Union Road Community Church

from the pastors desk

[Pastor Douglas Sukhia is an ordained minister in the Presbyterian Church in America. He has a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from California College of the Arts in 1971 (San Francisco, CA) and a Master of Divinity degree from Faith Theological Seminary in 1976 (Elkins Park, PA).  He has pastored churches in Grand Island, NY (4 yrs.); Lakeland, FL (4 yrs.); and Orchard Park, NY (33 yrs.). He is in his 5th year as the Pastor of the Union Road Community Church.]

My Journey to Christ                                 
by Douglas E. Sukhia

I was born into a middle class family.  My dad was an electrical engineer. He came here from India in 1940 to attend MIT on a scholarship. I was born in Pasadena, California where he did post-graduate work at Caltech.  Dad married a 17 year old, blond haired, blue eyed “beauty” from Connecticut who was working at the same G.E. plant in Schenectady, NY (he an engineer, she a typist).They soon had 5 kids, 4 boys and a baby girl. I was number two.  Most of my childhood we were living in Baltimore MD where dad worked for the Martin Marietta Company (now known as Lockheed-Martin). Mom was from a Roman Catholic background and dad was brought up as a Zoroastrian1 in Mumbai ,India. I don’t think either of them were particularly devout. We ended up attending a liberal Lutheran church where I was eventually confirmed at the age of 12. I must have learned some of the basics of Christianity at that time but I only recall being extremely fascinated with the pretty girls in the class.

We moved to Orlando Florida when I was in middle school in the early sixties.  We stopped attending church as a family around this time. I never really believed the teachings of the church.  I considered the Bible and Christianity (along with all other religious systems) to be well meaning attempts to get people to live “morally” and “responsibly”.  I considered all the Bible narratives to be legendary and fanciful, not historical. They were just morality stories like Disney movies or Grimm’s fairy tales.

As I got into my high school years I slowly but surely began to adopt the worldview of the pop culture of the 1960’s.  The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, the Rolling Stones... these were the “authoritative” apostles that I was listening to and trying to emulate. Their views on the “ultimate questions”: why are we here, what is moral, what is worth living for etc. (as presented in their lyrics and lifestyles) became my guiding lights.

Living in Central Florida, just an hour or so away from the beach, I took up surfing.  It was fun, trendy and cheap. According to The Beach Boys it also promised California “surfer girls” in bikinis!  Like most of my contemporaries I was happily riding the huge new wave of the “hippie” subculture... sexual freedom, psychedelic drugs, anti establishment rebellion, rock and roll... what’s not to like!  Of course I thought I was on the “moral high ground” when it came to all the issues of the day: the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement, psychedelic drugs, the cold war, capitalism vs socialism etc.

At the age of 19, with one year of college done, I left home with two friends to live in Hawaii so we could surf, do drugs and have sex totally free from all parental constraints.  We lived in a ramshackle, roach-infested apartment in Waikiki, and had our surfboard stolen within a matter of weeks. We managed to survive by working late into the night as dishwashers helping ourselves to leftovers...welcome to paradise!  We were soon smoking pot on a daily basis and taking LSD now and again. The sex was not quite as prevalent as we had hoped! While attending the University of Hawaii I heard Huey Newton of the Black Panthers speak on campus, I saw Jimmy Hendrix live on stage, and I had an accident on a motorcycle that I had stolen. The cops never figured out that I stole the bike because I think it was never reported as stolen. I got $6000 as a result of the accident from an insurance settlement.

I was working towards a bachelor of fine arts degree so I transferred in 1968 to the California College of the Arts, a prestigious art school in Oakland California.  I lived in Berkeley which was a “hotbed” of radical politics and assorted liberation movements. Once in awhile I joined in one of the “protests” primarily for the adrenalin rush. They usually turned out to be window smashing affairs with a lot of conflict with the cops.  I began to wonder if us peace loving “flower children” really had the moral high ground while we were making Molotov cocktails to toss at “the pigs”.

In December of 1969 I attended the now infamous Altamont Free Concert (“the Woodstock of the west”) where the Rolling Stones, The Jefferson Airplane, Santana and others performed for a raucous crowd of over 300,000.  During that festival three people were accidentally killed and one was knifed to death by the “Hells Angels” who were guarding the stage. This event got me wondering about the validity of the “hippie movement” and the hedonistic worldview it promoted. The political violence of the movement (SDS, Black Panthers, and Weather Underground etc.) was also disconcerting.

