For the first eight years of my life my family was part of a non-denominational church, after we were kicked out of the church because of lies told by one of the elders of the church we ended up in a tiny
Foursquare church that met at the local YMCA (which eventually merged with the Foursquare church the next town over). I spent most of my young life struggling and unsure of my salvation, having been raised to believe that my salvation depended on my coming to Jesus through personal decision and choice. My struggle was over how one could know if they "meant it" when they asked Jesus into their life. So no matter how many times I found myself begging for God to save me, I was always left feeling ultimately empty--since my salvation depended on my making Jesus my Savior, then knowing whether one was truly sincere was very important to me. After all, plenty of people could say the Sinner's Prayer or walk up to an altar call, say the right words, but end up walking away from Jesus (which, as I had been taught in my early life, meant they had never had faith in the first place). So a combination of Decision Theology and OSAS amounted to many years of despair, grief, and doubt. Though I never really expressed these things openly out of fear of others judging me.
In my late teens I was introduced by one of the more educated members of my church to the writings of the Church fathers. I was completely ignorant about the history of Christianity, but had a general interest in history, and so took the opportunity to start learning some of that history. Which led me to also begin talking to other Christians online in discussion forums. This exposed me to a larger range of ideas than I had ever been exposed to before. A couple of those early discussions made me realize that while I thought I knew the Bible, I didn't really know the Bible, I had never seriously studied the Scriptures, and had taken virtually all I had been told growing up for granted.
This combination of studying Scripture, exposing myself to a larger diversity of Christian beliefs, learning theology, and researching the history of Christianity ultimately resulted in me realizing that much of what I had been told to believe might not be true. I had already stopped attending the family church at that point, in part because my mom had passed away the summer between my Junior and Senior years of high school, my father had had to relocate to a new town for work, and I was without a car at the time.
I ended up in a period of wandering in the wilderness for a while, trying out a few churches here, a few churches there. But never finding a spiritual home.
A long story made slightly shorter, I never intended to become Lutheran; it happened basically by complete accident. Of all the different churches I was looking at, Lutheranism wasn't on the list. My "gateway drug" to Lutheranism was ultimately a small conversation I had online years ago now. A Lutheran explained since salvation is by the grace of God alone, then it really must be God's grace alone. My salvation didn't depend on me, it didn't depend on my efforts, it didn't depend on me saying, doing, thinking, feeling the right things; it didn't depend on me being "sincere" enough, it didn't depend on me making a decision, or any of that. It was simply this:
Christ died for me.
My salvation was out of my hands and in God's hands, and He is far more faithful, far more merciful, far more excellent than I am. Infinitely so.
A couple other significant occasions involved me reading Martin Luther's account of his "tower experience", where he speaks of his struggle with Romans 1:17, and his epiphany that "the justice of God" here isn't that justice by which God condemns sinners, but the justice by which He makes sinners just. This was the spark which ignited the Reformation. Further, I saw a bit of myself in the historical Luther--the Luther who so desperately wanted to be accepted by God, but found himself nothing but a cold dead sinner; how could God who is holy and just ever accept a sinner who is not? How could one possibly ever know if they are saved? How could one not live in the utter terror and immense dread that they would, very likely, no matter how much they devoted themselves to Jesus, still be condemned to deepest darkest hell? It was a dread, a despair, a guilt that I was intimately familiar with.
That the good news is that salvation is God's work alone, and is not of ourselves, is truly good news.
The more I read Scripture and the more I familiarized myself with Lutheran theology, the more brilliant everything seemed to shine. It felt, in some ways, like I had finally come up for air after having held my breath under water for so long. What seemed so brilliant about the Lutheran treatment of the Bible was, ultimately, it was just letting the Bible be the Bible. Let Scripture say what it says. It's okay if Scripture says something and it doesn't make sense right now, let it say what it says. It's okay if there are paradoxes, it's okay if there are things unexplained, it's okay if there are things that aren't reasonable, it's okay if Scripture doesn't fit in my mind's box, it's okay if Scripture doesn't fit into my preconceptions. It's okay, just let Scripture say what it says. It's not about me figuring it all out, it's not about me making all the pieces fit nice together. If Scripture is messy, let it be messy. If it seems like the puzzle doesn't have all the pieces, then fine, you don't have to have a complete picture. Just let Scripture speak, just let Scripture breathe, because ultimately what Scripture is saying, what it always says, is Jesus. Scripture speaks Jesus to us, let us kneel and hear the Word of God.
That is an abbreviated version of my life story.
-CryptoLutheran
