From the day I was born, the church was an important part of my life and identity. I was dedicated to God as an infant, and I asked Jesus into my heart at the age of three. I had memorized Genesis 1:1 and John 3:16 before I could even read, and I rarely missed a church service. Yet despite all that, I did not know the Gospel. I have always known and believed that Jesus died for my sins, but for most of my childhood, I had no concept of what that actually meant. It was just a cliché that I had learned to repeat.
With my shallow understanding of Christianity amounting to little more than a handful of rules and pious practices, it was no surprise that the real defining mark of my life as I grew up was hypocrisy. Though I genuinely wanted to live a good Christian life, and I certainly acted that way when others were watching, inwardly, I was consumed by lust, anger, self-centeredness, and greed.
There was no single event that changed my life overnight, but that process began when I first came to understand the Gospel that I had professed to believe for so long. I was in my late teens when my church started a weeknight Bible study, teaching through the whole story of Scripture, from Genesis through the four Gospels. As we progressed, I began to see the Bible in a whole new way. All those Bible stories that I had heard as a child suddenly began to mean something to me, as I saw them fit together into one big story. It was a story that warned me of the seriousness of my sin and the need for someone to come and take the punishment that rightly belonged to me.
I don’t think we had gotten through Exodus yet when I was blindsided by the Gospel. I realized that God made a good world and that He made mankind to rule over it in a good way. But we all follow in the footsteps of that first man, Adam, and we despise God’s goodness and choose to do things our own way. Suddenly it made sense that God would punish me for my sin. I was making myself an enemy of His good plan. But I also saw that God was gracious and forgiving, allowing for a substitute to take my place. As I learned about the Passover lamb that the Hebrews killed as a substitute for their firstborn, I realized the significance of Jesus, the Lamb of God, Who died as a substitute for all who would put their faith in Him.
Having spent so many years as a professing Christian, yet not knowing the Gospel, I set out to find what else I had missed along the way. This search eventually led me to Bible college, where I discovered a love for theology and biblical studies, and as sometimes happens at college, I met the girl who would become my wife. Our journey to becoming missionaries with NCEM is a long story. A story of literal mountaintop experiences (adventure racing in the Albertan Rockies to raise funds for Wycliffe Bible Translators), metaphorical valleys (financial hardships and the challenges of adjusting to parenthood), and even an injured rotator cuff, that God has used to gently steer us toward this ministry. But what has spurred me on most is the experience of my own life being transformed by the Gospel, and the knowledge that so many people have yet to understand the fullness of this Good News of the Saviour. •
