Testimony of John Feakes

My good friend and outstanding Old Testament apologist John Plantz once asked me if I knew where King Solomon's temple was located. "In Israel…Jerusalem." I said. John smiled, "His temple was located on the side of his head!" Lame, yes, but still funny.

It's nice to say something funny and have people laugh. What isn't nice is when you say something serious that's near and dear to your heart, and THEN people laugh. That happened to me not long ago when I shared with a young lady from the University of Waterloo what the Bible has to say on the topic of creation. Fortunately, she stopped laughing when I began sharing with her some of the scientific evidences for biblical creation. Days later she surrendered herself to Jesus Christ and asked Him to be her Savior. Her boyfriend was none too happy with this development, and he accused me of coercing his girlfriend into becoming a Christian. He assured me that he would not be so easily swayed. He challenged our Christian faith on historic grounds, confident that Christianity could not be defended intellectually. He was wrong. The evidences for our faith are overwhelming. Finally, the Lord got a hold of this young man, and the last time I heard from him, he was joyfully serving him in his local church. Praise the Lord!

Though the battle with scoffers is often quite bitter, it is far outweighed by the sweetness of seeing one of them accept Jesus as Lord and Savior. All of us are called to this, you know - to preach and defend the Gospel (Mat 28:19, 1 Peter 3:15). Listen, if I can do it, anyone can. I was born into a household that hardly ever talked about God, and certainly never talked to Him. As a kid I was shy, fearful, and very overweight. At thirteen I looked at myself and decided that what I saw in the mirror wasn't me. I began to train - physically - and became an athlete. In a sense, I became my own god, and training was my religion. I entered many martial arts and kickboxing competitions and won many trophies. I was a fighter - a good one - but God had other plans for me. My fight, I was to learn, would no longer be against flesh and blood, but against a spiritual enemy that was very real, and very powerful.

One day in the gym I met an ex-bodybuilding champion, who began to share Jesus with me. I started to give him a hard time, but he was very patient so I decided to hear him out (that plus the fact that his arms were the size of eggplants - HUGE! He definitely had my attention). I don't know when exactly it hit me ( I was about 20 at the time), but I distinctly remember sitting in my room when the Gospel suddenly became crystal clear to me. I realized what the Bible had been stating for over 2,000 years, and what Mark (the bodybuilder) was trying to communicate for weeks: that all mankind had sinned against God and was guilty. All were condemned to separation from God forever in hell. But Jesus came took the punishment for OUR sins, even though He himself had never sinned. He died on the cross FOR US so that we could be deemed righteous in God's sight. A trade was made: Our sinfulness for His righteousness. What a deal. And all that we need to do is believe and tell Jesus that we accept Him as our only Lord and Savior, and that we are through with sin and want to live our lives for Him.

Almost from day one the truthfulness of the Gospel has ranked higher in my mind than its "positiveness". Sure the Gospel message is nice, but it is absolutely worthless if it isn't true! Early on I understood that God wanted all of His children to spread this wonderful Gospel of His to the world. In my mind, though, I simply could not divorce the "positiveness" of the message from its truthfulness. In other words, I simply could not present the Gospel to people if I could not reasonably demonstrate that it was true. There's a million other world views out their, each competing for people's minds. If the Bible is true, we ought to be able to defend it intellectually. That was my thought anyway. I was not disappointed.

I began reading everything I could on the topic of Christian apologetics. Scientific and historic evidences for the faith captivated me. John Whitcomb, Henry Morris, Josh McDowel, Norman Geisler, Kent Hovind, and Walt Brown, to name a few, are men who have dedicated their lives to defending the trustworthiness of the Christian faith. Their materials have helped me immeasurably over the years.

In 2000, after several years of research in the area of creation and evolution, I gave my first ever seminar / slideshow. It was about 45 minutes long and consisted of about 45 slides. At the time I was witnessing to my boss, a self-confessed atheist absolutely hostile to the faith. At my insistence she attended my seminar. When it was over I saw tears in her eyes. When I asked her what was going on she replied that when she was a little girl she asked God to show her if He was real. My seminar, she said, was an answer to prayer. God was real, and He proved it to her that night. Since then, she too has accepted the Lord as her personal Savior.

That night was a turning point. I knew that this was the call on my life - to preach and defend the glorious Gospel of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Since then, the Lord has brought together a team of men equally committed to this call. It is my sincere prayer that the information provided by this team can help you all as you preach and defend the Gospel in your own mission fields, whether they be in a foreign land, at school or on the job.

Blessings to you all

John