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? |