"When Were You Saved?"- My Testimony

“When were you saved?” This is a common question among friends, to gain an understanding of their walks with God, and how they came to believe. It may also be a not too tactful means of trying to learn whether someone really is a believer.

For most of my Christian life I would have answered that question with only a little hesitation, as 1972. I had been in college two years and had been going through a bit of turmoil. Several times I had gone to God in prayer and asked God to save me, but it never seemed to “take”, and after some time of relapse into my normal life of sin, I would repeat the process. The problem was that I admittedly did not even know how to become a Christian, or what it meant to be a Christian. The culmination of that part of my search for God was in 1972, when another student associated with Campus Crusade for Christ came and explained to me the way of God understandably. Probably because of testimonies I had heard of others’ conversions, I had been expecting an emotional and persisting “cloud nine” experience that would assure me of real salvation. He told me that my salvation was not a matter of feeling, but believing, that if I understood the fact that God is holy, that I am a sinner and totally unable to save myself, that Christ came and suffered on my behalf, I could pray to God on that basis. He had me admit that I wanted to be saved and that I believed it was God’s will to save me. He then said that if I truly believed and asked God, that he would truly save me, no matter how I felt or didn’t feel. He told me that my salvation should rest in confidence on that prayer and God’s willingness to save me through Christ. In other words, I would be saved because I believed the truth of the gospel, not because I had an emotional experience. Our emotions come and go and are totally unreliable indicators of true salvation.

He said that I did not need repeatedly to “get saved again” after sinning, but relying on God’s acceptance of me, immediately to confess that sin, receive forgiveness through the blood of Christ, and then get up and start walking again, not wallowing in the mire of self-condemnation.

I responded that I had asked God to save me many times, but that I would pray this one final time, in sincerity and faith, and that from that moment I would reckon myself a believer in Christ and a son of God, no longer relying on feelings and emotions. So, no matter what I had gone through before that point, I would always count that spring day in 1972 as my spiritual birthday. I became involved in a campus ministry for students and began progressing as a Christian.

Some time later I began having serious doubts of my salvation, because of some besetting sins, and began to succumb to Satan’s common method of trying to convince a person that their continuing sins (even though repented of and prayed about) are somehow evidence that they have committed the “unpardonable sin” and so are hopeless and lost. This has been a common ploy of the devil for centuries, even with John Bunyan, author of Pilgrim’s Progress.

It was during this time that I began hearing from other students about the “Baptism in the Holy Spirit”, gifts of the Spirit, speaking in tongues, deliverance from demonic oppression, etc. I was open to the ideas but was very hesitant to commit. The reason was my lingering and internally crippling doubts about the “unforgiveable sin”. I was afraid to ask for the Baptism, because I thought “If I ask and do not receive, it will be proof that I am going to hell”.

So this inner turmoil continued for several months at least. Finally, I went to a Methodist youth retreat as a sort of chaperone, while feeling doubly condemned because I couldn’t say with confidence that I was right with God, and so wondered what I was doing as a retreat leader/chaperone. While there, another young man asked if I wanted to go to a nearby place where there was a church that believed in and had experienced this “charismatic” outpouring. I agreed, and we met two other young men there and began talking with them (it was not a church service). We eventually began to pray, and they were praying “in the Spirit” (in tongues). I was speechless, feeling overwhelmed by doubt and fear and condemnation. After prayer, one of the young men asked me if I was having doubts of my salvation. I said yes, but how did he know? I had always kept my fears under wraps, acting like things were fine. He said that while praying he had seen me in a vision, or at least in his imagination, dressed as a prince (I think), and holding a scepter (the Bible says that overcoming saints will reign and rule with Christ). This I took as relief from my long period of insecurity. They asked if I would like to pray for the Baptism in the Holy Spirit, and I was only too ready. We did, I received, and since that time I have never again been bothered by the “unforgiveable sin”. Furthermore, it was as if a veil had been removed from my eyes and I could now understand the scriptures more clearly. I had a greater and a lasting hunger for the Word. This has continued now for over 50 years, and I can rejoice in God’s goodness and grace to me, and for not allowing me to be turned away by the skepticism and unbelief of others. We were eventually turned out of the campus ministry because of our “charismatic” beliefs, I suppose lest we “corrupt” the other students, or jeopardize funding from the sponsoring churches, or the job of the campus pastor.

Now back to the original question, “When were you saved?”. The reason I said 1972 was because that is when I made it certain in my own mind. It was my final and definitive prayer for God to save me, instead of wondering whether any of those earlier times really counted. But as the years have gone by, I can look back and see God’s hand of providence and election moving in my life in the years before 1972.

