I was saved at the age of 6. I actually have no memory of the event and struggled with it for some time. If I do not remember it, was it real? I believe it was.
My dad used to read a book to us called, “Little Pilgrim’s Progress”, a children’s adaptation of the Bunyan classic. There is a scene in it in which little Christian takes his burden to the cross and lays it there. My dad helped me to pray and place my faith in Christ.
I was a “good kid” (except for the common refrain from teachers that I talked too much) but I did not serve the Lord until I was out of high school . I recommitted myself to Christ.
What’s Your Story?
Tell us about your salvation experience, will you?
I prayed a prayer when I was eight years old, but it never really stuck in me what had happened. It wasn’t until I was 15 that a real change took place. I was battling depression and some issue with pornography. I went to porn as a way to medicate my own depression for awhile. Naturally that didn’t work.
Eventually my parents found out what was going on and confronted me on the issue. Like any self absorbed 15 year old would do, I lied about it. What shocked me back then was that even though all the evidence pointed to me as guilty my parents chose to believe me anyway. That next Sunday during worship I was overwhelmed with guilt. I could actually feel God’s presence then. Following my dads sermon (I was a PK), I asked if I could talk to him in private. We went to his office and I confessed that I had lied, and completely broke down.
I was expecting My dad to become very angry or at the very least incredibly disappointed. Instead, my dad sat next to me on the couch, gave me a hug, and begin to cry with me. It was in that moment that I realized my view of God had been all wrong. Up o that point I had been trying to earn his love and favor through my actions knowing all the tie that I was never good enough. My earthly father exemplified the care and compassion that my heavenly father has. Following that things changed immensely and I had finally found myself putting my faith and dependence in God, rather than relying on myself to “earn” my way into heaven.
God’s power is great!
I was 8 when WWII ended. The cold war grew, we knew Russia had The Bomb, and I used to hear bombers fly overhead at night (thankfully they were our own SAC B-36’s). So I got to thinking, lying there at night, what it would be like to die. To simply not exist.
I got very depressed. After a few days of moping around the house, poking at my food, etc, Dad knew something was wrong and asked me. I recall saying .. with a lump in my throat, a hollow feeling in my chest and a weight on my shoulders, “I’m afraid of dying”. Dad said “Don’t you remember what you learned in Bible School .. if you believe in Jesus, when you die, you go to heaven?” Instantly the weight and the hollow feeling and the lump were gone and I said “oh YEAH!” and I ran outside and played.
My wife and I started to church regularly in our early 20’s, and I had to learn a lot more to discover that I’d been saved the day I trusted Jesus to take me to heaven when I died.
I personally know no more faithful couple who bear the cross of Christ and tell His Good Story consistently than Bob and Peg Cleveland. They were Jesus people before being “Jesus people” was cool on the California beaches.
Good word, Bob.
I crossed the room to turn off the AC in my trailer so we could watch and hear “Dallas” on October 20, 1979. Mid flight I realized what it meant to place faith in the finished work of Jesus Christ’s blood on the cross. I told my friend that I needed to do something and the next day was Sunday, my 25th birthday. I got to sit by the preachers daughter. Just as the invitation began, I stepped out and told the preacher what I desired. He was surprised and accepted my explanation and led me in the sinners prayer. I was baptized the following week. Since then, I have never doubted my salvation and have grown in grace since that day. What a wonderful Savior we have.
Several years later I discovered a great truth. He chose me! That one truth is therapy to the heart and soul.
I grew up in an SBC home, watching my parents teach Sunday School and work in the church. One night after VBS ended, a man named Bill Cox sprawled out on my NFL bedspread and shared the gospel with me in a way that seemed to hit home. I prayed there with him and excitedly told my parents the wonderful news. The preacher baptized me some time later. However, as a teen, I strayed from the morals I knew to be right and only rarely worried that God would punish me for it. Those moments of worry, though, were heart-stopping. It was not until my wife and I realized that our marriage was doomed without God that I turned to Him in order to fix my life. He’s been good to me, leading my towards wisdom and purity.
I started life in a Church of the Brethren. Dad was raised a Southern Missionary Baptist PK, but joined mom’s denomination where she had been a short-term missionary when they were married. I learned all the Sunday School lessons although they always seemed a bit disconnected. Did Paul come first or Moses? I could tell you the stories, but had no clue how they fit together. When I was 10, I lay listening to a radio preacher as I lay down for bed. He said the all-too-common “You just need Jesus. He’s standing at the door of your heart knocking. Won’t you let Him come in?” So I imagined my chest opening up and Jesus coming to reside somewhere in my left ventricle. I knew I would need to be baptized so I asked my mom about it. She called the preacher who told me to come up front at church as a candidate for baptism and I was dunked three times after the tradition of the Church of the Brethren in very cold Ohio creek water in the dead of winter.
We moved south with my aunt and uncle just after that, my mom having been diagnosed with cancer and my dad having found a new job. We went to their church that believes in soul sleep and are non-trinitarian. Mom passed away the next year and was remarried shortly afterward. Then we ended up in the Lutheran Church.
