Steve’s Testimony

NOTE: This page was created 9/2/02 and last updated 6/19/06.

My name is Steve. I am a child of God, a born again Christian, a husband to my wife, Michelle, a father to our son, Niko (9 1/2), our daughter, Mia (5 1/2), our son, Luke (3 1/2), and our son, Ian (16 months), and an engineer by profession.

The following is the story of how God transformed me from a "know-it-all" atheist, to a humbled son of the Living God.

Michelle had been saved for about a year. See her testimony for the details of how she came to the Lord. At first, I was just happy to see that she had found something to bring her out of the depression which she had been suffering from. My initial relief, though, rapidly turned to nervousness as I saw the changes that were being wrought within her. She started talking about going back to church. I was perfectly happy having stopped going to the Catholic church. I guess I was willing to accept that. She began talking about not going back to work once the kids were in school. That one I found kind of odd and thought she was just being lazy. But I nearly went off the deep end the first time she mentioned homeschooling! "Home-WHAT - is that legal!?!" was my response as I recall.

I am an engineer and during the course of my life had come to the conclusion that God was just wishful thinking by people who didn't want to come to grips with their own futility and were unwilling to accept the "reality" of science. Boy, did I have a lot to learn!

During the course of that year, though, I heard the truth of God spoken many times by many different people on the Christian radio station that Michelle had then switched to listening to. Michelle kept telling me that as the husband it was my job to be the spiritual lead of our family. I didn't really know what that meant, but decided I'd better learn a little about the Bible. I started reading the Gospel of John.

Around the same time, we had been riding in the car listening to a former courtroom reporter talking about how he had done a search for the evidence against Christianity in an effort to get his wife to stop talking to him about God and the Bible. He spent a year or so gathering evidence and speaking to authorities and came to the unexpected conclusion that all of the claims about Jesus really were true! His name was Lee Strobel and he wrote a book about what he found called "The Case For Christ". I told Michelle that if she bought that book, I would read it.

In the meantime, I had finished reading the Gospel of John and started on the next book in the Bible, "Acts". I was amazed how different the message in the Bible was than all of the miscellaneous tidbits I had gathered from watching TV, reading books, talking to people, and being spoon-fed portions of the Bible in Catholic Church. I had always thought that there was a great struggle between Good and Evil, that people who did more good than evil went to Heaven when they died, and that those who balanced out for Evil were sent to hell. Hell, of course, was run by demons with pitchforks. Somehow baptizing infants enabled them to go to Heaven. I don't know where those ideas had come from, but they had NOTHING to do with the scriptures.

The truth according to the scriptures was very different, and made a lot more sense. NOBODY meets God's standards. ALL deserve punishment (including the demons). Jesus' death on the cross was the ultimate sacrifice in fullfillment of all the Old Testament Jewish laws. The only way to enter the Kingdom of God, was to put your entire trust in God, and in Jesus' atoning work on the cross. As the Bible says, it is not enough to believe, for even the demons believe and are afraid (James 2:19)- to be saved one must die to one's self and be born-again by the Holy Spirit.

Well this was quite a different message, but in my stubborness it was still not enough for me. By the time I finished reading "The Case For Christ", though, I realized he had an open and shut case. I couldn't argue with Strobel's findings, and that left me rather shocked and disoriented. I had no idea what I was getting myself into, but one night in March 1999, I knelt down and prayed to God. I confessed my sins, said that I believed that Jesus had died for sinners - including me, and asked Him to come into my heart.

At first I didn't feel any different, but slowly the Holy Spirit started re-orienting my mind. Piece-by-piece all I thought I knew about the world began to come apart. The real shocker was when I realized how much I had been duped regarding evolution. I had been a card-carrying "Discover Magazine"-subscribing evolutionist. I was absolutely appalled, as someone with a scientific background, to discover how incredibly poor the "science" behind evolution was. Not only was evolution impossible from the standpoint of physics and probability, it completely violated the laws of information theory - something I should have recognized from my engineering courses in the subject. Evolution was the best theory anyone could come up with to explain away God, and it was absolutely pathetic.

It took a while, for as the scriptures say, God prefers to work with a "delicate whispering voice" rather than a rumbling earthquake (1 Kings 19:12). I had no idea before then how much sin had built up in my life. But God is patient and has been whittling away at them one at a time. I'm far from perfect but I thank God every day I'm not the man I was. And I know for certain that one day I will see God face-to-face and be welcomed into His Kingdom forever!

Page created 9/2/02