• I understood I was a sinner and no saint. (Later I learned that God, not the church, makes saints, and that God calls each saved sinner, a saint)
• I understood no man (bishop, priest, pope, or Mary) can bring another man to God. (What I learned, from the Word of God, years later, is that there is one man who can bring another man to God. "There is one God and one mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus."

Think about it. How could any human confer upon another the rights or access to God's holy heaven or eternal life? If you say that you are a Christian, whom (or what) are you trusting for you own eternal salvation? Read John 1:12-13 in your Bible.

Then came the teen years. It was growing more and more obvious that life was making less and less sense. I read books by Edgar Cayce (the alleged sleeping prophet). Mr. Cayce put books under his pillow at night and knew what was in them the next day. I tried that. Even sleeping in Algebra class didn't improve my grades. I read Taylor Caldwell and a few books on witchcraft. (The public library only had three or four books on the subject in those days.) In my very late teens, I met some Hare Krishna's at O'Hare Airport, bought their literature, and proceeded to my motel room to practice the prescribed chants. However, no one heard, no one paid attention, and no one answered. I hoped that philosophy might satisfy, and I went so far as to tape my high school philosophy classes. I had the material nearly memorized. I received an A for my efforts, but that wasn't what I was hoping for.

The general atmosphere in the late 60's just happened to coincide with my gut level feeling about life. Life doesn't make sense. The world is out of control. What was more unsettling was that we now knew as a culture that life did not make sense. The fairy tale lives of the past generation were a paradise lost. I think I would rather have been blissfully ignorant, than to be knowingly sentenced to a life of meaninglessness. I adapted a life style that fit my world view. Each weekend I would escape. I began to use alcohol and this activity developed into a regular weekend event. What began in junior high school escalated through high school. Another social phenomenon was concurrently developing. The country was being inundated with new recreational drugs. Men who knew nothing about drugs were being exposed to them during their overseas duties in Vietnam. Many of the servicemen who returned from a tour of duty in Vietnam brought more than a duffel bag of dirty clothes back to the States. They not only returned with drugs, they created an unprecedented market for those same drugs in the United States. I witnessed during about a one-year period in high school, drug use (marijuana and other psychedelics) mushroom from a virtual social anathema to a generally accepted social norm. It was a total transformation of culture. There was a name for what we all were doing—sin. I didn’t have that label for my behavior at the time, but now I can heartily agree with God, "For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23) Drugs and alcohol became a part of my life. Alcohol took the edge off the realities of life, LSD promised new realities, but nothing satisfied. When the sensations passed, life was there, staring cold and hard. God states in Proverbs 26:11, "As a dog returns to his own vomit, so a fool repeats his folly." I was that fool returning to my vomit. I was the bird torpedoing into the glass, not once or twice, but again and again.

Here are the lessons that I did not learn during my teens.

• The more you sin, the more unhappy life becomes.
• What I thought was an upward journey was a downward slope and a slavery. Read Proverbs 5:5 and John 8:34 in your Bible.

How would you characterize your own attitudes in relationship to your behavior? Have you discovered a link between attitudes and behavior? Could you agree with the God and name it sin against God? Reread Romans 3.

I assumed I was such an unhappy young man because of my home, so I ran away. Actually, I saved my money all summer and flew away from home. (Those were the days before picture ID’s were required to board flights) Two days later, in San Diego, California, my well-planned scheme came crashing down on my head. Not fifty yards from dipping my toe in the Pacific Ocean a voice boomed out behind me, "Hey, you, stop!" It was the police. My wonderful parents, however, were kind enough to bail me out of the juvenile detention center in San Diego, California. My Dad personally flew from Freeport, Illinois to the West Coast to bring me home.

When I graduated from high school, I wanted out. I joined the Army. Now I would be free! I, however, mistook license for liberty. Instead of attaining freedom, I only sunk deeper in bondage. I had degenerated into a miserable, obnoxious, foul-mouthed young man. I even stormed against heaven in my anger. "Prove to me there is a God," I challenged my friends. "Look at the world in which we live, and tell me there is a holy, just God."

