I was an enormous fan of classic rock throughout high school. I can remember the very first time I heard a Led Zeppelin song. By the end of it, my jaw had dropped while I sat in amazement and realized that, within 4 minutes and 34 seconds, Led Zeppelin had become my favorite band. My love for Pink Floyd came about in an entirely different way. They were one of my brother's favorite bands, and I was practically forced to hear the Wall and Dark Side of the Moon over and over again because we shared a bedroom. At first, I disliked the band, but the more I listened to them, the more I came to enjoy the music. Over a series of months, almost imperceptibly, Pink Floyd went from being an annoyance to a band that I have loved for several years.
The two ways that I came to love these classic rock groups can act as general models for how we come to accept and embrace Christianity. (It is, of course, a very imperfect analogy.) Of the two, the “Led Zeppelin” way is given much more attention and is generally more valued. We tend to uphold dramatic conversion stories like Paul's on the road to Damascus, or the calling of some of the 12 apostles, as the ideal way of becoming Christian. These are the stories that we tell time and time again, stories with a distinct moment of repentance and transformation.
Several evangelicals I've met have said that unless you can remember the exact moment that you accepted Christ in your heart, then you're not really a Christian, in which case you should make a prayer to do so officially right now. While studying in Israel, I became friends with an elderly American woman who described herself as a born-again. During one conversation we had, she explained how she had come to Christ. She had been an atheist and was the wife of a wealthy man. When she was in her sixties, she was diagnosed with a rare eye disease that doctors told her would lead to blindness. Soon after she found out, she had dinner with a good friend who was Christian. Right in the middle of dinner, her friend told her that she had been praying to God about the eye disease and that God would heal her. At a hospital appointment the next morning, she listened in astonishment as her eye specialist told her that she was inexplicably healthy. She became a Christian that very day. After having several dreams telling her to go to Israel and the West Bank, she divorced her atheist husband and made the trip. When I met her, she had been living in the Middle East for seven years.
Part of me is jealous of her experience of coming to Christ, her ability to distinctly recall the moment and be able to retell it to others. For me and, I think, a majority of today's Christians, there is nothing comparable to a “Eureka!” moment. Many of us were raised with Christian parents who consistently encouraged their children's faith. As a result of a religious upbringing and a conscious decision to continue in the religion of their childhood, they remain Christian. Others, like myself, come to accept Christ over days, weeks, or even months, a period of prayer, contemplation, and many discussions with friends and family. How are these ways of coming to Christ any less valuable than a single “Damascus” moment?
Regardless of how we come to God, what matters is that when we hear His call we should be willing to put aside all of our assumptions about reality, about what God is like and what He wants, and simply listen, as hard as that may be. More than that, every day afterwards we can make a conscious decision to walk in the path that He has laid out for us. We know that our God is a god of transformation, of rejuvenation. He is pleased when we do our best to live up to His love, rather than being content with how we were before we knew Him. When people encountered Jesus and his miracles, he didn't tell them, “Keep on sinning and living as you have been.” No, he wanted them to be as much transformed by his forgiveness as his healings, to live in newness of life in him, and with the aid of the Holy Spirit to sin no more.
The fact remains that, whether we come to know God's grace in a single moment of dramatic revelation or over a longer period of time, every day provides another opportunity for us to try to love Him more with our whole heart, and to love our neighbors as ourselves. God never promised us that this would be easy. Like any relationship, this requires a lot of hard work on our part. God doesn't want us to have a shallow relationship with Him. He doesn't want us to turn away from Him because life isn't perfect, because He doesn't seem to be doing exactly what we want. He wants us to grow, to mature, to accept fully His love and His desire for us to be His children.
We know this god. We strive to be in a relationship with Him. And when we are worked over and transformed by His love, we should want to share the story of God with others. Whenever I come to like an author, band, or artist, one of the first things I do is talk to as many friends and family members as I can about them. I want other people to know how much the band has changed me and enriched my life, with the hope that others will come to feel the same way that I do about this new, amazing thing. This is, for me, the right basis for evangelism.
When the apostles preached the Gospel around Palestine and the Roman Empire after Jesus' death, they did so with the strong conviction that the people they were speaking to needed to repent and be saved. But the emphasis of their speeches was the wondrous things that God had done and would do in and through Jesus. They were excited; they couldn't stop talking about Christ. We see the same thing in Paul's letters, where Jesus is continually on Paul's mind and in his heart. The apostles saw in Jesus' life, death, and resurrection all of God's plans coming to fruition. So should we. Imagine sitting a friend or family member down and telling him the story of the Bible, the story of how God saved (and is saving) us and the world. Get excited about it, knowing that if we're passionate about anything, it should be the God who created us and has given us the gift of His love.
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