My friend, never let condemnation strong-arm you. I have told my testimony here several times before, but I think it will help for me to repost some of it for you.
I committed my life to Christ while sitting in the hole in prison. In some ways it was almost entirely accidental, in other ways i was headed there all of my life.
I don't know for certain when I was actually born-again. I say that because, though I was raised in a non-christian household, and we did not go to church, when I was twelve, a friend invited me to a pentecostal church with his family, and I went up for salvation at the youth rally altar call.
I never really went back to church with any consistency after words, but from that moment forward I believed in God, and Jesus, and had great respect for christians. The only problem was that I could not live a christian life, no matter how hard I tried.
I had just started experimenting with drugs about the time I went up for that altar call. And going up for the altar call didn't slow me down much. I kept experimenting, then started smoking, then drinking, then got kicked out of school, then got kicked out of my house by my parents at the age of 13.
I was a street kid at the age of 13. I was in and out of juvenile hall for auto thefts, robberies, possession and sale of narcotics, burglary, etc., etc. I was remanded to adult prison at the age of 17 and given a five year sentence. I got out and reoffended and went back to prison with a two year sentence. Finally, at the age of 22, I ended up being sent to prison with a 14 year sentence. (If the time line doesn't add up for you dont trip, you have to take into account good time, early releases, probation, concurrent sentencing and a bunch of other things that for brevities sake I cannot cover here at this time.)
While in prison for this last, I caught another case inside the walls, and added another 3 years to my term, and ended up in the hole for a year.
On the streets when you are a problem, they put you in prison, and in prison, when you are a problem they put you in the hole. Here in California they call it the SHU, or Security Housing Unit. 22.5 hours a day of complete isolation, with 1.5 hour a day 'yard time'.
(The yard is a concrete patio about 10' x 20' in size with 14' high concrete wall around it. The only real difference fro your cell is that it is slightly bigger and has no roof on it so it is called a 'yard'. But with nothing to do there but look at the sky between the concrete walls, there is not much incentive to go out there. They help to dis-incentivize you from going to the 'yard' by always searching your cell when you are out of it.)
During all this time I had continued to believe in God, but I could not live a christian life. I must have tried a million times if I tried once, to stop smoking, to stop doing dope, to stop stealing, to stop looking at inappropriate contentography, (don't you know that every inmate keeps a stack of mags under his cot), etc. etc. etc. My decisions to stop/quit were limited to the amount of time it took to think about something else.
I respected christians for being able to live a holy and sanctified life, and just figured that for whatever reason I wasn't one of those holy sanctified people. I believed in God, but I figured He didnt really want anything to do with me anymore because I was such a lost cause, and I had resigned myself to this fate.
So there I am, sitting in the hole, with nothing to do, and I asked the gaurds for a book. The laughingly brought me a Bible. Old KJV at that. They thought this was some great joke. If they only knew...
I started reading through it mostly out of boredom, and of course it wasn't like I was really opposed to reading it because I did believe in Jesus. Much of it was just gibberish to me, so many rules and geneologies and stuff. It was like wading through quicksand at first. But some of it I understood, like when it would have story narratives about Abraham, or the wars of Joshua, and I especially got into the story of Saul and David.
I would certainly have given up except again, I had nothing else to do, and they wouldn't give me any other reading material.
Well, I got about halfway through the Bible, and got into the book of Psalms, and that is when something utterly amazing happened to me.
Have you ever been going along in life, just cruising along, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere it seems, a light bulb goes off, and you understand something that you have never understood before? You may have heard it or seen it a hundred times before and it never meant squat, but now, all of a sudden, it makes sense? And you wonder, 'Why didn't I ever see this before?'
Well, that is what happened to me. I had an epiphany. I didn't fully understand then what I know now, ie., that this is how God talks to us. So I guess the appropriate term would be that I heard the voice of the Spirit of God.
And it happened while reading this verse:
Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.
-Psalm 199:11
Like a ton of bricks dumped on my head I just knew that I knew that this meant that God was not waiting for me to be good enough for Him, He was waiting for me to start putting His Word in me so that His Word would make me good enough.
In other words, if wasn't a wuestion of me cleaning up enough. If I could clean up enough and be good enough then Jesus would never have had to die on a cross in my place to begin with.
God was not waiting for me to 'be good'; God was waiting for me to 'be good soil'. Two totally different things. Of course, as with all things with God, this seemed to simple to be true.
I mean, how many christians had I heard say that if you had really repented you would then quit doing '_________', (insert sin here). Following this logic I just figured I must have never really repented, no matter how much I tried to, because I could never stop doing '_________'.
But now I was being led to understand that God wasn't waiting for me to quit doing '________'; God was only waiting for me to put His Word in my heart, and then the Word would change me.
