Judges 6:25 "...tear down the altar of Baal that your father has, and cut down the wooden image that is beside it;"
Raised a Catholic, I believed that my weekly service as an altar boy put myself comfortably in God's good books. I was a nice enough guy and God had done well to have me on His side. I saw Him like the queen who waved at her distant subjects from her balcony, and then afterwards returned to her family members in the warm, cosy, living room. And that's where I was, in God's living room, where He discarded His austere front of law and justice and treated me with abundant leniency. It was only when a Barry Allan, a Christian colleague, asked; “so... do you believe that because you think it's actually true, or because it makes your life easier?” that I considered questioning my perspective. “Yes, of course I think that's true,” came my rather weak rebuttal, but I knew that I had just had the rug pulled out from under my feet. At 20 years old I realised I had completely made up God in my own head, and in fact had no idea what He was like, or what He wanted from me.
Hebrews 4:13 ...all things are naked and open to the eyes of Him to whom we must give account.
Some 2 years later, whilst settling into my first job as a project engineer in Market Deeping I found myself listening to a talk from the Promise 2004 Cambridge Outreach. My younger brother had lent me a CD with a couple of talks from the Outreach, put on by CICCU, the Cambridge InterCollegiate Christian Union. After gathering a lot of dust on my bedroom floor and on a day when I had absolutely nothing else to do I put it into my CD player. It was a very interesting talk, but what my mind could not forget was the testimony of the man at the beginning. He mentioned that come judgement day God would be able to put up on a big screen everything the guy had ever done, ever said, and ever thought, and that it would put him to shame. It occurred to me that I also would NOT like all my actions, words and thoughts laid to bare, and yet logically surely if there was a God how would I be able to hide anything from Him? I felt like I was on my way to school and had suddenly realised that I had not done my homework: I was in trouble and it was too late to do anything about it!
Proverbs 21:30 There is no wisdom or understanding Or counsel against the LORD.
That same year I joined an evening French class for adults to distract myself from all important issues. It turned out that the lady sitting next to me was the wife of the local Baptist Pastor. I was compelled to visit the church, although I felt I was above all these old religious types, as I was a science-oriented graduate engineer. I turned up at the midweek Bible study at Deeping St. James Baptist Church to discover my name on the list of prayer requests on the whiteboard! My surprise was further augmented when I met a chartered mechanical engineer, a chartered civil engineer, and a physics teacher... all who firmly believed the Bible was the Word of God! I realised how unqualified I was to say that I believed in science and not in God, and I was beginning to see that God was bigger than the box I had put Him in. The goads loomed closer and closer.
Luke 19:40 But He answered and said to them, "I tell you that if these should keep silent, the stones would immediately cry out."
Less than a year later in the early part of 2005 I was made redundant and would be forced to leave Market Deeping, and my new found Bible teaching fellowship. It was around this time that the afore-mentioned Barry invited me to stay a few days with his family in Sheffield so that I might attend a talk by what he described as a “very good speaker”. I was unaware of the topic but wanted to show-off my open-mindedness to his views, expecting some religious sermon which I could then criticise in order to seem like a deep intellectual thinker. It turned out to be eight hour-long talks. In the early part of 2005 at Hopefield Evangelical Church in Sheffield my eyes were opened to a possibility I had never before considered: that God really had made the world in 6 days. It had never even occurred to me to question evolution as the factual explanation for my life and all other life. I was after all a science-oriented engineering graduate. John MacKay of Creation Research in Australia showed me with crystal clarity that my faith in evolution was just that; faith, and he used the last thing I expected him to use: science, geology and fossil evidence. I would have sworn blind that these things were married to Darwin's theory, which I now realised was not fact, not proven, not evidenced, and not science; despite my having been taught to the contrary all of my life by intelligent, trust-worthy, well-meaning people. I had lost my safety blanket of materialism which had assured me that no mistakes I made in this life would haunt me after I died. I was gripped with fear; it seemed the prospect of an all-powerful God to whom I was going to have to explain myself was real.
Mark 9:23-24 Jesus said to him, "If you can believe, all things are possible to him who believes." Immediately the father of the child cried out and said with tears, "Lord, I believe; help my unbelief!"
Convicted of my wretched nature and unable to deny the existence of God I was miserable and worried, even though I had already heard that Jesus died for my sins. For months I longed to come under the cover of the Lord and Saviour who died for all mankind, yet I could not because I still had doubts. I still had questions, still had reservations. Surely to say I believed in Jesus when I had even the smallest doubt would be to lie to God? I struggled endlessly to prove to myself that Jesus was really historically God in the flesh, at the same time waiting and hoping for some bizarre and supernatural experience to serve as proof that the Bible was true. I waited in vain. Paul's words in 1 Corinthians 11:27-29 frightened me from ever touching the communion elements. All that changed on Good Friday 2005 when I was told what I had been waiting to hear for the better part of a year: “faith... isn't a feeling, no-one else can tell you you believe, it's not a test you can take or a certificate you can earn. Faith is what you choose to place your trust in...” These words from Pastor John Brown of soon-to-be Calvary Chapel Norwich were music to my ears. I could choose. And if for a moment I could lay aside my doubts, my questions, my reservations, even for a moment only, and choose what I wanted, it was indeed to have the only Begotten Son of God, God manifest in the flesh - Jesus Christ - as my Lord and Saviour, to wash away all the sins that I would never be able to put right, and to rule over my life. This night I heard a different word for faith that I found much easier to relate to; trust. I gave my heart to Jesus, realising that God is not insulted by my doubts and questions, that He wants me to reason, to think on these things, to work out my salvation with fear and trembling, to know that I have eternal life, and that these things were written in the Bible for this very purpose.
