Alistair Begg is Senior Pastor at Parkside Church in Cleveland, Ohio, and the Bible teacher on Truth For Life, which is heard on the radio and online around the world. He graduated from theological college in London and served two churches in Scotland before moving to Ohio. He is married to Susan and together they have three grown children and four granddaughters.
Here Alistair tells us how he came to faith in Jesus and his early years as a Christian.
When the Apostle Paul urged Timothy to continue in what he had learned and firmly believed, he reminded him of how from childhood he had been acquainted with the sacred writings ‘which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus’.
Like Timothy, I was nurtured in a home where the prayers of a godly grandmother laid the foundation upon which my parents built. Looking back on those infant years, I am able to identify with a verse from the hymn by Joseph Addison:
Unnumbered comforts to my soul Thy tender care bestowed, Before my infant heart conceived From whom those comforts flowed.
How old?
Faithful Sunday School teachers seldom see the fruit of their labours. It must often seem as though their pupils are learning very little, but God’s Word does its work. I have no recollection of what was taught on the Sunday morning in question, but after lunch I was sufficiently concerned to ask my father how old one has to be before ‘trusting Jesus’. We knelt together and prayed and I recall that my simple prayer of repentance and faith ended with the request that Jesus would ‘make me into the boy he wanted me to be’.
Childhood pattern
The following day at primary school I asked the teacher if I could tell the class what had happened and then, remarkably, I sang a song for them. The pattern of my life for the next ten years was established with ‘family devotions’, church attendance and Crusader class membership, all of which I entered into with happy enthusiasm.
The challenge of maintaining a Christian testimony while playing football for my school and facing peer pressure was increasingly tough. I did not know the Westminster Confession, but I was aware of being involved in ‘a continual and irreconcilable war’.
Moving to live in England in the mid-1960s provided me with an opportunity to ‘nail my colours to the mast’ spiritually and when I was baptised at 16 I realised that I could not be kept buoyant on the strength of my parents’ faith and that I needed to work out my own salvation with fear and trembling.
No plan for pastoral ministry
A driver’s licence made it possible to visit other churches and I have happy recollections of filling the car with friends and driving to York to attend the church where the late David Watson was the vicar. I had a clear idea about what direction my life would take and nowhere in my plan was pastoral ministry. How gracious God has been to keep me from what I thought was best in order to give me what is so much better.
