[A photo I took of the road that leads back to a 6th century monastery in Durrow, Ireland.]
For as long as I could remember, I
thought I was a Christian.
And then God made me one.
What follows is the story of a
small part of my long and twisted journey to spiritual birth at age
twenty-nine. I wrote this shortly after my first spiritual birthday in December
of 2004.
Still striking to me these years
later is the fact that religion consistently hindered me from meeting the Lord
Jesus.
I praise my Savior that He
intervened, shattered the religious beliefs that I had been indoctrinated into,
and saved me both from myself and from the wrath to come.
My Journey to Spiritual Infancy
January 27th, 2005 (Revised
September 15, 2011)
On December 5th, 2004, I
turned one year old.
In this first year of my
Christian life I have experienced an astounding, radical, and unbelievable
change in my nature. Every thought that comes into my head seems to come
along a channel that did not exist before my conversion to Christ. All of
my thought, speech, and behavior is now held captive to the One who brought me
from death to life.
What has happened during
year one of my Christian life has blessed, confused, surprised, and enlightened
me in ways that I never thought were possible. The purpose of this writing
is to chronicle my personal experiences and beliefs in the years leading up to
my life as a born-again Christian.
The
Religious Wanderings of a Pagan
I spent the first seventeen
years of my life in the Roman Catholic Church. I attended catechism
classes on Thursday nights, was an altar boy, and later attended a Catholic
high school. When I left the Roman church at the age of 17, for all
intents and purposes, I had become an atheist. I did not believe in the
existence of God. I was fascinated by the Big Bang theory and
evolution. I purchased and read many books about the various theories of
evolution (yes, there are more than one). I even remember arguing with
friends of mine, trying to convince them of the ultimate truth of evolution.
At that time, I believed
that Christians were generally nice people who had been misled due to their own
spiritual weakness. I thought that they had to be very gullible and somewhat
ignorant to embrace something that could not be "proven out" by
observable facts and logic.
After all, what kind of
person put their faith in something that they could not even see? I had
embraced the dangerous and arrogant view that if God existed, He would have to
"show me" some kind of proof.
Over time, I began to study
and practice a Japanese martial art called Aikido. This study led me to embrace
Zen Buddhism and Shintoism. During this time, while in my late teens and
early twenties, I continued to reject the Christian God of the Bible in favor
of more "cerebral gods" and pursuits. After all, I thought, the
intellectual community scoffs at those silly Christians who cling to
counter-cultural beliefs that are expounded from an outdated book.
I wanted to affiliate with
the intellectual elite in our society and identify myself as a fellow
"thinker." (This is especially ironic in that, at the time, I
was a dockworker on the Delaware River; certainly not the type of profession
that produces the great intellectual giants and scholars of society.) In the
enlightened world of the 1990's, there was no room for the Christian God in the
lives of intelligent and thinking people. Or so I thought.
In 1996, I began to date
the woman I knew was going to become my wife one day. During a
conversation with her one night in January of 1997, I had what many people
would call a "religious experience" and came to a strong conviction
that there actually was a God. I
also came to the realization that this God knew me personally and loved me very
much.
I soon joined the church
that my girlfriend Mandy attended, a Presbyterian Church (PCUSA) in New Jersey. This
church was very different from the Catholic churches that I had previously
attended. It was a very welcoming, loving, and upbeat environment that
stood in stark contrast to the mind-numbingly ritualistic and ultra-repetitive services
of the Catholic Mass. The people in this church were extremely nice and
actually hung around to talk with each other after the service was over, which
was a new experience for me. When I was a youngster in the Catholic Church
it seemed to me that churchgoers, at least the ones that had actually stayed
until the end of the Mass, were continually racing each other to see who could
be the first person to leave after Mass was over.
I had many good experiences
in this liberal Presbyterian church. While attending there, I had what I
believed to be many "spiritual" or "religious"
moments. I had been moved and brought to tears on various occasions over
the years, such as during the singing of a certain hymn or the christening of a
baby. Yet, none of these "religious" experiences had any lasting
impact on my life beyond Sunday morning. When I left church at noon on
Sunday, I went right back into the world and conformed very easily and very eagerly
to it and its customs. I had successfully confined my “spirituality” to
Sunday mornings, where I thought it properly belonged. I also believed that I
had the whole "God" thing down pat and under control. I could not
have been more wrong.
