"It is better to go to the house of mourning than to go to the house of feasting, for this is the end of all mankind, and the living will lay it to heart." (Ecclesiastes 7:1-2)

Dean Spies would have told you that was the stupidest thing he had ever heard. That was before August 19, 2003.

A Life Built for the World

For most of his adult life Dean Spies wanted nothing to do with God. Raised in the church and confirmed as a young teenager, he did not see the inside of a sanctuary again except for weddings and funerals. He spent his adult years working in the bar business, living a life of excessive drinking, promiscuity, and self-centered behavior. He called himself an atheist and meant it. He had friends who called themselves Christians. Not one of them ever told him the Gospel.

The Funeral That Changed Everything

On August 19, 2003, Dean was at a friend's house when he heard that a childhood friend had died. He had always liked and respected this man, though their lives had gone in completely different directions. His friend was what Dean would have called a Bible-banger. Dean was a partier. They had not talked in years.

On the day of the funeral, August 23, 2003, Dean was on his way to the golf course when he drove past the church and saw another childhood friend walk through the doors. He remembered the funeral. At the last moment he turned around and went in, arriving just before they closed the casket, out of respect for the man his friend had been.

He found himself standing in front of that casket with thoughts he had not expected.

It was sad, he thought, that this man had died so young at forty-three years old. Then another thought followed. If his God is real, it is not sad for him at all. He would be in heaven.

And then the thought that changed everything. Dean put himself in that casket and asked where he would be for eternity if his God was real.

The answer frightened him. The uncertainty frightened him more. Standing in that house of mourning, unknowingly living out the words of Ecclesiastes 7:2, the living will lay it to heart, Dean made a promise to himself that he would investigate the evidence for God and let it lead wherever it led, regardless of what he wanted the answer to be.

The Investigation

The very next day he began. He read everything he could find on Christian apologetics with one condition he set for himself from the beginning. He would not let his presuppositional worldview or his personal preferences determine the conclusion. He would follow the evidence.

The more he read the more he realized it was true. It did not take long before he arrived at the conclusion that Jesus really was who He claimed to be and that the Bible really was the Word of God that could be trusted. He then turned to Scripture itself with one question driving every page he read. Would he have been going to heaven or hell if it had been his funeral instead of his friend's?

The more he read the less he liked the answer he was getting.

He would go to work at the nightclub each night telling himself that tonight would be different. When work ended he would go out and do the same things again. He would wake up the next morning convicted and ashamed, unable to find victory over the life he now knew was destroying him. The evidence had brought him to the truth. But the truth alone had not yet set him free.

February 15, 2004

On the morning of February 15, 2004, after another night of drinking and the same old life, Dean got out of bed and got on his knees. Through tears he told God he was sorry for spending his entire life spitting in His face. He asked God to take the desires away. He promised that if God would free him from the life that had held him for so long he would spend the rest of his life serving Him.

God heard that prayer.

The desires left that day and have not returned. It has been over twenty years. Dean has not returned to a life of drunkenness. He has not been intimate with a woman outside of marriage. The self-serving atheist who walked into a funeral on his way to the golf course was gone, and in his place was a man who belonged entirely to God and knew it.

The Promise Kept

Dean made another promise that day. He would never be the silent Christian his friends had been to him. He would never have people in his life whom he knew were not ready to meet Jesus and say nothing. He would be the friend who told the truth about their spiritual condition and let them decide, because he never wanted to stand on the other side of that chasm in Luke 16 and hear someone ask why he had not told them before it was too late.

Over twenty years later he is still keeping that promise.

He earned a Bachelor's degree in Christian Counseling and a Master's degree in Biblical Theology from the University of Northwestern in St. Paul, Minnesota, and has spent over twenty years in personal Scripture study with a passionate focus on soteriology, the doctrine of salvation, which shapes every page of the Enter Through the Narrow Gate series. He is the founder of GloryBound Christian Ministries, which ministers to terminally ill unchurched people, people struggling with addictions and destructive lifestyles, and anyone who wants to start or strengthen their walk with Jesus.

The Enter Through the Narrow Gate series is the fruit of those twenty years. It was not written by a theologian who studied the Gospel from a safe distance. It was written by a man who once stood at a casket, put himself in it, and spent the rest of his life making sure everyone around him had every opportunity to hear the truth that changed his own eternity.

"Whoever comes to me I will never cast out." — Jesus Christ (John 6:37)