Needless to say, aside from being taught the Lord’s Prayer, Ten Commandments, and Nicean Creed in catechetecal classes, I wasn’t well discipled. After high school, I followed my heart into all kinds of sin. I partied my way out of my first jaunt as a music major in college, winding up up in the Marines and deployed to Saudi Arabia for Desert Storm. There, God was faithful and sent a couple of Christian men in my unit to teach me a few things about the Bible and started to bring my desires more in line with His. On returning home, I went back to school studying physics and studying the Bible on the side.
During this time I courted a young lady whose father was an Independent Baptist. He taught me my first hermeneutics from a dispensational standpoint and also tried to convince me of King James Onlyism. It didn’t work out between me and his daughter. Nevertheless, I came under the conviction that I needed to learn more Bible and less physics and went to Bible college after that where I learned a considerably better hermeneutic and also some good Christian philosophy.
I met my wife in the Lutheran Church I was still attending, although my studies convinced me that the Baptists had the “sacraments” and church polity right. When we saw signs that our denomination was heading down a decidedly apostate path, we made a break for it and landed happily in an SBC church.
So, I’ve known God for some time, but all my life He’s had to put up with my foolish antics. However, He’s worked to bring me this far and is still growing me in faith and ministry.
Jim Pemberton,
You have traveled a curvy road in your journey. Is you father still alive? Were you ELCA?
This is a good subject as a post. I hope others follow you in telling their story of conversion.
Curvy is a good way of putting it. On the one hand I can’t boast of any moral superiority like many people seem to do. On the other hand, I know from personal experience the pitfalls of foolishness.
Dad is still alive and relatively well. He and my step-mom are still Lutherans although they have long left the ELCA as well. As far as that goes, at least half of the ELCA churches in our area have left the ELCA.
So, yes, ELCA it was. There were actually homosexual operatives that joined ELCA churches “in the closet” and “came out” about the time that the issue was coming to bear in an attempt to influence the issue from the individual churches on up. It was pretty sickening. Several of us were already pointing out the troubling direction of the denomination on issues like abortion and “common communion” with the Episcopal Church. So we left when they decided that it needed a 5-year study to figure out if homosexuality was okay. If you can’t look at the Bible and see in short order that it’s pretty clear on the subject, you have to realize that the 5-year study was just a stall to garner support for the eventual policy change into rank apostasy. So we left early.
Some smaller Lutheran churches have suffered for leaving the ELCA. I occasionally fill the pulpit at one who has had a tough time finding a regular pastor. The retired pastor who is pastoring it part time was my former pastor and married my wife and I. They’re a faithful little church and if they are willing to let a Baptist come and preach, then I’ll help them out.
Jim Pemberton,
I ask that because after we left SEBTS, my wife became the HR director for the Lutheran Seminary at Gettysburg. It was a little “different.”
Well, you certainly have a good idea. It is definitely a different denominational culture. If you can imagine, the church I’ve been supplying went from the hierarchy you saw to being congregational. So they’ve been trying to figure out how to do business without the level of organizational support (and control) they had always had.
I was born and raised a Southern Baptist. Yes, that happens before you’re saved for some folks. I was on the “Cradle Roll” based on due date back in Abilene, Texas. Dad graduated from Southeastern Seminary back in the early 1970s, but spent most of my childhood in the Air Force helping pilots know how to find airports. He was a navigator.
I grew up knowing the truth of the Bible and some basics of theology that I still assume everyone learns while growing up, even though that’s not what happens. In 1988, we moved to Jacksonville, Arkansas. As the family moved their letters to First Baptist, I went ahead and said I wanted to be baptized and join the church. (Sidebar: that church is First Baptist, Jacksonville. All of that hullabaloo in Florida threw me off the first time I heard of it.)
Except that I wasn’t saved. I had not surrendered my life to Christ as Lord. I knew all the answers–might still know more than is good for me. There was no real heart change.
Of course, at that age, it’s hard to have much of a heart change. Dad and Mom would not have allowed that much of a sinful lifestyle from their 11 year old.
It was about 3 years later that God got ahold of me. I realized that my life was still my own rather than His.
Now, we won’t talk much about how much grace I selfishly required during my teen years, but I know this: without the saving work of Jesus, there would be nothing of me worth knowing.
” I was on the “Cradle Roll” based on due date back in Abilene, Texas.”
I wish I had been on the “Cradle Roll.”
Yours is a good story Doug. I hope to read those of others before Sun Rise on April 8, 2012.
Thank you Dave Miller for this good post.
No problem.
That’s why I keep this blog in my RSS feeder and Advil in my desk drawer: some posts are great and some cause tension headaches. 🙂
Doug,
You were born in Abilene, TX?
Don’t hold that against him.
I was born in Abilene too. :-p
Indeed. Abilene, Texas while Dad was assigned to Dyess Air Base.
