How I Became a Christian

I grew up in a Christian home, and was a happy and good child with a child's certain belief. To me being a Christian meant believing in God, being good, having the right morals and being really happy and excited and in love with him (which I never was).

As a teenager I was very embarrassed about being a Christian and scared of what my friends would think if they knew what I thought about abortion, homosexuality and sex before marriage. I was terrified of being ridiculed.

I didn't want to be a Christian so I decided to try not being one. But I couldn't shake my belief in God. So I became willing to call myself Christian and to stick with my moral views.

But I didn't recognise my need for forgiveness. I didn't have a relationship with God. I didn't read the bible, I didn't pray and I didn't live my life in obedience to him. Once I moved out of home I went to church irregularly. I could see that Christianity was true, but I didn't understand why all the words I heard about joy and praise and being thankful for salvation and God being our father had zero emotional resonance for me.

Without a relationship with God, I was left only with some rules and morality to live by, and I tried hard to do these things because I knew they were right. But it was too hard and unfulfilling and utterly disappointing. So in bitterness, I gave up and accepted the comfort and pleasure of the world, although I still aimed to do good, to help the poorest people in the world. I still believed there was a God and knew in my heart I should follow him, but he had little impact on my life. I started having sex and ended up living with my fiance. I wasn't happy though - I was just getting by. I didn't really know what life was all about and none of my ideas, or the ideas I came across, really made sense of things.

A year later my fiance broke up with me. I am now very thankful for this but at the time - even though our relationship wasn't that great - it was incredibly painful and I lived my life under a weight of grief and sorrow. This suffering humbled me. I became very aware of my helplessness and weakness. So I cried out to the God who had previously been in the background, asking him to help and comfort me. I didn't make any other demands of him or put any conditions on him - I just cried out for help.

Very slowly my suffering lessened and I was confident that God was there and that he was helping me, even though it was still very hard and confusing.

About five months after we broke up I came to Crossroads church. I'd never before heard sermons where the bible was so diligently looked into, the character of God made known, and application made to our lives. The sense, truth, relevance and usefulness of Christianity as laid-out in the bible quickly became obvious. I could see that Christianity was really serious stuff and I realised that you had to make a decision whether to go along with it or not, and I saw that if it was true you had to go along with it. Well, it seemed pretty obvious to me that it was true.

Until then I had had it all wrong. I had thought that Christianity was about being good and moral, but it was actually about being forgiven. It was only once I received forgiveness that I could start to really be good - because I was grateful and because Jesus was there helping me.