I’ve been a Bible Teaching Pastor my whole adult life. Central to the message I teach is that Jesus, by virtue of His grace gift to us (AKA; His death, burial, and resurrection) saves us from the punishment for sin and grants us eternal life as we put our faith in Him. I believe with all my heart what the Bible teaches, that I am saved by Grace through Faith. My story, however, is also one of being saved, by faith, from a life without purpose.
When I was in school, I couldn’t run fast or catch a ball well, but I excelled in the class room. I found my identity in my academic achievement. And even though I was a believer in Jesus, I was fascinated by Darwin’s finches and the proofs offered by the fossil record. My friends and I (we’d be called nerds today) spent hours hunting for fossils hoping to find the missing link. We dissected frogs and compared their organs to those of a fetal pig, noting how much more “advanced” the mammal was than the amphibian. We did experiments galore, each seeming to prove, beyond a shadow of a doubt that the earth and the life on it, came to be through time and chance
At the same time, I was working with kids at church and memorizing scripture and not ever coming to grips with my conflicting world views; until astronomy. We were studying the stars and the massive distances that the light had to travel. It was on a bus ride returning from a field trip to the Alder Planetarium that I asked my beloved Science teacher how God fit into this giant, ever expanding universe. Her answer was two words long, but it turned my world upside down. She said, “He doesn’t.”
For weeks I struggled to come to terms with this ever dawning realization that my “faith” didn’t align with my “knowledge.” I distinctly remember standing out in the backyard staring up at the stars, heart broken and confused. Finally, while quietly singing praises to the maker of those stars I recalled that faith IS the proof of what we can’t really see. I decided to trust what God said, even if the science books seemed more convincing. (Creation Science has come a long way from the 70’s. I no longer feel any conflict between my faith and my knowledge, but that’s not the point of this story.)
Recently I connected via social media with one of my “nerd friends.” He got a job out of college at a pharmaceutical lab. He made a lot of money and partied pretty hard — today his life and his family are a mess. He is chasing the ghost of who he’s hoped he’d be some day. As we were talking and I was trying to steer the conversation with my broken friend toward Jesus, I realized that I had been saved by faith from more that eternal temporal punishment. I had also been saved, by faith, from an unabundant life!
The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy.
I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly. ~Jesus