He opened my eyes. All of the things my parents had taught me. All of the verses I had memorized. It all suddenly clicked. I actually believed it. I didn’t have the theology for it at the time, but I got saved. It wasn’t in some dramatic moment. I didn’t pray a prayer. I didn’t walk an aisle. But I remember distinctly in my senior year of high school looking back and realizing that something was different. I no longer loved sin.

About 20 years ago, the Lord saved me. I grew up in church my whole life. I had parents who brought me to church every Sunday morning, Sunday night, and Wednesday. My parents had my siblings and me memorizing Scripture from my earliest memories. I was a relatively “good” kid. I was nice, polite, and didn’t like getting in trouble. Add to that the fact that I was a hyperverbal, articulate child from an early age, and I became a very convincing false convert. I was baptized as a professing believer around the age of six, but my heart had not really been changed.

As I got older, I was still a nice kid. I didn’t like getting into trouble, I respected my teachers, and was fairly good in school. I was also at every church function and began to lead in the youth group stuff. But that unchanged heart began to show itself. And you know how it is: the heart stuff really starts to appear, well, in the heart. I began to really dabble in sin, but always secretly. Maybe I was alone in my sin, or maybe it was with someone else, but it was always a secret. I didn’t want anyone to know. And not because I hated the sin, but because I was ashamed of being found out. I was in self-preservation mode. I loved the sin. I did most of the worst, most consequential things by myself. No one to impress. Just me and my love for sin.

Still in the thick of church life and living in a God-fearing home, I began to feel the weight of my hypocrisy. I knew I was being two-faced. How could I live like this in private, but then pretend like all was well at church? How could I love my sin, and claim to love Christ too? I started to see others around me, friends, family, start to walk into really life altering sins. I began to see my fruit.

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