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But because of his great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions—it is by grace you have been saved. Ephesians 2:4-5 Grace and peace be yours in abundance through the knowledge of God and of Jesus our Lord. His divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. 2 Peter 1:2-4 God’s grace. God’s sovereign grace. For such a long time I never realized what these words truly meant. The individual words, themselves, I had heard all my life but I had never put them together with any real understanding. Now I have come to realize it is the story found on every page of the Bible. Its theme is seen from the first page to the last. The gospel of Christ begins and ends with the good news of it. My own salvation is begun, is held secure, and will one day be completed by it. In learning how great my need, I have learned how great is that grace. God’s sovereign grace was at the heart of historic Reformation Christianity when the great reformers once again discovered and proclaimed it. It is, and has always been, the foundation of the message which changes lives and changes the world. It is because of those who have held to this historic Reformation Christianity, my family and I now appreciate what God’s sovereign grace means to each of us personally. I’m so grateful to God for bringing us to a church like Covenant Presbyterian where we can learn and grow and be equipped to minister from this solid biblical historical perspective and teaching of God’s Word. God was gracious to us. In bringing me to an understanding of His sovereign grace, I now realize He had been taking me along little by little in many different ways over the years. Both my father’s and my mother’s families were Christian. My grandmother, Grace Cochran, first responded to an invitation to follow Christ as a young wife at an old fashioned “tent revival” near Lamont. My grandfather, Samuel Cochran, soon followed suit as well as my great grandfather. Grandpa became a pastor with the Assemblies of God and even built the Fairfax Assembly of God Church near Bakersfield. He served as pastor there and in Parlier for many years. Being raised in church I made my commitment to Christ as a young boy. God was gracious to me. It seems I grew up always knowing God was gracious to me. Mom tells the story of how she was supposed not to even be able to have any children according to what the doctors told her. She and Dad prayed for children and they not only had me but a couple years later my brother came. My upbringing was in the Assemblies of God and I’m thankful for the faithfulness to Christ and to His Word which was impressed upon me during my early years. My parents were consistent in their Christian walk. They gave me a wonderful home and I have wanted for nothing. I shall always be grateful to God for them and for the upbringing they gave me. I have known many wonderful believers, pastors, teachers, and friends in those churches through the years. It was there I first came to know Jesus, desired to follow Him and to understand His Word. God was gracious to me. I graduated from Tulare Union High School in 1972 and went on to graduate from College of the Sequoias in Visalia. God then gave me a wonderful wife, Chriss. She was also raised in a Christian home by good parents. She’s from Woodlake and was also raised in the Assemblies of God. We met when our families both attended church in Visalia. We’ve been married almost 33 years and she means more and more to me as our time together goes on. She’s my joy and constant support. We have come down this road together, always arriving at the same place. She is truly one example of the grace with which God has richly blessed me. Shortly after Chriss and I were married I joined the Air Force. I ended up in language studies stationed at the Presidio of Monterey learning modern standard Arabic and Egyptian colloquial. After my discharge from the Air Force I was able to go back to school on the GI Bill. I graduated from Fresno Pacific College with a degree in Biblical Studies and Religion and Languages. I had vague plans of working in Christian ministry somewhere and I knew FPC was a good Mennonite Brethren school not too far from where we were living in Visalia. Because of my language training, my wife and I even ministered with the Assemblies in North Africa in a missionary work there for about 14 months. The pastor had us present ourselves before the church one Sunday evening. Amazingly, we were able to raise all our needed financial support and more in that one evening! At the time we didn’t realize that wasn’t the norm. We found out later it takes some folks years to raise that amount. God was being gracious to us again. We assisted the missionary and his family stationed there and ran a small book store making books, bibles, and bible studies available to the university students and a place for the local believers to safely meet for prayer and worship. When we returned to the States, I taught fourth grade at Visalia Christian Academy for three years before being hired with Southern California Edison Company taking a position in Goleta near Santa Barbara. I soon took another position with SCE which brought us back here to Bakersfield where we’ve been ever since. Chriss and I have two sons, Sean and Matthew. Sean has just recently earned his Masters degree in linguistics from Cal State Fullerton. As a young man he fell in