A Long Post After an IM Conversation

(This post could be so much longer... It is no way totally complete. :-) )

I had a long conversation last night via instant messaging with a young woman I have yet to meet in person. She asked me if I was a Calvinist and then told me I was only the 2nd female Calvinist that she has ever met. I told Mel later that I should introduce her to our co-workers (Melinda, Darlene, Jill, Dawn, Lauren, and a bunch more that we know and have worked with here in Ukraine over the years), as well as BethAnn, Linno, Michele, Robin, Cindy, Marietta, Kara and a whole bunch more that we have attended church with over the past few years when in the States. There really are a whole lot of us. Oh, and then there are all the international Calvinist women I've met in the last few years (Geeta, Annabelle, Francine, Lyuda, Nadia and so forth). It's kind of wonderful when I think of it. :-)

The conversation has had me thinking off and on all day about how it came about that I am a Calvinist. I was raised in a Bible church, one of the 'fightin' fundy' types. I think it was actually a member of the IFCA (Independent Fundamental Churches of America) or some such organization. Immanuel Bible Church, which moved into a larger new church building when I was in my teens, and changed her name at the same time to Mesa Hills Bible Church.

I grew up in the church, from the time I was a wee little baby. I accepted Christ as my Savior at the age of 8. I think I've written about this before, but that's ok - it's good to remember these things and go over in my mind once again what God has done for me! I was convicted of my sin either during Sunday School or during the church service and on the way home told my parents that I wanted to become a Christian. My parents were very young - at that time my mother would have been about 25, my dad 26 and they already had 5 kids. They told me to talk with the pastor next week and probably talked to me more about it during the week, but I don't remember that. My father walked with me down the aisle the following Sunday morning at the end of the service and the pastor's wife took me into another room to talk with me. She went over the plan of salvation once more and I prayed the prayer. A few weeks later I was baptised, along with a few others who had become Believers in Christ Jesus since the last baptism service. I well remember what dress I was wearing at the time. I also remember what dress I was wearing the first time I took communion and spilled the grape juice on my dress. Fortunately the dress was a pale lavendar and the juice washed right out of whatever man-made material it was made of. That was a very traumatic event and is etched in my memory. :-)

I remember the pew we always sat in. I remember the way the sunshine came in through the colored windows of that old building - a REAL church building - it LOOKED like an old fashioned real honest to goodness church. The sunshine spilled in and the dust motes in the air floated in splendor. We had Sunday evening services and usually went - until we got a television at home. Very sad. But I still love singing hymns - hymns I learned to sing on Sunday nights when even the little kids could raise their hands and ask for their favorite. I loved that! I remember sleeping on the pews while the preacher went on and on and on some Sunday nights. I remember counting the holes in the tiles in the ceiling while he went on and on. I remember the night the bats came out of the belfry and flew around the sanctuary during the evening service and scared us all. I remember running around the back of the church after services were over, and in the summer, going outside and running up and down the sidewalks with the other kids. I remember picking up the tree seeds outside and making helicopters with them - throwing them up in the air and watching them twirl back down to earth.

I have so many wonderful memories of church as a kid. I loved it! Oh, sometimes I found it very boring, too. And I didn't like it when I got taken out and spanked - I remember that happening at least once - I must have been quite small. Actually, the more I think about it, the more I remember about that old church and my childhood there. They are all, without exception, happy memories. Even of being terrified of the furnace back there in the back room - a huge white thing with big white 'arms' that came out of it and up into the ceiling. Well, there is the time my brother hit the preacher in a fit of anger and broke the preacher's glasses - but that was when I was quite a bit older - maybe closer to when we left that building and went to the new building. It was very sad to leave that old church - the old church that now is an apartment building. Maybe someday I'll write a children's book about it.

When we moved, the preacher at that time was a pulpit pounder who loved, no he lived to preach End Times. And boy was he strict. It was the mid-to-late '60's and he was against long hair on guys, beards, moustaches, sideburns, bell bottoms on girls and anything that even hinted that it might be related to hippies, drugs or rock n roll music. Anything. That's why we eventually left that church. My dad grew sideburns and the preacher didn't like them and told him to cut them off. My dad had had enough.

But along with End Times preached for months and months I did learn my Bible. When I went to Alaska Bible College I could have taught the Dan and Rev class. :-) I actually knew my Bible better then than I do now (part of that, I have come to realize in the last few months, is age. My brain is slower than it used to be. So sad. Good thing I'm getting a new one in a few days or years!)