In the 1990’s I pastored Abilene Baptist Church on Hartford Street just about a mile east of the main gate at Dyess AFB.
As a child being raised by my maternal grandparents on a sharecropper’s farm in Arkansas, I was taken to a local Southern Baptist Church, Nimmons Baptist Church, Nimmons, Ark. This was from around 1944,45-1953-54, when I quit going. Moving to St. Louis in ’55, I soon made my atheism known and went about making converts to that empty and meaningless viewpoint. Then on Dec.7,’57, I was invited to attend a YFC meeting ( actually I was dating a girl and, if I wanted to be with her, I had to go). While at the meeting that night, I thought, “I would like to go forward.” Then I thought, “But why? I don’t believe any of this is true.” At that moment I was stunned by what I saw (vision or hallucination: How does one prove it, either way?): There stood Jesus in front of me with an arm raised, like He was knocking at a door, and He was looking at me. I lost all desire to go forward. I wanted out of that place, and I wasn’t going to tell anyone about it (after all it is kind of hard on your atheism to have the God whom you say doesn’t exist show up, seeking admission into your heart and life. In fact, it was downright embarrassing). I went home that night, determined to tell no one until I was about two blocks from the house, when something or someone changed my mind and I decided to tell my mother, no simply matter. She was in bed, when I get home. I knocked at her door, and the first question was, “Are you in trouble?” Next, she asked, “Are you sick?” (typical mother questions and most aggravating). I told her I had gone to YFC and needed to talk with her. She said, “Let me get my Bible and we will go in the living room and talk.”
There I began to cry as I told her what had happened (She and my sister and my grandfather back in Arkansas had been praying for me for some time). There was a heavy burden on me heart. My mother read some verses to me (I don’t remember what they were) and then said, “All I know to tell you to do is to pray and ask the Lord to forgive you of your sins.” I did, and that burden that I did not know I had had up until that time was lifted off of me and I cried tears of joy.” I was going to go to church where my mother and sister attended the next morning and make my profession, but I sat up so late reading the Bible and like most teenagers I could not get up. But I went that Sunday night and went forward and the following Sunday was baptized. Crying tears of joy is one of the strangest things, and that was the first time I had ever done that. I did it again in ’72 at SEBTS in our Sem. apt., when the Lord was simply there one morning, no vision, just invisibly present, so real, so overwhelming. I cried for a half hour, getting ready to go to class. A solid half hour of a Divine visitation, joyful and quite rational, too. I was in seminary with Doug Hibbard’s Dad. In fact, I have his father’s picture in my student book. Our son was a year and a month old, when that occurred…and like Doug is a preacher, too. Praise God!
That’s an amazing account, Dr. Willingham! Praise God!
Long-story-short.
About 2:30 in the morning many years ago I was reading a Gideon Bible taken from a hotel. I became painfully aware that I was a sinner before a just and righteous God. (I learned later that was the work of the Holy Spirit) I repented of sin and asked Jesus to save my wretched soul. (I know now that was the work of the Holy Spirit) In that moment I was born again by the grace of God. (I know now that was the work of the Holy Spirit) It was totally a work of God in the life of a sinner. (I now now that Christ provided His atonement for me by the bloody cross and the glorious resurrection.)
Therefore on this Easter Day, I praise the One and Only Son of the Living God, The Risen Savior, Jesus Christ, The King of kings and Lord of lords! A-men! and A-Men!
” . . . for the LORD shall be thine everlasting Light, and the days of thy mourning shall be ended. . . ”
Amen
CB…I’m glad you finally found out it was all the work of the Holy Spirit, lest any of us boast in ourselves. amen? selahV
I was put into military prison for distribution of Valium. I was looking at 36 months for my crimes which gave me lots of free time to sit and think. I was so bored my first three days there while in administrative segregation, or “the hole”, that I read over half the OT. There was an independent baptist missionary that spent at minimum 2 days per week in the facility working with the inmates, often times he would be there 4 or 5 in the same week. Even today, he is still pouring his life into the men at that facility where I was confined. One June night in 2006 after he had preached the gospel at an evening service, God opened my heart to receive the Gospel. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ (2 Cor 4:6). He sent a man from Jacksonville, FL on a mission to a prison in Ft. Lewis, WA to find me. Our God is Mighty to Save!
Another great story of the sufficiency of God’s grace.
I received the Lord Jesus Christ as my personal Saviour on Thursday, June 7, 1979 as a result of the ministry of Twenty-fifth Street Baptist Church in Lubbock, Texas. I had been attending church for several months along with my wife, Rita. We became heavily involved quickly. One night, after returning home from church visitation, I decided I would become more familiar with the literature that I had been handing out to others. As I sat on the edge of my bed, reading “God’s Simple Plan of Salvation” by Ford Porter, I fell under deep conviction and soon realized that, though I was religious, I was lost. I then humbled my heart before God and received Jesus Christ as my Savior. The following Sunday I went forward at invitation time and made a public profession of faith and was baptized on Sunday, June 17, 1979.