Dr. Barry Peratt | 210 Gildemeister Hall | 507.457.5567 (Voice) | 507.457.5376 (Fax) | bperatt@winona.edu

HOW I MET JESUS
The Testimony of Barry Peratt

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Just as Mary rejoiced at the powerful work of God in her life, so too do I rejoice:
"My soul magnifies the Lord, and my spirit rejoices in God my Savior...For the Mighty One
has done great things for me---holy is His name." (Luke 1:46, 47, 49)

And just at the apostles were so excited about what they had experienced, so too do I echo their
sentiments:  "We cannot help speaking about what we have seen and heard." (Acts 4:20)

The following is the story of how I first met Jesus Christ.   Though no words are adequate to describe such an experience, my prayer is that by reading it, you may also come to seek and know Him.  Or, if you already know Him, my hope is that you will be encouraged by His work in my life.  To aid with the reading, I have divided it into five short "chapters."


Introduction:

"When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power, so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power." (1 Corinthians 2:1-5)

If one were to press me to identify one verse that I would associate with my salvation, it is the verse above. This verse has an interesting context, because if one reads Acts 17:22-18:1, one finds that just before Paul came to Corinth, he spoke with several intellectuals called the Areopagus, a group of Epicurean and Stoic philosophers---the academics of Paul’s day. During that meeting, Paul very cleverly tried to meet the philosophers on their own ground, noticing that they had an altar to "An Unknown God." Paul then tried to make the case that this unknown god that they were seeking was the God of the Hebrews. As can be expected with any clever human argument, some some accepted, some rejected, and some neglected Paul’s message.   And no doubt those who "accepted," when the next good argument came along, rejected Paul's ideas and embraced the new.

It is in this context that we find the quote above. Since I’ve been here at WSU, I have met many students and faculty who have given me stories to the following effect: "Oh, I was a Christian once. I had convinced myself that there was a God and that the Bible was true, but then I took some philosophy classes, or XXX happened, and I began to have doubts. Since then, I’ve left the church and am on my own journey. Who’s to say that Buddhism doesn’t have something to say? Can you prove there really is a God? Can you prove the Bible is true?"


Being a Seeker:

So, you may ask, what does this have to do with me and my experience with Jesus? Ah, that’s where it begins. You see, as a young boy, I attended Sunday School at a church in California. I liked the church and the people in the church, particularly a man from Nigeria named Musa Bawa. I had always been a bit of a loner growing up (reading the encyclopedia for fun didn’t exactly endear me to my brothers and sisters), and it was nice to actually be a part of something socially. At that age, truth really was a very fluid thing, and so when I thought about what we learned in Sunday school, it seemed as reasonable to me as anything else I’d ever heard. Besides, if that’s what it meant to be part of these people, then I was all for it. I was baptized in that church.

A few years later, we had moved to Connecticut, and my parents were having marital problems. Come to find out, they had been having problems almost since they were married, but managed to mask it from us, for the most part, until this time. One Sunday morning, however, as my brother and I were playing some catch before church, my dad came out and said, "We’re not going to church this morning." He and my mom had had an argument. We never went back to church, that I remember.

Being a rather astute young fellow, I noticed that this was all quite contrary to what I had learned in Sunday school. Of course, I drew the logical conclusion that this church stuff is all a bunch of nonsense.  Evidently, when you’re in a pinch, it doesn’t work.

It was at this time that my interest in science really ignited. I had a teacher, Mr. Balsley who, to this day I remember as the best teacher I’ve ever had…period. He taught Earth Science, where we learned about such fascinating things as meteorology, geology, evolution, and the theory of relativity. I ate it up, and it was at about this same time that Carl Sagan’s "Cosmos" series was on PBS. I watched it faithfully, and with excitement and wonder. The universe---so big, so fascinating, so wonderful. Truly this gave me a sense of wonder and awe I had not before experienced.

