Dear Woman Friend Reading This,
Usually, I tell a story using the multiple characters who “live” in the pasture and then draw an application from the story.
Today, I am going to do something different. This time, instead of telling an imaginary story as a way of illustrating the subject of the post, I am going to tell you an actual, 100% true story from my own personal life.
I originally wrote this story down because of an assignment in a Bible study.
Here we go!
I pretty much grew up in church. As a child, about seven years old, I thought I met the Lord Jesus and asked Him to save me. Growing up, I was in Sunday school, church, children’s church, JOY club, as a teenager, I went to youth group. I was involved in a teen evangelistic ministry. I attended Christian schools. I started teaching Sunday school the summer between my junior and senior year of high school. I did everything that was expected. I was a good girl. But I was a master manipulator. I knew how to get what I wanted and didn’t mind playing the long game to get it. I was deceptive. I could be very cutting and sarcastic in the way I spoke to people. I also had a secret I wasn’t about to tell anyone: about a year after I thought I met the Lord Jesus and asked Him to save me, I began having doubts about where I would go after I died or what would happen when Jesus returned. No way was I going to humiliate myself by admitting my doubts. I mean, I did once and the person tried to help but I got embarrassed or something and wouldn’t be serious about the whole thing.
These doubts went on for 23 years.
In late fall of 1998, a friend confronted me about whether or not Jesus really was my Savior. Well of course He was. I said most of the words the tract said to say. I didn’t make any commitment to Him because of course I was gonna run my own life. But still, I said most of the words I was told to say. I told the friend very briefly what happened and immediately I realized I was no more a child of God than a parrot would be if it repeated those words. My friend challenged my story but I held to it. I wasn’t gonna embarrass myself by publicly admitting I wasn’t saved and then getting baptized after I got saved. No way!
Fast forward to January 3rd, 1999. Sunday morning, one of the pastors prayed that if someone was there who did not know Jesus as their Savior, that day would be the day they meet Him as Savior. That caught my attention for some reason but the service continued as usual.
That night, we had the Lord’s table with the crackers symbolizing Jesus’s broken body and the grape juice symbolizing His blood. But the pastor did something different that night. He had asked a few men in advance to read specific parts of the story of Jesus dying on the cross. I’d never liked the graphic and gruesome nature of the story and all He suffered so I tried to tune it out. Problem: just when I was able to tune out the voice doing the reading, another man started reading. I couldn’t keep the story tuned out.
Just before leaving church that night, I so wanted to talk to the pastor or my friend and settle the doubts but the words wouldn’t come out.
I went home. I got mad and asked God to show me if I really was His child. I was expecting a warm, fuzzy feeling to come over me. Instead I got an indictment of what would not be true of my life if I really belonged to God. I thought of putting it off but being well trained on not knowing how much time you have left, I decided it wasn’t worth the risk and called my friend for help. I decided it was worth a little embarrassment to finally have the doubts ended.
I had to wait a little while before my friend called back.
She asked me if I was a sinner and I said yes. She kept talking and of course I recognized where she was going and I stopped her. I’m very literal. Don’t tell me to receive the gift of salvation. How can you possibly receive something you can’t physically touch? My friend then understood that she had to deal with me as with a younger child and she was kinda flustered because I had just wadded up and thrown away every method she had ever learned. To answer the question of how to receive something I can’t physically touch, she told me to pray. I’m thinking, “I did 23 years ago and it didn’t work.”, but I went along with it and prayed my way through Romans 10:9, “That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved.” I tried to get every possible detail of the verse into my prayer because up to this point in my life, I still thought I was supposed to say some kind of formula.
Suddenly, it was like everything around me was gone and it’s just the Lord and me. He tells me I’ve done everything else but I’ve never actually trusted Him to save me. Now I had learned not to trust anyone to that degree. So I decided I would prove God untrustworthy. This was simple fear based on past unpleasant experience. Again, this was internal and took only seconds. I reviewed everything I could think of at the moment about God and I couldn’t find even one time He had been untrustworthy. So with a whole lot of fear, I consciously trusted Jesus to save me. (By the way, my friend had not mentioned trusting Jesus. The emphasis was still on saying certain words.)
Immediately, for no reason other than that it seemed appropriate ( I knew Romans 12:1 but wasn’t thinking about it at the time), I bowed the knee (not physically, I was sitting on the kitchen floor at the time) and gave myself to Him to use for His benefit and gain. It sounds better using Christian-ese but that’s what it amounted to.
No emotional rush or anything but I had a sense that either something was inside of me that had never been there before or that something had been turned on that had always been off. Imagine the kind of gas tank used for welding that has flame shooting out the side and you can turn it on or off. It was like I was looking at life through freshly cleaned glasses. I mentioned the Lord to 11 people the next day and talking about the Lord had always been hard for me. I walked down the hall at church the next Sunday and reached to flip on the light switch like I’d done dozens of times before but still I knew I was doing it for the first time and I marveled that I could be doing something for the first time that I had done many times before. I heard that a couple people had said that my face had actually changed. When I was baptized a couple weeks later, the pastor told the congregation that there had already been changes. As time has gone on, I’ve learned that the daddy I lost as a six-year-old has been replaced by a heavenly Father Who won’t abandon me and is completely trustworthy.
So that’s where my life as a child of God began.
I didn’t know how to restart this blog after having it down for so long. And to be honest, I’m scared to get it up and running again because keeping it going is a lot.
But, God has been working on me to get back at this so with a whole lot of fear and trembling, I’m obeying. I have no confidence whatsoever that I will post consistently but if God truly wants me doing this, He will have to help me. I certainly can’t do it on my own.
What about you, dear woman friend reading this? Have you ever met the Lord Jesus Christ as your Savior and Lord? Have you ever trusted Him to save you apart from anything you have or could do? He’s waiting for you to trust Him. He wants you to trust Him. The Shepherd in the stories I normally write for these posts are meant to represent the Lord Jesus. Have you asked Him to be your Shepherd?
It’s as simple as a-b-c.
A – admit you have sinned and disobeyed God. All human beings except Jesus Christ Himself have.
B – believe that Jesus took your punishment of eternal death as your substitute and rose from the dead.
C – confess and call: Confess to God that you are a sinner and call on Him to forgive you and save you.
It’s as simple as a-b-c. Will you accept His offer of forgiveness and eternal life? He says today is the day. Trust Him right now.
If you make that decision after reading this post, please tell me in the comments. I’d be THRILLED to know you’ve made the greatest decision any person can possibly make and one that causes rejoicing in the presence of God’s angels.
(Highlight the link and choose how you would like to open it.)
Lambs and Wings 