As a young boy, I can remember that spiritual things and the existence of God were never questioned in my mind. I grew up in a Christian home with godly parents and due to my homeschooling, almost all of my friends were Christians. Since there was nothing to make me question what my parents told me, I believed it.
But head knowledge does not save, and while I do not remember much from my childhood and there is no “date” or “alter call” I responded to to receive salvation, I can remember several events that specifically stand out as God’s leading me to Himself and a knowledge of His Son.
One of these moments was during a service at our church. I must have been no older than 8 at the time, and I consistently thought church service was boring and mundane. One sunday morning, we were singing a “boring” hymn, and all in moment something came over me. Rather than just “repeating” the words as I sang, I really began to understand what they were saying. I cannot remember what hymn it was that we were singing, but I do remember that it spoke of Christ’s sacrifice for sins and my personal need of a Savior. A moment of brokenness followed by joy entered my soul. I believed this… it was not something I was just singing, but I truly understood in my child’s mind that Jesus died for me and saved me. The funny thing was that after we were done with the hymn, I can remember getting ready to sit down and an elderly lady I did not know behind me spoke up and complimented me on my gusto in singing. I had been so full of awe and joy at the moment I hadn’t even noticed that I was singing with all my might.
While the previous incident is very fuzzy in my mind, this next one is still rather clear. This must have been when I was around ten years old, give or take a year. I feel it a privilege to have been a recipient of a dream from the Lord even to this day. I vaguely remember the beginning of the dream, and it was a rather average dream, me and some friends playing in a park. But funny things started to happen. The dream took on some strange symbolism.
Beyond a “forbidden” sidewalk lived the devil, and while I could cross the sidewalk and tease and harass him, he could not cross back over the sidewalk in his rage and catch me. I repeatedly harassed him all afternoon and thought it was funny that I could get the better of him. But I forgot one essential fact. The devil, after sundown, could pass beyond the sidewalk and do whatever he wanted to anyone he wanted.
Well, you can imagine my terror when the sun slipped below the horizon and I remembered that the devil could come and get anyone he chose. A moment later, up he came from his shack, and he headed straight for me and caught me. I was terrified and knew that he would probably take me to his shack and torture me to death in his anger at my harassing him. Only one hope remained. Maybe my dad could talk the devil into letting me go.
The conversation between my dad and the devil lasted only a couple of moments. I can remember the devil saying that he had all the rights in the world to my life and unfortunately my dad agreed with him. I felt hopeless, even my dad could not save me. Then, the dream took on a whole new spiritual level. My dad suddenly changed, and his shirt was off, his back to me. Blood dripped from his back as I saw his agony as he spoke the final words in the dream, “Take me instead.”
I then woke up in a sweat. I immediately understood what my dream was about and who I had seen. I had seen Jesus in my dream, not his face, but his back, as he walked off to take the punishment I deserved for my passing the “forbidden” sidewalk and flirting with sin and the devil. I deserved to die, to be punished, but Jesus took my sins for me. Ever since that day, and even now, I cannot tell this story without tears coming to my eyes.
When I was twelve years old, reading my Bible during my quiet time, I came across Romans 12:1, and wanted with all my heart to give my life to Jesus, all of it without anything left to myself. Then and there I prayed to be a “living sacrifice” for the Lord, and have not regretted it to this day.
While I do not know when I was saved, or have a date, I know my Redeemer lives (Job 19:25) and that I am His and He is mine. The Bible says that if anyone calls on the name of the Lord he will be saved (Joel 2:32), for it is faith that saves us, not our works (Romans 4:3, Ephesians 2:8-9). For all of my works are like filthy rags in God’s sight (Isaiah 64:6) It also says that if we confess our sins, Jesus is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and cleanse us from all unrighteousness (1 John 1:9). We also know that we receive the promise of the Holy Spirit when we are saved (Gal 3:14), and I have evidenced that He exists in my life because He has changed me and is consistently at work both for God’s will and good pleasure (Phillipians 2:13). I realize the depth of depravity before God and thank Him with all my heart that He has loved me and chosen me and saved me.
