How God Shaped My Faith: Ten Influences That Transformed My Christian Life

Summary

This article traces the author’s journey from shallow church involvement to a transformed Christian life shaped by grace. A clear understanding of the gospel, modeled faith through mentors, daily Scripture and prayer, and intentional discipleship became defining influences. By slowing down to truly engage God’s Word and learning from faithful believers, the author discovered lasting peace, spiritual growth, and a lifelong calling rooted in grace rather than performance.

How God Shaped My Faith

Christianity played a minor role in my youth, despite spending over fifteen hundred hours in church sanctuaries. It didn’t significantly influence my goals, values, or thought life.

I was taken to church. Not going wasn’t an option. Church was something I attended, not the essence of who I was. It was like working on my uncle’s celery farm. I spent many hours doing it, but didn’t particularly like it. The following is the story of how God shaped my faith.

Confused Beliefs and a Lack of Peace

My beliefs were a confused mixture of God’s grace and my performance. They brought no peace to my heart. I had no confidence that I would go to heaven when I died. I wasn’t sure I did enough good things to deserve it.

A Dorm Room Encounter with the True Gospel

God corrected my misunderstanding of the gospel one evening in my college dorm room. Several men from The Navigators (a faith ministry supported by the contributions of individuals and churches) shared the same story I had heard hundreds of times in my home church about Jesus’s death, burial, and resurrection as God’s provision for my sin.

Their good news seemed old news to me. Although I heard it countless times as a youth, I only partially understood it. I didn’t understand God’s grace.

Understanding Grace for the First Time

They shared 1 John 5:11-12 (KJV) with me. “And this is the record, that God hath given to us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. He that hath the Son hath life; and he that hath not the Son of God hath not life.”

God used those verses to switch on a spiritual light in my life and to give me spiritual life.  For the first time, I understood that my good behavior doesn’t earn eternal life. Jesus did everything necessary. I could not add to it. God didn’t expect me to. For the first time, I had peace in my heart.

So, I have been reflecting on the most significant shaping influences in my Christian life since it all began in my college dorm room. Here they are, in no particular order.

Seeing Faith Lived Out in Others

Outside my family, I never saw anyone modeling the Christian life in my youth. I attended church services, but I spent little time with church people outside of church. I had no idea how their Christian beliefs affected their daily lives. I lacked Christian models.

Spiritual Mentors Who Walked with Me

The Navigators I met were oddly different from any Christians I knew. They lived and breathed their faith. Through their influence, I began daily devotions, small group Bible studies, attending Christian conferences, Scripture memory, and sharing my faith with others.

They pointed me in the right direction and walked with me. They didn’t tell me to do things they weren’t. It was show-and-tell Christianity every step of the way. They were the first fully committed Christians I had ever met.

Learning to Share Faith and Serve

Several years later, I became involved in Cru at Penn State University while working for the Pennsylvania Fish Commission. It was the same show-and-tell faith mentoring I had experienced through The Navigators, with an even greater emphasis on sharing my faith with others.

While I was part of that ministry, I responded to a challenge by Blair Cook, one of my mentors, to give my life to full-time vocational Christian service. That led to spending two years on Cru’s staff working at North Dakota State University. I learned more about following Christ and shared my faith with and discipled students during those years, but that ministry didn’t seem like the best fit for my spiritual gifts, especially the gift of teaching.

Preparing for Ministry Through Seminary

I attended seminary to prepare for a lifetime of ministry. The Trinity Evangelical Divinity School professors demonstrated how to teach God’s word and were my teaching mentors. My experience in pastoral ministry taught me that simple, practical, Bible-based teaching was most effective.

Discovering Daily Bible Reading and Prayer

When young men from the Navigators visited me in my dorm room, I didn’t know what daily devotions were. I had never previously met Christians who spoke about spending daily time in God’s Word and prayer. These guys explained and encouraged me to begin the practice.

Initially, I didn’t. The next time I saw them, they asked how my devotions were going. I was surprised they would ask me that. I began reading the Bible and praying daily because they held me accountable.

My goal became to read through the Bible every year. I spent relatively little time praying compared to the time reading the Bible. Now, I spend more time in prayer than reading.

I read one chapter daily instead of the three chapters required to finish all 66 books in twelve months. When I worked my way through the entire Bible annually, often very little of it stuck.  I didn’t spend time thinking about what I was reading.

My goal was to read through the Bible, not to receive spiritual food for the day. I was missing the main point of spending time with God. The goal is not information but spiritual transformation to become more like Jesus.