The Army stationed me on Hakata Air Force Base, Japan. One evening, I had no money to go to the bar, and I was utterly beside myself in depression. A strong thought gripped me while I was pacing the base "Craig, you have not given God a chance!" "It is true," I thought, "if there were a God, I have hardly given Him a chance." I went directly to the small base chapel and found the door unlocked and the building unoccupied. I stood at the back of the empty building and uttered a sincere prayer. I remember every word of it,

"God, if you are real, you have got to do something for me!"

Nothing happened! Now what? "But I still really haven't given God a chance," I thought. So I stepped forward to the center of the building and repeated my earnest appeal, "God, if you are real, you have got to do something for me!" Nothing happened! I knew I was still holding God at arm's length. I still hadn't really given God a chance. I went completely forward and rehearsed everything in my mind that I had ever learned about prayer. I kneeled at the altar rail. I folded my hands. I closed my eyes. "Did I have everything? I think so." This time I would be sincere. "God, if you are real, you have got to do something for me!" Nothing happened! That evening was the most disappointing night of my life! I have no idea what I expected might happen, but nothing happened, and I was in a rage. "Just as I thought," I shouted aloud, "the whole thing is a fake!" My suspicions were confirmed—there is no God, and I was stinging with embarrassment at what I had done. In retrospect I learned a very valuable lesson that evening. Although I was very sincere, and no one could have been more needy than I, God evidently did not respond. Why?

• Men without a go-between or in Bible terms, a mediator, do not approach God.
• For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus. 1 Timothy 2:5
  Jesus said to him, "I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me." John 14:6
• I was attempting to come to God without Christ. I knew nothing of the salvation that Christ provided when He died on the cross for my sins. Because God is holy, he cannot be approached on man's terms. Man is an unholy sinner. If a sinner still in his sins found access to the holy God of heaven, he would be judged at that time for his sins. This will happen to many in a future day. Read Revelation 20:11-15.

What is your relationship to God? Are you pretending to come on your own terms, without Christ? I am so thankful that I did not leave the chapel that evening thinking that I had found God simply because I prayed sincerely. My prayer had not changed me, but my circumstances were about to change. News arrived. Hakata Air Force Base was to shut down, and we were to be reassigned elsewhere. My elsewhere was Torii Station, Okinawa. At Torii Station I became the co-manager and lifeguard of the base swimming pool with one other GI. What a plush duty assignment! The change of environment gave me some relief, but I was still the same person on the inside.

Two other young people worked at the Torii Station swimming pool in the basket room. They were a brother and sister of one of the NCO's on the base. I was 19 or 20 years of age and they were about 17 and 16. I invited them out drinking after work, and they refused me. I understood they were under age so I offered to buy. They still refused.

When I asked them what their problem was, they told me they were born again Christians.

Christians! What does that have to do with anything? The poor kids became an object of my ridicule for the next three months. At the same time, I liked them and even more oddly they liked me. These young people were not intimidated. They stood their ground. If there was an activity that Christians shouldn't do, they didn't do it. If there was an activity that was appropriate for Christians, we could do it. For the first time in my life I met a person who claimed to be a born-again Christian. What was even more amazing was that being a Christian had some relationship to what they did or didn't do. I could not explain it, but I came to admire and respect them for whatever it was they had. My life had no real internal governing factor, and I knew it.

Theologians, they were not. When I asked them "why" questions, all they could or would tell me was either that they were Christians or that they were born again. After three months, I was reassigned to Fort Lee, Virginia.

One morning in September, 1972, I was pacing downtown Petersburg, Virginia, waiting for the stores to open. A man called to me as I passed his storefront building, "Hey, would you like a sandwich?" I peered behind him and noticed a cross on the door of the building. As curious as I may have been about the religion of my two young friends from Okinawa, I was still very anti-Christian. "Not if you want to talk to me about religion," I replied, thinking I was now off the hook. "I don't want to talk to you about religion," the man replied. Then came the great battle between my stomach and my apprehensions. My stomach won, so I entered the Christian Servicemen's Center for a sandwich.