(If you would like to use my story or dream for anything, sermon or print, you have my permission. May God be glorified in my life through what he has done.)
Where I am Now
I have to say beyond a shadow of a doubt that God is indeed working in my life and that I am growing. While I have my consistency struggles, I do my best to have quiet time, reading God’s Word and praying and memorizing verses (my weak point right now) in the morning and evening each day.
One of the greatest areas of spiritual growth recently for me has been learning to trust God to work His work despite me. I lead a Bible study that my friend Anthony and I started for college age people this last summer, and it has been a privilege to see people grow spiritually and to prepare lessons and use the skills I learned from my classes at Moody Bible Institute. But it has also been a struggle – a struggle to trust God that he would provide the people for the study and the time to prepare for it. He has not failed me once, and instead always seems to baffle me in how He works and the people who end up coming and getting touched the most. God is so cool!
Just recently I have become involved in a personal accountability study with my awesome friend Jonathan Strain. We both struggle with some of the same things and we call eachother regularly to check up on eachother’s spiritual life. Its been great getting to know him and he is fast becoming one of my best friends; and it’s also awesome to have a brother in the Lord to help in my weakness, and someone to confess my sins too. We meet once a week for prayer and Bible Study, normally at Starbucks where we have had opportinities to talk and share with people.
This last year I went on a missions trip to Brazil, and that experience changed my life (doesn’t everyone say that!) I feel so blessed that God provided all the money and all the time to go. Not only this, but He provided the scholarship I needed for school, on the day I left! God is so awesome! I was able to witness numerous people come to the Lord and had so many opportunities to serve and be encouraged while down there.
One of the greatest things I learned while in Brazil was the need to witness… to everyone all the time. I have been telling about my faith in Jesus to all my friends as often as God presents opportunities – this is normally once a week or more. I still struggle with knowing how sometimes, but I am learning. While no one has professed faith in Christ yet, I still pray for them and realize that God has to make the seed grow.
I am also currently applying for membership at the church I am attending.
There is only one more thing to say, and that is, that I am still a wretched sinner in need of a Savior (Phil 3:13-14). As I look at my life, I see my God working in me, despite me and my sin, for His good pleasure. If there is anything good in my life, something good that I have done, I can honestly say “those things I have counted as loss for the sake of Christ” (Phil. 3:7). My only goal is to be the best Christian ever: to grow in the grace and knowledge of Jesus Christ, to be godly, and to see my friends come to know the Lord.
Written 2/24/2005
Wow, that’s pretty surprising, that you never questioned anything as a young child.
You seem like the type of person who would have challenged the Sunday school teachers to the hilt.
You’re certainly making up for lost time now, Josh. :)
I was looking for some files today and came across this and thought it would be amusing to post it to my blog. I hope someone – anyone – can understand the frustration I now feel when Christians say I never really believed.
The irony of the entire thing is that I am the one who is supposed to be deluded.
I did question things as a child, but I remember very distinctly being extremely scared of asking questions. The main reason was my firm belief that the thoughts in my head that contradicted Christianity were from Satan. So I did everything I could to suppress them and keep them out. I remember once going to my parents and telling them that I thought I was brainwashing myself.
And, in a way, isn’t that what meditation is? It is constant fixation on a single concept – a single Christian truth or passage of the Bible… so as to let it “sink in” to your mind and heart. All other thoughts are to be pushed intentionally out of your mind and genuine questions only break the trance. Over and over in the Psalms, there is fixation on God’s Law, God’s ways, God.
So, yes: I asked questions. But a trained portion of my mind intentionally ignored them. Much in the same way that young men train their eyes to ignore women for fear of lusting, I trained my mind to ignore questions or doubt for fear of … changing. My fear was that changing anything could break the spell and throw me headlong into the clutches of Satan, where there could be no turning back.
I did not want to see reality, because reality could be deceptive. The irony, of course, should be apparent.
Josh,
I’m of the opinion that it is the suppression of honest doubts, and questions that in the end helps lead young people to unbelief. There is nothing more harmful than simply trying to enculturate (condition) kids into faith.
