DAVID’S TESTIMONY
I was raised in a religious family. When Sunday came we almost always attended church. When I was four I was baptized in the Episcopal Church in Seattle. My mother has my baptismal certificate which states that I will go to heaven because I was baptized. When we moved to Denver my family joined a United Presbyterian Church. At the age of thirteen I attended classes and was confirmed in the Presbyterian Church.
The summer I was fourteen I stayed with my relatives on their farm in Oregon for several weeks. I had visited my relatives on many occasions. My uncle was the pastor of a church that my great-great grandfather had donated the land for, and we always attended Sunday school and church services with them when we came to visit. My cousin Margaret was my age and we always spent time together. That year her sister Roberta attended a teen camp that instructed her how to use a tract to present the gospel plan of salvation. Roberta taught Margaret how to do it and I was the first candidate to come along.
On several nights Margaret and I had long conversations. One of these nights I shared with her my interest in books by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, French existential writers. These books taught a philosophy of life that I understood to be basically: exist. Through these writings I had begun to embrace a practice of "live and let live." I determined to get through life by trying to tolerate others when I had to, while trying to exist unto myself. The philosophy had no need of interaction with God, and I felt that it made sense. No one had told me that existential writers ended up committing suicide.
Margaret asked me an interesting question: "What does Jesus mean to you?" In my experience I felt that I was already a Christian because I believed that God had created us. Furthermore, I lived in a Christian family in a Christian nation and was a baptized, confirmed member of a church. My experience with God was rather like visiting a museum. I would go to church, learn about God, acknowledge and appreciate His existence and go home again. I felt God had no more influence in my life than our country’s forefathers. I appreciated what they had done and enjoyed what they had produced. I was grateful to God, but I certainly did not feel dependent on Him. I felt God had gotten us going and now it was up to us to live out our lives. Having been raised with a moral code, I considered myself to be about the nicest person I knew. The matter of working out my existence was troubling at times. I felt that even though people liked what they saw of me, there were contradictions in my innermost being. At times I felt I might be crazy and that it was only a matter of time until people found out. Indeed, the fellow student who introduced me to Existentialism ended up in a mental institution before she graduated from high school.
I found out that Margaret knew Jesus in a completely different way. She showed me in the tract what the Bible said about Jesus. I knew the Christmas story and the Easter story, but the Bible explained it as a personal payment for my personal sin debt. Further, the Bible proclaimed that Jesus was the way, and the only way, to salvation. So far, I was encountering things I knew. I knew I was a sinner and that Jesus died to pay for sin. I felt that since I was in a Christian family and a Christian nation and had been baptized and confirmed and tried to live a good life, that somehow when the end of this life came, God would work things out for me: sinner, Savior, no problem. What really stunned me, however, was what the Bible said about trusting Jesus Christ. It talked about personally receiving God’s gift of salvation through receiving Jesus Christ as my Savior. The Bible actually said a person must be born again, spiritually, into God’s family.
Margaret went on to explain that she had personally trusted Christ to be her Savior and He had literally changed her life. She pointed to others in her family and in her church who had done the same thing. She showed me in the Bible that this promise was to every one who believes, then she asked me a question. "David, have you personally trusted Jesus Christ to be your Savior and to change your life?" Of course the answer was no. I could remember reading the Power For Living handouts each week in her Sunday School class and being intrigued by people talking about a personal relationship with God. I had always known that there was something special about my cousin and her family, but I had associated it with being a simple farm family. Now I was being challenged by the Bible to open my heart to Jesus Christ and trust Him with my life. Margaret said: "David, why don’t you simply pray right now with me and ask Jesus to forgive you and to take over your life? Simply trust Him to be your Savior."
My answer was: "No." I explained to Margaret that I didn’t believe that God could have a personal effect in a person’s life. I told her that I believed in the God who created the universe but felt that He had left us to our own devices. I explained that since I did not believe that Jesus could change my life, a prayer requesting that would just bounce off the ceiling. I told her I was happy for her that she could believe it, but that I could not. In my heart I felt I was too knowledgeable and sophisticated for that.
