From Atheist to Evangelist

Sovereign Grace Family Church

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May 27, 2021

00:00: Good evening, welcome to Sovereign Grace Family Church.
00:05: This is our regular time for midweek service.
00:09: But as you all know, we have a very special event planned for tonight and tomorrow night.
00:15: We have with us a guest, Rich Suplita, who is from Georgia.
00:23: He is a former professor at the University of Georgia.
00:27: He's going to be sharing with us how the Lord saved him and brought him not just out of unbelief, but out of atheism.
00:35: And now he runs a ministry, askaformeratheist.com.
00:40: And the way that tonight's gonna go is I'm gonna pray, I'm gonna turn it over to Rich, and allow him to share his time and his message with you tonight.
00:52: And then in the last few minutes, we're going to have an opportunity to take questions.
00:57: So as Rich is speaking, if you feel led to ask a question, write it down.
01:04: That way, when we get to the end, you guys will be ready.
01:07: And I'm gonna walk around with a microphone so that those who are watching at home will be able to hear your questions, especially you young folks.
01:13: If you hear something or you came tonight with a question, we definitely want you to feel like you can ask that question.
01:21: And I wanna again thank you, Rich, for driving all the way down here.
01:24: I know you've been in the car all day.
01:25: And so I look forward to this time of spiritual refreshment as you share with us.
01:31: So let's pray together.
01:34: Father, we thank you for this opportunity to hear from Brother Rich tonight and to be encouraged by not only his testimony, but Lord, to be encouraged by what you are currently doing in his life and ministry and going on to campuses and reaching men and women, young men and women, for the cause of Christ.
01:56: Lord, I pray that everyone here would have a listening ear, that you would open our ears to hear what he has to say.
02:04: And Lord, that it would not just go into our ears and even just into our minds, but Lord, that it would go to our very heart.
02:10: And Lord, if there are those here tonight who are on the fence about Christ and they have not yet bowed the knee to the Lord Jesus Christ, they have not repented of their sins and trusted in him as Savior.
02:20: Lord, that they might hear something tonight that would draw them to you, that you would use your Holy Spirit, Lord, the only power that's able to take a dead soul and give it life.
02:32: And Lord, that your Holy Spirit might work among us tonight.
02:35: We thank you, we praise you, we give you all glory and honor for all that you're going to do in Jesus' name and for his sake, amen.
02:43: All right, Brother Rich, thank you for coming and we'll turn it over to you.
02:55: Okay, I got my timer going here because I never know how long I'm going to go.
03:01: This will help keep me in check.
03:04: It disappeared, there we go, all right.
03:07: Yeah, so it's great to be with you all.
03:11: Thanks for coming out on a Wednesday night.
03:14: I didn't remember that Florida was quite this hot.
03:18: Did your temperature like jump up really quickly in the last few days? So it's not just a Florida thing.
03:27: I've been on the road a lot.
03:28: I was up in West Virginia and then was home for one day and then making my way south.
03:35: So who knows where I'll be next week? Maybe I'll be in Miami or the Keys.
03:40: But yeah, it's great to be here.
03:42: I want to give you the story tonight of how I ended up here, right? Essentially a testimonial.
03:50: And tomorrow night at the seminary, we'll be delving more into apologetics.
03:57: I'll be looking at, the title of the talk is Five Philosophical Failures of Atheism.
04:06: And why is that my title? Well, 10 years ago, I was just finishing up my second year as the faculty advisor at the University of Georgia for a campus student organization called UGA Atheists.
04:25: And as the name of my website, my ministry would suggest, ask a former atheist, I was a professing atheist.
04:35: And so that's kind of where I'll start 10 years ago.
04:38: And it was about this time of the year, maybe even to the day, I'm not quite sure.
04:45: But I was sitting alone on my couch and at my apartment in Athens, Georgia.
04:52: And I had been challenged by a pastor that I just met, about a month previous to that, to read the gospel of John, to just sit down.
05:04: He asked me if I had a Bible.
05:06: And I said, yeah, I have a Bible that I have had since my teenage years.
05:11: And he said, well, just really would wonder what God would reveal to you if you opened up your Bible and you read through the gospel of John.
05:22: And so about 10 years ago, I was sitting on my couch alone, reading the gospel of John, and I came across John chapter 11, right? The story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead.
05:40: And you all know the story, Lazarus has died.
05:44: He was sick for a while, right? People were expecting Jesus because Jesus and Lazarus were very close friends.
05:52: They were expecting Jesus to come and to make Lazarus well.
05:58: Jesus doesn't do that, he stays behind, even though Bethany was just short distance away.
06:04: And finally, a couple of days, I think it was two days after, Lazarus had actually died.
06:11: Jesus tells his disciples, we're going to go and we're going to wake him up.
06:16: And then he shares with him that Lazarus had died.
06:19: Comes into town, Jesus is encountered by Mary and Martha, the sisters of Lazarus.
06:25: And of course, they kind of come at him with, they're confused, they're hurt, I would say.
06:32: And they come at him with a question, more or less, even though it's phrased as a statement.
06:37: They say, Rabbi, master, if you'd been here, our brother would not have died.
06:43: And Jesus says, then he makes the, kind of paraphrasing, but he makes that beautiful statement, that powerful I am statement that you find in John 11, verse 25, where he says, I'm the resurrection and the life.
06:57: It says, the one who believes in me, even if he dies, yet shall he live.
07:03: The one who lives and believes in me will never die.
07:08: And then you remember what he says to Martha, right? He looks at Martha and he says, do you believe this? And so this is where I am in the narrative about 10 years ago, where Jesus is asking Martha, do you believe this? So what I want to do is rewind, right? Rewind that narrative about six months.
07:31: So this would be 10 and a half years ago, all right? As I mentioned, I was just finishing my second year as the faculty advisor for the UGA Atheist Club.
