Pastor Batzig interviews my friend John Hendryx, the man behind www.monergism.com

PB: John, I’m sure our readers would like to know something about the man behind Monergism. Would you mind sharing a brief testimony and tell us how you came to embrace and love Reformed Theology?

JH: Thank you Pastor Batzig. I am honored that you would take the time out of your busy schedule.

Since I have basically been in a cave without much outside contact for the past 10 months, I have not had much opportunity to interact with people as I usually would. Those months were spent hunkered down developing our most recent project: a best-of–the-web MP3 by Scripture Library. So it is a pleasure to speak with you. But you asked that my testimony be brief, so let’s get right to it.

You first asked about the man behind Monergism … Well, “pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!” Much more interesting is the Person he and his website are pointing to. I really want to talk about the LORD, about what He has done, and what He is now doing. My conversion and my life in Christ is a demonstration of the sheer grace of God … how the LORD can take a hopelessly lost and darkened sinner and, without an ounce that sinners’ help, translate him from the kingdom of darkness to the Kingdom of light and life.

Interesting you should ask about my testimony and my embrace of Reformed Theology in the same breath, because they are actually one and the same.

I was a 19-year old sophomore at the University of Colorado, Boulder deeply entrenched in New Age Occultism, which was essentially to a mixture of Hinduism, Tantric Buddhism, Occult practices, pseudo-Christianity and solipsism or the worship of the Self. It was partly drug induced and partly arrived at through deep periods of meditation and lots of metaphysical literature … Then one day while reading the Bible I came across Deuteronomy 18 which reads:

“When you come into the land that the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not learn to follow the abominable practices of those nations. There shall not be found among you anyone who burns his son or his daughter as an offering, anyone who practices divination or tells fortunes or interprets omens, or a sorcerer 11 or a charmer or a medium or a necromancer or one who inquires of the dead, 12 for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord. And because of these abominations the Lord your God is driving them out before you. 13 You shall be blameless before the Lord your God, 14 for these nations, which you are about to dispossess, listen to fortune-tellers and to diviners. But as for you, the Lord your God has not allowed you to do this.”

This passage struck me right between the eyes. It instantly put the fear of the Lord in me because it revealed to me the inconsistency in my understanding of God. The weight of the text immediately drove me to my knees to pray to the Lord. I remember my prayer: “Lord, if everything I believe is wrong I want to know. Please just show me what is truth is. Nothing else matters” Well, it was the Lord who put that prayer into my heart and the Lord who answered that prayer. It led to a series of events (which for brevity sake I will spare you) that led me to read another verse …a verse that the Lord actually used to save me: Romans 9:15-16:

“I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,
and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.”
16 It does not, therefore, depend on human desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.

It was with these words that the Lord opened my eyes to the Gospel. The scales fell from my eyes and I recognized for the first time that He is God, and I am not. I despaired of all hope in myself and was given a new vision accompanied by a renewed will to take hold of the grace of God in Christ. The previous false understanding I had of Jesus and his mission were, at once, swept away by the Hand of the Lord and I now, by the grace of God, understood that there was no hope in me or anything else, save in the Lord Jesus Christ alone. … He implanted in me a new heart, a new understanding and a new life which I could not have possibly come up with on my own. So from this reading of the Scripture together with this life-changing experience, you can see why your two questions are actually one. The Lord was gracious by revealing to me, at the moment of my conversion, that Jesus deserved the glory for all of it. It was simple and profound and even though I did not know what Reformed Theology was, (and would not read about it till much later), I was born in Christ knowing, from His own words, that salvation is of the Lord ….all a work of God. It was the most radical paradigm shift possible. My understanding went from “I am God” to “I am not God” … from “I can save myself” to “only Jesus can save me”.

Full interview here.