Dr. Dobson: Greetings everyone. I'm Dr. James Dobson, and this is Family Talk. Every radio program that you hear was produced by James Dobson Family Institute. Thank you for listening today and joining us for this program, which I think will be inspirational to you all. Today we're continuing to pay tribute to my dear friend, Ravi Zacharias, who passed away a few weeks ago. He was a foremost name in Christian apologetics, I think the foremost name. He traveled around the world leading countless people to Jesus. He loved the Lord with all his heart. Ravi was a bestselling author, a passionate speaker, and Founder of the Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. Also in 2008, my wife Shirley tapped him to be the honorary chairman of the National Day of Prayer. He was such a great man of faith. And I, along with all of you, miss him greatly.
The program you're about to hear is the second part of a powerful testimony. Yesterday, Ravi talked about the immense struggles he had growing up, including depression and thoughts of suicide. And sadly, a lot of those issues came as a result of a verbally and physically abusive father. Through that difficult period Ravi explained his doubt and stubbornness to the idea of loving God. And yesterday ended on a bit of a cliffhanger in Ravi's story, so I'm anxious to let you hear the rest of the message. Let's listen now to the late Ravi Zacharias on today's edition of Family Talk
Ravi Zacharias: I was a student at the University of Delhi. And I kept pondering, I said, "My dad has said I'm going to be a failure. I really don't have peace within my heart. I'm not doing well in my studies. Maybe if I just took my life, that would solve it. And at least, to not exist is better than to exist, if what you enjoy when you're existing is such shallow sense of being and no hope and no meaning." I went to my university that day and put all kinds of chemicals marked, "Poison," in the science lab, put it into my briefcase. I didn't really think I was going to have the courage to do it, but I thought, "I'm going to somehow see if I will." Put all these things into my school bag and I went home that night.
People say, "Were you thoroughly depressed?" Absolutely not. In fact, I tried not to think much about it because I was going to do it as a moment of impulse and get it over with. The next day dawned, my mother was a teacher, and she was generally the last one out of the house, but she saw me still there. She said, "How come you've not left yet?" I said, "Little later. Little later." And she left and everybody was gone, the house was empty except for the cooks who were in the other end of the home. And I went into the bathroom, shut the door, took a tall glass, took a little bit from each one of those packets, put it into this glass, and I opened the faucet and ran that faucet and started to stir it into that glass. And before I could even have any common sense to stop myself, I guzzled that whole glass down.
The ironic thing about that was that all of those chemicals put together was so salty that my body was not able to keep it in, and my body was trying to reject it as I was trying to hold it in. Next thing I knew I was just collapsing on my knees and I shouted for help. One of the servants heard me shouting, came and broke that door down, and the next thing I was aware of a long while later was I was lying in a hospital bed in Delhi with all kinds of needles inside my body, and the doctor had not given me much of a chance to live. They were getting that intravenous into me, and they were trying to get the poison out of my system. And as I lay there in bed, I thought to myself, "I've really blown it now, haven't I? Not only did I not know how to live, I didn't even know how to die. Now I'm going to face the music good and proper."
But the thing that saved my dad's anger against me, I think, was the doctor didn't hold out much hope. He thought even if I did survive, I was going to do permanent damage to my inner system completely. And there is something horrible about lying in bed and knowing how much you've blown it. Completely blown it, and with no sense of hope or internal dignity. It's a horrible, horrible feeling of betrayal. You've betrayed everybody, including yourself. As I lay in that hospital bed, a man came to the door, I recognized him because he was the man who sang, "There is a balm in Gilead." So I knew my mind was clear, had I been also cheerful I would have said, "I hope he's not going to sing again, because that would have been awful for me at that time." But he didn't, he came in, and my mom said, "You're not allowed to come in here. How did you come in, he's in intensive care?"
