MY JESUS STORY
My name is Ed Grifenhagen. I'm the pastor/evangelist at Church On The Trail in Midland, GA (100 miles SW of Atlanta). I've been married to the love of my life, Susan, since 1988. I have two married sons, Zach and Will, 2 awesome daughters-in-law, Kelly and Amelia, and 4 beautiful grandchildren, Zachary, Caroline, Addie, and Eloise. My passion is to see the fire of revival sweep across our great nation in a mighty way. But first we need to back up to 2001.
I really needed to talk to my parents, but I didn’t know what to say. I just needed to tell them what happened that morning and the events that led up to that morning. My dad and I had worked together every day for ten years and we were thick as thieves. In addition to that, I knew they absolutely would not want to hear what I had to say. No parent wants to feel like their kid is betraying them and their heritage. In fact, the last thing I would ever want to do is disappoint my folks.
“I need to talk to ya’ll. Are you gonna be home tonight?” I asked my father. That was the afternoon of January 17, 2001. The Lord saved me in the dark, wee hours of that very morning and I needed to tell my mom and dad. You see, I grew up in a “religious” Jewish home. I was born on September 8, 1965 and had a brit milah, a ritual circumcision, eight days later on September 16. This event signified my entrance into the Jewish covenant community of Adonai (the LORD).
As a Jewish kid, I attended Sunday School every Sunday beginning at age four. Jewish Sunday School tends to be a bit different than Sunday School in a church. It’s two to three hours long and very academic in nature. I went to Hebrew School on Tuesdays and Thursdays after school from 4:00-6:00 PM. We didn’t read and study the Bible in Sunday School or Hebrew School. We learned basic Hebrew, learned about the Jewish culture, about Israel, and learned about the many Jewish holidays. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, I remember having to change into my football clothes at the 5:00 break so that I would not be any later to football practice than was absolutely necessary. Occasionally I would take some heat from other guys on my football teams about it, but my parents said, “Hebrew School trumps football!”
My family also attended services on Friday nights and Saturday mornings at Shearith Israel Synagogue on Wynnton Rd. in the heart of Columbus, GA. The Jewish Sabbath begins at sundown Friday and ends at sundown on Saturday. Most of the services were in Hebrew, which made it pretty difficult to have any idea of what was being said. We kept “kosher” at home, which means we followed the dietary laws in the Old Testament . . . no pork, no shellfish, no mixing of meat products and milk products, etc.
As a Jew, the New Testament and Jesus, in particular, were not an issue. If you are a Christian, the previous sentence is probably shocking to you, but I had zero knowledge about who Jesus was and I didn’t believe the New Testament was part of the Bible. I was not taught that Jesus wasn't the Messiah or that the New Testament was wrong. It just was not an issue. It wasn't discussed, period. As an aside, no one EVER shared the Gospel with me . . . ever. And, “yes,” I grew up in the Bible belt and “no” I never heard the Gospel from anybody. Wow, what an indictment on the professing Christian community!
I vividly remember the first football game of the 1978 Pioneer Colts Junior Midget division season at Bobby Ray Field right behind the Columbus, Georgia airport. It was a Thursday night-the day before my Bar Mitzvah. I was a fast little Jewish kid and played quarterback. On the second play of the game I ran a sweep around the left end and was streaking down the sideline only to be hammered by an onslaught of Edgewood Red Devils. I ended up in a heap out of bounds with a severely broken left arm. My dad came down to the sideline with a cigarette dangling out of his mouth, looked down at the tangled mess that was my left arm and said, “&8%$@#.” “&8%$@#!” is all that I remember him saying.
I had a Bar Mitzvah to tend to Friday night and Saturday morning and I just messed it up by breaking my arm. Mom and dad had just bought me a new suit for the celebration and now I couldn’t even wear it because of the cast that ran all the way from my hand up to my shoulder. As it turned out, my sister’s boyfriend (an Orthodox Jew from New York) handled the Friday night service in my stead. I performed Saturday morning with the sleeve of my new suit cut off and my arm packed in ice. I led the worship service, read from the Torah and Haftorah , and gave my Bar Mitzvah speech-all while on pain meds and with my casted arm in a bucket of ice. My parents said, “The show must go on!”
I met Susan when I was 16 and she was 14. She was saved when she was 11 years old at Edgewood Baptist Church. When I was a senior at the University of Georgia I asked for her hand in marriage, but with one stipulation. She must convert to Judaism, so that our future children could grow up in a Jewish home. My parents told me, for years, how important this was. She agreed, went through a year-long conversion, and we were married in 1988. She was not asked to renounce Jesus or anything of the like. She simply learned the Jewish culture and holidays and was declared Jewish at the end of that year.
For the first few years of our marriage, we were members of a conservative Synagogue and later joined a reform congregation. We attended services every now and then, but always on the Jewish holidays. Looking back on it I think we were members mostly for my parent’s benefit. During this time, the importance of Judaism in our life together waned. I didn't really know why, but it just kind of fell to the side. I never doubted God's existence or the role that he plays in our lives. As time passed there was just something about Judaism that didn't feel quite right. Something was missing. I didn’t know what it was, but there was a strange void in my life.
