Wisdom

I was a Fool

The fool says in his heart, “There is no God”.  Psalm 53:1

My word of wisdom for today is wisdom.  I said before that I’m not necessarily where I would want to be in life, and I believe the main reason for it is because I waited until so late in life to put my faith in God, who for me is the Lord Jesus Christ.

Some people remember the exact date & time that they accepted Christ as their savior.  I don’t.  I put the date @ late summer (maybe August) of 2002.  I was at a job that I hated.  Fridays were my favorite day of the week because it meant I wouldn’t have to deal with the folks from my job for 2 whole days.  Saturdays mornings were great.  On Saturday afternoons I started feeling mildly anxious because I thought, “I only have 1 day left, then I have to face those people on Monday”.  On Sundays I was in a fairly high state of anxiety.  One day, while I was riding the bus to work, I started crying for no reason.  That never happened to me before.

I was looking for solutions.  I picked up a book by Tony Evans entitled, The Battle is the Lord’s.  It described this war going on between God & Satan.  It was the first time I read about the purpose of angels or that humankind was caught up in the crossfire in this war.  The book also said that I could find safety in God.  Around the same time, I saw a sermon on television given by Charles Stanley.  The topic of that particular sermon was the cross.  I was raised in church, but I’d never been given a clear explanation of the centrality of the cross in the Christian faith and what it signified.  I’m a smart person, so if someone put me on the spot by asking the question, I certainly could have cobbled together an answer – but I really didn’t know.  Stanley explained the importance of understanding was the cross was where Jesus paid our sin-debt in full, thereby reconciling us to God, ourselves, and the rest of creation.

Before that, no one ever explicitly told me that God was against me, but that’s what I believed.  I thought God was watching me from heaven, looking for me to make a mistake so that he could have good reasons to send me to hell.  He’s a negative Santa-Claus.  He’s keeping a list, and checking it twice, he’s gonna find out who’s naughty & nice, Jesus Christ is coming to town.  If you know that someone is out to get you, the reasonable thing to do is avoid him – hide.  After watching Dr. Stanley, it occurred to me for the first time that God was on my side and that he wanted me to submit to his authority so that he could protect me.  So I said the prayer of confession.

The very first feeling I had was one of relief.  It was a comfort to know that I was now under the protection of the creator and ruler of the whole universe.  I stopped being a fool.