Popular late-night talk show host Stephen Colbert has revealed the Bible verse that completely changed his life after he experienced a serious crisis of faith. Colbert opened up about his personal spiritual journey in a conversation with Oprah Winfrey last month for one of her SuperSoul Conversations.
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Colbert explained the personal importance of Matthew 6:27: “Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life?”
He detailed how he had encountered someone passing out Gideon Bibles on the streets of Chicago. “There were Gideons giving out Bibles. They were handing out New Testament, Proverbs, and Psalms,” he explained. “And it was so cold that I had to, you know, crack it over my knee because it had kind of froze.”
After prizing open the scriptures, it immediately fell onto that very passage in Matthew.
“It changed my life. I had lost my faith, and I opened it to that passage in Matthew,” Colbert declared. “I was so racked with anxiety,” he continued. “It was the first time I had read the Bible and I understood the phrase, ‘It spoke to me.’ The words of Christ are that for me. The words of Christ just speak off the page. There’s no effort for me to read them.”
Colbert’s talk show has become renowned not only for its humor but also for Stephen’s candid questioning and the ease with which he opens up about his faith. In a previous interview with comedian and militant atheist, Ricky Gervais, Colbert pinned him with some questions over the existence of God.
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“People often, as the saying goes, find God as they approach their final boards,” Colbert, a practicing Catholic, said to Gervais. “And now that you’re older … have you given any more thought to God and whether he might be real?”
Watch how the conversation played out below: