7. Doctrine: this is what I believed

For me, as a Christian, in America, at the end of the 20th century, in an Evangelical branch of the movement that Jesus started, with an emphasis on holiness, my earliest concerns were being saved, and holding onto that salvation. From early on, I knew my life was in danger—for eternity—and that it was of primary importance that I be saved from that danger.

If life were a baseball game, I was running the bases, trying to get to home plate, before the Devil tagged me out with sin. If I made it safe, I would get to Heaven. But if I was out, eternity in Hell was what awaited.

The fall of creation and the free will of mankind

I learned early on that God had created a world and all its creatures and people, in order that those creatures might love and worship God. The first people that God created were pure and good and without sin. These people made the choice to disobey God, therefore bringing punishment on themselves and bringing all kinds of curses the whole of mankind. They not only sinned, but by sinning, they changed their very nature and the nature of their offspring—even the nature of the planet itself—into something fallen.

With their sin, they invited work, pain, sickness, and even death into what had been a perfect creation. They poisoned their own perfect bodies, and those of all of us to follow.

When I asked pastors and Sunday School teachers why God didn’t just create a race of beings who were compelled to love and obey him, I learned that this compulsory adoration wouldn’t be real love if we weren’t given free will to make the choice ourselves. If it was forced, it wouldn’t be love.

However, our freedom to choose also meant we were free to choose not to love God, but to love ourselves and the things that God created instead. And when we made the wrong choices about where to direct our love and worship, we were responsible to face the consequences.

The wages of sin and the cost of forgiveness

I learned that God is a perfect holy being who cannot tolerate sin, and so the consequences for those of us who were sinful was that we had to be cast away from him, into a place of eternal punishment. God had originally designed this terrible place, alternately described as Hell, the pit, and the lake of fire, for the punishment of angels who had rebelled against him before the creation of the Earth.

Now, because of sin, humans belonged in Hell as well.

I learned that because of original sin, all of us on earth were guilty and deserving of Hell, not just because of the things we choose to do, but from our very birth, because we are born from a fallen, rebellious nature (although some of my many ministers did comfort me with the notion that there were “innocents,” children younger than the “age of accountability,” who would not be punished if they died or the world ended while they were children. But by the time I understood this concept, I figured I was too old to take advantage of it.)

I also learned that despite our universal death sentence as humans, that there was a way out for us. In the Old Testament (the Christian version of the Hebrew scriptures), the earliest Jewish people lived under the Law of Moses, which were a list of laws about what was allowed and forbidden, clean and unclean. Built into that system were rituals for cleansing, sacrificing, and otherwise ridding people from sin, which would purify individuals or the community as a whole of their sins when they violated the law. 

The life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ

I learned that later, when Jesus came to Earth, he traveled and preached about how to be good in the eyes of God. He gave us a clearer understanding of the Law, such as when he said that all of the Law is summarized as loving God with all your heart and loving your neighbor as yourself, even as he said that not one stroke of a pen in the law would change until all things were fulfilled (whatever that meant). He also was recorded as saying that there was no way to God but through him. He came to be known by his followers as the Son of God, and was understood to be the promised Messiah or savior that Hebrew prophets had predicted.

After three years of teaching, Jesus was arrested by the Romans and executed by crucifixion on a cross. After three days of being dead, Jesus miraculously came back to life and was seen by the apostles and many others, before he flew back up to heaven—promising that he would come back soon.

I learned that Jesus’ death on the cross was the ultimate sacrifice for our sins, reflecting the ancient animal sacrifices of the Hebrews. I learned that through this event, he had paid the price for mankind’s sinful choices, taking on the punishment that we deserved so that we were now all forgiven.

Saved from Hell and born again

If we only believed that Jesus was the Son of God, asked him to forgive us of our sins, asked him into our hearts, and confessed that he was our Lord and savior, the guilt of our sins would be washed away and we would be guaranteed a place in heaven instead of hell.

I learned that this moment of prayer for forgiveness was what the Bible talked about when it spoke of being “born again.” At the moment of surrender to God, the person was reborn as a Christian—a new creature, expected to be good and to do good as we wait for Jesus to come back or for our own death to reunite us with God.

I can’t remember the first time I sat uncomfortably in a church pew, peeking around the sanctuary with one eye open during the prayer while the preacher would ask if anyone here was worried about what would happen if they died tonight and if they would go to heaven or hell, or if they felt Jesus knocking on their heart’s door.

I can’t remember the first time I felt that heaviness on my heart, and with tears in my eyes, felt myself lifted from the seat and pulled forward to the altar, as if propelled by a force beyond my control, with a song like “Just As I Am” playing quietly on the piano.

I can’t remember the first time I got down on my knees and prayed to be born again, waiting to feel different and holy and sinless. It happened over and over. On the last night of Christian Summer camp, or when a guest preacher would host a revival meeting at our church, or during a particularly moving youth group meeting, where a group leader just out of college would play contemporary Christian songs on an acoustic guitar.

Just a “Yes” away from God

Perhaps the most important step in the story of my salvation wasn’t in a church at all. It was in my Dad’s dining room.

After my folks split up, I used to spend Summer’s at my Dad’s house in Maryland.  One Summer night, I remember listening to my Dad, one of my preacher uncles who was also visiting, and another family friend who was a devout Christian, sitting around the dining room table and talking about God. I can’t remember the exact content of their theological discussion, which was likely about the finer points of some scripture, whether it was what “sanctification” really was or what “speaking in tongues” really meant.

What I do remember is the passion with which they spoke about their faith. The space that these men created as they sat around that table was a sacred space, and this act—people gathering together to sharpen one another’s understanding of the most important things in the universe—was part of an ancient tradition that could be traced all the way back to the first people who sat around a fire under the stars and asked, what’s up there? And what does it want from us?

I stayed up as long as I could, listening to these wise men of God talk about eternity, until it was time to go to bed. But I couldn’t sleep. Instead, a great ache swept over me as I tried to sleep. There was an emptiness in me that called out for something like what they had.

With tears streaming down my face, I walked back out into the dining room in my pajamas and broke right into the middle of their rabbinical dialogue with a single, raw, pained phrase:

“I want to be a Christian.”

“Well yes!” my Dad said. “All you have to do is ask for it, and it can happen tonight.” (If you are reading this and you know my dad, you can just about hear how enthusiastic and “on fire” he was when he affirmed this. Nothing gets my dad more excited than “winning souls” for Jesus.)

In an instant, the conversation halted, and the men attended to me as emergency workers would attend to the wounded. Soon I was in a chair, with the men around me, heavy hands laid on my shoulders, as my uncle led me in the Believer’s Prayer, and Dad, ever the prayer warrior, said an emphatic prayer of thanksgiving for me and called down the spirit of God to protect and guide me.

In my family, a fond memory that we often share is one of my Grandpa Wilson’s favorite words of wisdom about salvation. As the legend goes, he was famous for saying, “Everyone is only a ‘Yes’ away from God.”

This summer night at the farmhouse table, I felt like I had, for the first time, seriously said Yes to God.

As I wiped away my tears and made my way back to bed, glowing with the blessing of new salvation, I already wondered how I was going to hang onto this feeling once I went back out into the world.