Pulling into a gas station with a friend from work, I noticed a large advertising sign with a single word emblazoned in red letters, “Save!” Underneath was the standard marketing ploy showing the old price of other gas stations crossed out and the new, reduced price highlighted. This was in 1972 when gas prices didn’t change daily and hovered around 36 cents a gallon! Having just turned my life to Christ a few days earlier, the word caught my attention.

I didn’t know anything about witnessing for Christ or evangelism, but I wanted to tell my friend about what happened to me. I had no teaching about being tactful or cautious in talking about “religion” or my excitement and enthusiasm for the new life in Christ I had found, so I blurted out, “Do you know what that word means?” My friend, an electrical engineer where I worked at Cornell Aeronautical Laboratory, looked at me with a puzzled face, “What do you mean?” I had thought I was making a clever segue to talk about what had recently happened to me, but I froze. My feeble explanation probably sounded confused, and the conversation dwindled.

My life was so completely changed that I wanted to tell everyone about God and Jesus Christ. Repeated efforts eventually brought me to the attention of other Christians in the company. One was a specialist in communications research who took an interest in my story, which ignited him to return to his childhood faith. Others were new believers like me, but two stood out. One was a department manager (two levels up from me) who heard about this young fellow who had turned “religious,” and we happened to talk at a company picnic. He confessed that he had been with the company for five years but few people knew he was a Christian, while I had been there less than a few months and everyone in the company knew about me. I didn’t take that literally, but it was the confession of a man who felt like a failure for not sharing his faith. As for me, my life was so changed; I could not have hidden it if I had tried.

Another fellow who was on the same level as my boss caught me in the hallway one day and somehow found out I was a new believer. It turns out that Bob Lehmann was a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary, but after graduation felt the Lord leading him back into “secular” work. This fortuitous encounter led to frequent visits to his office with questions about the Bible and God. I was like a sponge and couldn’t get enough. He taught me how to study the Bible and sort through the various theological waves floating around among the myriad churches and movements of that time. This led to frequent visits to his home and dinners (which was a big attraction for a 21-year-old single guy). Our study grew to include others and settled into a weekly gathering that sometimes numbered between 20 and 30 young adults.

Bob taught me the Scriptures, continuously recommended books and answered complex questions that arose as I interacted with anyone who would listen. Jehovah’s Witnesses or Mormon missionaries found out I was willing to talk when they came to my door, and this raised many questions in my mind. When I would go to Bob, he would faithfully say to me, “That’s interesting; let’s take a look at what the Bible says.” I was ready for the next time those groups came knocking at my door. They stopped coming when they couldn’t answer my challenges to what they believed.

In time, I developed a desire to learn the original language of the New Testament, Greek. At that time, Bob suggested a textbook and workbook used at the Seminary (DTS) for first-year Greek students. I was able to master the material in about six months (with a bit of help from Bob with questions that arose). That was only first-level Greek, but I wanted more.

To give this a little context, when I was driving home on the day I accepted Christ into my life, I knew that my entire life trajectory was changing. I was going to preach about Christ—I didn’t know how or when that would happen, but it was clear to me that was the first day of the rest of my life. And the rest of my life would be dedicated to living for God and telling others about Him. So the desire to learn Greek was as natural to me as breathing. It wasn’t a decision so much as a transformation of my life goals.

Because of my interactions with people from so many different religions and denominations, I wanted to learn to study the Bible for myself, to be sure of what I had come to believe. I didn’t just want to take what people said about the Bible without checking it against Scripture. But I needed to learn how to study it; I needed the tools to evaluate the differing interpretations and ultimately to read it in its original languages. This desire eventually led to my moving to Dallas and enrolling in their four-year full-time program. I didn’t go to be told what to believe but how to study the Bible. After all, if what I believed was based on Scripture, I had better know the Bible in-depth, especially if I was going to teach others.

However, before I could take that life-changing step, the Lord brought me together with a young lady who would become my wife and life partner. She had already expressed her desire to God to marry someone who would serve the Lord full-time, so our life goals lined up. We married four years after I trusted in Christ, then in 1979, about eight years after being saved, we left behind our employment and I began my full-time studies in Texas. With no job lined up to support our young family (our son was not quite a year old at the time), Mary and I took a huge leap of faith, trusting God with every step we were taking. Everything we knew about our Lord supplying our needs was about to be tested.