Why I got Baptized
By: Deren Sanli

I was raised Christian by my mother, who took us to the United Church in Canada (a church that was very liberal and has almost no focus on doctrine). My father was a Muslim, but later became agnostic. Both my parents allowed us to make our own decisions on what we wanted to believe, a blessing in disguise.

I started to get weary of the United Church when they introduced the very controversial topic of homosexual unions. I didn't know the Bible too well at that time, but I knew for sure that the Bible

spoke clearly against such things.

My first year of University, I joined the local Christian campus group and in our second "small group meeting" I met a Christadelphian sister. She invited us over to her house for the next group meeting and we all went. I brought my guitar along as I was to lead worship that night. After the Bible talk on John's Gospel (at the time I was Trinitarian and we all used John's gospel to prove the trinity) we had a few songs. Eventually people started to leave and so I closed the meeting with prayer, interchanging Jesus and God in the prayer as the same person.  People started to leave and a few stayed behind to sing some more songs. Eventually, it was just the sister and I along with her siblings who came to provide refreshments. The sister wanted to learn guitar, so I was eager to teach her. One thing I didn't expect was that she was the one who was going to teach me The Truth.

At our first guitar lesson she asked me why I kept interchanging Jesus and God as if they were the same person in my prayers. I thought it was a strange question. I replied with a somewhat sarcastic, "you know, the trinity" expecting that to satisfy for an answer. She asked me if I could prove that Jesus and God were the same person from Scripture. This peaked my curiosity. At the time, I couldn't find any, save for John 1:1, which was horribly taken out of context with a large assumption that "the word" spoken of in verse 1 was actually Jesus. I was later to find out that was not the case. The sister and I had many more "guitar lessons" which ended up being hours of long debates over the Trinity.

One thing that surprised me was how context played such a key role in sound doctrine. Almost every Bible reference I used for the trinity debate was thwarted by the surrounding context in scripture.  The sister provided me with a pamphlet on what Christadelphians believed and I told her I would not accept any new beliefs until I read the Bible the whole way through. That summer I did just that. At that time I didn't want to stop reading because the connections in Scripture were just so amazing. At other times, I wanted to stop reading because I found that the doctrines I knew all my life were not of Biblical origin. I knew my brother and other Christian friends would be very skeptical of my new Bible discoveries. But I couldn't stop, I was hungry, thirsty and ready for God's word.

A few months passed and I completed my reading. I found that on almost every point I was in exact belief with Christadelphian teaching. By this time I had attended a Bible lecture at the closest hall on Daniel and Nebuchadnezzar’s image. I was amazed at how the prophecy made sense and was so accurately fulfilled. I started to take baptism classes shortly after.

This was a long answer to the above mentioned question. The scaled down version is that I couldn’t hide from what the Bible taught. Once I started to read it, I knew there was no turning back and I wanted to know the Truth about God's Word. During the course of my reading I kept extensive notes and even wrote a pamphlet for my friends entitled "Who is Lucifer". It was a very exciting time in my life. Knowing such an amazing hope exists with God through His son the Lord Jesus has brought me peace, joy, and a new way of life.

Bro. Deren Sanli

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