Testimony: Chris Green | Supporter Appreciation Episode

Hi, we're glad you can join us for the bonus episode of the Behold Your God podcast. And I'm John Snyder, pastor at Christ Church in New Albany, Mississippi, and the author of the Behold Your God Studies.

And I'm here this evening with Chris Green, good friend and also a member of the church. Recently, we did a series of podcasts on the nature of evangelism, really the heart of evangelism. So not so much, you know, techniques, how do you reach the Muslim or how do you reach a religious person or an atheist, but the heart of the issues.

How does God deal with the soul and how do we cooperate with him in that so that we are in harmony with the evangelist? And that's probably an aspect of evangelism that we don't think of so much today.

Having done those episodes, we thought it would really be nice just to hear from some believers that we have watched walk with the Lord and have been a real encouragement to us. And Chris is one of those.

And just to hear from Chris how God had dealt with his soul. So before we get going on that, Chris, just tell us a little bit about yourself. Well, thanks.

I've been, I'm a law professor. I teach at Ole Miss Law School over in Oxford. We've been, my wife and I have been coming to Christchurch since 2006, and I've been on the Medio Gratia board for the last few years.

We have four kids who started coming in 2006. So we showed up and Bonnie was great with child. But we came to the church, short version, we came to the church for the theology and stayed for the hymns and the preaching, which we just love, love to death.

But we, both of us came from families where we didn't really hear the gospel super clearly at home, but we had encountered the gospel in high school when we were in our teens. She was in California, I was in Chicago.

But we met at school out East and eventually made our way down here. Yeah. School out East. Where did you meet? Princeton? So we met at Princeton. And then you went on to Yale. And then I went on to Yale.

She was north of the city. And then Notre Dame. And then, yeah, then I got a philosophy degree at Notre Dame. All right. All right. So lots of degrees. And I'm basically still going to school for a living.

Yeah. I get to read books all day. Yeah, I have to do some writing, but basically be a student for a living. Oh, good.

How the Lord Brought Chris Green to Faith

Well, Chris, tell us how the Lord brought you to Himself. Sure.

So the denomination, I grew up going to a Presbyterian church and we were a family. We went to church every week. I liked going to church every week. Eighth grade, we had a thing that eighth graders do, a confirmation class.

So you're confirming the promises made on your behalf when you were baptized as an infant. And Presbyterian denomination, they have... There's back... So this is when I converted in 1988 when I'm 15 years old.

So back then, there was, I think, a bigger diversity of different attitudes towards scriptures in the Presbyterian church than you'll see today. But there were a few pockets where they took biblical authority more seriously, a lot of places where they didn't.

Our congregation was somewhere in the middle. I think it was... There were some people in the congregation took it very seriously, others who didn't. So as I'm listening to the sermons, and I'm in eighth grade, I'm taking notes on the sermons.

In order to graduate your confirmation class, you're required to turn in 10 pages of notes on the sermons. So I'm paying attention to the sermons. I'm paying attention to all these Bible stories. And I don't really disbelieve the Bible at that point.

Don't really... I mean, if you asked me whether I believe it, I'd say, well, I guess I do. So I get in the high school, and I'm on the quiz bowl team. And when there's Bible questions, I was like, oh, I know these.

You know, I know the answers to Bible questions. I'm like, you know, what's Matthew 5 to 7? Oh, that's the Sermon on the Mount. I know like Bible trivia kind of stuff. And some of the Sunday schools, they would say things like, well, you know, the feeding of the 5 ,000, the multiplication of loaves and fishes, that might have been just because everybody brought their lunch, and they were willing to share because they saw all these little boys.

So we heard, you know, but it wasn't an aggressively anti-biblical message. But I really didn't see the Bible as a message from God until about the midway through high school. So I got involved with the youth group, and there were a few folks who were interested in Christian music.

And I started listening to Christian music. I was a good-ish kid, sort of, and I sort of thought, well, you know, I want to hang out with these, you know, people doing churchy stuff because they're not getting into trouble.

Some of them were getting into trouble, but I tended not to know about that. But I got these songs stuck in my head, and one of them had this line in it. And so I was a religious kid. I was self-righteous.

I thought I was a pretty okay sort. Didn't really think God had any particular problem with me. But there was this one line in the song, Amy Grant, she covered a song by another fellow, but a song called, I Have Decided, and there's one line, it goes, forget the game of being good in your self-righteous pain, because the only good inside your heart is the good that Jesus brings.

So, kind of a corny line, but at one point in the middle of high school, that just suddenly hit me like a ton of bricks. For some reason, I just can't explain, but I thought, oh my goodness, Christianity is a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy.

