Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices

Helping Christians find the faithful teachers of the whole church, indexed to Scripture. • John 17:21 • 1 Thess. 5:21 ✝️

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

@RandyRRQuaid God bless you, Randy, have a great day!

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

@MrRobertForge @CatholicDrip___ That’s what I was thinking.

[Sophie Cunningham @sophaller]

everything happens for a reason is not in the bible but "God promises to work all things to good for those who love him" is.

Romans 8:28

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

@farmingandJesus I miss him. ❤️

[Amir ✝️👑⛪️📖✨️ @AAmirKh50764293]

Today we are Preaching the gospel in Pakistan 🇵🇰 please remember me in your prayers 🙏

[Sarah Salviander @sarahsalviander]

This one’s real, y’all. If you’re looking for cozy comfort about the Christian life, you’re not going to get it. Instead, you’re going to get my honest assessment of what life has been like since I converted to Christianity two decades ago.

Many of you know my atheist background. I was the perfect atheist experiment. Raised in secular Canada by lapsed Catholic parents, I had zero exposure to churches, Scripture, or even basic knowledge of who Jesus was. Science was my religion, my entire reason for being. I devoured Carl Sagan, lived for Star Trek and Star Wars, and pursued astrophysics with evangelical zeal. According to pop atheism, I should’ve stayed an atheist forever.

Instead, in 1999, my work on Big Bang-related research (coupled with an unexpected moral and philosophical nudge from The Count of Monte Cristo) convinced me God is real. There was a genuine sense of joy attending that realization. Belief in a Creator lifted a weight I hadn’t fully realized I carried, but I also accepted no real burden with it—I was just someone who believed in God. Seven years later, after reading Gerald Schroeder’s The Science of God, Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ, and studying Scripture, I became a Christian—much like C.S. Lewis described himself, “the most reluctant convert in all England.” Unlike so many conversion stories I’ve read, I didn’t find myself jumping for joy. I knew this meant committing to an eternal change, and I felt the weight of it settle on me immediately. Here’s what no one told me about what happens after.

1. Life got infinitely more complicated

They say the devil leaves his own alone. As an atheist, life wasn’t necessarily happier, it was just simpler. I could let things slide and ignore that deep, nagging sense that I shouldn’t. Sure, I might’ve felt bad after being rude to someone, but without immediate consequences or eternal accountability, it didn’t seem worth the humility or effort to change.

Becoming Christian ended that illusion. Now every aspect of my life falls under the light of Scripture. I examine my words, attitudes, and choices with new scrutiny. I bite my tongue when snark or unnecessarily harsh “truth” would have been my default. I consider how my actions ripple into the lives around me—and into eternity. Picturing the moment I stand face-to-face with my Savior, accounting for it all… few things make me feel the weight more.

In the moment I was baptized, I felt a great unease settle on me. Maybe it's coincidence, maybe not, but shortly after, my life turned upside down, and it hasn’t righted itself since. Multiple rounds of cancer. The stillbirth of our daughter Ellinor. My husband’s near-fatal bout with meningitis and encephalitis. Recurring health battles, job stresses, anxiety, and depression. Being Christian has given me the long view through all this, but it hasn't made it easier. To anyone who claims people convert to Christianity to go through life on the easy setting, I raise a Spock-like eyebrow. Christianity didn’t simplify my existence at all.

Want to read the rest of this? Hit the link in my profile. You can also sign up to have my articles delivered straight to your inbox. (I know it's annoying to click out of here to read something, but X's article feature provides zero reach.)

Critics: This is *my* story, not every atheist's story. Read the article before you comment.

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

This was one of the things that I did! https://t.co/fwDTTzqt9x

[Sarah Salviander @sarahsalviander]

I’ve met a few self-described atheists and agnostics who say they very much want to believe in God, but are not convinced he exists. I propose a simple experiment: Take a Kierkegaardian leap of faith and live for one year as though God exists.

I'm not saying force yourself to believe. I mean change how you live. That could include praying sincerely to God daily, reading Scripture as though it's true, attending services regularly, joining a Christian community, etc. Not with the intent of discovering if God is real, but as though he is real.

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

@accordingtowoz True. It’s been awhile.

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

Matthew 19:26. 🏈

[Josh Barzon @JoshuaBarzon]

Tell me the plot of a movie in 10 words or less, and I’ll guess the movie.

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

Me too! https://t.co/kUzsxJHVQL

[Josh Barzon @JoshuaBarzon]

I built my first app with AI.

I know nothing about coding.

I have 100 more app ideas.

And AI is just in its infancy.

What a time to be alive!

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

@boardyai Deprecated

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

@danclipping Ai

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

Definitely F.

https://t.co/nwVU1eiY67

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

@Thevine_ntwk https://t.co/nwVU1eiY67

[Faithfulness Okom @AttorneyF_]

Luke 9:24 says "For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for my sake will save it.”

If you read it without any inherited Sunday school reverence or vocabulary of religious surrender, it sounds really unhinged.

Packed inside that single sentence is a massive, three-tiered claim about how reality works. First, it assumes you possess an inner life that can be thoroughly ruined while your heart is still beating.

Second, it claims this identity can be completely pulled apart and recovered, rather than just destroyed.

But the third claim is the craziest: “for my sake”. Not “for God”, or for truth or love. For him. A named individual in first-century Judea asserted that your entire inner existence must revolve around his specific personhood.