love with Asian languages and the Asian peoples. He spent a year in China doing field language survey work for the Summer Institute of Linguistics. This is the preliminary work which must be done before the language of a people group can be put into a written form and bibles and other materials can be translated for them. He speaks Mandarin and is teaching at CSUF and at Cypress Community College. Sean just gave us an incredible daughter-in-law this last May 2007. Van is one of the most wonderful young women we have ever met. What a gift of God’s graciousness to us she is. She is delightful, intelligent, and generous to a fault. She has a very good position with the Raytheon Corporation. She comes from a Vietnamese Christian family whose story of fleeing persecution under extremely difficult and dangerous circumstances, hard work and accomplishment here in the U.S, is nothing short of inspiring. Their courtship lasted four years and we’ve come to love her and her family very much. With the addition of Van to our family, our family now has grown tremendously to span from Southern California to Texas to Switzerland to Australia. You should have seen the wedding! Sean and Van are making their new home in Buena Park and attend St. Luke’s Reformed Episcopal Church in Santa Ana where the good news of God’s sovereign grace is also carefully made plain. Matthew is our younger son. He has transferred to CSUF to complete the last two years toward a degree in entertainment art. His desire is to possibly get an internship in one of the studios and then become a “character concept designer” for computer video games and the like. He has always been a talented artist and some of his drawings are amazing. Chriss and I are finding ourselves missing him so much now that he’s gone off to school. Matt is very quiet but he has a heart that runs deep. We both miss having his unique wit and wisdom around us all the time. Both of our sons have been nothing but a blessing and have never caused us pain or trouble. What a gift from God they are. And God has been gracious to them. When we relocated to Bakersfield working for SCE, we found a good home church at Laurelglen Bible Church. What good teaching we discovered and what good friends and fellow believers we found there. LBC is a Mennonite Brethren church with a congregation made up of many diverse church backgrounds. Having graduated from Fresno Pacific I was very comfortable and we were very happy there. We attended LBC for over 16 years as our home church and our sons never knew any other. We are so glad that God brought us to LBC. It was during a teaching series in the book of Ephesians while there our pastor for the first time presented us with God’s sovereign grace and our justification in such a way that we got our first glimpse as to what it was really all about. I remember being struck with the thought that, “It is God Who saved me! I didn’t save me. I and God didn’t save me”. God in his sovereign grace has done it and all credit and glory is His alone. That was the beginning of a realization of the depth and fullness of God’s grace toward us. I was raised to understand and believe that my salvation ultimately depended upon me. That it was up to me to hold on to God and that there was always a chance I could lose my salvation. God did everything to make salvation possible but I had to make it effective for myself. Growing up I witnessed countless times folks I knew “going forward” at the close of the service to be saved again and again because they had blown it. And this was considered a good thing! In wanting to please God, we were caught up in this never-ending struggle to be good enough – to hold on hard enough. There were certain extra-biblical expectations that we were to do and not do and if we violated them we would need to “pray through” and get right with God again. In order to gain the power to live a victorious Christian life, one needed to be Spirit baptized with the evidence of speaking in other tongues (It seemed that every “good” service was geared toward some aspect of doing these things). To not do so was to settle for second best and maybe to settle for living a life of spiritual carnality. What a terrible weight the knowledge of God’s grace has taken off us. I’ve come to realize I’m not holding on to Him all by myself but that He holds on to me. Even if I lose my grip or stumble, He’s holding on to me and His grip will not fail. He is the author and finisher of our faith. The single most precious Bible passage to Chriss has been John 10: 27-29, “My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. My Father, who has given them to me, is greater than all and no one is able to snatch them out of the Father’s hand.” With the assurance and peace these verses have brought to her, she has never been the same since. In those church services as a young man, one could tell if there were real spiritual things taking place, not by how well God’s word was made known and followed but by how much emotion one could feel. It seemed to me, even early on, that folks used to interpret Scripture by how they felt, rather than interpreting their feelings by the light of Scripture. And if I remember correctly, it was just after Chriss and I returned from North Africa, we began to see how such notions were not really spiritual at all and can lead to all kinds of abuse in interpretations and foolish behavior. It seemed like there was so much bad