Still There

Many years after becoming a Christian, I found myself back in Limerick, Ireland, the city in which I once handed God an ultimatum that would ultimately change my life. “I am never going back to church,” I told Him, “until You show me the truth.” Twenty-five years later, I visited the church in which I had broken with my past and decided to stop in at the pub where I stayed during that time.

It appeared little had changed since my last visit a quarter of a century earlier, apart from the addition of video games and television screens.

Greeting a man seated at the bar, I asked him if he visited often. “I’ve been sitting in this same spot for thirty years,” the man told me.

“I could count on one hand the weekends I haven’t stopped in.” I was stunned. “I visited here early in 1991. You would have been here at the time,” I said. “No question about it,” he replied. “I would have been sitting right here.” Unaware of the circumstances of his life, I certainly didn’t want to pass judgment.

But for three decades, the man had been frequenting the same watering hole, drinking the same beer with more or less the same people.

I realized in that encounter what God had saved me from.

There was little reason to believe my life would have been substantively different had God not intervened to put me on an altogether different path.

In 1 Corinthians 6, Paul catalogs various sins he states will keep people out of the kingdom of heaven, including the sin of drunkenness. Then he reminds the believers in Corinth, “And such were some of you.

But you were washed, but you were sanctified, but you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus and by the Spirit of our God” (verse 11).

Faith in the death of Jesus transforms the life of the believer.

Whatever a person’s struggles, God looks forward to saying, “Such were some of you.” One’s past does not have to define one’s future.

Jesus offers a new start and a bright tomorrow.