How I First Encountered the Gospel

I was not born into a Christian family. My family was an ordinary working family in mainland China, much like many others around us. There was no Christian faith in our family history, and no one taught me to read the Bible, pray, or attend church when I was young.

But there was one thing that made my childhood a little different from that of someone who had never encountered Christianity at all. The village where I grew up had a house church, and it has now been there for more than thirty years.

Even though I did not grow up believing in Jesus, I knew about Christianity from an early age. I recognized the cross, and I knew that some people in the village believed in Jesus. But that was about all I knew.

Christianity existed somewhere near me, but it had little to do with my own life. I knew the symbol of the cross, but I did not understand the gospel. I knew that people believed in Jesus, but I did not know why anyone actually needed Him.

I first began to seriously encounter the Christian faith in my twenties, while I was at university. The person who introduced me to it was my first girlfriend, who is now my wife.

At first, we met with other believers in university classrooms on weekends. Later, we found a small house church near the campus and began attending regularly. I was not especially resistant to what I heard, nor did I feel the need to argue against everything. Most of the time, I was simply curious.

I was willing to attend gatherings and listen to sermons. There were Bible passages and teachings that I questioned or did not understand, but those doubts did not make me leave. I simply kept going, slowly becoming more familiar with the church, the Bible, and the Christian faith.

After university, my girlfriend and I moved to another city for work. We found another house church there, rented a small place nearby, and later I was baptized in that church.

From the outside, it looked like a fairly complete journey of faith. I had encountered the gospel, joined a Christian community, been baptized, and become a believer. Looking back now, however, I think my faith at that time was sincere and yet still very unclear.

I was not rejecting God, and I was not intentionally walking away from faith. I attended church, listened to sermons, and called myself a Christian. But for many years, my understanding of the Bible, doctrine, the church, and even myself remained shallow.

Faith was part of my life, but it had not yet entered the whole of my life. I had not seriously thought about what faith should mean for work, family, money, responsibility, or the deeper direction of my life. I also had not really considered the difference between calling myself a Christian and living as a disciple of Jesus.

I do not want to look back and say that everything about my faith then was false. I did believe. I was simply immature, and I understood very little.

Later, after entering working life, I went through many setbacks and difficulties. Life did not always move in the direction I expected, and I learned that some problems could not be solved simply by working harder. Some outcomes did not appear just because I had tried to be responsible or serious.

Through those experiences, I began to return to the Bible with different questions. Passages I had heard before slowly began to carry more weight. Words like faith, grace, repentance, obedience, and discipleship no longer felt like terms that belonged only inside church life.

They began to meet real life.

I started to see that perhaps my main problem was not that I knew too little Christian information. It was that much of what I knew had never truly entered the way I lived.

A clearer turning point came later. I joined a four-month course focused on Christian growth and discipleship, and later attended a retreat in another place. Neither experience changed me overnight, and I did not come away with every answer.

But through them, I began to understand the gospel and what it means to follow Jesus more deeply. For a long time, I had thought of becoming a Christian mainly as believing certain things about God and accepting a new identity. Slowly, I began to understand that following Jesus cannot remain inside church gatherings, Bible reading, or prayer alone.

It enters a person’s whole life.

It enters the way I live as a husband and a father, the way I think about work and money, the way I face failure, the way I carry responsibility, and the way I understand what my life is actually for.

By worldly standards, I still would not call myself a successful person. I do not have a finished story that proves everything has worked out perfectly. I still do not have all the answers, and I am still seeking the Lord’s direction for my life.

I still become weak. I still feel anxious. There is still much in my heart that needs to be changed. But one thing is different now.

I no longer see being a Christian only as a label. I no longer see faith as an additional part of life that can remain separate from everything else.

I knew about Christianity from a young age, entered the church in my twenties, and later was baptized. But it took me many more years to begin understanding what it means to live as a disciple of Jesus.

That journey is not finished. More and more, I feel that it has only truly begun.