God used a number of ways to bring Lee Strobel, a former atheist, and a Yale-trained-lawyer turned into a legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, to believe not only in the existence of God as the creator of the universe therein, but also in Jesus as his personal savior. One of them that he remembers vividly was meeting a man by the name of Ron Bronski.  As a subject for his newspaper article, he interviewed Ron not only skeptical of his reformed life but also to prove that this man was simply pretending to get a lighter sentence for his crime.

Before the meeting, Strobel called his police sources and all of them in the Gang Crimes Unit were acquainted with Ron Bronski.  They described him as dangerous and violent with a long criminal record.  He later called Ron’s pastor in Portland, Oregon, who told him that Ron was “one of the most beautiful, loving people I know.”  He told Strobel that Ron had met some Christians, abandoned his life of crime, married his live-in girlfriend, and became a follower of Jesus. 

And this was the part that spoke to Lee Strobel: Knowing that there was still an outstanding warrant for his arrest, Ron saving money to buy a train ticket to Chicago to turn himself in. That’s what he did: he turned himself in. But to his surprise, not only the judge, but even the police detectives and the prosecutor were convinced that the changes in his life were authentic.  So, the judge set him free on probation, “Go home and be with your family,” he told Ron.  At the time Lee Strobel wrote his book, The Case for Faith, twenty years after that meeting, Ron Bronski was still ministering to kids in the inner city of Portland.  Lee Strobel himself later became a Christian.

God never stops working in the lives of men and women who want to change.  It does not matter what kind of persons we were before, what matters is the kind of persons He is changing us into today.

Pastor Paul