I became involved with our
church's youth group and even helped to plan several outings. I believed that
I was in God’s favor and that He would certainly and immediately receive me into
heaven if I suddenly died. Since no one in the church or in leadership ever
told me anything different, or ever even discussed such uncomfortable topics as
sin and death, I was confident in these beliefs.
I was a "good
person" who tried to be nice to people, went to church on Sundays, and
placed my piece in the collection plate. I was doing all the "right"
things that a man did in this life to go to heaven. Wasn't I?
“Good people” go to heaven.
Hell, I thought, was a place where God punished murderers, rapists, and arch
criminals; not "righteous" people like me. I had never done
anything "that bad" that I felt that I "deserved" to go to
hell. After all, I believed in God and Jesus Christ, so I was okay. Wasn't
I?
The
Promotion of Spiritual Ignorance
But there were many things
that I was never told while in this church.
No one there ever told me
that a man is not saved by his "good deeds."
No one there ever told me
that I needed to be "saved" from anything in the first place.
No one there ever told me
that I was a sinner, and under the curse of God.
No one there ever told me
that I should fear God because I had broken His laws.
No one there ever told me
about Judgment Day.
No one there ever told me
that due to my sin, the wrath of the infinite God was hanging over my head like
the razor-sharp blade of a guillotine about to fall.
No one there ever mentioned
repentance, whatever that was.
No one there ever told me
that Christ had said that unless a man was "born again" or “born from
above” he could not see the kingdom of God.
No one there had ever told
me about the basic doctrines of salvation, such as regeneration, justification,
or propitiation.
And because no one there
had ever told me about any of these things, I continued merrily along in my
ignorance, whistling Dixie while I raced toward certain destruction. I
thought that if I needed to know something important about the Christian faith
or about heaven that my church would tell me about it. Wouldn't
they?
The
Departure
I had never really looked
into what the beliefs of my church were. When I finally did, I realized
that I had taken many important things for granted.
In October of 2003, I began
to investigate the Presbyterian Church USA because I had read that they
supported abortion. I could not imagine how a Christian organization could
promote the murder of the unborn and still credibly maintain its Christian
identity. I also found out that the PCUSA had even gone so far as to pass a denominational
resolution in support of partial-birth abortion, which is now illegal. I figured
that if the churches of America would not stand against the holocaust of
abortion, then there would be no one left to fight this battle.
I gave some thought to
remaining in the church and attempting to influence it in a more Christian
direction. But after a very short time I came to the conclusion that it
was the church's responsibility to
move me in a godly direction, not vice-versa. The very fact that my church
supported this abomination seemed to indicate that something was very wrong
with this organization.
I made a decision that
seemed to be a pretty simple and straightforward solution to my problem: I
would leave the church, even though most of my family attended there and even occupied
certain leadership positions within the church. I knew that this would
cause many in my family to become very angry with me (including my wife), but
in my thinking, I had properly ordered my responsibilities. God had to
come first, with family, friends, and church occupying positions subordinate to
Him.
I feared that God would not
look favorably upon me if I remained in a church that openly supported the
murder of innocent children. This fear of God and my desire to please Him
led me out of an organization which, further study quickly showed, had
resoundingly departed from biblical Truth a long time ago (cf. Prov. 1:7).
The Search
For nearly two months, I
began to look into the doctrinal positions and social beliefs of the mainline
Protestant churches and found no significant differences among them. If I
were to begin attending a new church, I didn't want to make the same mistake that
I had made with the PCUSA. I wanted to know what they believed in before I
even walked in their doors.
I hadn't even considered an
independent church because I figured that they had no real credibility as
compared to the mainline denominations. I briefly considered returning to
the Catholic Church until I realized that I had not grown one inch in a spiritual
sense in the seventeen years I had spent in that church. In fact, the teachings
of that church, and many of the people within it, had done nothing but drive me
away from God and organized religion when I was a young man. I knew that
to go back to that was to go down a dead end road.
While surfing the Internet
one evening in late November 2003, I came across a Bible-believing
independent church. I went straight to the "Our
Beliefs" page and found that I was in agreement with what was stated
there about abortion. The other beliefs all seemed like they were biblical (to
the extent that I even knew what that was, having never read a single one of
the sixty-six books of the Bible in their entirety in my life). After
listening to one of the senior pastor's sermons online, I was determined to
visit this church. I was so excited that I had potentially found a church
to attend that the very next day, a Wednesday, I went to the church at mid-afternoon
and walked right in. I found out that there was a service scheduled for
that evening, and I returned that night in my best suit.
