Because it was 20 years ago today that I came to know Jesus in a personal way. And it's fun to kind of look back and see what has happened.

It's hard. Some of you have heard bits and pieces of the story, and I suppose any of us who have gone on with the Lord for as many years as that have so much that could be said. And what's the most important? I'm not sure what's the most important. One thing that really struck me as I thought about it was the role that Christian women have played in touching my life at various places. Because, of course, the story doesn't really begin 20 years ago. It begins at the beginning.

And as early back as I can remember, God was involved in my life. If you were to ask my mother about it, she would tell you, oh, he wanted to go into the ministry from the time he was three. I don't remember it that way.

But that's an apocryphal story that she will tell you. What I remember is this. I remember two twin girls who were my babysitters, who came to my parents when I was three and said, could we take him to Sunday school?

And we were definitely not a church-going family. My dad had been raised with a kind of a Sunday morning only churchmanship, and my mother had come from a really ripped up background and had absolutely no church whatsoever. And so when they got married and moved away from both of their parents' homes out to the Middle West, they did nothing. When I came along, they took me back to the family church to be baptized, and that was the only time I was ever in church.

Until these two twin girls came along and said, could we take him to Sunday school with us? And my folks said, well, what kind of a church? And they said, it's an Episcopal church, and they thought that was safe.

And not too much can happen to him there, right? So off I went. And it is true, I loved it. I did enjoy it. I'm not sure why. But I did have a love of, I guess you'd have to say the Lord, but I certainly didn't know Him in any personal way. I loved the religious things. I loved worship at that early age. And I remember coming home with the coloring books, you know, and telling my mommy, wait till you see the picture I drew of God.

She said, nobody's ever seen God. I said, wait till they see my picture.

And I went faithfully. You know how you get the little bars, right? And I got the little circle, and then you get the wreath around it, and then you start getting bars, and I sort of walked with a list like that. I clanked when I walked.

And out of years of going to church school, faithfully, I don't remember missing a Sunday.

I also don't remember a blessed thing that I ever learned.

except once.

When I was about five,

I remember going to Sunday school one morning and the church school superintendent, a Christian lady, I can't remember her name, came in and she began her little talk by saying, on the way to Sunday school this morning, God told me to tell you, And then went into her lesson. I don't remember the lesson.

But what rocked me was her saying, God told me. I'd never run into that. That registered at age five. God told me. What does that mean? I never heard that again for another ten years. God could speak to somebody in a personal way.

That she could come with her own lesson plan and have it set aside God spoke to me as I was driving here this morning. That registered. Somewhere around that same time, or maybe just a bit before, my mother gave birth to twin sons prematurely, and they both died within a matter of days.

And they didn't know what else to do. They were going to just have them cremated and forget it. And something welled up inside my father, and he said, no, we can't do that. He said, what's the name of that church he's been going to? Looked it up. It was a great big Episcopal church. Never had even heard of the rector. Got his name, called him up. He came over, talked with him.

And he said, you know, he was very sympathetic. And he said, I'll call my assistant. I'm sorry, I've got a commitment to go out of town. Let me call my assistant. And then he said, no. He said, this is more important.

And he canceled his commitment to minister to my family at that particular moment. And God's love came through Father Carr. And that was the beginning of their relationship, my parents, to go back to church. And my mother ended up going through the confirmation class, and eventually they both became very, very active in the church. We moved back to Connecticut, and I was still active. I was in the choir. I was altar boy.

I even sometimes substitute taught for younger kids. Very, very active in my church. And something began to happen as I moved into teenage years. And somehow in our particular town, in our particular church, the Acolyte Guild was also primarily composed of the town Tufts. I'm not quite sure how that worked out. but the boys who were getting into trouble in our town were the chief servers at the Lord's table. And somehow that seemed to be part of the package, and I tried to work that out and learn it.

I never learned it very well. I never became a very bad boy, but that was the kind of thing. It tells you something about our acolytes. It tells you something about how we could go through the motions and somehow not really have it register at a deep level.

church at that point began to be less and less significant to me I still did it but I could see that dichotomy I could see that to be cool was not to be the altar boy or perhaps it was to be the altar boy and really have a secret life and something kind of ebbed away

and about that time I began to be aware of another group of kids in our high school.