As I grew into high school, my mom continued to date and attend the local bars, my sister Terri got married, and my sister Paula entered the party scene. All of them had taken up smoking, which I always disdained. It is a complicated situation, but I got tired of being the responsible "man of the house," always fixing the car and the house and taking care of the lawn, and missing all of the fun. I got tired of being a nerd at school. So, in a very scientific way, I studied the popular people to see how they acted, and resolved to become one of them by my senior year. While awkward at first, this did occur, and by my senior year I was in the "in crowd." Along the way, I had taken up smoking, drugs, drinking, etc. I maintained two groups of friends, the "cool partiers," and the really burned-out crowd. I liked my druggie friends; they were not pretentious and were very ready to accept anyone who was willing to do drugs with them.

As I entered college, I seemed to have a knack for finding friends who were what I called "water-pipe philosophers." Pseudo-intellectuals who liked to sit around and smoke dope, listen to the Doors or Pink Floyd and talk about life. We thought that we were really profound, but mostly we were just stoned. Perhaps my most influential class in college was a class I took on Eastern religions. Buddhism and Taoism seemed to me to be truly enlightened thinking…nothing like that "closed-minded Christianity" that was all fluff anyway. A professor of mine introduced me to the writings of a peer of Timothy Leary, Ram Dass. It was beatnik sort of stuff. I became totally immersed in this sub-culture of drugs, Eastern mysticism, and of course Pink Floyd and the Doors. It all combined to form a sort of religion for me. It is what I worshipped---what I gave my time and emotional energy to. But it was also a time of confusion and despair. Life seemed truly meaningless and quite pointless, actually. I was hanging onto this sub-culture because without it, there would have been nothing.

Through an interesting set of circumstances, I ended up in graduate school at the University of Delaware. As I began to take these upper level classes and learn about the forefront of research, I began to gravitate more strongly to this idea that meaning was just around the corner---get more education, more learning. Climb as high as you can go. Get deep into it, and somehow things would begin to make sense and life would begin to have some meaning. Somehow, in all of this, I married my high school sweetheart, and truly loved her beyond words.

But throughout all of these years, I had become a very cynical, bitter, and angry person. I especially hated Christians, though I didn’t know why. I had rejected Christianity, and anyone who embraced it seemed to me to either be pathetically stupid or insanely stubborn. They just irked me. And they were always talking about how we are sinners.  Well, I thought I was really pretty good; certainly not a sinner!   I found out, however, that I could use my training in logic to get into very interesting arguments with them. I would bait them with questions, and then tear their logic apart. Sometimes I would simply be willfully obtuse and then declare victory in the argument because they had been unable to convince me! Either way, I had it out for them, and I made a hobby out of verbally assaulting them. But inside, nothing gave me any satisfaction. I was feeling cheated by life somehow and was incredibly angry at the utter stupidity of it all. Everyone started looking stupid to me (except me, of course)! Boy, if they just had more education, they would behave more rationally! No matter who they were, I could tell you what they were doing that was stupid and how I would fix it if I were allowed. Yes, life was stupid simply because it wasn’t following my logic! Drinking seemed to be more attractive to me than ever.


God Turns Up the Heat:

Then, my worst nightmare occurred. A new fellow came to graduate school. His name was Kenny, and he wasn’t just a Christian, he was a conservative Christian (i.e. he actually believed it!). Went to a church I’d never heard of before, the Church of the Nazarene. Probably a cult or something, I thought. At the same time, I had a student in my Calculus class named Mike. He was a pleasant fellow who wore this very annoying shirt with a picture of Jesus on the front and the quote from Matthew 16:15 where Jesus asks, "Who do you say that I am?" Oh, I hated that shirt. He wore it every test day. Drove me crazy, but I liked him. He was a good student---humble and gentle and somehow very peaceful. I tried to bait him into an argument, but he wouldn’t bite. He simply said, "Oh, you’re too smart for me. You’d tear me apart." Nevertheless, he acted as if the fact that he couldn’t defend his faith in a manner which I would accept in no way was relevant anyhow. It was as if his faith wasn’t based on that at all. What manner of fellow was this?

