My baptism testimony

I was baptized at Home of Christ Church Cupertino on December 22, 2019. I had become a believer in the Lord Jesus in January that same year. (If you don't know, baptism is what Christians do after becoming believers, to publically profess their faith through this symbolic act of union with Christ -- not only a symbolic act of cleansing, but also going under the water to signify Christ's death and rising up out of the water to signify his resurrection.) We were all asked to prepare a testimony of how we came to faith and were saved, so this was the 2-minute address I gave. If I were to go back, I would've tried to make it more personal and attempted to actually recount the events to led up to my conversion. But for historical interest, this is a lightly edited version of what I said. Some details are ommitted for privacy.
        -October 2024

Hi, my name is Jacob.

Apparently me being baptized was a pretty surprising thing for some people. I remember when [NAME] found out, he just kept shaking his head in surprise. But that's okay. Maybe it's because I'm too much of a scientifically minded person. So I thought it would be nice if I began with an example from scientific history.

At the tail end of the 19th century, physics was a very stagnant subject. Classical mechanics was well developed, and Maxwell had just finished his formulation of electromagnetism. Many people believed that physics was essentially a closed subject, kind of like tic-tac-toe, where there was nothing left to discover.

However, there was a slight discrepancy in the mathematics. Long story short, hot objects were not radiating heat in the way that physicists thought they would. It sounds like a kind of boring thing, but it was an important gap in the theory. Unfortunately, theories are right until they're wrong, and now it was wrong. A new theory was needed to explain everything, and that was quantum mechanics. Suddenly, physics went from being a very stagnant field to an absolute explosion of new science, just because things weren't radiating heat in the right way.

So in scientific history, moments like those are known as paradigm shifts, when discrepancies in existing theory force the consideration of entirely new frames of thinking.[1]

We as people undergo similar paradigm shifts in the process of collecting experience. Today I'd like to talk about my own personal paradigm shift, which came from observations of this thing that we call love.

Do you know how when you start look at a word for too long, it starts to look kind of funny? Like suddenly you're not sure if it's spelled the right way? That's sort of how it was when I thought about love. I grew up thinking it was a pretty normal thing, but I started to change my mind as I examined it more critically.

Now love makes sense in a lot of ways. If a mother didn't love her child, the child would die. In evolutionary contexts, this kind of love is a positively selected trait. The love between a man and a woman is what allows children to be born. Another positively selected trait. But other kinds of love just don't make sense at all.

The apostle Paul speaks of a very selfless love that "bears all things and endures all things." Now this kind of love is very bad for you. If you love like that, chances are, you'll hurt yourself deeply. It's painful and impractical. It doesn't make you live longer, and it doesn't make it easier for you to have a kid. By all biological means, this kind of love should not exist.[2]

But it does. And we consider it to be one of the greatest things in our lives. How could that possibly be?

Over the years I experienced glimpses of this very strange love that seemed to me as being very unnatural. It made no sense in the context of my existing frameworks. I was very atheist during this time and I hated the foolishness of religion, but there was one thing I hated more than religion, and that was being wrong. Many things happened later, for which I don't have the time to share today, but I finally turned to Jesus as my Lord and Savior. Finally, this "problem of love" that I encountered wasn't so confusing anymore.

You see, the love that the apostle Paul speaks of is one of the most unnatural things in our world. That's why we must find its source outside of our world. And that was the key to my paradigm shift. As Christians, we make sense of this very unnatural love by believing it comes from a very unnatural place: our very unnatural God. The apostle John writes: "Let us love one another, for love is from God. If we love one another, God abides in us and his love is perfected in us."

I hope today can be a celebration of this beautiful love, both through our love for one another and God's love for us.



[1] This concept was introduced by Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962).
[2] Although I came to this conclusion independently, it is no surprise that similar ideas can be found elsewhere, especially in the writings of C. S. Lewis. There is, of course, the argument from morality made in Mere Christianity, but there is also this very intriguing passage about "friendship-love" in The Four Loves: