For a while I have been making videos with stories of people who have found Jesus. I used to read many books with wonderful stories about how God intervenes in people’s lives. Ultimately, these stories all have the same meaning: God liberates people from a bad, selfish and dark life and gives them another chance, by blotting out their sins and showing them a new better way. Often inexplicable things happen, so that people can no longer ignore it: I have to be with Jesus! He can save me!
A while back we were filming a story at someone’s home in Amsterdam. She was so overjoyed… she had a smile on her face all the time. She told how she used to draw all the curtains, not long ago. And how her life was dominated by meaninglessness and disease. When we saw her there with that big smile, it was almost unimaginable!
What started to strike me…
I regularly heard the statement during such an interview: I thought I knew something about the Bible and about Jesus. But when I started reading that Bible myself, it turned out that nothing I had been told was correct. I especially noticed that with people in the ‘new-age corner’. There are even all kinds of books, workshops and videos that talk about Jesus… but it turns out to be a completely different version than the Jesus in the Bible! This is also the case among Christians. There too, many things that they have heard in their church are accepted as truth. That version of Jesus is also very often different from the one in the Bible.
Know you actually who is the Jesus of the Bible? Or do you think you know? And if yes, how do you know? Have you heard that from others, or have you read it yourself? Because when Jesus says who he says he is in the Bible, that is relevant to you. Very relevant!
In the course of my life I have made a lot of surprising discoveries 🙂 Read a bit of the practice in this piece I wrote earlier .
Why do people read the Bible so little? I think the book has a rather dusty image. Or perhaps an even bigger reason: this country is Christian, there are churches everywhere and many people, myself included, have attended a Christian school or have friends or family who are Christian. All that can kind of make you immune to words like ‘Jesus’, ‘God’, ‘Bible’. We all have our own thoughts about it… And that’s a shame, because the Bible shows something quite different. It is definitely an exciting, interesting and surprising book. The more you engage in it, the more it will speak to you and change you!
New website and video series!
And that’s how I got the idea to make a website for this and a series of short video tips – for the absolute beginners – by the alias ‘ Bible for Beginners ‘.
Below is the 1st video in the series:
…and the rest can be found on the site biblevoorbeginners.nl .
“I thought I was open minded”
To conclude this blog, I would like to share the story of someone who learned the truth through reading the Bible. This appealed to me enormously. This was someone who was looking for spiritual things and really researched EVERYTHING and excluded NOTHING…
He made the discovery of a lifetime in a small second-hand bookshop in Thailand…