He said, "I've come because the most important thing I can give your son right now is right here in my hand." And he took out a red New Testament, but he wasn't allowed to stay there, and he opened it to John chapter 14 and asked my mother to read it to me. My mother was a lovely lady, but she spoke with a very, very heavy accent. And to give her the King James version of the New Testament, to have her read it to me in that condition, only the sovereign grace of God could have brought something out of that. As she stumbled and started to read in John chapter 14, and then the words of Jesus saying, "I am the way, the truth, and the life, no one comes unto the Father, except through me." The way, the truth, and the life. I didn't know enough to expound on each one of those words. But then he came to these words, "I will not leave you as orphans, I will come to you. Before long the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live."
Those words, "Because I live, you also will live." And I prayed this prayer, I said, "Jesus Christ, I don't know who you are, but something in here tells me you are the author of life and you are what life is all about. If you will give me that life, give me that life, so that you change what I want to do." And here's the words I prayed, "I will leave no stone unturned in my pursuit of truth, because I will follow you with all my heart and with all my soul." Five days later, I walked out of the hospital bed a brand new man. Completely well. Completely New. And for the first time in my life I had what I believed was meaning. It didn't all come together overnight but I began to realize I had found the source of meaning. I had found the place from where I would find the answer. Let me give you four quick reasons why I believe Jesus provides that answer in a way nobody else does, and you will see His uniqueness and how He stands tall.
The first thing is this: when you're looking for life, how do you decide what is life's perfection? How do you know what life is meant to be? You see, the only reason you can judge something to be true or false is when you see it conforms to what actually is. And when you are trying to find out what life is meant to look like, what is the perfect reflection of life as it is intended to be, where do you look? We talk so much about love these days, where do you look to find out what love is like, what it is meant to be? We hear so much about marriage, about the home. What home do you look to, to find out what the home was intended to be? We talk about manhood, and we see more hoods than we see men. How do you find out what manhood is supposed to be? What womanhood is supposed to be? We talk of being and doing, how do you know what it really means to be?
Last year in Russia, an incredible story took place. A man who had been in Russian prisons for most of the last 50 years, in solitary confinement, was released. He was a Polish man. During the war when they captured him and they put him behind bars and then put them into solitary confinement, so many years had gone by that when they started to talk to him after the decades were going by, he sounded like he was talking gibberish, that he was not making any sense at all. So, psychiatrists called him a deranged man and left him as an idiot behind bars alone. And all of a sudden, about two years ago, some Polish man happened to be talking to him, and he said, "This man is not talking gibberish, he is talking a very old dialect of Polish. This is a legitimate language." One thing led to another, they released him and he has gone back to his homeland of Poland. When he went to behind bars and to solitary confinement, he was in his twenties, now I think he's somewhere in his seventies.
In those four to five decades, he had never even looked into a mirror. They said the first time they showed him a mirror, he just looked into it and just kept feeling his face, and the tears were running down his face like a little baby. All these decades had gone by, age had now taken over, he had even forgotten what he really looked like. Young people, imagine if life were like that for you and for me. Where we do not know what we look like, what we are meant to look like. Nobody in history, listen, nobody in history has ever represented the life of purity and perfection the way Jesus Christ has so uniquely represented the perfect nature and the character of God.
When you see what people have said about Him, here for example is a skeptic. A skeptic in history. He says this about Jesus, "The character of Jesus has not only been the highest pattern of virtue, but the strongest incentive in its practice, and has exerted so deep an influence that it may be truly said that the simple record of three short years of active life has done more to regenerate and to soften mankind than all the disquisitions and philosophers and all the exhortations of moralists." Here's a man who's telling us that no one has influenced the history of moral certitude and dogma the way the person of Jesus Christ has. I dare you to study His life, you will never find the sins of lust, greed, or pride in Him. No one ever spoke like Him.
After all these years of looking at the life of Christ, I have found Him to be the pristine example of what life was meant to be. Jesus Christ is the representation of absolute purity. And in His purity, He reveals to us what our lives were truly intended to be. If that is so, then we need to know that purity in life is not merely exterior, but it is interior. And out of the overflow of His very person and His being, all the goodness, all the kindness, all the entailments of moral virtue flowed from Him, and I hold up Jesus Christ to you as a perfect example.
