Here's an excerpt from the article in the Fremont Tribune about Pastor Ty's speaking at a prayer breakfast before Easter... (The whole article can be viewed here)...
"Ty Schenzel shared stories this morning of three near-death experiences in his life. The executive director of the Hope Center for Kids in Omaha, Schenzel was the guest speaker at the Seventh Annual Fremont Area Leadership Prayer Breakfast in Midland University's Hopkins Arena.
Approximately 250 people heard Schenzel talk about times as a youth when he could have died; once when his father's car spun out of control in Colorado, coming to rest with its rear wheels hanging over a cliff, and twice when his sister saved him from drowning.
"I am so thankful for God's mercy, because if I would have died that summer (of the second near-drowning). I was not yet a believer," he said.
Later in his teenage years, the Fremont native went with his father to a movie about the rapture where, for the first time, he began to doubt his own goodness and whether he would go to Heaven when he dies. The experience changed his life.
It was, he said, "a head-on collision with faith" that he compared to the Apostle Paul's similar collision with Jesus on Paul's way to Damascus, when Paul was converted from a persecutor of Christians into a follower of Jesus.
"That's what faith looks like," Schenzel said. "Jesus is the immovable object, the rock of salvation."
Over the years, persecutors unable to silence the message of Christianity would instead kill the messenger, Schenzel said. Paul was present when Stephen the Martyr was killed, and Paul himself was eventually persecuted for his Christian beliefs, Schenzel pointed out.
"They killed Jesus because they could not silence his message of love and forgiveness," Schenzel said.
"It makes sense to embrace the collision of faith and embrace Good Friday, take up the cross, dying to self so He can resurrect you into a new man or a new woman," he said.
"We tend to want Easter Sunday resurrection power in our lives, but we tend to not want the cross of Christ that crucifies self and selfishness," he said. "The reality is we can't have Easter Sunday without Good Friday.
"On Good Friday," he continued, "God wants us to invite him into our lives."
"The best way we can thank Jesus for his death on the cross is by the way we live our lives," he said. "
