I’ve been honored to speak for Impact Week at Redwood Christian Schools where I graduated twenty-five years ago. I share my testimony in this 3-part series and challenge readers to make the Lord their greatest fear in life.
My Story
I became a Christian at the tender age of four. I had grown up in a little Baptist church. My Sunday school teachers were a ninety-year-old spinster and her bachelor brother (I don’t really know if Ms. Cooper was that old, but she sure seemed like it). This was back in the day when churches still used flannel graph and the kids competed in sword drills. Like most Baptist churches, we held a morning and an evening service. I remember going to church on Sundays in my three-piece suit and always getting grubby since the church owned acres of land with a tire swing and a sliding hill and a forest of tall grass where we pretended to be jungle explorers. Our family would go home for lunch, then a few hours later return for the evening service. I drew pictures and read the Bible just to stay awake as our pastor droned on and on. I probably read the book of Judges a few hundred times before I finished elementary school.
It was through a conversation with my mother when I decided to follow Jesus. My dad was away at a funeral and I started asking questions about death and where people go when they die. So my mom took the opportunity to share with me the gospel. “Tommy, God loves you, but he cannot have a relationship with you because you are a sinner (Romans 3:23). A holy God must judge your sin (6:23a). But instead of punishing you for sin, God sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to die in your place (5:8). And if you confess your sin and believe in Jesus, God will forgive you and bring you into his family so that you can live with him in heaven forever (10:9). Tommy, where you go when you die depends on whether or not you believe in Jesus.” I decided, right then, that I would rather live in heaven with Jesus and with my family than receive God’s judgment in hell (John 3:16-18). So I prayed that God would forgive my sin and welcome me as his child. That was the day I followed Christ. I grew up in a Christian home, attended a Christian school, and went to church with my family both morning and evening for as many Sundays as I can remember.
Then I got to the twelfth grade. I was still attending church and sometimes youth group, but my Christian walk had grown sporadic. Some weeks I’d read the Bible and try to pray, but some weeks the only time I thought about spiritual things was in church or in Bible class. My senior year, I began to doubt my faith and question what I believed: “Did God really create the earth or could evolution be true? Why do bad things happen to good people? How do I know that my own faith is personal or just something my parents taught me? Is this life even worth living?” I started asking all kinds of questions, but the problem was that I didn’t discuss then with anyone. I didn’t process my doubts in the fellowship of the church or talk with my parents. Although it’s natural to have questions and normal to doubt, it’s unhealthy to process those doubts in isolation. We need a safe environment where we can wrestle with our faith and the church should be that place to ask questions without feeling judged.
So instead of dealing with my doubts in a healthy way, I began to spiral in despair. It was a really dark period in my life, yet what brought me out of it was that I began to pray again. Those childhood prayers came back to me and directed my heart toward God at a time when I needed him most. I prayed something like, “God, if you’re really there, then show yourself to me. I’ll give you one more chance.” This is not the sort of ultimatum you give to God, but at the time, it seemed the most honest thing to say.
Then graciously, God answered my prayer. I attended a meeting with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes where my soccer coach and his wife shared their testimony. I listened as they spoke openly about a recent miscarriage and how they continued to trust the Lord even as they were grieving the loss of their child. I remember going home that night and thinking to myself, “I sure don’t have that kind of faith, but I want to. God, if you give me faith that like that, I’ll do whatever and go wherever you want me to go.” It was like a light bulb went on as joy surged into my soul. My doubts still remained, but they no longer consumed my thoughts. Then two days later, one of my friends at school invited me to go on a mission trip to Russia. I recalled my promise to God and said, “Yes,” without quite realizing how far away Russia was. So that summer, I went on my first mission trip. My mom was a nervous wreck because it was the first time I would travel to another country. I also didn’t think about how to pay for college in the fall. But again, God was gracious and provided a scholarship while I was away on missions. He seemed to confirm every step along the way: “This was the right decision.”
