I'm told that in the last few weeks as Ravi's condition worsened, the ministry was flooded with messages of gratitude for this pillar of the Christian faith. Ravi was an anointed man of God who displayed a profound love for people and a fervor for the gospel of Jesus Christ. Now, this is the first time I've been back in this studio for several months after being sequestered with Shirley in a small condo in California, and walking into this studio today brought very warm and nostalgic memories for me, especially about Ravi Zacharias.
He was here on Saturday morning in September. It was actually September the 7th, and we sat and talked together for the last time. He's been on my program many times through the years, and this one was the finale. He was sitting right across the table from me just a few months ago. And he sounded healthy. He sounded in good spirits and he spoke with such conviction and passion as he always did.
Roger Marsh: Boy, that is so true, Dr. Dobson, I think it is very safe to say there will never be another Bible teacher or especially an apologist like Ravi Zacharias. He was such a godly man and an unparalleled champion and pioneer of the Christian faith. I'm Roger Marsh and this week here on Family Talk. We are honoring Ravi Zacharias' life and legacy by revisiting a few of his timeless messages. Today, we are re-airing a presentation that Ravi gave many years ago where he examined his own spiritual journey. Dr. Dobson, we actually replayed this message last winter while you were on a writing assignment. Let's hear now the kind words that you used to introduce this meaningful message this past January.
Dr. Dobson: The guest that we're going to hear in just a minute is no stranger to Family Talk. In fact, we receive overwhelming responses from you, the listeners, each time we feature him on our broadcast. I'm talking about my great friend and the person that I respect so highly, Ravi Zacharias. He's an accomplished author, a Christian apologist, as well as a dynamic speaker. Zacharias also served as the honorary chairman of the National Day of Prayer, back in 2008.
I remember him making a comment when he was involved with the National Day of Prayer and Shirley was pressing him pretty hard. And he said to an audience one time, "Be careful about Shirley Dobson. She has a marvelous plan for your life, and she can't wait to tell you about it." Anyway, he's an anointed man of God. And every time he opens his mouth, we're captivated by the truth that he shares. I especially love today's message from Zacharias because he turns back the pages of his own life. He will talk about his journey from India to his prominence here in the United States. The first time I heard his testimony, I was shocked by the heartache he endured. Now that I have sufficiently intrigued you, let's get on to today's broadcast of Family Talk, featuring Ravi Zacharias.
Ravi Zacharias: Many years ago, when I was living in Toronto, Canada, that time I remember a major commercial on television advertising a Yamaha motorbike. And what happened in that commercial was fascinating. Questions would emerge on the screen. Some of them were very ponderous questions. Do you know the age of the universe? How far is it from this to another planet? And so on. All these scientific, philosophical questions, and then rather silly questions like, do you like pizza? And trivial issues.
Those questions then would build in sort of hundreds of them on the screen at the same time. The screen would go black and there would be a silhouette of a motorbike that would emerge with an ominous sounding instrument at the back, and then just saying "Yamaha." It would say "it may not be the answer, but at least it's not another question." I am sure that was well-thought through, but if your Yamaha breaks down, it would also pose another question. "Why did I buy this and not another motorbike?"
Questions plague our minds. From the time you begin to speak, you begin to use the word "why." And initially they are merely questions of trying to know a little more, and then they just become irritating questions to keep a conversation going. But then you come into your teenage years and the questions begin to feel very intense. And as the years go by, sometimes those questions are not answered, and it would be very easy then to become cynical and assume that there are no answers.
Listen to me carefully please. G. K. Chesterton, the English philosopher, theologian said this. He said "For the Christian, joy is a central factor of his or her existence, and sorrow is only a peripheral one." Joy is central and sorrow is peripheral. "The reason being" he said, "for the Christian, the fundamental questions are answered. The central questions of life are answered. Some of the peripheral ones may not be, therefore joy becomes fundamental, sorrow becomes peripheral." He said "for the one who is not a Christian," he said, "sorrow becomes fundamental and joy becomes peripheral because the fundamental questions remain unanswered. And at best only the peripheral ones may be addressed." Is that a correct assessment by Chesterton? I believe it is.
Now, young people, there are many ways in which I could address this issue of Jesus among other gods. I've written about it quite profusely, addressed it in various forums. Sometimes philosophically demanding one, sometimes more existentially strongly felt questions, but I want to talk to you this afternoon from the vantage point that I had felt it as a teenager, and how I felt some of those issues then more meaningfully responded to. You see the answers are basically the same, the way you support those answers may change with the years to come.