After another week passed,
I invited the pastor to my home so that I could talk with him about joining his
church. I was sure that I would impress him with my intellect and
accomplishments, and that he would obviously see me as a fine addition to his
church. Little did I know, the pastor was coming to my home with an
entirely different objective in mind.
The Light
of the Glorious Gospel of Jesus Christ
On a snowy December 5th,
2003, the pastor came to my house, sat down in my family room by the fireplace
where I had a small fire burning, and spoke with me for some time. After
about half an hour of small talk he got down to business and asked me a very pointed
question. "If you died right now, do you think you would go to
heaven?"
Smiling and without
hesitation I replied, "Absolutely."
The pastor's next question
knocked me off track a bit: "Why do you think that?" he asked.
No one had ever asked me
such a question before. I was a little shocked that our conversation had
taken this confrontational turn. I had expected him to reply, "Well
that's great. Since you're obviously a Christian and going to heaven, why
don't we talk about what you have to do to join my church?"
Defensively, I stated what
I believed to be the obvious reasons why I would be going to
heaven: "Well, I'm a good person...I try to help people when they
need help...I go to church...uh...I'm a police officer...."
The pastor smiled at me and
asked, "Can you go and get your Bible? I would like to read some
things from it together with you."
Feeling a little dumbstruck
that this meeting was not going the way I had planned, I went into my office
and grabbed my barely-used Bible from the shelf. I thought to myself,
"Why was this man not satisfied with my answers about heaven? I gave
him the right answers and told him the truth, didn't I? Does he know
something that I don't? Why does he want me to get my Bible? What
does that old book have to do with anything?"
From that "old
book," the pastor explained to me that all people are sinners by nature and
by choice, and that because of this, humanity remains in a state of separation
from God. He told me that the penalty for sin is death. Although I
could not recall ever hearing this teaching on sin before, I thought to myself,
"That's okay. God forgives sin and I'm a good person. God will
see that I am basically good and will forgive me if I do good
things."
The pastor then told me
that doing "good works" would do nothing to help a person get to
heaven. We went to the book of Ephesians, chapter 2, where the Bible explains
that a man is saved by grace through faith, and not by his "works" or
"deeds." Salvation is a gift that cannot be earned, but can only
be received by fully trusting in Jesus Christ and what He did on the
cross.
I was really confused
now. For my whole life I had had the notion that "good" people
go to heaven and that "bad" or "evil" people go to hell (if
such a place even existed). I believed that when a man died, if his good
deeds outweighed his bad deeds, then he went to heaven to be with God. Man
was basically neutral and created his own destiny by his actions, whether they
were “good” or “bad.” And now this pastor was showing me verses from the Bible
that contradicted everything I had ever held in my mind to be true about God, humanity,
salvation, and eternal life. He was speaking with biblical authority. Yet,
I resisted the Truth that the pastor was preaching to me.
I remember thinking,
"Why hadn't I ever heard this message in the other churches I had
attended? They were Christian churches and taught from the same Bible that
this pastor was reading from, right?" The Catholic Church had taught
me that if I kept the sacraments of the church and did good deeds that I would
get to heaven. The Presbyterian Church I previously attended basically
ignored my personal spiritual condition, taking it for granted that I was
heaven-bound. They believed that infant baptism saved people and that
through this ritual, the baby was admitted into "God's family." What
was up with this pastor? I had been baptized, so I was okay, right?
Why did this pastor think that I would end up in hell if I suddenly died? No
other priest or pastor I had ever known ever questioned my salvation!
The real problem was that I had never questioned my own salvation
either.
I slowly came to the
realization that I really didn't know anything about the Bible or its
teachings. Sure, I knew some things about the Bible and about Jesus
Christ, but apparently I had missed (or had never been told) the most important
thing in the Bible, like how to gain eternal life.
It was like coming to the
realization that, even though I could read the names of all the locations on a
map, I had no idea how to get from one place to another.
As the pastor spoke with
me, I began to think about my faith and its relationship to the Bible. If
I was basing my faith upon my own religious experiences and upon what I
believed was true, then, in a very real sense, my faith had no substance.
It was completely subjective. If, however, I placed my faith in the Jesus
Christ of the Bible, then I was suddenly sure that my spiritual foundations
would be on solid ground.
