Seriously, How Cool Is God?!

If you’re following me on Twitter – @vinceantonucci – you heard a piece of this story, but here’s the fuller version, and it’s definitely worth reading…

I write out my messages, word for word, and then read them a couple times before Sunday. They never come out exactly how I wrote them, but it’s usually pretty close.

Yesterday, I was preaching in our second service when I started saying something I hadn’t planned to say. I didn’t make a decision to say it, it just came sorta started coming out of mouth. When I got done with that “section” – probably about 6 to 8 sentences – I thought, “That was kinda weird.”

So after the service I met this lady who was at Verve for the first time. She told me she was a Daoist who would be graduating soon with a Master’s Degree in Chinese medicine. (Daoism is a religion that originated in China.) (This lady was not Chinese.) (If you think it’s unusual for a Daoist to show up in church, you haven’t been to Verve. 70% of the people are not Christians when they first show up. It’s just about as good a chance for someone who shows up to be an atheist as a Jesus-follower.) So she told me she was a Daoist, and then thanked me for my message. She said, “There was one thing you said that I really appreciated. It was exactly what I needed to hear.”

I asked her what it was, but I was sure I knew the answer. The sermon was about the miraculous conversion of Saul/Paul, and I had taken some time to acknowledge how weird the story is, and that if you’re a cynical person with an anti-supernatural bias (which describes my natural mindset) it’s difficult to believe. But I explained that IF there is a God, He could certainly strike a person down, blind them, and speak to them from Heaven if He wanted to. If there is no God, this story is impossible. If there is a God, it would be no problem for Him. And I explained that people (like Oxford educated Gilbert West and Lord George Littleton) had tried to disprove the historical account of Saul/Paul’s conversion, but ended up proving it really happened and becoming Christians. And I was sure this Daoist graduate student was going to thank me for my intellectual approach to faith.

Nope.

She said what she totally needed to hear was … the part that I hadn’t planned on saying and had surprised me by just kind of popping out of my mouth.

Ummm, yeah. Seriously, how cool is God?!?!