A new joy and light began to flood my thinking and heart. I marveled at God and the fact that I could know Him. I started reading the Bible regularly (a KJV I had from growing up) and I started praying. I found that I suddenly enjoyed singing worship songs and I experienced a sweetness of drawing near to Him that filled my heart with gladness and wonder. I even started telling others about Christ-something which would have been utterly foreign before. I started writing songs about knowing God. (You can find some of the songs I wrote later on here).
I also experienced a conviction of sin and an awareness that I was a sinner. What I had done in high school in relationships with girls, who were clearly not my wife, was wrong and evil. Trying to live for music or friends or being in a relationship with a girl instead of God was wrong and evil. God is God and deserves our love and worship; to forsake God and put other loves before Him is a form of spiritual adultery (see the book of Hosea). In an act of repentance, I called up one of my ex-girlfriends and apologized. In addition to this, I sensed a conviction of sin over other areas of my life: God was showing me how absolutely clouded my life was with sin, but also how deep and amazing was His grace, love, and mercy toward me in Christ.
Through all this, God was comforting my heart and filling me up with the knowledge of Him. I began to know experientially that God really is the “God of all comfort” (2 Cor 1:3). He comforted me in my pain and confusion, He comforted me with the truths of the gospel and His love for me. This was a love truly better than any other love I had known, one that was better than life (Ps 63:3). Continue reading