And one in particular approached me and invited me to come with him to something with the awful name of the Bible Club. I mean, that just... That was not cool, okay? I mean, I knew that much. That was not cool. He was cool.

And that really created a problem for me. He was the captain of the basketball team and also the captain of the track team. And I didn't understand how that worked. And I was flattered that he, who was one of the big men on campus, was interested in me, who was not. But somehow I never could work it out to go to the Bible club with him. And he asked me faithfully, dig this, he asked me every single Friday for over a year.

And every single Friday I had something else to do.

I got interested in a girl by the name of Linda at that point and I asked her if she'd go out with me and her answer was I'll have to pray about it

I'd never heard that

so I came back the next day and I said did you pray and she said yes and I said what did he say

and she said I can go out with you we never went out

not sure what it was about her praying

but she was also in the Bible club

and I began to be aware of the fact that somehow paradoxically the very sharpest kids in our particular high school were all members of this strange thing with this awful name, the Bible Club. And I began to be aware, as a matter of fact, that most of them had been in it for a long time. Raised a question in my mind. What is the relationship between being sharp, being cool, and being a member of the Bible Club? So I finally went.

Not primarily because Tommy had been asking me for over a year, but because I was interested in Linda, you see. that's the second Christian woman

and then I shortly met the third the leader of the Bible club was the wife of the Baptist minister in town and if she would open the scriptures week by week they came alive in all those years in all those endless sessions of Sunday school where it never somehow registered suddenly was alive she was talking about a God she knew.

That was the second time I remembered it rang that bell. I remembered that church school superintendent. Now here was another one. And she could say, God told me to tell you this.

And somehow my allegiance transferred very quickly. I got deeply involved in that Bible club. It became meat and drink to me. I just loved it. I ate it up. I began to study the Bible for myself. I began to read it. I couldn't put it down. I would be up at night reading my Bible. My mother didn't know what to make of it.

She said, we wish it was like it used to be. You know.

And we went off on a retreat one weekend. I had been involved in this thing for about a year. We went off on a retreat to New Hampshire.

And I saw something happen in the lives of several of the kids that weekend where they said, in essence, we've been playing games. We've been going through the motions. We've been claiming a relationship with Christ. But we've come to the point of knowing that we've never really given our lives to him.

These were some of the kids that I'd been looking up to for a year whose lives had really influenced mine. I didn't do anything on the weekend, but I thought about it. How could it be that such and such a guy who had been such an example to me could say, he was never really committed to Christ. What in the world does that say about me?

It's 20 years ago today

that I got down on my knees next to my bed, Bible open, and I said, God, I've been studying this Bible for a year. I've been involved with these kids. I've heard Ruth Wood teaching your word.

it is either truer than I have ever experienced or it is all some kind of a crazy mind trip

if you are real come into my life

and if you will make yourself known to me I will follow you for the rest of my life

I didn't know it at the time but I really was fulfilling one of the most important sets of conditions that Jesus ever laid down. Do you remember when he was talking with the Pharisees and they challenged him to prove all the claims that he was making about himself? And what they wanted was a theological debate. His answer was very interesting. He said, if anyone is willing to do God's will, he'll know the truth of my teaching. It's a matter of your will, not your intellect.

It's not a matter of academic ping pong. it's a matter of your will if you're willing to follow me then you'll know who I am not the other way around and I really meant it friends when I was kneeling down I didn't know what I was asking but I meant it if you will make yourself known to me I will follow you for the rest of my life I said I've got all afternoon

you're supposed to laugh

either it will become dinner time and my mother will call me and nothing will have happened and I will close this Bible and I will never open it again and I will never darken the door of another church and I will never go to Bible club again or you will somehow make yourself known to me of God all afternoon.

I don't know how long I was there on my knees. I want you to know I was dead serious.

And somewhere in the middle of the afternoon, praying, reading the scriptures, God spoke to me. He's only spoken to me in the way I'm describing twice.

He's spoken in so many ways, through circumstances and through other people and through just that inner sense of what he wants you to do and, you know, through the scripture itself.

Twice I've heard his voice.

Twice I've known in my experience what that church school superintendent meant.