After I ate the man's sandwich and drank his Coke, the man asked me if he could show me a few things from the Bible (which was conveniently located on the opposite table). I felt obligated to hear what he had to say, since I was indebted to him for the refreshments. "Did you know that you are a sinner?" he asked. I was taken aback by the question, but I had to admit that I was indeed a sinner. I told him that I knew that I was a sinner. He then followed up, "But did you know that everyone is a sinner?" That was news to me. He showed me from Romans 3:23, "All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." I suddenly comprehended that ALL are sinners short of God's expectation of righteousness. In one verse, my early religious training--that good people go to heaven and bad people go to hell--was shattered. God did not divide the world into good and bad camps. God considered the world one bad camp! No one was good enough to earn heaven. I had written myself off as meriting heaven, but in the back of my thinking I entertained the idea that someone might merit heaven. The man further queried, "Do you know why there is such injustice in the world and wars?" It was a question that I had actually wondered about. When I argued with people about the existence of God, my main platform had been, "How can you prove there is a just and holy God when the world is so full of injustice?" He opened to the book of James chapter four."Where do wars and fights come from among you? Do they not come from your lusts that war in your members [inner selves]?" "Do you see that?" he asked, "Even international conflicts have at their root individual sin or lusts!" Now I understood the teaching of the Bible. There can be a just and holy God and world of inequities, because man is in rebellion against his Creator. I was totally dumfounded. For the first time in my life, a viable explanation for the world in which I lived. Then the man asked,

"If this is the case, that all are disqualified by sin, how can God save anyone?"

"I don't know," I said, "You are the theologian. You tell me." "God would have to make it a gift," he concluded! That was a ridiculous idea, and counter to everything that I understood. I asked the man to show me that one from the Bible. He opened to Ephesians 2:8,9; "It is the gift of God." I still didn't buy the idea. That was just one verse. "You are clever, and you can make the Bible say whatever you want it to say. If this is true there must be a larger passage on the subject," I told the man. I thought I had him there because there is no way that God would just give away salvation as a gift. "As a matter of fact there is," he countered. He then opened his Bible to the book of Romans chapter five from verse twelve to the end. We read through it together. The passage compares what Adam did in his one act of disobedience bringing sin and death into the world to what Christ did by His one act of obedience--offering up of his life on the cross. Christ paid for a gift on the cross by one act of righteous. By Christ's one righteous payment on the cross "those who receive abundance of grace and of the gift of righteousness will reign in life..." What could I say? I knew nothing about the Bible, but I could count to five, and I counted the word gift five times in the paragraph. I now understood the Bible taught that salvation was a free gift.

The man saw that I understood, and he pressed an invitation on me. "Would you like to receive Christ right now?" I hesitated. Again he asked, "We have a prayer room upstairs...." "What is a prayer room upstairs," I thought! What had I gotten myself into now? I told the man, "The Lord would have to hit me over the head before I did anything like that!" I bolted out of the building and never saw the man again.

The next month I received a phone call at the base from my Dad. He found a car for sale that he thought that I would be interested in buying. I certainly would. I took a long weekend off from duty to allow me time to hitchhike home from Petersburg, Virginia to Freeport, Illinois. It rained the whole 24 hours or so that it took to get home. In one of the cars everyone was smoking marijuana, and they invited me to join them. I think that was the car, traveling through the hills of Pennsylvania, that had very bad wipers and we nearly went off the road due to the inclement weather and mental condition of the driver. I was sitting in the back seat rather numbly staring out the window and the thought struck me, "I could die right now." After that ride, I was totally wiped out and just wanted to check in to a motel. I was on a limited time schedule so I pressed on. By the time one of the next cars picked me up, I must have appeared really wasted, which I was. This group of Good Samaritans (I say this tongue in cheek) offered some amphetamines to pick me up. I graciously accepted the little white pills, and I immediately woke up, and my head cleared for the remainder of the trip to Freeport. The final ride before Freeport was a drag car driver. He told his partner in the cab to drive, and he would ride in the trailer with me. I rode with him in the closed bed trailer with the dragster. As we traveled, he asked me, "What do you think is the most important thing in my life?" "I suppose the car," I replied. It was a beautiful piece of machinery. "No, there is something more important than that." "Probably your family then." "No," he answered, " something even more important than my family." He had me stumped. "I don't know, tell me."

"It is Jesus Christ, and He has put my whole life together again!"

If there was one thing that I didn't have, it was a life that was together! I don't recall any more of our conversation. We were at Freeport, and the ride was over. The thought of Jesus Christ putting a life together had lodged in my thinking, and I was deeply affected.