I just suddenly realized, oh my goodness, I really don't have any good in my heart. And that's what Jesus came to do, is to ask people to file a declaration of spiritual bankruptcy, say, I am completely beyond my ability to repay my debts, and I need a Savior.

And so I had this thing happen to me. I remember the day, it was June 30th, 1988, and I suddenly found myself with an enormous hunger for the Scriptures. So sometimes I've been sick for a few days, I've really lost my appetite, and the way I can tell when I'm well again is I'll wake up in the morning, like, oh my goodness, I'm famished, I haven't been eating for several days, I'm just so, so hungry.

And that's what I felt like with the Scriptures. I would just open up the Bible, which I knew a decent bit about, you know, I had this Bible I got in third grade or something, and I'm like, oh my goodness, there's a lot of stuff in here that I'd seen, but never really seen.

And there were things about the moral law that I thought, oh my goodness, Jesus is telling me to do stuff, but I'm telling Him not to do stuff, I'm due. I mean, it was, I suddenly saw those things. So it was, you know, a lot of people describe it this way, it's like someone turning on the lights, or like you've been living in a black and white world that suddenly just turns to color.

And that was very much how it felt to me. So yeah, I said we came for the theology, stayed for the hymns, a lot of the hymns that we sing have these verses that have this sort of picture. So the very popular hymn, obviously, but, and can it be, the fourth verse, Long my imprisoned spirit lay, Fast bound in sin and nature's night, By an eye diffused a quickening ray.

My woke the dungeon flamed with light, My chains fell off, my heart was free, My rose went forth and followed thee. And the idea of the spirit as a quickening ray, it opens up this whole reality that I couldn't comprehend before, but it's quickening, it gives life at the same time.

That I think is such a beautiful picture. And there's a whole bunch of hymns with similar pictures. But in the middle of high school, I found myself with this sudden interest in the scriptures, and the book of Acts, when I heard some messages, I just thought like, oh my goodness, this is amazing.

These guys just go from town to town and they just show up and they proclaim this message. And this message completely changes who these people are. And I found, as I was encountering the apostolic teaching, that I was being transformed in just the same way that the people in Thessalonica, or the Ethiopian on the road that Philip meets.

I had never heard God speak to me before, and I suddenly was hearing God speak. So a passage that I look at to think about what was going on, 1 Thessalonians 2, Paul says to Thessalonians, we thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God, which you heard from us, you accepted it, not as the word of men, but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers.

So Paul doesn't come to Thessalonica and say, well, I've got a whole bunch of proofs, all this complicated rationale, why this is just a better scheme of theology. He proclaims the word and the word does its work in the believers.

So I've always, my general stance on apologetics has always fit really well with my own experience in that way. So I found myself with this enormous hunger for the scriptures. I started digging in. I got myself a study Bible and kind of looked through some doctrines and realized like, yeah, the Bible testifies to its own nature in a way that makes, you know, you either have to have a high view of scripture or think that there's something fundamentally dishonest about the process that led to us getting the scriptures, if you just look at how the scriptures present themselves.

So that was the big thing that happened in high school. My understanding of things like the atonement and Christ's death in the place of his people took a little longer to understand, to tell you the truth.

There were actually some other songs that I'd heard. I'm a little embarrassed just how corny some of them were, but just the idea that Christ was a sacrifice for his people was something, until I really saw the scriptures in full color, I never really understood.

But when I encountered people who explained it really clearly, like Spurgeon I think was particularly clear, I just loved hearing the story of the gospel of Christ dying a substitutionary death. And Spurgeon loved to tell his own testimony about there being life in a look at the crucified one.

I turned to Christ, Isaiah 45, turn to me and be saved at all the ends of the earth. John 6, everyone who beholds the Son and believes in Him would have eternal life. So just how love for sola fide and substitutionary atonement grew to have a love for Christ.

Strong doctrines of the sovereignty of God. So I was at Princeton and read, it was almost just because Jonathan Edwards had a strong association with Princeton. I picked up just some, I think I picked up like the latest volume in the Yale edition of Edwards' works, which is not even his major study, it was like his sermons he preached between the ages of 17 and 20.

It's like the sermons from 1720 to 1723. And I read them like, man, this is amazing stuff. So I really came to love the Puritan theology and the just systematic biblical making the way that Edwards made his own mind biblical and sought to have his congregations and his readers' minds made more biblical.

That was really enrapturing. So both my wife and I got involved with the same student group at school. It was a group that's been there really since the 1930s. So back when there was the reorganization of Princeton Seminary and the Westminster Seminary in Philly was formed in 1929.