And in the middle of my praying, he spoke to me. I'm always just a little bit embarrassed to say this because it's not at all Episcopalian. But it was Bible Club, okay, what he said was, you are saved.

You are saved. And I knew it. I'd love to tell you that it was upward and onward from then on. It was not. It was not. I was a senior in high school at that point. And I went off to college the next fall with a whole set of really wrong ideas. Wrong ideas of myself, wrong ideas of what God was calling me to do.

And I went looking for people with whom I could do theological battle. The very thing that Jesus refused to do with the Pharisees. I saw myself as some sort of Christian 20th century warrior and I was going to find the sharpest atheists and agnostics and whittle them down to size.

And it didn't take me too long to find that they knew a whole lot more than I did. I found some very well-educated, incredibly intelligent people who could argue circles around me. Here I was, a six or I guess about a nine-month-old Christian baby, and I was taking on one of the guys that I met was in his mid-thirties and a personal friend of Bertrand Russell, who some of you know was one of the great free thinkers of our generation, one of the great atheistic philosophers, cut me in shreds.

and by the end of that year I was in deep, deep trouble one thing I didn't mention was that in that Bible club experienced while there was a tremendous reality to Christ there also was a very narrow world view of Christian do's and don'ts you know a Christian is one who doesn't smoke doesn't drink, doesn't wear lipstick doesn't wear short skirts, doesn't go to the movies etc, etc, etc and I swallowed all of that It was all part of the package.

And as I was off at university on a secular campus, those things got thinner and thinner in terms of the veneer on my life. I saw less and less reason for them. I could understand why you don't get drunk, but I couldn't understand an absolute prohibition against drinking, for instance. I couldn't see why some of the same people who would condemn movies would watch the movies two years later on television.

And so there was a moral crisis. Now the issues were fairly trivial, I think, today.

But at the time they were very real. And I was going through a whole rethinking, a re-shaking up of my life, at the same time realizing the poverty of my theological depth.

By summer I was ready to throw the whole thing over. In spite of what I had said at that prayer, in spite of hearing, with my ears the voice of God I was able to rationalize my way out of it because the moral dilemma was too great and because my theological my intellectual pride was too great

this gives me great soberness in realizing that someone may have had an experience of God and yet can come to the point of finding a way to deny it to himself I went through the summer and it was a summer of tremendous rebellion and as I look back on it I see the hand of God on my life keeping me from doing things that I wanted to do that I was prepared to do that had I done them might have ruined my life totally and somehow one after another he prevented them happening I wanted to go with a buddy down to Greenwich Village and we wanted to go get drugs neither of us had the ghost of an idea what drugs were about that wasn't there in those days it was a whole new thing we went down, we went into the village the very first few minutes we were down there two guys came after us to roll us and we went running back to the hotel Biltmore with our tails between our legs we never got into drugs the night that I finally talked my girlfriend into sneaking into the town pool for a moonlight nude swim

I got your attention, don't I?

We got there to find 20 others that already snuck in.

Somehow I could never talk her into it again.

There's one thing after another. Things I was ready to do, wanted to do, was not allowed to do. Jesus said, if you think it in your heart, before God, it's as much as if you've done it. Okay? So I confess to you that I'm guilty of all of them, okay? But somehow I wasn't allowed to actually do it.

And I thank God for that protection. I thank God for that. Some of you have done them. And some of you are spending the rest of your life working out some of the consequences. God allowed me to think it, want it, desire it, sin in my heart. But he kept me from some of the consequences.

during that first year of college I had become very active in the InterVarsity Christian Fellowship I had gotten elected to an office as secretary I was rooming by the end of the year with the president of the fellowship in the middle of the summer I sent him a letter and said I resign I'm willing to go on rooming with you if you won't thump the Bible at me I don't want to talk about it better than that.

Somehow he was gracious enough to accept my conditions.

Came back to campus in September as a sophomore and I was absolutely convinced there was no God. The whole thing was ridiculous. And I thought to myself, wouldn't it be fun to go to the first meeting of the inter-varsity group of the year, sit in the back row and watch my roommate explain to the rest of the group why I, the secretary, had resigned.

Went out and got fairly well liquored up before that.

Went in, sat in the back row.