I didn't know how to take this except literally. No one had yet taught me that I needed someone to help me understand the figurative permutations of the eisigeses of the metophorical implications of the prophetic application of the Psalm. I just decided to believe what it said.
So I thought, 'I guess the only way to hide the Word in my heart would be to memorize it'. So I started memorizing.
I memorized the book of James, the book of Galatians, the book of Romans, the Gospel of John, several of the Psalms, and significant partial portions of other books.
For that entire year in the hole I had a daily routine. I got up at 6am for breakfast, then paced the cell memorizing until lunch. At lunchtime I took a break to eat, then did my work out. Then I would pace the cell and memorize until dinner.
After dinner I would lay back on my cot and requote back to myself everything that I had memorized up until that point. Then contiue reading through the Bible like I was doing before.
I got so immersed in scripture that I began to dream the Word of God. This was an amazing time in my life that may never be duplicated again, but it was what I needed at the time to get a foundation of faith.
When I got close to the end of my stay in the hole I started getting scared. I felt so close to God there that I didn't want to leave. I feared that the changes that had happened to me would fall away from me when I got out of the hole and onto the mainline around others and where all my old sins would be waiting for me.
In fact, for a moment, I sincerely considered stabbing a gaurd in order to stay in the hole and be close to God. It was an almost irresistable urge for a short period of time. However, with the scripture that I had been reading/memorizing I was able to recognize it as a demonic attack and resist it.
So they finally let me out of the hole. The day that I walked down the tier on the mainline to my new cell, a homeboy walked by and dropped a bag of dope in my pocket and said 'welcome back homie'.
I went to my cell and did it. Then I sat there for a lng time and wondered, why did I do that? I don't need that in my life any more. And that was it. I didn't do it anymore.
One at a time things just started falling off of me. It didn't happen overnight, but I kept memorizing the Word, (though at a much slower pace now that I didn't have all day to spend at it), and payed no attention to when I would mess up. I would just confess it and move on, quoting scripture.
This was way different than before, when I would decide to 'be good', mess up 10 minutes later, then feel condemned and unworthy, and go do it some more because I felt so worthless and incabable of changing.
Now I put all the responsiblility for change in my life on the power of the living Word that I was putting inside me. The only responsibilty that I chose to shoulder for myself was the responsibility to put Gods Word into my heart so that it could do what it does best. Change and renew me!
This is how God brought me through the war of condemnation waged by the devil against all of mankind. I hope my story helps.
I committed my life to Christ while sitting in the hole in prison. In some ways it was almost entirely accidental, in other ways i was headed there all of my life.
I don't know for certain when I was actually born-again. I say that because, though I was raised in a non-christian household, and we did not go to church, when I was twelve, a friend invited me to a pentecostal church with his family, and I went up for salvation at the youth rally altar call.
I never really went back to church with any consistency after words, but from that moment forward I believed in God, and Jesus, and had great respect for christians. The only problem was that I could not live a christian life, no matter how hard I tried.
I had just started experimenting with drugs about the time I went up for that altar call. And going up for the altar call didn't slow me down much. I kept experimenting, then started smoking, then drinking, then got kicked out of school, then got kicked out of my house by my parents at the age of 13.
I was a street kid at the age of 13. I was in and out of juvenile hall for auto thefts, robberies, possession and sale of narcotics, burglary, etc., etc. I was remanded to adult prison at the age of 17 and given a five year sentence. I got out and reoffended and went back to prison with a two year sentence. Finally, at the age of 22, I ended up being sent to prison with a 14 year sentence. (If the time line doesn't add up for you dont trip, you have to take into account good time, early releases, probation, concurrent sentencing and a bunch of other things that for brevities sake I cannot cover here at this time.)
While in prison for this last, I caught another case inside the walls, and added another 3 years to my term, and ended up in the hole for a year.
On the streets when you are a problem, they put you in prison, and in prison, when you are a problem they put you in the hole. Here in California they call it the SHU, or Security Housing Unit. 22.5 hours a day of complete isolation, with 1.5 hour a day 'yard time'.
(The yard is a concrete patio about 10' x 20' in size with 14' high concrete wall around it. The only real difference fro your cell is that it is slightly bigger and has no roof on it so it is called a 'yard'. But with nothing to do there but look at the sky between the concrete walls, there is not much incentive to go out there. They help to dis-incentivize you from going to the 'yard' by always searching your cell when you are out of it.)
During all this time I had continued to believe in God, but I could not live a christian life. I must have tried a million times if I tried once, to stop smoking, to stop doing dope, to stop stealing, to stop looking at inappropriate contentography, (don't you know that every inmate keeps a stack of mags under his cot), etc. etc. etc. My decisions to stop/quit were limited to the amount of time it took to think about something else.
