God Seeks and Changes an Atheist

By Chun Lai

As I think about how I came to know the Lord, one of the most amazing things was how obvious it was that it was He who sought me. He used no personal crises to generate motion on my part—no addiction, no tragedy. Instead, I was on my merry way to hell, and he had the unbelievable mercy to wack this arrogant, spoilt, thankless barely human thing over the head, give me a glimpse of who He really was, and give me a new heart and an opportunity to live a real life.

You see, aside from my innate sinfulness, I am the youngest son of 9 children from a Chinese family. For those of you who are older siblings, I think I could end my story here and you would already have a good idea of how much the Lord needed to do.

To make matters worse, I was a youngest child who spent his formative teen years in the eighties. For those who may have forgotten the eighties or may not be familiar with this side of it, let me remind you of the creed of the eighties that was defined by my former hero, Gordon Gekko—"Greed is good. Greed is right…." I think I even memorized that speech at one point in my life—thankful now that my memory is not so good.

In the middle of all this, there were a few positive influences to keep me from becoming completely abominable. One of them was a couple of well-meaning brothers who used to force me to go to church. Unfortunately, although I learnt many of the right answers, the heart image I developed of God was a weird mixture of one part cosmic killjoy—don't do this, don't do that—and one part cosmic vending machine—give me this, give me that. With such an image of God, I suppose it isn't a great surprise that I drifted away from church during that latter part of my teen years.

By my last year of high school, I was a professing atheist who thought that the best solution to world hunger would be to explode nuclear warheads in all the third world countries to put them out of their misery. This horrific callousness extended to all my relationships. Love was for wimps who weren't courageous enough or smart enough to reason out the truth to its logical conclusion. In this world, I thought, you should love things and use people. You see, I reasoned that, if there is no God, I would serve the most important person in the world, me.

A testimony to the Lord's mercy and patience is the fact that he didn't just strike me dead. During this time, he allowed things to go well for me in a worldly sense. I inherited my brother's newly bought sports car. I even successfully stole a girlfriend from another guy at university. As I mentioned earlier, I was on my merry way to hell (hint to any parents or future parents: new license, new sports car—bad combination).

Then, on a fateful Wednesday night, the Lord brought an elder and deacon from my former church to my doorstep. They realized that I had been missing from church for a while and thought they would see how I was doing. A most remarkable thing happened that evening. They actually didn't ask me why I wasn't coming to church anymore. All they really did was ask to see how I was doing, offered a warm invitation for me to visit church again with them and left. The rest is inexplicable in any way except by saying that the Holy Spirit began to penetrate my heart and mind.

That evening, He showed me how resistant I was, particularly to Him. Why was it that whenever the conversation turned to Christ or Christianity, my automatic response would be to change the conversation or leave the room. Why was it that, tacky though they were, I would even switch channels to avoid seeing Christian advertisements that would sometimes play on TV. The overriding questions seemed to be: Why was I avoiding God? Why was I so prejudiced against him? Why would I not give God a fair shake?

So, on the basis of these thoughts, I agreed to visit church again. Somehow, even though I completely disagreed with the sermon the first time, the Lord brought me back again and again. This time though, unlike during my early years, the Lord showed me himself through the worship services. Again, it is inexplicable outside of His working.

Where I used to emptily mouth hymns, this time, His spirit brought the words to life. "Man of sorrows what a name, for the Son of God who came, ruined sinners to reclaim, Hallelujah what a Savior. Bearing shame and scoffing rude, in my place condemned he stood…" and, right at that moment, a vivid realization that the Lord of the universe, with more power in his little finger than all the armies of the earth, restrained himself and suffered and died for my sins—not sin in general but for me. To my utter surprise I found myself crying by the end of the hymn—this I suppose is particularly inexplicable. When you are singing hymns in a staid Presbyterian church and find yourself overwhelmed with emotion—you know it is not man-generated!

Where I used to fall asleep during the sermon or otherwise daydream, this time the words broke through. "God hates our sin the same way a mother hates the cancer that is killing her child," my pastor preached. The Holy Spirit grabbed those words and filled me with a profound realization of the Lord's deep benevolent love for me. He was no cosmic killjoy, the sin that I so coddled and desired to commit was cancerous and destined to destroy me and this was the reason he commanded me not to commit them. Moreover, he showed me how sub-human, not super-human it was to love things and use people. As a bearer of His image, he called me to love people and use things!! Bit by bit, I began to taste real life, not just existence.

And so, here is a part of the beginning of my story. I still have a long way to go—as my lovely and very patient wife can tell you—but there is hope. Still so much callousness, so many ways that I don't see him as He really is, still so many caricatures of Him in my mind—but He's working, pushing, prodding. There's hope and I'm thankful for His promise that He's not finished with me yet.