His Story This is the story of what the God of the Bible has done for me. If you chose to read it, it might tell you a little about my story, but I hope it might also tell you a little about His story. My Early Life I was born in the 1980’s in Connecticut, a few years after my parents had immigrated to the U.S. during the Lebanese Civil War. My parents both completed their education in the U.S.: my father in pharmacy and my mother in engineering. With the exception of my father, all of my close relatives when I was young were either teachers or engineers. My family moved to New Hampshire when I was two years old, shortly after the birth of the older of my two sisters. My other sister was born two years later. I am thankful that my parents raised me in a stable home. They also took me to church and told me about the Bible. I knew many stories from the Bible, but it took several years for one potentially life-changing concept to sink in; that concept is my sin. The God of the Bible In order to really understand sin, it is first necessary to understand who God is. We live in a universe governed by the laws of physics. If we think back to how the universe began, we will reach one of two conclusions: either the laws of physics that govern the universe have always existed for all eternity and had no beginning (i.e. the laws of physics are the only true god), or else the laws of physics came into existence at some point in time. As you can tell, I believe that the laws of physics came into existence by the design of a pre-existing god. The explanation for why I believe the God of the Bible is that god is too long to include fully here, but I will summarize quickly. The Bible is composed of 66 small books that were written through history over a period of well over a thousand years. Those books all weave together to describe the same attributes of the same God in an amazing way. They contain dozens of prophecies that have already been fulfilled in every detail, even though those prophecies were sometimes written hundreds of years before their fulfillment, and the remaining prophecies that have yet to be fulfilled all point together to a consistent picture of God’s plan for the future. I have witnessed individual lives that were changed by the Bible in wonderful ways, and through history there have been many others. It is also worth mentioning that the Bible itself claims to be the words of God, for example, “All Scripture is God-breathed, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness” (II Timothy 3:16). It is impossible for me to respond here to every argument that has been made about why the Bible might not be true. Some of these claims state that the Bible contains errors or contradictions, that the God of the Bible should not allow suffering, and that the Bible has been disproven by science. While I certainly do not claim to have all the answers, I have studied the arguments above and do not believe them to be consistent with a careful study of the Bible. I am willing to discuss topics such as these privately. Sin Most people would consider me to have been a good person as I was growing up. I never got in trouble with the law, I usually obeyed my parents and teachers, I usually treated my family and friends well, and I never seriously hurt anybody. Of course there were times when I broke commands that God had given in the Bible (for example, commands forbiding lying or desiring the belongings of someone else, and commands to love God above all else, and to always treat other people as being better than myself). The problem is this: the Bible says in James 1:10 “whosoever shall keep the whole law, and yet offend in in point, he is guilty of all.” Since everyone has broken some of the commands in the Bible, Romans 3:10-23 says “There is none righteous, no not one… There is none that doeth good, no not one… All have sinned, and come short of the glory of God.” Sin is doing anything that is wrong in God’s sight, and since God is the standard, everyone has sinned because everyone falls short of that standard. I remember a specific day when I was in the third grade that I felt a guilty conscience after something I had done. Romans 2:15 says that everyone shows “the work of the law [of God] written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness.” The conscience is thus a gift from God to help us realize our own imperfection, and thus our need. At that time when my conscience bothered me, God also brought to my mind something I had already been taught by my parents: that God is holy (Isaiah 6:3), meaning purely separate from sin, and will always punish sin that has not been paid for. Romans 6:23 says “The wages of sin is death.” The word for death here means ‘separation’ and refers not only to physical death (separation of the spirit from the body) but also spiritual death (eternal separation from God). Hebrews 9:27 says “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgement.” The Bible teaches that because of the nature of who God is, as the only eternally existent being and the one who created everything else, He is perfectly right and just in His requirements of us. Rather than creating us as robots that always do what He wants, God created us with a free will, and everyone has chosen to sin. God's Requirement While God is holy and therefore does not accept sin, I am thankful that He is also a God of love. There are several words for love used in the Bible, but the one that is used to describe God’s love means “self sacrifice for the good of another.” II Peter 3:9 explains the reason that God doesn’t punish sin right away: “The Lord is not slack concerning His promise… but is long-suffering toward us, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance.” The way that God demonstrated His love is in the alternate way that He provided for our sins to be paid for. We read in John 3:16, “God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” In this verse, God tells us that believing in God's Son is the way that anyone can have eternal life, which raises 2 important questions: What do we need to believe? What does it mean to believe? What do we need to believe? In the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John within the Bible, we read of Jesus Christ, who called himself the Son of God, who was born on earth and lived a perfect life without sin. He was executed by hanging on a cross as a punishment for calling himself the Son of God. He did not remain dead, but rather his spirit was resurrected into a new body and he was seen by over 500 eyewitnesses, most of whom remained alive at the time when the eyewitness accounts of his resurrection were written (I Corinthians 15:6). In Romans 3:25 we read of Jesus “Whom God hath set forth to be a propitiation [acceptable substitute payment] through faith in his blood, to declare his righteousness for the remission of sins.” Put in modern English, God is willing to accept the death of Jesus Christ who was perfectly innocent as a substitute penalty for our sins though we are guilty, and we can choose to accept this offer by “faith” or believing. We can