Finding Jesus in the Bible…So We Can Follow Him in Life
Bible Reading Plans
- Plan One: New Testament Only
- Plan Two: New Testament + Psalms
- Plan Three: New Testament + History
- Plan Four: The Entire Bible – Year 1 of 3, Year 2 of 3, Year 3 of 3
Don’t know which plan? Go to A Christ-Centered Bible Reading Plan: Quick Start.
Extras
Verse of the Day, Audio Capsule, and Video Minute
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The One True Church
Chapter 3 – My Decision to Go to Seminary
Within a few months of settling on the church we would attend, I made the decision to enter seminary. For you to understand how I came to that decision, I have to give you a few more details about my conversion experience.
The high-school classmate who witnessed to me and I were about ten years out of high school. We hadn’t see each other much since high school. The context that brought us together in 1978 was a business opportunity. I thought he might have an interest, so I looked him up and arranged for us to have a business lunch.
My immediate reaction to hearing his conversion experience in the restaurant was revulsion. That is, I was stunned and dismayed to find out that he had become one of those religious people I’d been avoiding since the mid-1960s. I went away from the experience wishing him well but hoping to never see him again.
A day or two later, he dropped off four or five Christian books at my office while I was away. When I got back to the office and saw the books, I was even more dismayed. However, since the books were loaned and decency required me to return them in due time, I skimmed them.
The skimming aroused in me the thought that I should read the Bible for myself in order to be able to use it to refute him and any others like him. I was cocksure that he was twisting the Bible to his purposes and that I could show him where was misrepresenting it.
The problem was that in reading the Bible – especially the New Testament – I found that it actually did support the idea of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ!
At this point, I found myself seeking out Christian bookstores to buy books about Christianity. I started watching Christian television which had become available through new cable television systems that were being installed around the country at the time. Just as I had devoured secular culture, books, music, and so on since adolescence, I was now devouring Christian culture, Christian books, Christian music, and so on.
Now you can see that it wasn’t my friend’s testimony that won me over. On the contrary, it was simply the event that confronted me with something that I had to research for myself if I were truly going understand it. In the end, it was the combined weight of all the research I did. More specifically, it was reading the Bible for myself – especially the New Testament – that convinced me.
My wife’s initial reaction to my conversion was very much like my initial reaction to my schoolmate’s conversion: thoroughly negative. After a few tense months, however, she came to see the same truth I did. It was at that point that we began looking for a church.
We absolutely loved the church we had found. We, of course, went on Sundays – including Sunday school. We also attended the midweek service that included a covered-dish supper where we made many friends. During the rest of the week we’d do various things with these new friends. (Our old friends were as disinterested in Jesus as we had been; only they didn’t do the research we had done, and therefore didn’t change their minds about Him.)
After six months of being thoroughly immersed in all things Christian, my wife said to me, “Maybe you should be a minister.” After a few months of mulling this over, I wasn’t sure that I should be a minister. But I had been successful enough in business that I could sell my small company in order to at least see what seminary was like.
So, within a year of my conversion to Christ, I sold my business and our family of four pulled up roots and moved 750 miles away for me to enroll in seminary.
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