Again, I don't remember what the speaker said that night.

But we had a speaker who knew God.

And it was undeniable.

Worse than that, my friends who I'd been looking down on knew God. And it was undeniable. It was like running at full speed into a solid wall. All of my arguments, all of my rationalizations, all of my pride, all of my superiority, and God was there. He was there. He was real, and I knew it, and I couldn't deny it, and it was the most frustrating night of my life.

Because they still had those dopey do's and don'ts, and I knew better than them, and I could argue circles around them intellectually, and they couldn't answer my arguments, and God was real. And all of my arguments didn't matter any, and he still was real.

I found myself sitting behind a young lady that night and something about her caught my attention and after the meeting was over I engaged her in some of my debate and lo and behold I found somebody who I couldn't talk circles around and who could come right back at me and that was Karen

I was very attracted to her and I knew she knew God

that weekend my roommate and I went down to my parents place in Saybrook on the shoreline and I ranted and I raved the whole weekend long I threw every argument at him that I could he couldn't answer one single one of them he just smiled

I know John I love you God loves you and that's the way it should be

and I came back to campus that Sunday night and I went into the little Episcopal chapel right across the street from campus and I said this is ridiculous I know you're real

Lord I want to start over I can never be the kind of Christian that I was before I can never be the kind of man that I was before but I know you're real could we start over

and from there things did move upward and onward I don't know which of those was the more important of the two nights the first one when I was a senior in high school or the second one when I was a sophomore in college I've never doubted since I've had great sympathy for the doubter because I've been there I know what it is to have intellectual arguments and I'm concerned to answer them when they're genuine I also know what it is to rationalize arguments because you really just want God to be at arm's length I said at the beginning that there were two times when I heard God's voice that night in the chapel was not the second one but there was a night in that chapel when I did hear him speak again and I want to just share that with you and then I'm going to quit

but sometime later when I was responsible again I had moved into leadership in the Christian fellowship and I was responsible for planning a retreat one weekend and I went into the chapel and I went there frequently after that first experience whenever I wanted to be alone and pray and be in the scriptures, that was a great place to go.

This particular night I went in and there was a guy playing the organ.

And usually, had there been anyone present, I would have turned and walked out. I wanted to be alone, but somehow I felt, no, tonight I'm going to just go and pray anyway. I went up to the communion rail. He kept playing his organ and I started in on my prayers.

And halfway through the prayers, God said unmistakably clearly I want you to go pray with that man and I recoiled from it that is not the sort of thing I do just go up to a stranger and pray with him

ignored the voice kept on came again I want you to go pray with that man I said alright Lord if that's really you I'll do it I'm willing to be a fool for your sake I went up to him and he was playing along and he got to the end of his piece and I said

would you pray with me? He looked at me and he said yes. What am I supposed to pray? So I just prayed about the stuff I was praying about. When I got to the end of it he said amen. And then we introduced ourselves. Turned out he was a medical technician from the next town over. He had nothing to do with the college or the church except that he was taking organ lessons from the organist. And I walked out of the church and I thought he must think he has just met the biggest yo-yo that he has ever met

in his life. What was that about?

Two nights later, I was back in the chapel and there he was again. That was really strange because I was in and out of that chapel many times a week. I'd never seen him. Twice in a row, he's there. I'm walking down the aisle and I have this overwhelming sense. I turn around and I say, Stu, you're going to go on a retreat this weekend.

he said well I'd like to very much but I can't I've got a friend coming from New York and we've been planning this time I said your friend is not going to be able to come he laughed

he said if my friend isn't able to come I'll go on your retreat that was a Thursday next night the phone rings he says my friend has just called me and he can't come he said I'd love to go on your retreat

that day he met Christ in an overwhelming way he had never opened the Bible before no that's not true he did open once and I'll tell you about it in just a minute but he didn't know the scriptures he met Christ in an overwhelming way and a week later I got a note from him and he said John I've been praying incessantly since last week I want you to be the first to know that God spoke to me on the way home tonight and he's calling me to be a medical missionary

he said I'm going to take my medical training I'm going to get some biblical training and use it for him. He has gone on to Bible college. He's gone on to Wycliffe translators. He's been trained in the business of going into an area where they have no written language, learning the language, reducing it to a written form, teaching the people how to write their own language, and translating the scriptures into that language.

