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… Read more »
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… Read more »
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.… Read more »
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.… Read more »
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.… Read more »
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”… Read more »
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… Read more »
” 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… Read more »
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… Read more »
” . . . 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… Read more »
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,… Read more »