In the summer of 1970 I bought a charter flight ticket from L.A. to London with plans to spend the next three months touring Europe.  The girl from CCA who I was supposed to meet up with in Denmark stiffed me (what else is new) so I started hitch hiking with $300 in traveler’s checks in my pocket.  That summer I spent a few weeks in Amsterdam, Paris, Split Yugoslavia, and Istanbul Turkey with plenty of intermediary stops in between staying mostly at youth hostels.  I did make it to some of the great museums. I saw Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa in Paris and Michelangelo’s David in Florence, Rembrandt’s “Night watch” in Amsterdam. But this trip was part of my quest to find better answers to those nagging ultimate questions.  After several years of “independence” doing what I thought would bring satisfaction I was still unfulfilled. I was clueless as to why I was even alive!  I thought that perhaps in Turkey, a moderately Muslim nation, I might discover something that I couldn’t find in the “oppressive-capitalist” USA. But after three months of travel I came home without answers.  At least I was now convinced that the problems of life were not due to economic systems, culture etc. but were endemic to the human race. Everybody was screwed up.

When I returned to CCA for my final semester to complete the BFA degree, I was getting desperate to find some solid philosophical ground to build my life on. After all, I saw myself as an artist who’s calling was to enlighten others, to get them to see and experience higher realities of being, to break free of the shackles of traditional conventions .  I began to more seriously explore “religious” explanations. By then, out of curiosity, I had already read books like: The First and Last Freedom  by  J. Krishnamurti 2, The Tibetan Book of the Dead,(a Buddhist guide for the consciousness after death), and The Bhagavad Gita (a classic Vedanta Hindu text). But now I was no longer just dabbling in ideas I had to know what is really true.  

I walked into the local Scientology storefront “church” and plunked down $25.00 ($150 in today’s dollars) for my first “training” course.  After a month of exercises designed to enable me to control my mind (and the mind of other people around me), I decided it would be prohibitively expensive to go “clear”. As a waiter, I didn’t have the income of Tom Cruise or John Travolta.  The founder of Scientology, L. Ron Hubbard, was a former science fiction writer. He taught that all our personal problems are due to negative “imprinting” on our brains (engrams) from traumatic experiences in our current or past lives.  These can only be removed by costly “auditing” sessions. He also taught that we are actually “Thetans”- all powerful, all knowing “spirit beings” that assume new bodies over and over (Scientology is an eclectic worldview that cobbles together ideas from various religions  but especially from the imagination of its founder L. Ron Hubbard.

From Scientology I moved on to the “hippie” brand of Hinduism popularized by George Harrison of the Beatles. I got a hold of a popular book in the Berkeley community Be Here Now written by Richard Alpert (aka “Baba Ram Das”). He was a colleague of Dr. Timothy Leary at Harvard (LSD,“turn on, tune in, and drop out”).  He went to live in an ashram in India, became enamored with Hinduism and headed for California to enlighten the “lost generation” of disaffected hippies who were getting to the end of their philosophical ropes.  I started to practice transcendental meditation,( about 30 minutes a day) changed my diet (brown rice and veggies) and chanted Sanskrit mantras (“I send a beam of love from my heart to the heart of my beloved”) . All this to attain the illusive “higher states” of consciousness I was told I lacked and desperately needed.

During this “religious search faze”, I avoided Christianity because of its association in my mind with unreasonable dogma, historical oppression, elaborate  religious hierarchy etc. It was the “un-cool, uptight, straight laced, establishment”, religion. Due to my lukewarm Lutheran background I thought that I knew what Christianity was and it wasn’t for me. In retrospect, this attitude reminds me of the statement that “Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and not tried”.

