The Day I Discovered I Wasn't Saved

I was listening to Hark the Herald Angels Sing the other day and the line that says He was “born to give them second birth” flooded me with emotions.

Maybe you think that’s a strange line to be moved by but for the last several months, I’ve been doing a deep dive into what it means to be “born again”. Even after spending the better part of my life in circles that talked about this subject non-stop, it wasn't until this year that I started to understand what it truly means. And let me tell you, it’s not at all what I was taught growing up.

Studying the new birth has both frustrated me and floored me all at the same time. I’m frustrated that the flavor of Christianity I subscribed to for so long somehow continually missed the importance of this doctrine and its impact on salvation.

And on the other hand, after lots of study, I’m completely floored by the magnitude of its significance. The Christian who truly grasps what it means to be born a second time by the Holy Spirit and made a child of God considers no other doctrine of higher importance. It is supreme to every other doctrine of salvation. If you get the new birth wrong, you will get everything else wrong.

And I did get it wrong. For almost three decades, I believed I was truly saved.

The earliest I remember being drawn to the Lord was at 5 years old. I was down at the altar at a children's crusade “giving my life to the Lord”, as they say. Or, at least that's what I was told was happening. From that day on, for the 28 years that followed, I spent my energy striving to stay saved. Of course, I didn't know this is what I was doing while in the thick of it. I genuinely thought I had been born again and was living my life for the Lord because I was told that repeating a prayer was the ticket to salvation. But in reality, I was totally lost and struggling to muster whatever self-made righteousness I could to keep convincing myself I had done enough to earn it.

Some days, I felt close to the Lord and like I could talk to Him and be in His presence. And other days, I would wake up with a deep shame that seemed to bore a hole all the way down to my gut. On those days, I was keenly aware I hadn't done enough to deserve Him. It was a roller coaster that would rise on false assurance and then plummet into shame as I became aware of my own depravity. It was absolute torture when I look back on it. Somewhere deep down, I knew that on one side of the scale was His perfect holiness and on the other side was my insufficient, self-made righteousness. And no matter how much of it I managed to contrive, the scales would never be made right.

I used to joke that I loved Jesus so much, I would get saved over and over again every time someone would give an altar call. In hindsight, this wasn't a joke at all. I had no genuine assurance of my own salvation. It was an attempt to hide my lack of certainty by deflecting it with humor and disguising it as a virtue.

But then one day, at 33 years old, all of this changed. I was upstairs in my house, walking back and forth between the rooms of my toddlers at the time, getting them ready for bed. Unbeknownst to me, my husband turned on a documentary downstairs that was stacked with a line-up of various preachers and teachers that I guarantee you’ve never heard of before. I wasn’t paying much attention since I was trying to get my little ones situated, but as I stepped out into the open walkway to cross between rooms again, I caught a sound bite that stopped me in my tracks. I leaned over the second floor half wall to look down into the living room at the TV. I listened for a moment, then became completely transfixed by what I was hearing.

One by one, these obscure preachers were popping up on the screen expositing small portions of Scripture. And as each were given spurts of screen time, different facets of the Good News were being stitched together to create a wholistic Gospel message I had never heard before. Keep in mind, I'm on year 28 at this point of having heard countless sermons and participated in hundreds of altar calls, and I had never heard the Gospel taught this way.

I was glued to the TV but I really needed to get the kids to sleep. So I called down from the second floor to my husband to tell him I was going to start this documentary at the beginning tomorrow.

And I did.

The next day when we sat down to dinner, I started it over. Not even a third of the way into it, I was ruined at what I was hearing. Little did I know that I still had a spiritual blindness and a resistance toward God until that very day. It was at that moment the Lord started cutting around my hardened heart, removing it completely, and giving me a new heart that was finally softened toward Him and beating with spiritual life! That was the moment I was truly born again.

At that same time, He also opened my mind to finally understand the Scriptures. I had always been so frustrated by the Bible. Whenever I would sit down to read, I would get up feeling more confused than when I sat down. At some point, this actually turned into resentment and I started avoiding it altogether. But starting that day, I couldn’t put it down, and I still can’t. It’s like the light switch was finally flipped on and I was understanding everything I was taking in. For the first time, I was comprehending what I was reading; I had no trouble recalling what I had studied even long after the fact; and I was now easily able to piece things together in a way that brought clarity to the bigger picture.

It’s hard to explain such an event to others, especially to those that have known me for years, and who have undoubtedly looked at me as a genuine follower of Christ for so long. I don’t expect many to understand. In fact, I suspect those who have long known me to find a reason to resist this testimony. But I hold to it nonetheless. Indeed, I would die defending this testimony. I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that I was truly born again in June of 2020 at 33 years of age.

So, my hope is that maybe this plants a seed for just one of you to pause and consider that even though you've been living a life you believe has been marked by righteousness, it’s completely possible you may be just as lost as I was. Indeed, just as lost as Nicodemus was after living by the letter of the law his whole life (John 3).

And this is because the TYPE of righteousness matters. If it's a righteousness that comes by you striving to bring all your good works to the table, the Father looks at it and all He sees are filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6). But if it's a righteousness that comes through faith in the only One to have lived a perfectly sinless life and given Himself as a sacrifice, then the Father looks at you and sees a new creation. Jesus throws His robes of righteousness over your filthy rags (Isaiah 61:10) and you get to stand before a holy God perfectly justified by works you had nothing to do with.

A better righteousness than you could ever hope to muster yourself has been credited to your account and the wages of your sin have been paid for. What a glorious gift.

I created a design for this phrase and printed it on a mug because I want this truth continually in front of me: that He was born so I could be birthed from above by the Spirit and made His child forever. I did nothing to earn it. It is a sovereign gift through and through. There is no greater doctrine than the new birth and there is no greater event to have ever taken place in my life.

And if you want a more thorough analysis on the new birth, you can read my thoughts on what "born again" really means →