Why I am a Christian

Why I Am a Christian

            It was a good question for me to ask myself.  I really could not have told you a few years ago.  I know these facts about myself: I was not brought up in a church-going family.  My parents were believers but not committed to following Christ in any methodical way, such as going to church.  My dad came from a Baptist background, but I gathered that he, as the youngest boy, was somewhat of a playboy in his youth, and whereas his siblings and parents were overtly religious, Hoyt was not.  His father, my grandfather, did not go to a church but gathered people in his house for Bible studies.  Most of the others were Baptists.  My mother’s family largely belonged to the Disciples of Christ Church.  Her two sisters were the regular church-goers.  My grandmother, for reasons unknown, refused to go to a church, and my grandfather would only say that he came from a Baptist background, which he did, but he was somewhat of a Deist.

            Mother wanted me to go to Sunday school, and I did go with my cousin Mary Ann, probably the most devoted member of the family.  Mary Ann still attends the Disciples Church with great regularity.  I can remember Mother crying because I would not get up and go to Sunday school.  I think back an wonder why she didn’t say that she would go with me.  That’s all it would have taken; I felt scared and alone going by myself, and Mary Ann and I were not always in the same class.  Mother always said that she was interested in First & Calvary Presbyterian Church.  I wish now we had gone there.  A friend of the family invited us to a new Baptist church in our hometown of Springfield, Missouri, and we went for a while as a family.  I enjoyed it, but my parents soon quit because the pastor talked too much about giving. That must have offended them. 

            And so Sunday mornings were a time for staying in bed and reading the “funny papers.”  Yet, I did believe in God, and I did pray to God every night.  I did have a friend, the grandson of the people who invited us to the Baptist church, who definitely encouraged me spiritually.  Unfortunately, he was tragically killed in a hunting accident just before his twelfth birthday.  And thus it went on through my high school days.  Sometimes my friends invited me to their church, and I attended a number of them, including an Assembly of God service that scared me terribly.  I remember sitting by a column in the building just hoping I would survive and be able to go home.  By then I was skeptical of religion and thought it anti-intellectual.  Of course, in my pride I thought of myself as quite intellectually superior.  Until my class with Mrs. Eleanora Beck in the twelfth grade.

            Mrs. Beck was my handcraft teacher.  I took the course only because something in that category was required for graduation, but it was one of the events that changed my life.  Mrs. Beck was quite friendly, and she enjoyed learning about her students.  While inquiring about my family, she found out that I had two aunts and an uncle who attended South Street Christian Church, as well as another aunt and uncle, Mary Ann’s parents, who attended regularly every Easter.  She told me that she was one of the teachers of the high school class at

South Street

, and urged me to come.  I told her I would think about it.  Of course, I lied.  But she did not give up.  Contrary to what would be allowed in public schools today, she literally, but in a nice way, harassed me every Monday.  “I didn’t see you yesterday in Sunday School, David,” she would say, and I would promise to be there the next week, never intending, of course, to keep the promise.  She would say to me on Friday that she would be looking for me on Sunday, and I would give her the same lie…until one Friday when I looked at her and said, “Mrs. Beck, I promise you, I will be there Sunday.”  And I knew I would go.  I guess at the time I realized that she would keep on until I did, so I just relented.  But once I gave me word in that way, I did intend to keep it. 

            So on Sunday I took the 1942 Chevrolet that my dad and I shared and headed out from 1036 S. Pickwick, down to Elm, left on Elm to South Street and the beginning of my Christian journey.  As I reached the corner of Elm and National, at a point where on the old brick streets one could still see the scars in the pavement where the streetcars used to pass on a short double track section (the street is asphalted over today), I had a strange feeling: I knew there would be no turning back….ever.  This was for the rest of my life.  I didn’t think about that strange feeling much, although I never forgot it, until I learned more of Biblical theology.  I now believe with all my heart that it was there, at National and Elm on that Sunday morning in 1955 that God effectually called me to faith, salvation, and eternal life.  I now know and believe that it was at that point that I was born from above of the Holy Spirit, infused with new life, and now a new person who would be willing and able to embrace Christ.

            By the next year my desire for God had grown, far outpacing my knowledge of Scripture.  But I did feel a call to the ministry.  I won’t say that all my motives at that point were pure.  Ministers were exempt from the draft, and my pride and confidence in myself as a public speaker made preaching an attractive occupation.  It would also involve intellectual pursuits, and I had heard of a seminary in Edinburgh, Scotland that sounded intriguing.  But I know now that though my faith in Christ was genuine, my sanctification had only begun.  So God may have used my sinful pride and sinful fear, but I now know that He was at work.

            After beginning college, I was able to secure a pastoral position at the Christian church in nearby Sparta, Missouri.  I was only nineteen, far too young to know what I was doing.  But I really dedicated myself to the task.  Meanwhile, my best friend, who was a member of the Church of Christ, would frequently go with me on my preaching appointments.  However, now that I had become a Christian, Roger began to share with me information about his church and how well-informed his minister was.  He also criticized some of the practices of the Disciples as unscriptural, such as our use of instruments in worship.  He also now started urging me to come to church with him.  As with Mrs. Beck, I put him off, until I finally yielded and went to a Wednesday night service with him.  I guess I was curious if his minister was as smart as he said he was, and if people could really sing without an instrument.  I found he was right on both matters.  Of course, the fact that the song leader used to be sing in operas might have had something to do with it. 