So I want to take you back. In fact, as Dan was walking me up here, he said, "You're going to look at this audience and is going to take you back many years in your own life." I don't know whether he was stressing many years or what, but the fact is well taken. I go back to my own teenagers, born in Mudras, raised in Delhi. I lived in India till I was 20 after which my father immigrated to Canada. But I remember as a young teenager, struggling with many, many issues. In many ways, as I was part of other young people's gatherings, nobody would have ever known looking at me how deeply I felt these struggles, because it is easy to put on a mask and pretend that all is well. You always had the quip and the line and the funniest story. And yet when I went back to my home every night, there was a deep sense of loneliness inside of me, some of which I could not even explain.
I recall one day sitting in our drawing room in Delhi and supposedly studying my physics textbook, but in the background, very quiet softly was playing the radio and I was tuning into what was then called radio salon. They used to be a nightly program called the choice of the people and many of the English pop songs would be played every evening. With this textbook open, I was listening to it and a particular song came on and I remember putting my pen down because of the way it sounded almost Eastern in its background sound but very Western in the musician who was narrating it, the musician, his name was Ed Ames, and the song was called Who Will Answer.
Every evening when it would come, I would take a pen and write down another verse of that. This is the way it went: "from the canyons of the mind we wander on and stumble blind, way through the often tangled maze of starless nights and sunless days hoping for some kind of clue or road to lead us to the truth, but who will answer? As side by side two people stand, together vowing hand in hand that love's embedded in their hearts. But soon an empty feeling starts to overwhelm their hollow lives. And if they ask the hows and whys, who will answer? As high upon a lonely ledge, a figure teeters near the edge, while jeering crowds collect below, to egg him on with, "Go, man, go!" And none will ask what led him to his private day of doom, and who, who will answer?
As far upon a distant hill, a young man's lying very still, his arms will never hold his child because a bullet running wild has struck him down, and now he cries, 'My God, oh, why, oh, why?' And who will answer? As 'neath the spreading mushroom tree, the world revolves with apathy while overhead a row of specks roars on drowned out by discotheques. And if the secret button's pressed, because one man has been outguessed, who will answer?
Then came this stanza, is our hope in walnut shells? Worn around the neck with temple bells, or deeper than some cloistered walls where hooded figures pray in shawls or high upon some dusty shelves or in the stars or in ourselves? Who will answer?" The chorus went this way: "If the soul is darkened by a fear it cannot name. If the mind is baffled when the rules don't fit the game, Who will answer? Who will answer? Who will answer?" If there was a song that mirrored my confusion, that was it. But what was so interesting to me is that all along, if I would phrase the question in my mind, I would say something like, "what is the answer?"
Interestingly enough, this man was saying, who will answer? Who has the authority? I think the biggest struggle of my life was a struggle I had with my father. My dad was an honorable man. He was a good man at work. Well-respected, very powerful man. But he was a man with extraordinarily high expectations, expectations that I knew I was never going to be able to meet. I came up as one of five brothers and sisters, my older brother then myself, the two girls, and then my younger brother. And in that home, I knew somehow I was not meeting the standard that the rest of them were doing very well at, whatever the explanation may have been.
One of my great struggles was with a sensitive heart, I did not know how to cope with a dad who had a violent temper. And if he were here today to tell you, he would agree with what I'm saying to you. When he lost temper, he became extremely vicious. I remember him beating every member of the family in the fit of that rage. And often I'd get the worst of it. And one night particularly something happened in the home that I don't need to go into. Delhi can get quite cold in December, almost down to freezing temperatures. And he was so upset with the rest of us, that he literally put my mother and the five of us kids outside the home and shut the door on us. We were in our nightclothes and we didn't know where to go. My mother on the other hand was an extremely kind, gentle and a very strong woman in her character.
In India there is a proverb that says "whatever you are overflowing with will spill out when you're bumped," whatever you're overflowing with will spill out when you're bumped. It has in mind, a village woman carrying a port or an urn of milk or water or something on her head. And it's right to the brim. And suddenly as some careless lad runs across her path and she stops for a moment and whatever is up to the brim there, begins to spill out. It is intended to convey what your real character is about. Whoever you are in your character, that characteristic will spill out when somebody annoys you or cuts into your path.