A lot of the undergrad, a lot of it really was parents of the undergrad who wanted more shepherds for their sons going to Princeton, founded a group that's now called the Princeton Christian Fellowship.

It was the Princeton Evangelical Fellowship for many years. And those folks really, really fed me the Bible in a way that I feel like, okay, I can think about the world properly because I've got a more biblical mind.

So that was college. I ended up getting rebaptized my senior year of college on Easter of 1994, but had various meanderings theologically. I feel like we're getting grumpier and grumpier as we age. But having kids, I think you start thinking, okay, well, I need to be given these folks.

It's one thing if I go to a place and I think, well, I agree with 93 of what they're giving me. But when the kids start coming along, you realize, well, I need to really get as absolutely pure a description of the Savior as we can get, which is why we've been traveling a bit.

The fact that Christchurch gets folks traveling from distances, really a lot of people to the east. We're one of the families coming from the west. You see people that live an hour and a half or two hours away from each other who never meet except for the fact that they meet here.

But we've loved... I think that one of the things we love most about Christchurch is that it has a transparency about the preaching, everything we do. We don't want people to see the stuff we're doing.

We want them to see Christ. We want to see Christ standing behind a window. We want to be a window. A really good window doesn't shout at you, hey, I'm a window, look at me. A dirty window does that. But a clean window is going to be transparent.

You look at the window, you don't see the window, you see the thing behind the window. So the emphasis on presenting Christ in a way that the medium is not there, but it's not seen, it's not noticed. So I love being able to be involved with the Media Gratia work in terms of encouraging them to have that same sort of transparency that we've been blessed by at Christchurch.

The Sweetness of Christ's Faithfulness

Well, as a believer now, if you were to just say, you know, I don't mean ten years ago or five years ago, but just, you know, in the last months or year recently, if one of your children came up to you and said, Dad, you know, what's one of the aspects of Christ that you find sweetest of late?

What would you say?

I mean, as each year passes, His faithfulness is more and more precious. I mean, it's frankly just because I think of like how many times I have failed to do what Christians should do. How many times have I woken up in the morning and just, I just, I don't know, you know, I don't want to pray.

I don't want to read the Bible. I don't, I'm tired and I just, I don't want to pay attention to stuff that I know I should be paying attention to. And I think Christ, He looks at people like that who are year after year after year struggling with the same sins, and yet He's faithful to them.

It has a sweetness that really increases with each passing year, seeing that God is faithful. He is a God who keeps His promises even when it's promises to really, really, really unworthy people. The atonement, I mean, the fact that Christ died for His people is, it continues to just flabbergast me in its beauty.

I just love, love to read and think and talk about Christ's blood covering His people, His righteousness being imputed to His people. So those have been particularly, particularly sweet. Edwards has a line, he says, you know, if I'm trying to describe the gospel to somebody, it's almost like describing the taste of honey to somebody who's never tasted honey.

There's just the sweetness to it that it has an ineffability about it, it can't be described. And so as I describe it to my kids, I try to get them to see, like, don't you see that this is just the most amazing news in the world?

And they roll their eyes, you know, they're 12 down to three, you know, hoping that they'll taste it themselves and, you know, taste and see that the Lord is good.

Growing in the Love of Christ and the Love of God's Word

Yeah, I think that really is, it's such a clear picture, Chris, the faithfulness of the Lord that you talked about. But not only, you know, the objective looking at that reality outside of yourself, but even, you know, you, your life is a picture of that, that year after year, with your intellect, with your reading, you're not getting used to these infinite paradoxes of mercy, you know, but you are still in the grip of these things.

And I do think that for each believer, that ought to be the pattern that, okay, so I am growing in an intellectual awareness of how these things fit together, of how really deep and borderless these bottomless, wonderful truths, you know, the height, the depth, the length, the breadth of the love of God in Christ.

I am aware of how little aware I am of that, and yet, so as the mind gets a grip, but as a man lives on those things, they don't become humdrum, you know, it's as if the doors are thrown open, or, you know, just when you think you get to the edge of the border, it's as if God opened your eyes to see that you have just taken the first step into this ocean.

And, you know, we have all eternity. We have tomorrow morning to wake up and live with the same God. Well, we want to thank you guys for joining us, and we'll be hearing from some other folks. In fact, Chris mentioned trying to bring the gospel in a way that's understandable to his own children again and again, and I'm going to be able to introduce you to one of my daughters, and a very self-righteous, really nice daughter who the Lord had to bring to Himself through many months of conviction.

But she won't let me tell her story, so I'll let her tell it. So, we will follow up next week with that episode and with others.