After visiting a Baptist church several times in 1970, I was encouraged to make a decision to be saved. One evening the pastor preached a highly emotional sermon. I felt very guilty, for he said that I needed to make a decision, or I would go to hell. After the service,one of the pastors asked me to go to his study. He urged me to pray and give Jesus my heart. He had me to repeat the "sinners prayer." Then he told me I had been saved and if I ever had any doubts about my salvation it would be the work of satan trying to deceive me.

When I was discharged from the military I enrolled in a Baptist college to prepare for the ministry. There I met and married Karen Wimer. After graduating, I went to seminary. While there I heard, for the first time, the doctrines of God's sovereign grace, through my brother- in-law, Ken Wimer. Even then, they made sense, but were very different from the doctrines I had been taught.

In 1979 Karen and I joined a large fundamentalist mission agency and later went to Chad, Africa. As I stud ied, I saw that the gospel of God's sovereign grace in Christ is indeed the truth. I debated the doctrines of grace with other missionaries, but it was not until we returned to the states that God revealed his Son to me.

While helping to start a church in Florida in 1987 I met a couple who believed the gospel of Christ. At the same time Ken and I were having long talks about the gospel on our amateur radios while he was in Ivory Coast. The Lord was pleased to show both my wife and me that salvation is totally by his grace in Christ alone. The christ I had been taught to trust is not the Christ of the Bible.That christ is a man made idol whose power to save is subject to and depends upon the will of man. The god I believed in is not God. His power and purpose are subject to man's will. The gospel I believed was a false gospel. I was not yet saved, but lost in religion.

Thank God, be would not leave me in that lost condition! Now, by his grace, I see that Christ alone is my Savior. His righteousness is my only righteousness. His blood is my only atonement. His purpose, work and grace do not depend upon my repentance, faith and good works. They are the cause! Now, by believers baptism, I wish to publicly renounce my former idolatry, confess my faith in Christ and commit myself to him, his gospel and his kingdom.