But what about the fact
that the Bible taught something that was totally contrary to what I had always been
taught and believed in my heart? This matter of salvation by grace alone
was against grating against my nature because I had, in my own defiled mind,
built myself up into something that, by biblical standards, I was not: a righteous man. I thought to
myself, "Should I now submit to God's Word? Or should I depend on my own
thinking on this matter? Should I depend on the teachings of my previous
churches, or should I look to the unchanging Word of God for direction? Should
I trust what mere men thought and said, or trust what God has said?"
The pastor and I began to
discuss what I thought about Jesus Christ and my relationship to Him. I
quickly realized that this relationship was something that I had never fully
considered before. I knew of Christ as "the" Savior, but had
never truly known him as "my" Savior.
The pastor asked me if
I truly believed that Jesus was the Son of God. He further asked if I
believed that Christ had risen from the dead. I nearly answered yes before
I took a moment to fully consider if I really believed this in my heart. I
found that I had some tiny, nagging doubts about who Jesus really was; doubts that
were so small that I had never truly considered them before. I estimated,
if a man can ever place an estimate on such an ephemeral thing as the
intellect, that I was more than 90 percent sure that Jesus Christ was and is
the risen Son of God.
I told the pastor about my
small doubts and stated that I needed more time to do some research on Jesus,
that I needed time to find out "the facts." Why, just six months
ago, I said, I had purchased a book about Jesus and had been meaning to find
the time to read it. This gave me the excuse I needed to get out of this
prickly conversation with the insistent pastor who seemed to be attempting to
corner me in an intellectual and spiritual sense.
In the ensuing conversation,
the pastor and I began to go around and around to such an extent that my wife,
beginning to feel uncomfortable, got up and left the room, taking my young son
with her. While I was ducking and weaving the pastor's biblical arguments,
I thought I was buying myself some time and was beginning to think of ways that
I could politely end this conversation without animosity.
He asked me if I could
turn to the book of Romans. I didn't have the slightest idea where this book
was located in the Bible. And the pastor, initially, let me flail around
trying to find this book. I thought, "Here I am, sitting in front of
a man who seems to know the Bible in a very intimate way, and I'm trying to
argue on his level over matters of faith and theology...and I can't even find
the book of Romans!" At that time, I got a very real sense of my
Biblical ignorance, which sobered me immensely. My counterarguments began
to seem very frivolous and ridiculous to me. I began to face that fact
that I had been dead wrong about a lot of important things, which was not an easy
or comfortable thing to digest.
While my mind was
racing from thought to thought, I was still having trouble locating
Romans. I was all over the Bible, looking everywhere. Finally, in
frustration, I thought, "The title sounds old. I know where Genesis
is, and that is the oldest book in the Bible, right? So Romans must be near
Genesis. Let me start there." I turned to the beginning of the
Bible and began to flip the pages forward from Genesis on through the Old
Testament.
Mercifully, the pastor put
an end to this insanity and patiently said, "John, Romans is after
Acts." When he saw the confusion still etched on my face, he added,
"And Acts follows the Gospels." Well, now I was in business,
quickly and shamefacedly turning to Romans.
The pastor took me
through Romans 3 where the Bible says that there is not one righteous person
upon the face of the earth and that all men have sinned against God. Then
he took me to Romans 6 where the Bible states that the penalty of this sin is
death.
"John, now I want you
to turn to Romans 10 and read verses 9 and 10 aloud," he said.
"That if you confess
with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised
Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto
righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation," I
read from my New King James Version of the Bible.
The pastor said to me,
"Now I want you to read what verse 13 says."
"For whoever calls on
the name of the LORD shall be saved."
"John, if you believe
in your heart that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and that He was raised from
the dead, the Bible says that you need to confess this with your mouth and in
faith, call out to Him to save you. You need to pray to Him and say, 'Lord
I know that I am a sinner. I believe that you died on the cross for my
sins. I believe that you were raised from the dead. I now turn from
my sin and ask you to come into my heart and save my soul.' If you ask Him
in sincerity, He will save you."
I sat back and thought,
"Can it be this easy? What about sacraments and baptisms and church
traditions? Didn't any of that matter as far as salvation
goes?" My mind was working faster now and I quickly concluded that it
was time to lay aside what men had been telling me about God all of my life and
put my trust in what God Himself had said in His Word.
He said to me,
"You don't need me here to do this. If you decide to pray for forgiveness,
you can do so at any time. However, I would urge you not put this
off. The Bible says that 'now' is the day of salvation. Would you
like pray to God for forgiveness right now?"