07:45: And I was about halfway through that year when I started really experiencing some issues with atheism, okay? Realizing that atheism doesn't quite add up.
08:01: But to give you, by way of giving you more background, I will share that I grew up very religious, okay? I grew up with the religion of Christianity like a lot of people do.
08:11: I grew up in the churches of Christ.
08:13: I'm not sure how familiar you are with the churches of Christ.
08:18: And I'm not here to diss them.
08:21: I'm not here to criticize them.
08:22: Obviously, these days I have some pretty strong differences with them, but they had a very high view of scripture, a very high view of the Bible.
08:31: Just like we believe, they believe correctly that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, infallible word of God.
08:41: They have correct core theology about the identity of Jesus, all of these things.
08:49: And that's what I believed.
08:50: I didn't question that.
08:51: I remember attending church three times a week as a child.
08:56: And my dad was a deacon in the church of Christ.
09:01: And that was just part of my life.
09:04: I don't think I ever questioned that.
09:07: By the time I got to middle school and then high school, I realized there was these strange people out there that I could not identify with at all called atheists.
09:17: And when I heard that, I'm like, how in the world is that possible? How does anyone come to believe that there's not a God? It didn't resonate with me in the slightest.
09:31: And so I stayed very religious.
09:34: In fact, I graduated high school.
09:37: I worked construction for a couple of years as an electrician apprentice.
09:41: I went into the Marine Corps Reserves, did that.
09:46: And during the time that I was, it was actually I did the summer of 1991 up the coastline here at Parris Island, right? South Carolina.
09:57: So I was there.
09:58: I still remember the dates.
10:00: May 15th, 1991 to August 9th, 1991.
10:05: And when I graduated from Parris Island, I was going to do school of infantry the following summer.
10:13: And so I enrolled in a church of Christ school in Tennessee called Freed Hardman University.
10:22: And I only lasted one semester.
10:25: I was suspended for behavioral reasons.
10:27: We won't get into that.
10:29: But all of that to say is I was still very devoutly a believer, right? In the Bible is the word of God.
10:37: In Jesus is the son of God.
10:39: And so I wanna get at the issue, the question of what changed? How did things go end up going south? And without going into too many details, I look back at this in retrospect.
10:58: And I remember that really happening about halfway through my undergraduate studies.
11:06: So I left Freed Hardman.
11:09: I worked instruction for a couple of years.
11:11: Thought to myself, I don't wanna do this the rest of my life.
11:14: I don't wanna be 200 feet up in the middle of winter, some silo at a power plant in West Virginia.
11:23: I'm going to go back to college.
11:26: And so I enrolled at West Virginia University and studying communication and psychology.
11:35: And it was the latter half, I was still involved in campus groups, right? So this is something to be aware of.
11:43: Just because a student, just because a high school student or a college student is active in ministry, that's no guarantee of where their heart is.
11:55: You can't go by that.
11:57: A lot of people go to these things for the pizza on Friday nights, right? And you don't need me to tell you that a big draw for a lot of people, a lot of our young people, I'm not trying to pick on young people though, not so much in reformed churches, but in sort of evangelical Christianity in general, can be the big show that's made of what passes as praise and worship.
12:23: And so I stayed involved in the campus, the Church Christ Campus Group.
12:30: I actually drove the van on Sundays to pick students up and take them to church and then take them home.
12:38: But shall we say, I'm trying, we're a mixed company, we have some young folks, so I wanna make sure that I don't deviate too far.
12:48: Bad lifestyle choices.
12:50: What do a lot of people get caught up in in college, right? Decisions about relationships and what happens in the context of those relationships.
13:01: Decisions about alcohol, things like alcohol and marijuana.
13:06: So that is really, I would say, the point of departure.
13:15: But I've heard it said, and I really, I think this is very descriptive.
13:19: If you talk to a person who says, you know what, I grew up in the church.
13:26: I grew up religious.
13:27: I grew up believing the Bible.
13:29: I don't believe that anymore, especially if they're in the 16, 18, 20, 22.
13:36: You could probably extend that up to 40 these days, age range.
13:40: They'll tend to give you two responses.
13:44: They'll give you two answers.
13:46: One is the answer that sounds good, right? One is the answer that sounds good.
13:51: And then the other one, which they almost will never verbalize, is the actual answer, is the actual reason.
14:00: And so for me, the reason that sounded good was evolution.
14:07: And I say it that way out of my deep respect for Richard Dawkins.
14:12: You know, he's a British guy.
14:14: The British, they don't say evolution.
14:15: They say evolution.
14:18: But that was the reason that sounded good.
14:20: Hey, I'm studying science.
14:22: I'm learning this psychology stuff.
14:25: I'm in this experimental analysis of behavior class, and we're learning about all these similarities between humans and chimpanzees and birds.
14:38: And if you would have asked me, why are you losing your faith? Why do you no longer believe the Bible is the word of God? You see, that's the answer I would have given you.
14:46: I don't believe the Bible is the word of God anymore at this point.
14:50: I would say, I believe science.
14:52: If you wanna know truth, you've gotta ask the scientist, right? So that was the reason that sounded good.
14:59: It was an easy grab.
15:01: What was the real reason? What was going on in my heart? What was going on in my heart was very much a, I don't wanna follow God's law as far as things like sexuality is concerned, as far as things about what type of life I should be living.
15:20: Should I be an honest person? Should I be getting drunk on the weekends? You see that? The reason that sounds good, and then you have the actual reason.
15:30: The actual reason, as it is with all people, fundamentally a heart reason.
15:34: It's a heart issue, right? But I think I had my head buried so much in the sand at the time, in the sand at the time, that even I was not aware of that.
15:46: The fact that, you know, the way it says in Romans 1, suppressing the truth and unrighteousness.
15:52: I didn't feel like I was suppressing the truth and unrighteousness.
15:56: I felt liberated.
15:57: I felt freed.
