Although many stories of God’s work in someone’s life begin with a particular life struggle such as broken relationships, poor health, death of a loved one, ruined careers, financial troubles, low self-esteem, addiction, depression, etc., mine is a bit different. Although it is tangentially related to some of the struggles above, it is primarily within the intellectual world of my mind and its struggles with belief that my story resides. Having been raised Catholic, Methodist, and Baptist throughout my childhood, while also attending Presbyterian, Anglican/Episcopal, and Non-Denominational churches later in life (and briefly dabbling with Eastern Orthodoxy as well at one point), I’ve always had a natural affinity with Christianity along with a keen awareness of the commonalities and differences of its various forms and expressions. As a naturally inquisitive and analytical person, I’ve always sought to understand the reasons for why people believe the various things they do, especially when it comes to religious beliefs.
The sheer amount of diversity and disagreement surrounding religious beliefs, even within Christianity, is truly astounding and ultimately sent me down my own personal path of pursuing truth and trying to figure out what I believed and why. Although this pursuit first started as a passionate hobby of reading the Bible along with books on theology, philosophy, and apologetics from a variety of persuasions, it became more serious when I decided to direct a local chapter for an apologetics ministry, completed a master’s degree in philosophy with an emphasis in Christian apologetics, wrote a book exploring the relationship between faith, belief, and skepticism in the Christian life (which, though I never admitted publicly, I had written as much for myself as I had for others), and eventually began pursuing a Ph.D. to continue my research on the topic. Over the period of more than a decade of intense academic study, I became increasingly convinced (and still am) that the Christian faith is a reasonable faith, not a blind faith, and that there are good reasons to believe that the central claims of Christianity are true and worthy of committing one’s life to.
Yet, throughout that process, what had started as a passionate desire to love God with all of my mind by earnestly seeking His truth, slowly began to turn inward as I began to question and deconstruct my own beliefs, leading me to increasingly frequent states of doubt, anxiety, angst, and even despair. I was constantly plagued not only by the fear that what I believed might be wrong or that what I didn’t believe might be right, but even more so by the prospect that God might punish me as a result, for failing to “get it right.” The God that I had once seen as a loving Father became the temperamental theology professor in the sky, red grading pen firmly in hand, constantly watching and waiting for the opportunity to cosmically flunk me should I make a theological slip. This idea of God that I had begun to craft in the dark corners of my mind wasn’t as concerned about whether I truly desired and committed my life to loving Him and those whom He created, but rather was ultimately concerned with whether and to what degree my theology was correct; He cared less about the desires and orientation of my heart, and more about the accuracy of the beliefs in my head. Did I truly believe all or enough of the right doctrines to pass God’s litmus test for salvation? Was I orthodox enough? Evangelical enough? Conservative enough? These questions became my ultimate concern, my ultimate battle, my ultimate idol.
It wasn’t so much that I began to think that certain tenets of my faith were false and so was led down the path to disbelief, but rather that I increasingly struggled to find compelling reasons to believe that some of those tenets were true in the first place. Not primarily because I had certain problems or objections, but because the arguments in favor of those tenets simply began to lose their persuasive force. I began to become increasingly proficient at defending the feasibility of positions which I myself no longer believed, not because the defensive arguments I knew were in some way deficient (indeed I thought they were quite good), but because I could no longer find offensive arguments that compelled me to believe the truth of the positions I was defending. Although various arguments may have compelled me to believe that certain tenets of my faith were rational, possible, plausible, or maybe even probable, they no longer compelled me to believe that they were actually true. Indeed, there was a time when I was so caught up inside the trappings of my mind that I wasn’t even sure what it meant to believe anything anymore – certain things just seemed to me to be true, and certain things just seemed to me to be false, but many other things just didn’t seem either way, and it wasn’t as if I could make things seem one way versus another by sheer force of will.
As a result, and having also become intimately familiar with the dizzying array of perspectives and the corresponding depth of scholarly disagreement surrounding most issues, I increasingly found my home in the space between the worlds of belief and disbelief, between the worlds of conservatism and liberalism, between the worlds of orthodoxy and heterodoxy – a home of honest and hopeful agnosticism on many issues that I had led myself to believe was somehow unacceptable to God. As a person who was immensely attracted to Christ and who sought to show His spirit, to meet the challenges, hardships, and sorrows of life in the light of that spirit, and who was even sure of many Christian truths, I nevertheless increasingly felt that I could no longer honestly and conscientiously “sign on the dotted line” that I believed certain theological ideas about which many expressions of Christianity had dogmatized; expressions from which I felt increasingly excluded because I did not “believe” – my intellectual integrity made me say about many things, “It may be so, I do not know.” Thus, what had once been an intellectual act of worship given in gratitude to a God whom I loved had become a life of constant striving to manufacture or maintain a set of doctrinal convictions in order to “measure up” to the theological standards of an idol whom I feared. In a constant state of analysis, my personal and spiritual growth grinded to a paralyzing halt. Terrified of being outspokenly transparent about the nature and extent of my doubts out of fear of judgment by both God and others, my life became an increasingly secretive one of internal anger, bitterness, and cynicism disguised by the outward facade of a carefree outlook and demeanor, and my heart became increasingly colder and harder as it slowly began to close itself off from those closest to me.
