"Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" |
Friend Xerxes, in his latest column, scorns an evangelical pastor for asking him if he has given his life to Jesus.
“Many times,” Xerxes answered.
“Once is enough,” the evangelist replied.
Xerxes holds that truth dawns only slowly, over one’s lifetime. In the real world, it does not happen all at once.
But I have to agree with the evangelical pastor. Once is enough to give your life to Jesus, assuming you do not take it back; and we should expect conversion to come suddenly. This is how the Bible describes it.
See Saul on the road to Damascus. Deus ex machina.
But see also the calling of the apostles. “So they pulled their boats up on shore, left everything and followed him." James and John even abandon their father Zebedee in the boat, no doubt wondering what just happened.
Compare the experience of Saint Augustine:
“I quickly returned to the bench…snatched up the apostle’s book…and in silence read the paragraph on which my eyes fell: ‘Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying, but put on the Lord Jesus Christ and make no provision for the flesh to fulfill the lusts thereof’ (Romans 13:13)…. I wanted to read no further, nor did I need to. For instantly, as the sentence ended, there was infused in my heart something light the light of full certainty and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.” Augustine, Confessions 8
And Jesus says this is the way it is supposed to happen, refusing to let a prospective disciple wait even until his recently dead father is in the ground. “Let the dead bury their own dead.”
In an instant, everything changes.
Ask the Buddha suddenly enlightened under the Bodhi tree. Ask Moses encountering the burning bush.
I can’t really account for Xerxes’s experience being different. Of course over time one can grow in the faith, but the initial experience really is, as the Bible says, like being born again. I say that as a Catholic, not an evangelical Protestant. This is why in the Catholic Church we have the sacrament of Confirmation, a second baptism.
I suspect anyone who has not experienced this sudden wrench in perspective, like jumping off a cliff into the arms of angels, has not really given their life to Jesus in the first place.
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