Many unbelievers think that people who become Christians do so because they are weak people who need some kind of crutch to make it through their lives. The conversion account of Cornelius seems to refute this common false assertion.
Cornelius was a powerful governmental official in the Roman army (Acts 10:1) of whom everyone in the Jewish nation spoke well (10:22). He thus seems to have been highly successful in his life from a worldly standpoint.
Moreover, he was a very devout and upstanding man who “feared God with all his house” and cared for the indigent in his midst (10:2, 4, 22, 31). The passage thus gives no indication that he was lacking in money, having serious family troubles, disappointed with his life in some psychological sense, or facing some life-threatening physical problem that led him to turn to God.
He did have a fearful encounter with an angel of God (10:4) prior to his conversion, but lost people typically do not have such an experience in mind when they assert that people who get saved do so because they are weak. We who are believers would seemingly do well to use this aspect of the Cornelius account to refute the false notion that Christianity is just for “weak people.”
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