“God, I will go wherever you want me to go, and do whatever you want me to do.” The words spilled out of my mouth as I really prayed for the first time in my life. Just as quickly as they spilled out I immediately thought, “What did I just say?”
Raised in a Christian home, but a rebel at heart, God had been working on me during the past year. I was a lover of money, and planned to eventually buy a grocery store and get rich, then retire young and live in pleasure. I never even questioned whether I could actually do it. I just always knew I would.
But that year I struggled with repeated bouts of tonsillitis throughout the school year, partly because of my poor care of my body through poor diet and sleep. As a result I was constantly worn down, and towards the end of the year the thought entered my mind for the first time that I could work my entire life and not achieve that goal.
I also sort of believed that I would go to heaven when I died. I certainly didn’t live like it, but I had mechanically repeated the words that I was told to repeat in order to go to heaven. Nobody really wants to spend an eternity in hell, so of course I prayed. What I did not realize at the time was that true prayer comes from the heart and not the mouth, and I had absolutely no intention of yielding my heart to God. I was simply looking for fire insurance.
One of my vices was that I smoked pot. I never really enjoyed it because I experienced hallucinations when I smoked it, but I did it anyway, sometimes because of peer pressure and sometimes because it was just what young adults did. That changed towards the end of my senior year in high school. One time when I smoked some pot I had a hallucination that I was going to hell. I vividly felt my flesh wasting away and the sockets of my eyes hollowing out. I felt myself endlessly falling in a bottomless pit with the wind rushing by me as I fell. I was scared enough by it that I went and got my mother’s bible and read it until I came down off the high.
I am sure that I made no sense out of what I was reading that night, but three positive things came out of that experience. First, I never got stoned again. I no longer wanted to have anything to do with the stuff. Next, for the first time in my life I realized that I was on a path that was leading to hell. And lastly, that bible stayed in my room and I read it throughout the following months.
As I read through that bible it felt like I was coming up to the edge of a cliff, looking down, then stepping back. I was not ready to take a leap of faith. This went on for a while. And then when I finally prayed that prayer of commitment it felt like I had stepped off the cliff and was free falling into a new unknown life.
I would like to say that it was all a bed of roses after that, but it wasn’t. I kind of went off the deep end with my newfound faith. One of the first things I did was burned all my music cassette tapes out in the backyard, including my Simon and Garfunkel, Bread, Who and Pink Floyd tapes, all tame and harmless . A neighbor meandered over and asked me what I was doing. Afraid to tell him I simply replied, “Oh, I’m just burning a bunch of plastic.” I had some beautiful wide tires and chrome wheels on my little Toyota, and I sold those. And I gave away my nice leather jacket. In a short time I had quickly become like tofu: colorless and tasteless.
Unfortunately I had and was communicating to others the wrong view of Christianity. I was communicating that it was all about rules and regulations, rather than relationships. One of my cousins who was not a Christian himself, accurately commented, “Randy, you went from one extreme to the other.”
What Jesus actually says about it is that all of God’s commandments are summed up in the two commandments, to love God with all of our hearts, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. Everything else is just ugly clutter. I have since learned to ask myself, “Is this habit or action hurting God or someone else?” And if it is not I don’t worry about it. I try to focus on what shows compassion to others.
Some things in my life went away immediately, such as the drunkenness, the pot smoking, which was not healthy for me, and the stealing. Other things have taken a lifetime to work on and are still being worked on, such as the attitudes, the ways of thinking and the ways of responding and relating to others.
One of the things I especially struggled with in my newfound walk with God was the teaching at the time on what it meant to be “filled” with the third person of the Trinity, God’s Holy Spirit. The general teaching on the matter was that one needed to confess and forsake all known sin, ask God in prayer to be filled, and then in faith believe that you were filled with God’s Spirit as promised. If these conditions were met that person would be “filled,” possessing a supernatural power for holy living and sharing his or her faith. In essence they would experience an instant transformation to an entirely new level of maturity.
