How did you become Reformed?

[Learner]

I was raised as a Plymouth Brethren and that influenced
me in some negative ways.I went to a LIBERAL, Liberal Arts
College and started to attend an Evangelical Free Church.Though it is not reformed the pastor and I attended one of the reformed conferences at 10th Presbyterian in
Philly.One of the teachers at my college(also a PB)told me
(after I asked what author I should read for Christian growth)
to check out Dr.L-Jones.So I went through most of the early volumes of his Roman series at the college library.The Doctor
was wonderful.He was quite the tonic.Not only was his expo-
sition so different and clear and God-exalting,I started to develop a real love for Church History.I noted all the names
of historical figures and movements.He is responsible(humanly speaking)for bringing me along the Calvinistic path.
R.C.Sproul's books were a staple for me in the early and mid-eighties.I have noticed how many on this board have been helped spiritually by him.
Staying with the E.F.for 18 years was way too long.I have
no idea why I stayed so long while better churches were available to me.I finally joined a Reformed Baptist Church.Now,in S.Korea I fellowship with an independent,fundamental group.It's not reformed,but I know you can guess that my options are limited.The pastor is godly
and seeks to be as biblical as possible within his background.

 

[cupotea]

I was

Raised in a decidedly Arminian, dispensational Southern Baptist Church.

After many years I became so boggled by the inconsistancies of man's libertarian free will, the "accept Jesus, walk down the isle TONIGHT cuz you might get hit by a truck when you leave here and die without Jesus" mentality. I had this visual of Jesus pacing heaven, wringing his hands and grieving over man not accepting him and that so didn't jive with what a sovereign God should be like that I walked away from the faith.

Years later I realized that I just didn't have it right and got involved in church again. The same battles sprang up within me but I kept plugging away.

Then...I got involved in internet message boards. About two years ago, there was a major flame war on my board between a Calvinist and an Arminian. I decided to read everything I could get my hands on about Calvinism in order to debate the Calvinist and champion my board.

I read Lorraine Boettner, thought he was a she, and all of a sudden things weren't looking too Arminian anymore. I took over a year off the internet, buried myself in Scripture and when I came away with my understanding of the Doctrine's of Grace, all the inconsistancies that had plagued me for years were gone.

Soli Deo Gloria

 

[sundoulos]

Although my parents were both raised in the Dutch Reformed Church neither were Christians until I was about 8 yrs. old. Their background did little to help them although they made me memorize some of the Heidelberg and Westminster catechisms.

We attend all sorts of churches when I was a child. After I was saved I really didn't care what kind of a church I went to. Eventually I ended up not going at all. God called me to repentance and I started studying the book of Romans on my own. Chapter 9 did a number on me.

At the same time my Dad started attending a Reformed Baptist church and we communicated our new beliefs to each other. It was a while -- a long while -- before I embraced particular atonement and that came about from listening to Al Martin's sermon on the unity of God.

 

[ReformedWretch]

My church doesn't take a bold stance either way right now (give it time) but I have come to reformed theology simply from reading the bible!

Sounds overly simple I guess, but it's true!:yes:

 

[tcalbrecht]

[quote:660110aa31][i:660110aa31]Originally posted by houseparent[/i:660110aa31]
My church doesn't take a bold stance either way right now (give it time) but I have come to reformed theology simply from reading the bible!

Sounds overly simple I guess, but it's true!:yes: [/quote:660110aa31]

Is this a Chuck Smith-style Calvary Chapel? I thought they were anti-Calvinists.

 

[ReformedWretch]

I've heard that before, but from what I understand they say they don't follow Calvinism or Arminianism.

I have definately been blessed just in the study of the word there! I will look further into this. But I know our pastor supports it! I have spoke to him at length about it.

 

[FrozenChosen]

Well, I used to attend a huge SBC church (3,000-5,000 members) and the pastor preached in an Arminian fashion, but a new twist was about to be, uh, twisted. My father became really frustrated and torn up by predestination, so this pastor told him to check out a magazine called Table Talk! The guy was a closet Calvinist but he preached in an Arminian sense, yikes!

So my dad got into it, and confronted the pastor, and because the pastor didn't see anything wrong with focusing on free will exclusively, my dad left. We joined the PCA church in Pensacola you see in my signature, and that was not too much of a shock, since I was only like 10 or 12.

I learned a little about the doctrines but most of it went in on ear and out the other.

After a while, I went through a period of rebellion against God in which I considered myself an antheist. Gracefully, God brought me back quickly. This little incident happened fairly recently. A couple years ago.

