How Did Andrew Get Saved?

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Some time ago, I was invited on to a UK podcast

to share how it is I got saved.

Now, maybe you've heard this story before, maybe you haven't.

I know that recently, some time ago, I released an episode when I was

on the Reboots podcast and shared my salvation story, but I went into more

detail about what happened after I got saved.

This account is going to be more specific to the events of how I became a Christian.

There's a lot there, and I hope this episode will be encouraging to you.

It will be shorter than my usual episodes, however, it's a little bit personal.

So here is today's Rap Report.

Welcome to Andrew Rapaport's Rap Report, where we provide biblical interpretations and

applications.

This is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and the Christian Podcast Community.

For more content, or to request a speaker for your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

Hi, my name is Andrew Rapaport.

I'm with Striving for Eternity Ministries.

I'm also the Executive Director of the Christian Podcast Community.

I've been asked to share my testimony.

What testimony is, is basically is going to be a description of an event in

our lives.

Specifically, when we're Christians, we speak of our Christian testimony, meaning how did we go from being an

enemy of God to becoming a child of God?

Not everyone actually is God's children, no matter what some people say.

In John 1, we end up seeing that not all have the right to be called a child of God, because he says that only those

who believe on Christ have the right to be called a child of God.

Which means there's a time in history where we go from being an enemy of God, hating God,

to actually being converted and becoming a child of God.

And that happens differently for many different people.

Some people have heard the message of the gospel, which I'll explain later, over and

over and over again.

That's not always the case with everyone, and that wasn't the case with me.

I did not hear the gospel over and over.

I was raised in a Jewish home, so I never heard the Christian gospel before.

And so my testimony is one where we're going to see that this is

basically a three and a half hour conversation where I had that conversion experience.

Now, some people put a lot of weight on a testimony.

Testimony is my story.

That never supplants where we're going to get the absolute truth, and that's God's word.

So when we look at a testimony, always remember to go back to God's word.

Go to the Bible, read there, read the gospel, see why Christ came, because that's going to

be really where we're going to get to see truth.

So here's my testimony of how I came to know Christ, and it actually starts long before.

I remember waking to the sound of a siren.

There was much commotion downstairs, and I ran into the hallway where I saw my sister.

We both realized something was happening.

We went downstairs, and my older brother was already at the bottom of the stairs, and my parents were gone.

They had left the house.

My aunt was there.

She was still trying to explain to my brother that my mother had been taken to the hospital.

We did not understand.

I was only nine at the time.

My sister was only six.

But the next day, my father tried to explain to us what had happened.

My mother basically had died in my father's arms.

My parents were viewing pictures that my aunt had brought over to the house, and my mother, who had been battling

with cancer, passed out.

And my father had to revive her with mouth -to -mouth resuscitation.

No one was prepared to handle, really, the next six months.

My mother had been in and out of the hospital, was taking every drug possible.

This was many, many years ago.

And so we ended up seeing that my sister and I would stay awake at night, waiting for my

father to come home from the hospital.

And the question we'd always ask him is, can we go see mom?

She came home once that I remember where, with the chemo, she lost her

hair, was losing her hair, and she didn't want her children to remember her that way.

As I look back, that question, when can we go see mom, must have been a very difficult

question to keep hearing over and over from my father.

My parents had agreed that my sister and I would not see her, because of the chemo and

everything else and the losing of hair.

My father did not think it was best to let us see her, but he thought

it was also best to keep our hopes up, which was not always the best sometimes.

On June 27th, it was the last day of school, it was 1978.

Yes, I've just dated myself, because some of you are going, wow, that makes you old.

It won't seem that old when you get to be my age, I'm just saying.

But I was 10 years old, it was fifth grade.

The school was supposed to let out at 1230.

I remember at noon I got called down to the principal's office.

Me again, called to the principal's office, was not an unusual thing.

But when I got there, I saw that my sister was there, and we actually got ourselves excited.

We convinced ourselves that our father was picking us up the last day of school to take

us to see our mother.

See, my sister and I didn't get along.

My father said if we would be well behaved, we would be rewarded with being able to see our mother.

Well, we really worked at being good to each other, not fighting, getting along.

And so we assumed that this was going to be our reward, and my father did in fact pick us up

from school.

And my sister and I made it very hard, because we were extremely excited,

because we convinced ourselves we were going to the hospital to see our mother.

My father's first words that we would hear from him was in

the car, and we only lived about five minutes from the school.

