When I was growing up, my family believed in God, and I learned a great deal about Christianity from them. But until high school, I never really thought about whether I actually believed all the things I was told, and they never really influenced anything I did. There was church and the Bible on one hand, and on the other hand the stuff I really cared about, like science and computers, and the two were entirely independent.
In school, I was generally pretty satisfied with myself, and although I didn't have everything I wanted, I had most things that everyone else in the world wanted: I had pretty good grades, a good job as a programmer, a good prospect for the future, and a good chance at being quite successful. However, in high school I began to encounter situations where it would sure be convenient not to be encumbered by a Christian moral code. I started to ask questions like, "Is there really a God who cares about what I do? I sure can't see any other reason for guarding myself from pornography and the like. And am I really better off trying to be honest?" I wrestled with these issues for several years, and I eventually concluded that scientifically I could not see how without a God the universe could come into existence, and how life could evolve from nothing. (If the scientific issues bother you too, have a look at Reasons To Believe for one presentation of the case for a creator.) I was not dead certain about this, but I was certain enough.
This conclusion seriously troubled me, because I knew I was doing things that God didn't approve of. But I realized it was worse than that: it says, "Whoever wants to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God." (James 4:4b) It was not simply doing wrong things, but my goals--that I wanted to have the same things that everyone else in the world seemed to want--that made me an enemy of God. And later on, one of Jesus' statements really struck me: "What does it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" (Mark 8:36) What if I became completely successful and gained everything that I wanted--what good would that do me? My whole direction was wrong.
I didn't want to change, or even know how to change. But the contradiction between what Jesus said and what I wanted stung me. For the first time in my life, I began to read the Bible because I really wanted to know what it said. It made little sense to me, however, because I still had the same old goals and I wasn't interested in the things it had to offer. But I couldn't be satisfied with myself any more as I used to be. For months I struggled like this, growing more and more depressed.
One day, I saw a book lying on our dinner table called The Pursuit of God by A. W. Tozer. Someone just happpened to leave it there, and I idly picked it up. As I read the book, I understood for the first time what the Bible actually said about knowing God--that we can know him with at least the same degree of immediacy as we know any other person. (Not that other people hadn't told me this, but I had never understood it before.) When I understood this, it was something I really wanted.
[This is still under construction...]