I began to read more of this thing called "theology." In the first semester I was at Auburn, I read [i:7dc550c83c]Chosen by God[/i:7dc550c83c] and definitely went beserk, as us reformed individuals tend to once God grabs us by his word.

Anyways, I'm still reforming today. Still consider myself a babe compared to you giants on this board, but Lord make me humble and teach me.

 

[mjbee]

I don't really know. I walked into bookstores with money in my pocket and books jumped into my arms. Why on earth would a stupid person like me buy Pink and Packer and Sproul? Well, the books were there, and they found me. But I gotta confess, as I type this, I have really loud disco party music playing in the living room and I occasionally go out there and dance with my puppy-dogs.

Bee

 

[Bernard_Marx]

I cut my teeth, Christianly speaking, in arminian dispensationalist circles. In grade 13 I even did a paper that sought to philosophically destory Calvinism, which I hated.

However when I went to my first year of Bible college I began to change a little in my thinking. I decided that passages like "Jacob I loved, Esau I hated" were not given any justice by being ignored or glossed over. With this decision the ball started rolling. The next year I met someone who was vociferously calvinistic. We talked, I read some Sproul and I converted, so to speak.

 

[cupotea]

It never ceases to amaze me the ways in which God choses to reveal truths to us. The way I seem to run across more and more is when we set out to prove the lies of Calvinism and finally see the truth.

I'm fond of saying that I am not Reformed, I am Transformed. Coming to an understanding and acceptance of the Doctrines of Grace has wrought changes in me that are unbelievable.

 

[Poimen]

Originally posted by JohnV
PS:
I grew up in a Reformed church, with the Three Forms of Unity as our standards. Ideologically, it was as thoroughly Reformed as I believe can be. But in actual practice, I'm afraid that one would be hard pressed to call it Reformed. They now have women and homosexual preachers. As a first generation member of my particular congregation, I have seen her fall from the height of her ideology to the depth of her apostasy. Its a sad story.

JohnV

John, it sounds like you were a good ol' CRC boy like me. N'est pas?

 

[Poimen]

Originally posted by Paul manata
I used to not be a Christian. I thought all christians were arminian. I would debate them using calvinistic arguments...even though I had never heard of calvin or reformed theology...I just thought they were inconsistant with the Bible. So...I was an atheist.

I talked to a WTS seminary student...prepared to wipe the floor with him (because, remember, I thought all christians were arminian) used my arguments...he said..."your right." we then had many long talks about the typical things, e.g., that's not fair. But when I finally repented I was calvinist from the get go.

Wow! Do you mind sharing the student's name?

 

[sastark]

Coming over from the other thread....

By the grace of God, I was born into a reformed family. Praise God!

 

[WrittenFromUtopia]

Scripture.

 

[Romans922]

I started to read the Bible.

 

[VirginiaHuguenot]

Continuing the train of thought from another thread...My anti-US Constititution political convictions lead me to learn about a group called the Scottish Covenanters. A friend and a cousin at that time providentially introduced me to the Reformed Faith. Then I took a 3-week trip through Germany by train and read all of Calvin's Institutes. By the time I came back to the States, I had embraced the doctrines of grace and began my new journey as a Reformed Presbyterian Christian.

 

[rmwilliamsjr]

I grew up in a Lutheran church but it was a social not religious experience. I became a Christian reading Rushdoony's Institutes of Biblical Law in my early 20's. I've been to OPC, EvP or PCA churches since.

 

[PuritanCovenanter]

I was born dead in Sin. Unchurched in childhood. Was convicted that I was so sinful at age 18 that I picked up a Bible and started to read it. Matthew convinced me of my sin. John showed the the diety of Christ and His Chosing me. I just believed John 15:16. Things happening to me at that time were just a bit to out of the ordinary. It was like I was being played. So I just believed what the scriptures said. I was introduced to an 1689 LBCF Church without knowing it and I just started walking with God.

PROVIDENCE

God bless the Navy, the Navigator Ministry, and My Cradle Church.

 

[Authorised]

My brother, who wasn't even a Calvinist at the time, dicussed it with me. We never opened the scriptures once in the conversation. I basically became a Calvinist through logic.

 

[ReformedWretch]

Originally posted by houseparent
My church doesn't take a bold stance either way right now (give it time) but I have come to reformed theology simply from reading the bible!

Sounds overly simple I guess, but it's true!:yes:

I've changed churches sine this post JFYI

 

[jaybird0827]

I was baptized on October 6, 1946 at First Reformed Church (Dutch Reformed), in Bayonne, NJ. By that time the church had become thoroughly modernist. That church united with the Christ Presbyterian Church in 1952 becoming First Federated Church. Dutch Reformed liberals and Presbyterian liberals got along very well in those days.