I had very much the opposite experience as a child. I remember even when I was in elementary school, maybe nine or ten, wondering if God was really there, and struggling with the whole idea of God as trinity. I openly questioned, and challenged my Sunday School teachers.
Before I was an older teenager, I struggled with why a loving God allows suffering in the world, and at one point became agnostic. More than anything, I wanted to know truth, and God, if He was real.
I can honestly say in my personal experience, it was, in part anyway, through all of this dealing with honest doubt, and questions, that in the long run, I did come to faith, and my Christian convictions were more, and more strengthened. Of course, this was a process over the years. (I”m fifty-four right now, probably older than your mother.) :)
It seems to me that if God is really there, and He loves us, we can trust Him with our lives, and with our minds. “There is no fear in love..”
I would view prayer, and meditation not so much as a mindless brainwashing process, but more as a way that we open ourselves to God.
Thanks for sharing Grace, honestly I appreciate it.
I think my little mind back then was just confused trying to resole things like a real spiritual realm with the fact that it seemed like all the Christian teaching, the question asking, and… well… everything was so natural.
I was trying to figure out where the spiritual realm was, honestly. I didn’t get it.
So at the time, to me, I had all these concepts running around in my head like:
* The eternal is more important than the temporal.
* Satan prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.
* Put on the full armor of God.
And this was a huge one…
* Doubts come when our relationship with the Lord is weak.
So, try to put yourself in my shoes. I’m being told all the answers, but little questions are coming into my mind that seem to contradict those answers. So it didn’t make any sense to me. Why would I ask a question that I already knew the answer to?
I think what ended up happening in my early teen years was my mind was constantly running in circles. And, to be quite frank, we were taught in a Bible study group that our relationship with the Lord was a giant circle… a circle that could only be broken if Satan attacked us at one point or if we were involved in sin.
So imagine my little (forgive me for this, but) intelligent mind trying to comprehend all this while my friends were your “typical” aloof types who didn’t so much care about that because they were interested in girls.
I was also memorizing hundreds and hundreds of verses. We had one sitting where I remember quoting 240 verses back to back, with references, and word perfect.
Now, I wasn’t just trying to quote them, I was trying to comprehend them. Take, for example, this verse (from memory, of course :)
“And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only True God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.” (I think the reference is John 17:1,2, or 3)
Anyway, I remember going over this in my mind time and time again, trying to comprehend how ‘knowing’ something could actually be eternal life. How could that be? What did this mean: eternal life? So I remember thinking that if I was down or depressed or whatever that maybe I didn’t know God very much.
I also remember thinking, quite a lot, that I was so… weird. Why weren’t my friends struggling with this? Why didn’t these verses bother them? They seemed just so happy. I couldn’t figure it out.
Honestly, Grace, I finally reached a point where rather than trying to understand what the verses meant (because that always caused contradictions in my mind), I focused on what the authors meant. I tried to picture myself in their shoes and what sort of situation or knowledge would cause me to write such a thing. That’s when things started making sense. I wasn’t just trying to understand the words on the page, I was trying to understand the concepts that would cause a person to write such words. I’d compare it to the difference between memorizing calculus graphs and understanding calculus.
And you know what? Grace, I’m not lying. I honestly understand most of the concepts spoken about in the New Testament… a lot of those super hard concepts that people can’t grasp make sense to me. But they only make sense when I stopped trying to make every author say the same thing.
In fact, just the other day I read through Colossians and the entire book makes sense to me. I know what Paul was communicating… and it’s quite incredible really. The problem is that it does not match, say, Revelation… or even the theology of Paul’s earlier works.
The mistake that I think a lot of Christians make is starting with the assumption that they will never understand it all, so they just assume that when they read a passage they don’t understand, it will make sense “in the end”.
But that never made sense to me, because if the Bible was God’s Word, and was given in this lifetime, then we should do everything in our power to understand every single word and sentence in that book. It seemed silly to me that God would write that much simply to tell us “Be saved by believing in my Son, and then live a life filled with the Spirit”. Why introduce so much confusion with all those unexplained issues?
I mean, seriously! People say Satan is the author of confusion. Quite frankly, take some time to read a book like… Revelation. Can you think of a book that has caused more confusion, church divisions, church fights, arguments, debates, false prophecies, etc. than that?
