My story.

So I was required to write this up in preparation for a week long mission trip that I'll be participating in for the week of July 11-18. Please keep us in your prayers.

Testimony of Jon Lau:

The other day I had been posed with a scenario that God used to frighteningly expose my heart. The scenario was that the day of judgment had come and I was standing before Jesus and he asks me “Why should I let you into heaven?”. The frightening thing was that the first word that came to mind was “grace.” Now before I get too high on myself for giving the “correct” answer, the part that God really busted me in was my following thought: “Grace. I know what grace is. I could tell you what grace is.” So though my mind is preaching a doctrine of unmerited favor, my heart was proclaiming a cowardly fear that worked itself out in merit-filled insecurity. It was like I was praying to God, thanking Him of all the good I’ve done, all the knowledge I’ve gained along the way, and I was using that to justify the haunting, relentless feeling that I deserved to stand before God condemned. What God showed me was that unless I’m not crying out “God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” then I won’t go home justified (Luke 18:9-14). Though my mouth and mind can be on the same wavelength in proclaiming “grace,” if my heart and soul are apart from Christ, then I have nothing (John 15:5). The gospel of Jesus Christ has been wrecking my life in similar ways for quite some time now. I thank God for though it hasn’t always brought me happiness, it has brought me abundant joy.

Before Christ took hold of my heart, I lived a fairly happy life. I had my Pokémon cards. I had basketball. I had a family that loved me. I had a good amount of friends. I wasn’t necessarily the worst kid, though I will admit I wasn’t a “good kid.” I thought that’s what life was. Fill yourself with things that you enjoy and relax. Oh, and thank God for the food on the table every night. That’s what my philosophy on life was after a little more than a decade of living and growing up as a Pokémon-loving, basketball-adoring, second-generation, American-born Chinese boy who attended a Chinese, Baptist Church since birth. Attach “do quiet time” somewhere between middle school and freshmen year of high school.

Church was just church to me. It was another place to meet new people and make new friends. And come to think of it, church was just a really big hobby for me honestly. It had everything I loved in my first decade or so of life. My whole family attended. Most of my friends were there every Sunday and they brought their Pokémon cards to play with me. There was basketball after Sunday School. Sometimes the food there wasn’t half bad either. It had everything I could ever want. So having everything I thought I needed, the need for God, the need for a Savior, was not. I mean, I was happy already with all the pleasures that a 12-year-old could have right? I concluded that since I was more often happy than sad (translated in those times … I got what I wanted a fair amount of the time), I was happy. However, it’d take another 5-7 years before I would discover what joy was.

I was content, so why did I need a Savior? I was decently moral and “good.” I mean I was at church every Sunday after all. All that Jesus stuff really didn’t appeal to me from a young age. I mean, I could tell you that “Christ died for my sins” and I could tell you that “Jesus” always was the answer to every question in Sunday School. But when it came to what all that meant to me, I was apathetic. I wouldn’t know what that word meant at that age, but I really had no concern, thought, or affection for God, why the cross is important, why I memorized Bible verses for AWANA, why I prayed before meals, or why I claimed to be a Christian. I figured that as long as I didn’t kill anyone or cuss in public, I was set for heaven, a place I wanted to be, not because of good things I’d heard of it, but more because of the bad things I had heard of hell. Hell scared me. I wanted to be in heaven with all my family, friends, and the things I adored. So when I first “accepted Christ,” and declared that I “believed in Jesus,” I was baptized! All I had to do now was continue to keep on with abiding by (at least trying to obey) the “do not’s” list of morality. That was enough right?

It wasn’t until a then 15-year-old Jon Lau prayed for God to break him in the middle of a mission trip (his first) which he didn’t feel he was ready for, that God unveiled his eyes, took hold of his heart and Christ became a reality, rather than a rumor. Little did I know that God would continue to break me and strip me of the things that clung to what He had made, rather than Him, ever since. To this day, I haven’t recovered from it.

It’s been a real struggle from that post-freshman year of High school summer on to what is now post-freshman year of college. Unlike basketball, finding a rhythm has been a lot more rare. One week I’m relishing in the “joy of my salvation” and the next week I feel like I’m in the Sheol. After many more instances of God having to show me my need for Him, thus leading me to repent, and then finding joy in Him, only to get proud and then God having start the cycle over again, I am who I am today. I don’t expect for God to stop breaking me. I’ve come to find more joy when I pray for Him to continue to do so and to see that prayer fulfilled because I know my tendency to violently cling to creation rather than Creator. I’m just thankful that God is more relentless after my heart than I am for His stuff. What a wretched heart I have. Praise God that I have a more beautiful Savior … That despite my disgusting arrogance, pride, and lust for God’s creation rather than God himself, “that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). Though I am an offender of God, though I am accursed, “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13) … That “For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him, we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Corinthians 5:21).

I hope and pray that I will never think that I don’t need this gospel anymore. I cringe upon the thought that I would ever think that I don’t need this gospel that proclaims the message of a Savior who by his wounds, we have been healed. Without this good news, without Christ, I am nothing. If not for Christ alone, if not for grace alone, everything else is bad news.

I could go on to share about all this new world of college at Baylor and how it’s just a whole new monster from the trials I had to face in High School. From how I am to do ministry in a community that grew up with the same first half of this testimony, to big career decisions, I could share how God’s grown me. But in the end, It always seems to go back to this overlying message in the Bible that can be summed up as: “He must increase but I must decrease” (John 3:30), “For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself with be exalted” (Luke 18:14).

From these 19 years of life, I have come to know my shortcomings and failures darn well. I’ve learned that on my own, I’m a loser in every sense of the word. I can’t do anything good. I can’t save myself, lest anyone else. I am a selfish offender of God who deserves nothing but the just punishment of sin. I deserve to die. I have never been able to successfully pull off being good enough. But I have peace in knowing that this me that relies on himself to do good, find purpose, to be saved, was “crucified with Christ. And it is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. And the life I live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me, and gave himself up for me” (Galatians 2:20). Praise God for being more than enough.

“He himself bore our sins in his body on the tree, that we might die to sin and live to righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (1 Peter 2:24).