Somehow in spite of growing up in a congregation that was in control of the liberals, I managed to pick up the teaching that God is sovereign. I think I got that from home and maybe from "Sunday School" teachers who were possibly believers. None of my family were believers. But in our home nobody, and I mean nobody, ever questioned that God is sovereign.

I lost my father to heart failure when I was 13. Our next door neighbors were a couple about my parents age. I had older parents. I ended up adopting them as 2nd parents because Mr. Gary became like a 2nd father. He was a Presbyterian elder. First Presbyterian Church in Cranford was just as modernist as First Federated. We didn't go there. We went to the Methodist church closer to our house. That was far worse.

Mr. Gary had Calvin's Institutes and the Confession of Faith and Catechisms on his bookshelf. Not only did he have them, he read them, and he held to them. He had a profound influence on my life especially in the high school years.

I was converted some time between ages 19 and 28. I don't know. I had quit going to church at all in high school because there was like no purpose in going to the Methodist church. I went the Sunday before graduating high school for the Baccalaureat Service. That was strictly for Mom.

The summer I turned 19 I read a book, Answer Me This that had been written by some Episcopal rector. That was the first time in my life I ever heard that the reason you did certain things in church was because of the Bible. He even said something about the Psalms being the hymnbook of the ancient Hebrews. I was like "Wow. Maybe we should be doing that. But maybe that would be tricky trying to put that to music. I wonder how you could do that."

I ended up joining a Presbyterian (UPCUSA then) Church in Clark, NJ about 2 miles from my home in Cranford when I was 19. Church was better now because I knew more what worship was about. As far as I knew, that minister was a believer but more likely Arminian. He said all the right things, though, especially regarding the offer of grace by Christ in the gospel.

I spent 3 years on staff of Campus Crusade. The 4 Spiritual Laws increasingly became a struggle and I really never was comfortable with "appropriating the fulness of the Spirit." They blew it when they required some of us to take a course in Bible Study and the instructor chose to have us study the book of Romans. By the 9th of Romans it was all over.

I was in Africa with their Agape Movement ministry teaching in a government school in Swaziland. I decided that it would be best to finish out my "tour", fulfill my promises to my supporters, and return to the States when that was over. I never did use the 4 Laws as a "witnessing tool" again, so I could not chalk up any stats as far as talking to people. I "left staff" after debriefing and resumed my teaching career in a Christian school in Florida.

The clincher came roughly 4 years later when I found myself teaching at a Christian high school in Norfolk and a buddy who was attending a RPC/ES church on the Peninsula started explaining what he was learning. I was like "you mean, there ARE churches that believe that Romans 9 really means what it says?" That was the beginning of my recovery.

I got convicted of Psalmody in the 1990's. A Presbyterian elder who didn't hold to it helped get me there. Another story. I still remember the day when a friend showed me The Psalms of David in Metre. I'm like "Where did you get that????" We started using it for family worship and we didn't even have the tunes. We just scrounged up all the common meter and double common meter tunes from the "hymnbooks" we had acquired over the years. I fought back tears the day a copy of the split-leaf Psalter arrived in the mail, a gift from an elder in the Presbyterian Reformed Church.

We joined the Presbyterian Reformed Church in late 1995. To make a long story short, it only dawned on my recently that I had been looking for 30 years for the only church home where I would ultimately be comfortable.

Obviously there is a lot that I didn't mention. If you really knew me then you would know that all this is but by the grace and mercy of God.

 

[polemic_turtle]

Well, I was sort of in-between or far right or whatever you call it. I view myself as still coming out of it, but I was once the Landmarkist Hyper-Calvinistic sort of Baptist, though I was so only through implicit faith in what my church professes to be true. I am no longer Hyper or Landmarkist, but remain a Baptist, possibly because I've never known anything else, though I have yet to see why I need change in that regard( I met my first live Presbyterian this year; my sister babysits their children ). I accept the phrase Reformed simply because I've never learned theology from anything, but reformed writers and teachers, so... "Isn't the reformed faith grand?!" -Machen

P.S. I was once a Member of Adrian Roger's church, though I doubt my conversion at that point.

 

[beej6]

I became Reformed at the same time I became a Christian. By the grace of God, my then-girlfriend, now wife Teresa, was attending an independent Reformed church (which later joined the OPC) and she led me there. We became members there (though not married there!) and later became very involved in that church.

BTW, I was raised Catholic.