Searching for Identity

By Rev. Thomas Vent

So many churches. So many twists on religion. So many thoughts on getting to heaven. Sometimes it's easy to get lost in the midst of searching for truth and sorting out all the opinions. Imagine growing up in the home with an older brother named Jesus and trying to keep up with him day after day, battling with the rumors of your mother's infidelity and the bold statements of Jesus that was cutting against the religion they grew up in and still trying to find out where you fit into everything. This was James's early life before finally becoming the pastor of the first Christian church in Jerusalem. The book of James offers timely insights into finding truth about religion, social conflict, and salvation. James uses a hard-hitting style to pull back the cover and expose what makes a true Christian. In this book, Pastor Tom attempts to merge some of his own life experiences from a street kid in a broken home to being involved in legalistic churches, while all the time trying to search for his own identity as a Christian and pastor. This book was written to offer hope and help on this journey to finding biblical truth in the Christian life. Pastor Tom goes through the book of James and uses real life experiences, mistakes, conflicts, and successes to help make the journey a little easier to understand. Let Searching for Identity bring you encouragement to keep seeking truth, learning how to love, relating to others, and, most of all, finding living faith.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781643493480

Book preview

Chapter 1

There Has to Be a Beginning Somewhere

James, a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ, to the twelve tribes in the Dispersion: Greetings (Ja. 1:1).

Cultivating the Soil of a Heart—the Seed Is Planted

Iremember being sent to the principal’s office during the early month of my eighth-grade year. As was my norm, I was goofing off at lunch time and was reprimanded by one of my teachers and sent to the office. This was not an unusual occurrence for me. Throughout those junior high years, although I began to understand my academic potential, I behaved like the street kid that I was. I had developed a tendency to act tough and do daring things that always put me on the edge of trouble. Having grown up in a broken home with a brother and two sisters, an alcoholic father, and a widowed grandmother to watch us, it was pretty easy for me to get out of the apartment and into mischief with neighborhood kids. In fact, as I grew into preteen years, my oldest sister Cathy began to fill the role of the missing mom in my life and my grandmother became more just Gramma . On this particular day, my principal, Mr. Delk, had done something unusual. Instead of supervising the teacher as she administered corporal punishment (common in schools in the sixties and seventies), he requested to be alone with me and assured her that he would administer the paddling today. She gladly obliged and left me alone in the office with him. That began a relationship that I had never experienced before. Mr. Delk spoke with me as if I were his child. He spent time challenging me to be a better person, and then with a broken heart and a tender spirit, administered the paddling. It was not as bad as I had thought it would be or as severe as I had heard about it from other students. It was really bearable, as much as a paddling can be. But it was not until after school on my way home as I walked my usual path from the school to the apartment I was raised in that I understood what Mr. Delk was doing. As I was walking, he drove by and saw me and pulled over to offer me a ride home. Wow! The principal was giving me a ride home! After I got in the car, he began to speak to me again about my behavior and challenged me to make better decisions. He expressed the fact that he was a Christian and that he could see good things in me and a very bright future. He then dropped me off in front of my apartment building, and as I got out of the car, he told me that he would be praying for me. That was the first time in my short thirteen years that anyone had spoken to me that way. I had been sent to church when I was younger, usually just during VBS, and I remembered a few church songs, but not much else about those days at the Nazarene church had stuck with me.

I can remember many nights laying in my bed in the upstairs apartment that I was raised in and thinking about the future. From the time I was about ten or eleven years old, I can remember thinking ahead about a day that my grandma would die, and would I be old enough to handle it and would I see her again? The prospect of that scared me. I’m not sure if this was normal for young people or not, I just know that I did this a lot. From time to time, my mind would also think about the depth of space and what it was like out there. I can remember thinking about things like How can space never end? If outer space could end, what would be beyond that? I didn’t know until later in my life that God was scratching an awareness of eternity into my heart. Solomon said it this way, that God has put eternity into man’s heart, yet so that he cannot find out what God has done from the beginning to the end (Ecc. 3:11). He felt the itch, too! God draws men to himself by using many things, including nature. I found that this great curiosity about endless space was actually drawing me to the ultimate answer—that space reflects the existence of an eternal God. David painted a wonderful picture in one of his poetic psalms:

"When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars, which you have set in place,

what is man that you are mindful of him,

and the son of man that you care for him" (Psa. 8:3–4).

I related to this shepherd boy’s habit of looking at the heavens and contemplating his smallness and God’s greatness. I would learn much later in my life that God, being a sovereign creator, has an eternal plan for all His elect ones. He doesn’t always draw people the same way. Sometimes He uses a combination of factors, human witnesses, and exposure to scriptural truth to eventually hear the gospel and be saved. He spoke to Jeremiah and said, Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations (Jer. 1:5). The drawing God was doing in my heart was not over yet.

