December 2007

My spe­cial Guest Blog­ger on the Hori­zon today is Dan King of BibleDude.net, an online Bible study resource. Dan works with a young adults min­istry in Sara­sota, Florida. His goal is “to chal­lenge the way you think about the world around you as you look at it with God-goggles on. Com­fort­able Chris­tian­ity is a dan­ger­ous place to be, as the world around us is try­ing to chew up the Church and spit it out.”

Com­ing Back New
by Dan King

I must have asked myself if I was sure about this some­where around a mil­lion times. Am I actu­ally going to go through with this? Why do I need to do this any­way? Isn’t my sal­va­tion enough?

After my sal­va­tion expe­ri­ence about a year and a half ear­lier, I did notice some great changes in my life. How­ever there was always the sense that I could always go back to my old way of life if this Chris­tian­ity thing turned out to not be what I thought it was. After all, I was a liar with an immoral heart and a hyp­ocrite. I never did open myself up com­pletely to those close to me. I was a Chris­t­ian now, but won­dered why I still strug­gled with things. I even started serv­ing as a helper with the youth group, and often found myself talk­ing to young men telling them that they shouldn’t be doing the very things that I know that I strug­gled with in my own mind and heart.

I was told that the water bap­tism was about a bunch of dif­fer­ent things, and it all made sense. But most impor­tantly my Jesus told us to do it, and to me that was enough. How­ever, I still strug­gled with the idea of going through with it. Now I under­stand why. I didn’t want to let go of the past. I enjoyed my past. I had fun, and if I were to do this whole bap­tism thing, then I knew that it was done.