Yet, during this time, when it seemed like everything around me had become more and more opaque, when my darkened mind was trapped in a vortex of skepticism so strong as to filter out nearly all light (including even the bleak light of atheism itself), the one thing that ironically became more and more clear, the one seed of light that simply could not be extinguished, was the person of Jesus. Despite all of my doubts and questions surrounding a veritable mountain of theological material, when I looked to the face of Jesus I still couldn’t help but see the face of God. In Jesus I saw not only the incarnation of God’s character, the revelation of God’s passion, and the heart of God made flesh, but I also began to see Jesus more clearly as the way, the truth, and the life: as the way of death and resurrection embodied in a human life; the incarnation of the true and universal path to spiritual rebirth in God; the way and the path, not of meeting requirements through believing the right things, but of personal transformation through dying and rising again into new life. I may have doubted nearly everything else around me, but it was Jesus that I clung to and that was enough for me. Yet, there was still a side of Jesus I had never really known before. Having on the one hand always viewed Him primarily through the lens of His atoning death as the sacrifice for the forgiveness of sins and through the lens of His resurrection as the ultimate victory over death and proof of an afterlife; and having on the other hand always accepted – but never really resonated with or been moved by – the reality of my forgiveness and the possibility of an afterlife, I consequently always had trouble gaining an authentic appreciation for the role of Jesus in my spiritual life.
Where I had always struggled (and honestly still do) with the ancient and tribal nature of the strange notion that Jesus had to literally live a perfect life and then sacrificially die in order for God to forgive me of my sins, I began to see His life, death, and resurrection as a powerfully relevant and moving declaration of so much more: as the trustworthy disclosure of the evil of domination systems, as the exposure of the defeat of the powers of this world, as the embodiment of the “way” or “path” of transformation, as the revelation of the depth of God’s love, and as the wonderfully subversive proclamation of His radical grace. And where I had previously seen Jesus primarily through academic eyes as the theological centerpiece of Christianity and as an historical figure that served as an evidential pawn in one of many apologetical arguments used to establish its truth – the subject of a collection of historical facts that I used to provide a solution to the various intellectual predicaments of others – I now began to see and experience Jesus as a very real and tangible presence that provided the solution to the various existential predicaments of my own: where I was in darkness, Jesus became my light; where I was hungry, Jesus became my bread; where I was thirsty, Jesus became my living water; where I was lost and in exile, Jesus became my way of return; where I was disconnected from true life, Jesus became my vine; where I was wounded, Jesus became my healer; where I was in bondage, Jesus became my liberator; and where I was dead, Jesus became my resurrection to new life.
Where I had always primarily understood salvation in terms of freedom from the predicament of sin and guilt through forgiveness, it wasn’t until I experienced the reality of salvation as the solution to the other predicaments above that it really began to grip me, that the affections of my soul finally began to stir. I began to realize that sin wasn’t necessarily the one-size-fits-all problem of the human condition I had once thought it was, and that forgiveness wasn’t necessarily the one-size-fits-all remedy. Where my problem was a heart that was closed, it wasn’t forgiveness that I needed, but rather a heart that was open. Where my problem was a soul that was wounded, it wasn’t forgiveness that I needed, but healing. And where my problem was blindness, bondage, and exile, it wasn’t forgiveness that I needed, but sight, liberation, and return. I began to realize that being a Christian is not primarily about believing a bunch of doctrines about Jesus and being forgiven, but about simply following Him and experiencing the saving reality of His transforming love; that salvation is purely by grace, and that grace with conditions attached (whether of actions or beliefs) isn’t really grace at all. I began to realize that, in following Jesus, I had made incredibly complicated a life that was supposed to be remarkably simple; I had made formidably difficult a yoke that was designed to be breathtakingly easy; and I had made oppressively heavy a burden that was intended to be magnificently light. What had become a wearisome life marked by constant striving was supposed to be an invigorating life marked by soul-quenching rest. The scales on my eyes were finally beginning to fall, and I was now on the cusp of a brand new beginning.
