The Day I Believed

When I was a senior in high school, my friend, Lynn, invited me to spend Saturday night at her house.  I wasn’t into church or religion; nor was I saved.  But I knew it would be rude for me to spend the night and pack up and leave early Sunday morning to avoid church.  So I spent the night and attended services with them the next morning.  They were members of a Baptist church.

In church the next day, I was daydreaming and didn’t hear one word of the sermon.  Then, during the invitation, the preacher said, “This is the most important decision you’ll ever make in a lifetime.”  That statement caught my attention and I wanted to know what it was because I always thought that selecting your life partner was the most important decision in life.  So I leaned over and whispered to Lynn, “What decision is he talking about?”

Lynn grabbed my arm and said, “Come on, you need to go to the altar and get saved.”  She tried to pull me into the aisle but I resisted.  I replied, “Saved from what?”  I wasn’t going up there.  I saw no reason and I had no need.  God wasn’t calling me.  Lynn was trying to drag me.  She said, “You need to talk to the pastor.”  I asked her why.  I just wanted her to answer my question, but she insisted that I talk to the pastor, so after church she dragged me to the front to talk to her pastor.

He was not happy to see me.  Lynn pulled me to the front and said, “My friend wants to get saved.”  I still didn’t know what I was getting saved from.  The pastor was upset that I came to talk to him after church and not during the invitation.  He took Lynn and me into a back room and didn’t talk to me about anything.  He didn’t ask any questions to know where I was spiritually.  He just said, “Okay, repeat after me.”  So I repeated a bunch of words that had no meaning for me, and I left church just as lost as when I arrived that morning.  But Lynn said to me, “Remember this date, September 29, 1974; that’s your spiritual birth date.”

The following Sunday, despite my objections, they baptized me, and Lynn’s parents started picking me up for church every Sunday.  I didn’t really want to go, but I didn’t quite know how to tell them.  After all, they were excited about my recent “conversion.”  Then after church, I went over to their house for lunch.

Now Lynn’s dad, Mr. Meisenbach, really loved the Lord, so while his wife prepared lunch, he would talk to me about the things of God.   All afternoon, Sunday after Sunday for a good four or five weeks, Mr. Meisenbach taught me about God, His Son, our need for a Savior, the penalty of sin; and the more I learned, the more questions I had.  Acts 16:31 says, “… Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and thou shalt be saved…”  That’s when I believed; sitting on Mr. Meisenbach’s living room floor. So I actually got saved a couple of weeks after I got baptized. 

Lynn had a concern for my soul, although she didn’t know the right way to share the Gospel with me, and the pastor didn’t lead me in the right direction.  But God used the circumstances to get His Word in front of me, and that’s all it took.  I will forever be grateful to Lynn, who invited me over that night, and to her dad, who loved the Lord so much that he talked about nothing else.  I am saved today because of them.