I remember few things from my early childhood, but I do remember the how I felt that one Sunday morning as the pastor issued his usual alter-call. I was a shy kid and not one to seek attention, so I was amazed as I found myself asking permission from my mom, side-stepping out of the pew, turning down the center aisle and marching down to the front of the Church. Somehow I had suddenly needed to be baptized. My parents had not pushed me. My friends and siblings did not bring any pressure to bare. In fact, my older brother decided to get baptized out of sheer jealousy of me. I didn't even fully understand what I was doing, all I knew is that I needed to do it. As I look back on it, I can only explain it like this: God had called to me.
This was not some bright light experience. No angels sang, and I didn't set out for the remotest parts of the earth to convert the heathens. I was six years old. God knew that, and for the next seven years he just let me be a kid. A kid that began to love knowledge and the pride of knowing things other people didn't. Starting in fifth grade, I began bringing home straight A's. When a teacher would ask a question my hand was usually the first to shoot up. Shy as I was, I loved having the right answer.
It wasn't until I turned 13 that I really started to care about spiritual things. I began examining my life and the things I was doing and thinking. It was at this time that I became convicted about the amount of time and money that I was spending on Dungeons & Dragons (let alone the subject matter it represented). Much to my brother's dismay, I tossed into the trash over $100 worth of D&D books and manuals. That summer, before my freshman year of high school, a friend from church gave me some cassette tapes of a man named Josh McDowell. For the first time I heard someone talking about the reasons for faith in the God of the Bible. Real reasons. Solid logic. Rational answers. I had found the truth, and I was hooked.
I bought Josh McDowell's book, Evidence That Demands a Verdict. I not only read it, I wrote a book report on it for English class. When asked by my atheist teacher to choose a fiction book for my next report, I chose John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress. I read Josh's follow-up book, More Evidence That Demands a Verdict. I picked up books describing the errors of various cults like Jehovah's Witnesses or The Mormons. I never passed up a chance to bring my findings to the attention a classmate whose families belonged to these groups. I delivered apologetic speeches in Speech & Debate class. For the most part, my attempts to educate my teachers and peers fell on deaf (and highly annoyed) ears. But while I wanted to be loved and accepted by my peers, I wanted to be right even more.
Many years later I look back and think about how wrong I actually was. Not my doctrine, but my attitudes. You see, I didn't love my classmates or teachers. I loved being right. Maybe, if I had spent less time reading apologetics and more time reading my Bible, I would have come across these verses:
If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. -- 1 Corinthians 13:1-3 (NASB)My classmates were longing to be loved, and to them I was just a harsh noise. My message was certainly worthwhile, but my delivery was devoid of love. Not just my own love, but God's. I was testifying to the validity of the resurrection, the veracity of the scriptures and the weight of fulfilled prophecy. Big deal! God's love is the focus of the Gospel. Like someone standing in the way while extolling the exquisite frame surrounding a Rembrandt, I had missed the point.
...we know that we all have knowledge. Knowledge makes arrogant, but love edifies. If anyone supposes that he knows anything, he has not yet known as he ought to know; but if anyone loves God, he is known by Him. -- 1 Corinthians 8:1-3 (NASB)
Do this day, I have never argued anyone into the Kingdom of God, nor argued anyone out of Mormonism or any other cult. I sometimes cringe when I think about my high school years and how badly I went about it. I still love apologetics and while it does result in a few people finding the Lord (Josh McDowell for one!), the vast majority of people will not be impressed by long lists of reasons for believing. There is a reason that they call it "defending the faith." It was never meant to be an attack strategy, and when we try to use it as such it really does become offensive.
I still like being right (and who doesn't?), but now I like being loved even better. Not by those people who through ignorance consider my beliefs to be stupid, but loved by God Almighty who, in turn, loves these scoffers. Although evidence and historical fact played a large part in my early spiritual life, it was clearly not the reason that I first came to God. God chose me and called me to himself. I came to him in ignorance as a little child. I thank God that He did not call me to a brainless or blind faith. But more than that, I thank Him that He called me in the first place.
No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up on the last day. -- John 6:44 (NASB)
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