Three Years Ago Today I Despised Jesus

I can’t believe what I was like three years back!! Three years back I had a totally different worldview and what life was.

I hated Jesus

Three Years ago today, I hated Jesus, despised His work on the Cross, and made myself a proud enemy of God, and yet God reached down to me, loved me and welcomed me in anyway, and changed my heart and transformed me in to a new person.

Three Years Ago I walked a very different path...

Christians were weird

Christianity was weird to me, alien. Their lifestyle was just out of this world to me. I thought science and Christianity were two separate things. I thought Christians were deluded and crazy at worst and nice but simple at best. I hated it when people would try to “convert” me, and believed it fine for them to believe whatever, so long as it those pesky Christians didn’t interfere with my conscience. I didn’t get them and tarred them all under the same brush.

Today: Some Christians are still weird to me, some of them freakish and extreme, or plain annoying or wrong. Of course you have “Christians” portrayed as bigots picketing funerals like Westborour Baptist Church, or TV evangelists with diamond cufflinks asking for money telling you Jesus will make you rich and your dreams come true, or all kinds of random freakish behavior. I agree…

If you want to know what Christians are about, don’t base your judgement on what you see on TV, after all, the media only features what’s entertaining. Go have coffee with one, and you’ll find out that they think of themselves no better than anyone else, the true Christians will at least. You’ll find that they believe that this world is messed up, and they themselves are messed up and wrecked with sin. The only difference is that in a true Christian, they will have a joy in them so deep that it will withstand the deepest of struggles, and it’s a joy only to be found in Jesus. A true Christian will bug you, pray for you and tell you about Jesus, because they have found a true joy and eternal life in Jesus and they want you to experience it and know Jesus for yourself. They tell you because they love you.

I was a “good” person

I recycled! I gave to charity! I took the trash out, helped with housework, cooked for my flatmates, did the dishes, pulled my weight around the house. I helped raise money for the poor. I would help my friends out when they were in need. I would buy them gifts that were way beyond what I could afford. I would buy a round of drinks for my mates. I was generous. Surely all these good things about me would cancel out the bad! I essentially thought I was a good person through relativity, and could always pull out the Hitler card when I was in doubt; no one is ever as bad as Hitler of course….

Today: Of course no one is as bad is Hitler. Any idiot in any situation could come out looking like an saint compared to Hitler. Truth is, there will always be someone worse than you.

The difference for me now is that I know that I am not a good person, and there’s nothing I can do to make myself good. I can only compare myself to a normal example of what humans should be, and that’s Jesus. He was God come down, fully God, fully human. He is my point of reference and He is my measuring stick. Compared to Jesus, I am an awful person.

The more I have come to know God, the more I realise the depths of my depravity. No action, no amount of recycling, charity, giving, generosity, chastity, can make me good or make up for my bad, because to be good you have to be perfect. Even if I were to live a perfect and sinless life from now on, there’s nothing I can do to cancel out my bad. The only hope I have is Jesus who clears my debt that I owe God. It is God that will transform me and make me right, nothing that I can do of myself.

…whilst believing that aborting a 12 week bunch of cells wasn’t ideal, but okay, punching a 12 week pregnant woman in the stomach and causing a miscarriage was murder.

I was a hypocrite

Things like abortion I thought wrong, and I would never approve of it, but always professed that if I ever had an unwanted or unplanned pregnancy, I wouldn’t hesitate to get one. I would never hesitate over the 72 hour pill. At the same time, whilst believing that aborting a 12 week bunch of cells wasn’t ideal, but okay, punching a 12 week pregnant woman in the stomach and causing a miscarriage was murder.

I believed everyone had the right to believe in whatever they believed and believed in tolerance of other people’s belief, whilst remaining intolerant of Christians who share of their faith and believe everyone else is wrong.

Today: I still am a hypocrite, but this time I realize it. Of course I do not always “practice what I preach”, but that’s also because I am a fallen and imperfect person wrecked my sin. I make mistakes like the rest of the world, but even so, what I “preach” is not based on relativity or convenience.

No longer can I drug my conscience by boiling things down to circumstance or justify my actions based on what’s “best” for me. My point of reference is Jesus, and my understanding of good and bad are no longer relative but objective and are based on the Truth as revealed by God through scripture – The Holy Bible.

I thought that if there was a God, I could do what I wanted to and He would have to accept me because He was Good.

Growing up I thought I knew what Christianity and Jesus was about. I believed and was put off by what I saw of Christianity in the media. I imagined and believed that if I died, it didn’t really matter if I didn’t know or have a relationship with God. I thought that if there was a god, he would be able to see how “good” I was over all, that it was a matter or weighing out my good and bad, and I thought certain that my good outweighed the bad and I would have no problem entering heaven if there was indeed such a place.
Today: You can’t reject a loving God, do what you want, break all the rules, then hate and blame Him when things go wrong, expect Him to fix it, continue to hate Him, not thank Him for His providence in your life, and then expect that when you die He is obliged to let you in to His own heavenly home because “overall” you were a “good” person.