Faith of a Child

We had a guest speaker (Justin Grunewald) in church today. While he gave an excellent lesson and I hope that he comes back to speak again, there was one specific thing he said that really lodged itself in my mind. He related how he accepted salvation when he was only five years old. He made a point to emphasize how surprising it is for a child so young to do something like that. And then something donned on me.

I accepted salvation when I was somewhere between 6-8 years of age. Not as young as five, but still pretty young. Young enough that I really didn't understand the depth and implications of being saved. I did speak to someone in the church and I was even in a group class that taught about it, but I was the youngest in that group. It didn't really click. All I could wrap my head around was that Jesus died for my sins and that we needed to ask Him into our heart. So I did just that. I did it because I knew that was what we were supposed to do.

I've always found that to be kind of unusual. You always hear stories about how people came to be part of the Church after struggling with the choice. It seems so foreign a thing to me because I just did it out of obedience, like it was no different than doing school work or making sure to have good manners. I'm not trying to diminish my fellow Christians' testimonies or say that I'm in some way more spiritually mature. I'm only trying to explain how my mind worked at that time.

These have been discussed in a previous post, but Justin Grunewald's words brought to mind one of the five points of Calvinism, Irresistible Grace. Maybe my asking for Christ's salvation was purely an act of the spirit as opposed to relating to the mind. Jesus did say that the Kingdom of Heaven belonged to children and He instructed those around Him to have the faith of a child. It starts to fall into place.

Then I think about how incredibly fortunate I was to be blessed with that proclivity as a young church-goer. I could've been older when I got saved. I could've gone through a chunk of my life without Christ being bonded to me. It's true that the Lord is always with us. But there's a difference between the Lord being with you and the Lord being in you. I haven't always been the most dedicated of Christians. Yet it has always been something important to me in some way. Which brings up another point within Calvinism, Preservation of the Saints. That is, that the saved will always be guided back to the Lord, however far they've drifted away from Him. That's the distinction. I'm glad that I was able to have that gift as a little boy.

-L. Travis Hoffman

8/30/2015