15:58: I felt, you know, I would look back, and I didn't have an oppressive religious upbringing, right? I think the Church of Christ does err in terms of like work, salvation, and maintaining your salvation.
16:10: Things I don't agree with today.
16:12: But it wasn't a bad experience.
16:14: I had fond memories, but see, I started thinking, wow, religion is so oppressive.
16:19: It's trying to restrict people, keep us from being our autonomous, self-expressing selves.
16:26: And so I felt like, you know, finally here I am, I'm emancipated.
16:31: I've been released from my bottle, and I can live however I want.
16:36: Again, I didn't verbalize that, but that was the attitude that I took leaving West Virginia University, traveling down to Georgia.
16:45: I got married in 1999, and lived in Savannah for about a year and a half.
16:52: My now ex-wife, also from West Virginia, but she matched with Memorial Hospital in Savannah for her medical residency.
17:02: So she had just finished medical school.
17:04: I was between undergrad and grad school, and I knew I was going to go to grad school in psychology, and so we moved to Savannah, and it was the following year, the fall of 2000, that I started a PhD program at the University of Georgia in biopsychology, which later became a neuroscience and behavior program.
17:27: And so, again, so what I had, if you would have asked me at the time, what are your religious beliefs? We do these surveys.
17:36: They're called the Great Exchange Surveys.
17:38: It's a great little outreach tool, and I'll come back to that in a minute because it had a role in my own salvation, how the Lord used this ministry.
17:48: But it has nine questions on it, and the first question is, you just ask people, hey, do you have a minute? Do you have a few minutes to take a spiritual interest survey? Okay, I'll take it.
17:59: Okay, so you get their name.
18:00: Question number one, describe your religious background, describe your spiritual background.
18:07: What was that like? Okay, well, Church of Christ or Baptist or whatever the person was.
18:14: Question number two, do you believe in God? If so, what is God like? And you see, at the time, I would have still said I believed that there was a God, but I had jettisoned belief in the Bible.
18:30: I had left that behind, and so I was still, I basically had become sort of a cultural Christian in a sense, a Christian who denies the authenticity, the authority of the Bible.
18:47: And most people, another key point here to emphasize, that's almost impossible to stay in that place.
18:55: There's so much pressure, even more today than there was 20 years ago.
18:59: It's almost impossible to say, I no longer believe in the authority of the Bible, the authority of scripture, I'm just gonna camp out here and kind of do a quasi-Christian thing.
19:10: There's so much pressure from the world, and so that's what I really found in graduate school, that I'm getting daily doses of evolution and science and this narrative that it doesn't make any sense to believe in God, you should just believe in science.
19:28: You can't trust religious people, can't trust the Bible, you can't trust, and they'll use disparaging terms to describe the Bible.
19:36: They'll say some ancient book written by semi-literate goat herders thousands of years ago.
19:44: Do you really mean to tell me that you place that on a higher authority than the findings of modern science? And so people create these types of narratives What I would say is this though, more than anything, I was socialized.
20:03: More than anything, it was a socialization into a more devout form of secular humanism, which ultimately spilled over into atheism.
20:17: All of my friends, my faculty advisors, people I was in the lab with, people I traveled with to scientific conferences, people I worked with 40, 50, sometimes 60 hours a week, working on projects, working on manuscripts.
20:32: These were, almost without exception, very committed secularists, right? I remember this was the year of the George W.
20:44: Bush versus John Kerry, and I had never been very political, but they all were, right? And they were all very insistent on persuading me to make sure I voted for John Kerry rather than George W.
20:59: Bush, but it wasn't just that.
21:02: You see, it was a whole, it was a socialization program.
21:06: And again, to reemphasize, if that's what it was 20 years ago, it's five times, 10 times amplified in strength today.
21:17: That's where we're losing our young people.
21:19: Now, I do believe God is sovereign over everything.
21:21: I'm not dismissing that in the slightest, but where we're losing our young people is socialization.
21:29: I have three biological children and a stepson.
21:32: They're all teenagers.
21:34: They're all in public schools.
21:36: They all have been long before it became relevant for me to make a decision about what type of education my children would receive.
21:46: Their, my stepson's father and my ex-wife are, would say they're Christians, but they're not.
21:53: They're secularists through and through.
21:56: And so what has been the de facto socializing agent of our young people? These things, right? This is what they're getting blasted at them.
22:08: Instagram and TikTok and, you know, nobody uses Facebook anymore, I do.
22:15: But hours and hours and hours a week, right? Then they go to public schools and you guys know what they're getting there.
22:22: You know what they're getting.
22:24: Now they're getting all the critical race theory and all this secular.
22:28: The church is, you know, a little, a few hours a week cannot compete against that.
22:32: So important for parents to disciple their kids.
22:35: I won't get on the soapbox, but you know, that's what they're being socialized by.
22:40: So I was socialized into, I would say, a very radical form, a militant form of secular humanism, secular thinking.
22:53: And it's weird, I wrote it on my notes here.
22:56: I jotted down some notes.
22:59: Free thinker.
23:00: Have y'all heard that term before? It's sort of been appropriated by the atheists and agnostic.
23:06: Oh, we're the free thinkers.
23:08: Free your mind, you know? And I have some philosophical points to make about that tomorrow night.
23:14: I put a PowerPoint together, you know, for that lesson.
23:20: But that's how I felt.
23:21: I felt like a liberated thinker, a free thinker.
23:24: But in retrospect, it's kind of laughable because so much of my thinking was being dictated by what other people believed and what they were telling me I should believe.
23:34: It was its own form of indoctrination.
23:37: But again, at the time, I was pretty blind to it, okay? So I'll make a point here about what I didn't do.
23:49: And I think this is super important because I don't know anybody that does this.
23:54: What should I have done at this point in time versus what did I actually do? And so the exercise that nobody does whenever these questions come up about God, can I believe the Bible? Should I believe science or the Bible? I do not know a single person who would honestly say that they were starting to have questions about their faith upbringing.