Notice my mother's response. I said, we can't spend the night out here. It's cold. And I was so upset on the inside, particularly seeing her hurt like this, I said, "Let's go to one of my friend's house. They'll let us in for the night." She said, "No, we can't do that because your dad is well respected in this place and I don't want him to get a bad name in the community. We'll spend the night outside. So we went to one of our neighbor's homes that had a stairway outside their home. And the five of us kids huddled underneath that stairwell there, and my mother unwrapped half of her sari and wrapped it around the five of us, every one of us five kids remembers that night. And very seldom have we ever talked about it because it was a terrifying night for us that we could be put out of the homes so callously and so indifferently.
That night I began to say to myself, "where is this God that everyone talks about all the time? You see the pictures of gods, you see it in your schools, you hear it in the chants, you see it in idols, you see the temples, all of these places." I said, "Where is this God who doesn't really seem to have his arm around us when we need it very much." So that first struggle I had was with my dad. I think the turning point came when one night, he looked me in the eye, when I had not done very well in school. And he said, "You are going to make me ashamed of myself someday. You're never going to make anything of your life. You are going to be a complete failure."
I just recoiled with that, and I said, "Well, he's probably right," but I just didn't know how to respond. Which led me to the second struggle I had. The second struggle was, I never really was a good student. I don't know whether it was the absence of the discipline or the absence of the ability. I couldn't keep up with the competition that was going on all around me. Whatever I did, I made my attempt, but I lived more for the cricket field or the tennis court. That's what my life was to be all about. It wasn't to be about books. And the more I struggled and the more I didn't do well, the less I was able to live with peace within my own heart. You all very well know because you represent a culture where competition is severe in studies. It is not just that you're expected to pass, you're expected to come somewhere at the top. If you're not the first, second or third, you're just not performing up to par.
The third struggle I had was that I toyed every now and then in my mind, "would it be better? Would it be better if I were to just quietly take my life and end it all because I don't have life's answers?" So, one day a tragedy struck my life, when one of my very good friends, literally poured a can of kerosene over himself, set himself a blaze and took his life. I was terribly upset with that. And it was the same thing, not able to perform in school. So on the way back after his funeral, where his body was burned and so on, and the ashes were being shoveled into a container there, I looked at the priest and I said, "can you tell me where this person is now? Where is this person now? Just one moment alive. The next moment gone. Can you tell me where this person is now?"
And he looked me in the eye, and in Hindi he said to me, he said, "This is a question you'll be asking all your life and I'm not sure you'll ever find a satisfactory answer to that." And he went on to philosophize in some way, which meant absolutely nothing to a young teenager. And I thought if a man who was a priest, did not have the answer to the most fundamental questions. And I was going to be looking for it all my life and not finding an answer, what good was all this going to be?
Now, I want you to hear me, young people. Ultimately, when your questions are distilled, you take all of the surrounding issues that prompt certain questions. There really are four fundamental questions in life, you at some stage will ask, if you are to make sense out of your life. The first is the question of origin. The second is the question of morality. The third is the question of meaning. And the fourth is the question of destiny. Origin, how did I come into being? Morality, how can I determine what is right and what is wrong? Meaning, what is the purpose of life itself? And destiny, what happens to a human being when he or she dies?
Origin, meaning morality and destiny. The two that plagued me most were the questions of destiny and the questions of meaning. As a young man, I don't ever recall getting into anything greatly immoral, my choices were not that wide, but I do want you to know that I struggled with meaning, how do I find meaning and purpose in life? Meaning that is so powerful that I don't need a high for it to be meaningful. And no amount of low was going to take it out of my mind. And destiny, what happens to a human being when he or she dies?
I was wrestling through these and trying desperately to come to a conclusion. In my years as a university student in Canada, I remember reading the story by an existentialist philosopher, Albert Camus. Camus tells of a man who lived in a little town with his wife. He was a diamond merchant. And one day he took his wife into the big city to sell his diamonds. She had never been into the big city. Camus was an existentialist philosopher. The existentialist philosophers basically talked about life as only having meaning that you choose to give to it. There was no objective meaning out there. They basically challenged you and me to take life with a passion, to live it for a moment and find your own meaning.