I respected christians for being able to live a holy and sanctified life, and just figured that for whatever reason I wasn't one of those holy sanctified people. I believed in God, but I figured He didnt really want anything to do with me anymore because I was such a lost cause, and I had resigned myself to this fate.
So there I am, sitting in the hole, with nothing to do, and I asked the gaurds for a book. The laughingly brought me a Bible. Old KJV at that. They thought this was some great joke. If they only knew...
I started reading through it mostly out of boredom, and of course it wasn't like I was really opposed to reading it because I did believe in Jesus. Much of it was just gibberish to me, so many rules and geneologies and stuff. It was like wading through quicksand at first. But some of it I understood, like when it would have story narratives about Abraham, or the wars of Joshua, and I especially got into the story of Saul and David.
I would certainly have given up except again, I had nothing else to do, and they wouldn't give me any other reading material.
Well, I got about halfway through the Bible, and got into the book of Psalms, and that is when something utterly amazing happened to me.
Have you ever been going along in life, just cruising along, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere it seems, a light bulb goes off, and you understand something that you have never understood before? You may have heard it or seen it a hundred times before and it never meant squat, but now, all of a sudden, it makes sense? And you wonder, 'Why didn't I ever see this before?'
Well, that is what happened to me. I had an epiphany. I didn't fully understand then what I know now, ie., that this is how God talks to us. So I guess the appropriate term would be that I heard the voice of the Spirit of God.
And it happened while reading this verse:
Thy word have I hid in mine heart, that I might not sin against thee.
-Psalm 199:11
Like a ton of bricks dumped on my head I just knew that I knew that this meant that God was not waiting for me to be good enough for Him, He was waiting for me to start putting His Word in me so that His Word would make me good enough.
In other words, if wasn't a wuestion of me cleaning up enough. If I could clean up enough and be good enough then Jesus would never have had to die on a cross in my place to begin with.
God was not waiting for me to 'be good'; God was waiting for me to 'be good soil'. Two totally different things. Of course, as with all things with God, this seemed to simple to be true.
I mean, how many christians had I heard say that if you had really repented you would then quit doing '_________', (insert sin here). Following this logic I just figured I must have never really repented, no matter how much I tried to, because I could never stop doing '_________'.
But now I was being led to understand that God wasn't waiting for me to quit doing '________'; God was only waiting for me to put His Word in my heart, and then the Word would change me.
I didn't know how to take this except literally. No one had yet taught me that I needed someone to help me understand the figurative permutations of the eisigeses of the metophorical implications of the prophetic application of the Psalm. I just decided to believe what it said.
So I thought, 'I guess the only way to hide the Word in my heart would be to memorize it'. So I started memorizing.
I memorized the book of James, the book of Galatians, the book of Romans, the Gospel of John, several of the Psalms, and significant partial portions of other books.
For that entire year in the hole I had a daily routine. I got up at 6am for breakfast, then paced the cell memorizing until lunch. At lunchtime I took a break to eat, then did my work out. Then I would pace the cell and memorize until dinner.
After dinner I would lay back on my cot and requote back to myself everything that I had memorized up until that point. Then contiue reading through the Bible like I was doing before.
I got so immersed in scripture that I began to dream the Word of God. This was an amazing time in my life that may never be duplicated again, but it was what I needed at the time to get a foundation of faith.
When I got close to the end of my stay in the hole I started getting scared. I felt so close to God there that I didn't want to leave. I feared that the changes that had happened to me would fall away from me when I got out of the hole and onto the mainline around others and where all my old sins would be waiting for me.
In fact, for a moment, I sincerely considered stabbing a gaurd in order to stay in the hole and be close to God. It was an almost irresistable urge for a short period of time. However, with the scripture that I had been reading/memorizing I was able to recognize it as a demonic attack and resist it.
So they finally let me out of the hole. The day that I walked down the tier on the mainline to my new cell, a homeboy walked by and dropped a bag of dope in my pocket and said 'welcome back homie'.
I went to my cell and did it. Then I sat there for a lng time and wondered, why did I do that? I don't need that in my life any more. And that was it. I didn't do it anymore.
One at a time things just started falling off of me. It didn't happen overnight, but I kept memorizing the Word, (though at a much slower pace now that I didn't have all day to spend at it), and payed no attention to when I would mess up. I would just confess it and move on, quoting scripture.
This was way different than before, when I would decide to 'be good', mess up 10 minutes later, then feel condemned and unworthy, and go do it some more because I felt so worthless and incabable of changing.
Now I put all the responsiblility for change in my life on the power of the living Word that I was putting inside me. The only responsibilty that I chose to shoulder for myself was the responsibility to put Gods Word into my heart so that it could do what it does best. Change and renew me!
This is how God brought me through the war of condemnation waged by the devil against all of mankind. I hope my story helps.
