The unfathomable treasures found in following Christ.
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I grew up in what is today termed a “churched” family. That means I was actively involved in the programs of an organized, mainline denomination. At various times I taught Sunday School, took part in music, went to a dozen or so Vacation Bible schools, gave money, sat through hundreds of sermons and eventually married a church leader. I knew a lot about God.
But all was not what it seemed on the surface. I had a very big, ugly, festering secret.
I hated the whole thing.
I’m not using the word “hate” the same same you would say you hate liver or you hate to wash your hair every day. I mean it in the “I loathe, despise, and don’t know how much longer I can keep this up” way. I was a professing Christian but the Christian religion was like a piece of rotting meat glued around my neck: it made me sick to my stomach, but I couldn’t get rid of it.
I lived in a world where the claims Christianity made for itself and my actual experience with it were 180 degrees apart. For instance, David spoke scores of times in the Psalms of a hunger and longing for God: I professed Christ, but I didn’t hunger for God, I hungered for things. Daniel prayed three times a day: I found prayer one of the most boring activities I’d ever tried to yawn my way through.
Everybody else in the services was singing, “I’ve got joy, joy, joy, joy down in my heart.” I had contempt, contempt, contempt, contempt down in mine. In fact, if I had sung what was really down in my heart I think the little old lady in front of me would have had a coronary.
The more entrapped I became in this pseudo-religious world — and my marriage was a major new entrapment — the more I saw the whole religious scenario as ridiculous. In my mind the church taught a lifestyle that sounded good and noble but didn’t really work. I thought the church was phony, the members were phony, the programs were phony, the pastor was phony, and the music was REALLY phony. But it was my world. I couldn’t get out of it without causing major damage in relationships, so keeping up pretenses became more and more of a strain.
But at the same time, in spite of all the revulsion I felt toward organized religion, there was something that bothered me in a way I couldn’t understand. Christ said the Biblical Pharisees were not righteous enough to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. (Matt. 5:20)
I knew enough Bible to know these guys followed the rules so stringently they even tithed the spices they put in their food! How could anyone ever attain such a fanatical lifestyle? In bed at night after everything was quiet, I would ponder this: why did a stale story from the Bible affect me in such an odd way? This verse worked in my soul sort of like the stick brake on a wagon in an old cowboy movie. Every time I was ready to turn the wagon of my life in another direction by ditching the entire Christian thing and declare my atheism, I would feel the weight of that brake. Somewhere, somehow, the Matthew 5:20 thing would come up, keeping me from doing anything so drastic, and I was right back where I started — sick of Christianity but afraid to abandon it.
Between the ages of 18 and 22 my inner life was an exhausting struggle between total rebellion against religion and everything connected to it, and the unexplainable “brakes.” As I look back at it now nearly 40 years later, I believe the reason that particular scripture bothered me so badly was because, underneath it all, I knew my profession of faith in Christ was a bunch of baloney.
The really frightening thing at the time was that my marriage was at stake. My husband blissfully embraced the entire Christian thing, and had his own view of the direction we were heading as a couple. [We were going to be a household of faith, by gum, or he’d know the reason why not.] But here I was, coming to the secret conclusion that it was all an orchestrated, manipulative hoax.
Things came to a head shortly after my 22nd birthday. A friend I worked with listened as I bitterly recounted all my frustrations. I was sick of trying to live up to expectations from the church and people close to me, of trying to be something I wasn’t and believe something I didn’t.
Religion was a tremendous, tediously boring, burden.
My friend saw it as a very simple problem. “You don’t have any peace,” she said, “because there are five things you must do in order to be right with God. Just do them and everything will be okay.”
She then proceeded to list what her church taught a person had to do in order to find peace with God. This sounded suspiciously like the same old recipe I’d had crammed down my throat for years. The fact was, I had done all five of those things — several times over! — and a whole lot more besides. It didn’t work! I could conceivably try to conjure it up. I could know that it should work and could even wish that it did…but I always came out the other side of the process as empty as I went in.
Where was the reality of God Himself? I was fed up with the whole emotional/intellectual struggle.
That night I went home in mental meltdown. My husband had a metting, so the house was empty and dark. I flopped down in a chair, totally at an end, and came to a crisis point. Either I would come up out of that chair believing Jesus the Christ was who He said He was — really honestly believing it — or I would come out of it a never-to-turn-back atheist. It was all or nothing.
At that point I prayed probably the only totally honest prayer I’d ever prayed in my life:
God,
I don’t know what you require of me — whether five things or five hundred….but even if the only thing you do require is faith that Christ really did rise from the dead, to be perfectly honest, I don’t have any. I’m tired of pretending I do. If I’m every going to be saved [a term I despised] You’re going to have to save me.
There was no indication God even heard. No lights, no blinding insight, no nothing. But I went to bed in peace because, finally, things were out of my hands. The ball was in God’s court.
The third verse of an old hymn by Charles Wesley reads:
Long my imprisoned spirit lay, fast bound in sin and nature’s night.
Thine eye diffused a quick’ning ray —I woke, the dungeon flamed with light!
My chains fell off, my heart was free. I rose, went forth, and followed Thee.
My salvation happened like that. It was as if someone had finally turned on the lights in a very dark room, and I could see. The next morning I opened the Bible to the Old Testament book of Isaiah and the first thought in my mind as I started to read was, ‘THIS IS TRUTH!” What I read made sense . I could grasp God’s point of view in His frustration with the idolatry and unbelief of a people he had done so much for.
By the time I got to the sixth chapter and read Isaiah’s description of Christ as the awesome King of the Universe, I began to notice something very different in my inner person. It was as if I had been picked up by the nape of my neck, like a mother cat picks up her kittens, turned around and sent on a different road and a different direction in life.
If you had known me before this happened, you wouldn’t have seen very much of a difference in my outer life. There was still church attendance, participation in worship music, etc. But inside I was a totally different person. There was a radical change in attitude and interests. I couldn’t get enough of the Bible. Instead of the rotten meat around my neck, Christianity was alive, vibrant and the world-view that, for me, finally made sense out of the world and the human condition. I changed from wanting to avoid God and hide from Him to having an intense desire to know Him, serve Him, and sense His presence.
That was nearly forty years ago.
Once in the backyard of a lovely old Georgian home situated not far from the Delaware river, a very troubled young woman who was looking for some real answers asked me why I believed in Jesus Christ. This was not a casual question. It was a very intense one. “WHY do you believe in Jesus?” she asked, her eyes desperate and challenging. She wasn’t interested in apologetic evidences — she was looking for something to satisfy her empty heart.
I answer anyone who asks that question the same way. Passionately I told her, “I believe in Jesus Christ the God-Man because thirty some years ago He reached out and changed my life. It was real and it was lasting and I’ve never been the same since. I’d rather be without food than be without Him.”
This blog is my attempt to recount nearly 40 years of wonder at how He works in the human soul.
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