The Day You Were Saved

I remember the Sunday in the Spring of 1964, two weeks before Easter. I was eight years old. What I felt was a compulsion to let the church know I wanted to get serious about Jesus. I was baptised several months later, after my Dad made me read all of John and Romans, memorise the Ten Commandments, and answer a bunch of his questions. I can remember the Sunday night in the Spring of 1972. I was sixteen years old. What I felt was a need to give the life I now had, aware of sin, aware of failure, to the Jesus I now knew. I wanted to be baptised again but my father talked me out of it. He said, "When you were eight you gave all you knew of yourself to all you knew of Jesus. Now you are sixteen and realise there is a lot of you he does not have, and he is asking for it. There is a lot more about him you know now and it is more serious. You were saved when you were eight. You are discovering at sixteen that when God saves you, he will not leave you, but is there shaping you. At times the shaping is painful, but joyful as well. You will have more experiences like this if you do not strive to always give him everything you know about yourself, to everything you know about him. In the end you will realise it is not about knowing if and when you were saved. It is a matter of being a disciple for the rest of your life." He then gave me a copy of Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis.