Confused about religion? I can relate to what you are probably experiencing right now in your life. About 43 years ago, I was in your position.

I had been raised Catholic, but I had become very confused about God and religion. Officially, our family was Roman Catholic. Unofficially, we considered ourselves Irish Catholic. Irish Catholics tended to give a lot of credence to the authority of the parish priest. As a young boy, I got the feeling that the real boss in our home was not my dad but the priest.

After attending 12 years of Catholic school, I was a senior in high school. I remember our instructor, a parish priest, showing my religion class that certain Catholic doctrine about the observance of Christmas was actually a myth: It was not based on the Bible.

This was a shock to me for several reasons. I had assumed that our religion was based on the Bible. It was unnerving that an authoritative figure in my life was telling me that what I had believed was a myth. It also dawned on me that I didn’t know anything about the Bible, because I was never taught to read the Bible. My family had one, but it just sat on a shelf in my parents’ bedroom.

After high school, I went to a state university and came into contact with people my age from all kinds of religious backgrounds: Evangelical Protestants, Jews, Lutherans, Methodists, Mormons and Muslims. Some of my friends got involved in the Eastern meditation movement. I also came into contact with avowed atheists. I was introduced to a world of religious confusion.

So I investigated and visited different religious organizations and services. Some of my acquaintances even started their own church. Doctrinally, it was an organized mess. Members of their church could believe what they wanted to believe, as long as it was in agreement with what the leaders believed. That experience ended up badly for me. Some of what the leaders allowed was clearly not right. I found myself on the outside.

I had a very rude awakening. For all my religious effort, I didn’t feel any closer to God, I didn’t know more truth about God, I definitely did not know what God expected of me, and I did not know where His true Church was. For a while, I pushed religion into the background.

After college, I married the girl of my dreams and started graduate school. I worked full time and went to school full time. However, I was still haunted about what to do about God and religion. We attended an Episcopal church temporarily, basically because my wife wanted to sing in the choir and there was no real pressure to believe anything. I made it my goal to read the Bible more seriously. I began with the book of Revelation. I had heard a lot about the “end time,” and I was very curious about prophecy and the Second Coming of Christ. But what I read in Revelation seemed so strange, I simply could not understand it. My wife started reading along with me, and we were both confused. I was very frustrated.

It Was Not God’s Fault

I could have blamed God for making the Bible so confusing. But it dawned on me that I was the problem—not God and His written Word. I knew about the Ten Commandments—at least what the Catholic priests and nuns had taught me about them. But keeping those commandments and avoiding sin had not been a big deal for me in my search for God. But I was miserable. I took a good look at myself, and I realized how far I had drifted from being concerned about obeying God.

In desperation, I got on my knees and begged God to help me get back to obeying Him and to show me His truth. I promised God that if He showed me His truth, I would follow it! I’ll never forget that night. It was August 1974. While praying, I noticed there was an incredibly beautiful full moon. I felt—for the first time in a long time—that I had actually gotten through to God.

Eventually, God put me to the test.

I kept reading the Bible, but switched to reading the Gospels. Even in these books there was so much I didn’t understand. On the evening before Thanksgiving Day, 1974, I was flipping through the television channels in the den of my wife’s parents’ home. I became captivated by a special program featuring a group of singers called the Young Ambassadors and a presenter named “Armstrong.”

I would later learn that this was the World Tomorrow program. I was impressed with the Young Ambassadors who seemed freshly alive and happy. They were my age. Even though I did not see the program from the beginning, I was highly motivated to write for the Plain Truth magazine that was offered, published by Herbert W. Armstrong and the Worldwide Church of God. At that time, having to juggle school, work and paying the bills, I especially liked the idea of receiving a free magazine that addressed the interesting and unanswered questions that had been nettling my mind.

When I received my first Plain Truth sometime in December 1974, I was in the middle of semester finals, and my wife and I were making plans for our first holiday season as a married couple. I quickly scanned the magazine. It appeared to be focused on the world’s problems and evils, not my specific problem of not understanding the Bible. I set the magazine aside.

Still, a hunger seemed to gnaw at me when I was not busy.

