A Faith Reality Check While in the Military by Snell Van King III

I grew up in the church, and for a long time I truly believed I understood what it meant to have confidence in God. I thought I had a solid grasp on the doctrines of our faith. I believed I knew who God was, what He had accomplished in the Bible, and what it meant to follow Him.

In my teenage years, I accepted Jesus, and the conversion was real. I remember asking my mother for a Bible and proudly taking it to school with me. Something in me had awakened—an excitement, a hunger—and I wanted to hold on to it with everything I had.

Somewhere along the way—I’m not even sure exactly when or where—I adopted the doctrine of eternal security. The idea that once someone genuinely accepts Jesus Christ as their Savior, their salvation is permanently secure. Nothing—sin, doubt, failure, or temptation—could undo it.

At first, that belief felt comforting. It felt like a safety net beneath my spiritual walk. But over time, it became something else. It opened the door to compromise. Slowly, almost without noticing, I began inching closer and closer to the line. I drifted away from the safety of genuine faith and the integrity of the gospel. Instead, I slipped into a kind of religion that creates its own rules, its own loopholes, its own ways of staying “righteous” without actually living surrendered.

Eventually, I joined the Navy, and the compromises that once felt small became the norm. What had started as subtle shifts in my heart grew into patterns that shaped my life. The faith I once carried boldly to school became something I carried only in memory, overshadowed by choices that pulled me further from the God I thought I fully understood.

I remember one evening vividly. I was climbing into my rack—what the Navy calls a bed, though “bed” hardly captures the reality of living in a floating city. A rack is a compact, engineered sleeping compartment designed to fit into the tightest spaces on a ship or submarine. Mine was the top rack of a three‑stacked unit, which meant climbing up into a narrow space barely big enough to turn over in. We kept a metal chair next to it to help with the climb.

As I lifted my leg to swing into the rack, I heard a voice in my mind—clear, sharp, undeniable: “If you died tonight, you would go straight to hell.”

I froze for a moment, but then brushed it off. Once saved, always saved, I told myself. I’m fine. And I climbed into bed.

The very next night, the same scene unfolded. I placed the metal chair beside the rack, lifted my leg to climb in, and again—at the exact same moment—the voice came: “If you died tonight, you would go straight to hell.”

This time, I couldn’t ignore it. I paused, slowly lowered my leg back to the floor, and felt something inside me break open. I knelt down at that same metal chair—the one we used to climb into our racks—and took a posture of prayer.

With my head bowed and my heart trembling, I said, “Lord, I need more time. In all of Your mercy, please give me time. I’ll live for You. I’ll give You my whole life. I don’t know how, but I know I haven’t been living right. I know I want to. And I know I don’t want to go to hell.”

I remember standing up afterward with a strange mixture of fear and peace. I felt like the Lord had heard me. Not only heard me, but answered me. There was a quiet confidence in my chest, a sense that God wasn’t done with me yet.

I climbed back into my rack using the chair, lay down, and fell asleep with a different kind of awareness—one I hadn’t felt in years.

The very next day, almost instinctively, I went out and bought a worship CD. It felt like sealing something, like marking a turning point. Two months later, I finished my enlistment. Six months after that, I fully surrendered my life to the Lord.

Looking back, I truly believe God had to confront that doctrine in me first. Because a man will never pursue what he thinks he already has. If I believed I was eternally secure no matter how I lived, why would I chase holiness? Why would I repent? Why would I return?

God, in His mercy, shook me awake. And that moment—kneeling at a metal chair in a cramped Navy berthing—became the beginning of my return to Him.