That's his life work. And he's been down in Peru doing it ever since. He was the best man at our wedding.

he told me a long time afterward this very interesting footnote to the story he said that about six months prior to our meeting in the chapel he had come to a point of real desperation in his own life he felt he was doing nothing significant and had no real purpose in living and he looked up to the heavens and he prayed oh God if you're really there please send someone into my life and Stu said that that night when I approached him in the chapel he had the most uncanny sense that that prayer was beginning to be answered he went home that night he took down the old family bible blew off all the dust and opened it at random and he said his eye fell on the verse that says there was a man sent from God whose name was John

and Stu said he knew then if there was any question about it before that something very special was happening in answer to that prayer

those are the two times that I've heard God speak somehow somehow they provide a framework those are the two things God has said to me you are saved

go it's been a great exciting time over the last 20 years totally unexpected I never wanted to make one of the moves that I've ever made including this one

and every one of them God has astonished us with his goodness when you give your life to him when you're willing to go where he wants you to go he ends up blessing you blessing you more abundantly than any other way you could find for yourself.

I tell kids, God is not going to call you to the mission field unless he knows that you're going to be more fulfilled there than anywhere else. Stu is having the time of his life sitting in a little village in Peru translating the Bible where God has sent me.

I've gone out of obedience

and I've found blessing. He gave me Karen not just as an encouragement and a witness but very early on And he gave me a love for her and finally gave her a love for me.

And it's been a great adventure.

Last month, we visited her brother and his family in Houston. They've adopted a boy who was unloved, very unlovely, was 10 years old, had been in five foster homes, something like that. They adopted him into their family. And they're doing beautifully, and it was a great pleasure to meet him.

And Drake, Karen's brother, told me something. This may be true elsewhere. I had never heard it before, at least in Texas.

When you adopt a child, do you know what happens? The original birth certificate is destroyed. And a new one is written. And little James has a birth certificate that says that ten years ago, he was born to Drake and Laura Elvgren in the city of Fort Worth, Texas. Even though they were in Florida at the time.

And had never met him until ten years later. Do you know what happens? when you come to Christ.

When you finally hear His invitation and respond to it, He says, I want to give you new life. And you say, Yes, I'll receive that. Do you know what happens? A new birth certificate is written for you. In John's first letter, he gives a cry of exclamation in the third chapter.

He says, Look at this. Has there ever been anything like it? That we should not only be called the children of God, but that we should actually be His children.

You become a member of His family.

If any man is in Christ, he's a new creature. Old things are passed away. Behold, all is become new.

Jesus said

I have come that you might have life and that you might have it in all of its abundance

as I look back on the story that I've shared with you tonight

try to sum it up it seems to me that there's a theme running through it that from a very early age, what I was looking for and what attracted me in a few other people when I bumped into it

was knowing God, knowing Him in a personal way. You know, there's all the difference in the world between knowing about God and knowing Him personally.

When Paul came to sum up his story, he used the same language.

He said to the Philippians in chapter 3, he said, Whatever gain I had previously, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. In fact, I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I've suffered the loss of all things. but I just count them as refuse. In order that I may gain Christ and be found in Him. He says that I might know Him.

The power of His resurrection

might share in His sufferings and become like Him in His death. That I might know Him. That I might know Him and His power. that the things that break his heart might break mine, that I might become like him.

Karen's witness was written up with a number of other Christian women in a book a number of years ago that was entitled, Does Anyone Here Know God?

It seems to me that if the folks out there in the secular world could come in here tonight and could walk up and down these aisles and look into our faces, the question that they'd be asking, many of them couldn't articulate it this way, but the heart cry of the world out there is, does anyone here know God?

Well, I've begun to get to know Him.

I look forward to getting to know Him better and better, and finally to spending eternity with Him. Thanks for letting me share this story. Let's just bow our heads for a minute.

Father, thank You for all those folks whose lives touched my life, for those babysitters, for that church school superintendent, for Linda, who prayed about it before she'd accept a date, for Ruth Wood, for Karen, for Father Carr.

Thank you for the surpassing privilege of getting to know Jesus Christ.

Amen.