, I went out and I told her the news and she burst into tears and she threw her arms around me and she said, "You hard-hearted son-of-a-Baptist. I've been telling you this for two years. Hello!" Then she said, "Honestly, Lee, I had no hope for you. I told that to this sweet woman in church and she pulled me aside and said, 'Leslie, no one is beyond hope.'"

Leslie said that the woman gave her a verse from the Old Testament, Ezekiel 36:26 (TNIV), which says, "I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh." And my wife, unbeknownst to me, had prayed that prayer for me every single day during my two-year investigation.

Here's what happened starting on that Sunday afternoon, not overnight, but over time, as I opened myself up to Jesus Christ and to his spirit: My life began to change. My priorities began to change, my morality began to change, my character began to change, my values began to change, my relationships began to change, my parenting began to change, and all of these things began to change for the good.

My little girl Allison, who at that time was almost 5 years old, had only know a dad who was angry and absent and kicking holes in walls and coming home drunk. That was her entire world. That's all she knew. But for the months after I opened my life to Jesus Christ, she would watch from her little five-year-old perspective as God was changing her dad in front of her eyes. She watched and she watched and she watched for about five or six months, and then she went up to her Sunday school teacher and later to my wife and said, "I want God to do for me what he's done for Daddy." And at age five, my little girl gave her life to Jesus Christ. And today she's my very, very best friend.

God changed my life. He changed my wife. He changed my whole family. He changed our futures. He changed our eternities. And that's my story.

So what do you do with it? What do you do? Let me end by applying it to two groups of people here. Some of you may not yet believe, maybe this is kind of new to you, maybe a friend encouraged you to listen today, but you're not quite there yet. That's okay. It's all right. But do what I did. Check it out. Investigate it yourself. The Bible says in Hebrews 11, verse 6b (TNIV), "(God) rewards those who sincerely seek Him." So seek Him with sincerity. If my book, "The Case for the Real Jesus," would be helpful, that would be great. There are many other resources there. But check it out.

Then there are those of you who believe, but you've never received, and you wonder, "Why has my life not changed?" Could it be because you're in intellectual agreement with the tenants of Christianity, but there has not been a moment in time where you have received this free gift of forgiveness and eternal life from Jesus Christ? You've not received Jesus as your forgiver and leader?

Let me encourage you, let me implore you for your sake, for your family's sake, don't let your head hit the pillow tonight without doing what I did. Just say in a simple prayer, "Lord Jesus, I do believe and I do receive that You are the Son of God as You claim to be. I've not lived the kind of life that you've wanted me to live. I know that I haven't lived up to my own standards of morality, much less yours, Jesus, which are so much higher. I understand that. So I want to turn, I want to repent. I want to stop walking my path. I want to turn, walk your path, and receive your love, your grace, your forgiveness, and your gift of eternal life. I can't earn it, I can't merit it, but you offer it as a gift of your grace. I accept it. I receive it. Lord Jesus, lead my life because, from this moment on, I am yours."

If you take that step today, even in this very moment, God will change your life. He'll change your eternity. He will adopt you as a son or as his daughter forever.

Now let's pray: "Father, I thank You for those who are spiritually seeking. May they find the truth about who you are. May they come to faith. May it change them. Father, for those of us who have been your children for a long time, help us to explain to others why it is we believe what we believe. Thank you that we can be intelligent, thinking people and be followers of yours. You gave us minds. We thank you in the name of Jesus Christ, Amen."

--Lee Strobel