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Tim Chester is our guide along the Keswick Convention’s path to world mission

‘Unknown to me, I had been waiting for this moment. Every part of me tingled with fervent joy and happiness that I was allowed the privilege of responding, and that Christ was inviting me to serve him, to be called his ambassador, his missionary.’

My parents were missionaries for 20 years in Brazil before I was born.

Two of my older siblings were born there. I arrived after they returned to Belfast shortly after the Second World War. So I grew up in a home where Christian faith was inseparable from mission commitment and global interest (aided by a stamp-collecting hobby). I remember asking Jesus to come into my heart as a young child of five or six, when my brother Paul asked me if my name was in the Lamb’s Book of Life; and when I asked how I could be sure (probably not quite understanding which book he had in mind), he told me to do just that.

I suppose most of us sometimes wish our stories were more exciting than they are.

That goes for the stories of how God first brought us to faith in Jesus Christ; we sometimes wish – foolishly – that the contrast with our pre-conversion life might be more dramatic because we had sunk into deeper depths of sinfulness before our conversions than we did.

I asked my wife, Bridget, for her thoughts on where to go with this article. She laughed and said: ‘Why do you ask me? You’re the one who’s taught the Old Testament!’ Then she added: ‘But I do keep hearing people saying, “I find the Old Testament really hard.”’

I’ve heard that many times, too. So I want to do three things here: acknowledge some of the challenges; ground our view of the Old Testament as God’s Word; give one pointer as to how to hear God’s Word in the Old Testament (OT).