Ravi - His great and tragic legacy

At seventeen years old, the young man, depressed by his grades in school, and his average ability in playing Cricket found himself contemplating suicide. He didn’t know that the maximum number of suicides in India occur just after school examinations, but he definitely felt the weight of having never attained academic excellence and the shame it would surly bring to his family. He simply didn’t care and he didn’t want to live anymore.
Although his parents were Christians and he went to church with them fairly regularly, nothing about the Christian faith became real to him. He had never even opened a bible on his own initiative. As such, the young man thought there was no real difference between himself and an atheist. Maybe that softened his conscience as he was about to become another sad statistic of youth suicide. At his parent’s home in New Delhi, the depressed boy having no hope for the future in this life and no idea what awaited him in the next, ingested the poison, closed his eyes and waited to die.
But the boy didn’t die. As he slowly and painfully awoke hours later confused and dehydrated in a hospital bed, the he realized that his plans were thwarted. A servant from the house had found him passed out and rushed him to the closest hospital. Not long after becoming responsive, laying in the hospital bed with his mother standing nearby, did a man walk into their room. The stranger was not a Dr. and was not invited in, so his presence was a bit curious. The man had a little red Gideon’s New Testament Bible and he offered it to the young patient. Seeing that he was too weak to reach out and take it, the man opened it up to read its words aloud. The boy’s mother gently tried explaining to the stranger, although his intentions seemed good, that her son needed rest and privacy at the moment. The unknown man, aware that the boy had just tried to commit suicide, politely replied that her son needed to hear God’s word more than anything else.
With that, he opened the New Testament to the gospel of John and read from the fourteenth chapter - "I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you. Before long, the world will not see me anymore, but you will see me. Because I live, you also will live.” It was those words from verse nineteen that resonated with the boy. “Because I live, you also shall live.” That promise of Jesus seemed to bring life into the boys poisoned body and purpose into his broken spirit. Upon hearing these words in Red, the boy who just previously didn’t want to live, having no reason to live, now believed that if Jesus himself was alive, then he too wanted to alive. And not just live - but live in God, and for Christ. The young man purposed in his heart to leave no stone un-turned in his pursuit of truth - that is to say, his pursuit of God.
Laying in the hospital bed that day in 1963, this young man’s life was forever transformed by hearing Jesus’ words. And in turn, God would use him to transform many other lives for the kingdom of Heaven. The stranger with the bible was named Fred, and the boy he read the gospel to was seventeen year old Ravi Zacharias.
Within just eight years of his unsuccessful suicide attempt, Ravi had become a passionate preacher - He spend the summer in Vietnam preaching the gospel to both US soldiers and VietCong members. Soon after that, in 1972 Ravi married his once youth group friend, Margaret Reynolds. They would remain together until the end. Upon graduating from Ontario Bible College in Canada, Ravi soon began preaching for a Christian Missionary organization and was sent to Cambodia for a short time. After being ordained by the same organization in 1980, Ravi began teaching at it’s affiliated Seminary as a professor of evangelism. It was during this stint, that the relatively young 37 year old Ravi, was invited to speak in Amsterdam at the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association. This placed him on a global pedestal as a leading international evangelical preacher.
Between teaching in class and guest speaking for large events, Ravi found himself sharing the gospel message back in his homeland of India. And it was there where he really saw the need for an apologetic ministry - to preach not only to one’s heart, but one’s mind as well. This was a ministry of teaching using logic, reason, intellect, and science to persuade even hardened skeptics. So in August of 1984, Ravi started Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) in Toronto, Canada. This platform served his desire to remain a classical evangelist, but “in the arena of the intellectually resistant.”
The timing of Ravi’s apologetic ministry heartened many Christians and challenged many atheists. At the time, ardent atheists like Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, were gaining popularity and Ravi was one of few Christians taking their arguments not only seriously, but humbly as well. This kind and intelligent approach to answering atheists and skeptics won o...