Is it possible for you to share your testimony ....?

cygnusx1 · May 17, 2005

I just thought that it would be encouraging and interesting as well as a good witness to share our testimonies of how we came to The Lord.
I posted this some other place , so sorry if you have already read it , I find it really inspiring the way God works , please feel free to witness , thanks. :wave:

I was saved about 25 years ago , I was brought up to attend an Anglican High Church and was a Choirister and enjoyed much of my time there.

Yet even though I heared the Bible , sermons , and the occassional discussion , they all meant ZERO to me , I had no real understanding and NO-ONE had ever told me I needed to Be Born-Again , no-one had told me that I had to give my life to the Lord ........... so I went on both Religious and spiritualy dead at the same time.

On rare occassions at this time I read my Bible (NEB) and was really interested in the accounts of Jesus last hours on earth ..........

Now I had some faint awareness that Jesus was very different from ordinary men , that I had gleaned shortly before leaving the Anglican Church was that something was "happening" on that hill outside the city walls called Calvary and it was something strange , something highly symbolic and beyond any normal occurence , the picture of Three Crosses and the amazing interaction and DETAIL around the crucifixion were telling the reader , me , something , but i didn't know what ......... I just accepted that Jesus Christ was no ordinary human.....

A number of years past and one night , a guy who I knew from School passed by where I lived .... he told me The Answer to all my problems was Jesus!! ....

He told me I just HAD to give my Life to The Lord , I was almost dumb struck , for secretly I had always believed in God , and had no real understanding about any message from Him........

I muttered (in my defence) "yes , I am certain Jesus was a very important figure , that the detail in the Gospels is staggering , and that I hold Jesus in high regard , but how can I be sure that He is alive , speaking , calling me right now , I , I must have some sign , I must see something first ...."

I looked up at that moment and the heavens lit up with a shooting star !

I was so moved , that I was jumping up and down , saying "yes , I see , yes , Jesus is Lord , He is The One "

My friend looked bewildered , for he had seen nothing .........

About a Month later , the Methodist Church had an outreach week , it was run by University students , and they spent night after night giving testimony to what Jesus had done for them , I was really moved , and on the last night an altar call was given , and I could see the gap from me to the altar was but a couple of feet , it seemed like a thousand miles , because all my friends were behind me , watching and seeing what would happen , it was that night I turned my back on the world , and came home ............ God had called me in a deep very personal way , and I knew He had spoken directly to me.

ps, a week later I attended the Anglican Church to Check out my NewFound experience , and surprise surprise , I heared a message from the pulpit that confirmed my beliefs , it was the only time I have ever heared God speak in that place , my ears were now open , and my journey had just begun.....

Praise The Lord!

Irishcat922 · May 18, 2005

I was lost but now I'm Found'
I was Blind but now I see.
The Great God of the Universe, showed mercy
to a wretched sinner like me.

That was twenty-five years ago, and he still shows me mercy every day. Praise God for His unspeakable Gift.

Antman_05 · May 18, 2005

Irishcat922 said:
I was lost but now I'm Found'
I was Blind but now I see.
The Great God of the Universe, showed mercy
to a wretched sinner like me.

That was twenty-five years ago, and he still shows me mercy every day. Praise God for His unspeakable Gift.

Ok thats cheating, as we are all in the same boat there.

I mean i was doomed to Hell, as i had broken all ten commandments, and it was the Lord who saved me.

Imblessed · May 18, 2005

Cynusx1, that was a great testimony!

I'm one of those boring folk who grew up in a christian home, going to church every week, never was rebellious, etc etc

But when I left home, I also didn't find time to keep going to church, and kind of gradually slipped away from it. I didn't exactly rebel or lose belief or renounce it, I just kind of forgot about the whole thing.

