Testimony of David Tomlinson

Given during October 5, 2003 Worship Service

On a gray autumn day several years back, I’m driving down Hampden. Our little family had just packed up and moved to the big city so I could go to seminary and we could discover what God had planned for us next. And since it had been necessary for us to put all of our savings into buying a house, God evidently had planned for us to be broke. So there I am, driving – gas gauge sinking – and I notice a little piece of greenish paper blowing down the middle of the street. On a hunch, I pull over, dodge traffic and come up with a $20 bill! With a full tank of fuel and praises on my lips, I hustle off to class.

I doubt that has happened to many of us this week. It hasn’t happened to me since. Nowadays I pull up, swipe my Visa and pump away, knowing that there is a paycheck coming to cover it. But the end result the same. Whether the grace to get a full tank is obviously, dramatically manifest or whether it appears utterly mundane and ordinary, God is providing. . . saving.

I tell you this little story because God did not save me dramatically like he did my wife, whom you heard last week. No angelic vision or miraculous coincidences or abrupt, visible turnaround from my life in the world. I was baptized when I was 8. The only really immoral behavior I remember turning from was my occasional cussing.

I was born to Christ-following parents, and the lineage of God’s grace goes back pretty far: we can go visit the red-brick church in rural Virginia where my forebears on my dad’s side worshipped God over two hundred years ago. Growing up, my family did church old school: Sunday school, worship service, lunch with friends, back for discipleship training, and the evening service (including the hymn sing. #287. “It only takes a spark. . . “). Sundays always culminated in that fine liturgical tradition: a Potluck in the Fellowship Hall. Every time I sat in a pew, I heard an invitation to the Gospel. Then at camp in the Utah mountains, age 7, I was drawn to pray with the preacher like a moth to a lone bulb. I don’t doubt the sincerity of my repentance or the saving grace of God at work that day. I skipped back up the hill to my cabin with an inexplicable joy and assurance.

Fast forward to adolescence. This is where the faith of my fathers has to become my own. Here, instead, is where the ordinary grace of the Good News, Scripture, the Lord’s Supper, starts appearing dull. I wrote in my journal at 15, “’Do not lean on your own understanding’. . .but I want to lean on my own understanding. It’s more interesting.” From there, as songwriter Steve Taylor put it, a hundred little gods on a gilded wheel vied to take His place.

If I found God and his church too banal to allow me an interesting life, our enemy surely wasn’t more extraordinary on his end. He plied me with age-old tricks: pride in knowledge – I devoured literature, exalting in the glories of human experience and love. With lusts of the flesh – if I were still convinced that actual fornication was right out (which I was . . . barely), then he could capture my eyes by piping in a surreal surrogate on the family TV. And with causes – the injustices of South Africa’s apartheid and the CIA’s questionable tactics in Central America. These all seemed more vibrant, alive, smart, than what I found in the walls of any given Church.

God patiently gave me time to taste what was available “under the sun,” and it turned out to be, ironically, a pale reflection of what he has given to his church all along. I had craved drama and wisdom, but had looked to insipid sitcoms when I had already been given intimate access to Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Tolkien. Now I am coming to believe Paul when he says that I, although in constant contact with God’s grace, was dead in my trespasses, that God made me alive together with Christ and raised me up with him and seated me with him in the heavenly places in Christ Jesus, When at first glance our Lord and his way of doing things appeared so normal, so ordinary, I now glimpse his profound loving power at work through his chosen means, not the least, our Christian families and the things we do right here every week.