How The Radical Truth of Christ Set Me Free

Have you ever fallen asleep on a raft in the ocean? It’s amazing at first. The rays warm your body while a gentle sea breeze keeps you from overheating. The mellow roll of waves lulls you like a baby in the arms of its mother. Life doesn’t get any better. Until, sometime later, you jolt awake, completely confused, skin on fire, and hear the faint sound of someone screaming your name in panic, only to look up and see that you’re probably a half a mile from the shore. All you can think is, “How did I get here?” 

That’s kind of how my journey with Jesus began, with one of those “How did I get here?” moments.

Growing up, Jesus and Satan were as real in my eyes as Santa Claus and the Grinch. I gave little, if any, thought to a spiritual world and considered the Christianity I learned as a child to be nothing more than a moral code for an upstanding life. While I believed God theoretically existed, he was out there somewhere, and I was here living my best life. 

And, I got that best life. 

I had the childhood people write books about, I got all the high school accolades, I went to the prestigious college, I found the man I dreamed of marrying, and I got the big job in New York City. I made it. And yet, for all of the prestige I carried on the outside, I felt empty and insecure on the inside. It was this year that I began to really recognize and suffer physically the consequences of a life lived apart from God.

A Wake-Up Call

During this time in New York, I lived in an apartment with three other girls. Walking to get a bagel one morning after a long night of partying, a best friend of many years confronted me about a bad decision I had almost made the previous night. I knew my friend’s concerns were right. As I considered the consequences it could have brought, I pondered what happened to the little girl in me who once met each day with joy and hope. How did I get to where I was—twenty-five, depressed, restless, and experiencing crippling anxiety that kept leading to choices that could eventually destroy my life?

The only conclusion I could think of was that I must be psychologically unwell, so I started looking for solutions. After a brain scan at NYU Medical, my results came back “normal,” and I was sent to a psychologist for further prodding. I was eventually written a prescription, given a few diagnoses, and told to see a talk therapist. He didn’t help either. 

Another roommate at the time, knowing that I was struggling, invited me to church. I figured church couldn’t hurt and that it would be therapeutic to do something that good people do. She took me to a church that met in a college auditorium in midtown, a very odd place, I thought, to do the holy business of churching. However, as soon as I walked in, something felt different.

I use the word felt, because that’s the only way I could explain it. All of the drugs and alcohol in the world couldn’t produce the feeling I had when I walked through the doors of that “church.” It was pure joy. And, it obviously wasn’t from the decor. The auditorium didn’t even have windows, let alone stained glass or velvet pews. Somehow I knew in my heart that the beauty I sensed was God—he was there among those people, and it was as though He was personally inviting me to “taste and see” that He was good (Psalm 34:8). 

So, my journey back to God started with a feeling. But, after attending that church for several months, that feeling gave me a hunger for truth. 

On a Hunt for Truth

I had graduated from a liberal arts college and was taught that truth was subjective. I fully embraced that idea, which seemed brilliant and liberating at the time. However, this church spoke a lot about Jesus, even when it taught from the Old Testament. And this Jesus that the pastor spoke of did not act like someone who believed that truth was subjective. He spoke like he saw things with absolute clarity. He spoke with authority. And, he wasn’t into people-pleasing—you do you was not in his vocabulary. He even claimed to be Truth (John 14:6). This Jesus was either the most arrogant person who ever lived, or I was grossly mistaken about him and needed to look more seriously into what he said.

Because of what I felt stirring in my heart, I stepped out in faith, considered that maybe I was wrong about Him, and started to read the Bible for myself. I sought some help from a childhood friend who met me for coffee and walked me through a book in the Bible called Romans. You can imagine her shock when I asked, “You mean, Jesus was a real person? I always thought he was like Santa Claus, someone we are told about in the Bible just so that we behave.”  

Confronted with the reality that Jesus not only lived, but as my friend pointed out, was the most historically documented person in ancient history, I had to look more closely at what he was saying. This Jesus wasn’t, as I thought, a fictional character from a man-made book of rules claiming to be truth as a philosophical concept. He was a real person who made real claims that were recorded in a real historical book, and many of his claims were really radical. In fact, the claim to be the source of all truth was so ludicrous that it actually got him killed. Why? Because in claiming to be truth, he was claiming to be God.

My Questions Found Answers in Jesus

However, if Jesus was who he claimed to be, he was not out there and disconnected from my reality. He stepped into my reality and claimed to be its source. As the source of all truth and reality, he must even know my reality and what was going on inside of me—how I was made, all the bad things that had happened to me, and even the bad things I had done to others. He knew “how I got here.”

I wrestled with these thoughts for months until one day this verse hit me like a ton of bricks. “How can you say to your brother, ‘ Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye?”(Matthew 7:4). According to Jesus, I was a hypocrite, a sinner, and my sin was the thing that “got me here.” 

Until this point, I had believed I was a good person in need of some help. But, according to the Bible, nobody was good (Romans 10:3-10), not even one. I wasn’t a good person in need of help; I was a sinner in need of a savior. 

I had embraced the lie that I was good, and because God is truth, I was unable to see, hear, or understand reality. John 8:31-47). The arrogant narrowness of this God-man’s claims was, paradoxically, the highway to freedom. (John 10:9-11), and more abundantly, today and eternally with Him.

While I can’t say that my life is without its challenges today, I can face each day with joy and hope again. No matter what happens, I know the God who knows all things and holds it all perfectly together for good purposes. The unchanging truth of His word grounds me in an always-changing, increasingly confusing world. And no matter what happens to me in this life, I know where I am going, and Jesus will guide me there safely (John 6:39).

What about your life? Are you wondering how you got where you are? Perhaps it’s because of choices you’ve made. Perhaps it's because of things others have done to you. Maybe a mix of both. However you ended up where you are, Jesus stands ready to save you.