Prophets point away from themselves; philosophers dissolve the self into abstractions. This man pointed at his own chest and said: reorganize your cosmos around me. That is either a monstrous, megalomaniacal arrogance, or it is the most grounded claim in history. There is no safe middle ground.

In the Greek, the word for "life" in verse 24 and "soul" in verse 25 is exactly the same: psyche. This isn't a transactional trade; sacrificing your current physical life for a future spiritual ticket. The psyche you surrender is the psyche you recover. It is a death and a reconstruction of identity. What comes back is you, but rebuilt around a completely different center.

Which forces a deeply uncomfortable question: what is your identity currently built around?

Be honest about your daily routine. You wake up. You brush your teeth. You eat. You poop. You shower. You go to work to earn the money required to eat and poop again tomorrow.

We romanticize the need for food and sex because they let us flirt with beauty. But the other side of that upkeep; voiding bowels, scraping plaque, and all the endless animal maintenance, we find privately humiliating. Yet it is all the exact same process.

Nearly 70% of what you call "yourself" is just running basic maintenance protocols on a biological vessel. What happens when you transition into the spiritual realm and the machine stops?

There is no food, no defecation, no teeth to brush. If you have spent your entire existence paying attention only to the upkeep of the machine, who are you when the machine is gone?

This is what crystallizes verse 25: "What shall it profit a man if he gains the whole world, and loses his own psyche?"

The hyper-successful do not look like they are losing. But when a man fuses his identity with external things; a portfolio, a reputation, or a career, he vanishes inside his own satisfied desires. He has poured his consciousness into scaffolding.

Imagine living on land while knowing with absolute certainty that at some the physics of your existence will shift and you will be forced to live permanently underwater. Piling up sports cars and Rolexes that cannot make that crossing isn't ambition; it is a literal form of madness. You are just buying heavier weights to drag you to the bottom, rather than learning how to swim.

Jesus��� demand to lose your life for his sake isn't an ultimatum of deprivation; it is a radical rescue mission. He is telling you to drop the heavy, exhausting gold of this world before the flood hits, so that you can actually float.

[Darwin to Jesus @darwintojesus]

America began as thirteen small colonies and grew into the greatest nation the world has ever seen. Why?

It happened because this nation was built on a profound belief that our rights come from God, that every human being has inherent dignity, and that we are accountable to a higher moral law.

You don’t agree? Look at Europe. For centuries it was one of the great centers of civilization. But as faith has steadily declined across most of the continent, Europe has been struggling with a deep crisis of meaning, identity, and purpose… and it’s falling apart.

Since the “enlightenment,” atheists and secular thinkers have naïvely preached that reason and science alone would usher in a kind of utopia, that humanity would inevitably progress toward a future like Star Trek where reason would solve our deepest problems. But reason alone can’t tell us why human beings matter. It can’t tell us why we ought to be moral, why justice is objectively good, or why a human life has intrinsic worth.

If God does not exist, then ultimately we’re the product of blind, unguided processes. Humans are reduced to highly intelligent animals whose thoughts, values, and aspirations are accidents of nature. In that worldview, morality becomes preference, meaning becomes imagination, and purpose becomes subjective.

When you remove God, you don’t simply remove religion. You undermine the objective grounding for reason, morality, human dignity, and purpose. You leave people searching for meaning in a universe that offers none.

Secularists will deny this with their last breath, but the facts don’t lie. And the facts are these: throughout history, virtually every civilization has recognized humanity’s need for something beyond itself—a higher power, a transcendent moral order, a reason for our existence. That longing is nearly universal because it speaks to something fundamental about human nature.

America has enjoyed an extraordinary 250 years. If we want the next 250 years to be just as great, we should continue to recognize the source of the principles that made this nation exceptional. As long as we continue to put God first, uphold the dignity of every person, and remember that our rights come from our Creator rather than from the state, I believe America will continue to be the greatest nation on Earth.

May God bless America.

[Interstellar @InterstellarUAP]

Jeremiah Johnston reveals the Shroud of Turin as Jesus' resurrection cloth: "34 billion watts of energy traveling at 1/40 of a billionth of a second" created the image with no paint, dye, or brush marks.

Top scientists from Los Alamos, Sandia, and ENEA labs, including weapons and rocket experts, confirmed it after years of study. Physicist Paolo Di Lazzaro replicated a tiny version only with an ultra precise laser burst of cold energy.

This matches biblical accounts of Jesus manifesting as brilliant light at the Transfiguration, to Paul brighter than the noonday sun, and in the empty tomb where John saw the linen cloths and believed.

The shroud isn't a death cloth. It's the signature of the resurrection moment, leaving what Johnston calls "Jesus' selfie." Watch the full discussion for the science, history, and scripture that make this one of the most compelling pieces of evidence for the Christian faith.

This theory challenges everything we thought we knew about the burial cloth.

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

@darwintojesus You belong on https://t.co/nwVU1eiY67 would you mind if I featured your blog?

[Darwin to Jesus @darwintojesus]

If the only reason you're a good person is because you're afraid of hell... are you really a good person?

[Bryan Leyenbeck | Real Voices @realvoicesapp]

Based.

[yannispappas @yannispappas]

It is beyond reasonable historical doubt that Jesus was crucified. It is the most firmly established fact of his life. The Quran, written six centuries later, says he was not crucified. The problem is, he was. So that particular belief is not true.