As an ex New Age Evangelist, I am in awe of God that He would have mercy on me a God hating sinner and a Christ rejecting sinner like me. That He would of His love for me choose to show me His glory in the person and work of His Son the lord Jesus Christ and so bring me to repentance and faith.
I feel like the criminal who was crucified next to Jesus, and I do not mean the one who came to repentance and faith and said to Jesus, Lord remember me when you come into Your Kingdom, to which the Lord replied, I tell you the truth today you will be with me in Paradise.
I also felt ten thousand times worse that Thomas who stubbornly refused to believe that all the Apostles had seen the risen Christ and said, unless I see the nail marks in His hands and put my finger where the nails had been and put my hand into His side I will not believe. Only after Jesus appeared to him and told him, Thomas put your finger here, put your hand into my side, stop doubting and believe. And Thomas said to Jesus my Lord and my God.
But I feel like the other criminal that no one talks about, the one who even after hearing Jesus cry out Father forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing, continued to blaspheme God. Everyone assumes that man never repented but we do not know that, for I was like that man, and I repented because of God's patience and mercy on me.
I was a new age evangelist who had come to believe in the universe and not in the true and living God. I never thought about God, nor did I pray to God but prayed to the universe, as far as I was concerned there was no God. Then one day I read a book where the person mentioned there is a God who was there in the beginning and that has always existed and was the creator of Heaven and earth and sea and everything in them.
Well that blew my mind so much that I gave my life to God and just wanted to live to serve Him, though I still did not know that the Lord Jesus Christ was that very God, God the Son, the image of the invisible God, as the bible says God manifested in the flesh, God with us, the only person who had ever lived who was truly God and truly man in the One Divine Person .
I was doing comedy at the time and some of the people that I knew in the business had come to faith and this beautiful old couple began to share with me something I had never heard of and that is the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, they told me that God had sent His own Son into the world to save sinners by choosing to become one of them for the sole purpose that He would die for their sins and on the third day rise from the dead proving that He was the Son of God.
Everything was going ok until they said that Jesus said He was the way and the truth and the Life and that no one comes to the Father except through Him, then I lost it and said how narrow minded, not knowing that no one else in the history of the world had ever said that. I also never knew that no Religious Leader of any major world religion had ever claimed to be God or ever promised eternal life, forgiveness, and Heaven to all who believed in Him.
A little while after that I befriended a man who was even more sceptical than I was and even began to read the bible to make up comedy material and ended up repenting and believing himself. straight after that he also began to share the gospel with me. I will never forget our first conversation, he told me the New Testament was written by Eyewitnesses who had seen the risen Christ, and that Jesus was fully God like His Father, which was the most mind-blowing truth I had ever heard.
He told me that he would not speak to me anymore until I read the New Testament for myself. And there began my seeking to know who the true and living God is and I have not stopped seeking God with all my heart ever since then and the rest is history. I now know that God has mercy on the worst of sinners and to all who will humble themselves and believe in His Son and His death and resurrection and cry out to Him God be merciful to me a sinner , He will have mercy on them and freely justify them, that is forgive them and give them a right standing with Him , solely on the merits of His Son alone .
My prayer is for you my dear friend, whether you believe, are on the fence, don't believe or feel far away from God, the Lord Jesus is seeking you as He was seeking me and now He wants you to seek Him because He promises that all who seek Him with all their heart will find Him and If you find Him you have found infinitely more that every gift of God and infinitely more than every blessing of God, you have found the giver of every gift and every blessing and by faith He is yours and you are His, God richly bless your seeking of Him, you will never regret it.