Wow, two posts in one day.

I certainly never thought that would happen! K, now I'll tell you why: I have a prayer request! See, I get on this one message board, and an atheist asked a bunch of questions about God and Christianity. So I started up this dialogue with this one guy where he's asking questions (or stating assertions!) and I'm responding from an evangelical Christian perspective. I've been trying to make my responses as biblically based and easy to understand as possible without losing the amazing beauty of the theological points (LOL, I feel the thinker "C" side of me kicking in... remember the DISC test?). Most of all, I'm trying to show the love of Christ to this person in the way that I talk to him, especially since he has been responding very aggressively to me. Hmm... reminds me of a message that we heard at church recently. About people knowing us by our love! Anyway, this has gone on continuously for a few days now, and I really need your prayer that whatever I write comes straight from God and that this person's heart would be moved by God's truth. I realize that it is not my job to bring this person to Christ, but that the Holy Spirit will move him in His timing. But if God can use me to nudge this person one step closer, that would be awesome!

I'm so thankful for Dad. He's been giving me lots of really good advice about things to bring up and how to respond. Sometimes it really amazes me how smart he is! Also what's really cool is that God has been bringing to mind a lot of different analogies and images I can use to describe certain aspects of Christianity. Some of them I heard really recently (like at our Worldview study) and some of them I haven't heard for years. It's definitely God!

One thing that's not good is that because this is a forum, a few other people have been throwing out their opinions. We've had all sorts of conflicting views of "Christianity" from the idea that good works are part of what gets you to Heaven to the Catholic belief of purgatory. It's really frustrating when I write for a long time and try to keep it as Biblically-based as possible and then a bunch of other people saying they're Christians come in and contradict what I say, yet insist that they agree! And then they go even further and say that down deep, we really all agree and while we're at it, it's probably the same God that every religion worships anyhow! GRRR!! I really don't want to respond to each of these people because I don't want to make Christianity look like it's warring inside itself. Not a good example!

So yeah, I'd really appreciate your prayers. I need wisdom. I'm really having to rely on God for every single word, and I really want to help lead this person to the truth. I have a feeling that because of the way this person is responding, something has happened in his life that would make believing in Christianity emotionally difficult (like the death of a loved one—and the knowledge that if Christianity were true, this person would be going to Hell). He's stated that he was raised a Christian, so I think there must be some personal experience that he's shielding with his arguments (most of which are about the "unfairness" and "irrationality" of what he calls "good" people going to Hell). But I'm really encouraged by the fact that He's taking the time to have this conversation. Like Dad told me, if he really didn't feel the Holy Spirit convicting him on something, he would have left the conversation long ago.

Thanks guys!