It was a short drive, but he waited until we got close enough.

As we approached the house, my father said the words that would ring in my ears for years.

He said, well, I have to tell you something, and it's not good news.

That was all that I needed to hear.

I knew the rest.

I didn't even wait for the car to come to a stop.

As we approached the driveway, I jumped out of the car, even though it was moving, and ran into the house.

That was all hard for a ten -year -old

to deal with.

When I entered the house, there were people everywhere.

If you don't know what a Jewish funeral is, we would have what's called sitting shiva.

Everyone comes to the house, and they're basically there day and evening for seven

days.

I didn't expect to see anyone when I got in the house, and there were people everywhere.

Family were there.

Friends were there.

My 13 -year -old brother actually was there.

He didn't go to school that day.

As he started to come over to me, I kind of pushed him away, ran up to my room.

I just didn't want to see anyone, and no one came to me for a while.

I figured they'd let me settle down.

Eventually, my little four -year -old cousin came in the room.

He just wanted to play.

He had been told that my mother just had gone away, so he really couldn't comprehend that she had passed

away.

He was way too young, and so he just wanted to play.

But I was not in a stable state.

I didn't realize at the time what he had understood.

I thought he understood the gravity of it.

He comes in wanting to play, and I picked up things to throw at him.

I remember picking up a small little TV that I had, and I launched it at him, barely missing him.

My father came in the room at that point, realizing there's a problem.

I was in a frenzy of throwing things at the door at my little cousin.

My father realized it was time for a talk.

For July 27, 1978, I had a diary back then that I wrote, Today is

the worst day of my life.

Today is the day that my mother died.

My father tried a bunch of different things to comfort me.

He had to eventually get me some

counseling, but he tried to tell me she was better off.

She had been sick so long and suffering.

It is hard to comfort a 10 -year -old child who just lost his mother.

I never really got a chance to know her.

I never got a chance to say goodbye.

The hurt that I had was more than I could have explained, but I also felt somewhat

responsible because I thought somehow in my mind I wasn't a good enough boy.

My father had said if we were good, we'd have the opportunity to at least see her in the hospital.

I ended up taking on some of that thinking it was somehow my responsibility.

My father remarried July 21 of the next year of 1979.

Now I had a new older brother and a new younger sister, along with my current older brother

and younger sister.

It was a big change, but now we had a large family.

Because they also were suffering from a loss of a father, it was a family that dealt with this pain together.

In May of 1978, my stepmother had lost her husband.

There was, for my stepbrother and stepsister, we had this relationship.

We were able to help one another because we were dealing with someone else's loss that was similar to ours.

I can remember times, late at night, crying out

and asking why this happened.

I didn't understand, and it was difficult, but I actually turned very violent.

This is a period where people would tell those jokes that you start in third grade where they tell the

mother jokes.

When people would tell the mother jokes with me, it turned violent.

I would actually black out.

To this day I can tell you that I don't remember any of the fights and things that I got into and did.

I just don't have any recollection of it.

But there were so many different people that were eyewitnesses to what I would do that I realized I would actually be blacking out

and turn violent.

I had no control over what I would do, and it became a problem for the school.

They realized they better get me some counseling.

So my parents sent me to counseling and tried to help me out.

It caused some difficulties.

And so what you end up seeing is as I'm dealing with this,

I would go to summer camp.

It's something that Jewish kids would do a lot is the parents would send them to a summer camp, especially as

I would, a sleepaway, so my parents had the summer free.

But I've been kicked out of two of them now.

What do they do?

So it was my sophomore year in high school, and I had an opportunity to go on what they

call a teen tour.

So instead of going to a summer camp, I'd be on a trip with a bunch of other teens, and they were

warned about the situation with my mother and that I could turn violent.

But after my sophomore year, I had this opportunity with other kids my age.

We flew out to Denver, Colorado, and we took a bus and we circled down to Mexico, California, into

Canada, back to Denver.

I became friendly with the bus driver, Chuck.

Now, Chuck was a believer in Christ, and he took that opportunity

over those several weeks to evangelize every one of those Jewish kids that he could, including the

counselors that were there.

So we traveled and we got to see some great things, but on July

21st, 1984, we were in San Diego,

California.

A few days before, we had found out that we'd just missed a maniac that had killed people in a McDonald's.

We had left only about half an hour before this guy came in, killing I think it was about 20

people, injuring 21 others.