I thought that would be the end of the matter. Margaret did not bring it up again before it was time for me leave. However, the Bible verses that I had read kept popping up in my memory. I attended a teen activity at Margaret’s church and we sang a song about Jesus being the Lighthouse. I looked at the various teens in attendance and heard some of them talk of their faith and changed lives. Here were people from a variety of backgrounds who shared a similar testimony of what Jesus Christ meant to them. It was an interesting phenomenon.
Shortly after I returned home with my family, I suffered the end of "an affair of the heart." It had been a brief summer crush, but when it ended I felt totally "crushed." I went from being a proud, self-sufficient teenager to being a humbled seeker of answers. One Sunday, as the family left for church, I determined I would find the answer to having God in my life. I listened to the sermon eagerly so that I would not miss hearing about how to receive Christ as my Savior. When the poem that signaled the end of the message was read, my heart sank. Never before had I heard a gospel presentation in that church, but now I felt desperate. If I could not hear it in church, where would I hear it? In the closing announcements the pastor mentioned a teen activity scheduled for that evening. Now my heart soared again. I determined to attend and learn how to have my life changed.
The teen meeting consisted of a discussion of pre-marital morality, without a single reference to trusting Jesus Christ. As the meeting ended and people filed out, I felt real despair. How could I leave without settling things with God? As others went to the parking lot, I went to the auditorium and sat on the back row. In my mind I reviewed all the ways I had tried to explain the phenomenon of salvation. I had thought it might be that people were deluded. Maybe people convinced themselves to believe it because so many around them did. Possibly it might be some form of mass hypnosis. I spent a great deal of time thinking about it, analyzing it and considering again the claims of the Bible. Finally, I walked down to the front of the auditorium and knelt at the steps to the altar. Although I had never seen anyone kneel in a Presbyterian Church, my childhood memories of the Episcopal church included the kneeling rails. My mother had read Bible stories to me as a child and I could remember kneeling beside my bed to say prayers.
My prayer was direct and to the point. I was no expert but I was earnest. I explained to God all of my theories and then I admitted that I had seen evidence of the New Birth in the lives of others. I was not sure that God would save me if I asked, but I was sure that He could if He wanted to. In simple faith I told God that I was a sinner, that I believed that Christ’s death was payment for my sins, and asked Him to take over my life. I can remember saying: "I don’t want a philosophy, I don’t want a religion, I would like you to change my life."
When my prayer was finished, I sat on the front pew and waited. I did not know what to expect. Would there be fireworks or angels singing? No one had told me what would happen now. Finally I bowed my head in prayer again and said: "God, I have done what I could, which was to trust You and what You have done. Now it is up to you."
I can remember sitting in study hall the next day. My life had been so full of turmoil that my insides had been like the waves pounding on the shore, swirling sand and shells and foam. As I sat there that day I felt a remarkable peace. I can remember thinking: "Why am I so peaceful?" Then I remembered what I had done the night before. "Hey, maybe He did it!" Indeed I can clearly trace my new life in Christ to that Sunday evening in September of 1965. I truly found a personal relationship with the God of the Universe, through my Savior Jesus Christ. It has been my privilege through the years to lead literally hundreds of people to the same saving knowledge and new life in Christ.
Six years after my salvation, I began attending a fundamental Baptist church. I had searched for years to find a place that preached what I myself had experienced, based on the Bible. Shortly after I began attending I was baptized again, a full immersion believer’s baptism just as the Bible describes. For six years I had searched for the song about the Lighthouse that the teenagers had sang. Neither my uncle nor anyone else had been able to point me to that hymn. After the baptism there was a church service in which hymns were sung and people stood to give testimonies. I was so surprised when the pastor led the congregation in singing "Let the Lower Lights Be Burning."
Let the Lower Lights Be Burning
Words and music by Philip P. Bliss 1838-1876
Brightly beams our Father’s mercy from His lighthouse evermore,
But to us He gives the keeping of the lights along the shore.
Dark the night of sin has settled, loud the angry billows roar;
Eager eyes are watching, longing, for the lights along the shore.
Trim your feeble lamp, my brother; some poor sailor tempest tossed,
Trying now to make the harbor, in the darkness may be lost.
Let the lower lights be burning! Send a gleam across the wave!
Some poor fainting, struggling seaman you may rescue, you may save.
