The turning point

The turning point came when I stumbled across a part of Paul’s letter to the church in Rome, where he was explaining the state of mankind.

‘There is no-one righteous, not even one. There is no one who understands, no one who seeks God. All have turned away, they have together become worthless. There is no one who does good, not even one. Their throats are as open graves; their tongues practice deceit. The poison of vipers is on their lips. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear of God before their eyes.’(Romans 3:10-18)

This completely rang true with how I saw the world and myself. I was studying Sociology and Politics at university. One subject picked away at the veneer of society to look at causes for patterns of behaviour while the other seemed to list one flawed ruling structure after another. It seemed clear to me that one of the things creating a lot of pain in the world was that we are all motivated by self-interest. No one is doing good, everyone is dishonest. I myself absolutely felt like my throat was an open grave, giving voice to an inner rottenness which hurt those I loved and put myself first in everything I did.

Over this year I started speaking directly to God asking him to help me understand who I was and what I should do, and he seemed to answer me directly from the book and the bible. I came to see that my life wasn’t all about me. God created me for his pleasure and had plans for me to use my life to serve him. Serving myself instead was making me unhappy, it wasn’t what I was designed for.

My reading had been gradually widening over this time and I’d picked up an old book for 20p called ‘The Day Christ Died’ by Jim Bishop. The blurb said it was ‘A journalistic account of the last 24 hours of Jesus life’ and reading it made the familiar story of Jesus come alive. It described his love for us. Even when pegged out on the cross being crucified and suffocating to death, Jesus used his last energy to ask forgiveness from God the Father for the soldiers who put him there (Luke 23:34) and he spoke to John, a follower, asking him to look after his mother as his own (John 19:25-27). He was a truly loving man.

That Jesus’ death was God the Father’s way of reconciling me to him began to make sense. If I couldn’t stop doing, thinking, feeling bad stuff, then there needed to be some justice for all the pain I cause. Jesus took the punishment for those bad deeds, bringing justice and enabling me to have perfect relationship with God, however crazy that sounded. That was why his own Father turned his back on Jesus cries of ‘My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?’ (Mark 15v34). It was the full anger of God at all the self-centred rottenness of this world, directed at the only man responsible for none of it. The more I read about Jesus, the more I saw that he was the only way that I could have a relationship with God properly. I gradually began to be truly thankful to God for the gift of Jesus, truly thankful to Jesus’ personal sacrifice, and to want to live my life to serve him completely.