It was in 1966 that my mother took us kids to a week-long camp in Chattanooga, called “Camp Farthest Out” (CFO). I don’t know that much about it, or whether they were scripturally correct in their beliefs or not, but during that week I responded in one of the meetings by asking God to save me. Unfortunately, though our family were faithful Methodists, I knew very little about Christianity, or how to live as a believer in Christ. As a result, I fell back into my normal 8^th grade life and became to all outward appearances nothing but any other unbeliever. Subsequent years saw me fall into profanity and other sins due to the boys around me.

Three major events occurred that showed me that God is real, and that he answers prayer. The first is when several boys and I jokingly asked how long we could go without swearing. To my dismay I found that I really could not quit even for a matter of a few hours. For some reason I could control it around my parents, and I never could bring myself to use God’s name, or “Jesus” in profane vulgarity, but at school I found I was a slave to foul language. This alarmed me, and I prayed to God asking him to forgive me, and I resolved that whenever I slipped and let out a bad word, I would stop, ask for forgiveness, and then start over. The result was immediate. I may have slipped one time but was truly delivered from the filthy habit. I still acted like an unbeliever in general though, because I was still quite ignorant of spiritual truth and how to walk as a Christian.

The second event was at a 4-H horse show at the Indiana State Fair. I was entered in a class there, but my horse had been terrified by the trip down, and by the huge Coliseum with its lights. She was barely controllable in her panic. My class was the next day and I was devastated. My mother talked to me and suggested that we pray about it. I agreed, but without much expectation that it would help. Again, the effect was immediate and profound. My horse was totally calm and unperturbed the next day.

The last event was in my junior year of wrestling. I was never particularly good at sports – not bad, but mediocre. I had lost several matches in a row and in fact had never won an interschool match. I had become upset out of fear of yet another humiliating loss in the next match. Again, my mother offered to pray – not that I would win, but that I would do my very best. As a result, I won every match from then until tournament time.

These three events had an enlightening effect on me, showing that God is real and answers prayers (my mother’s, at least). I started reading my Bible and would lay in bed at night, asking God to speak to me, to reveal himself to me, to give me a “calling”. Silence. Watching movies like “Quo Vadis” and “The Robe” made me wish I had lived back in the early centuries of the church, when men and women had such faith that they could face martyrdom.

Several times in my senior year of high school and then at college I would “go forward” to get saved, but no one seemed to know how to instruct me. I wanted to be a Christian but didn’t know how. Even in college, I knew that I wanted to marry a Christian, but why would a Christian want to marry me? I didn’t even know what it really meant or how to become one. (Eventually I did meet and marry the one God planned for me, and we have been married for 50 years, thanks to God.)

So, when was I saved? My real effective living as a Christian did not start until 1972 after I was told the gospel more accurately, but I must believe that God in his providence was moving in my life all through high school and early college. He was revealing himself to me by stages, not in an audible voice as I would have preferred, but gradually; partly by answered prayers, but also by implanting a spiritual longing in my heart to know God and somehow to become a Christian. In fact, I remember distinctly that in one of my college prayers (probably the last before talking to the Campus Crusade guy), I told God that “No matter what it costs, I want to be a Christian”. (Telling this to my girlfriend at the time resulted in her giving me the slip.)

After considering this, I believe that God really did give me a new heart and the new birth in that 1966 summer camp, and that he sustained me through 5-6 years of ignorance, sin, questioning and searching until in his perfect plan he lifted the veil from my eyes. It was really God who was inspiring that spiritual desire, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

A fuller view of God’s work of redemption though, is seen in the fact that, while our salvation experience - the new birth, the giving of a new heart, the making of us as new creatures in Christ, is an instantaneous action of the Holy Spirit whereby we become spiritually alive, delivered from the power of darkness and translated into the kingdom of Christ, yet it is only one part of a series of divine actions of redemption. Long before we believed on Christ, God was moving inexorably to bring us to Christ - even before we existed, and before the foundations of the world.

Rom. 8:28-31 – “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose. For whom he did foreknow, he also did predestinate to be conformed to the image of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brethren. Moreover whom he did predestinate, them he also called: and whom he called, them he also justified: and whom he justified, them he also glorified. What shall we then say to these things? If God be for us, who can be against us? “

From our side, all we see is that once we were blind and dead, and now we are alive and can see. But from God’s side, it was because of his eternal plan. He foreknew us, even as individuals. He knew that he would, at a specific point of time, bring us into existence, and then so work in the circumstances of our parentage, our birth and childhood, and all the occurrences of our lives, to bring us to Christ. His plan of redemption includes his foreknowledge, predestination, calling, justification, and eventual glorification.

Jn. 6:44 – “No man can come to me, except the Father which hath sent me draw him: and I will raise him up at the last day.”

So although our new birth occurs at a specific point in time, our election and calling, and God’s eternal and all-encompassing foreordination of all things made it certain that in his own desired time we would be drawn to Christ, that we would be given a new heart and repentance, and believe unto eternal life. Through this life he preserves us and enables us to persevere, so that in the end we will be glorified along with Jesus Christ in his eternal kingdom.