Ravi Zacharias, one of the most effective apologists and communicators in the Christian world, died on 19th May 2020 at the age of seventy-four.
He was born on March 26, 1946, in Chennai, India. His family went to church and observed Christian rituals, but he said he never heard the gospel. “I attended more Hindu festivals and celebrations than I did Christian ones,” he wrote in Christianity Today.
As a young man, Zacharias attended a Youth for Christ rally, where he responded to the invitation with what he later termed “a kind of half-hearted commitment.” At the age of seventeen, in response to poor academic performance that he felt brought shame on his family, he took poison to kill himself.
He was rushed to the hospital, where a representative of Youth for Christ left him a Bible opened to John 14 and Jesus’ statement, “Because I live, you also will live.”
“Jesus,” he prayed, “if you are the One who gives life as it is meant to be, I want it. Please get me out of this hospital bed well, and I promise I will leave no stone unturned in my pursuit of truth.”
God answered his prayer, and Ravi Zacharias kept his promise.
Zacharias preached the gospel in more than seventy countries. He wrote or edited more than twenty-five books about theology, apologetics, comparative religion, and philosophy. RZIM has grown to about two hundred employees in sixteen offices around the world with twenty traveling speakers. Their ministry strategies include evangelism, apologetics, humanitarian aid, spiritual growth, and training institutes at Oxford University and elsewhere.
He wrote the bestseller, Can Man Live Without God? His most recent book, The Logic of God: 52 Christian Essentials for the Heart and Mind, won the Evangelical Christian Publishers Association’s 2020 Christian Book Award in the Bible study category.
Let My People Think, a weekly radio program, airs on more than two thousand outlets in thirty-two countries. A television program by the same name is broadcast on thirty-one stations in Canada and Belize, with global coverage into Africa, China, and Europe. A version of the program airs in his native India as well.
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