I count it one of the greatest blessings of my life that my parents were serious, devoted Christians who loved the Lord and loved me, so “from childhood [I] have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make [me] wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus” (2 Tim. 3:15). They brought me up in the church, and as a grade school student in South Korea, I heard a pastor preach about the Korean word “헌신” (獻身), which means “consecration” or “devotion,” and is taken from two characters that mean, respectively, “give” and “self.” He used a wordplay, pointing out that the same word also means “worn shoes,” and that the word means to “give of oneself unreservedly to another,” like a pair of worn shoes that has sacrificed itself for its owner. He preached that “even the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28), and invited me to give myself completely to Christ. I believed in Jesus, then, and resolved to follow Him.

After moving to the United States at the age of twelve, I continued to grow in faith and obedience. However, soon thereafter, “having begun by the Spirit,” I sought to “[be] perfected by the flesh” (Gal. 3:3). I began to rely, not on the finished work of Christ on the cross, but on my own good works. I became self-righteous and prideful. However, “God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble” (Jas. 4:6). My inflated self-righteousness was punctured by struggles with sexual immorality, and I despaired that God would ever show me His favor again and use me for His glory. During this time, God spoke to me through the lyrics of one of my favorite hymns:
“When Satan tempts me to despair
And tells me of the guilt within
Upward I look and see Him there
Who made an end to all my sin.”
God reminded me, once again, of His gospel of grace—that He lavished His love and favor upon me, not because I deserve it, but because of His sovereign grace (Eph. 2:8-9). As I clung more tightly to the cross, the grip of besetting sins loosened, and it is now my honor and joy to preach this good news of Jesus to the precious saints of Trinity Cambridge Church.

I live in East Cambridge with my humble, guileless wife, Hanna, and my three tender, silly daughters, Inae, Inji, and Ina. I graduated from the Sovereign Grace Pastors College and have a Master of Divinity from Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, MA.

Having grown up in church, I learned all the right things to do to play the part of a good Christian. Lead worship? Give me a guitar. Go on mission trips? Sign me up. All the while, I unremorsefully harbored sin and sought to fit Jesus within my agenda of living as comfortable and controlled a life as possible. In my heart, there was no treasuring of Christ as Savior, no serving of Christ as Lord.

That began to change during college. For what it felt like the first time, I heard about the necessity of taking up your cross and dying to yourself to be Jesus’ disciple. Through those sermons, God cut me to the heart over my countless sins. But still missing grace and obsessed with control, I then set out to kill those sins and earn my salvation through my works. But time and time again, I fell amazingly short of the glory of God, slowly coming to the belief that God must have rejected me. This came to a head on a short-term mission trip, where I found myself sharing a loveless, graceless, joyless “gospel.”

But during the aftermath of that trip, by Scripture and the ministry of faithful pastors, God finally humbled me to the point of total surrender. I finally experienced joy in Jesus for the first time as I tasted of His amazing grace in His death and resurrection for my salvation. Since then, it’s been my life’s goal to savor the grace of the cross for the rest of my life.

Exploring how not to waste my life, I began to consider a future of ministry in college. It was then where I befriended my lovely and hilarious wife, Christine, and we married in January 2020. We moved to Boston during the pandemic and joined Trinity shortly after. Since the summer of 2022, I have progressing on the eldership track, with the process culminating in ordination as a pastor/elder at Trinity in late 2025. I’m also working on finishing my M.Div at Southern Seminary online. Christine and I both testify that by grace this church has been such a huge catalyst to our growth in faith, hope, and love.