The first time I heard the gospel was in 2017. I was in Panama City Beach, Florida, for a two-month-long beach discipleship retreat with my campus ministry. Briefly, to tell you a little bit about my experience: at the time, I was a sophomore in college, barely surviving school, dealing with plenty of broken relationships, a desire to know my purpose, and an obsession with pizza rolls and ramen noodles.
I had just become a part of this campus ministry, and they informed me about this trip, sort of missionary work, where college students gathered to learn about God, pray, worship, work an assigned job, and learn more about themselves within the Christian faith. While I was very reluctant and they were very relentless, I decided to attend.
To my surprise, it wasn't that bad. But inwardly, I was wrestling with so many questions and many more emotions, which left me feeling the same way I did before I came. Then, one day, I heard the gospel for the first time, and that night I couldn't sleep. How could God love me so much and know all the things I've done, my experiences that shaped me, the feelings of loneliness, a broken home, etc?
Yet, with Jesus, my sins were crucified on the cross and offered as a necessary sacrifice for the penalty.
The biggest concepts that I was reading about had transformed from my head to my heart.
Could the gospel simply be referring to me?
I immediately woke up the next day and ran to the first leader I saw and asked him, "How does forgiveness work?" At the time, I thought I was asking how to simply forgive everyone in my life, but in that moment, I was truly asking about the process of sanctification.
And that is what God did soon after.
For the next 8 years, God would mold me and shape me through the process of sanctification, and He still is today. What started for me in 2017 did not end that night. The gospel began transforming me then, and it continues to transform me now.
If you are a new believer, the process is hard and slow, often painful to understand, and even more challenging to admit, but it is good if you allow it. There is a taste of true freedom in Christ, with mistakes here and there, and a fire that burns purely. This is the infancy stage.
Then, you mature into an adult and spiritually graduate from the baby stage into a more advanced worshiper, learning about prayer, setting new boundaries, changing your friends and surroundings, and adapting into a serving-life mindset. This phase is your youth phase.
And next, you mature into a stable believer rooted in the faith, with an understanding of the gospel and how it shapes everything. You're not as hard on yourself, and you are relying on God more in faith. This is adulthood.
The gospel fits into all these categories. God does not value one stage more than the other because we will all have to walk the narrow path and journey for ourselves. But it is a journey. And because it is a journey, we can look ahead in hope that God's plan and will for our lives have not yet reached completion. Therefore we are still being sanctified.
I don't know everything that the next part of my journey will look like, but I know the gospel will continue to be at the center of it.
The gospel transformed my life in 2017, and it is still transforming me today. It guards my heart from straying. It holds me accountable when I am astray. It disciplines me when I do. It is my nourishment when my soul is hungry. It is my joy when I wake up and when I lay down. It is the beauty I see in people and in God's creation. And it is this hope in Jesus that comes from believing the truest words of the Bible, as pointed to in John 3:16: “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” God is my foundation, and the gospel is the bedrock of my story.
Prayer:
God, today I ask You to reveal Your truth to the person reading this devotional. I pray for their heart and mind, that they may become open to hearing the truth about who You are. May You conform them into Your likeness and shower them with Your goodness. May You satisfy their desires and not withhold anything good from them in the next days. Send more believers to them to allow Your beauty and love to be shown each day. I pray they find comfort in the gospel and in the process of sanctification, even when it is sometimes hard to see. Increase their faith and open their spirit to believe it. In Jesus' name, Amen.
