By Matt Friedeman, FAS Board member
I came from a great Christian family with involved Methodist parents. Their church, however, suffered from disappointing leadership in my youth. One day, I declared to my mother, “I’m never going back to that church again.” At age 12 I disaffiliated myself from the United Methodist Church—way before it was cool to do so!
My folks saw to it that I landed in the house church of my dad’s best friend. So, during the “Jesus Movement”—an era marked by bellbottoms, Larry Norman albums, the “Hollywood Free Paper,” and incense burning while singing early and pretty hokey Christian contemporary music—I “accepted Jesus” on the carpet of that humble house on Holland Street in Great Bend, Kansas.
Eventually, I went to college at the University of Kansas and became a conference champion and an All-American on the track and field team (discus thrower). But something happened at KU; I was beginning to drift away from Jesus. My sister Lisa’s fiancé was speaking at a youth revival, and she asked me to attend. One evening he preached on Numbers 13-14—the spies checking out the land but Israel deciding not to trust God and possess the Promised Land.
As I recall, my future brother-in-law said something like this: “Pursue the land Jesus has for you today, or you risk wandering for the next forty years.”
That frightened me.
I returned to my little white Volkswagen bug and started the two-hour journey home. Before long, the glory of God filled that little vehicle and, while I didn’t have the theological language then to express what happened, I was entirely sanctified.
A couple of years ago, I was preaching on Numbers 13-14 and in the middle of the sermon I started tearing up. It suddenly dawned on me during that message that it had been exactly 40 years since the youth talk that changed my life. In the intervening four decades, Jesus mercifully graced my life with purpose and a glorious lack of wandering.
My life since has been an abundant joyride with Jesus, marriage to my beautiful bride, the raising of six kids, teaching seminary, pastoring a church, and ministering in prisons. Like any joyride, there are the “downs” of failures, disappointments, and heartbreaks—but the “Yes” in Jesus is more than worth it. And, as we often say in our church, “the best is yet to come.”