A friend who left the flock

I think one of the saddest things to happen to a Christian is when a fellow believer announces to you that they no longer believe in Christ. That happened to me yesterday. A man who was a deeply spiritual man and a friend of mine, a man who cried whenever he talked about the cross, sent me an e-mail yesterday that shocked me. He told me he was no longer a Christian. After reading hundreds of pages on philosophy he has now decided that he does not have an eternal soul and that there is no God.

My dear friend, with whom I used to pray together and go to prayer conferences together, announced that he "reprogrammed himself" and re-framed his life using schools of thought from Philosophy and Psychology.

What do you to someone who hits you with news like that? I'm still so blown away that I'm not sure what to say to my friend when I write him back.

One thing I do know (and Philip Yancey states this so well in his excellent book, Disappointment with God) is that when someone is deeply wounded in life and perhaps feels let down by God, they sometimes turn away from Him. But they attribute their new found "freedom" to intellectual pursuits and discoveries. I'm afraid this is what happened to my friend.

Please pray for this dear brother who doesn't realize how desperately he needs prayers -- intercession from a God he at the present does not believe in. I ask the Father that He will make my friend so miserable in his new beliefs that he will once more come to the Savior's feet in humility and repentance, joining the disciples who said, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life." -- John 6:68

Jim