A former atheist who mocked Christianity is now a changed person after experiencing salvation and the transforming love of God.
Dr. Hongyi Yang is an assistant professor of systematic theology in the women’s studies program at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. Before moving to Texas in 2000, she grew up in Southwest China, where she believed God is a myth.
The very first time she saw a Bible was the same year she was an exchange student and before she came to the U.S., she had only known one Christian in her entire life. “I was an atheist and feminist,” but now she is a Systematic Theologian!
She said that she was an atheist when she first came to Texas. “I believed that there was no God who could save us and that we must strive for success by our own ability, diligence and luck.” But when she moved to Texas, she said, she was “surrounded by Christians and churches,” something which filled her with contempt for Christians.
She said she mocked Christianity, “I thought it is so humiliating to worship a God who was crucified on a cross. This is exactly what 1 Corinthians says, that ‘a natural man does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him.’ (1 Corinthians 2:14). I was actually the foolish one.”
But God had a different plan for Yang. In the final three days of 2000, she attended an evangelistic conference where she heard the word of God from two speakers whose messages changed her perspective and convinced her of God’s existence, and on the last day of the conference, Yang gave her life to Jesus.
Yang said her eyes “were opened” when she experienced “a kind of gentle, bright and great love” she’d never encountered before. “I surely know that there is indeed a God and I am experiencing His love,” she wrote. “Life is not meaningless anymore because there is this God.”
She got baptized Easter Sunday 2001 and she invited a handful of non-believing friends, and two of them later became Christians. Yang reflected that over the last 19 years, she has become “a new creation.” She says, “The Gospel has changed and continues changing my life, my mind, and my whole person,” she added.
1 Corinthians 1:18, “For the word of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.”
