X-Calvinist Corner Files: Testimony # 54

I was raised in the Catholic faith, which I always hated as a kid, catechism on Saturdays, church Sundays, when other kids were out playing and enjoying their weekends. Also I found ‘religion’ creepy, actually quite scary. Especially the confessional ‘box’. (For want of a better word). I rebelled in my teens, told my parents I wasn’t going to church any more, and they were quite happy to give it all up with me! I think they were concerned that I got the right start in life or something. We never really discussed it. Anyway that was it.

I wandered in the wilderness for around 34 years. Then I got evangelized by someone I was working for at that time and unfortunately ended up following the prosperity Gospel. And I was sort of in that for 7 years but had started to read Martyn Lloyd Jones, so was seriously starting to question things. Breakthrough came though winter 2018/19 when I read R C Sproul’s the Holiness Of God. I started watching his sermons online. Then John Macarthur’s. Then John Piper’s (Got his book Desiring God. I got R Cs Chosen By God too). I think it was early July last year though that the truth of Calvinism hit me. Hard. And I accepted it because it was Biblical, but I didn’t know if I was chosen, so it was worrying and I was praying (My prayer life needs improving btw).

Meantime some years earlier I had been baptized and although I’d left that church, I still knew some of the people from there. Still confused over my salvation, but talking to all who would listen about my new found Calvinism, I told the Pastor he had baptized a goat, and got into an argument over John 6:44, Romans 8 and 9, and a few other scriptures with an old friend from the church, who concluded I’d gone from one extreme to the other (prosperity Gospel to Calvinism). Our friendship suffered over that and we drifted, and don’t see each other now.

So I think it was probably January this year, I watched a Calvinistic sermon online that really upset me. I just thought this stuff, this thing, this Calvinism cannot be right. I knew other theologies were out there, I was just so sure that the great theologians and scholars I’d been watching and listening to and reading… they just couldn’t be wrong. But I cannot accept a God who randomly picked people to be saved and then consigned the rest of humanity to hell. I believe we are totally depraved, trapped in original sin, and our nature is to run away from God, as Adam and Eve did in the Garden. But I believe Christ made a perfect atonement for all by His death and resurrection. And God calls every one of us, thru creation, but more powerfully thru the hearing or reading of His Word thru grace, which we can choose to resist. Not willing that any should perish.

God holds out His hands to this fallen world – ‘Come home. I love you. I created you’.

That’s my life search, a shortened version, but suspect it’s long enough!

God Bless All x