My Dad helped me buy the car, and I had one more day in Freeport before I had to return to the base. I went to look up some high school friends, whom I had not seen since I had been overseas. My folks told me that Dennis and Mary Jo were running a coffee house in downtown Freeport. "A coffee house," I thought, "What in the world are they up to now?" I was surprised that they were even still married, but what was a coffee house? Mary Jo was first to meet me at the door of their coffee house. "Mary Jo," I exclaimed, "what has happened to you?" "Mary Jo replied, "I have been born again! I am a Christian." Whether I said it aloud or thought very loudly, my heart stopped, "Oh, no! Not another one!" Behind Mary Jo was her husband, Dennis. Dennis had gotten saved also. Behind Dennis was Terryl. Terry was also now saved. With them was a cousin of mine, Mary. She said also that she had become saved. Then there were a number of others whom I knew from high school in the room. They all had become born again Christians during the time I was overseas!  Suddenly, I felt hunted.

That night I arrived at the Christian coffee house at about 7:30p.m.. I was faced with the overwhelming evidence in the lives of my friends that Jesus Christ is real, and that He changes lives. The Bible says, "If any man is in Christ, he is a new creation, the old things have passed away, behold, new things have come." (2 Corinthians 5:17)  I began to question my friends about the Bible. They showed me from the Bible that Jesus Christ died for my sins, just as I had been shown at the Christian Servicemen's Center one month earlier. I also learned that not only had He died, but He was now risen from the dead and soon to return. We closed the coffee house at about midnight and a few of us went to Dennis and Mary Jo's home for further conversation. What more was there to ask? At 4:30a.m. Sunday morning, I had not one more question to ask. I remember saying,

"There is nothing more to ask. I have a decision to make."

I pondered the fact that if I turned away from Christ that night, I was rejecting eternal life. If I died in my unsaved condition or if the Lord Jesus returned, I was on the losing side. I would be lost forever. That was the terms in which I thought. I had no doubt that this was all true. What would become of me if I turned to Christ? It was very frightening, indeed. Finally, I bowed my head. I would receive Him, no matter what the consequences might be.I have no idea what I prayed. I announced to my friends that I must make a decision, I bowed my head, and I received Christ. I believed, put my trust in Him and told Him so. When I raised my eyes, I had a question. "What do I do next," I asked? "Well, you have to read your Bible," someone answered. "Do you have a Bible I can read?" They handed me a small white zippered Bible. "Where do I read?" "Begin at the Gospel of John." I had no idea where the Gospel of John was, so someone helped me find the Gospel of John in the Bible.

After attending church that morning with my friends, I went home and claimed one of the Bibles that were on the bookshelf as my own. I packed it in my new car and returned to Virginia. When I arrived at Fort Lee, I pulled into the parking lot behind the barracks. Where I parked the car, there was a man standing, holding a Bible, talking to Mike, one of my drinking buddies about the Lord. I knew him by name, because we were both in headquarters company, but I had never introduced myself. He was a religious person, and I had avoided religious people in the past. Now I confronted Spencer and Mike both, "Spencer, I got saved this weekend!" "That's great," Spencer rejoiced, "Mike, Craig accepted Christ as his Savior!" But Mike failed to share the same enthusiasm for the event that Spencer did. That day and that moment I changed lives, and God helped Craig the weakling to burn my bridges behind me back to my old life of drinking. God had prepared Spencer to tutor me in the new life in Christ. Spencer worked with me for the next six months until his discharge. He showed me how to read and study my Bible and talk to others about Christ. He challenged me to go on in my life for Christ, and by the grace of God, I have been helped to do so.

Dear reader, I am a saved sinner. God also calls me a saint. It is no glory of mine. It is all His work and glory. The Bible says, "But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." (Romans 5:8) In the words of Christ, He "...came not to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." He is willing and able to do exactly the same thing for you, if you will bow the knee to Him. Will you come to the living risen Christ, and receive Him as your Savior? He is the Lord from heaven, and He died for penalty of your sins. Now He lives to save you. He completed all the work necessary to give you the gift of eternal life. He paid for your salvation in His own blood on the cross. Before He died, with a loud voice, He declared from the cross, "It is finished." Read John 1:12 and 13.

There is nothing left for you to do, but take what He offers. Will you take Him today or face eternity without Him?