Death was again on my mind.

So it started with a fortune cookie.

Chuck and I had gone to a restaurant for dinner.

We had some others there, and Chuck noticed my concern and started

talking to me about God.

He started a conversation that actually started over a fortune cookie.

I don't remember what the fortune said, nor do I remember much of the conversation from that part.

I do remember we talked about God, and we talked for a while outside of an

ice cream shop in downtown Chinatown.

I believe it was like a Dairy Queen, but the thing that I remember is this

conversation, the first part of the conversation lasted about an hour and a half.

We talked about a man that I'd never heard of before really.

Chuck had explained that this man loved me very much, so much he was willing to pay a price

for the things I did wrong.

He told me that this man was actually God in human form, and that we know of Jesus Christ.

Now I had been raised Jewish, and I'd not heard this story before, never heard this account.

We finally get to the ice cream shop.

We're sitting in the front of the ice cream shop, and I do remember telling him it was a nice story for him,

but I believe in facts.

I actually told him that as he's explaining these things,

that Chuck ended up, I told him that I was God's chosen

people.

I was in like Flynn.

I was taught to believe that I was going to heaven because of my Judaism.

And for that reason, I really wasn't putting much weight in what he was saying about someone that died for me so

that I can go to heaven or be right with God, because I thought I was already right with God

just because I was Jewish.

Never mind the fact that I almost burnt my house down twice.

Once, we put it out with a fire extinguisher.

Second time, fire department.

I improved in my sin, crimes against God and others.

I was not a good kid, but I thought my Judaism was going to get me to heaven.

Chuck made a comment that normally would have enraged me, yet this time it didn't.

He ended up saying that as I told him I was in like Flynn, he ended up saying, what if your mother was right

here right now listening to this message and you walk away?

Your mother would have died in vain.

I really didn't like hearing that.

But Chuck challenged me in a way that no one else had done before.

And for some reason, I stayed clear in my thinking.

I didn't black out.

I remember clenching my fists and turning around and then I released the fist.

And as he said that, I kept thinking,

and theologically that wouldn't have been right what he's saying.

If your mother died so that I'd be right here right now listening to this message, then she would have died in vain if I walk

away.

That's kind of not the best thing to say and not really theologically accurate, but I do remember I didn't want

her death to be in vain.

Remember, I thought that somehow it was my responsibility that she died.

And this is the thing that sometimes happens with death is you never know how the surviving guilt can

occur.

So I wanted to at least hear him out.

And so I needed to know more about this God -man named Jesus because I had viewed this Jesus

being raised Jewish as nothing more than Hitler's God.

And that may surprise some of you who aren't Jewish, but being raised Jewish a

generation after the Holocaust, we were raised to believe that Jesus Christ,

we saw Jesus Christ as the God of the Catholics, and the Catholic Church funded

Nazis, funded Hitler.

And therefore we were always taught in Hebrew school that this is what Jesus

funds, the killing of Jewish people.

Jesus Christ to many Jews represents the Holocaust, the Inquisitions, the

Crusades, where Jews would be killed by the Catholic Church.

That's how it is viewed.

And so it was really hard for me to want to believe anything about Jesus.

Saying, believe in Jesus, was offensive to me.

Now, I'm a logical person.

And so I basically said to Chuck, if you give me a logical reason to believe, I will believe.

I'm so glad that God actually has a sense of humor.

And people say, really, where do you see that?

Well, you don't see him laughing in Scripture, but there's a thing of irony.

Here's me at that age.

I was a kid, very, very proud of my intellect.

I have a 168 IQ.

So because of that, I was very proud of that.

I was very proud of my abilities to reason and things like this.

And here's Chuck, who never even finished the sixth grade.

He's a sixth grade dropout.

Barely reads, but reads his Bible.

He knows his Bible well enough, and that was a neat thing.

That the fact that here you get a kid who thinks he's the smartest thing in the world, getting taught the most important

thing in his life from a guy who has barely passed the sixth grade.

Or didn't even finish the sixth grade, I should say.

And so Chuck started to show me prophecies.

We're going to the Old Testament, and then the New Testament.

And basically what was going on is I'm running statistics in my head.

And I'm realizing that some of these things are just coincidence, and some of these things could be self -fulfilling.

Now, I ignore the self -fulfilling ones, because if they're self -fulfilling, anyone can make them happen.

So what do I do?

