Tuesday, February 14, 2023 Adventures of a Young Christian, Part 2

If you want to start at the beginning of this series:
Adventures Part 1

Recently I saw a new Christian in his 60’s talking about his experience. He was a somewhat well-known podcaster, but unknown to me. His enthusiasm and zeal for this new-found faith was endearing, which made it easier to overlook the bad theology that sometimes emerged in the conversation. This is they way of it when you come to Christ as an adult carrying lots of pre-conversion baggage. And so it was with me.

I read something very early on that said that life is eternal, for the saved and for the unsaved – all will go to either heaven or hell. There is no other option. What? I had somehow missed that memo on my way in. I was appalled at the thought! Could people like my parents go to hell? Surely not! They’re such GOOD people. I had this idea that everyone is born good and the potential for good in them is never destroyed, no matter how they may have strayed. The fact that I was setting myself up as someone more just than God never crossed my mind.

The reality was that I knew I had been saved but I really hadn’t thought about what salvation meant. I wrote: “It’s like taking a child off the train tracks where sooner or later he would have been killed and then telling him that you saved him and shouldn’t he just jump and down for joy. No – that child is not going to know the full meaning of what happened, but someday when the child grows up, he will go back and look at those train tracks and see the inevitable passing of the train, and he will thank God that he was saved from that fate.” I was the child. I had never really understood the danger. “I did not reach for His hand to save me from being hit by a train…I reached for His hand because I was hungry for His love, His blessed unconditional love. I reached for His hand because I needed Him and He was there.”

Ah, such sweet, childish love I had for the Savior. There’s nothing wrong with baby Christians that time in the Word and in worship and in fellowship with more mature Christians can’t cure. It’s the same thing we need no matter where we are in our walk with Christ. I would eventually learn that no one is born good. There is no nature versus nurture debate when it comes to the sinfulness of man. We sin because we are sinners – that is our nature from the very beginning.

I had a lot of zeal, but still worried about turning into something or someone that I wouldn’t recognize as being me. I feared becoming “a smiling hollow robot with no mind whatsoever.” I was somewhat hesitant to tell my family about this new faith, especially since I had kept the whole journey to myself. They’d think I’d gone off the deep end, for sure. But on the other hand, the Lord gave me a huge desire to see the rest of my family come to faith in Christ – I not only had to tell them, I was already praying for them.

One thing I knew for sure – I needed to be baptized and make my faith a public thing. I don’t think I even remembered that I’d been baptized as an infant and really didn’t need to do it again. I hardly knew what baptism was, to be honest. I went to a church that did full immersion baptisms and I invited three close friends down to Rochester for the Big Event. Maybe it was unnecessary in the larger scheme of things, but I cannot regret that I went through with it. That was a great day.

Next up:
Adventures Part 3

Happy Valentine’s Day, peeps!

I’ll probably delete this by full immersion in the morning.