Ravi Zacharias – Jojo Agot

Ravi Zacharias on World Views

Ravi Zacharias: All world views seek to answer four basic questions: origin, meaning, morality and destiny.

All these four questions have to be answered in two ways… Every particular answer has to correspond to truth: either through empirical form of measurement or through the logical reasoning process. And when those four are put together, they must cohere and not be incoherent. The two tests: correspondence and coherence.

I guarantee you, only in the Judeo-Christian worldview will you find these four questions answered with corresponding truthfulness and with a coherence of a world view.

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Ravi Zacharias on Prayer

From Ravi Zacharias’ The Lotus and the Cross:

Prayer is a constant reminder that the human being is not autonomous. Prayer, in its most basic form, is the surging of the human spirit in its weakness, grasping at the Spirit of God in His strength. Sometimes mere words cannot give shape to the longing of the heart. You see, God answers every prayer by either giving what is asked for or reminding the petitioner that God’s provision is built on His wisdom and executed in His time. But the answer is always for the instruction and nurture of the soul.

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Subtle Heresies

I once heard Ravi Zacharias talking about two kinds of heresies according to Frank William Boreham: the heresy of hereness and the heresy of thereness.

The heresy of HERENESS is the idea that God is HERE (not out THERE) and so therefore, if I am to escape His presence, I simply have to get out from this place. Jonah is the perfect example of this. When God called him to preach in Nineveh, he FLED to a distant land, falsely believing that by going away, he had escaped from his accountability to God.

The heresy of THERENESS is the exact opposite. It is the idea that God is out THERE and if I am to escape His presence, I just need to stay right here and not go out there. Adam is the perfect example for this. When he and Eve succumbed to the temptation, they hid in the bushes and covered themselves with fig leaves. When they heard God walking in the garden, Adam falsely believed that God is just out THERE, unable to see him.

Both views of the presence of God are wrong. But of course we know all that. In theory, at least.

Things would only get a little complicated when we fool ourselves into believing that we could get away with little compromises just because we’re outside church walls or on vacation and nobody sees us. In Psalm 139: 7- 11, David wrote these classic verses about the omnipresence of God. If this psalm doesn’t make us think twice about sinning in private, I don’t know what would.

Where can I go from your Spirit?
Where can I flee from your presence?
If I go up to the heavens, you are there;
if I make my bed in the depths, you are there.
If I rise on the wings of the dawn,
if I settle on the far side of the sea,
even there your hand will guide me,
your right hand will hold me fast.
If I say, “Surely the darkness will hide me
and the light become night around me,”
even the darkness will not be dark to you;
the night will shine like the day.

Broken Clocks

“[There’s a story] of a man who used to go to work at a factory and every day would stop outside a clockmaker’s store to synchronize his watch with the clock outside. At the end of several days the clockmaker stopped him and said, “Excuse me, sir, I do have a question for you. I see that every day you stop and adjust your watch with my clock. What kind of work do you do?”

The man said, “I’m embarrassed to tell you this; I keep the time at the factory nearby, and I have to ring the bell at four o clock every afternoon when it is time for the people to go home. My watch doesn’t work very well, so I synchronize it with your clock.”

The clockmaker says, “I’ve got bad news for you. My clock doesn’t work very well either, so I synchronize it with the bell that I hear from the factory at 4:00 every afternoon.”

If you’ll pardon the grammar, what happens when two wrong watches correct themselves by each other? They will get wronger and wronger all the time. Even a clock that doesn’t work may show you the right time twice a day…but it’s not because it’s keeping time!”

Excerpted from Ravi Zacharias, Address to the United Nations’ Prayer Breakfast.

Losing Our Ability to Reason

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“In the 1950s, kids lost their innocence. They were liberated from their parents by well-paying jobs, cars, lyrics and music that gave rise to a new term, ‘the generation gap.’ In the 1960s, kids lost their authority. It was the decade of protests. Church, state and parents were all called into question and found wanting. Their authority was rejected, yet nothing ever replaced it.

In the 1970s, kids lost their love. It was the decade of nihilism, dominated by hyphenated words beginning with ‘self’—self-image, self-esteem, self-assertion. It made for a lonely world. Kids learned everything there was to know about sex and forgot everything there was to know about love, and few had the nerve to tell them that there was indeed a difference. In the 1980s, kids lost their hope. Stripped of innocence, authority and love, and plagued by the horror of a nuclear nightmare, large and growing numbers of this generation stopped believing in the future.”

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