I'd like to share the testimony that Christ has given me. "Testimony" is one of those funny Christianese words we church people use to mean a sort of spiritual biography. This is how I came to my present understanding of what it means to follow Jesus Christ.
I was raised by two Christian parents and have gone to church my whole life. I remember becoming conscious of needing to perform some kind of spiritual action in order to go to heaven when I was only about 6 years old or thereabouts. I had no understanding of who Jesus was or what made Christianity any different than any other religion at that age. Looking back, I don't believe I had any grasp whatsoever of grace or forgiveness. I simply knew that I had to say something to God or do something in order to go to heaven when I died instead of hell. I attended church with my family every week but I don't recall ever understanding that God's love for people (including myself) had no correlation with our behavior. I was quickly growing into a person who would judge others for not following the 10 commandments or attending church each week. My parents enrolled me in the Christian version of the boy scouts (AWANA) and I got more information on what the Bible said about X, Y and Z. I was coming under the impression that knowing enough stuff, memorizing Bible verses, avoiding "big" sins and going to church would make me a person in right relationship to God.
I grew in this understanding of "Christianity" for many years. Oh of course I would put out the window dressings of grace and talk about Jesus dying for me and forgiving me and my need to be saved... but it was just that... window dressings. All that talk about God's love for me and Jesus' death on my behalf was just smoke and mirrors. When you really got down to brass tacks, what mattered was me being obedient, me going to church, me trying to obey God's rules, me learning more about God... Me. Me. Me. Me. Me. My efforts. My goodness. My faithfulness. So long as I didn't wander too far from God I'd go to heaven when I died. Cause down deep I wasn't *that* bad of a person. I was pretty good. Better, at least, than people who always broke the rules, strayed from Sunday morning worship and decided God just wasn't their deal.
The problem was that the front I put up for other people to see wasn't the real me. When life didn't go the way I wanted I'd get pretty pissed off at God. Or I'd have long, drawn out pity parties. I remember immersing myself in pornography as an adolescent boy. I was growing into adulthood but God being my father meant little to nothing to me. If I wanted to *feel* like a mature man I would delve into the newly fashioned internet and satisfy this new set of urges. My use of pornography was far more for emotional and mental benefit than anything else. I wanted so much to grow up into a man but was lacking the resources to guide me in that process. I was learning to perceive myself as a weak victim in every arena of my life. I was learning that feeling trumps faith every time. So long as I *felt* manly I didn't care if I really was or not. I was using every resource that I had to deal with life but I felt like a weakling, an orphan, a nobody. I was learning to approach life as a hapless victim, unable to do very much in the face of life's great problems.
In 8th grade I switched from private school to public school. A little while after starting at the public middle school the bullying began. It was relentless. I had no idea what to do about it. I told my parents but they weren't able to provide any strong guidance. I was being humiliated by a group of about 5 other boys my age. I didn't know what to do. I just closed in on myself. If I kept my head down at school, retreated to my computer games as soon as I arrived home and rarely left the house (one of the boys lived a few doors down from me) I was okay. God didn't figure into my equation *at all*. I suppose it could be said I was just coasting spiritually. Going to church each week and not committing any big sins had secured my eternity (or so I thought) but provided no resources for dealing with life. There was no *relationship* going on between God and me. He was distant and abstract. For all intents and purposes, I was in this alone and I had to figure out how to keep my own head above water.
In 10th grade I had a fantastic English teacher. Mr. Hale was warm, friendly and a believer in Jesus. Of course he wasn't allowed to share his faith openly in a public school job but he'd convinced the principal to turn a blind eye to giving each of us invitations to our local Young Life organization. Young Life is an organization designed simply to love high school students of all shapes and sizes with the love of Jesus. The group met on a weekly basis to sing songs (some Christian but many secular), watch hilarious skits and hear one of the adults share about how Jesus had changed their life. By the time I reached 9th grade the bullying had mostly stopped but I hadn't yet had the courage to talk to a peer. If you'd asked me, I'd have said that I would never trust someone my age again. You see I was deriving my identity from others' opinions of me and I'd decided that nobody had a positive opinion of me so I would just not have any friends. By the time 10th grade rolled around I was pretty sick of my life being simply school, homework and computer games. Mr. Hale was so insistent with me too. It was almost like I was his special project for the year. He wanted so much for *me* to come to Young Life. So one day I told my parents about it and they drove me over on a Tuesday night. I hated it. Tons of my peers were there. I loathed nearly every second of it. Except for when I could just hang out with the leaders. Kevin (Mr. Hale, that is), Erick and Kurt were 3 of the male leaders and there's no other word to describe their mission at Young Life than "Encouragers". They were there to cheer on teens who were struggling through a very hard part of life, adolescence. They were so friendly to me. They were so insistent on trying to make me go home feeling like I had some kind of a support team. They cared. I mean they really cared. And so at Kevin's insistence I asked my parents if I could go to Young Life summer camp up at Lake Champion, New York in between my junior and senior years. I was still painfully shy around my peers but it was an enormous thing that I agreed to go to a summer camp several hours away from my home.
