…on March 20, 1983, a friend I had recently met at church, Bill, invited me out to lunch after the Sunday service in Washington, D.C. and shared the gospel with me. In particular, he asked me this question:

“What makes a person a Christian?”

I had never really considered that before and didn’t know the answer, even though I had been raised in a church-going family, and even though by that time I had already been reading the Bible and trying to follow Christ for over a year.

Bill used these Bible verses to answer his own question:

If anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he does not belong to Him. But if Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, the Spirit is life because of righteousness.
— Romans 8:9-10

As Bill explained, according to these verses, if we don’t have Christ living within us as the Spirit, we do not belong to Him. This is true regardless of what we may think or even if we’re going to church, reading the Bible, and trying to serve Him, as I was then.

So, after we left the restaurant we sat down on a park bench nearby, and I prayed to ask the Lord to come into my heart.

It has been quite a journey since then, with so many highs and lows, and a number of very difficult experiences, but thank the Lord, He has kept me in His way until now. Through it all, one thing I’ve learned is that the Christian life is by far the most meaningful life any human being could ever hope to live, and I would not trade it for anything.

If you would like to hear me tell the full version of my salvation story, I’ve made a video of it, “My Faith, then His.”

I also have a written account of the same story on my website. The subtitle pretty much sums it all up:

I sought for the meaning of life in politics, until I found it in the Lord Jesus Christ.

Sent to our mailing list on
— 20 March 2023 —