John Stott - Why I Am a Christian

For the son of man came to seek and to save what was lost.
~ Luke 19:10

Chapter One - The Hound Of Heaven

Because I am writing on why I am a Christian, I cannot avoid being personal and telling my story. Looking back over a long life, I have often asked myself what it was that brought me to Christ. As I have said already, it was neither my parental upbringing nor my own independent choice; it was Christ himself knocking at my door, drawing attention to his presence outside.

He did this in two major ways. The first was my sense of estrangement from God. I was no atheist. I believed in the existence of God—someone or something somewhere, the ultimate reality behind and beyond all phenomenon. But I could not find him. I used to visit a dark little chapel in the school I was attending in order to read religious books and recite prayers. All to no avail. God was remote and aloof; I was unable to penetrate the fog that seemed to envelop him.

The second way in which I heard Christ knocking at my door was through my sense of defeat. With a vibrant idealism of youth I had a heroic picture of the sort of person I wanted to be—kind and unselfish and public-spirited. But I had an equally clear picture of who I was—malicious, self centered and proud. The two pictures did not coincide. I was high-idealed but weak-willed.

Yet through my sense of alienation and failure the Stranger at the door kept knocking, until the preacher I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter threw light on my dilemma. He spoke to me of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He explained that Christ had died to turn my estrangement into reconciliation and had been raised from the dead to turn my defeat into victory. The correspondence between my subjective need and Christ’s objective offer seemed too close to be a coincidence. Christ’s knocking became louder and more insistent. Did I open the door, or did he? Truly I did, but only because by his persistent knocking he had made it possible, even inevitable.

I have told you my story; I wonder about yours. Jesus assures us in his parables that, whether or not we are consciously seeking God, he is assuredly seeking us. He is like a woman who sweeps her house in search of a lost coin; like a shepherd who risks the dangers of the desert in search of only one lost sheep; and like a father who misses his wayward son and allows him to taste the bitterness of his folly, but is ready at any moment to run to meet him and welcome him home.

Why I am a Christian, pages 29-30
John Stott
former Rector of All Souls Church in London
author of Basic Christianity, The Cross of Christ and The Imcomparable Christ