I got married, lived life, etc.. and right around the time I had my first child, my in-laws became JW's. All of this made me start thinking about my faith again, because I wanted the boys to grow up in church like I did, and I needed to figure out WHY my in-laws would become JW's. And to top it off, my husband was very open to going to church. So we started again, at a little Quaker church that was pretty 'dead', I took about 2 years, but I started getting restless, I just wasn't growing or learning and we were finding excuses not to go to church. We found an awesome community church and about a year later I found CF(and you guys/gals). The last couple of years, I've probably grown more than my whole life combined! God really led me to the place i am right now, finding out our church was Calvinistic AFTER I had accepted it as truth was the final clincher. Now I can relax knowing that my husband and the kids are getting good biblical teaching, and I can enjoy the church for what it is, knowing that it's sound. What a relief. I feel like I have the cake AND get to eat it! LOL

Anyway, I know that's not a testimony as to how I became christian because I have always been, but it is a testimony as to how God can "find His lost sheep"--I don't think it always means finding the unsaved, but it also can mean regrouping the already saved! PRAISE GOD!

rmwilliamsll · May 18, 2005

i wrote one for evangelism explosion and stored it at:
http://www.dakotacom.net/~rmwillia/ee_testimony1.html

rapturefish · May 18, 2005

I was born in Australia but raised in Hong Kong for my primary school years. While there my Mum took my brother and I to church, with a southern Baptist flavour. They always did altat calls for salvation or prayer and I was always convicted. The pastor's wife noted this to my Mum once as she could see from the choir seats how close I was to walking down that aisle on many an occasion. I never did; however, I had the sense that whatever the question was, God was the answer.

I was verbally bullied in school and life was pretty miserable. I was a loner, didn't fit in and tended to stay by myself. I actually had a tendency to try and put what I learnt at church into action e.g. one time I invited all my enemies to my birthday party because I was taught to 'love our enemies'. They had fun and they behaved while my parents were around; however I'm not sure my parents ever knew they were the people I most hated in school.

Anyway, I returned to Australia and discovered racism and more bullying. I had a sensitive nature and a bad temper, and there's still traces of that in me. At this time my Australian cousins invited me to their church camps. They went to a chinese presbyterian church, the first chinese church and the biggest one in Australia. I was at one of these camps one year and we were studying Colossians and looking at other religions and how they were false. I had many questions and although I had been told the gospel before I had never really got it. Things like "How can Jesus save me when he lived 2000 years ago?" were hard to understand for this slow brain. But at this camp I finally understood and gave my life to God - not at the camp, mind you, but afterwards, on my own praying by my bed three days after it.

That was just the beginning. I've had many rollercoaster rides since then. Suffice to say, the Presbyterian church I joined about 2-3 years after my conversion and stayed there for about 7 years. In that time I was heavily involved in ministry and went into the worship team, wrote poems and articles for the newsletter, led prayer meetings and bible studies a little.

I currently am at a Pentecostal church and that is another long story. But from the presbyterian church I was taught the word and learnt much about the bible, about God and Jesus and learnt many hymns as well as some contemporary music. It was a caring, friendly community and conservative in its handling of the word and mindset. In that church I found my church home in Australia and it's rare to find a chuch 'home' I realise, now that I've been to so many other churches and had a feel for what they are like.

God has a purpose and plan for everyone, and whether that means you go through a reformed church or end up in a Pentecostal one, it is the same God who works in all his children. For that, we should celebrate our common faith in Jesus and work together in step with eyes on the kingdom and not our differences, which to God's eyes are not to be things to separate us. We're all different, yet the same in Jesus, praise God for that.

blessings,

reformedfan · May 19, 2005

Hope this works, I posted this is a thread somewhere else, & am going to try to copy & paste it:

I used to not know what sin was, I was a devil worshipper, then in a cult, but I read the Bible, cuz a cult guy gave me a NKJV he stole from a hotel.

I was raised in a church going family, but the version of God I was taught was so unBiblical that I figured if that was God, I would rather worship the devil. I grew disennchanted with that after the novelty of devil worship wore off, for satanism's trappings were suspiciously reminiscent of the garbage church I'd grown up in.

So after a few years of nothing, I was living with my boyfriend, we had a kid & I didn't want my kid to grow up as twisted as I had with false religion where he'd end up hating God.

So my bfriend's friend had just the solution: Join his cult. Imagine, if you will, a satanist & a cult guy arguing over the attributes of God: neither one of us knew what we were talking about, obviously, yet it took us till 3 in the morning to finally agree to disagree.

