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Fresh Start Devotionals

Believe For if you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. (Romans 10:9 NLT) Recently our church went on a journey together through Vodie Baucham’s The Ever Loving Truth. Baucham made a choice to believe in the resurrected Lord of the Bible as an adult. He was not raised in the church, in fact, his mother was a follower of Buddha, not of Jesus Christ. His decision to follow Christ led him down a completely different path than he was on. He walked away from a promising football career to because a preacher of the gospel. Baucham says he believes the bible because “it is a collection of historical documents, written by eyewitnesses during the lifetimes of other eyewitnesses. The bible is divine in origin and it changes people’s lives.” According to Baucham, the reliability of the Bible isn’t even up for debate. He points out that we have more than 5,000 manuscripts or manuscript fragments of the New Testament scriptures, some of them written within 50 years of the events they cover. When you compare that with the 9 or 10 manuscripts of Julius Caesar’s Gallic Wars and 5 manuscripts of Aristotle’s Poetics and 10 manuscripts of the History of Herodotus, with the earliest manuscript being 900 years from the original, the Bible is one of the most documented ancient literary works we have. Many of the eyewitnesses of the events of the New Testament were willing to die instead of recant their testimonies. Think about that for a moment, would you die for a lie? Perhaps you would lay your life down for something you believe to be true, but no one in their right mind would die for something they know to be false. This authentic, holy document claims that Jesus died on a cross and rose from the dead on the third day. And it says that if we will confess that the risen Jesus is our Lord and believe that He rose from the dead, we will be saved. Do you believe? Then will you confess Jesus to be your Lord? Jim L. Wilson, Fresh Start Devotionals (Fresno, CA: Willow City Press, 2009).

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