One of my very good friends who paid with his life for having become a Christian. I went to see him in hospital once. Somebody had blown off his legs in a car bombing. And shortly after that, they were to succeed in taking his whole life. I remember this young man lying in bed. We were classmates in our undergraduate studies and he looked at me as I was praying with him and he said, "Brother Ravi, the more I see of others and anyone else, anywhere else, in any other worldview," he said, "the more beautiful Jesus Christ looks to me all the time." And I think you can take that; His purity is absolutely impeccable. Secondly, if it is not just an exterior but an interior purity that He gives to us, we also then find out that He's not just an idea, but He offers a relationship.
Young people, you will find out as the years go by that the most meaningful thing in your life is the relationships you have built and cherished and nurtured. I'm now in my mid-fifties and I've covered half of this world, many, many times over, had some extraordinary experiences in life, but the most thrilling thing to me is still to get back home and get to be near the ones who are nearer and dear to me. Who is with whom I enjoy that relationship that has taken years to build.
I remember when our little girl Naomi was born, I was away in Western Canada speaking and she arrived about a week or 10 days earlier than due. And when my wife phoned me and said, "You are the father of another little girl," I started laughing. I said, "Very funny, very funny." She said, "I'm not being funny, you are the father of another little girl." I said, "Yeah, yeah. Tell me another." I said, "Where are you calling from then?" She said, "The hospital." I said, "When was the baby born?" She said, "A couple hours ago." I said, "Yeah, I believe it. I believe." She said, "Ravi, I'm serious. You are a father of another little girl". And then I could tell by her voice I'd better listen. She was serious. She said, "I just had barely enough time to rush to the hospital."
So I rushed back as quickly as I could, flew back those 2000 miles. And I remember coming to the hospital and went to the floor where my wife was supposed to be and walked past the nursery. And I decided I wouldn't stop at the nursery first because I'm going to see my wife first. I said, "I'm going to see Margie and then together, we'll come and see the little one." But as I was walking by, I saw one baby by the side of the window, with the corner of my eye, with the hair at about a 45 degree angle like that, almost like a porcupine, and I said, "My, what a cute little Eskimo baby that is." Until suddenly I noticed at the top of that bassinet said, "Zacharias." I said, "That's no Eskimo baby, that must be my little girl." And from that moment on, I have never forgotten that tiny little face, took about a year or two before that hair would lie down, it stood like that for so long.
And it revealed her personality, my buddies here will tell you that she's a bubbly person. Absolutely effusive. In all the years that I've known her, she never, ever walked up to me, she always ran towards me and would just curl herself into my arm, she was quite little for many of those years. And I remember once speaking in Cambodia after she was born, I'd been gone, hadn't seen her for five weeks, and that was a long time. I hated to do that, but couldn't get out of that war torn country. So I arrived home at Toronto, where we lived at that time, and she was in her walker. And as I walked into the house, my wife was at her mother's place, and Naomi was in her walker, and as I walked in, we used to call her Nimi, I said, "Where's Nimi?" She said, "She's in a walker, I'm sure she's waiting for you." So I walked into the kitchen and there she was, hair at that 45 degree angle, just staring at me. And as she stared and I stared back, and a huge grin burst across her face.
And again, she nearly flipped over herself trying to run towards me in that walker. I bent down and picked her up and wrapped my arms around her as she nestled against my neck there. And in those 60 seconds, I learned more about the meaning of life than all the books on philosophy I have ever read. A clue to life's meaning is in relationships. We have a God who is not just distant and transcendent and far, we have a God who is coming near. He offers a personal relationship with you, young man and young woman. He offers that indwelling presence. People have often asked me on talk shows or interviews, "What doubts," somebody asked me this yesterday in an interview, "What doubts have you had since your conversion?" I have never had a second of doubt about who Christ is. Never. I can truthfully tell you, because what He did in that transaction, giving me that personal relationship. And when you're with Him, you're never ever alone. You can see the world differently.