Finally, he gave me a Bible, and by God's grace I didn't throw it off the balcony into the lake below. God was actually drawing me closer to Him by using this cult guy! He ordered me to read only some of the books from the New Testament, the rest of the Bible he told me to just ignore. Well, rebellion has always been a characteristic of my life, so naturally I opened to Genesis 1:1 & began reading. After a few months of reading through the Old Testament, I began to think of God in a whole different way. I was amazed at how incredibly loving He was to such a wildly rebellious Israel. Over & over He'd not just give them bare essentials, but blessed them massively, & over & over they'd reject Him, favoring their idols. Over & over He'd forgive them when they repented, & treat them all over again like the loving Father that He is.

As I read through it, a couple things happened. One, by the time I got to Saul chasing David around trying to kill him, I was hooked. I have always loved to read, but this was a book like nothing I'd ever read before, it wasn't just a book, I literally couldn't put it down. I was working at the time, 2 full time jobs, alla time I was so exhausted out of my skull that my life was like a weird, surreal dream world. The only thing I did besides work & cry out of misery & fatigue was read that Bible.

The other thing that started to happen was that I felt horribly, horribly convicted of my past devil worship. At this point, Christ was still a New Testament Bible character to me that I hadn't read about yet, He had no relevance to me. All I could do was feel horribly sorry & know there was no way on earth I could ever change that about me or make it go away. I told my cult friend how miserable I felt about what I'd done, & he insisted the problem lie in what portion of the Bible I was reading.

'You see', he informed me, 'if you had only read the handful of books in the NT like I commanded you, you wouldn't be so sad. Quit reading the OT.'

I tried to explain to him that idea was about as appealing as stopping breathing, that such a thing would be impossible, but I was completely unable to make him understand that.

God in His sovereignty used the death of my brother's baby to introduce me to a real live Christian in another state. When she found out that I was in a cult, she tried to witness to me. Now I was pretty ignorant of the cult's management & leadership, & I never read any of their funny literature, so all of her attempts to witness to me by debasing the cult's founder fell on polite indifference. Who cares if the guy's a stark raving liar? I figured, at least he's not twisting my mind with the sewage my parent's church tried to force feed me.

Quickly, she switched gears to the claims Christ made about Himself, pointing out to me John 8:58, where Jesus says, "Before Abraham was, I AM", & she asked me why Christ didn't use better grammar. Before I could launch into the limited cult vocab I'd acquired, translator's errors & all that rot, she directed me to Exodus 3:14, where God identifies Himself as I AM. Clearly this was a verse that had Christ calling Himself a name of God.

That poor girl, I was struck dumb by this bomb she'd lobbed into my lap. I remember she kept trying to talk to me after that, but my mind was so full of wonder at this polar opposite of what the cult had maintained that there was just too much thinking about that for me to do to be able to communicate with her clearly.

(detour: I've spoken to her in the years since that day, after I became a Christian. She always figured that day, that at that moment when I became monosyllabic, she had done something wrong & she'd spent years wildly frustrated that I was too uncommunicative after that for her to share the Gospel with me. She always felt like 'she'd blown it' because literally that just shut me down entirely. The exact opposite was true, but she couldn't read minds & I was too blown away to even tell her that.)

Anyway, once I got back to home base, (by now I had two kids & a third on the way & somewhere in there my bfriend & I had gotten married), the only knowledge I was certain of was that the cult guy didn't know what he was talking about when it came to the Bible. So the pages & pages & pages of questions I had would go unanswered, cuz I was WAY too afraid to go into a church.

Jump ahead, I started home schooling & the authors I read said get a good study Bible. So I did, & WOW! Those things are so cool! There were many answers for me in there! But still no Gospel. I just tried to obey everything I could, & just didn't understand why it wasn't something i was very good at.

Eventually we moved to around here, started renting from a Christian landlord who God used to invite me to his great Calvinist church, and come over with the pastor & tell me the Gospel.

I didn't get it.

So we moved away, to the town with the daughter congregation in it, where I & my husband heard the Gospel many more times. It was the word sin I just couldn't understand. And, Christ was still just a Bible character to me, I really couldn't understand why everybody made such a big deal about Him.

