Testimony of Nick Clube

The quotation comes from the play ‘Jumpers’ by Tom Stoppard which considers the issue of morality.  The hero is a philosopher called George Moore, and for him morality depends on objective right and wrong and not on the capricious whims of human nature which he calls moral jumping: thus the play's title. By the time I read this play at the age of sixteen I was already an atheist, and although I was not to discard my atheism for another five years, I felt a great empathy for George Moore who was an island of sanity adrift in a world of madness where anything goes, including all kinds of depravity and even murder. I certainly don’t want to draw parallels between Stoppard’s character who is a professional philosopher and myself in terms of intellectual ability, but for me too there had to be some way to approach the issues of God and morality in a rational and intellectual way. Whether I was to live the rest of my life as an atheist or to eventually adopt Christianity or perhaps Buddhism, the imperative was that it had to be a reasoned position.

Growing up in the sixties and seventies I suppose I could be labelled a child of the permissive age, generally comfortable with it, but increasingly bothered that something was amiss. God was dead they said, free love was our new creed and rock’n’roll was our message-bearer. John Lennon claimed to be better known than Jesus Christ and the main problem seemed to be when you slept with someone rather than if you did. We engaged in existential expression - we grew our hair, wore hippie clothes and some of us played in loud Deep Purple clone rock bands. These were exciting days where Marxian ideology still captured the hearts and minds of young people like me, and you absolutely couldn’t believe in the materialist concept of history and God.

My girlfriend at university often complained at the voracity with which I hounded the poor Christians on campus with my disingenuous arguments ‘proving’ God’s non-existence. At the root of my hostility to God were the stories of the Old Testament where God passed summary judgement on those disobedient to him. This simply did not seem to accord with the meek, loving Jesus of the gospels, and the whole idea of such a brutal maker angered me: how dare he treat people like this.

My father taught at a private Church of England school in Lancashire and as a pupil there I attended chapel seven days a week. No matter how many hymns I sung or sermons I heard I don’t recall being taught the gospel of Jesus Christ. I can honestly say that the only helpful thing that sticks in my mind today is a comment made by my German master during a lesson in my last year at school. He told us that Jesus was a well accounted historical person, that he really did exist in first century Palestine: I realised with some surprise that I’d thought of him in largely mythological terms up to this point, but then God can seem terribly remote.

During my adolescence and early adulthood, my moral and religious convictions developed in terms of the ‘pick and mix’ approach, which like my clothes were picked and mixed every day. At Leeds University I read Chinese and Philosophy. Each new philosophy, oriental and occidental which I encountered in my studies changed my moral clothing, and each subsequent one undermined the previous one and so my colours changed again. I liked to think of this educative process as positive personal development, that it would lead me to being a wise, well-balanced individual. Looking back I see now that I had in fact entered a philosophical and ethical wilderness which I only left at the age of 33. But I did have one shock waiting for me in that wilderness.

During the Spring holiday in the run up to taking my finals at university, I was at home alone. I spent the day translating and studying a Chinese story. By early evening I’d had enough and watched a little TV before going to bed. As I lay there, doubtless planning a glorious career as a rock guitarist in my mind, I was overwhelmed by a strong and powerful presence. The sensation I felt was that of being lifted into the cradle of two massive arms, or of being taken back into the security of the womb. Atheist that I was, and quite happy to be so, I knew at once who this presence was - God!

There were no words, but I still know what the Lord said to me. “Don’t worry. I am here.” As I continued to be held in this place of total protection and calm, I blurted out that he could have my music, at the time the most precious thing in my life. To this I was told just to keep searching for God, and then it was over.

By 1990 I had achieved the twentieth century idea of success. I was working in the City, was well paid, happily married with two children, enjoyed an annual overseas holiday and ran two cars. But in one sense I had never felt so empty in my life. All that seemed to be left for the future was to buy bigger houses, better holidays and faster cars. It’s true that I was attracting a lot of attention in the music business in London for songs I had written together with a friend of mine, but as exciting and flattering as it was I was still not a fulfilled person.

Into this situation came an insistent voice, “It’s time to sort Jesus out for once and for all.” It wasn’t a real voice of course, but I just knew I had to do this. Following a minor operation before Christmas I was invited by the surgeon, Bernard Palmer to what I thought was a debating society at his home on Friday evenings. As I walked through the door on the first Friday they asked me cheerfully, “Have you brought a Bible?” Even if this wasn’t what I had expected, I wasn’t unhappy about it because this group was going to give me the opportunity to sort Jesus out for once and for all.