            After graduation in 1959, a semester at Florida Christian College, and marriage to Alice in 1960, we moved to Charleston, Arkansas, where I preached for the Church of Christ there. I also taught in the local high school and for a while worked at a radio station to earn time for a Bible radio program.  In 1963 we moved to a wonderful little church in Trumann, Arkansas where our older son was born in 1964.  In 1966 we were called to a church in Wichita, Kansas.  By now we found ourselves in the “non-institutional Church of Christ,” otherwise known by the mainline as “antis.”  The non-institutional group refers in kind to the mainline as “the liberal brethren.”  Although we stayed at this first church in Wichita ten years, we came face to face with full-blown legalism, and it was horrible.  But I was no quitter, and I was determined to create a church with love as its hallmark.  It all failed, and in 1976 we gathered up our family of four (our younger son was born in 1968), and moved our membership to a mainline church, the Northside Church of Christ, where we remained the next ten years.  Those ten years were largely enjoyable, and were filled with activity, as I was soon asked to share pulpit duties with the long-time minister, Louis Tandy.  He and I had a great relationship.  I also served as youth minister.  I was busy and not deliberately trying to think through what I believed, but there were influences beginning to filter into my mind.

            While we were at the ultra-legalistic church, I started working on a master’s degree in history at Wichita State University.  While there I took a course in Reformation history and encountered Luther’s conversion experience when Romans 1:16-17 opened the gates of paradise to him. I learned the doctrine of justification by faith alone, and it settled somewhere in my mind as a seed, but I dared not preach or teach it.  I was able to separate what I came slowly to believe about myself from what I was preaching and teaching.  Yes, I was a very good actor, able to play my part well.  I just can’t do that any more.

            After my master’s degree, I secured a teaching position at a local, private, Christian, college-preparatory school teaching literature, history, and theology. I was still at the legalistic church and by then rather disinterested, and the teaching salary supplemented the pittance that church paid me.  Also, my sons got to go without tuition cost.  While at Wichita Collegiate School, the chairman of the board and founder of the school, and also the headmaster became Reformed.  Quite a number of students from Reformed churches attended Collegiate, especially from Eastminster Presbyterian Church where the headmaster, the board chairman, and their families attended.  The Reformed influence spread at Collegiate.  R. C. Sproul, head of Ligonier Ministries, was often on campus speaking, as was the pastor from Eastminster, and a new theology teacher.  By then I was teaching only history.  I tried to oppose this teaching of grace, but actually more and more of what I heard from them and what I had learned from Dr. Sowards at W.S.U. began to jell in my brain.  I should probably also mention at this point something else that was jelling in my brain, maybe in my subconscious.  When I repeated the Church of Christ doctrine that one can lose his salvation to my uncle, who was a devout Baptist, and whom I sought to convert to my position, he tried at first to point out some scriptures, and when he saw that we were just trading scriptures that taught security against those which seemed to teach to he contrary, he just looked at me and said in response to my assertion that I could walk away from Christ, “But I know you, David, and you never will.”  There was an eerie feeling that I had because I knew deep down that he was right.  But I dared not articulate it.

            Now, at this point, if you ask me why I was a Christian, I would suppress those growing influences, and probably answer that I made a free-will decision to follow Jesus and then “obeyed the gospel” and was baptized and at that point saved, but that if I didn’t behave myself, I would lose my salvation.  Thus my eternal life was contingent on my ongoing and improving obedience to the commands of the New (not Old) \Testament.  I would also probably appeal to apologetics, to the arguments for the existence of God, the deity of Christ, and the inspiration of the Bible.  These arguments are both true and valid, but they are not the reason that anyone becomes a Christian, I now know.  As proof  of that statement I can point to the fact that while teaching theology at Collegiate, the required course of all sophomores was evidences.  I used Josh McDowell’s book Evidences that Demand a Verdict.  It’s a good book, and for a Christian can certainly strengthen his/her faith.  Every student who took that course would tell me, if I ask him/her, that there was definite evidence or even proof of all three of these truth claims of Christianity. And yet those who came in as atheists or agnostics remained atheists and agnostics.  Then I wondered; now I know.

            Thank you for persevering to the end of this article.  If you want to know why David Lawrence is a Christian, the reason is not David Lawrence.  I did not choose Christ; He chose me.  Just as Jesus told his disciples, “You did not choose me; I chose you…”  It is not because I figured it all out.   It is not because I was smarter than all those students who were not believers.  Some of them are much smarter than I.  It was not because I was baptized on Easter Sunday in 1955 by George Myers at South Street Christian Church.  It is not because of all the body of evidence, as I was taught by a teacher in Florida who said that believing is like a jury making a decision after hearing the evidence.  We sit in judgment on the evidence, and if the evidence for faith is greater than for unbelief, we choose to believe.  That analogy and the concept that it illustrates I deny forthrightly.  It is not because of Mrs. Beck, or any other Christian people who influenced my life.  It is because of God.  It is because God in eternity past foreknew me as His child and in time sent His Son to be my surety, and in my life effectually called me by His Holy Spirit!  As Paul says in 1 Cor. 1:30, “It is because of him that you are in Christ,” and as he says of himself in 1 Cor. 15:10, “I am what I am because of the grace of God.”  I am a Christian because of God’s purpose for my life.  That is who I am, and I can never leave Christ.  I knew that deep in my heart on that morning as I drove down

Elm Street

. It was confirmed when Uncle Marlow told me that he knew me and that I would never leave Christ.  I am bought with a price; I am a new creation in Christ, and can never deny who I am.  And I am increasingly grateful for this unspeakable gift that He has given me, thanking God in my prayers every day. Then am I Reformed?  Yes.  And in a separate article I shall discuss why, continuing from the groundwork laid here. 

            -David Lawrence

            _July 18, 2011