Tonight, I was baptised into faith in Christ.  I was saved by faith in Chirst and baptised in the Holy Spirit more than a year ago.  But tonight, I obeyed God and was baptised in public, giving witness to the miracle God has worked in my heart through my testimony.  I share that testimony below;

I came to Michigan from my home in Virginia nearly four years ago, to attend Michigan State University and study nuclear physics.  At the time, I was an atheist, as I had been since I was a teenager.  I’ve studied physics since high school and all along it had provided me a strange kind of comfort in my atheism; not in that it confirmed there was no God, but for me it held the promise that it ultimately would, if I just learned enough.   Using what I did understand though, I took pride in challenging other people beliefs and encouraging atheism in those who were unsure.   My undergraduate studies reinforced this idea and my time spent on them never really challenged my own convictions.  I left Virginia feeling like a big fish in a small pond and being right about my beliefs was just a matter of going graduate school and learning the details.

By the end of my first year however, it was clear to me that this wasn’t going to work.  Not only was I nowhere near as smart as I thought I was, I was surrounded by many other students and professors who were much more talented than me and even they didn’t know the answers to everything.  I worked harder and longer than I ever had in my entire life.  Suddenly, I had become a small fish in a big ocean and there was more to learn than I could learn in a thousand lifetimes.  Where I had believed the universe was a simple, mindless clockwork thing before, now it seemed a towering intellectual feat, riddled with echoes of choice and design, symmetry and beauty.  And every corner of it had enough mystery to spend a lifetime studying.  But perhaps the most startling discovery I made during that first year as a graduate student was that one of my classmates was a Christian.

My friend’s name is Matt and as classmates, we spent many nights gathered around tables, struggling with homework and drinking lots of coffee.  I was fascinated and confused as to why a Christian would be a scientist and so as we got stuck or too tired to work, our conversation would often turn to religion.  Many months later, Matt invited me to church with him and I actually panicked.  I say panic because the idea of being in a church, surrounded by Christians terrified me.  Not only was I fairly shy in general, I was so nervous that someone would try to talk to me about faith or ask me questions about the Bible and would find out that I didn’t know anything.  I was truly scared of the possibility of feeling like I didn’t belong there.  So I said to Matt that I wanted to read the whole Bible before I made a decision about it!  Now, I said that, not entirely out of anxiety.  A part of me really did want to figure out everything about God on my own, before saying I believed in Him.  Of course, Matt called my bluff and went out and bought me a Bible.    And it was one of the most touching things anyone outside of my family had ever done for me.  We had spent hours debating and discussing faith and God but they were always just ideas to me, abstracted, academic and distant.  But this simple gesture, more than anything he could have said, showed me he wasn’t just trying to win a debate, it wasn’t just an idea to him.  He cared about something that was in the Bible and he cared about me.

So I started reading the Bible.  I read from the beginning, starting in Genesis and I also read specific chapters Matt recommended to me.  And to be honest, I read it on and off for months and I didn’t understand anything.  In the mean time though, I met Loraine, who would later become my best friend and so much more to me.  She was also a Christian and she helped my understanding a great deal by explaining the overall arc of the Bible, like how the Fall and our own sin had turned us away from God and how Christ paid for that sin on the Cross.  She also convinced me to start going to church and so I finally took Matt up on his offer and I came here to South, sometime in the early spring of last year.

For the next couple months, I came to South for Sunday services, I read the Bible as I could alongside class work and Loraine and I had long conversations about things I read and heard in the sermons.  Now, the sermons were my favorite part of the service.  It was just like a lecture at the university.  I listen, scribble notes furiously and crosscheck references as the pastor gives them.  But I had a problem.  You see, I was learning and understanding some things in the Bible but I realized that I didn’t feel anything for God and I couldn’t seem to reason my way into accepting Christ.  I didn’t really understand what accepting Him meant.  And I started to sense that while I understood and agreed with Loraine on important Biblical truths, our conversations were becoming strained and she was getting frustrated.  I slowly became desperate.  I wanted so badly to believe as she did and feel for God what I saw she felt for Him.  I kept thinking that if I came to church enough and studied the Bible enough and prayed enough that I could earn God’s favor and earn some secret wisdom in the Bible that would bring me to faith in Christ. 

I just wanted time to seclude and devote myself and figure out the details so I could get this faith.  But Loraine insisted to me that there was no way for me to earn God’s favor, no way for me to be pleasing and to earn saving faith on my own.  In one conversation Loraine backed me into a corner over it so badly I was left speechless.  I knew she was right but I couldn’t see any way to honestly progress past where I was stuck.  That was on a Saturday, the night before I was saved.  I went to church the next morning where Pastor Don was in the midst of his segment on the life of David.  The pastor's sermon centered on 1Samuel, mostly chapters 22-24 about David and Saul.  It felt like he was talking to me alone.  He talked about hardship and crisis being important for people for three reasons; first, to reveal their heart and how far from God it may be, like the time David spent on the run, repeatedly lying to avoid capture.  Second, to show how they will treat their enemies, as when David spares Saul when he is at David's mercy.  And how they will rely on their friends, as David did on Jonathan, Saul's son.

What he said about this last point rang very strong with me...he said, 'At no point has God ever endorsed a monastic brand of spirituality,...certainly their are times that call for solitude and reflection but, always you are expected to return and be their to be helped by your friends and to help your friends.  We are not designed to endure isolation.'  I realized that this was exactly what I had been trying to do.  So many feelings about so many things came over me then.  I had been like David, wandering my whole life in a desert, lying to avoid being cornered with nothing smart to say.  Later that day, as I wrote an email to Loraine, trying to explain all that I had felt, everything that I had struggled to see snapped into focus.  God’s plan for us as is all about ending our separation and isolation and restoring our fellowship with Him.  And to overcome the demands of His own holiness to our sin, out of His great love for us, He gave His only son Jesus to die on the cross and pay that penalty for our sin.  All I had to do was accept Christ.  Finally, I understood what it meant to accept Christ.  And It wasn’t in any book; I couldn’t calculate or study anything that would give it to me.  I had heard it said that it comes only from the Holy Spirit moving us to that faith and I realized at that moment the Holy Spirit was with me.  I met with my friend Matt that afternoon and shared my faith with him as well.  We talked and prayed together for what seemed like hours.  And I looked back on my life.  I felt so sorry for all the times I had ridiculed believers.  I felt so sorry for all the sins I had committed, for all the ways I had failed God.  But I felt so wonderful and so loved to be saved and to know that the Holy Spirit was with me and that eventually, I would be with God.  My isolation and separation from God was over.   On that day, April 10th 2005, I placed my faith in Jesus Christ.

Praise and glory be to God !!!