My story isn’t uncommon to many of yours. I grew up in the local church. We were active in attending and my mother was a faithful servant in the kids ministry, and in time, so was I. I vaguely remember “asking Jesus into my heart” as a preschooler and would say that I believed Jesus had died for my sins. I was baptized at ten and when I entered youth group I became an active participant in small group, mission trips, and Sunday night youth service.
Growing up, I always felt the clash of flesh and Spirit. I can look back and see sin patterns and behaviors that, though I knew what I was doing or how I was acting was sin, I had no power to stop or change it. My false gospel was limited to “Jesus gets you on the team but once on it you’re on your own to keep your spot.” My sense of right standing before God ebbed and flowed with whether I did or didn’t sin compared to the things I did for God. As a result, I wandered away from the church for the better part of seven years during and after college.
My wandering wasn’t the result of unbelief in Christian things but rather God handing me over to sin. I spent years trying to “live according to the flesh,” as Paul would say (Romans 8:5), only to find myself unsatisfied. I knew the way I was choosing to live was contrary to how God created me to live, but I had no power to stop sinning and thought I had to clean myself up before coming to God.
But God.
Through the colliding of worlds with my wife (Spring), moving to Fayetteville and being invited to Veritas by a coworker, God was working to bring me and Spring to Himself. At Veritas we heard the Gospel preached and, for the first time, understood and believed that Jesus not only gets you on the team through his life, death, and resurrection, but keeps you on it, too. The eyes of my heart were opened to receive Jesus’s grace and forgiveness through faith in what he had done for me. God’s love and grace are endless. Jesus’s finished work is enough. The Spirit gives life to all those who come.
For Jesus,
Travis Fulp
Director of Family Life