Meanwhile, as I tried to bait Kenny, he seemed to sense that I was doing more than baiting him. I really had some serious questions, but I didn’t want to look like I was interested (lest he try to convert me or something). He had some very logical and well-thought-out responses to my questions, but what impressed me most was that when he couldn’t prove something, he would simply say, "I can’t prove that." And when he didn’t know something, he would simply say, "I don’t know." Period. That’s it? You don’t know? What do you mean you don’t know? Christians never admit that they don’t know---I knew this well, for it was their Achilles' heel. But like Mike, it didn’t seem to bother him that there were questions that he didn’t know the answers to. Very intriguing.

So, now I was on the defensive a bit. I had to educate Kenny. Certainly the only reason he believed in Christ so much was ignorance. If I simply exposed him to Buddhist thought and the writings of Ram Dass, he would most certainly be enlightened and realize how truly provincial his outlook was. Yep! I was getting to him, I could tell. Little did I know that he had marshaled his local church body to pray for Laura and me. You see, his "message and preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit's power."

At this time, our lives went downhill fast. The future looked hopeless. The job market stunk for mathematicians, and Laura and I had an increasing fear of getting stuck in what we called the "pipeline." You know, get a job, buy a house, have 2.5 kids and a dog---the rat race they call it sometimes. Just more emptiness.  For various reasons, I dropped out of graduate school and took a job teaching high school. Somehow I thought this would help. It was the worst year of my life, and I’m not exaggerating. I was worked to death. But, more than that, I saw in the high school the fruits of my "moral relativism" philosophy. I saw students that hadn’t the faintest clue about right and wrong, whose lives were so messed up that it’s difficult to describe. And we couldn’t provide them with any moral direction, because of "values clarification." They’re supposed to somehow figure all of this out on their own. Actually I was glad, because I couldn’t have given them any direction anyhow since I had no direction myself. There was something happening inside me that is difficult to describe; it felt like I was being emotionally and spiritually strip-searched.

I was tired and heavy of heart. I felt like I had used up all of my hope, all of my chances. I quite frankly just wanted to die. I had built a wall of intellectual garbage around me to keep the truth at bay. Now that wall had collapsed, and I was beginning to see for the first time that really, I was a very awful person. Oh, I was no Ted Bundy, but what I’m talking about is in light of who God is, I truly was very awful. All the times I lied came before me---I was a liar! All the times I stole something came before me---I was a thief! I was a drug abuser! I was ruining my health! All of the times I had been cruel to people, including my wife! Oh, oh no. Not that. Remember that abortion? It’s just a fetus, right? No, that’s just another lie, and deep down I knew it. I am a murderer! And there are worse things that I won’t tell you.

For the first time in my entire life, I was being honest---really honest. In my pride, I had built up a rather complex façade to keep the truth out. But, the façade was gone. For reasons I didn’t know, I rented Franco Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth to watch; I had never seen it before. During the scene about the prodigal son, Peter comes into Matthew’s house to confront Jesus. He is weeping and broken and says, "Forgive me, Master. I’m just a…a stupid man!" I wept as I’d never wept before. Deep down I carried regret. What can I do? I’m scum! It’s all a lie, and now I see. I’m just a stupid, sinful man. What’s the use? Oh, God, how I wanted to be free from myself!

Meanwhile, Kenny and his wife and church kept praying for us.  But there is more.  My mother had returned to church, and I had bought her a "Life Application Bible" for her birthday, though I had mixed feelings about doing so as I didn't want to encourage her "religious trip."  But the Lord touched her as she spent time in His Word, and now she was praying for us, too.  Only the Lord Himself knows how many others He enlisted as prayer warriors on behalf of Laura and me.   You see, it's not about us reaching God; it's about Him reaching us.