also chose to reject this offer, as Jesus said in John 3:36: “He who believes in the Son has everlasting life; and he who does not believe the Son shall not see life, but the wrath of God abides on him.” What does it mean to believe? The terms "believe" and "faith" have the same meaning. The Bible also uses the term "repent" which means a change of mind, as I will get to later. Believing requires knowledge of the facts to be believed, but perhaps more importantly, it also involves the emotions and the will. It is not enough to know that there is a God; even demons know that (James 2:19). Believing requires a personal decision to trust in the work of Christ as our sole means of salvation from sin and separation from God. We must acknowledge that we cannot be good enough to pay for our sins on our own and we must chose to accept the work of Jesus Christ as the sole payment for our sin, as explained in Ephesians 2:8-9 "For by grace you have been saved through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest anyone should boast." This, in my opinion, is the hardest part of becoming a true Bible-believing Christian. To my knowledge, every other religion (and many groups that claim to be Christian) teaches that you must do good things in order to please God or the gods. However, the Bible teaches that we can never please God by being good. We must "repent" (change our minds) about who we are (sinners) and who God is (holy), in order to realize that we can never meet God's standard on our own, and we must trust in the payment that Jesus Christ has made on our behalf. The Christian Life Ever since that day when I was in the third grade that I realized my own sin and my need for Jesus Christ's sacrifice to save me and set me in a right relationship with God, I have been able to enjoy an assurance about eternity. The Bible states clearly that it is possible to be sure that I will be in heaven after death. Just as John 3:16 states that anyone (no matter what that person has done in the past) who believes will have eternal life, Ephesians 1:13 and 4:30 tell us that after believing we are "sealed" by God for eternal life. Following that day when I first acknowledged my sin and accepted God's gift, I have witnessed God at work in my life and have continued to grow in my faith and my understanding of God. There seem to be many ideas about what it means to be a Christian. To be a Bible-believing Christian DOES NOT guarantee money, health, or success in life (II Tim 3:12), but it DOES guarantee that you can come directly to God in prayer at any time (Hebrews 4:16), and that you can know with certainty what will happen to your spirit after death (John 3:16). It DOES NOT require you to try to change the government or the world (I Peter 2:13), but it DOES require you to submit to God and allow him to change you (Romans 12:1). It DOES NOT expect you to try to compel others to do what you think is right or to stop doing what you think is sin, but it DOES expect you to be willing to share with others what God has done for you and how God can save them from their sin (Acts 1:8, I Peter 3:15). Seeking to please God is not a requirement for salvation (Ephesians 2:9), but it should be a natural consequence of it (I John 4:19), based on thankfulness for what God has done rather than being based on fear of punishment (II Corinthians 9:7). My Young Adult Life I enjoyed the sciences during high school, and after graduating I chose to study electrical and biomedical engineering at the bachelor's and master's level. While I continued to love engineering design, I didn't want to spend the rest of my career sitting at a desk in front of a computer. I wanted more direct opportunities to use my training as a means of ministry to people and not just a way to earn a living. For that reason, I attended medical school at Tufts University in Boston, graduating with an M.D. in 2010. I have often been asked about this transition, and I would like to point out that medicine and engineering are more closely linked than many people realize. As healthcare providers, we rely on engineers to design the technology that we use to care for patients every day. More importantly, medicine and engineering are both applied sciences: engineers apply basic science principles from physics and chemistry to achieve something useful, while physicians apply basic science principles from biology and chemistry to achieve something useful. Following graduation from medical school, I enrolled in residency training in 2010 in emergency medicine at Stony Brook University Medical Center on Long Island, NY and completed the program in 2013. There are many aspects of emergency medicine that attracted me. The most important are that I love to be the first physician to evaluate a patient presenting with a new problem, and I also enjoy the diversity of evaluating any patient in any age group arriving in the emergency department with any type of medical problem. The diversity encountered in an emergency medicine residency also makes it an excellent preparation for providing healthcare in resource-limited and international settings, which meshes well with my reason for studying medicine in the first place - to use it as a means of ministry. Since 2009, I have traveled on international medical missions at least once per year. These trips have a dual purpose. They provide people in medically-underserved countries with an opportunity to discuss their physical health needs, and they also provide people with the opportunity to discuss their spiritual needs with regard to their relationship with God. Unknown to me, while I was preparing for medical missions through medical school and residency, my future wife Katrina had been working as a nurse at Hackensack University Medical Center in New Jersey and had also been serving regularly on medical mission trips. God allowed our lives to first cross paths on one of these trips in 2011, and after getting to know each other better over the next 2 years, we were married in 2013. Since then, I have worked for Dartmouth-Hitchcock as an emergency physician, staffing the emergency departments both in Keene NH and Brattleboro VT. Kat and I both believe God is directing us to spend more time providing medical care in medically underserved countries and using that as an opportunity to tell people what God has done for us. Because I have been asked multiple times about the ethics of doing this, I would like to state my perspective on this. I believe it is important to ensure that it is clear to those who come as patients to a medical mission clinic that it is not necessary to agree with the spiritual beliefs of those running the clinic in order to receive or benefit from from medical care. However, I see nothing unethical about sharing with those who come to a medical clinic the story of what God has done for me. I am very thankful that God was willing to do wonderful things for me, and I wish to provide others with the opportunity to hear about it if they by their own free will chose to listen. God wants to do wonderful things for each of them and for you, too. -Steve