This unexpected strange effect came upon me (which started slowly) forty seven years ago. It has changed me over time, involving the emergence of a vastly different worldview which commenced without request or me consciously doing anything to provoke it into being, starting when I was about twenty eight years of age.
If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come…And He has committed to us the message of reconciliation. We are therefore Christ’s ambassadors as though God were making His appeal through us. (2 Corinthians chapter 5 verses 17,19-20).
The effect
This new/different worldview has enveloped me such that its truth is now beyond doubt, as is the mutual love between God, Jan and me. By this time I had performed well at high school, had obtained two degrees from the oldest university in Australia, and had travelled alone through many countries in-between those university days, occasionally in a few dodgy places which could have resulted in a sticky end for ‘old Gav’.
But God was then (and still is) very patient with me, at all times tenderly watching over me, and waiting for His right time to confront me.
I was twenty one when I embarked on overseas travel starting in South Africa, and like all young people regarded myself as bullet-proof. For my twenty second birthday (still in travel mode), to alone celebrate the occasion I had my jeans dry-cleaned in a more stable country than some as they virtually stood-up on their own beside my youth hostel bunk.
The start
After my wanderings and degree in law, my then young wife earnestly wanted our tiny infant daughter to be baptised though I knew not why. She was a nominal Roman Catholic who believed that to avoid hell in the event of that tiny girl’s untimely death (I being un-phased by any of that religious gobbledegook), the baby had to be baptised before she turned six weeks/months (??) old.
I was a totally indifferent young lawyer only interested in the drama of the courtroom who had no room for God whoever He was and if He even existed. What did His existence matter to me anyway?
Now over forty nine years later, sometimes involving turbulent ‘marital waters’, I reflect on my dearly beloved having strollered our baby to the local shops and saw what to her was a nice little brick church where the blessed event could take place. She wrote down the ‘phone number displayed on the board out the front and pressed me to phone it. I did, not knowing what I was doing or why.
A time was made for the minister (Rev Barry George) to call around one evening. He and I ‘hit it off’ straight away. It was his personality I liked though as much as his conversation. I had no idea where this would lead to or the effect (if any) it would have.
We met many times thereafter and he told me later that on a number of occasions he had wanted to grab me by the shoulders and shake me saying: why can't you see what I’m saying to you? But I simply enjoyed the sport of writing down questions for him to try to answer. To me it was just enjoyable intellectual fun, and sometimes to his credit he simply said he didn’t know: no-one knew. I can now say about certain matters: nor do I.
But that admission in no way shakes my confidence in the truth of Christianity and the message of the Bible, nor that Christian people: are therefore Christ’s ambassadors as though God were making His appeal through us.
I have read the gospel accounts (the historical records) just as I have during my legal career read many secular witness statements, and state emphatically that the gospels are often eye witness accounts about which I knew I was reading the truth.
Some small (but significant) examples of a changed worldview
Jan and I recently travelled in north Queensland and visited a brilliant large double level aquarium in a regional centre. On display included the life cycle of frogs.
Apart from the large variety of size, colour, call and markings, the fertile eggs laid by mum start to form tiny embryos and eventually tadpoles emerge living, swimming and breathing under water. They slowly but surely grow legs and emerge from their watery beginning, the tail slowly disappearing and they become air breathing land-based animals. How can this happen?
Can the atheist/evolutionist explain this in reliance on the ‘engine’ of evolution: survival of the fittest? But with a spiritual worldview the explanation is confidently well known and accepted. Evolution can’t begin to sensibly explain this miraculous metamorphosis. Similarly with the egg, caterpillar, chrysalis and ultimately the beautiful butterflies we saw flitting among the trees in the mountains behind the town.
Miracles pointing unmistakably to our magnificent Creator. The mindset of evolution is not a theory (every theory must be grounded on some evidence) but is merely a baseless, godless, barren ideology. You were redeemed [by Jesus] from the empty way of life handed down to you. (1 Peter chapter 1 verse18).
No doubt about it
All that I have read and heard over the ensuing decades (books, articles, sermons, prayers, discussions and debates) irrefutably confirm the truth of what I have firmly come to accept and unreservedly commit my eternal future to, notwithstanding my doubting stumbling start.
God and His message will easily withstand such a start, and the questioning seeker (as I was for so long) only needs to persevere once having commenced the journey of discovery, to also become: in Christ …a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come.
The result will be a spectacular never-ending outcome.
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