Then one day when I was going through the Westminster Larger Catechism section on sin, my whole view of myself changed. No longer was sin just some abstract concept, it was stuff that's desperately offensive to a holy God. Suddenly then I remembered the Gospel presentation a church lady had made earlier, and suddenly Christ taking the punishment I deserve for my sin made perfect sense. I've always equated my conversion with Acts 9:18; it perfectly describes what happened: I was all alone at my kitchen table, suddenly I understood the Gospel. Immediately I had a new understanding of the Scriptures, I had passed from death to life. God is no longer the one who I will stand before as a judge, He is my Father, because Christ's blood bought me out of my slavery to sin, I have been adopted into His family.

cygnusx1 · May 17, 2006

bump!

mannysee · May 18, 2006

When I was a late teenager, I remember getting an old family bible out of my parents cabinet at home, and looking at a few pages in the gospel accounts. All I can remember from that time is that I had read some things about Jesus talking about hell, and that I was a bit scared. I cant remember anything else I read, though I felt somewhat afraid that I could not understand the things I was reading in the New Testament.
When I was 24 I left home and found work far away in the north of the state. Because it was a small town, I thought that I might go find a church to meet some people. I attended a small baptist meeting which was run in a sports centre and met some nice people. I got to know one man and his wife a little, and went over their house for dinner a couple of times. He gave me a small book written by Paul Little about God/Jesus/Christianity etc. When I was back at my place, I often read these.
One night, as I was having dinner with some family members who had come up, I remember saying that I think I am going to be a christian, and sensing quite a bit of joy while saying this. My sister looked a bit perplexed at me.
The couple of times I saw my friend outside church, in the supermarket I felt that he wanted me to become a christian. But I didnt want to, under what I felt was pressure. I left town a few weeks later and moved up north again to a larger town. I was still reading these books I was given.
One night after arriving in town I heard some christians singing in a band on the street corner. This was their way of Saturday night telling people about Jesus. I knew they were a christian group, but that did not bother me, and I sat down to eat my dinner and listen to them.
After the concert I met someone from the group, and we had a long chat about things. As I was new in town, he offered to put me up for a few nights at his place. Instead I moved into the YMCA for a week. This person I met again, a few days later, and moved into his place, along with another person from the church.
Mostly I stayed at home for the next week, as I did not have a job, and I read some books about George Whitefield and others. I phone my friend in my old town and his wife said that he was now in hospital where I was, as he had broken his foot playing basketball. So I visited him in hospital a couple of times. I sensed during these times that he wanted me to be a christian, but he did not say it in words.
The third time I visited him, I was extremely careful to ride to the hospital because I did not want to die (get hit by a car etc.) on the way and end up in hell. After we talked as usual about whatever, I said to him that I wanted to be a christian. We prayed together and I cried out to God to forgive my sins and I told him that I believed in Jesus raising from the dead etc, pleading with God to save me. He did. Afterward I felt different, like things around me such as the trees and sky were something new. I felt great!
I began to look for a church, so I attended a baptist one -as my friend whom I met in hospital was baptist- but it ended up attending a pentecostal church as I had met some people from there (those I was staying with at the time).
I kept reading these books about Whitefield and others, and I thought that I wanted to preach Jesus Christ like they did. So I got my small bible and went into town. As I was pacing up and down being extremely nervous, suddenly a very odd thing happened to me. My whole body was filled with what I can only describe as being the most pure and wonderful love. It began in my heart and slowly spread throughout my entire body. It was overflowing/incredible love. I began to preach Jesus Christ at the top of my voice!
Anyway, it turned out that the church I stayed in for 7 years was considered a cult in the U.S. by alot of people, mainly because of its control and manipulation of people. Being a new christian and knowing nothing about church etc. it took me 7 years to understand what was going on.
I eventually left and went through 5 years of post traumatic stress disorder; the result of being in the group and coming out of it.

After looking for a new church for some time I have been attending a presbyterian one in a new town, which is what I need at the moment, as part of my recovery. I am learning and reading alot about things which I did not know while in my old church. The journey continues....

Ethan_Fetch · May 18, 2006

I was born and raised with no particular religious affiliation. My dad was an agnostic and my stepmom was nominally Lutheran.

My biological mother was Southern Baptist but, since I never knew her it had no impact on me, besides any of which, her being Baptist was even more nominal than my stepmom's Lutheranism.

When I was a young teen I began to get interested in religion.

I latched on to the Roman Catholic Church and eventually was sprinkled and confirmed in that church.

I didn't change my life though and I was a rough one.

As I proceeded through my teens I completely gave myself to pleasure, sex, drugs and rock and roll. I still went to mass but with little regularity.