Fast forward a year to my freshman year in high school. I remember lying on the grass in front of the high school I attended and soaking up the sun and the warm autumn air during lunch period. I distinctly remember that my mind was wondering about football practice and how hard it was going to be and feeling a little overwhelmed because of the level of classes I had this year. I also remember feeling a little lonely because the girl that I had a crush on in eighth grade was going to a private school this year and I felt like I lost my only chance at love! (I think I felt that way every time I had a crush that didn’t work out.) Then one of my childhood buddies, Bill, saw me and came and sat next to me on the grass and began to talk with me about school stuff. During the conversation, he took out his folder and wanted to show me the paper he was going to turn in for one of his classes. I took the paper and looked at it and saw that it was a paper defending creation over evolution. I looked at him and asked if he was serious about this. He began to explain to me that he had been going to church with his mom over the summer and that he became a Christian and that I should consider coming with him on Sunday. I remember explaining to him that it was cool for him, but I don’t think that the idea of God and science are compatible concepts. We spoke about it for a few minutes before the bell rang and we had to go to our next class. As it turns out, this conversation would stay lodged in my memory for a long time.

As we meet James in his epistle, we get no word of his pre-conversion story or earlier years within the household of Jesus. We just get a statement: James the Servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ (1:1), and the Lord of Glory (2:1). What amazing statements from a man who spent all his youth and a majority of his young adulthood rejecting the premise of Jesus being the Son of God. What happened to change the course of his future? What made him change his opinion so dramatically, going from thinking that Jesus was out of his mind to revering him as Lord and Savior? The only real clue we get from the biblical text is one statement between the record of rejection and the meeting in the upper room as disciples. It may have taken twenty or thirty years, but the miracle occurred. It’s found in I Cor. 15:7. As Paul was describing all the various groups and people that Jesus appeared to after his resurrection, he says, "Then he appeared to James." To be a mouse in the corner that moment! All the doubt, all the fear, all the confusion settled in one instant. A precious meeting with, not his earthly brother Jesus, but with the eternal Son of God, the Lord of Glory, Jesus the Christ! James was changed forever. He knew at that moment, that all the lessons learned from him growing up, all the lectures, all the sermons, all the insights into the scriptures were all true! All the times he heard Jesus pray for him were genuine and now fruitful. James becomes a believer. A disciple. An apostle. The pastor of the first church in Jerusalem where he forged many friendships with fellow believers and worked closely with Christians in the first church.

Watering the Seed . . . Then the Sprout

People say that God works in strange ways. The scripture declares that "His ways are above our ways" (Isa. 55:9). This I found to be true. As I look back on the changing point in my life, I never thought it would be during my sophomore year in high school while I was taking a rare study hall during my driver’s education class. While some of my classmates participated in the driving portion of the class, a few of us who had already driven had to attend a large study hall in the school auditorium for a few weeks. That’s when it happened. I saw her! The girl I would one day marry. I wasn’t sure why I was so attracted to her when I saw her. But I was. I had to do investigative work to find out her name and why I hadn’t seen her before. A mutual friend of ours made the connection, played matchmaker, and got me her phone number.

On February 4, 1976, I made the call. We talked for hours and found a connection that has never ended. You see, Cindy was her name, and the more I talked to her the more I wanted to be around her and get to know her better. Alas, there was a problem. Cindy and her family were church-going people and there was another boy interested in her at her church. Solution: Tom is going to church, too!

I found myself eventually going to her house after school and visiting with her and her family and being picked up on Sunday morning to accompany her to church. Were my motives for going to church right? In my eyes, they were. Either way, I was there Sunday after Sunday attending the Sunday school and the preaching to sit by Cindy and dare that other boy to try anything. Little did I know that little by little, the gospel seed was being watered week by week. I even found myself going to the public library and doing research on the Bible and the claims of Christianity. I had many conversations with Cindy’s mother, Lana (who also won me over with her wonderful cooking!) about the Bible and the Christian life. We spent what seemed like endless hours discussing the Bible and some of the more familiar stories in it. I often left their home unchanged but thinking. I was wrestling. Then one evening during a revival service in October of 1976, like James, I had my face-to-face with the Savior. During the whole sermon by the evangelist that evening, all I could think about was my lost condition. My heart raced at times, and I remember feeling my lost condition. He could have used any text in the Bible for his sermon and I believe I would have been saved. The gospel had reached my heart. I had been confronted with my sinfulness and his holiness and became aware that Jesus died for me, and I finally called out to him in repentance and asked Jesus to be my Savior.