I mean, why go to the all of the trouble of making it complicated? Why not just say “here is what is going to happen in the end times.”
Instead, we have all these books that people are fighting over, trying to understand, when God could have made His message ten times clearer – if that is His message.
I have discovered, like I said, it makes ten times more sense when you aren’t trying to make it say anything and you allow the authors to contradict one another. Then you begin to see the light.
You know, I have to confess, there is some repression going on in this personal testimony.
For one, it is bizarre to me that I never mention having voices in my head, etc. I don’t mention the extreme struggles I had with demonic presences (which were all completely in my mind), or anything like that.
I think this testimony was to Moody Bible Institute. I often hid things from people during high school because I was scared of letting people know what I was really thinking about some stuff. Demonic things, for instance.
I guess I just assumed… at the time… that everyone else was experiencing the same thing.
Gah, the memories are getting fuzzy!
Josh, did you share all this with your parents at the time?
Were they concerned about hearing voices, and demonic presences, memorizing two-hundred plus verses… Think as a mom, I would have been hitting the panic button. Hey, just being honest.
That’s great that you have such wonderful insight into the meaning of Scripture. Can’t always say the same for myself. I definitely am uncertain concerning the interpretation of Revelation, although I do lean more toward the amill position. Think we’re dealing with tons of metaphor, and symbolism here.
Perfectly ok, though, with folks disagreeing with me.
Josh, did you share all this with your parents at the time?
Would you have?
I shared certain things and soon discovered their answers were so predictably unhelpful I didn’t know what to do. So I hid the worst parts and learned I had to figure things out on my own, out of a desire to keep my parents stress down.
As you can imagine, it is quite frustrating to not be able to share the joy of figuring things out with them. They refuse to believe my cure is possible.
Think as a mom, I would have been hitting the panic button. Hey, just being honest.
My mom never really hit the panic button… she normally just reassured me I was “normal”. I love her to death, but I sure wish she would listen to me now.
Perfectly ok, though, with folks disagreeing with me.
Hmmm, I think that if no children existed in the world I would be inclined to agree to disagree. Honestly, my de-conversion would not mean so much to me except that my little sister is being taught similar things as I was growing up.
I honestly have no idea how to deal with this.
It is tough when the things your mother hold dear are the enemy to the solution to your greatest problem.
You are in a tough, and I”m sure hurtful situation, Josh.
It will be very hard for you to reach your parents, partly because you’re their son, and partly because they might simply feel everything coming across like an attack toward them, and their faith personally.
I don’t have all the answers. But, here are some ideas. Hey, eat the fish, and spit out the bones, whatever might help. :)
Sometimes it helps to be able to find common ground. Is there anything about your parent’s faith where you actually might be able to agree, and see as a strength.
If you can affirm that to them, and build from there, they might be also able to hear some of your concerns.
Maybe it would help to point out that not all committed Christian people have this fixation on demonic attack, or in feeling perpetually guilty, and condemned. How does this all square with the unconditional love, and grace of the Lord? Doesn’t the Scripture say that nothing in all creation can seperate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord? That there is “no condemnation in Christ Jesus…”
Above all don’t argue. When people argue, minds shut down!! Do more listening than speaking.
If you can affirm that to them, and build from there, they might be also able to hear some of your concerns.
Yeah, I’m trying to figure out how to do this, for sure.
But the difficulty is probably summed up in that Christians are trained to avoid anything that could hamper their faith… so even discussing this will send up red flags galore.
Probably not a lot I can do, except be myself and focus on doing what makes everyone as happy as can be given the circumstances.
Sometimes I have to vent, but I’ll try not to let it create problems with them. Goodness, this whole wedding / elder thing got me sooo angry it is not even funny, but I’ll survive. I have until this point!
“But the difficulty is probably summed up in that Christians are trained to avoid anything that could hamper their faith… so even discussing this will send up red flags galore.”
Well, not all Christians…:)
But, I missed the controversary about the whole wedding/elder thing… ??
We all need to vent at times. That’s for sure.