“No” she said, “you don’t understand.” She was right, as always. I did not understand grace. And then in the space of maybe a minute or so G launched into this exposition of God’s promise of forgiveness in the Bible. I don’t remember exactly what words she chose, but I know she said that God loved me and that all I had ever done and even all that I might continue to do that was wrong, it could all be forgiven.
Little did I know that, all along, God had been actively pursuing me and calling me to Himself. That book of yours helped me to grasp who Jesus really is, what He really did, and what it actually meant for me. I came to realize that there was not only a different God out there than I had constructed for myself, but that there was also plenty of good evidence to consider the claims of Christianity as sound.
We pulled up to the emergency entrance after days of vomiting while my blood pressure took a nose-dive. I tested positive, resulting in instant banishment into a quarantined room. I pulled out the computer from my backpack and spent three hours asking individuals, community groups, and church prayer lines to pray for me.
On May 3rd, we will begin a new special Podcast series — Questioning Christianity with Tim Keller — specifically designed for people who are exploring Christianity, but don’t yet have a personal faith in Christ.
So long as I persisted in trying to write my own agenda for life, based on my wishes, I met with frustration— so many of my longings simply weren’t going to be fulfilled— not yet, anyway. But whenever I accepted God’s agenda for me (and surely that’s what’s implied in saying “Jesus is Lord”), life became not only bearable but fruitful in unexpected ways. What I perceived as my prison became a field rich with opportunities for knowing and serving Christ.
My coming to faith has been a gradual journey—at first being quite resistant to the idea, then selectively choosing what to learn from the sermons, and then at some point, my heart opened to God at an accelerated pace. It has been a few years since the first Sunday I stepped into a Redeemer service in NYC, and I am in awe as I never thought I would become a follower of Christ, let alone tell others about my newly found faith. I am truly grateful to have a new identity in Christ!
Following my parents to board a plane to move to the opposite side of the world made it clear that our life isn’t all about me, and that my own desires were not our family’s center of gravity. This act of unsolicited submission proved to be crucial to my future discipleship; it gave me an experiential understanding of myself in relation to God.
My wife has spent almost 30 years in constant and often unbearable pain. And for many Christians, this just doesn’t fit with the faith they’ve been taught in church. For them, Christianity is about overcoming, not about enduring. It’s about dreams coming true, not shattered dreams. And it’s certainly not about persistent suffering.
When my sister walked out of her room and said she met Jesus, my mom knew all that. And here is the part that gets hard to believe: Sima, my mom, read about him and became a Christian too. Not just a regular one, who keeps it in their pocket. She fell in love. She wanted everybody to have what she had, to be free, to realize that in other religions you have rules and codes and obligations to follow to earn good things, but all you had to do with Jesus was believe he was the one who died for you. And she believed.
It’s true, I’m not deficient. There is no moral value to being bipolar. There are merely advantages and disadvantages. But the reason I have value has nothing to do with my job or productivity. It has to do with the incredible and nearly unfathomable fact that the God of this universe deeply loves and values me. Through gospel-centered and cognitive behavioral therapy, I now have a toolset to help me process and understand what I’m going through and prevent relapses.
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