How I became a Christian

I never really doubted that God existed but I had no idea who he was or how I could approach him. Jesus was just another great moral teacher of the past like Muhammad or Buddha. When I got to college I set out to figure out just who God was. Was Hinduism correct, or Islam, or Judaism, or Christianity, or none of these? I began by looking into the various religions and essentially narrowed it down to Hinduism and Christianity as being the only religions that “rang true” in my heart. This was when I began reading the works of Gandhi extensively and became a vegetarian.  Gandhi was my “god” for several months. I still felt that God was reaching out to me and I began to realize that Gandhi himself was searching his whole life for a spiritual leader or mentor.  So I began to more seriously explore Christianity.  The problem I faced was that I had a tally sheet in my head of all the Christian behavior which I thought inappropriate or hypocritical.  The Christianity I was holding up and rejecting was not based on Christ and his teachings, but on Christians and their behavior.

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I began praying for God to reveal himself to me and to help me reconcile this discrepancy between Christian behavior and Christ’s teachings.  I decided I would look to the source of Christ’s teachings, the bible, and see what Christ himself had to say rather than just taking other Christian’s word for it. At the same time I began to pray that God would help me to know him. I will never forget one day when I was lying on my bunk in the dorm at Western Washington University reading my bible and praying for God to make himself known to me.  While I was praying a poster fell from the door and came to rest below my face. The poster had on it all the names for Jesus used in the bible. The amazing thing about the poster is that door from which it fell was at least 15 feet across the room from me. I tried to make the poster fall the same way again several times and it fell only 2 or 3 feet from the door, no matter how I dropped it. At this point I realized that God could not make it any clearer to me than that – he wanted me to know his son Jesus.

This turning point began my friendship with Jesus. Ever since that time, the friendship between me and Christ has grown. There have been hard times and good times but Jesus has always been there waiting for me, even when I have moved away from him. I realized that becoming a Christian does not make you perfect but rather is an admission that you are not perfect.  The bible was my guide to discover the person of Jesus and has proven to be reliable in all other respects so I have no reason to doubt it regarding the kingdom of heaven. I have also found the person of Jesus Christ to be reliable and he said “I am the Way the Truth and the Life. No one comes to the father except through me” (John 14:6).

The bible was crucial in my coming to know Christ. These are some of my favorite passages that helped me most in my discovery of Christ:

Matthew 9: 12, 13: 11-23 ; Mark 5:19, 12:29-31; Luke 13:24-30, 15: 11-31, 20:9-16; John 12:44-50, 1 :29-34, 17:25-26