|
My triplet sisters and I were all born while my dad was at Yale seminary. Since my dad was a minister it goes with out saying that we were all in church from a very young age. We grew up in church. We lived in a house that the church owned. We went to Sunday school and church outings. We learned Bible stories and sang Jesus loves me this I know, for the Bible tells me so… Still something that I could not quite put my finger on seemed to be missing. I did not know why but there seemed to be a strange emptiness that could not be filled. I wanted to fill the emptiness; I just did not know how to fill it.
When I was fifteen my parents divorced and I moved to a new house with my younger sister and dad. One Sunday when I went to church with my dad he introduced me to guy named Andy Cabot. Right away Andy invited me to his family farm in Walepole, NH for a couple days. The first night at the Cabot mansion, two new friends Andy Cabot and Lenny Wells shared with me Scripture dealing with salvation and what it really means to be a Christian. I claim as my salvation verses
I John 5:11,12 , which says: "And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life." The first time I read these verses they leaped off the page at me, and I said to myself "the way to Heaven is simple; this is real; this is the single greatest truth in all the World." At fifteen years of age and no formal theological training it could not have been more clear, and I could not have been more convinced that all I needed to do to go to Heaven is to simply ask Jesus to forgive all my sins and to come into my heart and to be my personal Savior. Nothing more, nothing less.
At that point my friends left the room, I knelt at the couch in that living room and invited Jesus into my heart to be my personal Savior. The void had been filled! The emptiness was gone! The joy that I had seen on the faces of other public school kids at a Bible study I now had for myself.
The first thing that accorded to me on that special day, February 19, 1981 was that if I had not met someone that cared enough about me to take the time to tell me what it meant to trust the Lord as my personal Savior and show me from the Bible what it means to be a true Christian I might have lived and died never knowing for sure if I would go to Heaven. After that day that I became a Christian I would go to school, work and even to church and almost no one seemed to know the simple truth that was the key that unlocked the gate to Heaven and a personal relationship with the Savior of the World. This troubled me a great deal even though I found a great deal of joy in my new Christian life. I realized from the very beginning of my Christian walk with the Lord that everybody needs somebody to tell them about the saving grace that is found in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. This one thought has grown into the main theme of my life, and that is telling everyone I can about my Savior.
|
