A Spiritual Odyssey

We all have hopes. We all hope to prosper in this life. We all hope that we remain healthy throughout it so that we can enjoy whatever prosperity we achieve. At one time, most of us hoped to find our one true love with whom we could build a family. In short, everyone hopes to fulfill their dreams in this life.

But what about when this life comes to its inevitable end? What hope do we have for what lies beyond that event? The following is the chronicle of my journey to possessing that hope, the hope the Bible refers to as “that blessed hope,”  ((Titus 2:13)) “the hope of glory.”  ((Col. 1:27; Romans 5:2))

I was born into a church-going family, spent all my youth in the church denomination we belonged to (Methodist), and had anyone asked me if I was a Christian I would have said yes, of course. Did I know whether or not I was going to heaven? I hoped so.

Being a Christian one would think I would be familiar with the Bible. The fact is, when I left home for college, I couldn’t have quoted one verse of scripture save for the “Lord’s Prayer,” which I didn’t realize was even part of the Scripture until years later when I started to study the Bible.

This condition didn’t change as an adult. After graduating from college, I joined another denomination ((Episcopalian)) in the hope that I would find there what I hadn’t found in the first—some hope—but it turned out to be basically the same old religion.

Unable to find any hope or fulfilment in my religious affiliations, I clung to the belief that it could be had through achieving status among my piers and material prosperity. And I did achieve this to some extent, but it came short of doing what I thought it would, that is fulfill me. No matter how temporally successful I became, there still remained a void within me.

Desperate to fill that void, I turned again to religion, but this time, religion of a different sort: secular humanism. I started out with “I’m Okay, Your Okay,” which for a brief time became my “Bible.” By this time I was into my second marriage, which was failing, and I believed I had found the remedy for what looked like a hopeless situation in this popular book.

But it didn’t work, so I moved on to the more spiritual “new age” version of SH: mind “science” and transcendental meditation. I thought if I could just get all this garbage out of my head that seemed to keep me in so much conflict with other people, especially my spouse, things would change, and I would be able to get on with achieving my dream of material prosperity.

At the time, I was on the cusp of realizing that dream when I was invited to join the elite club of custom home builders in the city in which I lived. But a severe economic downturn destroyed the real estate market, and in a matter of a few months, I found myself out of business and unemployed. Unable to pay the rent on the apartment I’d moved into upon the break-up of my marriage, I was evicted and forced to move into a tiny, un-airconditioned room behind a friend’s garage.

My hope of becoming “somebody” in this world dashed, I was pretty much at my wit’s end. That had always been my singular “hope” for my life, as I was certain without becoming rich in this world, one could never become fulfilled. It was under this circumstance that a friend invited me to a meeting which I was reluctant to attend. Why? Because it was “Christian,” and by that time I wanted nothing to do with anything Christian. But he was persistent, so I went. The meeting wasn’t in a church. It was in the Municipal Auditorium, downtown San Antonio, Texas. I thought this was odd, but my friend did say it would be different. There were a lot of people there—I’d say at least 1500. I wondered what the big attraction was. There was nothing on the stage but a lectern and a large screen for an overhead projector; no religious trappings whatsoever. Somebody came out and prayed, and then led the crowd in a couple of traditional Hymns. A man then began to write Scripture verses on the overhead projector. (I was beginning to feel some tension by this time, not having a clue as to what was fixing to happen). After a few minutes of this activity, he turned to the crowd and asked, “If you were to die tonight do you know, for sure, that you would go to heaven?” The question hit me like a ton of bricks. You could have knocked me over with a feather. The answer for me was No, I didn’t know that. In fact, I didn’t believe someone who had lived as badly as I had could ever qualify for heaven. He then followed with: “If you don’t know, you can by simply trusting Jesus Christ for your salvation, believing that he died for your sins, and accept him as your personal Savior, right now, right there where you sit.”

I must say that in all my religious experience I had never heard it put that way—at least not that straightforwardly. Oh, I believed in Jesus Christ. I had repeated that in the church creeds hundreds of times, even made an “altar call” as a teenager, but I could not honestly say that I had ever personally trusted the Lord from my heart to secure my eternal destination, and at that moment I realized this was the answer to being loosed from this miserable life I existed in. I had lived all my life in doubt and fear of going to hell because I knew I wasn’t good enough to go to heaven. I found out that night that being good or bad wasn’t the measure God used to determine where someone was going. The measure was based on what His Son, Jesus Christ, did on the cross, and whether or not you had trusted in Him and that work of faith to pay for your sins. This was great news to me, and about 8 pm on that Monday night in June, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Savior, and I knew from that point on—without a doubt— that I was saved and bound for heaven.

Related article: Salvation… It is the Gift of God

Post Script

Are you saved? Jesus Christ—“who knew no sin”—and his sacrificial death on the Cross, has made the way for “everyone that believeth…to be reconciled to God. History has shown that whatever peace man has achieved in the world can only be temporary. The Bible says that individual men and women can know, beyond a doubt, that they are saved and bound for heaven, and therefore have absolute and permanent peace, regardless of what is going on in the world, by trusting Jesus Christ and his death on the cross for their eternal salvation. “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved…Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved.” Have you done this? If not, why not now?