Professor and scientist James Tour has standard Zoom calls with overall strangers in buy to share the Gospel with them.
HOUSTON (BP) – In an unassuming workplace on the campus of Rice University, you can normally obtain professor James Tour on a Zoom connect with. Is he chatting with other researchers all-around the entire world about his groundbreaking investigate in nanotechnology? It’s possible. But extra usually than not, he’s talking with a stranger about the resurrection of Christ.
Anytime he has the opportunity – on his web-site, at a lecture or at the close of just one of his many YouTube video clips – Tour invitations anybody who does not believe that in the resurrection to converse with him about it. Seekers connect with him from all about. The only stipulation to obtain an hour of a single-on-a single time with one of the world’s top scientists? You have to be curious about the resurrection.
“You have to have a tranquil spot, a Wi-Fi connection and a camera turned on,” he tells them. “When they agree to that, I meet with them.”
Tour, who calls himself a Messianic Jew, teaches chemistry, laptop or computer science and nanoengineering at Rice. He has been given his share of accolades, these as remaining named “Scientist of the Year” by R&D Magazine in 2013 and remaining inducted into the Royal Modern society of Chemistry in 2020, just to name two.
He retains a lot more than 200 patents. But he’s a great deal quicker to mention a further variety – the 107 people today who received Christ previous year immediately after investing an hour with him.
Tour has a “burning motivation to see folks saved,” he advised Baptist Press. “As Rachel cried out, give me young children or I die. Lord, give me little ones, or I die,” he mentioned, quoting Genesis chapter 30.
Not all of Tour’s resurrection discussions are on Zoom. Many of them are at his household on Sundays.
For 25 years, he has taught a Sunday College class at West College Baptist Church near the Rice campus. He and his wife invite the course – which can amount upwards of 80 people – to their home for lunch following church. Several seekers settle for the invitation, where by they hear Tour share the Gospel by way of the resurrection.
Tour typically starts by utilizing the illustration of a bridge – guy on just one side, God on the other, a chasm of sin in involving.
“But I constantly funnel it correct into the resurrection of Jesus Christ,” he said. “The past verse that I share is Romans 10:9. ‘If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord, and think in your coronary heart that He’s risen from the lifeless, you shall be saved.’ This is specifically where by the Scriptures lead us to. It is not Jim Tour’s prescription. It is exactly in which the Scriptures guide us to.”
The resurrection varieties the basis for the other crucial doctrines of the Christian religion, he believes.
“We do not have to influence them of the Trinity,” he stated. “We do not have to encourage them of the virgin delivery. We do not have to convince them of the Noah’s Ark story. None of that. That’s hardly ever on the table for me.
“It is individuals two matters – the lordship of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus Christ. And I go proper after the resurrection, mainly because once the resurrection is established, the lordship is distinct.”
He lays out all the proof for Jesus’ literal demise and bodily resurrection. The reality that Roman soldiers were proficient in the practice of crucifixion, so there was no way Jesus was continue to alive when he was put in the tomb. The fact that Thomas was capable to truly feel and see the wounds in Jesus’ hands and facet. The actuality that Jesus appeared to much more than 500 folks following the resurrection and that He even ate with them. The reality that secular historians of the time affirm that Christ’s followers were being inclined to die alternatively than deny the resurrection.
“I would die for what I imagine,” Tour stated. “But these adult men and these ladies ended up not dying for what they believed to be legitimate. They were dying for what they understood to be legitimate. Since they saw it with their personal eyes. They observed Jesus risen from the useless. And no person dies for what they know to be a lie.”
Tour goes by this narrative with diverse persons every week. Most of them are really educated, he mentioned. The dialogue usually takes 30-40 minutes.
“I see individuals go from not believing in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ to believing in the physical resurrection of Jesus Christ based mostly upon this 30-minute conversation…,” he stated.
“I imagine why they occur to feel, to embrace the resurrection is truth, is due to the fact the truth of the resurrection was presently created on their hearts,” he claimed. “It’s by now there. I’m just bringing them to a level to confess to what’s by now there.”
Tour then prospects the man or woman in a prayer patterned following Romans 10:9.
“Once they have prayed that prayer,” he claimed, “it’s like a seed that’s sitting down right here in your coronary heart. That seed opens. Now, when you pray that prayer, now anything is gonna get started increasing.”
Tour reassures each new convert that their faith doesn’t have to be pretty significant.
“I do not have a hundred per cent assurance of everything in this lifestyle,” he tells them. “I never feel just about anything a hundred p.c. For all I know, we are living in a matrix.”
He then tells the story from Mark 9 about the gentleman who asks Jesus to heal his son. Recover my son “if you can,” the man asks.
“And Jesus states to him, ‘If you can? All issues are feasible to him who believes.’
“And the male says one thing pretty profound,” Tour mentioned. The gentleman says, “’Lord, I feel, enable my unbelief’ … that means that I do imagine, but you know, I’m not a hundred %. …
“Jesus didn’t say, ‘Well, you go absent when you are a hundred per cent, occur back again, I’ll heal your son.’ Jesus immediately healed his son.
“I do not know what percentage belief you have in the resurrection. Possibly it’s only 20 p.c. Which is superior enough. The Lord’s gonna support your unbelief.”
Tour then assigns homework to each individual person who prays to obtain Christ – 15 minutes of Bible research and meditation each morning. He has them begin in John 1. He tells them to be well prepared for a improve in their existence and behavior.
Paul asserts in 1 Corinthians that the resurrection is the most crucial point, Tour explained. Which is why he thinks it should really be ground zero for any conversation about the Gospel.
“This is God’s prescription for salvation,” he reported. “Why would not you use it?”
(EDITOR’S Take note – Laura Erlanson is handling editor of Baptist Push.)