24:20: And so what they decided to do, being a free thinker, being a rational person, being a reasonable person, is they're going to sit down with a big piece of paper, right, and put God exists, God does not exist across the top, put a line down the middle and start asking really hard questions and thinking as objectively as possible about those two alternatives.
24:46: I could tell you, I did not do that.
24:49: I promise you, I didn't do, and I've met a lot of atheists in my days.
24:53: I don't know a single atheist that has done anything like that, okay? Just to emphasize the point, people do not end up as atheists as an exercise in pure reason.
25:05: They end up calling themselves atheists for reasons that have everything to do with personal motivations, socialization, social pressures, wanting to be popular, not wanting to follow God's commandments about things like relationships.
25:22: That's how they end up there, but they, again, what sounds good, you know, versus what's actually going on in the heart.
25:30: And so I didn't do that exercise.
25:32: I'll start talking now a little bit about the turnaround.
25:37: Okay, so me and my ex-wife were separated in 2006, reunited for a brief period of time, and then finally divorced in 2008.
25:50: And not coincidentally, that timeframe mapped on to sort of the maximum intensity of my atheism.
26:03: And I think that revealed a lot of hurt, right? A lot of pain that I was going through.
26:08: And I was kind of in denial about that at the time.
26:10: I was sharing with some of the members here earlier, you know, even as an atheist, I didn't want a divorce.
26:17: My ex-wife is the one who filed, had me served.
26:22: We went to counseling.
26:23: I thought we should stay together, but she was of a different opinion.
26:30: And so I found myself on the wrong end of divorce papers and not really wanting to be divorced with three very young children, but that's where I was.
26:42: And so, you know, here's another factor.
26:46: It's an emotional one.
26:47: It's not a rational one, but we have strong emotions as human beings.
26:51: That's the way God created us.
26:54: But I misdirected that.
26:57: Instead of asking good questions and being open to what God would want to teach me, I became bitter and angry.
27:06: It's been said that atheists, two things are true about atheists, right? They'll say there is no God, and a lot of them will say, and I hate him.
27:16: Number one, there is no God.
27:18: Number two, I hate that guy that I don't believe exists.
27:21: And that's true.
27:23: Unregenerate people do hate God.
27:25: They hate his law.
27:26: That's scriptural.
27:28: But that's what was going on in my heart and in my mind at the time.
27:32: I was very angry with the God that I was becoming more committed to say I don't believe in.
27:40: And so I remember picking up, I was invited by a guy who worked in our lab to pick up a copy and read Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion.
27:55: And I think I shared it on Brother Keith's podcast.
27:58: I remember going to the bookstore.
28:00: It was still on the best seller's table.
28:03: Shiny silver cover, a little orange-like hole in the middle of it.
28:07: The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins.
28:09: I didn't know who Richard Dawkins was.
28:10: I hadn't really read anything in terms of his anti-God rhetoric.
28:16: But I knew he was an evolutionary biologist.
28:19: I knew he was a respected scientist at Oxford University.
28:22: I knew that I had a newly minted PhD from the University of Georgia and conducted scientific research, published scientific papers, and now was teaching neuroscience classes.
28:37: And I remember thinking when I went to pick up that book, I don't know exactly what he's going to say in here yet, but whatever it is, that's what I'm going to go with.
28:45: That's going to be kind of my new belief system.
28:51: And so I don't think I'm unique in this regard.
28:53: I just think that the Lord has brought me through this.
28:56: And so I share that.
28:57: I can share that transparently.
29:00: But I think there's a lot of professing atheists out there who, if they were honest, would tell you something similar to that.
29:09: And so I finished Richard Dawkins.
29:11: I pick up Sam Harris, The End of Faith.
29:14: I picked up Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great, How Religion Poisons Everything.
29:23: And I became an aficionado of an internet program called The Atheist Experience, broadcast out of Austin, Texas, with their most famous talking head guy, a guy named Matt Dillahunty, who blows a lot of hot air.
29:37: He's really a lot more rhetoric than he is substance whenever you watch his stuff.
29:43: But I was so drawn into that.
29:46: I liked how fervent his voice was.
29:52: And I really identified with that.
29:54: But the first turning point on the way back, I would say, happened during the winter break, my second year in as the faculty advisor of UGA Atheists.
30:04: And it was, my main class that I taught was biological foundations of behavior, physiological and comparative psychology.
30:13: And so neuroscience, brain science was my area of expertise.
30:20: And as an atheist materialist, in other words, a person who believes just in matter and physics, right? A person who would say that there is, what is real? The philosophical question of metaphysics.
30:35: What makes up reality? What is reality made up of? And we as Christians would say there's both the physical domain and there's the spiritual domain.
30:45: In other words, the physical is not all that there is.
30:49: But most atheists, I wouldn't say all atheists, but most atheists, especially United States, would say that they're materialists, they're physicalists.
30:59: All that exists is matter.
31:01: All that happens, all that occurs since the dawn of time, however far you wanna rewind the tape, all that happens is matter is in motion.
31:14: You have matter, you have stuff, and you have stuff obeying the fixed laws of physics.
31:19: That's it.
31:21: Well, I don't know why it didn't occur to me earlier, but all of a sudden I had this big question looming in my mind.
31:27: If that's possible, if that's true, and this is what I would say I believed, well, then what about things like volition or choice? Decisions, because see, there's no wiggle room.
31:39: You can't have it both ways.
31:41: You can't have a philosophy that's true that says there's just matter and matter in motion, but at the same time, people make real choices and we should hold people accountable for their choices and their moral decisions, all of these things.
31:56: And so that really stuck out in my mind.
31:58: I'm like, I've gotta do something with this because this seems super incompatible.
32:06: I'm a very introspective person.
32:07: I'm one of those people who like on the way down here, I might've had music on.
32:11: I listened to Brother Keith's podcast from seminary, but that was unusual.
32:15: A lot of times I'm a motorcycle guy.