Slowing Down to Be Spiritually Nourished

My daily pattern changed in December 1981. I slowed down my journey through the Bible and read one chapter daily. I began to write in one to three sentences what God was saying to me through His word each day.

God’s word has been much more spiritually nourishing since I stopped, looked, and listened. I read the Life Application Bible and often consult its notes to clarify meaning or application.

My devotions have an assigned time and place in my life. I read while I am eating breakfast alone at our kitchen table. I pray on my bed about half an hour after breakfast, sometimes while I do my stretching and strengthening exercises. On Wednesdays, I pray for The Timothy Initiative ministry.

Encouragement of My Gifts and Ministry

What wind is to a fire, encouragement is to effective ministry. While coaching throwing events at a local high school, I seek to find something positive to say about each thrower’s efforts in a sport where frustration can easily reign unopposed.

I grow lettuce in cut-down plastic gallon milk containers. Unless it rains, I water the plants every day. The small amount of soil dries out quickly. Left unwatered for a hot summer week, the plants will die.

Without the watering of encouragement, people’s ministries dry up quickly. I am thankful for those who have encouraged my writing ministry. Encouragement is a key ingredient in discovering our spiritual gifts and ministry.

If our ministries are ever to bear fruit that will remain, regular watering makes all the difference. One responsibility of Christians is to encourage what other Christians do that blesses them. We dare not remain silent when experiencing the fruits of others’ ministry to us. That is how those who bless us discover God’s purpose for their lives.

In 2021, I sent the original manuscript of my book, His Power for Your Weakness: 260 Steps Toward Spiritual Strength, to a man whose opinion I greatly respect, asking him to review it. He could have killed it with a negative evaluation. His very positive, “I LOVE IT,” encouraged me to take the next step so that God could use and bless people through it.

Using Technology to Reach People for Christ

Our spiritual output is no less important than our spiritual input. “When you produce much fruit, you are my true disciples. This brings great glory to my Father” (John 15:8 NLT).

I was a below-the-radar pastor who never directed a large church. The average worship attendance of the rural churches I served never surpassed 100.  I have never preached to more than 170 people, while my dream has been to touch as many people for Christ as possible.

I am not a dynamic speaker. My content usually outshines its presentation, although my wife says I am improving in my old age! Significant influence for Christ seemed forever beyond my grasp. But then technology changed everything.

Technology opened ministry doors that didn’t exist when I began my pastoral ministry. It started when no one volunteered to create a website for the church I served about 13 years ago. I used Weebly to construct it and included many of the discipleship resources I had written. I noticed people from around the world were accessing these resources.

After I retired, I created a Christian Growth Resources website and Facebook page. I began posting two blogs each week. I learned through trial and error, a lot of the latter! Interest in those blogs slowly increased.

I learned that I must pay to boost blogs to reach considerably more people. God brought my twin brother into this ministry as a major supporter. I was initially amazed by how much more interest there was in my blogs in Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, and Liberia than in the United States. I boosted my blogs in those five countries.

I boosted blogs that contained the heart of the Christian message and designated Christians in those five countries as the recipients. One of the blogs was “Why I Believe in the Resurrection of Jesus,” and another was “Jesus Is Lord.” Recently, the “Jesus is Lord” blog I boosted in India, Nigeria, and the Philippines has received 10,000 engagements daily for $4.00 spent. In the U.S., that money would cover only 5 first-class stamps if I mailed out my blog's message.

Since I began the boosts, they have reached more than 70 million people, with more than seven million engaging with them and tens of thousands sharing them with their Facebook friends.

Thanks to my daughter’s technical help, more than 1,900 people click on my websites monthly, including a church website I created 13 years ago.

I organized my first 260 blogs into a book, His Power for Your Weakness: 260 Steps Toward Spiritual Strength, and sent a digital copy to a pastor in Malawi in 2021. He used it to follow up new believers in Jesus.

He began teaching the content of the book in class after class. We have provided him with Chichewa Bibles for those in his classes who don’t have a Bible.

He sends me a picture of class members holding up their new Bibles for every class. More than 7,500 people in the classes have received Jesus as their Savior and Lord. Many other pastors began to teach my book in Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia.

The vision is to reach 50,000 people in these classes by the end of 2030. We estimate there will be 22,000 new believers by then.

God has used this obscure rural pastor to touch far more people in retirement than during his 35-plus years of pastoral ministry. Technology has made it possible, but God gets the glory, and the rural pastor remains obscure!

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