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R.C. Sproul is the founder and president of Ligonier Ministries, which provides theological training for laypeople. He has also taught theology, philosophy, and apologetics at Knox Theological Seminary, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, Reformed Theological Seminary, and Westminster Theological Seminary. He has written more than 38 books including his most recent, Five Things Every Christian Needs to Grow.

How did you first become a Christian?

I had actually gone to a church-related college, but I went on a football scholarship, not because of any interest in the church. And at the end my first week, which had been spent in freshman orientation, my roommate and I decided to head out to town to hit some of the bars across the border. We come to the parking lot and I realized that I was out of cigarettes. So I went back in the dorm and went to the cigarette machine. I can still remember it was 25 cents for a pack of Luckys. And I got my Luckys and turned around and saw the captain of the football team sitting at a table. And he spoke to me and to my roommate and invited us to come over and chat. And we did. And this was the first person I ever met in my life that talked about Christ as a reality.

I'd never heard anything like it. And I was just absorbed, sat there for two or three hours, and he was talking. He didn't give a traditional evangelism talk to me, he just kept talking to me about the-the wisdom of the word of God. And he quoted Ecclesiastes 11:3: "Whether a tree falls to the south or to the north, in the place where it falls, there will it lie." I just feel certain I'm the only person in church history that was converted by that verse. God just took that verse and struck my soul with it. I saw myself as a-a log that was rotting in the woods. And I was going nowhere.

When I left that guy's table I went up to my room. And into my room by myself, in the dark, and got on my knees and cried out to God to forgive me.

What was it that made you head down this highfalutin, rigorous academic preparation for your life?

To tell the truth, I hated school from first grade all the way through high school. The last thing I wanted to do was even go to college. But because it was a church-related college I had to take a course in the introduction to the Old Testament, first semester, and second semester an introduction to the New Testament. I'll tell you, I just absolutely devoured the scripture. I just read it all day. At the end of the first semester I had an A in gym because I was on an athletic scholarship, an A in Bible, and all the rest Ds.

At the beginning of my sophomore year I had almost like a second conversion. And it was a strange thing. I had a required course in introduction to philosophy. The first assignment was on David Hume. I just thought this was so much nonsense, and I was so bored. I sat in the back of the class and I had Billy Graham sermons stuffed in behind my notebook. And while the professor was droning on about this stuff, I was getting edified by the Reverend Billy Graham sermons.

And then this one day he started to lecture on Augustine's view of creation. And he got my attention. And I sat there, and I had an experience that was almost as powerful as my conversion where all of a sudden my understanding of the nature of God just had exploded. I went downstairs and changed my major to philosophy just so that I could learn a more in-depth understanding of God.

After I graduated from college then I went to seminary for three years, and then I went and did doctoral studies at the University of Amsterdam.

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December (Web-only) 2002, Vol. 46