Jesus Reveals Himself:

When I returned to graduate school the next year, I conveyed to Kenny that this moral relativism doesn’t work and that we humans need moral direction. You see, I had concluded that moral relativism is kind of like communism: it looks good on paper and sounds good in the university classroom, but it looks horrid in the real world and it doesn’t really work because it fails to account for the sinfulness of man. He was floored and said he never thought he’d see the day when I would say that.

When we moved in our apartment, I set up a work bench in the garage, and a Bible that I had been given when I was a child somehow got left on that bench. Since I couldn’t smoke in the house, I would go down to the garage to smoke. One day, I picked up that Bible and began to read where it opened. It read, "What then shall we say that Abraham, our forefather, discovered in this matter? If, in fact, Abraham was justified by works, he had something to boast about---but not before God. What does the Scripture say? ‘Abraham believed God, and it was credited to him as righteousness.’ Now when a man works, his wages are not credited to him as a gift, but as an obligation. However, to the man who does not work but trusts God who justifies the wicked, his faith is credited as righteousness. David says the same thing when he speaks of the blessedness of the man to whom God credits righteousness apart from works: ‘Blessed are they whose transgressions are forgiven, whose sins are covered. Blessed is the man whose sin the Lord will never count against him.’"

I was stunned. Could this be true? If it was, I knew I needed this badly. Oh, but no; this is just a bunch of words. And that is when Jesus showed up. It wasn’t a dream, or a fuzzy experience in any way. He was there, just as plainly as you are here. Did I see Him with my eyes? No. Hear Him with my ears? No. But I saw Him and heard Him loud and clear nonetheless. We call it revelation, and it’s like nothing else---that’s why it has its own word. God revealed Himself to me. He identified Himself to me as the Jesus of the Bible I was reading. How? I don’t know. You’ll have to ask Him; He’s the one who did it! But there I was, having a conversation with Jesus. It didn’t seem unnatural in the least. In fact, it didn’t occur to me until afterward that this should have seemed strange to me. I was interested in more pressing matters. Like, "is this forgiveness and covering my sins thing possible? If so, will you do this for me?" He replied, "Yes it’s real, and I long to do this for you."  He was talking directly to me.  "Oh, but Lord," I replied (it seemed most natural to address Him this way, though I always had recoiled at that word before), "if this is just another empty promise, I don’t want it. I’ve had enough of those; I would die, I think, if this is another lie. I can’t trust anymore; I’ve no more trust left." He asked, "Can you trust just once more? I will not fail you." Then He left.

Over the next several weeks, I thought long and hard about this, and decided that I really wanted to trust Him. Kenny asked me if Laura and I would be interested in a Bible study. I said, "Yes." Laura wasn’t too enthused, but in the meantime, she decided she should just start reading the Bible anyway, just to see what it really said. Most folks think they know what it says, but very few actually read it. I hadn’t told her that I was really starting to believe the Bible. As it turns out, she met the Lord during this Bible study, but that’s another story…

At some point during the Bible study, Kenny and Beth invited us to church. Eventually, we acquiesced. I asked Kenny if they did anything weird during their services, because I’d heard that some of the Christians do weird things. He assured me that they didn’t. We showed up that morning before service, and everyone was still in Sunday school. A woman by the name of Pam met us and mused to herself, "Oh, we’ve been praying for you." Interesting, I thought. That was our first clue as to what had been going on. During the service, we sang some praise songs, and the congregation actually sang loudly and joyfully! I’d never seen that before. Some clapped, a few raised hands, and all seemed genuinely glad to be there. There was a brightness about the place as the pastor began to preach.