After striving long and hard over the course of several years as my intellectual outlook grew increasingly deeper and darker, I eventually reached a breaking point of mental and spiritual exhaustion. With my hope in Jesus in one hand and my obsessive striving for orthodoxy in the other, I finally found the end of my rope, fell to my knees, threw up my hands, and told God I was done striving once and for all, come what may. I laid it all in His hands, hoping for the best, and decided I was no longer going to live in fear and let my obsession with trying to believe the right things get in the way of trusting Him; no longer going to allow myself to try and contain Him inside the box created by the limitations of my mind; no longer going to continue striving to measure up to the stipulations I had sought to place upon His grace. My heart had been yearning for God’s light and love for too long but had been bound and suppressed by the heavy chains of my critical mind. But the moment I gave in and laid it all down, those chains finally broke free. The immediate sense of joy and relief was unlike anything I had ever felt before, and something I can still feel to this day when I reflect upon it. My heart softened and swelled as God continually poured His love into me, breaking off the hard places and eventually cracking it wide open, allowing it to pour out with a love for others I had never encountered before. In my weakest of moments, His strength was made perfect, and in my darkest of places, His light was made known. After years of convincing myself that God first wanted me to believe this and that doctrine and get my essential theology squared away as a prerequisite to following Him, I finally realized that all He ultimately wanted was me, a simple but broken person with a willing heart to trust Him, flawed theology and all. He completely broke me in that moment, and the face of a once stoic personality overflowed with tears of joy that could have filled an ocean.
Through that experience, God showed me that the Christian life is not primarily a life of requirements and rewards, of “getting it right” or “measuring up” by believing or doing all of the right things in order to please God for the sake of receiving a blessed afterlife in the future, but rather a life most centrally marked by radical transformation in the present through a personal relationship with Him. He showed me that believing is less about thinking and more about beloving; that faith is less about intellectually assenting to the truth of a given set of propositions and more about actively trusting and committing my loyalty and allegiance to the God to whom those propositions point; and that truth is not limited to or contingent upon the confines of literal historical factuality, but rather is most deeply, most meaningfully, and most transformatively expressed and experienced through the storied world of metaphor and parable so brilliantly modeled in the life and teachings of Jesus – the wonderful paradox that truth needn’t always be fact, that myth needn’t always be fiction, and that when it comes to the meaning of a story versus whether it actually happened, although it can assuredly be both, it is the meaning of the story that almost always matters most. He showed me that I needn’t take the Bible literally in order to take it seriously, that I needn’t fear the findings of mainstream scholarship or contemporary science in order to study it faithfully, and that although there are a variety of different perspectives on its nature, origin, inspiration, interpretation, and authority, what matters most is not so much believing or defending one particular perspective over another, but rather allowing the Spirit to speak into my life by being intentional about listening for the voice of God within its pages, regardless of my perspective.
He showed me that the Christian tradition is an extraordinarily rich, lively, and multifaceted conversation voicing countless intellectually and experientially sophisticated understandings of the Christian life and worldview, and that it’s not about bringing the conversation to an end by reducing it to the particular understanding of a specific voice, but about joining the symphony of voices and living within the variegated beauty of its melody, as it continues to develop and evolve in response to the Spirit’s ever present work within its midst. He showed me that it’s okay to have open or unanswered questions no matter how central, that it’s okay to disagree, and that it’s even okay to be wrong, but that what’s not okay is to refuse to love Him by refusing to love one another – that I can worship Him with wild abandon without needing to demean those of other religious persuasions. He showed me the danger of reducing my faith to a cognitive level and thereby missing the sense of wonder, awe, and mystery about God and salvation; the importance of the affective, emotive, and intuitive dimensions of human life; and the importance of the practical outworking of Christian commitment in a life of service to God and others. He showed me that although I may not always be able to choose my beliefs (i.e. what seems to me to be true), I do have the power to choose how to live in light (or in spite) of them; that Christianity is less about affirming a system of beliefs (including this one) and more about pursuing a way of life; and that the fruit of His Spirit isn’t a mind marked by correct theology, but a life marked by joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control, and, most of all, love.
He showed me that my identity isn’t found in being a “Christian” – whether conservative, liberal, evangelical, catholic, contemplative, activist, charismatic, orthodox, or associated with any particular denomination or theology, etc. – but that it’s found in simply being His child; that it’s not about who I am, but whose I am. He showed me that the Christian life isn’t about toeing the party lines of man-made religion which construct endless barriers of division between who’s “in” and who’s “out,” but about a relationship with God that supersedes all party lines and breaks down all barriers of division; that it’s about becoming increasingly conscious of and intentional about a deepening relationship with God as known in Jesus, as I seek daily to pick up my cross and follow Him and His way of self-giving love for God and for all of God’s creation. He showed me that it’s not so much about subscribing to a theology about Christ, but about dying and rising with Christ, about dying to an old identity and an old way of being, and about being born again into a new identity and a new way of being; an identity and a way of being that is centered, not in beliefs about God, but in God. He showed me that it’s about a relationship and a way of life that not only transforms me, but also allows me to serve as one of the primary means through which God transforms others and, ultimately, the world. He showed me that it’s not about punching my “get out of hell free” card by reciting a prayer or a creed and then waiting around to escape earth so that I can go to heaven one day when I die, but about heaven coming to earth here and now; about the Kingdom of God as a present tense reality experienced whenever God’s will is done here on earth as it already is in heaven. It’s about being sensitive to the Spirit’s presence and work, not only in my own life, but in the lives of those around me as well; about living out my identity as an image-bearer of God by reflecting His sovereign rule of love into all of creation; about becoming an active participant in fulfilling God’s dream for the world; about doing justice, loving mercy, and walking humbly with the One who humbled Himself beyond all comparison. It’s not about believing in God and trying to “be a good person,” but about becoming a good person through the practice of loving God and loving other people; about becoming the person God created me to be; about loving God with all of my heart, soul, mind, and strength; and about living life in the redeeming presence of His love, now and forever.
