Laman's Lens

About Laman

I was converted by the grace of God to a saving, repentant faith in the Lord Jesus when I was around sixteen years old. Prior to my conversion, I was familiar with churchianity. And, in this context I recall no faith in Jesus Christ, but instead many sinner’s prayers paired with emotional confessions and certain special spiritual feelings. Deducing from hindsight, I’d say that was the sum and total of my religion. Now, at to whether this was due to a lack of exposure to true biblical gospel preaching or my own deaf ears and hard heart or both, I cannot say (John 9:25b).

At some point (I can’t recall even the year it occurred) I came across sermons and sermon bites on YouTube from some men whom I now recognize as being instrumental to my conversion. Paul Washer, Tim Conway, and Ligonier Ministries were the primary sources. Through these YouTube videos and Sermon Audio files, over the course of months, perhaps, I became conscious of the infinite divide between sinful man and holy God. Furthermore, I knew that man, myself especially, was dead in his trespasses and sins, corrupt, God hating, and condemned. Hell, was my just desert, and still more, it was eternal and imminent. Even the time of my death was in God’s control. What a pit of darkness and despair! Truly, there is no hope for such a wretched creature.

Along the path of these discoveries, I held in mind this “gospel” which knew from both before, nominally from church, and more deeply afterwards from Washer and the rest. But I didn’t know how to make it fit in my mind. And, what of it I could make fit in my mind, I couldn’t get to comfort my soul. I found no peace, but still a foreboding of punishment forever.

Washer was then especially helpful in explaining the substitutionary atonement of the gospel. That is, Jesus, bearing the just penalty of wrath that was due to man, is accounted guilty, crushed, and killed by God instead of man. Man is then accounted righteous before God, adopted, and soon to be glorified in His immediate presence for eternity.

Here was peace at last. All lose ends that concerned me were tied up in the divine proclamation “It is finished!” There is therefore now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus. I understood it, and I threw myself on top of it in reasonable faith.

Three or so years later, I am currently a member of a local reformed Baptist church, and attend John Brown University as a senior accounting major.

Intention

Now, to the grits. Why make a website? Because I have grown tired of unlearning so many of the faulty principles instilled on me from childhood and through my first years of being a Christian from innumerable sources. I desire with Laman’s Lens to start over, so to speak, in my approach to Scripture.

Laman’s Hermeneutic