I sat in my pew, and Jesus came to me again. Apparently, the pastor was preaching on stewardship, but I wasn’t listening to him. I was interested in what Jesus had to say. It felt so good to be in that place, but I was concerned about what He might say. After all, I know what He said about forgiveness and all, but I had some pretty scummy stuff, and maybe He was having second thoughts. He was silent, and that sort of scared me. What was He going to say? Barry, your sins are too great? I’ve reconsidered, and I can’t do this for you? What would He say? I just wished He would speak! The air was pregnant with tension. When I finally looked up at Him, I felt like Peter did when He said, "Lord, depart from me, for I am a sinful man." I trembled. "Forgive me, Lord," I said over and over. Then He spoke---only a few words, but the best words I can ever remember anyone ever saying to me. Quite gently, quite joyfully, and quite simply, He said, "Welcome home, my son!" Oh, it’s real! What indescribable joy flooded my soul at that moment! I did everything in my power to keep from breaking down. "I’m not going to cry in the middle of a church I’ve never been to before. I will not!" So, I stared at the wall just wanting to burst open. Afterwards, I commented to Beth that she and Kenny had not told us that their services were so emotional. She didn’t seem to know what I meant.

Jesus has not left me since that day.  I grow more and more intimate with Him as each day passes.


My Walk with Jesus:

And what can I say to you this day but that before I met Jesus, I had no life. Now, the life that I have is His and His alone to do with as He pleases. How could it be any other way? I walk and talk with Him moment by moment, day by day. Some would tell you that’s not possible.  I’m telling you: it is possible. Can I explain everything about the Bible?  No. Can I answer all of your questions?  No. But I know someone who can answer your questions---or make them irrelevant. You see, it’s not about intellectually assenting to a certain creed, or being baptized, or saying a sinner’s prayer, or reading a book by Josh McDowell and deciding that he has a pretty good argument. None of those things constitute being a Christian.

Spiritual problems are just that---spiritual. They aren’t intellectual problems, and they can’t be cleared up by thinking really hard. They are only cleared up by seeking and obeying Him. You can’t argue people into the Kingdom of Heaven, and they can’t think their way into it.  In fact, Jesus said, "If anyone chooses to do God's will, he will find out whether my teaching comes from God or whether I speak on my own," (John 7:17) and again, "Whoever has my commands and obeys them, he is the one who loves me. He who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I too will love him and show myself to him,"  (John 14:21).   In the Bible, seeing and understanding are always linked to obedience.   God meets us right where we are, but He does so on His terms, not ours, because He is God and we are not!

The most succinct definition I’ve found of what it means to be a Christian is found in John 10:27-28, "My sheep listen to my voice; I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life…" And what is this eternal life? Jesus says that "this is eternal life: to know the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom He has sent," (John 17:3).  I know Him, the living Christ. I listen to Him, and I follow Him.  He has shown Himself to me---blessed be His name.  You see, if you think this testimony is long, I’ll tell you that this is only the beginning of what God has done in my life. This is where it all began; this is the story of my birth. Indeed, Jesus has come so that we no longer have to live this futile, empty life.

Many of my colleagues don’t seem to understand this, of course. To them, anything that cannot be grasped with their minds is untrustworthy at best and invalid at worst---a lie. You see, to trust such a thing would mean that they’re not in control, and most intellectuals have seriously deluded themselves about their own importance and capabilities. We hate to admit that there is something we can’t do or understand. And we don’t understand that it isn’t about us reaching God. If it were, there would be no hope. But, it’s about God reaching us. That’s what revelation is. A person can seek all they want, but unless God chooses to reveal Himself to them, they have no hope of ever knowing God. But, Jesus has promised that He will honor our honest seeking, and reveal Himself to us (Jeremiah 29:13, Matthew 7:7). So, ironically, I’m now that person that people come up to and say, "On guard! Defend your faith against this! And take that! And what about the Crusades? And can you prove this? And can you explain that?!" And I say to them, "Well, that’s all very interesting but really irrelevant. Would you like to hear about a Man I met back in 1995? His name is Jesus; He’s the one you really need to deal with. And He can change your life…"