I'm looking at the ones that I categorize as coincidence, and I figure out what are the calculations of these things.

And I start running them in my mind.

And I realized that we got beyond what's called statistical impossibility, which is 10 to the 48th

power.

It is statistically impossible to fake all of these fulfillments of Scripture

on just ones that are put in the category of coincidence, like where Jesus, where Messiah would be born,

what family line, things like this.

He had no control over those things.

I ended up saying to Chuck, stop.

We're beyond statistical impossibility.

The New Testament had to have been written by God.

I didn't believe in Christ, but I believed in the New Testament.

I asked Chuck, what does the New Testament teach?

And Chuck started to explain about the death of Jesus Christ on behalf of my sins, where I have broken

God's law.

I lie and I steal and do things like that.

I've broken His law, and that Jesus Christ, by His death, being an eternal

being, He could pay that fine for all of eternity.

Because every time we break God's law, because God's infinitely holy, it has an infinite consequence.

And that's why either we pay it for all of eternity, or an eternal being pays it once in time.

And that's what he is explaining with Jesus Christ being eternally God, can pay that

for not only me, but for others as well.

And so, as he's explaining that, he talks about His death, he talks about His

burial, he talks about His resurrection.

And at the resurrection, I stopped him.

I understood that Christ might have died for my sins on that cross, but the

resurrection, dead people don't raise themselves.

So I tried to explain away the resurrection.

I explained away, without having ever read any of the different arguments against the resurrection, I

argued almost all of them.

The wrong tomb, maybe He didn't really die and He walked away.

All the different ones.

I have one that I believe is still original with me.

My last argument was to say, maybe the disciples stole the body by digging

underneath the tomb, stealing the body, they dug underneath, come up through the center, take the body out.

And Chuck says, in three days, Andrew?

They didn't have heavy equipment back then.

And I dropped my head into my hands.

And he says, what's wrong?

And I realized that the resurrection was the proof that Jesus was who He said He was,

Almighty God.

And so sitting there on the steps of a Dairy Queen, for the first time in my life, I was able to come to

grips with my mother who died six years earlier.

I could deal with her death all of a sudden.

It didn't seem to bother me.

But more importantly, I realized that I was in a right state with God.

I prayed that Christ would forgive me.

I turned and trusted Him and Him alone, not my Judaism.

Definitely not my good works, because I didn't have too many of them.

Not being a good person, because I didn't have that.

But I was trusting my Judaism.

I had to turn from trusting that to trusting Jesus Christ.

Now, I'm not sure where my mother is.

And that may be hard for some to hear, to think about.

As far as I would know, I believe that my mother is probably going to spend eternity in a lake of fire, which is horrible

to think about.

But unless she believed in the Gospel, that's where she would be.

And as hard as it is for me to think about, it is the way

reality works.

God is a just judge, and He's going to be angry with the wicked every day.

And we have to pay that fine, unless it is paid for us.

Now, the resurrection is really the proof of this.

I say this about my mother because she didn't, as far as I know, know about the message of Christ's death,

burial, and resurrection.

You know, Jesus, His resurrection, His message,

what He said, you can look up in the Gospel of John.

There He said, in John 14, 6, I am the way, the truth, and the life.

No one comes to the Father except through Me.

One must believe that Jesus Christ is who He said He is.

In John 6, 47, it says, He who believes in Me has everlasting

life.

So everlasting life is not living forever.

It's not being in heaven.

It is actually knowing God and Him whom He sent, Jesus Christ.

Now, many people have been raised knowing that Jesus was a famous

person.

Some may know He was a Jewish person.

One of the most well -known verses is this verse, John 3, 16, For God so

loved the world that He gave of His only begotten Son that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting

life.

Yes, Jesus is a famous person known because the world, the entire world actually was changed

because of what He did.

In 1984, I came to realize what that meant for me.

That Jesus Christ, Almighty God who became a man,

actually died in my place and paid the fine I should pay.

And that's when I went from being an enemy of God to a child of God.

You can have that too by turning from trusting whatever it is, whether you trust in your good works, your

genealogy, thinking you're a good person.

Turn from those things and trust Jesus Christ and Jesus alone and you can have eternal life.

Now, God has done many things with me since that time.

I've been able to get into ministry.

I've been a pastor of a church.

I now work for the founder and executive director at Striving for Eternity Ministries.

You can find out more about me and the ministry at strivingforeternity .org.

