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