When I graduated from high school I lived a double life. There was the 'church and work' me and then there was the me that lived during non-church and work hours (I worked for a well known Christian organization at that time). I always think of the next era of my life as "the time God picked me up by the scruff of my neck, off the path of self-destruction, and plopped me down in the wilds of Alaska under 24 hour rules and regulations that I had to follow OR ELSE". Alaska Bible College. I knew it was going to be tough - and it was - when on the ride from Anchorage to Glennallen the prof driving the van full of future students told me exactly what he thought of my two favorite movies at that time - 2001: A Space Odessy and Dr. Zhivago. Needless to say, he had nothing good to say about either of those two very wicked movies. So sad. I still to this day like both of them, no matter what my children think of 2001.

One of the classes I took there was a course in theology. It was taught from the Arminian point of view, but one of the books we had to read was Knowledge of the Holy, by AW Tozer.
That book changed my life. I think it stands just under the Bible in having had the most influence in what I believe of anything I've ever read. After that book, a few years later, was JI Packer's Knowing God. I'm sure that the profs and staff of the college would be horrified to know that it was there and in that class that I became a Calvinist. A little seedling Calvinist, for sure, but well on my way to becoming an old oak Calvinist. (I do think in metaphors)

All of the Bible learning I had before reading Knowledge of the Holy was preparing me to finally understand the sovereignty of God. I like this definition: "The Sovereignty of God is the biblical teaching that all things are under God's rule and control, and that nothing happens without His direction or permission. God works not just some things but all things according to the counsel of His own will (see Eph. 1:11). His purposes are all-inclusive and never thwarted (see Isa. 46:11); nothing takes Him by surprise. The sovereignty of God is not merely that God has the power and right to govern all things, but that He does so, always and without exception. In other words, God is not merely sovereign de jure (in principle), but sovereign de facto (in practice)." link

Since then, I have fallen in love with the book of Ephesians. I also love Isaiah 40. And there are so many more passages of scripture that assure me of God's sovereignty!

Learning the true meaning of God's sovereignty also opened my eyes to what man is really like. The older I get, the more I realize what truly happened in the Garden of Eden. I know that I will never fully comprehend it until I meet my Savior face to face in heaven, but more and more I come to realize just how sinful man (me!) is and what Christ did on the cross. I realize more and more how man (me!) in and of himself would never chose God, but would always want his own will. That without God intervening in a man's (mine) life, NO ONE would be saved. Even John tells us this in the Book of Revelation when he describes how people will call out for the rocks to fall on them rather than repent and worship God. I think that the Pharisees are the most blatant example in scripture - when we read the Life of Christ in the 4 Gospels, we understand clearly that they KNEW who Jesus was. They knew and understood that he was Christ, the Messiah, sent from God, that he WAS God - and they rejected him outright (except for the few who secretly believed, secretly because they were afraid of the other Pharisees). Since the fall of Adam and Eve man has always and will always stand in rebellion to God. We will never choose God - unless God changes us first and enables us to do so.

We are dead in our sin. Dead. Dead people don't do anything. They don't open their mouths and say give me some medicine so I will live. They don't open their mouths so that medicine can be administered. I can't think of any more graphic example that Paul's use of that in Romans. We are DEAD in our sins, unable to do, unable to choose God. But God - in His mercy - has chosen some of us for His own and makes us alive so that we can respond to him.

I am no theologian and others have explained it ten thousand times better than I am able. I only know that this doctrine is one of the most beautiful things I have ever learned and believed in my whole life. God loved me for absolutely no reason other than the fact that he wanted to do so. He doesn't love me because I'm so wonderful or beautiful or good - all of those things come and go with my mood, my age, etc. No, He loved me because he wanted to.

Malachi 1:2“I have loved you,” says the LORD.
“But you ask, ‘How have you loved us?’
“Was not Esau Jacob’s brother?” the LORD says. “Yet I have loved Jacob, but Esau I have hated, and I have turned his mountains into a wasteland and left his inheritance to the desert jackals.”
Edom may say, “Though we have been crushed, we will rebuild the ruins.”
But this is what the LORD Almighty says: “They may build, but I will demolish. They will be called the Wicked Land, a people always under the wrath of the LORD. You will see it with your own eyes and say, ‘Great is the LORD—even beyond the borders of Israel!’

Mel preached this passage last summer, along with the rest of the chapter. It can be found at The Fear of the Lord is the Beginning of Missions a little ways down the page, near July 4, 2010. I highly recommend it to everyone. :-)

And now - this post is long enough. It's getting dark and it's after 5pm already and I really need to get something started cooking so Mel can have some dinner. :-)