32:17: I guess that's where I got used to it.
32:19: I'll ride or drive for hours and hours and hours, and I don't have anything on.
32:23: I'm just thinking about stuff.
32:25: I'm praying some now, I'm singing songs in my head, or I'm just thinking about stuff.
32:29: I've always been very introspective.
32:31: And so I really started introspecting about this philosophy that I had espoused, and I started seeing all these problems.
32:38: It doesn't add up, okay? The things that matter the most to us as humans, you guys can do a little experiment yourselves, right? Here's a social psychology experiment.
32:48: Don't get caught because you'll seem kind of creepy, but next time you're in a coffee shop, just start eavesdropping on people, strangers.
32:55: No, no, don't like, you know, that would look weird, but just kind of from a distance, just act like you're looking at something on your phone, but listen to what people are talking about.
33:04: Most of the time, people are talking about other people, and most of the time, what are we doing? We're moralizing about other people.
33:13: So-and-so did this, and they should have done that, or they shouldn't have said this, or, you know, that moral component.
33:19: It's unavoidable because it's woven into the fabric of who we are, and I realized that my philosophy, my worldview didn't allow for that.
33:27: The second turning point, which was huge, was my oldest daughter, even though her mom, cultural Christian, was still taking her to church on Sunday mornings at a Baptist church in Winder, Georgia, and I got a text that said, "'Annabelle is going to be baptized "'like three Sundays from now.
33:49: "'Can you come, can you attend?' And my first thought was, "'No way, I'm not gonna go.
33:55: "'I'm the faculty advisor for the Atheist Club.
33:57: "'Why would I go to a Baptist church?' Right? Well, here I am.
34:03: You know, but then I started talking to, it was my secularist friends that said, "'You know, yeah, you should go, you know, "'be a good dad, go get the pictures, "'smile, don't say anything at the time, "'and then, you know, a week or two later, "'just sit her down.'" Annabelle was like seven or eight years old at the time.
34:20: Just sit her down and be like, come on, you know, do you really, it's fine to have a religion, it's fine, people have all kinds of religious beliefs, you know, just don't get too carried away with it.
34:32: And so I sat down, I planned to have that talk with Annabelle, actually sat her down on the couch, and the words wouldn't come out of my mouth.
34:41: I couldn't get the words out of my mouth.
34:45: And what I realized, the more I thought about it was, why? I realized not only did I not want to talk her out of having faith in God, making a profession of faith in Jesus, but there was actually something in my heart, very real, very undeniable, that rejoiced in that.
35:07: Now, there's a term in psychology, it's called cognitive dissonance.
35:11: You might have heard about that before, kind of like the classic example, you have a cardiothoracic surgeon who smokes a pack of cigarettes a day, right? What you see, what you believe, what you say you stand for in your behaviors aren't matching up, and so I experienced a very profound dissonance.
35:30: Here I am, I'm the faculty advisor for the Atheist Club, my oldest daughter, the person, one of the few people that I, at the time, I would say I truly loved, especially, who do you love the most? Well, my daughters.
35:44: What I should have thought is, she's been drawn into some sort of myth, that she's gotten off course.
35:51: She's believing, being taught superstitious stuff, and she's buying into it, and I should have been angry about that, but my heart was in a completely different place, and I couldn't make that match up.
36:03: And so that was a big turning point, too.
36:06: And all of that just sort of had to marinate and saturate for a while, three or four months, I would say, before I would finally exit atheism.
36:17: So very quickly here, this is about, I have like seven minutes, then we'll do some Q&A.
36:22: I wrote down, exit atheism, enter higher powerism.
36:26: That's what I tried next.
36:28: I had a friend who is, and this was a real friend, I'm not just saying a friend, it was really me, it's not one of those things, but a friend who was a recovering narcotics addict, and he had gotten really into N.A., Narcotics Anonymous, and we would ride our motorcycles together, and he's like, hey, Rich, why don't you come to one of the N.A.
36:47: meetings with me? And I'm like, well, I'm not an addict, and he's like, doesn't matter, they don't know that.
36:53: And so I'm like, okay, as a psychologist, that'd be cool, sit around, see what actually goes on at one of these things.
36:58: And so I sat there, and everybody's talking about their higher power, how their higher power wants them to be abstinent, wants them to have good relationships, wants them to hold down a job, and I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, you know, that's kinda what I need.
37:11: I'm not an atheist anymore, I knew I was checking out of atheism.
37:14: That was supposed to be a silent exit.
37:17: Nobody was ever supposed to know about that, really, I was just gonna tell the atheist group, like, hey guys, this has been great and all, but I'm too busy next year, and find somebody else.
37:27: It was just gonna be a totally personal thing.
37:31: And so I wanted, what I really liked is this idea of a higher power.
37:34: You know, my higher power wants me to have good relationships, wants me to be a person who perseveres, there to give me strength when I'm tempted to use drugs or do something wrong.
37:46: I'm like, that sounds good.
37:47: I think that's very low commitment, just sort of a genie in a bottle, right? And you can rub the bottle whenever you need a little boost, and the genie will pop out and help you out with your life.
37:59: I'm like, this is perfect, because I can still do what I wanna do, like, with pretty much everything.
38:05: And so I did that for a little while, probably like a month, and very quickly, it occurred to me, okay, well, this doesn't work, right? Because the problem is, I really do believe there's a God.
38:19: I had laid down, I'd stopped suppressing that much, okay? I knew there was a God, and I was prepared to come to terms with that.
38:31: And so it occurred to me, if God truly exists, then it's not up to me to define God.
38:38: If there really is a God, and I became convinced there was, then I don't get to assign characteristics and attributes to God.
38:48: God is who God is, and my role is to discover, to learn who God is, to understand who God is, and submit myself to that truth, right? And so that was another big, profound turning point.
39:05: And wouldn't you know it, right about then is when I had just finished turning in my grades, late April, it was Good Friday.
