August 25. Lee Strobel. Lee has won multiple awards as the legal editor of The Chicago Tribune and is a New York Times best-selling author of more than forty books and curricula that have sold fourteen million copies.
At Colorado Christian University, Lee is president of the Lee Strobel Center for Evangelism and Applied Apologetics. That’s all pretty impressive on its own, but it becomes astounding when you note that well into his adulthood, Lee was a staunch atheist. “Atheist” as in the exact opposite of apologist. He went from being a man certain there was no God to a man whose life is dedicated to showing that God is and who God is. On this date in 1998, Lee published The Case for Christ.
When life leaves you unfulfilled, dig for truth.
Lee stumbled through the front door. His toddler, Alison, grabbed her toy blocks, scurried to her bedroom, and shut the door. Lee shook off her cold-shoulder reception. Tried to forget the times he had yelled. Kicked a hole in the wall. Made Alison and her mother—his wife, Leslie—cry. An atheist, he had chosen to focus on sensual pleasure. If there were no eternal consequences, then you grabbed all the pleasure you could. But chasing happiness with alcohol had left him unfulfilled, profane, and angry.
That night Leslie had big news. She had become a Christian. Lee’s first thought was “divorce.” He hadn’t signed up for marriage to a prudish do-gooder. But over time he noticed attractive changes in Leslie’s character and morality. In how she treated him and the kids.
One Sunday morning, Lee stirred as Leslie dressed. He had planned to sleep off last night’s drunk, but Leslie invited him to church, and he went. The speaker toppled misconceptions about Christianity. The claims disturbed Lee. Oh, he didn’t believe them. But if they were true, they had huge implications.
At its core, Christianity relied on one event, the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth. If it wasn’t true, Christianity was false. An investigative reporter for The Chicago Tribune and a graduate of Yale Law School, Lee was wired to dig for truth. So he set out to disprove the Christian myth.
For two years, Lee chased the evidence. He studied the claims of a dozen experts, authorities with degrees from places like Cambridge and Princeton. Atheists. Jewish scholars. Historians. Psychologists. Not one could disprove the resurrection. Lee’s head swam.
One Sunday afternoon, he shut himself in the bedroom with a yellow legal pad. On it, he dumped a summary of all he had learned—page after page after page—an avalanche of evidence. It all pointed to one place. Jesus was who He said He was: the Son of God. And Jesus backed up his claim by rising from the dead. Lee put down his pen. It would take more faith to maintain his atheism than to become a Christian.
Now what?
Lee grabbed a Bible and read John 1:12. “But to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God” (ESV). An equation formulated in his mind. Believe plus Receive equals Become.
Lee knelt beside the bed and poured out a lifetime of curl-your-hair immorality. After his confession, he received the forgiveness Jesus offered. He became a child of God.
Leslie was in the kitchen. And he went in and told her what had happened. She cried and threw her arms around him. She had told her friends that Lee was a hard-headed, hard-hearted legal editor, who would never bend his knee to Jesus, but one of them had read Ezekiel 36:26 to her. “And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh” (ESV).
For years, Leslie asked God to take her husband’s stony heart and replace it with a new one. Now, God had done it.
Over time, Lee quit being angry, disrespectful, and narcissistic. About six months later, Alison, now five years old, told Leslie and her Sunday school teacher, “I want God to do for me what he is doing for my daddy.” Lee and Alison became the best of friends. Lee had taken his family on a road to destruction. But when he dug for truth, God rescued them.
Does your belief system lead you and your loved ones toward destruction or toward restoration? When life leaves you unfulfilled, dig for truth.
Strobel, Lee. The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1998.
History vs Hollywood.“Lee Strobel Tells His Story of Finding Christ.” The Case for Christ. Accessed June 23, 2020. http://www.historyvshollywood.com/video/lee-strobel-speech/.
Story read by: Chuck Stecker
Introduction read by: Daniel Carpenter
Audio production: Joel Carpenter
Editor: Teresa Crumpton, https://authorspark.org/
Project Manager: Blake Mattocks
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