A Struggle with Knowing I'm Saved

This testimony, written in the spring of 2006, is by a member who prefers to remain anonymous.

I’ve been going to church practically since I was born. Both my parents professed to be born again believers. On my dad’s side of the family, I guess you could say that I’m a third generation believer. My grandparents were Christians who raised their children in the church, and now my parents were doing the same. In spite of this God did not save me till I was in my teens. I remember when I was about four or five praying and asking God to come in my heart, but it wasn’t due to belief in God. I was mortally afraid of hell. In fact once I realized how happy it made my grandparents, I prayed that prayer a couple of more nights just so I could hear them praise me.

When I was around six years old my parents left the Brethren denomination for the Reformed Baptist denomination. This is when I first learned about the doctrines of grace. The two doctrines with which I struggled the most were election and perseverance. After coming from a Brethren church and going to an independent Baptist school, the idea that God only saves some and not anyone who desires it was quite troubling, as was the idea that believers would persevere to the end and not backslide. Under free will it had been comforting to know that essentially I was the master of my own destiny. It was terrifying to think that God may not choose to save me. I never rebelled against the notion of election because it just made good sense; if there was free will that would mean that an all powerful God could be fettered by imperfect man, which to me meant that God wouldn’t be omnipotent. I realized that to acknowledge that God was omnipotent was to admit there were many things that God had control of that I did not—including salvation.

It was a combination of these two doctrines plus elements of my own personal life that caused me to struggle with assurance of salvation for many years. I’m grateful to have been in a family that passed down the word of God from generation to generation. My paternal grandpa and grandma were and are wonderful Christians. The one fault that unfortunately has been passed down is pride—especially in how one appears to others. Being a good member of the “Family” (which meant participating in church activities, being baptized, waiting till marriage to have sex, and going to college and beyond to become a well-paid professional—all so that other people would compliment the family) was more important than real spiritual development. The “Family” was known in many Brethren churches. Because God led us to a Reformed Baptist church, I was fortunate to grow up away from the fawning I could have received. However, “appearance is everything” still played a large role in my childhood.

Although I truly believe that my mother is saved, I cannot say the same thing about my father. My father is a batterer; so I have spent all my years watching him be a good Christian while sitting in the pew at church, but come home and act like a completely different person. For a while, I tried to reconcile his behavior; but eventually I could not. I realized that his growing up in a legalistic home lead to self-deception where his salvation was concerned. This frightened me because although my mother did require spiritual development both she and my father valued other people’s opinion too much and I was afraid that I once I was on my own I would tread the same path of self-deception. What also made it hard for me to have assurance is that sometimes I was chastised not because I did something wrong, but because it would tear down the image my parents tried to portray. So I felt I was always doing or saying the wrong thing because God hadn’t saved me.

By the time I reached the end of my high school years, I was in bad place spiritually and psychologically though I did not understand the full extent of it at that time. I was disenchanted with my childhood church because my parent’s marital problems had gone before the church, but the pastor really required no conformity with the Scriptures. I felt church discipline was such a joke. Although I knew I needed to be in church, I did wonder what the point of it all was since how one lived outside church didn’t seem to matter. I started merely going through the motions while at church. I rarely paid attention to the sermon instead I lived in my “imagination station.” I had always loved to read as a child; but as I grew older I read voraciously as means of escaping reality. When I could not read, I created adventures in my own mind. I was so alone. I had no friends. I had always had a difficult time making friends, which was compounded by the fact that I was not allowed to tell anyone about what was going on in our house. I always felt trapped—like I was inside a store with a window and no door. I could see life going on around me but I couldn’t participate. I started shutting down emotionally; I even lacked the ability to feel grief when my paternal grandfather died. The amazing this was I thought that I was unaffected and that other people had more “issues” than I did.

When I started college I didn’t realize how good God was to me by putting me in J.H.U. in Baltimore. There is a wonderful Reformed Baptist church there led by Pastor Steve Hartland. For the first time in my life I was away from the daily influence of the problems at home. Instead of spending my life dealing with domestic violence, I was dealing for the first time with just myself. I definitely flourished. In that church, Christianity was taken seriously. The pastors were zealous in their oversight and how one lived outside of Sunday was just as important as how you looked in the pew. In addition, the people were warm, caring, and extremely hospitable; until that point I didn’t realize how much I needed that. It was during this time that I stopped struggling with salvation. After four years under that ministry I had changed. With God’s help I had gained some sort of control my spiritual life. But I still had a long way to go.

After graduating from college, I moved back with my parents. But things did not go smoothly. The four years I was away gave me the time I needed to rest up and find out what I believed and needed for my own spiritual and mental well-being; but it did not prepare me to defend what I believed to my parents. Soon after moving back in I felt I was being battered on all sides. But then God changed my circumstances. A few weeks after 9/11, my parents went through the worst bout of domestic violence that I could remember. As a result, my mother and I moved back to Baltimore and lived with an aunt and cousin. It was good to be back in what I considered to be a spiritual oasis because both my mother and I need serious spiritual fortification after such a trauma. My mom and I lived in Baltimore for a year; and I can say that was the roughest year of my life. I learned that my dad’s side of the family cared more about getting my parents back together so they could be the perfect “Family” rather than caring whether my mom, sister, and I were safe; I learned that my mom bore some resentment over the fact that I wanted to get on with my life; and I learned that both my parents expected me to put their marriage ahead of everything else. God used these things to teach me that He should be the most important thing in my life, that there is a Plan and Purpose for my life independent of what everyone else thinks and wants for my life, and finally that I need to stop letting other people get in the way of doing what I know is right before God. As I entered law school I decided to start a new life for myself. I started going to Tenth (independent of my parents), put my parents marriage in its proper place, and started doing things people my age typically do. It’s been a hard putting my foot down and truly taking care of my spiritual and mental well-being. I still haven’t got it perfect.

I waited three years to become a member because I wanted to first see what the church was about; and second (which was wrong) I was trying to figure out how to do the whole baptism and membership that would make everyone—my dad and his family—happy. My dad’s side of the family never approved of the fact that we had left their denomination. Baptisms tend to be a spectator sport as a way to bring more accolades for the “Family." I knew they would talk because things wouldn’t be done according to the “Family” way. But you know it hit me last quarter that God never asked me to make everyone happy; He asked me to follow Him. Following Him means being baptized and joining a church. So that’s what I’ll do. The rest will have to resolve itself.