Then I met a fellow student at CCA who happened to be in an advanced painting class with me, Chris Small. In these classes the aspiring artist makes some paintings and then explains his work to the class.  Chris made a series of paintings on Biblical themes and used his explanation period to share the Christian “Gospel”. In so many words he told us we were sinners in need of Christ the only Savior. Needless to say most of the, avant-garde, narcissistic young “artists” present were highly offended by this simplistic, “fundamentalist” brand of Christianity. Most there were not too shy about showing their disdain and offence at being “proselytized. As for me, by then I was a humbled desperate seeker willing to leave the door open to anything. At first I wondered why a young man would put his reputation in jeopardy by promoting such an unpalatable, politically incorrect philosophy.  But I was also struck by his gracious, humble response to his classmates who were so dismissive towards him. After the class I got him aside and asked him “what he was selling”. He said that he was simply sharing the basic gospel message found in the Bible that had been proclaimed for 2000 years.

He gave me a copy of the “Gospel of John” to read. This is the fourth record of Christ’s ministry in the New Testament. It  concludes with this statement “Jesus did many other miraculous signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book.  But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name” (John 20:30). I began to read the New Testament for the first time with an open mind entertaining the possibility that it might contain the truth.

In the Gospels Jesus impressed me with his direct, unflinching confrontation of sin, disease and death. If this was an accurate historical record, Jesus  spoke like no other and did things no other had done. Out of compassion he healed the sick and raised the dead. He miraculously produced enough food to feed 5000 people. He calmed a storm by speaking to it.  He made audacious claims to be the Son of God, the source of life, to pre-exist Abraham, to be “the way the truth and life”. He taught that we are sinners and need a Savior. Our problem is not that we’re ignorant and need enlightenment, rather we are law breakers and need forgiveness.  We are moral creatures made in God’s image. We are actual individual persons who will be held accountable for our sins. Death is not “natural” for us; rather it is the judgment of God for our rebellion. We are not just the chance products of chemistry “dancing to our DNA” but individually created beings with inherent value and the faculties of reason and will.  The emptiness and dissatisfaction that plagues us is due to our alienation from God. Our greatest need is reconciliation with our Creator. This is available to us through the work of Jesus Christ, the God-Man, the only begotten Son, the second person of the Trinity. Jesus obeys the Father perfectly in our behalf then lays down that perfect life as a payment for our sin. To prove all His claims, He rises from the dead. (The historical veracity of the Bible, the death and resurrection of Christ etc. are addressed at the apologetics sites listed3 ). All that he did is the culmination of over 1900 years of prophecy and types found in the Old Testament.(For a further explanation of the gospel see my YouTube sermons 4)

Over the next two months or so I had many more conversations with Chris about what I was reading in the Bible.  I remember at one point asking him why Christianity seemed so distasteful to me compared to other worldviews. It taught that I was a “sinner” under the authority of a holy Creator-God and I must humbly submit to Him. In other words, I was not an autonomous, independent, mini-god able to define my own reality.  Christianity seemed too exclusive; Jesus said “no one comes to the Father but by me”.  It was morally restrictive, especially in the area of sex. It had a tainted history: crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts ...  For these and many other reasons Hinduism, Scientology ,Transcendental Meditation, Zen Buddhism etc. all seemed so much more attractive to me.  In answer to this Chris told me that I was viewing things from my “natural” or unregenerate state. Like Jesus to Nicodemus, he told me that I “must be born again to see the kingdom of God” (John 3:1-18).

Eventually I was convinced that I was indeed a sinner. I realized  that I could die at any moment and that I was in danger of being condemned by God as a result of my sin. I remember reading a bumper sticker while on my motorcycle during this period. It read: “Humble yourself and Receive Christ”. It then dawned on me that my pride was keeping me from Christ. Finally, after several agonizing weeks, I acknowledged my sin to God and appealed to Him for mercy on the basis of the saving work of Jesus Christ.  I got out of the “self-savior” business and put my trust in the crucified and risen Christ for my personal salvation. I admitted my dependence on Him for my very existence. I relinquished my “self-sovereignty” and submitted to the only risen and ascended Sovereign. Jesus Christ became my Lord from that point on. This was not just an psycho-emotional decision. There are good reasons to believe this is all true. 3

When I did this everything changed.  I now knew there was a God and that I was loved by Him.  I began to view all that I had and all that I was as a gracious gift from Him.  I began to live each day for His glory, with an eye to pleasing Him who made me and gave me new life in Christ.  Now I had a basis for objective moral standards. Now I had a plausible explanation for the existence of the world.  Now I had an answer to what is fundamentally wrong with people. I understood why we were all subject to disease and death.  Now I knew how the deep inner void that all of us have must be filled- by a right relationship with God through Christ!

