Time transcripts of Gary_Audio [00:00:00.00] [Interviewer]: Hi. So if you could just tell us your name and maybe a brief outline of what you're going to talk about and then you can launch into your story. [00:00:07.58] [Interviewee]: Ok. My name's Gary and I'm going to share some stories about my own experiences in the area of biblical literacy. [00:00:20.43] I think the... [00:00:24.56] I became a Christian just as I was graduating from high school. I was seventeen. [00:00:33.51] And I had been experimenting with drugs for the previous two years. [00:00:39.65] And I was becoming increasingly paranoid, [00:00:45.96] and I would be always looking for where there was a police car or whatever. [00:00:51.46] And that was one of the things that I was struggling with when I became a Christian. [00:00:56.22] So, like two days after I became a Christian, I was telling my friend who was a Christian, that I had become a Christian. [00:01:06.88] And after I told him about that, I remember we were walking along the Olentangy river, [00:01:16.47] and I was telling him about how I had been wrestling with feeling paranoid. [00:01:22.74] And he said, he was walking ahead of me, and he said, [00:01:27.02] "Yeah. 'The wicked man flees when no one pursues, but the righteous man is as bold as a lion.'" [00:01:35.69] And that just cut right through me... [00:01:40.09] I literally stopped walking when I heard him say that because I realized it's so true. [00:01:47.31] The reason why I've been paranoid is because I've been doing what was wrong... [00:01:52.02] If I was not doing what was wrong I would not be paranoid. [00:01:56.62] I'd be bold. I said, "Where did you hear that?" I thought he'd you know, learned it in his psychology class or something. [00:02:03.94] He said, "That's in the book of Proverbs." [00:02:08.11] And that was, like, my first experience with the Bible in terms of its power to explain and the depth of psychological insight that it had. [00:02:25.69] So that's one experience. [00:02:28.77] I also remember, maybe a year later, reading for the first time [00:02:36.23] the story of David committing... adultery with Bathsheba, and then having her husband killed. [00:02:46.16] And... then it says that God sent Nathan the prophet to him. [00:02:53.10] And Nathan came to David ostensibly to ask David for a ruling on a civil case in Israel. [00:03:02.65] And he tells David about this rich man who had a thousand sheep. [00:03:12.56] And how next to him lived this poor man who only had one sheep that he dearly loved. [00:03:19.66] And so when someone came to visit the rich man, he was too greedy to slaughter one of his sheep to feed him. [00:03:26.90] Instead he stole the other man's only sheep. [00:03:31.24] And he asked... [00:03:33.95] Nathan said to David to, "What should we do with this man?" [00:03:37.63] And David had this extreme reaction and said, "This man deserves to die!" [00:03:44.14] And I remember reading that. [00:03:47.44] And I stopped at that point, because it was like... I was so blown away with how Nathan [00:03:52.97] had constructed this story in order to arouse David's moral indignation [00:04:01.20] and then Nathan said, "You're the man." [00:04:04.66] And I just... remember just putting it down because I was just so amazed at the creativity that God gave Nathan [00:04:14.28] to come at David about this in a way that was designed to pierce his conscience. [00:04:20.53] So that was another very striking experience for me. [00:04:25.50] I would say in general, with my experience with biblical literacy, since I did not grow up in a Christian home... [00:04:32.89] I...had no real understanding of the contents of the Bible. [00:04:40.51] I... started reading it, and... I just started reading through it, and most of what I read did not make sense to me. [00:04:50.62] Most of it raised questions more than it gave answers. [00:04:55.44] But I noticed over that next year that each... [00:05:05.14] slowly, but surely, my comprehension of different biblical passages [00:05:13.30] increased because I began to see the connections between what this passage was saying and this other passage was saying. [00:05:21.34] And it was very exciting to me, because it was like... [00:05:26.47] if you've ever looked at an impressionistic painter, when he's painting a picture, you know, he's just putting these dabs of color on the canvas. [00:05:37.03] And he clearly has an idea of what he's painting. [00:05:40.93] But if you watched them doing that and you don't know what they're painting, it's very confusing. [00:05:45.79] You just see dabs of color, [00:05:48.70] but there comes a point when you're watching a painter doing that when you realize what he's trying to paint. [00:05:54.91] Then every dab makes the picture more clear. [00:05:58.75] And I experienced something like that the first year or two reading the Bible, [00:06:02.71] that it was initially just confusing, these disconnected dabs of color so to speak. [00:06:08.49] But there came a point where I began to grasp the overall message of the Bible. [00:06:13.33] And then every individual passage was, like, a dab that made the picture clearer. [00:06:18.17] And that was like, so amazing to me that that happened. [00:06:23.99] [Interviewer]: That's cool. So you said you didn't grow up in a Christian household. [00:06:28.36] So pretty much your first experience with the Bible was when your friend gave you that passage out of Proverbs? [00:06:34.34] [Interviewee]: Yeah, there's one exception to that. [00:06:36.89] ..There were a couple of different occasions before I became a Christian where I was exposed, amazingly enough, to this one Bible verse. [00:06:50.44] There was... like, some youth thing that I went to when I was twelve, [00:06:56.33] and then there was another Bible study that some friend dragged me to when I was fifteen. [00:07:01.96] And in both of those cases the verse Revelations 3:20 was used. [00:07:08.18] I did not know the referene, but the verse is Jesus saying, [00:07:11.47] "Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him." [00:07:19.35] And I had heard that verse. It was really the only verse of the Bible, I think, I was even familiar with. [00:07:26.09] I heard that verse when I was twelve and again when I was fifteen. [00:07:30.82] And so the night that I became a Christian, when I was seventeen, [00:07:35.96] I basically, for the first time ever, called out to God and said, "I don't know what I'm doing with my life." [00:07:42.40] That verse just kind of came pouring into my mind. [00:07:49.01] So I guess that counts as an experience of Biblical literacy. [00:07:53.01] Cause I did not know where it was, but I knew what it said and it was like, I sensed, you know, [00:08:00.12] God is, you know, speaking to me through this verse that I happened to have heard twice before. [00:08:08.60] But that was the extent of it. I mean, I was from a biblically illiterate home. [00:08:12.50] My parents didn't go to church; [00:08:15.98] I think there probably was a Bible in our house but I never saw it. [00:08:19.50] [Interviewer]: Ok. Cool. Well, thanks for talking to me today. [00:08:23.56] [Interviewee]: Glad to do it.