My Story (part 2)

In my mind, I honestly thought Christians suffered from a mass delusion. Looking back, I know my Christian friends (especially my twin brother Greg, his girlfriend at the time Lindsay, my girlfriend at the time, Sarah, and my best friend Brad) could see right through my fake beliefs. Brad was always nice and gave me the benefit of the doubt, but I think he knew what was really going on in my heart. I always got nervous around them because I knew they wanted me to believe in Jesus wholeheartedly.

Before I knew it, college started at Georgia Tech. My friends told me to join a Christian organization on campus, but I had no desire to join one. I didn’t want to go to church either. College was finally a time for freedom. I could finally hang out with people without having to talk about God!

Thank God for Greg and Lindsay. They encouraged me to go to church, and I started to go to a church called Buckhead Church. I only went a few times my freshman year, but when I went I usually liked it. This place was completely different than my home church. They talked about the Bible like you could actually apply it to your life. They talked about God like you could actually know Him.

This trend continued through fall semester of my second year. I would go to Buckhead Church irregularly, and I usually enjoyed it, but God still wasn’t real in my life. Brad and I were living together at this point, and that definitely planted seeds for later, but God was still an abstract concept to me.

At some point during that semester, Greg invited Brad and me to go to this conference over Winter Break in Nashville, TN called Passion. It was some gathering of Christian college students from all over the country. I’m not even sure why I did, but I said yes.

I had never seen anything like this before. We had 12,000 college students in a building singing worship songs to God. Many of you will probably scoff and say I was caught up in the moment, but this was the first time I ever sang a worship song and felt like I meant it. God was in that building.

I heard several messages over those few days, but two of them stick out in my mind: one from John Piper, and one from Louie Giglio. Piper said the following statement:

“God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in Him”

That was huge for me. I had never heard about pursuing God as your satisfaction. That whole conference was about pursuing Christ as your happiness, joy, and fulfillment. I had never thought that was possible. Most of the Christians I had met up until that point always seemed joyless, not joyful.

Louie’s talk had more of a personal impact on me. Oops, I forgot to mention something. From the beginning of high school to this conference, I struggled deeply with lust. I’m not going to go into details, but that sin had its grip on me. This lust chained me down in guilt and I thought God hated me for it.

Back to Louie’s talk, it turns out that on the last night, he (amazingly!) talked about struggling with sin in our lives. He mentioned this “rededication process we go through when we do something wrong. It goes something like this:

1) We sin

2) We feel bad, so we apologize profusely to God, vowing never to do it again

3) Things go alright for a while

4) We mess up and do the same wrong thing again

5) Goto 2

Essentially, we always try to do good. We promise God that we’ll never sin again. Unfortunately, in this process we need to realize that living the Christian life is impossible on our own!

For all you church people out there, you’ve probably heard Romans 3:23:

For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God

As Louie pointed out, we usually stick a period at the end of that verse. But in the text, that verse is followed by a comma with the following statement:

and are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus

Yeah, we’re sinners. And yeah, we can never ever measure up to God’s glory. But by God’s grace, He redeemed us through Jesus Christ! Because of Jesus’ sacrifice, we become saints! We like to call ourselves sinners saved by grace, but through Jesus, we are saints who happen to sin!

He didn’t stop there. Below is Colossians 1:25-26. This is Paul speaking to a church in Colossae about what his job is:

I have become its [the church’s] by the commission God gave me to present to you the word of God in its fullness – the mystery that has been kept hidden for ages and generations, but is now disclosed to the saints

So Paul’s been commissioned to proclaim a mystery. It’s a mystery that’s been hidden for ages, but now it’s been revealed! What is this mystery? This is huge (Colossians 1:27):

To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles [that’s anyone that’s not a Jew…which means us!] the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory

This mystery is amazing. Why, you ask? Let’s go back to what we were talking about earlier. Like we mentioned, we like to play the I-promise-to-never-do-wrong-again game with God. But we have to realize that we can’t stop sinning on our own! It takes something else. It takes us giving up, and giving control to the One who can. It takes us surrendering to Christ, and letting Him dwell within us so that He can live our lives for us. As long as we try, we are going to fail. When we give the reigns to our Lord Jesus, He makes anything possible. So, in order to stop a struggle with sin, we can’t tell God, “I’ll try harder next time!” We should tell Him, “God, I can’t do this. Only you can!”

That was incredibly freeing to me. For me it was always: try to be good, try not to sin, try, try, try, try, try. But what I really needed to be doing was surrendering to Jesus.

Well, that talk set the stage for the last part of that night. We ended the night with some really powerful worship, and at some point we sang the song “Wonderful Cross”. I completely broke down and started bawling. But these weren’t tears of sadness…they were tears of joy! I could see Jesus in my mind hanging on the cross. Jesus was no longer a story, and He was no longer a historical figure. I realized that this man left footprints in the earth when He walked. He had flesh and blood. He actually did the things the Bible says He did.

And for the first time in my life, I could see He was hanging on the cross for me! He was there for my pride, my arrogance, my atheism, my lust, and all of the other crap I’ve done and ever will do. He loves me so much that He hung where I should have been hanging!

