Thirty-four years ago this week, as a nominal Christian at best, I was witnessed to by a friend. In a flood of tears in his driveway, I called out to God to take me just as I was.
So this week I celebrate the thirty-fourth anniversary of my conversion to Christ.
A lot of people described it as a foxhole conversion, because it came in the darkest days of Watergate. But thirty-four years later I am more convinced in the reality of Jesus Christ than I am in my own reality.
Another person who had a dramatic conversion was the Apostle Paul, who wrote the following: "Therefore, if anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come" (2 Corinthians 5:17 NIV).
In a sense, that is a life verse for me because it describes precisely what happened. The change that takes place is not overnight. God has had to do a lot of work in my life from that initial moment of commitment.
This is the essence of the Christian faith as well. Christ went to the cross and was crucified, dying an atoning death for our sins. We meet Him at the cross when we become Christians and actually make an exchange: We surrender our old lives to Him, He gives us a new life in Christ. And since He takes our place on the cross, we spend our lives living for Him.
For those who may be skeptical about conversions, I can only say that after thirty-two years working among thousands of prisoners in 113 countries around the world, I have seen the process that the Apostle Paul described repeated hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of times.
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