On December 18, 1978, the Lord Jesus Christ saved me from my sins and myself. I was just a month past my 21st birthday and had been aware of a painful emptiness in my life since I was 10 or 11 years old. Watching Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969, I wondered what they went looking for, and if it was the same thing I was looking for – answers.
Where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? What was wrong with the world? Can it be fixed? Although there was nothing original about these questions, they are things we have to know if we are to satisfy our thirst for identity and purpose. Throughout my teen years, I began to read philosophy, religion, and science, to see if I could stop this aching loneliness in my heart and mind. They all failed, miserably and thoroughly.
Various philosophies explained that I was the supreme ruler of my destiny, and that my subjective views were all that mattered. That left me close to suicidal. One religion after another gave me a prescription for “earning my way” into some deity’s favor. Yet when I asked, “Yes, but how?,” I found neither the will nor the ability to live up to those tenets. And when I tried, I had no assurance of what was adequate, making me the victim of a cruel guessing game. Darwinism asked me to believe that substance came from nothing, that order came from chaos, and that life came from non-life. It asserted that I was an accidental by-product of a process without purpose that worked in reverse from all scientific methodology. What about atheism? It was simply illogical nonsense, a thinly veiled, disguised defiance of God, to avoid moral accountability.
In pain, I turned to extensive drug use and aggressive amusements, in an effort to drown out the torment in my mind and soul. The eventual damage only compounded my suffering and added further loneliness and misery to my existence. I even failed at a couple of suicide attempts, because I was too afraid of what might await me afterwards.
At 19 years old, someone who cared (now my dear wife) bought me a Bible. I had grown up going to a popular Protestant denomination and had some respect for what was taught in Scripture. Still, I saw “going to church” as a community feel-good club, where people were deluding themselves into thinking that they were something more than they were. I preferred drugs, because they provided similar feelings without the moral obligations.
But as I read the Bible (especially the first five chapters of Romans), I began to realize that it could only have been written by “Someone” who knew me at the core of my being. Here were the answers to my questions, and I began to realize that I was designed by a loving, all-wise Creator, to have a living relationship with Him. Unlike religion, it was not up to me to earn my way into His favor, for He had already provided the remedy. My main problem was not an intellectual one, it was a moral one. What the Bible calls “sin” kept me apart from God.
However this was not an obstacle for Him! In a love which transcends description, He sent His only beloved Son to take the death penalty for my sins. Christ became my Substitute, and when I trusted 100% in what He had already done for me, the emptiness was gone. In an instant, He forgave all my sins and filled my soul with assurance and joy. I did not understand it, and I have spent the last four decades trying to measure it so it could be explained. The moment I believed that Christ had died for my sins, my questions were answered. I now know who I am and why I am. He not only satisfied divine justice, but He satisfied the deepest needs of my soul. Do not reject Him. He is and has everything you are truly looking for.