I'd like to respond to this, although I don't want to write a life memoir; so please bear with me if it seems brief. My first major life change came when I was 20 years old (many years ago). For certain reasons, I hated my father and all he stood for, so I wasn't about to become a Christian. I lied to people (saying I was a Christian) to keep them off my back. But I went to church because I didn't want to have a confrontation with my father. One day after a church service when the pastor was giving an invitation, I heard God say "
This is your last call" after which I saw myself being cast into the lake of fire. I went to my knees in fear and trembling. God met me where I was.
The progress of my Christian life was slow. There was a time when I came to realize my spiritual bankruptcy, and that I was truly a fool and spiritual idiot, and did not understand much of anything. But in some years God turned that around, and answered a secret prayer that I would understand more than my teachers like it says in Proverbs. Yet I still have a long way to go.
One breakthrough I had was that one day many years ago I was in prayer, and was feeling a great burden on myself that was not good. I was apparently still under bondage of legalism, not necessarily consciously, but unconsciously. I was shown 2 paths which were each labeled by a sign, one said "Religion" and the other "Grace". I was standing on the path of "Religion." I then saw the value of being on the other path, and was about to make a jump. But I heard a creepy voice behind me saying "
Watch out, you've tried that before and backslid. If you go there, God will let you go back into sin, and you'll be lost forever." But then knowing what the Bible taught about grace, I replied to that voice "
well, if God can't save me, then to hell I go," and I made the jump (as a final decision in my mind). What it meant to me was that I was never to make another decision motivated by fear or guilt. I discovered that God never abandoned me.
Another breakthrough I had was that one day I wrote a letter to God, and in that letter asked that God show me that I was His son. This was in response to reading the verse "
the Holy Spirit bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God," since I did not feel that I had any tangible evidence of it. Seven years later after that letter was long forgotten, God reminded me of it during a meeting with other Christians, and told me that I belonged to Him. I began to shout that He loves me, and God very powerfully answered that prayer. I never doubted Rom. 8:16 after that.
Another major breakthrough came years later around the year 2000. Up to that time the gospel seemed to me like an unfinished jigsaw puzzle, many pieces that I couldn't see how they fit together, even after reading the Bible many times and the NT about 20 times. Then I decided I was going to study Hebrews because I thought it was one of the most difficult to understand at that time. After reading it about 10 times and outlining it, I came to the realization that one of the key threads through the entire epistle was faith. The writer was saying that the disobedience he was talking about that displeased God was unbelief, and the object of our faith must be Christ. Quite suddenly and over about a month time, the gospel came together to me as a unified message. I've been teaching it ever since.
TD