I found that this teaching just didn’t measure up to my experience. First, no matter how much sin I dredged up in my life, and I certainly dredged up plenty, there was always plenty more that could be found. And even though I confessed it, it always came back to haunt me. And as much as I wanted to tell others about God, I was terribly afraid that they would think I was weird and reject me.
I was greatly helped by a little booklet by Miles J. Stanford titled, “The Red Letters.” In it, he traced the 19th century teaching on the baptism of the Spirit. I found that it was remarkably similar to the 20th century teaching on the filling of the Spirit. Apparently the devil found the teaching so effective in confusing, discouraging and stunting God’s people that he presented it again under an entirely new label. Stanford showed from God’s word that the teaching was not correct, and I realized that neither was the teaching on the filling of the Spirit. I found a passage in Ephesians 5 especially helpful. In it, God contrasts being drunk with wine with being filled with God’s Spirit. The question is which one we are going to be controlled by. If we progressively are obedient to God, we are being controlled or “filled” by His Spirit.
I was also helped by another book by Stanford titled “The Green Letters.’ One chapter that especially rang true was the chapter titled, “Time.” In this chapter he compared the time it took to grow a squash with the time it took to grow a mature oak tree, and asked the reader which they would rather be. The obvious choice was the oak tree. It takes time to grow in maturity and there is simply no getting around the long hard work.
I also struggled with the question of whether I could lose my salvation after initially being saved. To settle the question I decided to choose one of the most fruitful Christians in the history of the Church and see what he or she said on the matter. I chose a pastor and evangelist of the 19th century, Charles Finney, who reportedly led around 500,000 people to Jesus. In his books I read his teaching that every time a Christian sinned they lost their salvation and would be sent to hell if they died before confessing and turning from the sin.
For a while I was greatly troubled by this teaching, again dredging up any possible sin I could find so that I did not go to hell as Finney taught. But over a period of time God gradually taught me that He was in it for the long haul. One passage that I found meaningful was a passage in 1 Corinthians 1 where God promised to keep them firm to the end, so that they would be blameless on the day that Jesus comes back. He has called His children into fellowship with himself and will be faithful to do it. I was also helped by a passage in 1 Thessalonians 5 where God promises to make His children holy and keep their spirit, soul and body blameless when Jesus comes back, again because He is faithful. And I learned in 2 Corinthians 5 that it is not because His children are perfect, because they are not. It is because Jesus died for their sins and gave them His righteousness instead. I have been washed clean.
I have found this new life to be a good one. Not an easy one by any means, but a good one. I seriously believe that I would probably not be alive today if I had not prayed that prayer years ago. I was on a very destructive course. Not that I am perfect because I am far from it. But my life has been far more meaningful by focusing on my relationships and trying to love God and others. That is the main thing that drew me to Christianity in the first place, the desire to make a difference in the lives of others rather than just living for myself.
Father open up my eyes
So I might truly see
Everything that you have done for me
Lord I’m tired and I’m torn
My face is on the floor
Break these chain and set me free
Lord I wanna be washed clean
Don’t you know I wanna be washed clean
Father take away my pride
Just set it all aside
So I might hear what you have to say
Lord I’m tired of all my guilt
I’m tired of all my shame
Break these chains and set me free
Lord I wanna be washed clean
Don’t you know I wanna be washed clean
Cause I been living a lie that I just couldn’t see
And holding on to things I just didn’t need
But you took these hands and you washed them clean
Oh like a blind man lost in the middle of the night
You came down and you opened my eyes
And I won’t ever be the same
Oh that’s what Jesus
Jesus did for me
Oh He would do the same for you
So now I’ve opened up my eyes
And swallowed all my pride
And I finally let you lead the way
Let you lead the way
And Lord I fall down on my knees
I’m just a brother of your grace
Of your grace
Cause I’ve been washed clean
Now I know that I’ve been washed clean
Lord I know that I’ve been washed clean
“Washed Clean,” Zach Williams