By the grace of God I was brought to faith in Jesus Christ in October of 2000. Each October I make it a point to spend time reflecting on my conversion, taking inventory on the progress of my sanctification, and thanking God for his steadfast love in Christ.
It has become sort of a tradition that each year I think back on the earliest days of my Christian life through the lens, if you will, of the songs I learned during that time. These past couple of weeks, I have kept going back to a song called ‘There must be more.’
The words are short and simple:
Lord I’m tired, Lord I’m weak.
I need your power to work in me.
But I can’t let go, I keep holding on,
Because there must be more.
The song ends with a cry for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit.
In the days leading to my conversion I found myself expressing that same idea – there must be more. Of course I didn’t know then the famous quote from Augustine, ‘Our hearts are restless till they rest in thee.’ I had been not been raised in a Christian home, and was basically a heathen, which suits my name. And I was restless to say the least. I was directionless. My only direction was toward hell, and I had a sense of it in my heart – not a sense of flames, but a sense that I was beating eaten up inside by my own wandering and emptiness.
In Jesus, first, I found a friend. I didn’t understand sin. I didn’t understand the nature of free grace and forgiveness. But I did understand that a great man, who claimed to have risen from the dead, invited me to be his friend. I liked that.
I later learned of the holiness of God, of the cost Jesus paid to call me his friend in light of that holiness. His friendship drew me. The cost of that friendship has sustained me. The older I get the more I appreciate his work on the cross. The more I am resolved to know nothing except Jesus Christ and him crucified.
In my early days I was hesitant to confess the Apostle’s Creed because it claimed that he ‘descended into hell.’ What exactly that means is up for interpretation, but I no longer hesitate to confess it, because I now see that regardless of the creed, Jesus had to walk through hell to reach out his hand to me. I was a brand plucked from the fire.
In recent years my favorite hymn has become O For A Thousand Tongues To Sing by Charles Wesley. It has become somewhat politically incorrect because of one allegedly insensitive stanza, but it is that stanza that I relate to so well:
Hear Him, ye deaf; His praise, ye dumb,
Your loosened tongues employ;
Ye blind, behold your Savior come,
And leap, ye lame, for joy.
That was me, it is still me, apart from him. And now I leap for joy by his strength.
I encourage Christians to thank God every day that they are a Christian. We take it for granted. We don’t realize that it’s a miracle. His mercies are new every morning. Sometimes I wake up and wonder if it has all be a dream. I think of the words of George MacDonald:
Sometimes I wake, and, lo! I have forgot
And drifted out upon an ebbing sea!
My soul that was at rest now resteth not,
For I am with myself and not with thee (Diary of an Old Soul, 1.3).
But I always find that he is still there, and that the dream is not a dream. And I thank him.
He gave the Israelites new manna each morning that they might trust in him to sustain them. And so he gives us new mercies with the dawn of each day that we might trust in his persevering grace. Part of Jesus being a friend that sticks closer than a brother is that he is always close. Thank God.
Here’s to another year.