39:14: Good Friday, we had a very late Easter in 2011.
39:19: And I was walking across campus, I was just wrapping up my grade rosters, waiting for finals, campus was pretty much dead.
39:30: And I walked from the psychology building at the University of Georgia down to the Bulldog Cafe to get lunch, and I see this table, this tent thing set up, it says The Great Exchange.
39:43: And at first I thought it was a book buyback, okay? End of the semester, they're buying books back.
39:48: Students are like, the book they paid $300 for, they give them 15 bucks for it.
39:52: End of the semester, something like that.
39:55: But then somebody walks up to me and is like, hey, do you have a minute to do a spiritual interest survey? I'm like, sure, why not? And so this is where I end up finally meeting David Holt, who is now the senior pastor at the church that I am a member of in Athens.
40:15: So I do the survey, actually gave him all the atheist answers because I wanted to get out of there quickly, but then I realized how interested I was in this conversation.
40:25: And I finally confessed to him at the end of that.
40:27: I said, you know, I gave you all, that's where I was six months ago, that's where I was a year ago.
40:32: That's not where I am now.
40:33: And I just really opened up to him and we started talking.
40:37: And David did something that was very powerful, and I'll share with you guys.
40:41: When it comes to evangelism, I call it evangelism with the ears.
40:45: There's lots of forms of evangelism.
40:48: A lot of ways it can be done right, a lot of ways it can be done wrong.
40:51: A lot of times it's not the method, it's the person's attitude and disposition, but we really want to make sure that we're good listeners.
41:01: The word says that.
41:02: Let everyone be quick to hear, right? Quick to hear, slow to speak.
41:09: I'm terrible, I get that backwards all the time.
41:11: Maybe it's just me.
41:14: But Pastor David did a great job just listening, asking good questions and just listening.
41:21: And we started meeting at Starbucks in Athens every Friday for an hour or two, just to talk about my journey, where I'd been.
41:30: Kind of like, obviously the focus was Jesus.
41:34: And I think it was about the third week in, he looks at me and he says, where would you say you are with the resurrection? Like if you just had to put a number on it, you had to put a percentage on it today.
41:49: What percent? I've been doing a lot of reading on this subject, by the way, from all kinds of different perspectives.
41:57: And so I said, well, I don't know.
42:00: I see some really good reasons to believe that's true.
42:03: And I see some reasons that people doubt it.
42:06: He's like, well, where are you? And I just threw out the number, I said 50-50.
42:11: I'm like, I guess I'd have to say I'm 50-50.
42:14: And so that's where Pastor David issued the challenge.
42:17: He's like, well, do you have a Bible? I said, yeah, I have an old NIV study Bible, sitting there between two neuroscience textbooks on my bookshelf.
42:25: Will you read it between now and when we meet next Friday? And I told him I would.
42:32: I remember thinking to myself, I'll do it.
42:34: But I didn't say this to him.
42:36: I'll do it, but it's not gonna make a difference.
42:38: It's not gonna put me at 100%.
42:41: And so I'll wrap up in a minute, we'll do Q&A.
42:47: And so I went home and I forgot about it, right? And as God would have it, right? Not fate, but God.
42:57: Fate through God, as dictated by God.
43:00: I was cleaning my apartment the next Thursday evening.
43:05: It's like 6 p.m.
43:06: on the middle or late May.
43:09: Nothing else to do.
43:11: So I got so bored, I started cleaning my apartment.
43:14: That's pretty bored.
43:16: And I'm actually dusting off my bookshelf.
43:19: And what catches my eyes is my Bible, NIV study Bible.
43:26: Not quite as good as an ESV study Bible, but nonetheless, there it was.
43:31: And I remembered, I told Pastor David, I told David, he wasn't my pastor yet.
43:37: I told David that, I promised him I would read.
43:41: And like, I've got no excuse.
43:42: There's like literally nothing else for me to do the rest of the evening.
43:46: And so I take the NIV study Bible off of the shelf, wipe the dust off of it, right? And open it up, start reading John.
43:56: And these stories sound very familiar.
43:58: I remember so much of them from my childhood.
44:01: And I just love the picture that it's painting of Jesus.
44:05: But even that evening, before I started reading, I thought, I'm still gonna be 50-50.
44:10: I'll read this.
44:11: I don't wanna lie to him.
44:12: I wanna be honest, wanna be true to my word.
44:14: But I'm still going to be uncommitted on this issue when I go to meet with David tomorrow.
44:22: Well, you know, fast forward, John chapter 11.
44:25: And that statement, which really just left off the page.
44:27: I don't know why the Holy Spirit chose that rather than some other text.
44:31: To this day, I can't answer that question.
44:33: There's so many.
44:34: You guys are familiar with the great I am statement.
44:36: I'm the bread of life.
44:37: I'm the light of the world.
44:38: Why not one of those? Why not one of the other vignettes? I don't know.
44:43: I really have no idea.
44:45: But it was John chapter 11 where Jesus made that statement.
44:49: I'm the resurrection and the life.
44:51: And I realized he's not claiming to just, he's not making a claim about what he can do.
44:58: He's not making a claim about his power.
45:00: He's making a claim about his identity.
45:04: I can raise the dead, not why, but because I am the resurrection.
45:10: I am resurrection.
45:12: I am life.
45:14: And I had never seen that.
45:15: I knew that verse, but I had never seen that before.
45:19: And for some reason, that is what flipped the switch.
45:24: And then I knew when I got down to where he turns to Martha and says, do you believe this? I knew that Jesus was asking me the same question.
45:34: And I knew that my answer wasn't 50-50.
45:37: I knew unequivocally that I did believe that Jesus is the resurrection and the life, and that he had died for my sins, was buried and rose again on the third day.
45:52: Now, just to wrap it all up, I wish I could say, so I went and told Pastor David this, and I was baptized a week later, and was on fire for the Lord, and just was tearing up my Bible, studying until three in the morning.
