Finding the Way

I’d always thought I was a good person – at least “relatively good”.  Growing up I felt I had a deeply ingrained moral compass – although I didn’t always bother to consult it – and in general, I was not a malicious or hateful individual.  I would even go so far as to say that most people I grew up with would have considered me of sound character.  I was raised in church, “saved and baptized” when I was in elementary school, and grew up my whole life with the awareness of God.  I did fairly well in school, went to college, and considered myself to be part of the “good crowd” – the ones that were “doing something with their lives”.  I was also an exceptional liar.  So well in fact, that I had convinced myself that being “relatively good” actually meant something and that an awareness of God was somehow equivalent to having a relationship with God and being submissive to Him.  I was completely blind to who I really was and totally unaware of it.

The truth is I was a selfish, rebellious, egotistical, arrogant, vain, sinful, and defiant human being.  If there was one person I cared about throughout high school and college, it was myself.  I was completely enamored with being part of the popular crowd – the clothes, the cars, the parties, dating the right girls.  I was no victim of peer pressure either…I was right there in the middle of it all.  I loved to drink and I loved to have a good time.  I remember boasting, so ignorantly in retrospect, about some of the parties we used to have.  It’s amazing how small your worldview is when you’re young – I was such a fool and, to be honest, I’m ashamed of who I was.  I remember being drunk and having theological arguments about God and religion – as if I cared about anything else other than being right.  Can you imagine what God must have thought watching me completely intoxicated, in defiance of one of His commands mind you, arguing about what I thought I knew about Him?  I didn’t know God and the truth was I didn’t care about God.  Everything about me was tainted by sin.  Even in relationships, where I thought I was actually capable of loving and caring about another human being, I was only concerned with myself.  I was never capable of loving another individual more than myself and, because of that, I treated a lot of young women in ways that I know God was disappointed with…in ways that I am disappointed with.

In the later years of college, I used to have this feeling of being lost.  It was as though I didn’t know where exactly “home” was, I just knew I wasn’t there.  I began to struggle with guilt and loneliness.  Looking back, I realize now that God was beginning to work in my life.  It wasn’t as though I found Him, because He was never lost – I was, but He began to draw me to Him.   That very fact has humbled me to my core, has begun to mortify my pride, and has brought me to tears more than once.  John 6:44 says “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him” and it’s true.  I was so lost in the depths of my own sinfulness that God had to reach in and save me – by no merit of my own, but out of an overwhelming grace and mercy.  Around that time I met my future wife and God began to slowly put things in place to accomplish His will in my life. 

A few years later my wife and I were driving home from San Antonio; it was dark and she was asleep in the passenger’s seat.  I sat there thinking as I drove about who I used to be and how my life had begun to change.  I was now playing in the worship group at our church – quite the different scene from my days in college.  As I thought about all the circumstances and events that had to happen in order to get me from where I used to be to where I was, I began to feel this overwhelming sensation that I had not journeyed there on my own, but I was brought there by divine purpose.  All along God had orchestrated the events of my life up until then to bring me to Him, right to that very point, and I knew he was offering me the gift of life.  Right then, I accepted Jesus as my Lord and Savior – the perfect sacrifice that paid for my sin in full so that I might spend eternity with Him and glorify His name.

In Luke 7:41-43 Jesus tells the following parable – "A certain moneylender had two debtors. One owed five hundred denarii, and the other fifty.  When they could not pay, he cancelled the debt of both.  Now which of them will love him more?"  Simon answered, "The one, I suppose, for whom he cancelled the larger debt." And he (Jesus) said to him (Simon), "You have judged rightly".  I think most of us walk through life in denial of who we really are.  We count ourselves as “relatively good” and therefore perceive that our debt (sin) is small and that diminishes Jesus and His sacrifice on the cross.  Once we begin to know God and are convicted of our true sinful nature, we then realize the great magnitude of our debt.  The Bible says the wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23) and it also says that all of us are sinful (Romans 3:10-18).  The only way we could repay that debt is an eternity spent in hell.  However, Jesus has paid our great debt and once we can understand the enormity of the debt cancelled, we can truly accept God’s gift of eternal life, love Him as we should, and recognize the immeasurable significance of the cross.