Zachary, our first child, was born in 1992 and then Will, our second son, in 1995. Time passed and we started raising our little family the best way we knew how. We were trying to live and raise our children with a strict sense of right and wrong. They went to Sunday school every Sunday, just like I had and just like all their Jewish peers. I put my lack of spiritual fulfillment on the back burner and just went about my day-to-day life.
In January of 2000, I decided that I wanted to figure out what I believed in, both, in my head and in my heart. I wanted to believe because I believed, not because somebody told me to believe. I wanted to know the truth. Somebody is right in this whole deal and somebody is wrong. I told Susan that I might end up a Rabbi, or a monk, or an atheist, or a whatever. In a sense, I wanted to prove to myself that Jesus could not possibly be the Messiah and that Christianity is really one big deception involving just another one of many Old Testament prophets. Surely there was no way that I would end up believing in this Jesus stuff.
The logical place to start was the Bible. You know, that book that I’d never read, even though I was in the synagogue every time the doors were open. So, off on the quest I went. Every night I opened up this huge Bible my parents gave Susan and I for our wedding (obviously Old Testament only), as well as a New International Version that I purchased independently. I was reading both of these Bibles at the same time. I tried to be as objective as humanly possible. I would read the NIV, because it was easier to understand and then I would refer back to my big Old Testament Bible whenever I ran into a controversial issue.
I spent the next 11 months reading these bibles cover to cover. I had never read the Old Testament, much less the New Testament. While I was reading these, I also read parts of the following books, Biblical Literacy by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, Christianity in Jewish Terms by Kenski et all. and The New Evidence That Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell. When I finished the Bible I read these books in their entirety. I was trying to investigate the historicity of both The Old and New Testaments. I think I needed a factual basis for belief. I read Answering Jewish Objections to Jesus by Michael Brown, The Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism by Dennis Prager and Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, The Case for Faith and The Case for Christ by Lee Strobel. My dad also gave me a paper that he received, as a teenager in the early 1950's, from his Rabbi addressing the Jewish perspective of Jesus as the Christ. I could not get my hands on enough reading material. It was an obsession. I would stay up until 2:00-3:00 in the morning reading.
When I finished the book of Malachi (the last book in the Old Testament), it just seemed like the story couldn’t possibly end there. It took about a week of wrestling with myself, but I decided to continue on and read the New Testament. What? I could not believe that I was actually going to read the New Testament. But, what’s the harm? If it’s fake, it’s fake and I’ll figure it out, right? Sounds crazy, but one passage kept sticking in my mind.
“Behold, the days are coming, declares the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah, not like the covenant that I made with their fathers on the day when I took them by the hand to bring them out of the land of Egypt, my covenant that they broke, though I was their husband, declares the LORD. For this is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days, declares the LORD: I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts. And I will be their God, and they shall be my people. And no longer shall each one teach his neighbor and each his brother, saying, ‘Know the LORD,’ for they shall all know me, from the least of them to the greatest, declares the LORD. For I will forgive their iniquity, and I will remember their sin no more.” (Jeremiah 31:31-34)
During this thirteen-month investigation I developed thoughts and feelings I never imagined I could have. The only way I can even begin to understand what happened was that I experienced a gradual build-up of belief in my head that culminated in a passionate conviction in my heart. I was blown away. I mean flabbergasted. Could I possibly believe in this? I guess I could because I was totally convinced of the historical accuracy of the Bible, both the Old Testament and the New Testament.
Knowing the truth is much more than just knowing a set of facts. A person can't be convinced of the truth by persuasive reasoning or shrewdly designed arguments. The truth about life can only be known by those who want to know it, by those who love the truth because it is the truth, not because it is what they hoped or expected it would be. Anyone who wants to know the truth and is willing to see and hear it will know it; no one will ever know the truth that does not want to know it. Dan Cardea, in A Matter of the Heart says, “Knowing the truth is not a matter of intellectual enlightenment, mental capacity, or reasoning power. . .it is ‘a matter of the heart.’”
On a dark rainy morning in the middle of January 2001, at about 6:00 AM, I was driving to work by myself thinking about my faith, my parents, my wife and my kids. I just started to cry because I realized that I had accepted the fact that Jesus died on the cross a few thousand years ago to pay a penalty that was mine to pay and then He ran out of the tomb a hundred percent alive three days later. All of the soul searching that I had gone through in that year culminated in a monumental change of heart that rainy morning. A nearly inexplicable newness overwhelmed me.
It was such an amazing, scary, exhilarating, and thrilling journey. God, in His sovereignty, allowed me to experience radical life change, using a trek through His inerrant Word as the tool. Unbelievable! The Word of God can lead a lost sinner into a saving relationship with Himself. That 13-month journey resulted in a passionate love for His Word. Frankly, I wake up almost every day just blown away that He saved me.