The entire trip was seven weeks long. The first week was a missions Boot Camp somewhere in the Midwest with hundreds of students headed all over the world on different teams. We slept in tents, trained for physical fitness, and drilled each other in Bible memory. Yet the most impactful moment for me was when one of the Camp directors showed us from the Scriptures how we could not serve the Lord on missions if our relationships at home weren’t right. I was convicted in my own heart because my relationship with my dad had been a source of conflict during high school. I hadn’t been respectful of him and my actions had shown it. So after that message, I immediately went to the Camp store to wait in line at the payphone—a phone literally attached to the wall which takes your coins so that you can make a call. But when I got to the payphone, I had to wait in a really long line behind a bunch of other kids who were also calling home to mend their broken relationships. I learned that day about the importance of character in ministry.
From the Midwest, our teams all flew to various locations around the world. My team went to inner city London for two weeks with a stopover in Finland, so that we could practice our evangelism. I was chosen for the drama team (without any kind of training or dramatic bone in my body). We would set up a boom box in a public square like Covent Garden and hit play on the cassette tape (which I won’t bother to explain what that is). It was crazy performing shows in downtown London next to seasoned street performers, but we always drew the largest crowd. And when the show was over, we went throughout the crowd in pairs and shared the gospel with anyone and everyone who would talk with us. We used a gospel tract from Campus Crusade called the Four Spiritual Laws and if the people couldn’t speak English, we had the same tract available in many different languages so that they could follow along. By God’s grace, many people came to Christ just by reading those gospel tracts.
From there, we flew to Russia and spent three more weeks in St. Petersburg and Moscow and former Soviet villages and cities. In London, crowds were cheering for us. In Finland, they smiled politely. But in Russia, it was like talking to a cement wall. Yet we continued our street performances and gospel evangelism and witnessed many more come to Christ. It was quite the adventure: I ate some old lady’s borsch that made me want to puke, slept in places that I still haven’t told my mother about, and filled up my first passport with stamps.
Then when I got home, I had to maintain that same passion for God as I began a whole new adventure in college. I served in campus ministry and went on mission trips every summer. I taught the youth in a tiny Southern Baptist church. The most important choice I made in college was to be actively involved in a healthy, local church that got me away from only college students. Campus ministries are great, but my faith was strengthened by being actively involved in a healthy, local church. Midway through college, the Lord called me out of engineering into pastoral ministry because I enjoyed serving people more than building bridges. Then in 2004, my wife and I got married and we moved to Southern California—land of the hated Dodgers. For most of my life I didn’t know what I was doing, but I have since learned how my early life was characterized by what the Bible calls “the fear of the Lord.”
The Fear of the Lord
King Solomon writes in Proverbs 1:7, “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” Thus, there are only two paths you can take in life: You can fear the Lord or you can play the fool. You can worship God or you can “follow your heart.” You can either grow in knowledge or despise wisdom and instruction. Like my four-year-old self, you must choose between heaven and hell. Like my twelfth-grade self, you must choose between faith and doubt. Then every day after, you must choose to either follow Christ or to follow that which breaks the heart of Christ.
In Proverbs, the fear of the Lord contains a two-fold meaning: reverent obedience and worshipful joy. In one sense, we obey the Lord out of duty because he’s God. Yet in another sense, we worship God with delight because he’s good. And we must do both. If we only obey God without delighting in his truths, we’ll view him as a harsh taskmaster—a demanding boss. Yet if we only delight in God without revering him, he will seem to us like Santa Claus who grants us all our desires without expecting a return. Any deficient view of God will always result in doubt. My problem was the former: I didn’t know how to delight in God. I knew him by his rules and didn’t view his commands as ultimately for my good. I considered him restrictive and cruel and sometimes capricious. I didn’t know that my purpose in life was to glorify God and to enjoy him forever.[1] As Christians, though, our heavenly Father is the King of the entire universe he created, which means that we should fear and obey him because we know what happens if we don’t. Yet the King of the universe is also our heavenly Father, which means that we can go to him at any time and plead with him like a child with her Father. We can rush boldly into his throne room and pour out our desperate requests. We must eagerly delight in God’s very presence.