G.K. Chesterton said, "God is like the sun, you cannot look at it, but without it you cannot look at anything else." I think once you come to grips with this and understand this, you begin to see the beauty and the power of the Christian faith maturing so wonderfully in your own life. I want to try and bring this to a close and try to tie in one of the most important truths that I think we have in our gospel. It is not despairing, the message is not despairing, but the message is one of hope and ultimate triumph over the grave. You see, when my mother died in 1974, she was only in her fifties, and died very suddenly. I remember then, as I was asked to preach at her funeral, the sadness which I had, which I believed, I just didn't know how I could preach.
But you see, about six years before she died something wonderful had happened in our home. When my brothers and sisters all had come to know the Lord one after another and changed our lives, my father was a bit of a tough one, quite resistant, quite powerful. He was a moral type of being and had a spiritual sense, but never had come to that point of a personal relationship with Christ. And then in 1968 in a church in Toronto one night with over 2,000 present, when the gospel was preached, my father stood up and just about stumbled up to the front and the alter as my mother also followed, and they both gave their lives to Jesus Christ.
I want to say something in tribute to my dad, because my wife said it at his funeral, when he died in '79, five years after my mom. We were standing literally by his coffin, and his pictures, some of his pictures were on that coffin lid. And Margie, my wife looked at me and said, she said, "Rav," she just grabbed my arm and said, "Looking at those pictures, you could tell when your dad came to know the Lord." She was right. He became such a dramatically changed man from the day of his conversion till the day my mother, his wife, died, I never saw him lose his temper even once. And as he wept at her grave, by her corpse, he wept and wept and wept, and he said, "Belle, I wish you would forgive me for all the years of pain that I brought you." And we assured him that she did because she loved the Lord. But that was the kind of sensitive heart he had after having a tough, coarse, resistant will.
And he asked me to preach at my mom's funeral, which I did finally. But I did after a struggle, thinking to myself, "She's gone, she's gone, she's gone." And then I felt as I was on my knees, "Complete the thought, gone where?" And I knew she'd gone home to be with her heavenly Father. You see young people, when Jesus rose again from the dead, he redefined life in every sense of the term, no other person ever conquered the grave the way Jesus did. And you will have to admit that if the resurrection is true, life's paradigm changes dramatically. Everything changes, the idea of justice, the idea of morality, the idea of purpose, the idea of destiny. And of course, Jesus Christ told the disciples that in three days, as they would destroy him, that those who would try to destroy him, in three days He would raise up that temple and conquer the grave. And when you and I pass on from this life, we are not just gone, we're going home to be with the Lord, for those who know Him.
My prayer for you this morning is this: if you know Him, make Him the passionate commitment of your life, He will never let you down. If you don't know Him, before the day is over, bow your head quietly and invite this Christ to come into your life. He will change not only what you do, He will change what you want to do and enable you to see this world through different eyes. In my case, it took the death bed for me to find life. Thank God for you, you don't have to get there. You can find life seated exactly where you are and be spared the horror of many other things. You have been a wonderful, patient audience. May God richly bless you. And thank you so much for giving me a hearing.
Roger Marsh: Well, what a powerful presentation from the late Ravi Zacharias here on Family Talk. I'm Roger Marsh, and I'm sure that you were moved by this two-part message. It is so encouraging to hear how the gospel absolutely restored Ravi's broken family. If after hearing this message, you would like some prayer, please give Family Talk a call. Our number is (877) 732-6825. And there's a member of our staff waiting, standing by at that number, to talk with you and to pray over you. Our emphasis here at Family Talk is on marriage, parenting, and the overall health of the family. But of course it's all meaningless if we don't point you to Jesus first. You can call (877) 732-6825 and a member of our staff will be happy to pray with and for you.
Also, you can learn more about the life and ministry of Ravi Zacharias as well. You can also get that information when you go to drjamesdobson.org. Well, that's all the time we have for today. Be sure to tune in again tomorrow as we continue to honor the life of Ravi Zacharias by revisiting another classic program, that's all coming up on the next edition of Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk.
Announcer: This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.