Like James, I had my eyes opened to who Jesus really is. I entered a personal relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ and was reconciled to God through the forgiveness of my sins. This put me on a new path in my life. It gave me a new sense of purpose. I didn’t have to be told to make Jesus Lord of my life, I gave it to Him. I didn’t have to drilled by a preacher to become a disciple, I was one now. I had a new way of interpreting my circumstances as I began a new journey, this time with Christ for direction. I would love to tell you that from this time on everything went great in my life and I lived happily ever after, but that was just not the case. It put me on a spiritual roller coaster, into a battleground, into social conflict that I thought I wouldn’t survive at times. Those first years as a Christian brought challenges and crippling temptations that visited me on and off for years. Although the early years of James’s conversion are not provided in the text of his letter or, for that matter, anywhere in the scriptures, it’s not difficult to assume some of the issues that he and other Christians dealt with from his instructions. So I began a new journey back to my broken home, my public school, my future plans, and, of course, my new relationship with Cindy and the Lord.

It Was like I Was a Baby Again!

Long before I knew the story of Nicodemus, the Jewish ruler who came to Jesus privately and asked how he could be a follower, too, I felt Jesus’s answer. He told him, You must be born again (Jo. 3:7). This totally confused this leader who wondered out loud how could he go back into his mother’s womb. Almost immediately after I accepted Christ as my Savior, I felt different. I didn’t know the Bible yet. I didn’t understand about the Holy Spirit yet. I didn’t know what being born again meant yet. But it happened to me and I knew it. The first thing I noticed that was different was that I now had a desire to learn the Bible. I didn’t know yet that Peter had told Christians, "As newborn babes, desire the sincere milk of the word, that ye may grow thereby (1 Pet. 2:2); I just did. It was only a few short weeks after my decision for Christ that Lana bought me my first Bible. A small leather-bound King James Bible that I still have to this day. It was this little Bible that I began to pour through daily (between studying chemistry and trigonometry) to learn about Christ. The more I read this little Bible the more God began to change me. I didn’t know what He was doing, but He was changing my heart and things were becoming new" (2 Cor. 5:17) to me.

One evening while reading the Bible and trying to grasp it’s meaning book by book, I read a verse that jumped out at me. It became my life’s verse: Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth (1 Tim. 2:15 KJV). During those early days, I felt like I was studying enough to show myself approved by God. I was even given a paper chart to check off and try to read the whole Bible in a year (which was a daunting task to give a new believer). I plugged away at it every day, hoping God understood when I just glossed over the genealogies and some of the Old Testament laws. But as I grew spiritually in those first months, I began to feel convicted that I wasn’t bold enough yet, and I was afraid that meant I was ashamed of Jesus. I heard a sermon on Romans 1, and the verse For I am not ashamed of the gospel, for it is the power of God for salvation to everyone who believes, to the Jew first and also to the Greek (v. 16) struck me pretty hard. My resolutions: Bring people to church with me and start carrying my Bible to school with my other books. I’m not sure if this was necessary or not. But it did make my high school years get interesting. It narrowed down my circle of friends to only a few who weren’t afraid of the change I was going through. Being a high school athlete, I remember one time after gym class standing and looking at a signup sheet for something and one of my friends standing next to me handed me a pen and, as I took it to sign the paper, I had too many books in my arms so I attempted to get him to take them from me for a minute when he saw my Bible on top, he jumped backward and said, I’m not touching that thing, man! I told him, Nothing will happen by just touching it, you have to read it for it to do anything to you. He still refused. I wasn’t going to be ashamed of Christ.

The first person that I brought to church with me was my brother Daryl. He also was the first person that I tried to witness to and explain what was going on in my life. What was really going on in my life was what Titus called the washing of regeneration. Later in my life, I learned that the word translated regeneration literally means re-gened. That made real sense to me. After I was born again, God changed my spiritual genes and began a process of making me look like Jesus—a process that is still going on to this day. After coming to church with me for a few months and several evening conversations on our back porch, Daryl came to receive Jesus as his Savior, too. I remember feeling like Andrew who first found his own brother Simon and said to him, ‘We have found the Messiah’ (Jo 1:41). Now with my original best friend and companion in mischief on board with me, we began to get involved together in youth activities, rallies, and even formed a church basketball team (which I never was as good at as Daryl), and together we made our new church life pretty fun! But the journey was just beginning.

"Heavenly Father, we humbly acknowledge the marvelous, miraculous nature of