For the first two or three nights I called home to gripe to my parents from the dinky little payphone near the cabin. One night, Erick pleaded with me not to call my parents and then followed me the whole way to the phone telling me how much Jesus loved me. He went on and on about how Jesus loved me with all the issues and problems and horrible things I was dealing with. All my sins and shortcomings and all my failures couldn't stand in the way of Jesus' love. I remember becoming conscious of the fact that I'd walled God out of virtually every area of my life and that this was not a good thing. I remember being so afraid to let God break through all the little walls I'd erected to keep myself safe and I remember Erick telling me that God loved me even though I'd put up so many walls to keep him out. And I remember watching a video at that camp about Jesus dying for me. Literally dying for me. And I remember praying after that video was over telling God that I didn't want to change. I didn't want to take my walls down. But that he could take the walls down for me if he wanted.
Things changed very, very slowly. Knowing myself, I was battling God every step of the way to keep up the status quo. Like I'd said, I didn't want the walls coming down. God was going to have to go against me to accomplish his work in my life. And he did. The longer I continued walking in relationship to the Lord, the more I understood that God's love comes *in spite of* our actions, not because of them. Though I opposed the changes God wanted to make in my heart the changes came and with them came deeper joy and a deeper trust in God's love.
And then there's what happened in Korea. I'm convinced that my Christian walk consists of a series of crisis points where a new level of darkness is perceived in my heart followed by questioning how God could love such a wicked, sinful human being as me, followed by a new, deeper rest in Jesus and in what he has done for me and in the vast array of resources he purchased to face life with. In Korea I became conscious once again of just how far I'd drifted from intimacy with my Father. My heart was so dark. Pornography had surfaced again and again. I was deriving my identity from others' opinions of me and God wasn't factoring into a lot of my struggles. I was listening to a particularly abrasive preacher talk about the fruit of the Spirit in our lives (love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self control) and how lacking these things might mean we don't know Jesus at all and are not saved. I came to the conclusion that I'd never known Jesus. There was such a stark contrast between what a believer is supposed to look like and what I was looking like at that moment. I spent a couple of days in the bottom of a spiritual pit. All I "knew" was that I wasn't saved. I tried to figure out how to get saved. Listening to sermon after sermon on salvation, repentance and grace. Reading the Bible trying to figure out how salvation comes. And then came John 6:37. "All those the Father gives me will come to me, and whoever comes to me I will never drive away." That was it. Hah! Of COURSE I'm full of sin and darkness! But this doesn't have much to do with me! It has a lot to do with HIM! All I do is come. I come with all my failures, all my black, black, horrible, wicked sins. I come with a black heart, completely in need of a Savior. Not able to do *anything* to merit his love or *anything* to win salvation. Flawed in every way! Impure motives, flawed repentance, addicted to porn, using people to derive my identity, completely self-centered. Because this is the kind of person that Jesus usually rescues. Not the person who thinks weekly church attendance does something. Not the person who tries their best to be obedient. Not the person who repents completely enough or trusts enough or works hard enough or reads enough or knows enough or memorizes enough Scripture or spends enough time in prayer. But the person at the end of their tether. The person who looks at themselves and says "There's no way in bloody fucking hell I could ever earn the right to be in God's family." The person overwhelmed by the amount of sin in their heart and the smallness of their stature who has almost given up hope that God could ever take notice of or think kindly of them. The person who knows that if one one-thousandth of an inch of their salvation depended on them they would unquestionably be damned for all of eternity. And God comes to these people and says "You don't even know half of how bad you are, but I love you in the face of all your blackness and I love you so much that I took all of your blackness into myself and I suffered so you don't have to and now I can just wrap you in my arms and hold you close to me."
And when that love sank in and I saw that I was loved so completely by the God of all the universe, I could finally forget about protecting myself or improving my life or deriving my identity from the opinions of others and find a rest so much deeper than I'd ever known in my life. And it breaks my heart to see people write off such deep grace as either lawlessness or legalism. There's an entire new world when you see Jesus as he truly is and trust in him for every inch of your life.
And now I'm completely free, though I often return to my chains as they are easy and familiar. I often struggle to see the length and depth and breadth of the freedom I have in Jesus' love but I catch glimpses of it sometimes. And when you catch a glimpse of a love that amazing you always pour yourself out so others can see how amazingly they are loved. It's still an uphill battle remembering that I'm not "in this alone" and that I can keep looking out for the interests of others in the midst of my own difficulties. But wherever freedom is, service and love for others (not to mention the fruit of the Spirit) will inevitably follow.
