How Jesus Changed Me :: Brian

Over the next couple weeks we will be sharing several stories from people who were baptized several weekends ago at our baptism service. This is Brian's story.Church is something I have been exposed to since a child. Every Sunday I went to church with my family and sat through service after service. I think that I have always believed in a God, but for most my life I have not really cared. Church was boring. The God I believed in was distant. He was far away. He was not personal. While I kept going to this church as I got older, my faith in God was something that did not grow. Having no real love for God, I lived a life in which I answered to authorities other than His own. This led me to search for happiness in all the wrong places. At about 16 years old, my main concern in life was to be cool. I needed that feeling of belonging and being accepted by my peers. At the time, I saw the means to achieving this acceptance was to indulge in the worldly pleasures the “cool” kids around me were doing. I took to a life of drinking and partying and this became my sole focus. Entering college, the pressures to belong grew stronger. I was in a place where I knew no one and wanted so badly to fit in. Once again, I believed the way to become accepted by those around me was to continue to engage in revelry. My life was one that was guided by the idol of approval. I had a need to become part of the crowd. This need, however, never went away. No matter how many people I met or friends I made, my need to be accepted was never satisfied. 

"My life was one that was guided by the idol of approval. I had a need to become part of the crowd. This need, however, never went away."

 The constant worship of my idol of approval began to make me weary. It wore me down and exposed a great deal of emptiness in my life. Over the summer of my junior year I begin to understand how lost I really was. I felt unfulfilled and alone. I thought about the idea of purpose and searched for the purpose of my life. I kept asking myself what it was that I wanted to do with my life but could find no answer. This desperate search for purpose was when faith began to creep back into my life. I could only have a purpose if I was created. I had to ask myself not what I wanted to do with my life, but what was it I was made to do.This pull toward a life of faith led me to begin attending church again. I went back to the church in which I was raised. Over the next year, I began to become more receptive to God. I begin to understand that he loved me and that distant Father I had always imagined became closer. However, I still felt a void in my life. There was still an emptiness I had inside me I was longing to fill. Simply attending church on Sunday was not enough to do this. The growth that I was experiencing had ceased and my faith was becoming stale. I knew I loved God but I still didn’t know what was missing from my life. What I did know, however, is that the church I was in was not where I needed to be. My growth in it had stopped and I felt it was time for me to try something new.It was during this search for a new church that I decided to attend a service at the Paradox. Listening to the services over the next few weeks, I discovered what the void in my life was. I was not a follower of Jesus Christ. While I had listened to the Gospel many times in my life, I was truly hearing it for the first time. The life of Jesus was no longer just a story to me, it was real. He was my savior who in His death took my sin and conquered it through His resurrection. The walls that I had been putting up around my heart were torn down and His love overtook me. His love was overwhelming. I had lived a life in which I repeatedly spurned my savior, yet he never stopped pursuing me. I had been longing for many things. I longed for acceptance, belonging, and purpose. Yet all I was really longing for was Him. And He was there. Just as he always has been; waiting for my heart to open to receive His grace. 

"I had been longing for many things. I longed for acceptance, belonging, and purpose. Yet all I was really longing for was Him. And He was there."

 In Christ, I have been given freedom. Freedom from the exhausting search for approval. I have come to understand that his approval is all that I need. His acceptance is something that I will always have and something that I have always had. He chose me when he traded me His righteousness for my sin. It is because of this that I have been given new life - a new life in which I will forever proclaim God’s glory.Knowing Jesus has not made life easy. I make mistakes every day and struggle with false idols and temptation. Some days are still just hard. However, no matter what is going on in my life, there is now a constant joy. Romans 5:8 says, “But God so shows his love for us in that while we are still sinners, Christ died for us.” When I wake up every day, I remember that I am so loved that my savior gave His life for me to save me from my shortcomings. Knowing this, it is impossible to not be joyful. The glory and grace of God is great and it is why I stand here today to be baptized.Brian McDermott is a member of the South University City Group.