There is only one way to God—it’s through our Lord Jesus Christ. Jesus said, “I am the way . . . No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). He is the only way to God.
That said, there are many roads to Jesus. We don’t all approach Him under the same circumstances. Think of the variety of ways in which people came to Christ in the book of Acts. Three thousand were saved through Peter’s sermon on the Day of Pentecost. Saul of Tarsus was saved after being blinded and knocked to the ground. The Ethiopian in Acts 8 was saved when Philip showed up in the desert just as he was puzzling over Isaiah 53. The Philippian jailer was saved during an earthquake, and a ship filled with terrified passengers became an evangelistic arena for the apostle Paul in Acts 27.
Who or what led you to Christ? We all come to Him through one message (the Gospel), by one means (by grace through faith), but God draws us all differently.
God Uses Circumstances to Bring Us to Christ. Several years ago in a prayer letter to his supporters, Billy Graham told of a mother in an African nation who came to Christ and grew strong in her commitment and devotion to the Lord. This alienated her from her husband; and over the years, he grew to despise and hate her fidelity to Christ.
His anger and bitterness reached a climax when he decided to kill his wife, their two children, and himself, unable to live in such self-inflicted misery. He decided he would accuse her of stealing his precious keys—the keys were to the bank, the house, and the car. Crossing over a footbridge over on the headwaters of the Nile River, he paused and dropped the keys.
Later that afternoon, his wife went to the fish market to buy the evening meal. As she was gutting the fish, to her astonishment, in its belly were her husband’s keys. She did not know how they had gotten there; but she cleaned them up and hung them on the hook.
The drunken young banker came home that night and pounded open the front door shouting, “Woman, where are my keys?” Already in bed, she got up, picked them off the hook in the bedroom, and handed them to her husband. When he saw the keys, he immediately became sober and was instantly converted. He fell on his knees sobbing, asked for forgiveness, and confessed Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.1
He Uses People to Bring Us to Christ. Not every story is that unusual, but most testimonies involve another person. The Lord’s favorite method of evangelism is the tell-a-person method. Church historian Philip Schaff described how the Gospel spread in the years right after the era of the apostles: “While there were no professional missionaries devoting their whole life to this specific work, every congregation was a missionary society, and every Christian believer a missionary, inflamed by the love of Christ to convert his fellow men . . . . Every Christian told his neighbor, the laborer to his fellow laborer, the slave to his fellow slave … the servant to his master and mistress, the story of his conversion as a mariner tells the story of the rescue from shipwreck.2
He Uses Literature to Bring Us to Christ. I had the joy of speaking at the annual convention of the Gideons, an organization that’s been distributing Scriptures for nearly 100 years. In the Gideon files are thousands of testimonies of people who have come to Christ by picking up a Bible in a hotel or hospital or prison and found Christ as Savior. Many have been saved by reading a sermon in the newspaper, a tract left in a restroom, or even a verse of Scripture scribbled on a poster at a ballgame.
God devises many ways of bringing us to Himself, and it’s all by grace. There’s only one way to God; but the journey to Christ takes different routes, just as a variety of highways and byways led people to Jesus in the dusty hills of Judea so many years ago.
###
Dr. Jeremiah is the founder of Turning Point for God, and serves as Senior Pastor of Shadow Mountain Community Church in El Cajon, California.
For more information about Turning Point, go to www.DavidJeremiah.org.
1 Billy Graham, “Prayer Letter from the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association,” July, 1989.
2 Philip Schaff, History of the Christian Church, Vol 2: Ante-Nicene Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1910), 20-21.
