Shaped by the Cross (IV)
This is Part 4 of my personal testimony and my spiritual autobiography.
3. Call to Ministry
In retrospect, those two years coordinating worship at CCF was a time in the trenches in which God was molding me into a better spiritual leader. I made lots of mistakes along the way and was far from perfect, but still, God used all my good and bad experiences to teach me what true worship was, what true humility involved, and what genuine mentorship required. In the midst of mentoring the next Worship Coordinator of CCF, I also began feeling a call from God towards a leading a larger ministry and taking a greater responsibility. Through Campus Challenge, the yearly campus ministry conference run by Ambassadors for Christ for Southern Ontario CCFs, God opened a door for me to be the Worship Coordinator for the conference.
At that first conference I coordinated, I learned a great deal about the importance of the word of God that was expressed through songs of worship, as well as the importance of painting a big, clear picture of God Himself through the times of singing. God taught me that before we could ever sing anything to Him, He first must show us Himself. Before any response happens on our part, God must reveal Himself to us. Worship is our all consuming response to the all-deserving revelation of God, and it begins with a true vision of the living, and not with us saying things we may not mean. It was through the two years of coordinating worship for the Campus Challenge conference that, looking back, I could see now that the LORD Almighty was high and exalted, and was asking me, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”
During my last couple years of university, I was also being immersed into God’s infallible Word through Sunday School—not just as a student learning, but also as a teacher leading my brothers and sisters at church in studying Scripture. I accepted the invitation by my church’s Sunday School Deacon to teach Sunday School, and began teaching Paul’s letters to the Colossians, Ephesians, Galatians, as well as a course on New Testament men of God, and the Ten Commandments. It was through teaching those Epistles and being taught by my Pastor on the book of Romans that I grew to have a great interested in the Doctrines of Grace and Reformed theology. As I taught those classes on the doctrines of sovereign election, divine foreknowledge, and substitutionary atonement, I also began to struggle with a lot of issues and questions I had from the Scriptures. Before the beginning of my last year of university in August 2005, my girlfriend of five months suddenly broke off our relationship. I knew not the reasons for a long time, and vaguely understood them to be incompatibility, where she thought I was not who she thought I was. During my second last term of school, I fell into a bit of mild depression, thinking that I had failed God to be a good leader in the relationship. I have not experienced much “significant life experiences” over the years, but this has felt like the most momentous event so far—certainly having a negative effect on my academic performance.
(To be continued…)
In this series: (Download PDF of the entire autobiography)
