The Field is the World (Matt. 13:38)

Last night, Cindy and I participated in Campus Crusade's first "Virtual Homegroup," a chat based on CCCI President Steve Douglass' small-group study, "Essentials of Spiritual Growth and Multiplication." It was pretty exciting to see how God worked. All the participants were people who had come through our Ministry Response Center, so at one time or another, they had responded to one of our Gospel presentations online. Our study was on assurance of salvation, and we began with the story of Zacchaeus in Luke 19, his genuine repentance, Jesus' statement that salvation had come to him...it was great, because we had at least two in the group who didn't feel assured of their salvation before we began...yet, based on an in-depth study of repentance and receiving Jesus identified that they had done that. Based on that, we could share the Bible's assurance of salvation, and it was very freeing to them. Another participant was able to testify of her spirit...

I have to confess, I have been in this camp. A few short months ago, my idea of an appropriate response to this book and movie was, "Hey. It's fiction, OK?" The latest results at our JesusandDaVinci.com prove how wrong I have been in my dismissal. This is a novel which has sold some 50 million copies, more than any work of fiction in history. The movie and the hype surrounding it will keep it in the public's attention span for some time to come. Something that big deserves more attention than that. At the heart of the controversy is something at the very heart of my calling--communicating Christ to the world. As the public's notoriously short attention span is once again captivated by the person of Jesus, we have an opportunity to share the well-documented truth about him and dispel the poorly-researched tangle of conspiracy theory garbage that the book disingenuously promotes. For some, this will finally register the watershed issue of Jesus' uniqueness and ...