From that point on, my life has never been the same. Even though I still sin, I know that Christ has freed me from sin. Even though I’m going to die, I know that won’t be the end for me. That night, Jesus Christ became my Lord. God became real. He revealed Himself to me, and the grace He gave me through His Son now drives everything I do.

Now, I know some of you may say, “Great story! It’s cool that you’ve found something that works for you!” I’m here to tell you that Jesus Christ did not come to this earth so that people could find something that “works” for them. He came so that we can stop running around like chickens with our heads cut off looking to lust, pride, arrogance, alcohol, sex, drugs, and all that other junk for our satisfaction. He came to restore the rift between us and our Creator. He came to save us.

Well, that about wraps things up! I'd like to thank all those in my life who didn't give up on me. Especially Greg and Brad. I'm eternally grateful to both of you for all of your prayers and encouragements through the years.

Stay tuned for the Psalm 73 series!

For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life

John 3:16

My Story

So it’s been a ridonkulously long time since the last post. Hopefully someone actually reads this one!

This post is actually the first part of a two-part introduction to a multi-part series (confused? =D). In the series, we’re going to examine Psalm 73 and hopefully discover that it speaks just as powerfully today as it did when it was written so many years ago. If you don’t believe in this whole Bible thing, or if you’d rather have me blog about random junk that happened in my day, I’d encourage you to keep reading. There’s some stuff in this Psalm that you really don’t want to miss (plus you don’t want to stop procrastinating on studying, do you? =D). But before we dive into it, I’d like to take this moment to tell you my story.

Have you ever heard someone talk about their “relationship with God”, or their “walk with Christ”, or something of that nature? Or have you heard people say, “God’s in control, it’s going to be ok”, or “Jesus is my best friend!”? Well, to be perfectly honest, not too long ago, I always thought those phrases were hogwash. They made me uncomfortable and sometimes even hostile! Let me explain.

The following sentences may seem like bragging, but they have a purpose, so please bear with me. I’ve always done well in school. I’ve always had nearly the highest grades in my classes, and I’ve hardly struggled with understanding subject matter.

As I grew up excelling in academics, my family attended a traditional church for as long as I can remember. We faithfully attended church every Sunday. Probably like many of you, when I woke up on Sunday mornings, I always hoped there was a way we didn’t have to go to church. Sleeping was always a better option than going to be bored every week! Yeah, I had a few friends in Sunday School, but I think shared boredom was the depth of our friendship.

Anyways, much to my disappointment (and my dad’s yelling!), I usually ended up at church Sunday mornings. Like my academic classes, I did well with answering the Sunday School and Confirmation teachers’ questions. Since I attended church each Sunday and could regurgitate answers about God, Jesus, and other churchy things, I “made the grade”. As far as I could tell, I could appease my parents and other church folk, and then go on my merry way the rest of the week. For me, God was confined to church and Sunday morning (I guess you could throw a few holidays in there too). Just like math or science, He was an abstract concept.

Well, it only deteriorated from there. By middle school, this whole being smart thing was pretty sweet. I could figure most things out on my own. So, at some point, I examined my situation.

• Church is really boring
• Why do all these people go to church anyway? None of them seem happy. They seem to do it out of obligation
• Hmmmm, maybe they're just not smart.
• Yup, they just made God up to explain the unexplainable
• God doesn't exist!

So, I became an atheist. This lasted for a few years, but it was strange because I didn’t tell that many people. I think I was scared of what they would say.

Unfortunately, these middle school years were probably my worst. At some point, I discovered that you could make people laugh by making fun of people. Since I was a geek and in band, this was an enjoyable way to get attention. So, (as some of you may remember) by 8th grade I became known for making a few people’s lives miserable. I was a jerk. Period. On top of this, up until this point I had always done well at everything I did (except sports…which is probably why I quit). So, whenever something didn’t go my way, I would throw a tantrum. If people criticized me, I would snap back in defense. My temper was horrible. I probably should have seen a counselor.

Then high school rolled around. I was still an atheist, but since high school was a new environment, I did what I always do in new environments: become shy and quiet. This lasted for a little while, but since I was in band, I met a few people that I’m still friends with today. It turns out that a lot of these people were Christians, so I quickly had to evaluate how I would swing this whole atheist thing. I decided to be as non-confrontational as possible and pretend that I believed in God. These people were pretty cool, so I would sit through youth group and things like that so I could hang out with them.

Meanwhile, I continued to excel in school. This smart thing had gone on for quite a while, so it became more than pretty sweet. It really got to my head. I had tons of pride and arrogance (and I still struggle with this today!). I would ridicule people in class that didn’t understand things. I would look around at my classmates and honestly say to myself, “Ha, I’m smarter than them”. This calmed down as I got older and into college, but I always considered myself better than the people around me because of my mind. Pretty horrendous, eh? I hope you guys will forgive me.

So, high school was a weird mix of arrogance and pseudo-belief in God. When I would hear my Christian friends say phrases like “relationship with God”, or “walk with Christ”, I would scoff inside. I would think, “These are just things Christians say to each other. It’s just a crutch.” I couldn’t stand when people talked about God like they knew Him. People would sing songs talking about how God is their happiness, how Jesus died for them, and how they’re so committed to this guy named Jesus. I thought it was all garbage.

To be continued…