“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (John 5:39-40).
This passage was shared with me by a friend who I will forever cherish in my heart. Its words will be with me for the rest of my life until I see Jesus face-to-face. If it were not for this friend—whom I firmly believe God had sent into my life for this very specific purpose—I would not have recognized that I had traditionalized Christianity with man-made religion just like the scribes and Pharisees.
Before That Day
A few months before that day, I was theologically narrow-minded and thought all things were black and white. I was spiritually prideful because I thought I knew enough about God’s Word. I held on to one perspective of Christianity so firmly that I was unable to grasp the reality of Jesus’ love and grace. Those two things were so hard for me to accept because I was so fixated on earning favor from God with my own self-righteousness.
I loved Scripture and theology so much to the point where I studied God’s Word for the sake of studying God’s Word. I had gained all sorts of insight from well-known Bible teachers who fed my craving for knowledge. I was puffed up, blind to my own sin of idolizing theology. I knew the gospel. I had “sound doctrine.” I had “right theology.” All of this was in the head, and none of it ever made it to the heart. I had totally missed the point. Jesus was not in view, theology was.
Everything in my life had begun to falter. My spiritual walk with God had gone cold. My heart was hardened like stone. I had no grief over my sins. I felt no convictions from the Spirit. These things led me to do all the more I could just to try and hear His voice again. I read and read but I couldn’t hear Him. I prayed day in and day out but the words went nowhere. I, for once in my life, was genuinely stuck and did not know what else I could do to fix my spiritual problem.
It wasn’t until one day that I read again two passages in Scripture. In Luke 5, the soon-to-be disciples struggled to catch fish all night. Jesus commanded them to cast their nets to a specific area and they did so, resulting in a miraculous catch of many fish. Immediately, Simon Peter, realizing Jesus was the Christ, fell to his knees and cried before Him: “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” To this, Jesus replied: “Do not be afraid.”
Reading this passage felt fresh for some peculiar reason. Although I had read it dozens of times, it felt like this was my first. I began to see my sin again. I felt unsaved. I thought I was unworthy to be in the presence of Jesus. It felt as if my eyes had finally begun to open again, almost like scales falling from my very eyes. I began to see the beauty of Christ once again.
I then flipped over a few pages from this passage and read John 21—a passage that shared great and real-life parallelisms with Luke 5. The narrative is as follows: The disciples struggled to catch any fish all night, Jesus commanded them to cast their nets to a specific area, and the disciples made another great catch. Before this, the disciples didn't know that this was Jesus because He was recently crucified; They thought He was dead. But when this miracle had happened—the same miracle performed at their initial calling—the disciples immediately knew it was the risen Lord. Jesus had all the right to rebuke the disciples for abandoning Him and denying Him at the cross, but He didn't. Instead, Jesus appeared to them, prepared breakfast for them, and re-established them.
Reading these passages brought two words to my mind: love and grace. The Lord had shown me that I didn’t need to do anything to earn His favor. He had revealed to me that I just needed to sit under both His love and grace because the work of God was already finished.
Instead of relying on my own self-righteousness, I was to trust in Him and His finished work on the cross. The burden was lifted. The deafening obstacles were removed. My heart of stone had become a heart of flesh. I was revitalized.
The Asbury Revival
A few weeks later, news broke out about the Asbury Revival drawing in thousands of people from all over the nation. Every day that I went on social media during that time, all I could see was the disgust, bitterness, and hypocrisy of many professing Christians—many, I would even say, from my own theological camp—shaming the Asbury Revival and its attendees. A revival that sprung from a typical college chapel service had somehow been attributed with false and discouraging narratives by many Christians all over the nation who were not even present at the event.
Mockery ran rampant. And no, I’m not only talking about the mockery of other Christians but of God. Professing Christians were mocking the almighty God, restricting Him to natural and theological limitations, saying that if God was truly reviving souls at Asbury, He would be doing so everywhere else.
Asbury didn’t have crazy strobing lights, reckless fog machines, or nonsensical things going on. If anything, all that Asbury had were long periods of song and prayer—two acts of worship mightily displayed throughout the Psalms. It may not have been perfect, but I can assure you that it glorified God in ways that we cannot imagine. Even if God’s own people were not pleased, God was. And that mattered most.
Seeing the outlash of many professing Christians made me profusely upset. When God chooses to reveal Himself to others in ways we don't expect, His own people are mad and skeptical to a new degree. The scribes, the Pharisees, and the brothers of Jesus were all like this. Why are we like this?
I shared these thoughts and feelings with my friend, and they were surprised that I felt this way because they actually expected me to be extremely skeptical, like most, due to my theological narrow-mindedness. Hearing this, I was captivated by profound thought. My friend was right. I was usually skeptical of any big event that bore God’s name. Why have I suddenly changed?
That’s when I realized God was doing something to me. He was changing me. He was deconstructing me of false beliefs I held on to for so long in life. He had shown me that theological traditions—although good—can only get us so far.
I began to see that not all beliefs in my theological tradition were scriptural and I had to strain them out, weighing them accordingly with God’s Word. I began to see that God, within a biblical framework, was not meant to be kept in a man-made, finite, and theological box. God is not a natural God after all; God is a supernatural God.
The Culmination of It All
All of these things had accumulated to that very moment when my friend shared the passage in John 5 with me. Not all things were as black and white as they seemed. I had made Christianity legalistic. I had made theology my god. I had made Jesus everything without grace and love. I had searched the Scriptures because I thought that in them I had eternal life, but I was wrong.
Like the Apostle Paul, whatever gain I had, I counted as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Jesus, so that I can be found in Him, not with a righteousness that comes from the Law, but from God through faith in Jesus. The day I fully deconstructed my beliefs was the day when I embraced the liberating truth that eternal life is found in Christ alone, not in Scripture nor theology.
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