Conversion Story: God Converts a Messenger
An Introduction
One of the first passages God directed me to, even before I converted, was Galatians Chapter 3 Verse 28:
There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.
Before God converted me from atheism, when Christians said things like: “God told me”, or “God led me to understand” or “God directed me to”, I did not understand the full meaning of what they were saying. Mostly they were telling me about things which are spiritually discerned. I will return to what I mean by “God directed me to” in the Revelation Happens section of this article.
If the written word is not your optimal mode of hearing testimony, you may want to skip to the Take Home Message by scrolling to the end.
God Himself Directly Evangelises
First, let’s tell a story.
As I posted previously, I was directly converted by God’s intervention. I was not brought to Jesus just by one thing (such as an article like this, a believer, the Church, or surviving a dramatic life-threatening event).
As an atheist one of my objections to Christianity was: “all that Jesus stuff is fine but what happens to someone who has never been reached by a missionary, never heard about Jesus, or who lived in a time before Jesus?” I thought to myself, it does not make sense that someone living in the wilderness would be disqualified from God just because of where (or when) they existed on Earth.
I had several thoughts like this which kept me in darkness, but I never actually studied them, or made a thorough enquiry at all. I had studied English literature to masters level, got in to medical school by teaching myself science, completed a medical degree, passed the Membership of the Royal College of Surgeons exams, then did a PhD in cardiothoracic surgical bioengineering. Clearly I did not mind studying. Yet, I never actually studied any of my spiritual questions beyond a passing reflection and a shrug of the shoulders.
In the event, in December 2023 God directly “evangelised” me himself. I did not know what evangelising was. If you had asked me, I probably would have said it is Christians knocking on people’s doors and asking them about Jesus. I knew people could have conversion experiences but (if I thought about it at all) I would have said that those people “found God” through their own seeking, not that God found them. I had no idea that God himself is at work around the world directly evangelising people.
When I say “evangelised”, the word just means that I had the “good news” brought to me (in Greek the word ‘evangelion’ essentially means the ‘good news’ — ‘gospel’ is the same but with English language roots). If you had asked me what an “evangelical Christian” was, I would have probably said it was a Christian with a more fervent or outwardly expressed belief than usual. I never would have imagined I would become one. Christians might use the analogy of God like a shepherd bringing back one of his lost sheep.
By directly intervening to bring me home, God also provided an answer to my question about people in the wilderness who have never heard Jesus’ message. He converted me in a phenomenal way, using my own situation and surroundings. It was so personal to me that it cannot be correctly described. There was not just one sign, or one change, but so many reinforcing signs and changes that it was impossible to explain it by anything other than God. You could use the analogy of a network of connected lights, or musical notes which come together to make a melody.
If this could happen to me, then it could happen to anyone, anywhere. For someone else, the signs and the mechanism would be personal to them. I would not be able to understand this any more than someone else could understand how it happened for me. I also would not be able to understand God’s entire plans throughout the ages. God worked in a certain way, here and now, for me. Many of the revelations came through mechanisms which were not written down or time-bound (such as nature or people) — so why would it be a barrier to God if someone had not encountered a human missionary or lived before Jesus walked on Earth?
Atheism and Mental Acrobatics
Most of the time, God gives the option to choose to believe or to not. This is because faith is (in-and-of-itself) something God wants us to have. As an atheist I did not understand this. My attitude was something like, “if God exists, let it be scientifically proven”.
Interestingly, this is similar to the attitude expressed by Stephen Hawking at the conclusion of his best-selling 1988 book, A Brief History of Time. His wife at the time, Jane, a Christian, had influenced his inclusion of a discussion of religion at the end of the book. Written from the point of view of an atheist scientist, he does not rule out the existence of God and includes God in discussions about the origins of the universe.
As an aside, Stephen Hawking’s survival with motor neuron disease for 55 years after his diagnosis is medically unheard of. He is the person with the world record (by far) for surviving motor neuron disease. When diagnosed in 1963 he was told he had about two years to live. Only 5% of patients live longer than 20 years and the next longest recorded survival time for one individual is a maximum of about 40 years. You can read more about this here: How Did Stephen Hawking Live So Long with ALS? | TIME.
If you had asked me three months ago, as an atheist medical doctor, how it was Stephen Hawking lived so long, I would have said the diagnosis cannot have been correct. Now I understand that this statement almost certainly would be false — an example of how atheists do mental acrobatics to believe any truth other than God. To me now as a converted believer, I see that God was at work. The probability of Stephen Hawking surviving that long without God’s involvement is so low, that it would require significant mental acrobatics to believe it.
Nonetheless, as an atheist listening to a Christian, I would choose to believe any explanation other than God.
I would argue that most atheists do not exactly disbelieve the Christian giving testimony of spiritually discerned truth (i.e. they don’t think the Christian is intentionally lying). The atheist hears, looks for another explanation and moves on.
Another atheist thinker, Richard Dawkins, described belief in God as “The God Delusion”. He has argued that believers fill in gaps of understanding of complex things with the most “simple” solution: God. Arguably, the atheist hearing a Christian truth also fills in an understanding gap: not God. In effect, it is sometimes easier for atheists to say “not God” and keep on walking the predictable path they know. If they stop and accept God might exist it could set them, right then-and-there, on a journey which would completely change their life. Atheists may say that Christians have to be apologists for their faith and perform considerable mental acrobatics to sustain their belief system. If atheists are intellectually honest, they would have to admit that this is true of their own world-view.
Revelation Happens
One of the issues I used to have with spiritual testimony is that people sometimes do not describe in explicit terms how God communicates with them. Perhaps they worry that the other person will think they are foolish. Perhaps they worry that it is a futile exercise, trying to put these things into words which may land flat.
