Kindness, compassion drove evangelist Zacharias
By Mike Haynes
Ravi
Zacharias was at least as much heart as he was mind.
The
Atlanta-based evangelist who died of cancer May 19 at age 74 was known for his
intellectually vigorous apologetics – reasoned arguments justifying the truth
of Christianity. But according to speakers at his memorial service May 29, it
was his compassion for whomever he saw in front of him – whether at a dinner
table or as he spoke onstage to a crowd of thousands – that struck them more
than his brilliant persuasive skills.
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Ravi Zacharias, who Vice President Mike Pence called “the
greatest Christian apologist of this century,” died May 19
at age 74. Zacharias
last spoke in Amarillo in 2016, and
members of his team have led discussions in
Amarillo
and Canyon several times.
(Photo by Ravi Zacharias International
Ministries)
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“He saw the
objections and questions of others not as something to be rebuffed, but as a
cry of the heart that had to be answered,” said Michael Ramsden, president of
Ravi Zacharias International Ministries. “People weren’t logical problems
waiting to be solved; they were people who needed the person of Christ.”
Zacharias, who last spoke in
Amarillo in 2016 at Hillside Christian Church and whose team members have made
presentations in Amarillo and Canyon several times, was remembered in a service
at Atlanta’s Passion City Church that was streamed live. Speakers included
Ramsden, Vice President Mike Pence, former football star Tim Tebow, Brooklyn
Tabernacle Pastor Jim Cymbala and Passion Movement founder Louie Giglio.
Contemporary Christian singer Matt Redman and hip-hop artist Lecrae highlighted
the music. The service still can be watched on YouTube and Facebook.
Zacharias was born in India in 1946
and moved with his family to Canada at age 20. He called himself a religious
skeptic until an experience in a hospital after he tried to commit suicide at
age 17. He said a Youth for Christ director visited and gave him a Bible.
Zacharias noticed a statement by Jesus in John 14:19 that became a landmark of
his life: “Because I live, you also will live.” He lived for Jesus the last 57
years of his life, 48 with his wife, Margie. His three children all are
involved in his ministry.
After Billy Graham invited him to speak at a
1983 evangelists’ conference in Amsterdam, Zacharias was ready to start RZIM in
1984. It’s based in Atlanta but has offices in a dozen countries, 100 speakers
who travel globally and offshoot ministries including Wellspring, a
humanitarian outreach to women and children.
Like Graham in his heyday, Zacharias
traveled constantly, racking up more than 4 million miles in the air just last
year. My cousin Thacker and friend Mike live in the Texas Panhandle but said
they were blessed mightily when they heard him, Francis Chan and Cymbala at the
Brooklyn Tabernacle in New York a few years ago.
A slogan of Zacharias’ ministry was
“Helping the thinker believe – and the believer think.” He took the Christian side
in debates with unbelievers, but he certainly wasn’t the type to let a
discussion turn into a shouting match. In his 1983 Amsterdam speech, he said,
“When you are trying to reach someone, please be sensitive to what he holds
valuable.” He often quoted an Indian proverb that he heard from his mother:
“There is no point in cutting off a
person’s nose and then giving them a rose to smell.”
Mahlatse Mashua, RZIM’s Africa
regional director, said Zacharias had “a precise, robust, yet tender, voice.”
Lou Phillips said “Uncle Ravi,”
which he and other RZIM team members sometimes called their boss, liked food,
Elvis and laughing. And his favorite sport was cricket.
In 2015, Zacharias participated in a
forum at Oklahoma Christian University in Edmond, where he was given a cricket
bat engraved with John 14:19. Phillips smiled when he said Zacharias would tell
audiences that explaining why Christianity is true and how God is loving in the
midst of evil and suffering weren’t the hardest things he had to do.
“Ravi has argued that one of the most
impossible tasks he was ever given,” Phillips said, “was trying to explain the game
of cricket to an American.”
At the memorial service, not long
after doctors ended Zacharias’ cancer treatment in Houston and he returned to
Georgia, Ramsden said:
“Those who knew him well will
remember him first for his kindness, gentleness
and generosity of spirit. The love and kindness he had come to know in and
through Jesus Christ was the same love he wanted to share with all he met.”
Zacharias talked about Jesus with people from
Atlanta to Amarillo, from sheiks in Saudi Arabia to a general in Russia to
Louisiana prison inmates who crafted his casket. He met five times with the
late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.
And he was more to his staff than
the man at the top. “Ravi became a father and a friend and a mentor,”
Phillips said. “But he always pointed us to Christ.”
Closing the May 29 service, Giglio said
Zacharias had asked him to talk not so much about Ravi but more about Jesus.
Giglio apologized, not able to resist pointing out the example of his late
friend’s character and achievements. But he still kept the focus on Christ.
Just more than two years ago, at the
2018 memorial for Billy Graham, Zacharias said, “A great voice has been lost,
but the message goes on.”
The same could be said now.
