By Morgan Miles –
Atheist French engineer Guillaume Bignon decided to give God a chance with an “unbelieving prayer.”
“I’m a scientist. There’s one experiment I can run about the whole thing,” Guillaume said on a Justin Brierly video. “If legitimately there’s some sort of a living God out there, then maybe he’s interested in the fact that I’m looking into this.
He prayed an unbelieving prayer: “If there’s a God out there, why don’t you go ahead and reveal yourself to me,” he said. He asked for a sign to confirm God’s reality.
The sign appeared in the form of an attractive woman who stopped to ask him for directions after renting a car at the airport. Her hotel happened to be next door to where Guillaume was staying while on vacation on a Caribbean island. After chatting a bit, he learned she was a model from New York.
“I ended up going out with her,” Guillaume says. “She shared with me she believed in God, which I thought was crazy.” He thought only people of deficient intellect believed.
“Just as problematic was the idea her view of marriage that she believed in abstinence before marriage. For me at the time, I thought that was a huge problem.”
On the one hand, he liked her. On the other, he rejected any notion of belief in God.
But as he got to know her, Guillaume realized that his own unbelief had never been based on a fair and unprejudiced consideration of the evidence.
He dug through some old books and found his childhood Bible. It had not been opened since his parents dragged him to church, which he considered boring as a child.
“I found the person of Jesus himself captivating. He was incredibly smart. He always had the right retorts. He would navigate tough conversations with people who were trying to trap him. He amassed a certain following of people who were captivated by him. I found it very disturbing.”
God began to stir his heart with the Word and the Spirit.
He had been unable to attend church on Sunday because that was his volleyball day. Then suddenly, he injured his shoulder and could no longer play.
After attending church for the first time in many years, he practically ran for the door when the service ended. He didn’t want to have to introduce himself to the “weirdos” he thought populated the pews.
“I had one foot out the door, but I couldn’t physically escape that church,” he reports. “There was a big blast of a chill that came into my stomach, going up in my chest and (it) grabbed me by the throat. I was frozen on the doorstep. I heard myself thinking this is ridiculous, I need to figure this out.”
Since mysterious physical phenomena prevented him from leaving the church, he wheeled around and marched straight over the head pastor and introduced himself.
“So you really believe in God?” he asked immediately.
The pastor kindly invited him to meet the following Tuesday night. Guillaume showed up, and the pastor, who possessed respectable educational credentials, began to present the evidence in favor of belief. Gullaume listened intently.
He was intrigued by the historical and archaeological corroborations. One historical fact grabbed his attention: 11 disciples independently allowed themselves to be tortured and martyred because they believed in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.
Why would they go to their deaths for the sake of a lie?
“The disciples did suffer or at least risked persecution for their proclamation of the resurrection,” Guillaume says. “It was a piece that I noticed that doesn’t quite fit. Why would they do that aside from simply sticking to the truth that they had encountered.
“Those historical pieces came together.”
Guillaume met with the pastor for months. They held long conversations that lasted well into the night.
Finally, Guillaume concluded his research. “Some pretty improbable things seemingly conspired to bring me back to this decision point about the faith,” he says.
Today, Guillaume is one of many former atheists who have faith in Jesus Christ as their Savior and Lord. He didn’t marry that American model from New York. God brought another American girl into his life, with whom he started a family.
If you want to know more about a personal relationship with God, go here
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About the writer of this article: Morgan Miles studies at Lighthouse Christian Academy near Venice, CA.