These realizations radically shifted my overarching perspective on what the Christian life is all about, and gave me a renewed sense of passion and purpose as I sought to move forward into the next season of my own life by focusing less on trying to ace my theology and more on simply following Jesus; less on being right and more on loving and serving others. Not because I no longer valued the quest for truth through pursuing the life of the mind (I most assuredly did and still do), but because I no longer idolized those things in the way that I used to, seeing God and His people as more important and worthy of my love and devotion than any argument or collection of propositions. And, as God would have it, it was precisely on the heels of this transformative experience that He providentially changed my life forever, as if He had been waiting for me all along. Uprooting me from a decade of life, career, education, and ministry in Houston that I had only assumed was going to last a lifetime, He snapped his fingers out of the blue and, through an incredibly miraculous series of events that blew through my life like a whirlwind from another world, brought me and my family back home to the Dallas area practically overnight. Although I had always believed in the sovereignty of God from an intellectual standpoint and had even heard stories of His unmistakeable providence in the lives of others, it wasn’t until this point that I actually experienced it firsthand for myself. Between “just so happening” to receive an unsolicited job opportunity on the very same day that I found out my previous company was being sold, between “just so happening” to close on the only offer on our house the very day before we moved, and between that only offer “just so happening” to be from one of my favorite professors who impacted my intellectual and spiritual development in such a profound way – between all of that and so much more – I finally witnessed what it looks like when the providence of God is at work, and it utterly blew me away. He had brought us home in every sense of the word, and gave us a new beginning we could have never imagined.
And, because God likes to show off from time to time, moving back home also allowed us to become debt free for the first time in our lives; allowed my wife to be a stay-at-home mom for a few years before getting the incredible opportunity to enter full-time ministry with the most amazing church we’ve ever known; allowed us to reconnect with old friends while making several more; and allowed us to move into a beautiful home in a beautiful neighborhood that’s just minutes away from both of our families. The very things we had been constantly striving for and dreaming about for almost a decade were given to us in what felt like a matter of days – all after making the painfully simple decision to give in and let God be God, and all by the work of His sovereign hand. I don’t say any of this to brag or to boast, but to simply proclaim the unfathomable faithfulness of God in our lives which has humbled us to dust. I’m still a work in progress, and things are far from perfect by a long shot, but looking back at what God has already done in my life is more than enough to be grateful for. I now know firsthand how strong His love truly is. As the lyrics of the song that became my spiritual anthem (and in which I constantly immersed myself while writing this) so beautifully express: it’s strong enough to calm the storms of fear and unbelief, fierce enough to break the cords of death that clung to me, close enough to hold me near when fear is crippling, and safe enough to be my home when my world is crumbling; it’s power has overcome every insecurity, vanquished all my enemies, broke the cage that silenced me, and set this songbird free.
It is truly a blessing beyond measure to be where I am today, and I thank God for it daily. But in the end it’s not ultimately about me, but Him. It’s all for His glory, for the sake of His Kingdom, and for the love of His people – including people like you. So as I bring my story to a close, let me end by simply stating that no matter who you are, what your struggles are, what your fears are, what your beliefs are, or whether I know you personally or not, I want you to know that I love you and that, even more importantly, God loves you. Indeed, God is love. Not a sappy or sentimental love, but a powerfully deep and unconditional love that seeks the best both for you and for those of whom you love. A love that is patient and kind, that doesn’t envy, doesn’t boast, and isn’t proud; a love that isn’t self-seeking or easily angered, and that keeps no record of wrongs; a love that always protects, always trusts, always hopes, and always perseveres; and, most of all, a love that never fails. A love that I have come to know and experience in ways that I could have never even imagined and, if you are willing, a love that you can come to know and experience too.
God is good, and although I’m in constant awe of all that He’s already done, the best is still yet to come, and I can’t wait to see what He has in store next – not just for me and my family, but for you and yours as well.
With Abounding Love,
”Love one another. Just as I have loved you.” – Jesus