46:07: There was a desire to read the Bible.
46:09: There was a desire to live holy.
46:11: There was a lot of unholy living that continued for the next three years of my life that caused a lot of pain.
46:19: I won't go into details.
46:20: That caused a lot of heartbreak.
46:21: That caused a lot of disappointment.
46:23: But ultimately, in 2014, the Lord brought me to a place of true surrender, where I knew that were I to live for one more week or 50 more years, like I'm living for Jesus now.
46:44: And so, just wanna make that clear, because I don't know how much that relates to other stories you've heard, but it just reminds me of the verse where Paul writes that he who began a good work in you.
46:57: If God began that work, he will complete it into the day of Christ Jesus.
47:02: And so, you know, if a person is one of his sheep, and he comes and gets them, there's no going back.
47:11: He's going to be the hound of heaven.
47:14: You know, he's not gonna let you fall.
47:16: He might discipline you severely, harshly.
47:20: That was the case for me.
47:24: But, you know, he never gave up.
47:26: And my life has never been the same since late in 2014, where God brought me to that point of complete surrender.
47:38: So, I think I'll stop there and see what questions you guys might have.
47:47: Well, thank you, Brother Rich.
47:48: That was a very moving and encouraging testimony.
47:52: And I think I'll go first, because I have the microphone.
47:59: Could you share just another minute, because I know we talked about this on the podcast, how you got into Rossio Christi and got into campus ministry.
48:11: Can you share what you're doing now and how, you know, since your salvation, what God has you doing on campuses? Yeah, yeah, for sure.
48:22: So, I traveled with a traveling campus preacher evangelist named Tom Short.
48:28: Tom is based out of Columbus, Ohio.
48:31: And I did that for four semesters, which really that started within probably about six months of my surrendering of my life, quicker than I would have anticipated.
48:43: But it was very clear that God was green lighting this.
48:46: And so that's what brought my attention to campus ministry.
48:49: Then there's some good reformed brothers there in Athens, Georgia.
48:53: One had been preaching on campus of UGA.
48:56: So I remember him from when I was an atheist.
48:58: I never argued with him.
49:00: He wasn't really the argumentative type so much.
49:03: Bobby McCreary.
49:05: And so, you know, of course, Bobby heard of my story.
49:09: Have you ever had Bobby speak here before? You're thinking you might.
49:12: No, not yet, but I do know Bobby.
49:14: We've known each other for years and he is a wonderful open air minister and evangelist.
49:19: Wonderful, wonderful man.
49:21: Yeah, you all would love to, so blessed to have him, if you ever get a chance.
49:25: But I filled him in all these major life changes and he invited me.
49:32: He says, you know what? We do some downtown outreach on Friday nights.
49:36: Athens has a small downtown area within that tiny, just like, I don't know, it's like three square block area.
49:44: There's like 40 bars.
49:45: And so it's no secret.
49:47: You know, it's won the party school of the year award number of times from the Princeton Review.
49:53: What a designation, right? And, but they'll have people read scriptures and preach.
49:59: It's not, by the way, it's not the guys who are out screaming at people.
50:02: You'll see people like that.
50:03: That's not at all what they do.
50:05: But he invited me to come along and I didn't preach right away.
50:11: I just handed out tracts and talked to people.
50:14: Eventually I started preaching some, but that was sort of my segue into street ministry.
50:22: And then also started going to a Planned Parenthood abortuary outside of Atlanta with Bobby on Tuesdays, which I still continue to do to this day.
50:34: As far as Rossio, that was, Rossio Christi is a student organization.
50:40: It's apologetics with good theology.
50:43: So it's not one of these questionable groups.
50:46: The Rossio Christi's are, they police and patrol their theology really well with their leaders.
50:54: And I was a co-director with a lady who just passed away a few months ago, Miss Beth Sims, who was in her late 70s, sort of died unexpectedly though, following knee surgery.
51:06: But my wife and I are now directors of the Rossio Christi, which meets every week during the regular school year for about an hour and a half.
51:14: It's mostly student led.
51:15: I mean, I will do some presentations, but the real key there is discipling the students to be the apologists.
51:24: Those guys come out with us on Friday nights now to do dry erase board evangelism.
51:30: We just write a question on the dry erase board.
51:34: And as people are walking by just, hey, we're doing a little informal poll here.
51:40: Who is Jesus? Lord, liar, lunatic, legend, sort of the C.S.
51:44: Lewis classic.
51:46: Would you like to weigh in? And so the person just puts a, okay, well, legend.
51:51: I see you put legend.
51:53: Can you, do you mind taking a minute and kind of like help me understand how you arrived at that conclusion? And from there, just having a gospel conversation.
52:03: Awesome.
52:04: Is there a Rossio Christi in Jacksonville that you're aware of? I haven't looked, but I can check, let you know.
52:11: Thank you.
52:12: All right, now comes the opportunity for you guys to ask questions.
52:16: I don't know if anyone has one.
52:18: Hopefully you were inspired to ask a question.
52:21: Does anyone have anything they'd like to ask Brother Rich? Oh, I knew this might happen.
52:27: Don't be, don't be scared.
52:29: Okay.
52:31: The difference between an atheist and an agnostic.
52:37: I always thought an agnostic, I don't know what I thought.
52:40: I thought agnostic just did not believe there was a God.
52:43: It was just big bang theory and all that stuff.
52:47: Yeah.
52:47: So you're saying that an atheist does believe there is a God? Does not.
52:53: Does not.
52:54: But again, what is the difference between an agnostic and an atheist? Yeah, yeah, it's a great question.
52:59: And sometimes the answer is none, practically speaking.
53:06: But technically this is the way, because this was a big conversation point actually when I was an atheist.
53:11: What does that mean to say that you're an atheist? And they would say that the right answer was that an atheist lacks a God belief, okay? So when it comes to the question, is there a God? They would say, I don't believe in any of the gods that have been proposed.
