My “Testimony”

I was asked to give a brief “testimony” in front of my church congregation as part of applying for Associate/Youth Pastor. I presented it this morning:

My spiritual journey doesn’t have the aggressive, exciting, roller coaster up and down episodes as some people’s do. I didn’t fall into a life of drugs, wondering, and rebellion or anything like that. But like all stories of men and women in the faith, my basic need for salvation was the same, and I’ve seen and experienced God’s love, faithfulness, and grace. And so that’s naturally what my testimony is going to be about – God, and not me. After all, my story only has meaning in the context of God’s larger story. Trying to come up with my own plotlines, of drama, romance, and adventure will never compare with the sovereign and brilliant epic God has in mind.

God was first good to me in the childhood environment he placed me in. I’ve had the (rare) opportunity of having two parents, one mom and one dad, both Christians who were willing to protect, provide, and educate me, affirming and trustworthy, and encouraged the progress of my own spiritual journey. Mom was my primary spiritual mentor, while my dad taught me what it meant to be a man. Both did what they could to manifest their gifts and abilities in the local church. Without either influence, I don’t see myself having the right orientation, the attitude, the soil needed to accept the seed of the gospel.

And you know what? I had no choice over this matter. I had two parents, not one, and both were there, not absent, and both were encouraging, not discouraging. And, this doesn’t just mean I’ve had more opportunities to worship and know God, it also gives me reason and desire to proclaim God’s goodness and faithfulness to others.

Of course, nothing is more inspiring to proclaim the gospel than the gospel itself. At 7, I made a public confession of faith. But, admittingly, it wasn’t until my teenage years that I really came into grips with how enslaved to sin I was. God’s law demanded perfection, and I couldn’t meet the standard. For the first time, I saw the real necessity of a perfect substitute – Jesus Christ as an atoning sacrifice for sin.

This basic conviction came not in the doors of a church but in times of personal prayer and study. Indeed, my formal “church” life was very much a separate, parallel track to my more spiritually progressive life.  I never wanted it that way, but I wasn’t content with being “OK,” I wanted to know my faith and why I believed it. What I needed at so many times in my journey was clarity – who Jesus was, who God was, and what the Bible really teaches. But for most of my life all I got was fuzziness. Jesus appeared to be just a really nice guy, and God the Father was like this giant teddy bear in the sky that didn’t have any problems with us because, well, He loves us unconditionally, right?

I knew God loved me. But no one actually explained why this was significant. It was like I was getting half the story for most of my life. It was like walking into a movie 45 minutes late, every Sunday. God’s love was stressed so much that it didn’t have any meaning. It took a while before I realized that my God, the God of Scripture, is also a God of justice, just as much as He is a God of grace. Even though this truth was foreign to many churches (or even over-emphasized on some), I didn’t resist this fact because I read about it in the same Bible I had been given as a young child. And I knew that when the Bible clearly taught something, if I didn’t like it, it was my problem, not God’s problem; it was my sinful heart, and not God’s good heart.

So who God was didn’t bother me at all, even though it was all very new and strange at first. Something did bother me though: why I wasn’t taught any of this. Why wasn’t I exposed to the full, untamed God of the Bible? I was blown away just by reading a book on God’s attributes, not having realized that “love” was just one aspect of God’s being. God was so huge! In fact, after reading Arthur Pink’s chapter on the faithfulness of God, I was tears of worship and gratitude over who God was. It was like I was worshiping God for the first time. But, there was no church building, no music, and it wasn’t Sunday.

I felt like most of the mainstream evangelical churches around me were almost trying to hide who God was, and to find out who God really was, I had to read the Bible, by myself, on my own time. And so that’s what I did. After all, if I had been missing out on so many treasures of wisdom and knowledge for so long, what’s to prevent me from getting blind-sided again?

