In Psalms 96:2 we are told to “Sing to the Lord, bless his name; tell of his salvation from day to day. “ I hope that in the telling of HIS salvation our response would be to “sing to the Lord” and “bless his name”, knowing that he is the author of our salvation. So I want to share a little about me and my life but more importantly what God has done.
I was raised in a Christian home, where my parents were both Christians and believed the Bible to be true. As long as I can remember I went to church and Sunday school, and even attended a Christian school all of my life.
For the first 19 years of my life:
My ambition in life was to live “the American dream”. Have a big house, nice cars, and lots of money, a life of leisure, fun, and excitement. One day, far down in the future I would die and go to heaven. For me salvation was a way for me to get out of hell and the foundation for my salvation was my works. I found security in having knowledge about God but I had no true desire to have a relationship with him. Jesus, for me was a cultural thing that everybody around me claimed to know and so did I.
When I was 18 I began a new stage of my life, the college years. My freshman year I was forced to start looking at the difficult questions of life like: what was I going to do with my life? And what was my purpose here on earth? The more I started to think about these questions the deeper I would sink into despair because I was coming up with no answers.
In between my freshman and sophomore years of college, God by his grace used two of my closest friends to help show me I was living a hopeless life. They pointed me to 2 main resources, the bible and then recommended several pastors that I could listen to. So I took their advice and began to read and listen with a deep interest.
Things that I had heard a hundred times over the years in church and had no effect on me now began to interest me. I started to read about God and hear about his holiness, justice and because of my sin I stood before him condemned. I learned about the person and work of Jesus, who humbly came to the earth, lived a perfect life, bore our sins on the cross, died, and was raised from the dead and because of him I could stand before a righteous God.
During this time God started to work a miracle in my life, I began to see the beauty of our Lord and how truly sinful I was. I realized that I had a need and there was emptiness in my life and something terribly wrong with me. I realized that I needed Jesus but I had hurt him with my sin and I wanted his forgiveness, I wanted him to accept me, know me, and it crushed me. I remember falling to my knees in that moment of real despair and saying “I’m sorry, can you please forgive me, can you please accept me?” and he did.
In 2 Cor. 4:4 it says “ The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.” For the first 19 years of my life I had been blinded but God in his mercy opened my eyes to the “light of the gospel of the glory of Christ”. The Bible that I had one time thought was boring and dull was now coming alive. I began to have a desire to learn about my God and had a passion to know him.
The Bible describes the miracle of salvation clearly in Ezekiel 36:27-28, “I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit within you, and cause you to walk in my statues and be careful to obey my rules.” This is what God did in my life and this is why I am here in Japan today.
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