The fear of the Lord answered many of my questions: How did I end up on a plane to Russia when I had never traveled farther than Hawaii with my family? How could I humble myself before God’s Word and seek my father’s forgiveness? Where did I get the boldness to not only perform street dramas, but to also go out and share the gospel with strangers I’d never met? Why did I give up a career in engineering to become a pastor? And why did my wife and I leave all our friends and family to serve the Lord in Los Angeles? The fear of the Lord means doing whatever he wants us to do whenever and wherever and however. Yet the fear of the Lord also means that we find great joy in what we do. The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge which then produces the faith of his people.
The Faith of God’s People
Imagine I brought home flowers for my wife and she said, “Oh, honey. They’re lovely!” To which I replied, “Yes, dear. It’s my duty!”[2] She would toss those flowers in the trash. My wife doesn’t want to be a duty. She wants to be delighted in. Likewise, for the people of God. Christian living should be a joy! The chief end of man is to glorify God AND to enjoy him forever. So how’s your joy? Do you view your God as a loving, heavenly Father or as a tyrannical King? Do you live with worshipful joy or are you simply going through the motions? Do you trust the God who loves you no matter what trials you face in life?
The first faith decision we all make is whether to follow Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. You can chase all kinds of worldly joys, but you’ll never find real joy unless you find it in Jesus Christ. You would be a fool to despise the wisdom and instruction of Christ. So do you know Jesus as your Lord and Savior? If you don’t, I encourage you to pray to God. Tell him you don’t want to be a fool. Tell him you need his wisdom and instruction because you can’t make it on your own. You can’t forgive your own sins or get to heaven by human merit. You can’t work your way into God’s grace. You must trust in Jesus who lived the perfect life you could not live and died a sacrificial death on your behalf. You must believe, by faith, that God accepted Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross then raised him from the dead in order that you might be saved (Romans 10:9).
The fear of the Lord begins at conversion, then continues with commitment. This means following Christ even when those doubts arrive or when your faith becomes a struggle (Galatians 2:20). When you have questions and concerns, instead of spiraling in despair, you explore those questions in a safe place with people who love you—your parents, your church, your teachers, your pastors and youth leaders. When you’re struggling to fit in at school or disappointed that life hasn’t gone your way or brokenhearted over a failed relationship, you seek comfort in the person of Christ. When you need wisdom for life’s direction or courage for life’s challenges or strength in the face of suffering, you trust Jesus at his word. A faith-filled life is one of joy in the midst of struggle and obedience to Christ even when your friends are headed in the wrong direction. The fear of the Lord strengthens the faith of his people. So let me challenge you to go before the Lord in prayer. Go to the Lord when you struggle to find joy in life. Go to him with any doubts or questions. He might not take them all away, but he’ll give you something better. Go to the Lord to receive forgiveness of sin or to reconcile broken relationships. God puts us through these struggles to help our faith increase. I have personally seen over and over how the fear of the Lord becomes the faith of his people. So my prayer is that you will follow the Lord for the remainder of your life and forever delight in the journey.
Understand Proverbs 1:7
- The fear of the Lord is reverent obedience and worshipful joy. What Scriptures provide the biblical basis for this definition? What does this fear of the Lord look like in biblical examples?
- What happens to a Christian life that leans too much on duty? Too much on delight? How do you maintain a proper balance?
- Do you agree with the Westminster Catechism that “the chief end of man is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” Why or why not?
Apply Proverbs 1:7
- Do you have a personal salvation testimony? If so, share it with a friend or family member this week.
- With whom do you talk about your doubts or questions of faith? Why is it important to have a safe community for these discussions?
- What is one faith-filled risk you can take for Christ this year? How can the fear of the Lord bolster this step of faith?
Pray Proverbs 1:7
- Lord, keep me from being the fool who trusts in my own wisdom.
- Teach me to fear you with reverence for your character and commands.
- Cultivate my heart to delight in your goodness and grace.
- Help me to grow in my knowledge of your holy Word.
[1] Westminster Shorter Catechism, Question 1.
[2] John Piper first gave me this idea in an anniversary poem for his wife, accessed at https://www.desiringgod.org/articles/for-noel-on-our-25th-wedding-anniversary.