What we thought would be a wonderful holiday season turned out to be full of emptiness and disappointment. I began to see what a sham the Christmas season truly was. The lights, the glitter and the trappings really had nothing to do with God and religion. It was all about getting. It was at this time that I stopped going to church.

Booklet After Booklet

My sleep began to suffer. One night, instead of tossing, turning and disturbing my wife, I got out of bed, gathered up my Bible and sat by a window lit by a streetlight. I had come to John’s Gospel. What happened was miraculous. Starting at John 1:1 and reading through the first chapter, I came to understand that Jesus Christ had a prior existence as the God Being named the Word. I was shocked and amazed. The Bible finally made sense. What was even more astounding, I knew that God let me understand it. God had answered my prayers from back in August. I was greatly encouraged.

I did not make any connection between that night and the World Tomorrow program until I was flipping through the television channels while at home on Sunday mornings. I thought maybe I could find a church television program that would teach what I had just understood from reading the Bible. I nearly gave up the search because I knew that so much of what I was hearing from these shows was just the ideas of people. One Sunday in mid-January 1975, I came across a program with some incredibly inviting music. The words The World Tomorrow flashed across the screen and the same man I had seen the previous November began speaking. I was immediately captured: This program was different from all the others I had been investigating. He asked if listeners truly knew the real Jesus. And then he explained John 1:1.

Wow! I was electrified! At the end of the program, he offered a booklet. I called immediately.

I waited by the mailbox almost every day for that booklet to come. When it came, I devoured it. I actually forsook my schoolwork. I noticed ads in the back of the booklet for more booklets: I wrote for all of them. When they came, I looked for ads for other booklets and wrote for them too. Soon I had a huge stack of material to go through. As I read page after page, I found a plethora of Bible questions answered. Does man have an immortal soul? Is heaven the reward of the saved? Is there an ever burning hell? Should Christians keep Christmas? Should infants be baptized? What is true conversion? A new world of knowledge opened up to me. I spent more time with these booklets than I did with my graduate studies. I tried to talk to my wife about what I was reading, but she was not interested. I kept going though, because I had prayed to God and He had answered that prayer. Everything I read in the booklets was grounded in the Bible. I was being given the truth, and I knew God was showing me where His true Church was.

And then I came to a crossroads.

Saturday vs. Sunday

One of the most important booklets I read was Which Day Is the Christian Sabbath?The author was Herbert W. Armstrong. Studying this booklet, I learned that the Fourth Commandment requires true Christians to keep the seventh day of the week holy as God’s Sabbath.

As I boy, I was taught a shortened version of this commandment: “Remember to keep holy the Lord’s day.” I was taught by my parents’ example that Sunday was the Lord’s day. They had taken me to church on Sunday since I was a baby. My brothers and sisters went to church on Sunday. My aunts and uncles went to church on Sunday. My neighbors went to church on Sunday. There was nothing to question.

However, I learned that the King James Version (the most profitable version for proving doctrine) reads: “Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: But the seventh day is the Sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day, and hallowed it” (Exodus 20:8-11).

Here was the complete instruction on why and how to keep a weekly day of worship—and how to do it God’s way. It was not shocking to learn that what I had been taught was wrong. However, it was unnerving to realize that I had never questioned what I was taught.

“Did you realize that there is one religious body which lays claim to being the sole infallible authority?” Mr. Armstrong wrote, regarding the Catholic Church. “It claims the Bible ‘is not a sufficient guide to heaven.’ It claims, through its own church leaders, that it, by its own infallible authority, substituted Sunday for the Sabbath” (Which Day Is the Christian Sabbath?).

Mr. Armstrong quoted one Catholic authority who bluntly stated that the Catholic Church took it upon itself to change the Sabbath to Sunday, and that is the reason that Catholics and Protestants keep Sunday. “But you may read the Bible from Genesis to Revelation, and you will not find a single line authorizing the sanctification of Sunday. The Scriptures enforce the religious observance of Saturday, a day which we never sanctify,” wrote James Gibbons in The Faith of Our Fathers.

