Christian Testimony

Ben Broocks’ younger brother is Dr. Rice Broocks. Rice is a graduate of Mississippi State University and holds a master’s degree from Reformed Theological Seminary, Jackson, Mississippi, as well as a doctorate in missiology from Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. Rice is COFOUNDER of the EVERY NATION family of churches, which currently has churches and campus ministries in more than seventy nations. He is also the senior minister of Bethel World Outreach Church in Nashville, Tennessee, a multiethnic, multisite church.

Rice has authored several books including

GOD’S NOT DEAD: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty;
MAN, MYTH MESSIAH: Answering History’s Greatest Question; and
THE HUMAN RIGHT: To Know Jesus Christ & To Make Him Known.

The movies, God’s Not Dead, God’s Not Dead 2, and God’s Not Dead 3, are all based on Rice’s books and Rice collaborated on the screenplay for each. Concerning Ben, the following comes from Rice’s book, God’s Not Dead:

“I WAS IN MY THIRD YEAR OF COLLEGE WHEN MY ATHEIST older brother, Ben, decided to try to talk me out of my Christian faith. I probably looked like an easy target. I had not been a Christian that long, and Ben was in his third year of law school at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He was at the top of his class, already had a master’s degree in counseling, and had been sharpening his disdain for Christianity for a while. We arranged to meet over a weekend at our parents’ house in Dallas. Ben prepared as if he was going to be trying a legal case, studying the Bible to get the ammunition he needed to blow me out of my new faith. He told one of his classmates, “I’m going home to get my little brother out of this born-again thing.” He showed up with his prepared questions and finely tuned challenges, anticipating anything I might say. He was confident he could get me to abandon this whole notion of faith in God and belief in Jesus Christ. I’d like to tell you that I had brilliant, learned answers for everything he brought up. But I never had the chance to respond. As I listened to and addressed Ben’s doubts simply, the truth of God’s Word began to soften his heart. I could see he was doubting his doubts. There was finally a moment when I told him, “Ben, it’s not what you don’t know about God that’s keeping you from believing; it’s what you do know. You know He is real and you know He is holy [meaning pure].” The apostle Paul wrote that people “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Romans 1: 18). The reason? They don’t like God’s rules. The problem with this is that it’s like trying to hold a beach ball under the water: the harder you push truth down, the more forcefully it resurfaces. This was definitely what my brother was doing. He was trying to escape from the pangs of conscience that were convicting him of his behavior. At the end of the day— the day on which he intended to talk me out of my faith— I baptized Ben in a swimming pool. Not long after he came up out of the water he said, “I don’t think you answered all my questions, but I think I was asking the wrong questions.” Today, Ben is a successful trial attorney in Austin, Texas, and a formidable witness for Christ. That weekend thirty years ago was a turning point for both Ben and me. He became a believer in Jesus Christ while he was trying to talk me out of “this born-again thing.” And since that day, I’ve devoted my life to getting people out of “this atheist thing.” I work primarily among university students around the world, and I have been joined by thousands of others who have found that faith in God is both spiritually revitalizing and intellectually satisfying. We’ve also seen the opposite: that atheism doesn’t satisfy a man’s heart or mind.

Broocks, Rice. God's Not Dead: Evidence for God in an Age of Uncertainty (p. 2-3). Thomas Nelson.