1. point of origin
If all you get out of this life on earth is to know and experience God more and nothing else, is that enough for you?
As a kid, I can bet my answer would have been no. But my parents told me that as a seven year old, I had asked about a girl who passed away from our local church. They said they explained Heaven and the Gospel to me then and I “asked Jesus into my heart.” The problem was that as I got older and further away from that moment, memories of such a prayer completely eluded me.
It was like an amnesia of sorts. As if I woke up one day… years into my life, and everyone was calling me Mariah. Yet, I’m looking around with no personal recollection of ever actually being or wanting to be Mariah. But people were saying that’s who I am, so I put on the name tag and called myself Mariah too.
Before performing a baptism, the pastor will usually ask a variation of two questions.
Do you believe Jesus did everything necessary to save you?
2. Are you willing to do what He’s called you to do and go where He’s called you to go?
The origin of my false theology, my misconceptions of God’s nature/character, as well as the true mark of a Christian life can be traced back to ground zero here, with those two questions… because I had never personally said “yes” to either one.
Instead, the event that I believed saved me, enough to call myself a Christian at least, was some second hand prayer from my childhood. I assumed my own action, although I couldn’t remember it, was the only thing necessary to be handed a ticket into Heaven.
In my heart though, I had not acknowledged that I was a desperate sinner, not just someone who was imperfect from time to time and needed to turn over a new leaf when things started feeling messy.
I had not handed over the reins of my life and said, here you go Lord, everything I have including the breath in my lungs is yours to begin with; all for your glory now and forevermore.
I made confessions believing in God’s existence but I did not dare raise my hands and praise Him for being my deliverer, because that would require an understanding of what He delivered me from.
Being raised in a Christian home, with a pastor for a dad you wouldn’t think that it would take 17 years to finally surrender to Jesus, but a heart of stone is something only Christ can soften and mold. As the narrative so frequently goes, I participated in all the “right” things; youth groups, camp, Awana, and my attendance record for Sunday morning services was nearly spotless.
The association to all these extracurricular activities falsely became the indicators of my Christian identity, but in my heart, there was nothing of my own to say YES this is who I am. Since my “Jesus prayer” was second hand knowledge, the desire to actually be a believer in Jesus never took. More importantly and most cancerous, the desire for God never took.
As I was getting older there was nothing to look back on in awe and thanksgiving as the moment I encountered Christ Himself, and could never be the same because of it; and looking forward there was nothing except fear and dread that God was inescapable and only on the lookout to punish. To me He seemed like the warden of the world more than anything else. In my mind, God was a distant deity who had a list of demands that needed to be obeyed, His single greatest concern being how well the rules and expectations from some thousand years ago were followed.
Ephesians 4:27 instructs
“do not let the enemy have a foothold.”
Sounds simple enough…Foothold just means some place to tread on. But Satan is the father of lies and a wicked deceiver and he found landing after landing of places to tread on in my life early on. Although receiving gold stars and badges in my youth proving that I could talk about the Bible, I grew no closer to knowing Jesus intimately.
The head is a long way from the heart and Satan licks his lips at the opportunity to further the distance. The accuser was able to use my false theology to discredit the Word of God, blind me to the consequences of sin, and distract me from acknowledging my own desperation for a Savior. No matter how many times I heard the good news, it did not register to me that I had never accepted its message; and was thus unable to partake in the spiritual beauties of and from God. The enemy put a crack in my foundation when he began flashing the world and all of its pleasures and promises in front of my face and convinced me of the same lie he told Eve in the garden- that God was holding out on me.
Walking the line of figuring out my identity made me an easy target. Identifying myself with Christianity became the ugly itchy sweater you have to wear for family photos but cannot wait to shed as soon as possible.
Under the impression that it had more to offer, I started looking to the world instead of the Word of God to gain wisdom. Because somewhere along the way I said yes to wanting to go to Heaven rather than first agreeing to submit and walk with God under His authority here and now, I would spend over 17 years trading permanent treasures for worthless commodities, stacking up bricks to create my own prison on sinking sand.
John Piper writes in his book Future Grace,
“The spiritual beauty we need to embrace is the beauty that God will be there for us in the future, certified for us by the glorious grace of the past. We need to taste the spiritual beauty of God in all His promises. Our confidence and trust must be in all that God himself will be for us in the next moment, and in the next month, and in the endless ages of eternity. It is He and He alone who will satisfy the soul in the future. And it is the future that has to be secured and satisfied with the spiritual riches of glory, if we are to live the radical Christian life which Christ calls us to live here and now.”
Trust in the promises of Christ had not yet formed. I wrestled and shifted uncomfortably to understand His nature and the struggle did not spur on a yearning for His presence. Instead of an all consuming satisfaction in my soul from loving and magnifying Jesus in my life, I fell trap to legalism early on.
This looked like anxiously filling up journals with verses and bowing my head in half hearted prayer with one eye open, to politely ask for safety going through my days in order to remain in good standing with God, all from a reservoir of my own will power. I wanted to please God, while at the same time staying as far away as possible from His sight.
I was lost and had no idea.