teaching and there were so many bizarre notions believers were buying into when we returned. The hyper-faith/health and wealth gospel was something we hadn’t noticed before. All kinds of new sensationalisms seemed to be everywhere. We watched “Christian” television stunned. I remember how we were shocked and wondered if all this had just happened since we’d been gone or were we just becoming aware of it for the first time. We observed all this and were sensing that not all was as it should be and there was so much of which I was unsure. I guess it was sort of a crisis time for us and I was open for change. I wanted any change to be for the good. I wanted to get it right. Being a part of Laurelglen Bible Church was a great blessing to us. The ministry at LBC kept us headed in the right direction and it gave us a place to grow and to minister. While there we were part of a small group Bible study and prayer group. The group had been going through a video series called “Dust to Glory” by R.C. Sproul. This was an overview of each book of the Bible and it was very good. I began to appreciate how the Bible looked when seen as a whole. There were themes and messages which flowed from beginning to end. The Bible was one book in a very real sense and I was beginning to see how marvelous a thing that was. Since we had now been introduced to Sproul and were impressed with how he understood scripture, I began to read other things he had written as well as things written by others to which he made reference. Here was a universe I had only scarcely heard of before and I was discovering for myself the rich depth of understanding and grasp of God’s Word there was in the writings from these authors! They became giants of the Christian faith to me. The approach to reading and understanding the Bible handed down to me as I was growing up was called Dispensationalism. I didn’t know that’s what it was called but it was the only approach to the Bible we knew. Dispensationalism, as an approach to understanding the whole of the Bible, is very much based on a certain eschatological (end times) scenario. This end times scenario is the one upon which the very popular ‘Left Behind’ series by Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins are based. This approach is then assumed upon Scripture by dispensationalists and interpreted by it. Bible prophecy had become a very popular subject at the time I was in high school due to books like Hal Lindsey and C. C. Carlson’s ‘The Late Great Planet Earth’. I was intrigued and wanted to figure it all out. The harder I tried to make all the prophetic scripture pieces fit into a clear picture of the future the more difficult it became. As I picked at the threads of details the more it became unraveled. Things were becoming a mess. I was about to resign myself to the idea that it just couldn’t be done. I fear what might have happened if my devotion had not been solely to the person of Jesus Himself. During my studies I discovered that this dispensational system was only about 150 years old! I had just assumed it had always been the way Christians had understood the Bible. This was a real shock to me. It’s not that so recent a teaching in the history of the church couldn’t be true but it did make it a bit more suspect. One has to be careful not to throw out off-hand centuries of what the Church has understood to be the teaching of Scripture. Today it is the predominant position held in American evangelical Christianity. And I believe that is, for the most part, due to the same unwitting assumptions I had inherited and such assumptions are being perpetuated by the popularity of books like those I mention above. But I was driven to take a harder look and I wanted to know how the Church had understood the Bible for all the centuries before John Darby first began to teach Dispensationalism about 1840. As I began to read more on the subject and to read the Bible anew, I came to see that Dispensationalism as a way of understanding the Bible went beyond just an alternative understanding of the end times. It had far reaching consequences for how one would come to understand the Bible as a whole, the nature of God Himself, His holiness, His grace, providence, predestination, Christ’s atonement, justification, sanctification, original sin, propitiation, and on and on. These were doctrines in the Word which were more often than not, neglected or glossed over in the teaching I had received as a young man. They were concepts which had vague meanings. So now Dispensationalism was beginning to unravel from all the rest of its edges as well. But because God was being gracious to me, I was also being given the alternative to the poor theology I found myself abandoning. Despite Dispensationalism, God’s covenant with his people is the architecture of the whole Bible. The Bible cannot be divided up into different portions which apply only at certain times to certain groups of people. There is not one part of the Bible which applies only to national Israel and one portion which only applies to the “Church”. The Church is not God’s “Plan B” until He can get back to “Plan A” which is national Israel and a rebuild future temple. Christ Jesus is the true temple of God. Note the Old Testament reference in the following verses of John 2:19-22: Jesus answered them, “Destroy this temple and in three days I will raise it up.” The Jews then said, “It has taken forty-six years to build this