And Camus was one of those philosophers who thought his idea was take life by the throat. Even when there is no meaning, you find meaning so that you find some authentic way of living. So here's this diamond merchant with his wife who comes into the big city. He goes to sell his diamonds and tells her you just walk around the city and I will go and sell these diamonds. At the end of the day, we will meet, we'll have dinner. And then we'll go back to go to a hotel, spend the night, then get back to our town tomorrow. So he goes about his business. She's alone.
Now, as she is alone for the first time in the big city, she is struggling with certain temptations. Camus doesn't tell us what those temptations are, except that she'd had them as a young teenager, and now she thinks she has the opportunity without getting caught, she could get into whatever she'd wanted, but she is somewhat fearful. What if her husband finds out? So ambivalent, struggling to give into this temptation and resist it, her husband arrives, and the day is over. They go into the hotel, check into the hotel for the night. He is sound asleep. She is unable to fall asleep because she thinks she'll never have this opportunity again.
So while he's sound asleep, she awakens, goes to her suitcase there, gets into some clothes and goes out into the night. And in the words of Camus, goes and enjoys the lust of the night. Enjoys all of that. Comes backs. Quietly slips into the hotel room, gets into bed. The husband is totally unaware of her absence. And now she's got her head down on the pillow. Now she can't sleep for a different reason. The regret, the guilt, the sorrow is welling up within her and she feels the tears begin to come down the side of her face. As soon as she is beginning to feel those tears, she's fighting them off, but as unable to bottle them in, and just explodes in sobs.
The husband sits up and says to her, "What's the matter? What's the matter?" And she pushes him away and says, "Nothing. Just nothing." And I bend these words by that story. The loneliest moment in life is when you have just experienced that which you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it has let you down. The loneliest moment in life is just when you've experienced that which you thought would deliver the ultimate, and it has let you down. I had various ways of trying to find the ultimate, none of them were satisfying. I even found myself going to a Youth for Christ meeting. And the only reason I went was because they told us they were going to serve refreshments after the meeting.
And I would go anywhere where there were serving refreshments. I don't know this was supposed to be a religious meeting, especially since the leading singer sang a well-known gospel song that meant nothing to me. And the song was called There Is a Balm in Gilead. So I looked at my friend, who'd come along with me. He was a young Hindu lad, and I said to him, "What on earth is a bomb in Gilead?" I didn't know he was saying balm, I thought he was saying bomb. I was just hoping we weren't sitting in Gilead. I said, "What on earth is a bomb in Gilead?" He said, "I don't know you joker. You brought me here. I didn't bring you."
The lady next to me grabbed my tie - and that was really not nice. She grabbed my tie and she says to me, "Young man, don't you know you're in the house of God?" I said, "House of God?" I didn't know I was in the House of God. I was in the New Delhi municipal corporation auditorium. I didn't know that was the house of God. And I said, "Well, what's the point? You know, nobody understands anything here anyway. They're just sitting looking at all of this. They don't know what this means." And at the end of it, they didn't even serve refreshments. And that was one ruined evening.
Roger Marsh: Well that was the unmistakable voice of the late Ravi Zacharias. I'm Roger Marsh. And we really hate to interrupt this broadcast, but unfortunately we've run out of time for today. What Ravi Zacharias shared was really quite raw, especially the strained relationship he had with his father. I'm sure you might be able to relate to that pain that he talked about. That's why I hope you'll come back again next time to hear the conclusion of Ravi Zacharias' testimony. I think you'll be encouraged by what he shares.
In the meantime, be sure to visit drjamesdobson.org to learn about Ravi's ministry, or the many books that he authored. That's drjamesdobson.org, and then tap on to today's broadcast page. Our mission here at Family Talk is to uphold marriages and families through programs like the one you heard today. An interactive way we can do so is through the Dobson digital library. Visit dobsonlibrary.com to listen to the many thousands of Dr. Dobson's radio broadcasts. There you can also read any of our blogs and articles, as well.
Now, this library addresses topics such as raising kids, resolving marital conflicts, and passing on a Christian legacy. Whatever you may be going through in your family right now, we have something that can help you out. So I hope you'll take advantage of this great resource by visiting dobsonlibrary.com. Thanks so much for listening today and for supporting our broadcast ministry. Be sure to tune in again tomorrow to hear the conclusion of this moving testimony from the late Ravi Zacharias. You won't want to miss that presentation on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh. Hope you have a safe and healthy day.
Announcer: This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.