faith - Testimony

I grew up in the United Methodist Church. My parents were (and still are) pillars of the small church I grew up in. All my childhood years were spent being involved in church activities. I was the youth group president, the pianist, the organist, the drummer, and a member of countless committees, choirs & councils. My future wife and I were in the youth group together. Everyone knew me. Everyone knew each other.

In my latter teens, I began to feel TOO close to the political goings on of the church, and the whole experience soured for me. Thus began my descent which ultimately lead to my enlightenment.

When we got married, we moved our membership to a "mega church" a few miles away, where we spent several of our blissful 20-something years in relative anonymity within the massive throng of this affluent congregation. It was what we wanted after years spent feeling like “big fish in a little pond”.

During my whole 20’s, my Christianity waned. I became very cynical about all the emotionalism and sales pitches I saw at church services. By the time I was in my early 30’s, I saw the church and the Bible as a giant house of cards, built entirely on mass delusion and feel-good, self-help programs. I was disgusted, but I thought maybe I just didn’t get it. Although I had a solid upbringing in the church, I now regarded nearly everything ‘Christian’ as part of my childhood, and not much more. I just couldn't take it seriously anymore.

My marriage suffered because of my cynicism and a constant feeling of my soul being in a pit of darkness. I thought perhaps I needed to cleanse myself of these feelings and jump into something ‘adult’, so eventually I took the plunge and joined a Bible Study program.

But the turmoil only increased. Hoping to find ‘answers’ provided by Bible scholars who knew what they were talking about, all I found was a kind of watered-down, everyone-is-right, wishy-washy presentation that didn’t feed me at all. I genuinely felt like the Bible could apparently be interpreted to mean any number of things, and every single phrase could be taken out of context and related to whatever was being discussed. I wanted to scream “If it means EVERYTHING, then it means NOTHING!”. After about 6 weeks, I dropped out.

I had sunk to a new low. My Christianity seemed dead, and I mourned it.

About this same time, a lifelong friend of mine, who is an atheist, began a respectful email debate with me about my beliefs. I was forced to defend Christianity and the Bible, and although I felt that I was a believer, my arguments were weak and emotional, and it lead me to question my spirituality on a deeper level than I ever had before.

Finally I confided in a dear friend and told him that I didn’t know if I believed in anything, and the Bible and church all seemed meaningless to me, and I was very frustrated by it all, because it seemed like others “got it”, but I just didn’t, and I certainly couldn't stomach the shallow emotionalism of it all. As I poured my heart out, attacking the church and the Bible, my friend just basically sat there listening and smiling. I felt like I was in absolute Hell, and he was acting like all this was SUPPOSED to happen! I didn’t know what to think.

He introduced me to some shocking concepts regarding God’s sovereignty. Instead of hearing the typical “God loves you” comfort-in-a-can speech I had grown weary of, what I heard was that God actually doesn’t NEED me and my feeble attempt at righteousness, that He existed whether I believed in Him or not, and that my turmoil was actually the hand of God bringing me to Himself, and that the proof was the agony itself, which wouldn't be FELT by someone who wasn’t being actively DRAWN by the Holy Spirit, so it was all good. My head was spinning. I didn’t understand it, but it felt good. This God my friend was telling me about wasn’t the ‘big marshmallow in the sky’, but was in fact, absolute MASTER of me whether I wanted to “make him my personal savior” or not. It wasn’t a feel-good message. It was actually a little scary … but I liked it! This, at last, was the food I was after. Maybe Christianity was bigger than me, and didn't depend on my own emotions about it. Maybe I was a sheep after all.

The next day, my friend emailed me Jim McClarty's ‘Sovereignty 101’ MP3, and my life hasn’t been the same since. That was October of 2004, and since then I have been completely, personally REFORMED from the inside out. Post Tenebras Lux: "After darkness, light" indeed.

After two years of attending Grace Christian Assembly, and listening to Reformed Biblical scholars doing solid exegesis, I was baptised by my pastor, Jim McClarty on February 11, 2007 at Sovereign Grace Baptist Church in Nashville, TN. I made a public profession of my Christianity before a room full of witnesses consisting largely of members of GCA.

New! Click here for the audio recording of my baptism and profession of faith!

Now the Bible makes sense. Now I cannot read any passage in the Bible without seeing God's sovereignty, and I love it. I can't believe how so much of what it actually says gets glossed over and ignored in much of the modern church. Now I’m bubbling over with excitement and devotion to the God of the Bible. My Christianity is not hokey, frail or emotional at all. I’m not embarrassed or ashamed of my faith. I actively SEEK OUT opportunities to share what I believe, and I feel no fear of being shunned because I am REFORMED or, dare I say it, a Calvinist!

Now I see the TRUTH: The God of the Bible is SOVEREIGN! What does that mean?