I was born into a churchgoing family, spent all my youth in the church denomination we belonged to, and had anyone asked me if I was a Christian I would have said yes, of course. Did I know whether or not I was going to heaven? I hoped so.
Being a Christian one would think I would be familiar with the Bible. The fact is, when I left home for college, I couldn’t have quoted one verse of scripture save for the “Lord’s Prayer,” which I didn’t realize was even part of the Scripture until years later when I started to study the Bible.
This condition didn’t change as an adult. After graduating from college, I joined another denomination in the hope that I would find there what I hadn’t found in the first—some hope—but it turned out to be basically the same old religion. After fifteen years bouncing from one religious philosophy to another in an attempt at finding some kind of meaning to my life, a friend invited me to a meeting, which I was reluctant to attend. Why? Because it was “Christian,” and by that time I wanted nothing to do with anything Christian. But he was persistent, so I went. The meeting wasn’t in a church. It was in the Municipal Auditorium, downtown San Antonio, Texas. I thought this was odd, but my friend did say it would be different. There were a lot of people there—I’d say at least 1500. I wondered what the big attraction was. There was nothing on the stage but a lectern and a large screen for an overhead projector; no religious trappings whatsoever. Somebody came out and prayed, and then led the crowd in a couple of traditional Hymns. A man then began to write Scripture verses on the overhead projector. (I was beginning to feel some tension by this time, not having a clue as to what was fixing to happen). After a few minutes of this activity he turned to the crowd and asked, “If you were to die tonight do you know, for sure, that you would go to heaven?” The question hit me like a ton of bricks. You could have knocked me over with a feather. The answer for me was, No, I didn’t know that. In fact, I didn’t believe someone who had lived as badly as I had could ever qualify for heaven. He then followed with: “If you don’t know, you can by simply trusting Jesus Christ for your salvation, believing that he died for your sins, and accept him as your personal Savior, right now, right there where you sit.” I must say that in all my religious experience I had never heard it put that way—at least not that straightforwardly. Oh, I believed in Jesus Christ. I had repeated that in the church creeds hundreds of times, even made an “alter call” as a teenager, but I could not honestly say that I had ever personally trusted the Lord from my heart, and at that moment I realized this was the answer to being loosed from this miserable life I existed in. I had lived all my life in doubt and fear of going to hell because I knew I wasn’t good enough to go to heaven. I found out that night that being good or bad wasn’t the measure God used to determine where someone was going. The measure was based on what His Son, Jesus Christ, did on the cross, and whether or not you had trusted in Him and that work of faith to pay for your sins. This was great news to me. At about 8 pm on that Monday night in June, I gave up the fight and accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior, and I knew—without a doubt—from that point on that I was saved and bound for heaven.
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A book on the Dispensational approach to Bible Study
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