Early in my Christian life I was a skeptical sponge. By that, I mean I couldn’t learn enough about God and His Word, the Bible. I checked out everything I heard against the Word of God. I would rush home from work to devour it, initially trying to speed read through to make up for lost time. I was at the ripe old age of 21 and had never read through the most important book ever written! My first complete Bible was an old version King James Bible, which gave way to a thick New American Standard Bible that I could more readily understand. I still have that Bible, with many squiggly underlines highlighting passages that stood out to me. It seems more verses were underlined than not—like every verse jumped off the page at me!

I was thirsty to find like-minded believers, so I began searching for churches to attend, settling on three different ones: a small brethren church for their Sunday Lord’s Supper service (where my first mentor attended), a Baptist church for their preaching service (where a lot of young adults attended), and a Charismatic Methodist church (attended by the family of the girl who was instrumental in my coming to faith). The variety was wonderful and seemed to give me the best of all worlds. I was always looking for Christian gatherings and music in the budding “contemporary” music scene that featured Christian rock pioneers (Larry Norman, Keith Green, Chuck Girard, etc.). Southern Gospel music was coming into its own as well. My life was immersed in anything related to God.

My thirst for learning brought me in contact with many different viewpoints of Scripture and God, the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Satanic practitioners. I studied up on all these, comparing their teachings to the Bible. On top of all this was a growing awareness of the different views within Bible-believing Christianity. I attended faith-healing services of quite wild gesticulations and behaviors and heard people claiming to speak in unknown spiritual languages. Christian rock music was one of the biggest controversies among Christians of that time period, and it also engulfed me. There were pastors who preached with unquestioned authority and super-confidence as being a prophet’s voice. There were churches where common, ordinary believers could take the pulpit, asserting all kinds of interpretations. How could people speak with such confidence that they believed their interpretations beyond all doubt and knew God and how He would work in a particular situation, or be assured of specific answers to their prayer?

I carried into these issues the skeptical mindset I had before I came to Christ. I studied creation science, which was in its infancy in those days, and joined the respected Creation Research Society, whose membership required a science degree (mine was in Mathematics). I bought history books to understand the Old and New Testament backgrounds and read the Bible in the context of the ancient world. And I voraciously read Christian literature.

I share all these things to highlight how God used it all to form in me an intense desire to study and know the Word. This is ironic since I had avoided college classes requiring reading or writing essays. I was not a reader in any sense of the concept and was certainly not a writer. Yet, I felt compelled now to study the Word of God as the one true anchor for belief.

Before I lived out my first year as a believer, I began to preach at the small brethren church occasionally I attended. Looking back, I was too young in the faith for such a responsibility, and as a result, struggled with what I now call “pride of the pulpit” (see 1 Tim. 3:6, 5:22). But I felt God had called me to preach the Word. So I began to take the youth group to a nearby nursing home, where they would sing and visit with the residents, and I would preach my heart out to a captive audience (most of whom were there in body only).

A passion for teaching God’s word was growing, even at a young spiritual age. I recognized my relatively limited knowledge of the Word, but when I learned something, I wanted to tell it to others. This led to gathering the youth group and young adults in my small apartment for make-shift Bible studies. I would open the Bible and begin explaining (with my limited knowledge) what it meant, challenging them to wrestle with the passages and more fully commit to following the Lord.

Some of the older folks were unsure what to make of me, with my shoulder-length hair, beard and refusal to wear a tie and coat on Sunday mornings, which I considered hypocritical efforts to impress people. Years later, one lady confessed to me that in those early days, she had warned the young girls to stay away from me because I was too worldly. How ironic, for the people who knew me before I came to Christ thought I had become too religious.

Thankfully, my mentor ran interference for me (to use a football term). He believed in me, could see past the externals that so many other Christians stumbled over, and defended my sometimes-radical youthful ideas. At my baptism, he gave me this verse:

Let no one look down on your youthfulness, but rather in speech, conduct, love, faith and purity, show yourself an example of those who believe. (1 Tim. 4:12)

None of this deterred me because of the overwhelming knowledge of God’s love for me. I was ready to give up everything and live only for Him and His opinion of me. Little did I know where it would all take me, the path through life I can now see more clearly in hindsight. God has proven Himself faithful through 50 years, even when I have come up short!