The Power that Changed My Life
By Philip Chamberlain ’70
I had never seen a single picture of Yale when Phelps Gate welcomed me to the Old Campus three years ago next month. I arrived late Saturday night before registration week, before many had come. The man at the campus police switchboard supplied a key and steered me left of Harkness Tower to find Vanderbilt Hall, where I was assigned. Two large suitcases accompanied me through the quiet, empty campus, across the sidewalks, and up four flights of stairs. The other three in the quad hadn’t arrived, so for a night I had the largest room in all my Yale career. After a day with family friends in northern Connecticut, Monday began the impressive whirl of registration, receptions, and course selection. Even the genuine ivy that nearly covered our living room windows seemed to say that I had arrived in the world.
That feeling was challenged only by a vague uneasy sense that I would soon be facing situations designed to shatter my carefully constructed self-control. With no family or old friends around for moral support my first year at Yale would have to be a wilder ride than I had ever had before.
There was a difference in my case from hundreds of other freshmen that week, though, and it began with a handbill on Monday announcing a meeting on Tuesday. The same people had also sent a letter to the freshmen over the summer, so I was at least mildly interested.
Tuesday night’s meeting was run by undergraduates, mostly sophomores, to talk with freshmen about the power of the New Testament church. The Bible’s Book of Acts is full of miracles and healings that were performed by this church in the daily course of its life.
Three of them spoke to about forty of us freshmen. One of them particularly struck me. He spoke of getting power from God to work in our own lives from Jesus Christ. Jesus Himself, he continued, supplied the New Testament church with power, and He can do so today. Afterward he gave an invitation to us to pray silently along with him, asking that we raise our hands also if we were serious about asking God to help us. I was in a muddle for a little while, partly because I wasn’t used to praying like that, and partly because I had the perfect excuse not to nominally, I already was a Christian, and had been in Sunday School and church rounds for years. After only a few seconds I realized, though, that labels notwithstanding, if I turned away from Jesus there, I was done with Him, perhaps forever.
I prayed that night to God, and raised my hand, and from that night God’s power began to transform my life and set me free of habits, fears, sin, God, as great as He is, accepted me without reservation. He let me know that I was special to Him, not because I earned it, but because He loved me. The miraculous power with which He intervened in my life was only the first token of the love He had for me.
Some people might say to this, fine, you found your help in a Christian thing, and others can get the power they need from other places. That misses the whole point. The Bible has since shown me that it wasn’t just certain people God would take, but “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, that whosoever believed on Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.” The “whosoever” that night was me. It could be anyone. No wonder Peter, of the New Testament church, said, “There is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved [than the name of Jesus].” (Acts 4:12)
The externals of my student life for the next three years changed somewhat, but the internals changed even more. For the first time I could read the Bible and receive some of its message to which I was dulled and blinded before. It began to make sense, glorious sense. There were special times, as when a group of us prayed one night in Branford Chapel (under Harkness Tower) for a friend who was seriously ill in New York City. God soon gave us faith to believe for the healing, and we just about split that chapel with the sound of our praise. It wasn’t until the next morning that a phone call confirmed what we knew by faith: the healing had come that night.
I graduated this past June, a year ahead of myself, and I can say that I am a very different person from three years ago. More than that my purposes and expectations are different.
I am convinced that the New Testament church is neither a fable nor an historical oddity. I expect to see it functioning in the same sort of power and authority in these times, very shortly. And more personally, I know that the God who loved me, loved me and all of His loved ones before the foundation of the world. He has a definite and perfect place in His grand plan for each one daring enough to grasp for it. I want to do the will of God for my life, wherever that leads. It doesn’t mean that everyone ought to be a minister or missionary. My own expectations of becoming a minister were surprisingly modified by the Lord, as I believe, during my senior year at Yale.
God is original, and what He may do in your life through Jesus Christ is as unpredictable as what He has done in mine. One thing you can know, they will be great and eternal things when everything else is gone, testimonies to God’s love, wisdom, and power. That kind of life is worth your life.
Philip Chamberlain ’70