53:34: But you raise a really good point because philosophically that would be called like a weak atheist or a negative atheist, whereas a positive, don't think positive good, but a positive atheist or a strong atheist would say, I actually disbelieve.
53:52: I'm making the claim that none of the gods, that no God exists.
53:56: There is no such thing as a God.
53:58: So they kind of play around with terms.
54:02: And so you really have to ask, when a person tells you they're an atheist, just can you give me some more information? Can you kind of describe that to me? When you say you're an atheist, what does that mean to you? What do you mean when you say that? And have them talk some more because you don't know exactly.
54:20: Because this is so common on campuses these days.
54:24: Where people will say, I guess I would say I'm sort of an atheist.
54:28: And I say, well, can you explain that to me? What's that look like? I've had this happen dozens of times where they'll say, well, I believe something spiritual, something higher got it started.
54:40: I think something got the universe started, but I don't believe that any of the major religions today are true.
54:48: I don't follow any of those.
54:50: But see, that's not really describing atheism.
54:52: That's describing deism or something like that.
54:56: But I think that they're throwing the atheist card out there.
55:00: A lot of them just want that to be a conversation stopper.
55:04: They don't really, what they're saying is, I'm not comfortable in this conversation.
55:07: I don't like talking about spiritual things.
55:10: Let me just say that this is what I am and maybe the person will leave me alone.
55:15: So I never leave them alone.
55:18: I ask the follow-up questions, but that's a great question.
55:24: Thank you, Ms.
55:25: Woman.
55:25: Does anyone else? Oh, well, I walked away.
55:28: Let me try it again.
55:34: Have you had any conversations with the people that were on the Atheist and the Atheist Club with you now? Have you? No, they got rid of me.
55:44: It was interesting.
55:47: So I wanted to have the silent exit.
55:55: Over the summer of 2011, they just assumed, because I didn't tell them.
56:00: I guess I should have told them, but I didn't tell them that I wasn't interested in being their faculty advisor anymore.
56:08: Pastor David, actually, I think it was bad advice.
56:10: He gives me a lot of good advice, but I think this was bad advice.
56:13: He says, you know what? You should just go ahead and keep being their faculty advisor.
56:18: Kind of make them fire you, right? And so they did.
56:26: I remember the girl who was the president, Lisa, called me that summer, about halfway through summer, and she's like, well, just wanted to reach out and see how your summer's going, and just ask, make sure you're still good with being our faculty advisor this coming year.
56:44: And I said to Lisa, I said, well, actually, I got some news for you.
56:48: She's like, what's that? I said, well, and it was hard.
56:53: I said, I actually, I've left atheism, and actually, I'm a Christian now.
56:59: And she's like, ah-ha, Rich has got jokes.
57:03: She thought I was totally messing with her.
57:06: And I said, no, like, I'm serious.
57:10: And she says, we'll find someone else, click.
57:15: And so that was the end.
57:16: And I looked about an hour after that, I looked at the Facebook page for UGA Atheists.
57:21: I had been not only taken off as administrator, one of the administrators, I'd been blocked from the entire site, and probably about half of the people in the club had unfriended me within 24 hours.
57:36: But to their credit, I feel like I have to say this anytime I tell that story, because there were four or five who really didn't like the fact that the others treated me that way, and actually reached out to me and apologized on behalf of the others, and said, hey, look, we don't believe in God, but you seem like a good guy to us.
57:58: If this is where you're at, we're still your friends.
58:02: And so there were some like that as well.
58:10: Thank you, Jennifer.
58:11: Does anyone else have something they'd like to ask? Yes, sir, Lee.
58:20: Did you ever hear about anyone who rented an auditorium and advertised it on such and such a date, come hear me give a talk about how my life turned around the moment I became convinced that God did not exist? No, I've never.
58:45: There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of, how would you say it? Those don't make good testimonials.
58:55: Anyone? All right, well, we're just past the hour.
59:04: This is when we normally end our Wednesday night.
59:06: Brother Rich, I wanna again thank you for coming and being with us tonight.
59:10: I wanna thank everybody for coming out.
59:13: Want to remind you that tomorrow night, Brother Rich is going to be speaking.
59:19: It's going to be to the seminary students, but it's available to everyone.
59:24: We're still gonna be in this room.
59:26: The seminary, we have about 20 students, so there'll be plenty of room.
59:32: And if you wanna come back tomorrow and hear his five philosophical arguments.
59:38: Five philosophical failures.
59:40: It's my report card for atheism.
59:43: It's all Fs.
59:44: Straight Fs.
59:44: Okay.
59:46: So if you're interested in hearing that, it will be a wonderful part two to tonight's lesson, and you don't have to be part of the seminary to come back tomorrow night.
59:57: So I would like to close with a word of prayer, and thank you.
01:00:00: Let's give Brother Rich a hand for coming and sharing with us.
01:00:05: Very grateful.
01:00:07: And I've never in my life seen somebody that ended at one hour perfectly, but I have a recorder right here.
01:00:12: It says one hour.
01:00:13: You are amazing.
01:00:15: Don't get used to him.
01:00:17: Don't get used to someone so punctual.
01:00:22: But let's pray.
01:00:23: Father, thank you for this opportunity to get to hear this testimony and to be encouraged to see someone who God, as he so eloquently stated, did not give up on him, but drew him in and used even the reality of atheism to show him the vacuous nature of unbelief.
01:00:46: And Father, I pray that tonight and on to tomorrow that everyone who's heard this will, that again, it would go into their ears and into their mind and to their heart, Lord, and especially anyone here who may not yet know Christ, that they would understand that abandoning faith and running away from Christ is to run away from the only one who can save.
01:01:12: And it is to run away from the one who created all things.
01:01:16: So Lord, help us not to turn from Christ, but to turn to him in repentance and faith.
01:01:23: We pray this in Jesus' name and for his sake.
01:01:26: Amen.