When I was a child, my family occasionally attended a Lutheran church near my house. We didn’t go often, so I didn’t hear the gospel or come to a true understanding of who Christ was. My parents bear witness that as a family we only attended church in an outward, formal manner lacking any fervency of heart. As a result, I lacked the privileges of growing up in a covenant community and home with the constant prayers of others in the congregation, encouraging fellowship, and catechesis.

During this time, sports were everything to me. I would watch Sports Center every morning to keep up with the standings and scores. I played football. I even had dreams of one day becoming a professional baseball player. During my transition from middle school to junior high, I met all new friends on my football team. With these new friends came the habits they had after the games. My life of carousing started mildly until my mind became more and more polluted by the world. I started to listen to the music of the culture, which was dictated mostly by rap or hip-hop. Sadly, through the influence of my friends, through the kind of music I listened to, and chiefly through the deceitfulness and wickedness of my own heart, I started to lose all interest in school and even sports. All of my ambitions and dreams seemed to be destroyed by my lifestyle. With all of my hopes fading away, I didn’t see much meaning in anything.

I dropped out of school in 10th grade, when I was 16, and took the test for my high school equivalency diploma. I moved out of my house (off and on) and didn’t have much of a relationship with my parents or siblings. My life continued in a downward spiral. It didn’t take long until the darkness I was in became darker. I was getting in trouble with the authorities and eventually was put on probation for 2 years for various offenses.

Even when I was heading my own way and set on doing things the way I wanted, God had His love set on me. He started to work this out in my dad by giving him a new heart. That made him sensitive to his sin and gave him eyes to see his need for a Savior in Christ. As a result of this, many Christian books and tapes began to be accessible in our home. In God’s providence, the two guys I was living with moved to Virginia, leaving me no option but to move back to my home. When I was almost 20, I moved back into my house. My father shared with me what he had found in Christ, but it wasn’t until the Spirit of God prompted my heart to listen to tapes of John MacArthur’s preaching that I began to be pierced by the Word. The Holy Spirit began to confront me and convict me of how great my sin was and how desperately I needed a Savior. I can’t recall the topic of the tape I was listening to by Dr. MacArthur at the time, but he quoted Acts 4:12 in a sermon, “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” This verse made me come face to face with Christ. I was struck with amazement at the grace and love expressed by God through His Son, giving us a way of escape from eternal death.

At that point, God granted me repentance and a living faith in His blessed Messiah. As Paul said, “God, who said, ‘Let light shine out of darkness,’ has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ” (2 Cor. 4:6). The new heart the Lord gave me no longer desired to listen to the rapper Eminem, but rather stirred up a newfound love to read Christian books and listen to Christian teaching and preaching.

When I first believed, I only had a glimpse of the glory of Christ. But as my mind has been renewed over these past two and a half years, God has been showing me through His Scriptures that He promised a Savior back in the garden of Eden who perfectly fulfilled the law of Moses and who also was predicted by the prophets to come. The Bible as a whole became clearer to me as I began to see how it all pointed to Christ. Like the two men on the road to Emmaus, the Lord began to show me how all the Scriptures were to be fulfilled in Him and that they were to be a means to look to Him for salvation.

The Lord has blessed me with a desire to know what I believe and why I believe it. Through struggling with various theological topics like election, infant baptism, and the end times, I came to see how much disagreement there was. I then discovered Reformed theology and seemed to find less confusion and more confidence in the Bible’s teaching. Above all, however, I was convinced by the testimony of Scripture that the historic Reformed faith was the truth carried down through the ages.

The Lord has been very gracious to me—a once-lost sheep—by leading me into His fold at Messiah’s Church in North Syracuse, N.Y., where Christ is preached from the pulpit and the evidence of Christ’s presence has been displayed among the entire congregation. The God of all grace has also drawn my father, mother, and little brother to worship there as well. He has continued to fulfill His promise to build His church and is doing so at Messiah’s Church. I’m eager to grow in grace under the eldership the Lord has appointed over me. I thank God for these men and the impact they are having on my life.

To be able to retrace the signs of God’s saving grace in one’s life as a believer is a great privilege. We have different stories to tell; but though diverse, we still all meet at the same Lord. My prayer is that this testimony of God’s mercy to an unworthy sinner will encourage those who read it and remind us all of how great is the God we serve.

Matthew is a member of Messiah’s Church in North Syracuse, N.Y. He works part-time for UPS and attends a community college for general studies. He enjoys reading theological books.