temple, and will you raise it up in three days?” But he was speaking about the temple of his body. When therefore he was raised from the dead, his disciples remembered that he has said this, and they believed the Scripture and the word that Jesus had spoken.” The old has passed away by God’s design. All has been fulfilled in Christ. That is the whole plot of the book of Hebrews! To look forward to the old being reestablished is an affront to the very person and work of Christ! Jesus told the woman at the well in John 4:21; 23-24, “Woman, believe me, the hour is coming when neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem will you worship the Father…But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and in truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth.” The Church is not just some “parenthesis” in God’s prophetic scheme of history. This is not historic Protestantism. The Church is made up of all true believers throughout history. The Old Testament is to be read in light of the New and everything makes sense only in the light of Christ. He is the One who brings it all together. He is the fulfillment of, and the correct interpretation of, the Scriptures for they speak of Him. There are not two peoples of God. God only has one people. They have one means of salvation and one future glory. And it is by His sovereign grace He makes them His own. In Romans 11: 17-24, in Paul’s reference to God’s cultivated olive tree, God only has one olive tree. It is from this one olive tree He prunes off branches and grafts in branches. It is His story. As I began to learn more of Him and to see Him as the Bible shows Him to us, I began to see myself in contrast to His holiness. I am persuaded that whenever a man sees God, he truly sees himself for the first time. The prophet Isaiah, when he saw a vision of the Lord, cried out, “Woe is me! For I am lost; I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!” Isaiah 6:5. And when Peter first understood who Jesus was he fell down at Jesus’ knees saying, “Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, O Lord.” Luke 5:8. Time and again this same scenario is seen in the Scriptures. It is in His Word we can see Him as He truly is. As I began to understand how sinful I am because of my fallen nature and my own chosen sin, I began to see how much I needed God’s grace. We are justified by God’s grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone, according to the Scriptures alone, to the glory of God alone. Again, God was gracious. Had He let us see all this at once I know we wouldn’t have been able to take it in. As He took away one misunderstanding it was being replaced by something better. As one misconception fell away, a more marvelous thing was there to replace it. By word upon word, precept upon precept, doctrine by doctrine, we were hearing and understanding the gospel like we were hearing it for the very first time. But we weren’t learning something new. We were learning something very old for the first time. We were hearing and being taken hold of by the truths of historic Reformation Christianity. As I’ve been trying to put our story together, I realize there are so many times and in so many ways God has been gracious to us and to ours. During a study of the book of I Corinthians I was struck by how similar the Corinthian church seemed to be to the contemporary Church. There was bad theology which always leads to bad behavior. They were obsessed with all kinds of shallow sensationalism. They were tossed around by every wind of poor doctrine. They were close to forgetting Christ and His grace and, as a result, who they were in Him. Here’s the question Paul put to them and for which each of us needs an answer for ourselves, “What do you have that you did not receive?” I Corinthians 4:7. The answer to the question is, “Nothing!” There is nothing that is ours that He did not give us. God has truly been gracious to me my whole life but nothing compares to the grace He has shown to me in Christ my Lord and Savior. I did not save me. I and God did not save me. God saved me! And God keeps me by His own power and grace, not mine. I deserved nothing and he has given me everything. It completely humbles me, for who is able to boast in light of all that? I owe Him everything and it is because of His undeserved love to me I am motivated to follow Him. If you have never known this Christ and have never really heard the gospel or heard the good news of God’s great grace, you need to hear it for the first time. A warm and open invitation is extended to you to visit or contact us. If you realize you need to hear the good news of God’s grace again, please do the same. If you have heard the gospel all your life, as I had, but you sense there must be something more than dubious feelings and empty sensationalism, there is. If you’re tired of shallow experiences touted as spirituality, if you desire to be challenged deeply, intellectually, and spiritually in your Christian faith and find the real strength and motivation for living your life in Christ, you can. If the grace of God you understand is too shallow, too cheap, quickly forgotten, too easy to fathom, and really doesn’t make a whole lot of difference in your life, you need to take a harder look at what His Word will tell you. I invite you to take advantage of the resources you will find on this website. Jesus, Jesus, Jesus
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