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 1 – My Earliest Experiences with Church
I was born into a Roman Catholic family. As a result, my earliest memories include going to church every Sunday. For in those days, we were taught that not going to church was a mortal sin. This is because the Roman Catholic Church considered missing its mass a violation of the ten commandments – specifically, “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy.”
My elementary school years – all six of them – were spent in our parish’s parochial school. The school had a priest say mass every school morning. Also during this time, my mother took my brothers and me to confession on Saturday afternoons. Therefore, during this time in my life, I was going to church seven days a week!
Once I reached adolescence, our family moved to another part of town and my parents enrolled me in a public school. There, I quickly took to secular ways. I wasn’t unique.
Beatlemania hit the U.S. full force when the foursome first appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. Their appearance attracted 73 million viewers – meaning that almost half of all Americans with a TV set in the home were tuned in. It must have been close to 100% in the public school I was attending. Church life had little attraction for a teenager in the midst of a social phenomenon like that.
The Beatles were, of course, just the tip of an iceberg. The first wave of baby boomers came of age in the 1960s. All sorts of social change was at work during that decade. A primary drive of it all was the secularization of America. An event far more profound than Beatlemania was the introduction of the pill in 1960…and that launched a decade of decadence that has cast its shadow on all the decades since.
By contrast, it was in the 1950s that “In God We Trust” was added to our currency and “under God” was added to the Pledge of Allegiance. Those changes could never have taken place in the 1960s. The 1950s were not a golden age, but things have only gotten worse in America since then. Church attendance began declining in the 1960s – a trend that has continued, and even accelerated, to this day.
As an adolescent in the 1960s, I watched secular television, went to secular movies, read secular books, and had secular friends. I became agnostic about God and ceased going to church as quickly as I could get away with it.
I lived entirely without church from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. During these 15 or so years, I avoided religious people at every turn. They made me uncomfortable with their pamphlets and pitches. They just didn’t seem like normal people to me. And I especially didn’t want to hear someone talk about Jesus. That was the weirdest religious talk of all to me and my personal social circle.
All that changed in 1978 when a former high-school classmate told me his personal experience with “accepting Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior.” I’ve written about this in the first chapter of The Duty of a Man, so I won’t repeat the story here. In short, I became obsessed with Jesus Christ and the Bible – what was called at the time a “born again Christian,” an “evangelical,” even a “Jesus Freak.”
This change in me meant a whole-hearted embrace of church because every Christian source I checked said that finding and joining a church was the one of the essentials of following Jesus. And then there was the word “church” spread all over the New Testament. Everyone and everything was pointing me in that direction.
Church – something I had accepted without complaint as a child, but shunned as an adolescent and young adult – became a central focus in my life from my late 20s onward. But it would not be the Roman Catholic Church this time around.
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