“This religious body offers the very fact that all Sunday-keeping people—which includes the Western world as a whole—have bowed down to its dictum on Sunday observance as proof of its absolute authority,” continued Mr. Armstrong. “Few realize, today, but the Sabbath vs. Sunday controversy raged during the first three centuries of the Christian era. Violence and bloodshed mounted. Millions were tortured and put to death over this question. Who is right?”

That is a serious question I had to answer.

I had to make a life-changing decision about how to properly worship God. Choosing the biblical day would upset my own family, my wife and even my close friends. When I look back on that time, I now know that God was challenging me, as if to say: Are you going to obey me by keeping MY Sabbath day?

Jesus Christ Is Lord of the Sabbath

What was I to do? I had some previous knowledge of the Saturday Sabbath because several of my close college friends were Jewish. Back when I was investigating different religions, I had actually attended a Jewish service with them on a visit to their home in Pennsylvania. This experience did cause me to think somewhat about the Saturday Sabbath. From my earliest Bible reading days, I recognized that Christ was a Jew, and since I was supposedly a Christian (a follower of Christ), I wondered if I shouldn’t be doing, well, more “Jewish” things. I wondered, Is Saturday-keeping for Jews and Sunday-keeping for Christians? If so, why? Reading Mr. Armstrong’s powerful booklet brought this issue very forcefully back to the forefront of my mind.

Mr. Armstrong reasonably and very logically answered this question for me. “Jesus Christ had considerable to say and teach about the Sabbath and its observance,” he wrote (ibid). In a straightforward and simple manner, he discussed scripture after scripture that show Sabbath-keeping is not just for the Jews: It is a New Testament Bible doctrine!

“And he said unto them, The sabbath was made for man, and not man for the sabbath: Therefore the Son of man is Lord also of the sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28). Mr. Armstrong used Christ’s statement to clear up all doctrinal confusion over whose authority establishes the correct day for Christian worship.

“I want you to read that pivotal text again!” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “Jesus said, ‘The Sabbath was made.’ It is one of the things that was made. It had to have a MAKER. Who, then, made the Sabbath?” That is a question you must think deeply about and study. “God is the Creator. But it is written in Ephesians 3:9, ‘… God, who created all things by Jesus Christ,’” he continued. Study Genesis 2:2-3 to see how Jesus Christ, who was at that time the Word, made the Sabbath. He made the Sabbath, just after He created Adam and Eve. Our first parents were not Jews. The Jews are descended from Judah, a son of the patriarch Jacob. This was thousands of years after the creation of Adam and Eve.

Reading these compelling words, I knew I had to begin keeping the Sabbath. I mentioned Sabbath-keeping to my wife. At the time, she asked me to stop talking about all the religious doctrine I was learning. She did not want to change her beliefs. I respected her request, but I also took the matter to God.

On my knees again, I thanked God for showing me His truth. I knew that God knew my wife was unhappy about my studies. I knew my Catholic family would reject me, and I now saw the real possibility my wife would eventually want to divorce me over religion. However, I told God I was going to keep my word to follow His truth. He did His part: He answered my prayer! Now I had to do mine. But I asked God that, if He wanted my wife to know the truth, would He bring her along. I planned to not say another word about it to her. However, I never hid any books I was reading. I had to be patient and wait for God to act.

It was within weeks that I came home from working late to find that she had been crying. She had actually picked up the booklet All About Water Baptism and realized she was not a true Christian because her Quaker religion did not believe in baptism. I was so excited. She was ready to make some changes in her life! Together, we took our first step toward God. We shared our first Sabbath together—alone! We did not know what to do on the Sabbath. That’s when we knew we had to find God’s Church.

Now It’s Your Turn

This is my story; you have yours. Perhaps many of these experiences, feelings, struggles and hopes sound very familiar to you. Perhaps you have read book after book and are excited about what you are reading. Perhaps the crossroads I came to in 1975 is the same one you have come to in 2018.

What I can say to you is this: Ask God for the courage to take your first step toward Him. Prove God’s Sabbath day, and keep God’s Sabbath day. He will open a whole new world to you. It is a world of a few trials, I’ll be honest, but a world of blessings too!