After graduation I returned to Orlando to live with my parents.  I worked at Disney World as a busboy and at various sign companies (you can’t do much with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree!).  It seemed like wherever I went and whoever I met the most important issue to me was their relationship to Christ. I shared the gospel with my parents and siblings. Several also became Christians.

After about a year or so I felt called to ministry. I saw this gospel as the most critical and important thing in the world. So I went to seminary in Philadelphia to prepare for a calling as a pastor or missionary.  The first fulltime work in ministry after earning my Master of Divinity degree was in the Grand Island Bible Presbyterian Church as an assistant pastor. After four years there I left with Nancy, my new bride, (a graduate of Houghton College) to become the solo pastor in a Lakeland, Florida church.  After four years there I became the pastor of the Armor Bible Church in Orchard Park where I was senior pastor until I retired in June of 2016. Now I’m the pastor of the Union Road Community church in Cheektowaga.5

In conclusion I summarize the answers Christianity gives to the “ultimate questions” of life and urge you to seriously consider them...

Is there a God? Yes. He is the triune, infinite, eternal and unchangeable creator. He is the eternally self existent first Cause. He has the ability to suspend the “laws of nature” that He established.  He is holy, merciful, loving, full of grace and justice. He is most clearly seen in the person of his eternally begotten incarnate Son, Jesus Christ.

John 1:1-5  In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  He was with God in the beginning. Through him all things were made; without him nothing was made that has been made.  In him was life, and that life was the light of men... The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth.

Why do we die?  Physical and spiritual death are the consequence of our sin and rebellion against God.

Rom 3:10"There is no one righteous, not even one; there is no one who understands, no one who seeks God.  All have turned away, they have together become worthless; there is no one who does good, not even one." There is no difference, for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, Rom 6:23 For the wages of sin is death,

Is there life after death?   Yes. The resurrection of Christ proves there is a post death body/soul experience and that there will be a judgment.

Acts 17:30 In the past God overlooked such ignorance, but now he commands all people everywhere to repent.  For he has set a day when he will judge the world with justice by the man he has appointed. He has given proof of this to all men by raising him from the dead."

John 5:28 "Do not be amazed at this, for a time is coming when all who are in their graves will hear his voice and come out — those who have done good will rise to live, and those who have done evil will rise to be condemned.

How do I get right with God?  By repenting of your sin and trusting whole-heartedly in the work of Christ alone for your salvation.

John 3:16"For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.  For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to save the world through him. Whoever believes in him is not condemned, but whoever does not believe stands condemned already because he has not believed in the name of God's one and only Son.

Why do we exist?  “To glorify God and enjoy him forever”.

1 Cor 10:31 So whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God. Ps 16:11 You have made known to me the path of life;you will fill me with joy in your presence, with eternal pleasures at your right hand.

How do I know what is moral and right?  God has revealed His will for us in His law.  Jesus distilled all God’s commands down to “loving God with all our hearts and loving our neighbors as ourselves” (Mt. 22:37-40).  Jesus Christ is the living example of a life so lived.

End Notes:

1 Zoroastrianism is an ancient Persian religion that centers on the prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra). The Avesta is the name of their sacred scriptures. It is a semi-dualistic belief system. Ahura Mazda is the supreme creator God and Ormudz is the equivalent of the devil. Salvation is attained by doing ,thinking, and speaking what is “right”. From a youth my dad  attended a Parse (Persian) boarding school for boys. Although he memorized prayers in the Avestan language and received the ancient rituals he told me he never believed all the mythology. He was a humanist and a moralist . He considered himself a part of the “aristocracy of the intellect”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoroastrianism

2     J. Krishnamurti was a theosophist/Hindu . “I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path.”

3    https://crossexamined.org/         http://coldcasechristianity.com/    

4   “The Essential Qualities of Saving Faith”

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNm5kl0vCSU&list=PLBH1qk4uRPPGDlhXspvD3E1IAZiP8z-3P&index=2

     https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gH0yC3Pi0g4&index=7&list=PLBH1qk4uRPPGDlhXspvD3E1IAZiP8z-3P