The following series is going to be about my personal experience with objective truth. It will feature the background in which I lived and the environment in which I quested for the ultimate question: Why am I here? This first post will simply be a summation, a get to know me in a quick way, or as one could call it the best place to start a testimony is always at the beginning. It is my hope you will all enjoy a small bit of myself.

When I grew up in an evangelical church environment in which I could ramble of verses from Ephesians chapter two, “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not your own doing, it is a gift from God,” or from Romans chapter three, “the righteousness of God through faith in Jesus Christ for all who believe,” that told me that it was my faith in Jesus that would walk me through the pearly gates at the end of time. That Jesus would enter into my heart and make me new, and all I had to do was accept Jesus as my personal Lord and savior, and that was it. I was taught that all my sins from that moment would be forgiven, past, present, and future. In my faith alone it did not matter what I did, and it did not matter what I didn’t do.

This was a sub-cultural norm found within that branch of Christianity. My evangelical roots tied themselves to Pentecostal movements such as Azusa Street, and even small tent revivals held in Bush Park in Salem Oregon in the 1990s. I grew up hearing messages from all sorts of great speakers from Bob Hope to Billy Graham, even sermons by R.C Sproul. This was a cultural movement inside of American Protestantism that shared in no small manner faith that went back to the Reformation, especially John Calvin. This all is to say that while it might have been evangelical on the face, at its roots it was Calvinism. In my opinion the best term would be to call it Neo-Calvinism with a healthy dose of Baptist thrown in for good measure. This is the historical background I found myself, and that I fell in love with the Bible, and with Jesus Christ. But it would not be into this group that I would find myself being baptized, instead, it was not until I was thirty years old that I would enter into the baptismal covenant with Jesus Christ and have my sins washed away. In short I came to Jesus the Bible way.