After Christmas I became a regular at the Friday evening meetings. For the first time in my life I heard the Bible explained clearly to me and I felt challenged and excited but only from an intellectual perspective. Bernard lent me a book by Josh McDowell, a former atheist who had set out to disprove Christianity by destroying the historical Jesus whom he saw as mythical. In his studies he found out that it was he himself who was holding the untenable position: his book ended up being a reasoned account of why people should become Christians called “More Than A Carpenter”.  I read this fascinating book without being converted but together with the Friday studies it had made a deeper impression on me than I suspected.

One day at work, two of my Jewish colleagues were arguing about Jesus. One said that although he was a great teacher and thinker he wasn’t the Messiah. I remember jumping up out of my seat and blurting out that Jesus was indeed the Messiah, the son of God. The statement shocked me as much as them! I knew now that I should be a Christian, that the ‘inner me’ had recognised a truth I had not yet consciously acknowledged: the historical evidence about Jesus is overwhelming. He did walk on this earth and he did say and do the things the writers of the gospel stories say, and most importantly he is who he claimed to be - the creator and sustainer God. When you recognise that fact then you just have to do something about it, life cannot be the same again. Not only could I now say that there is indeed a God but that I knew his name, Jesus.

Knowing about a person and knowing them personally are two different things, and Christianity is the latter. It’s knowing Christ as intimately as you know your spouse and conducting your relationship with total trust, honesty and commitment. It’s also holding nothing back from him. It was this which was stopping me being a saved Christian, I was holding bits of me back from Jesus. He could have the music and every Friday evening and...

One Friday evening a Jewish Christian called David and I were watching a video of Helen Shapiro talking to a gathering in London. The singer told them how she had reached the point I had arrived at in my spiritual life and how she didn’t know why she wasn’t a saved Christian yet. She explained how she had come to realise that what God wanted was not little bits of her but all of her, her whole life. Now I knew what I had to do and that night, in front of my wife Kim, David, Bernard and his wife Rosie I gave my life to Jesus.

The view that many people including myself hold about Christianity prior to conversion is that it is full of rules and restrictions and that it destroys the fun in life. The great secular movements of our century have all shouted slogans of freedom in their bid to rid themselves of the perceived strictures of Christian morality. As long as it doesn’t hurt anyone else and you like it, then just do it, they say. One by one the Ten Commandments have been held up to ridicule, and our generation which eagerly bought this New Life (on credit!) has viewed people like me as totally mad for voluntarily giving up the freedoms so hard won.

My step to faith was not without its worries that what I was doing would achieve exactly what the modern world warns us all about. Indeed, it was my biggest worry that the Christian life would bind me in endless chains of rules and obligations, but to my delight and great relief, the world of faith has no chains at all. I marvelled for months at the tremendous sense of freedom, real freedom, that I had found in following Jesus. Much of that freedom comes from knowing why I’m here and what life is really about: that I was made by a loving God who cares very deeply about me and that I am here to return that love. The commandments are the ‘advice’ of a loving father and I try my best to live to them to honour him and because I understand that life is best when I adhere to them: I am not forced to adhere to these rules by a tyrant.

One often hears Christians talking of their relationship with the living Christ. I’m aware that this must sound strange to people who don’t enjoy that privileged position and they must wonder how one converses with a God who is silent in the conventional sense. When I talk to him I pray, and share as much as I can with him about what is going on in my life, what’s good and what’s bad at work and in family affairs, and I ask Jesus to help in certain situations in which other people find themselves. I talk about politics and philosophy, about my music, my hopes and my fears. I say sorry when I do things that are wrong and I say thank you when he responds to something I’ve asked for previously. I tell him the things I don’t understand in the Bible and ask him to explain them to me.

Jesus always answers me and most often he does so through the Bible. I’ve lost count of the number of times the latest sermon I’ve heard or Bible reading I’ve studied answered something I’d just asked him about. Alternatively, Jesus ‘speaks’ through circumstances. I continually find that statistically impossible coincidences keep on happening, and I am convinced it is the hand of the Lord guiding events along. I certainly didn’t experience all these ‘coincidences’ in my life before I came to faith. The thing is, you have to become a Christian and experience that life at first hand to understand the truth of what I say.

It is true of our relationship that it waxes and wanes like any other. There are times when I am close to my Lord and times when I want to scream at him, but I have learnt that he is always there for me at the end of the day, patient and loving.
It would be wrong to say that the Christian life is a bed of roses. It’s often portrayed as the answer to all life’s problems, but that is quite a different thing from saying that it solves them all, as if by magic. It is the answer in so far as it puts the right perspective on life, on both the ups and the downs. It is the answer in that all the previous philosophies and religions that I clothed my life with were always full of holes, inconsistent and transitory, whereas Christianity is not. I am now fully satisfied that there could never possibly be any other philosophy which explains so accurately the universe in which I live and which makes sense of it.

‘Is God?’
Yes! His name Jesus. Wouldn’t you like to meet him too?