I wrote at the beginning of this article: “one of the first passages God directed me to”. Let’s attempt to explain what this means in real terms.
It was not just that one low-probability event happened (that an atheist surgeon happened to process Galatians 3:28 with an unusual level of interest). A series of subsequent “low probability” events happened over time which illuminated the significance of the passage. A feeling was attached to these events, which Christians might describe as being filled with the Holy Spirit, but which an atheist might understand as an intuition or an intense feeling of special significance of the moment. In the photo above, I used the analogy of a chain of lights, some larger than others, flooded by the “total light” of the Holy Spirit.
Describing signs explicitly can be an alienating experience to those believers who have not received these things. I have spoken to believers of very deep faith, far better and more mature Christians than I am, for whom signs have not been a part of their journey. So if you do not want to read about these things, skip the next paragraph and (perhaps) take my word for it: after I stopped saying no to Jesus, God flooded me with signs and left me with no option but to believe.
To be explicit, “direction” included: posting Galatians 3:28 in reply to a question in an online doctors forum about the LGBT community “splitting the church”— a thread which subsequently got shut down by the moderators for being too religious (weeks later I was permanently banned for posting four links to articles about diversity and inclusion in the Church); remembering Galatians 3:28 and saying it (in person) to a believer when it came up in a conversation (to do with that believer’s concerns about the “negative” focus of some people in their own church); reinforcement of the passage by others from the Bible, such as Acts 8:38 — Philip baptises an Ethiopian eunuch (for which the matter is more important than the source and which I was directed to even though I did not own a Bible at the time); being directed to converse with exactly the right believer at exactly the right time to illuminate God’s messages (in a way that could not have been coincidence or “reading into” situations); being compelled to my knees and confessing my faith in front of multiple believers at a certain Pentecostal worship service which I did not know was happening, had never been to before and which was miles away from my own home; being directed to a multitude of sources from across the world which connected like a network (in a way that also could not have been chance); vivid signs coming through poems and music combined with related signs coming through the real world; a feeling of incredible joy and a total transformation of myself for the better which had no explanation other than God; a total positive transformation of my work life, my home life, the way I see people, my behaviour and my words; the sudden healing of a physical condition which had objectively proven signs and medical results (which amazed my own doctor and is very difficult to explain medically); a sudden and highly abnormal sensation of being lashed on the back with a whip accompanied by a strong invocation of Jesus’ suffering and which fits no known pattern of back pain in the medical textbooks; the direct answering of prayers which on one occasion included a call to Jesus for help, answered within seconds by a car driving slowly towards me on the wrong side of the road which showed me the path away from a certain non-righteous action on my part; God directly intervening to save me when Satan attempted to end my life; an optical phenomenon whereby an aeroplane appeared to stop mid-flight and be suspended in mid-air seen by two other people as well (one shouted “it’s flying backwards” and the other explained away the phenomenon as “just the way it was turning”); recurring signs and teachings about inclusivity in the Church; signs about the harm caused by pushing people away from Christ including women and the LGBT community; truths about the nature of the Bible and the “opposition” that God allows to occur, including against the translators of his Word; witnessing a girl speaking in tongues (directly into my ear and then repeated when, in my astonishment, I asked for it to be repeated — so that it was unmistakable) and myself experiencing a baptism of the Holy Spirit as described in John 7:37-39 and Luke 11:10-13.
These are glimpses of a personal journey given in the hope that reading this may bring others closer to God. In the end, it may be futile to transcribe spiritually discerned experience. One way to explain it is: if you hear music it would be ridiculous to say that music is not composed because the notes just fell together by random chance.
God left me with no other scientific explanation other than God. The only other explanation would have been madness, and yet I never experienced the psychiatric symptoms I had learned about as a medical doctor. Not one negative thing has happened from this process. I believed the same thing as billions of others past and present and my spiritual revelation led to beliefs aligned with the truth of Jesus. My life has been renewed and I have been taken out of darkness and brought into the light. I am almost two months into the conversion process and everything in my life is better, which does not fit with any diagnoses, which are characterised by negative effects.
I am a practising medical doctor, a cardiothoracic surgical registrar, with a real UK General Medical Council number. You can find me by a basic internet search. I take quite some risk posting some of my testimonies in this way. I only say this for the chance that it will bring someone closer to God.
If my former atheist self had read this story, I wonder what that person would have believed had happened to me?
The Spirit and The Word
Jesus is followed in the spirit as well as the letter. As his servant and his messenger he passes these ideas and questions to you through me, so that you may be brought closer to God.
As Jesus himself is recorded to have said (Matthew 22:37–40):
…love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind…love thy neighbour as thyself…On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets.
With gentle tone, for learning and becoming closer to God, the following questions may be useful: Are you acting in accordance with Jesus’ spirit? Or could you be letting yourself be deceived (and maybe even batting people away by mistranslated letters)? If you bat someone away, you might think you’ve scored big by hitting the ball out of the park — but is it likely that Jesus would need you to be his batter in this way? Could pride be what’s driving your bat-swing? What are the consequences if you are playing the wrong game?
If you misuse his God-breathed Word (which is subject to the opposition which He permits to exist) to attack His Spirit in another person, will you not be asked about this?
Take Home Message
If you have ever been hurt or pushed away from God by a church or an individual, my promise to you is that God is working to rectify this wrong. A revival has been prayed for and it is already happening. You are created in God’s image. Jesus does love you. He’s not going to say no to one of his children. If you ask, He’s going to bring you home:
For every one that asketh receiveth; and he that seeketh findeth; and to him that knocketh it shall be opened (Luke 11:10).
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Welsh Christian Revival
21st January 2024