We actually have my testimony written out there on the website.

God has been able to use me to travel around the world to be able to

teach and preach.

I evangelize in many places pretty much wherever I go.

I've just recently come back from two weeks in the Philippines with my friend Justin Peters as we were doing a discernment conference

and I taught on church discipline.

We did a training for evangelism.

And so God has now used me to be able to travel the world, to be able to share

the same thing that happened to me can happen to others, that they

too can have eternal life.

Now, God has opened up doors for me not only to travel the world and share that message, but I also do it through technology.

We have means through our website.

We have classes we offer that we can teach people here from the United States, literally around the

world with our Striving for Eternity Academy.

We have classes on how to interpret the Bible and systematic theology, how to disciple someone.

We have a class on world religions.

I've written a couple of books that are out.

What do they believe, which is on the major Western religions.

What do we believe, which deals with basically a systematic theology of Christian faith, which is really helpful

for folks to know what Christians actually believe.

And those are available at the website.

But what God has also opened up with the technology is the ability to do podcasting,

a great way of teaching.

And we have started what's called the Christian Podcast Community.

I'm the executive director of it, and I have a couple of podcasts of my own.

I have Andrew Rappaport's Rappaport, which is usually about an hour -long show weekly.

But then I also do a daily show, which is Monday through Friday, only two minutes long.

So if you like something shorter, you can get Andrew Rappaport's Rappaport daily.

That's the shorter one.

Or you could do both.

I also have one called Apologetics Live, which I do with a friend of mine from karm .org, Matt Slick.

He and I do a live show every Thursday night, 8 to 10, Eastern Time.

People can come in, and we basically just have an open forum where anyone can ask anything,

as long as we don't have a pre -scheduled debate or something like that.

And that becomes a podcast, so you can listen to those anytime at your convenience.

I have a podcast for podcasters because we train people how to do podcasting in our Christian

podcast community, and therefore we have a podcast called So You Want to Be a Podcaster, and that is

another podcast I do.

I have a couple more that I'm going to be working on within our community, but we run a group on Facebook

called Christian Podcast Community, where we discuss podcasting,

and I try to be accessible to folks.

Because of that, if you're interested in any of the things that we have, you can get a hold of us.

You can get a hold of us at our website, strivingforeternity .org.

You can follow me on Twitter, I'm at AndrewArapaport.

I'm on Facebook.

I try to stay active in the Striving for Eternity group on Facebook.

So those are some ways you might be able to get a hold of me.

If there's any way that I could be of help to you, if there's any of this that you heard and you said, you know,

I want to know more about Jesus Christ.

I've heard of Him, I haven't had a great view of Him, or I've

heard He's a fairy tale, I don't believe He is real.

Whatever is the view that you have, if you would like to have someone that you want to talk to, you

can reach out.

You can always contact me, and I will do my best to answer your questions, because the most

important message you could ever hear is the message of the Bible.

The message that God Himself died in your place.

That God Himself paid a fine you and I could never, ever be able to pay.

It would take us all of eternity.

He paid that once in time that you and I could be set free.

That you and I could be in a right state with God.

We could be forgiven.

So many people deal with guilt of sin that they have.

They have so much guilt over things they've done, and some people turn to drugs or alcohol or

different things like that.

But you can be forgiven, and you can be released from the guilt of sin.

More importantly, you can be in a right state with God.

The way to do that is to stop trusting yourself as a good person.

Stop trusting in your good works as thinking they'll save you.

Don't trust that your genealogy or I was raised Catholic and therefore I'm going to go to heaven,

whatever it is, I'm raised Muslim, whatever your religion is.

Don't trust in that.

The only thing you can trust in is a payment that was made by God Himself

when He became a man and died on the cross.

The reason it's so important is because of who He is.

He's Almighty God.

And so for that reason, you have to turn from trusting those other things and trust in Jesus Christ.

Repent is what that means when we turn.

That's the word repent.

So we repent and we receive Christ.

He died in our place.

We believe, we put our trust in Him.

If you've done that, please contact me.

Definitely contact this podcast so that they know.

But I want you to think about that.

There's no more important message than the message of the gospel, the good news of Jesus Christ.

I thank you for listening.

Keep checking this podcast out for more testimonies and more people

sharing how they came to know Jesus Christ.

This podcast is part of the Striving for Eternity ministry.

For more content or to request a speaker or seminar to your church, go to strivingforeternity .org.

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