There was no more avoiding
this issue. I had to make a decision. Would I continue to put Jesus off
until a later time? What if there was no later time? I was convinced that
what the pastor was telling me was true, and yet a part of me still resisted
this Truth. The pull of my corrupt sin nature remained very strong and a
small part of me remained hesitant. I sat in silent conflict for a few
moments before finally asking the pastor to give me a minute to sit and think
about what I wanted to do.
As I sat there, I bowed my
head and pondered what I had just been told. I kept thinking, "How
can I pray to God and ask Him to save me when I'm not sure of who, exactly, He
is?" Then my thoughts went back to all of the things that I had
learned about Jesus and His life here on earth in my previous churches. I
realized that I knew just about everything a person needed to know about Christ
to have faith in Him. I had "believed" in Jesus Christ, but realized
that my “faith” had been merely an exercise of the intellect, mixed with false
teachings of works-righteousness.
I had been waiting for some
kind of unlikely informational intervention to take place in my life that would
confirm everything about Christ that the Bible claimed was true. I had
been waiting to see the right documentary or read the right book about Jesus
that would give me the knowledge that I thought I needed.
I thought to myself,
"Why won't you place your full
faith and trust in Him? What is stopping you? You know the Scripture is true. You know the message is right. So what
is your problem?" At that point I realized that I had always stopped
just short of placing my full trust in Christ and of totally committing myself
to Him. I had never truly claimed Christ as the Lord and Savior of my
life. I had depended on the church to do that for me. And just look
where that had gotten me.
Why had I never placed my
full trust in Him?
Was it because no one had
ever confronted me, as this persistent and patient pastor was now doing, and
told me that I most certainly was a sinner before God and needed to reconcile
with Him? Was it because no one had ever challenged the foundations of my
faith before, and exposed them as imaginary, rotten, and corrupt? Had no
one ever confronted me about my faith because everyone just assumed that I already
was a Christian?
I had heard countless times
before that Jesus died on the cross for my sins, but in the past that phrase
had always rung hollow. The "preaching of the cross" had always
been "foolishness" to me (1 Corinthians 1:18). It was
"foolishness" because it simply made no sense to me. I had accepted
it, but never fully understood what Christ's sacrifice meant to me as an
individual. I had never been truly convicted of the utter seriousness of
my own sin and never had a sense of my spiritual plight before a holy and
perfect God.
I realized that I had known
only half of the Gospel message; that Jesus loved me and died
for me. But I had never truly understood why I needed a Savior in the
first place, because I had never been confronted with the fact that I was a
lowly, foul, wretch of a sinner who deserved, not heaven, but hell. I had
always been told, in church and in the world, "go and do good
things," or "go and be a good person," or
"pray a couple of Hail Mary’s and Our Father’s and you'll be just
fine." Upon this faulty and unbiblical foundation, I had built myself
up in my mind to think that if I went through life being a "good"
person, going to church and keeping the religious teachings of men, that I was
going to make it to heaven.
I also realized that half
of the Gospel message is really no Gospel message at all. Separation from
God? A foul and wicked sin nature? Repentance from sin? Judgment
Day? Hell? Never heard of those things. I had never heard the
Bad News that preceded the Good News. Therefore, the Good News had never
really impacted me in any significant way. I had no need of a
Savior. I was doing just fine.
The pastor that I barely
knew was challenging me on spiritual issues that I had taken for granted for
twenty-nine years. But now the light of the God's Word was shining into
the darkest recesses of my thoughts and was exposing them as vain and
foolish. Would I continue to cling to my own shaky belief system, or would
I place my faith in the God-breathed words of Scripture that, as a light unto
my path, pointed the way to the only One who could save me?
With my assurance of heaven
flattened by biblical truth and in severe distress, I knew I needed to make
peace with God. Quickly.
I lifted up my head and
said, "Yes. I would like to do this right now."
And I prayed to God from my
heart.
And He saved me.
And my life has not been
the same since....
Summary
I did not leave my former
church looking for salvation. I did not think that I needed to be saved
from anything in the first place. I had gone out to look for a church to
attend and a place to sit on Sunday mornings. Instead, the Lord from
Heaven delivered me from a death I had not known was coming, and gave me a
place to sit in His Kingdom.
I can never repay Him or
thank Him enough for what He has done for me, a wretched and foul sinner saved
by grace alone.
(Some of my story following salvation and regeneration can be found in a piece I wrote called "Christian Hatred, Don Miller, and Missing Limbs.")
.jpg)
