Basic Theology 3

I would not have become a Christian were it not for the direct and personal experience of contact with the Divine. This happened on the day that I first accepted Christ, age 14, at 8 or so in the evening in the garret bedroom of the House of David in Fairview Slopes in Vancouver, now a bunch of townhouses and condos. I felt a presence so strong and so beautiful, such as was shared and experienced by my hosts who had graciously invited me for dinner that night. Yes, they wanted to persuade me to know Jesus, but I needed no persuading. I knew, from the deepest core of my being, I knew that it was God and that he was calling me in all his love, sweetness, grace and power. This is so hard to convey to those who don't believe, the skeptics, the scoffers, but this is because it is like describing the colour green to someone who is colour blind, as I said just a few weeks later to my scoffing and mocking brother. Several weeks later, when I was baptized in the Holy Spirit, I had never experienced such a heightened sense of power, joy and love sweeping into my life. This in many ways empowered me as a Christian, but also as a complete human being, and I am to this day convinced that I received through this presence of God in my life a great deal of healing and recovering from the fallout of my abusive childhood. I badly wanted my family to know for themselves, and to experience the beauty that was happening to me. They resisted from the first day, were angry, hostile, and scornful: my just-divorced and very angry mother who wanted to be a middle aged party girl, my alcoholic father, and my brother who abused drugs and was himself full of anger and hate. They didn't know what had got into me, neither was there anything they could do to withstand the power of God in my life. Even more to their outrage, I was happy! I no longer wanted to smoke pot or drink, I was peaceful, and I was becoming kind, responsible and loving, all changes that are consistent with an authentic Christian conversion, and they couldn't stand that this was authentic and there was nothing they could do to oppose, short of increasing their own personal resistance against God in their lives. This was painful for me. I was convinced that they would be going to hell and I didn't want them to burn forever in the Lake of Fire. I'm not sure what I think of this now. I like to believe that God is merciful and welcomes everyone who comes to him. But I also acknowledge, from very hard personal experience, that God calls us to repentance, to accepting and admitting where we are wrong and where we have wronged and done wrong, to turn away from that with the motive to do what is right, just and beautiful. I also understand from many of the near-death experiences I have read and heard about that those people who meet God in the afterlife have all been confronted with the wrong they have done to others and are called to repentance and a turning around in their lives. Neither can I imagine anyone who is not wiling to do this really wanting to live in God's presence, because as beautiful and loving God is, because God is love, he is also the essence of truth and truthfulness and I can't understand that anyone who avoids the truth would be able to bear being in the presence of the Living God. I know this from my own personal experience. When I am living in a way that is false and self-centred, it is very hard for me to draw near to God. There is a barrier. Our hold, our grip on our lives, in wanting to be the ones in charge, our own personal CEO, is so strong and so unyielding, that it is going to be something very hard and very difficult and challenging for many of us to really let go and let God. But before any of us can really move forward as complete human beings, that is exactly what we have to do. We are not our own.