Of course, I wasn’t alone. There was a church to guide me, but it just wasn’t “official.” I did have several spiritual mentors to point me in the right direction as I explored fuzzy areas of my faith and tried to find solid spiritual food. A wise and godly sage who was a minister to the prisoners met with me once a week for about two years to play table tennis, talk theology, and pray. A man from PA who appeared on CNN for suing his high school stopped by my place on a tour across the United States and inspired me to rise up against educational and intellectual injustice. Together we founded a teen-oriented ministry that continues to grow to this day (liveoffensively.com). And an apologist from Arizona challenged me to think critically on his weekly webcast. It was clear that providence was working; God orchestrated all of these things to help me grow and seek Him.

It wasn’t long after being discontent with the organized churches of my area that I realized other teenagers had the same spiritual hunger. I myself was attending three churches every Wednesday night at one point, including a youth group I started in my own home. I started a following of about 10-20 teenagers, mostly consisting of prayer and Bible study.

I was terribly surprised when I heard that a lot of the local churches didn’t like what I was doing. What was wrong with a group of kids gathering in a place of prayer and Bible study on Wednesday nights instead of an “official” service that consisted of games, donuts, and random talk about sports?

I quickly learned a couple things. The first was, the true church does not have to exist in a church building or in a specific institution. The Bible teaches that the Body of Christ is the assembly of believers, and the purpose of the church is not a weekly service, but actual teaching, evangelism, and worship. Every church claims to do these things, but I’ve noticed that only a few actually follow through.

This is not the way things should be, and it’s not something I prefer.  I would have rather have had an educated adult to be present to lead our weekly Bible studies, I would have even rather have had it in a church and not my home. I struggled with this for some time, but no one was there to do the job. And I felt guilty for keeping everything to myself – the gospel was so rich and so many of my Christian friends were missing out, especially the ones who attended church! It was against my conscience to be passive, and to go against conscience is neither right nor safe.

This was the second lesson I learned: even though it is difficult decision to make, spiritual growth should and must always be a higher priority than tradition. If I wanted personal comfort, I would have sent everyone home and went to the same Wednesday night services I did for most of my life. I would have did what people expected me to do. But sometimes in life, the spiritual health of the church and God’s glory is more important than my comfort and people’s expectations. In fact, I think male passivity is perhaps one of the greatest sins in our church today. As the quote goes, “evil triumphs when good men do nothing,” and that’s the truth. Men, women, and children are starving for the truth (that’s never changed since the beginning of time) and strangely, instead of being fed at church, they simply weren’t, because of passive elders and deacons, grudges, unforgiving hearts, gossip and rumors, personal traditions have no basis in the Bible at all, or some other such vice that virtually every congregation goes through.

This is, of course, only a tiny slice of what things God has been teaching me and has been doing in my life. I never mentioned publishing a book at age 19, years of camp counseling, a couple heart-wrenching breakups, college, seminary, starting an online apologetics ministry, rock climbing in West Virginia, band tours in Eastern Europe, driving four wheelers up exploding volcanoes in Ecuador, etc. However, I do want to offer a final reflection, which is probably the most crucial step I made as a Christian.

Sometime around age 16, a pastor encouraged me very seriously to start praying for 10 minutes every day. I did…and its’ changed absolutely everything. No single action on my behalf has done so much to my life in such huge ways. And, despite being a personal discipline, it is this simple practice that I believe all the rest of a person’s abilities depend. Indeed, as my mom recently commented to me, “all your other relationships are only as good as your relationship with Jesus Christ.” Your marriage, your family life, your friends, your relationship to your pastor etc. can only be as good as your relationship with Christ. And if you’re not talking to God, and you’re listening to Him by reading His Word, you can’t know God. And if you can’t know God, you can’t even know yourself, because we’re made in God’s likeness and image. Being like God is what it means to be human, and we can’t be like God without knowing God through Jesus Christ. So without praying and seeking the Lord daily, disorientation will set in sooner than we can understand.

I do pray God will continue to us me for His kingdom, and that I can encourage others with a similar vision – regardless of their age – to do the same.