As a young teenager I was like most people who have a very negative view of Christians and Christianity in general. I had been brought up going to church but most of the people I knew who attended were the kind of Christians who were “Sunday morning only” types. Once they left the building at noon on Sunday you would have thought they had never been there at all. I’d also become fed up with the way some preachers seemed so ready to manipulate people. Sincere Christians to me seemed to be mostly naïve people whose thoughts were easily redirected, but most of the people I knew were not even sincere about it.
Once I reached the age where I was able to make my own decisions on things, I chose to reject Christ and the church and anything to do with religion. I wanted no part of it. I especially didn’t want to be hypocritical and I knew that I couldn’t live a good Christian life so I decided to chuck the whole thing.
It was during my senior year of high school that I met some Christians who were really different from the ones I grew up with. There was just something very attractive about them. They really cared about others and accepted me without any of the strings that I found usually attached to that. And they were more than “Sunday morning only” types. They really did believe in Christ and it made a difference in their daily lives.
I remember one of them sharing with me that the really important thing was to believe in and receive Jesus Christ as Savior. This meant that I had to willingly turn my life over to Him. I remember a verse from the Bible that was shared with me-“But to all who received Him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God”. This made real sense to me but I still had hesitation about the whole thing. But I had no sense of meaning or purpose in life. I wondered about death and what would happen to me when I died. I was really looking for something worth living for and when I finally reached the end of my rope; I decided to give it a try. I remember praying something like, “If you are there, I want you in my life.”
I wasn’t even sure when I prayed this prayer that God was there or that anything would happen, but it was dramatic what changed right away. All of a sudden I had a brand new interest in knowing about God and following Him, and this was a 180-degree turn around for me. It seemed like my eyes were opened and I had a whole new outlook on everything. All my problems weren’t solved right away, but for the first time in my life I had a real sense of meaning and purpose to my life- to know God and help others to know Him too. I found out that even though there are plenty of hypocrites out there, there are also many people who are sincere about following Christ. They measure their Christian lives not by how many church services they attend but by how much their faith affects their daily living.
But probably the most important thing that has changed for me is that I no longer worry about what will happen to me when I die. The Bible says, “This is the testimony, that God has given us eternal life, and this life is in His Son. He who has the Son has life; he who does not have the Son of God does not have life. These things I have written to you who believe in the name of the Son of God, so that you may know that you have eternal life.” I know I have eternal life because I have Christ in my life.