Where I once believed people were there to be used, I started thinking of other people first.
Christ appeared alive on several occasions after the cataclysmic events of that first Easter.
On December 19, 1959, at 8:30 at night I placed my trust in Christ as Savior and Lord and asked Him to come into my life and forgive me.
Where I once constantly lost my temper, I found myself arriving at a crisis and experiencing peace.
The New Testament witnesses were fully aware of the background against which the resurrection took place.
I am not a Christian because God changed my life; I am a Christian because of my convictions about who Jesus Christ is.
Here`s the simplest answer: Within weeks, the disciples proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus Christ, that He had been bodily raised from the dead and appeared to them.
Why don`t the names of Buddha, Mohammed, Confucius offend people? The reason is that these others didn`t claim to be God, but Jesus did.
Now, whenever you read any historical document, you always evaluate it in light of the historical context.
For centuries many of the world`s distinguished philosophers have assaulted Christianity as being irrational, superstitious and absurd.
From that foundation, Christianity spread throughout the Roman Empire and has continued to exert great influence down through the centuries.
The writers of the four Gospels either had themselves been witnesses or else were relating the accounts of eyewitnesses of the actual events.
I once had a lot of hatred, mainly toward my father, an alcoholic.
Both Jewish and Roman sources and traditions admit an empty tomb.
Jesus claimed He had the power to raise himself from the dead and His followers would be raised from the dead. That`s a unique claim in the literature of religion.
After I set out to refute Christianity intellectually and couldn`t, I came to the conclusion the Bible was true and Jesus Christ was God`s Son.
The first thing that stuck in the minds of the disciples was not the empty tomb, but rather the empty grave clothes - undisturbed in form and position.
Prayer is talking with God. God knows your heart and is not so concerned with your words as He is with the attitude of your heart.
As a reward for their efforts, however, those early Christians were beaten, stoned to death, thrown to the lions, tortured and crucified. Every conceivable method was used to stop them from talking.
But Jesus claimed to be God. He claimed that unless we are personally related to Him we are still in our sins and we are not saved.
Because the New Testament provides the primary historical source for information on the resurrection, many critics during the 19th century attacked the reliability of these biblical documents.
Paul the apostle recounted that Jesus appeared to more than 500 of His followers at one time, the majority of whom were still alive and who could confirm what Paul wrote.
If they had connived a scheme, and Christ had not been raised from the dead, where would have been the hardest place on the face of the earth to convince anyone? In Jerusalem.
By the end of the 1 9th century, however, archaeological discoveries had confirmed the accuracy of the New Testament manuscripts.
On that Sunday morning the first thing that impressed the people who approached the tomb was the unusual position of the one and a half to two ton stone that had been lodged in front of the doorway.
If Jesus Christ was who He claimed to be, and He did die on a cross at a point of time in history, then, for all history past and all history future it is relevant because that is the very focal point for forgiveness and redemption.