I joined the Army when I was seventeen and went around the world still enaging in all the self-destructive behavior I'd learned in high school only now I was completely unleashed.

Eventually the Army and I parted ways, they didn't want me and I figured I was smarter than pretty much everyone in the world so why should I take orders from idiots?

I struggled along like this going from job to job, girlfriend to girlfriend, high to high until eventually, after a couple of stints in the county jail for alcohol induced violence I realized that I wasn't so smart and I wasn't so special.

It didn't come to me all at once, it just kind of rolled over me in the form of unhappiness. I was depressed.

I seemed to have "enjoyed" a good run of promiscuity and selfishness, I had had my high happy days of boozed up, smoked up, sexed up delirium and now they'd left me.

I had become a parody of myself. Nothing worked. I couldn't even get drunk or high anymore without hurting myself or someone else.

So, I got sober.

God sent some Christians my way and they preached the Gospel to me and got me into the Bible.

I wish I could tell you that I made a clean break. The flesh is strong, I relapsed occasionally, hankering after the fleshpots of Egypt I guess, like a dog returning to it's vomit, I would crawl back into slavery from time to time.

But things were different, if I had been uncomfortable living that way before, now it was absolutely excruciating.

I had seen the light, I had tasted the sweetness.

I didn't realize it when it was in my mouth but the water from the fountain Christ had set in me was more satisfying than anything I had known before, and slowly, surely, I began not to be thirsty for any other kind.

I eventually broke with the Roman Catholic Church but it took a long time. That's another place where my flesh was enslaved. It is so easy to see gold and beautiful vestments and hear the music and bells and smell the incense and mistake it for real communion with the Body of Christ and it took me years to finally get done with it.

My history is one of stops and starts. There are very few clean breaks, but God is gracious, He never gives up on me and He has given me so much: a beautiful wife, healthy children, a good job and above all the lasting and abiding certainty of salvation in and through the cross of Jesus.

I've been sober for a long time now. God has taken that away form me. I have no desire at all to be related to the Roman harlot again.

I'm older, maybe wiser, but I still have my battles to fight.

I was thinking the other day how very good it is to have the assurance that God's love for me in Jesus will carry me through anything.

Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine, o what a foretaste of Glory Divine, Heir of salvation, purchase of God, Born of His Spirit, washed in His blood...

cygnusx1 · Jan 14, 2007

bump!

wmc1982 · Jan 14, 2007

I believe I was always saved. But I went through 10 years of severe problems with drugs and alcohol. Just now getting over all of that. Hope to be an addiction counselor/psychologist when I finish school.

God is great.

Iosias · Jan 14, 2007

I was baptised in the CofE and raised up in a Christian home hearing the gospel each week in a Charismatic "Calvinistic" Baptist Church. At university it made sense to me and I was converted. I was baptised as an adult (which I now renounce) and am a member of the CofE.

reformedfan · Jan 1, 2012

cool!!!!

lol, i remember this thread!!!

boldlion · Jan 1, 2012

I came out of the catholic church when a friend met me in the street and showed me from the bible how a person receives the Holy Spirit and speaks in tongues. A man placed hands on me and prayed with me and I too received the Holy Spirit, just like they did on the day of Pentecost, because I spoke in tongues !! I now realise that speaking in tongues is the sign when one receives the Holy Spirit.

I was then later baptised in water in full immersion and now realise that my infant baptism was ineffectual. What I had done was completed the command by Peter in Acts 2:38 !

reformedfan · Jan 1, 2012

ummmmm....

y'ever read hebrews 1:1?

heymikey80 · Jan 2, 2012

High school, influenced by existentialism, parents divorcing, no reason to live.

Last year, Christian high school, kids inviting me to stuff, teachers tackling real questions of the heart, not artificial, answers I could use. Many lifetimes of answers, people who lived those answers, people who conflicted, but didn't separate, people who loved but didn't overstep or overwhelm.

Scared, worried this would be swept out from under me, chasing down references, dusty old books, dusty old seminaries, reading deeply, weeping deeply, I've found my Rock. It's here. It's thousands of years old. It's solid.

JustAsIam77 · Jan 2, 2012

Raised in a devout Christian household, legalist all the way, found out about grace at a Christian youth group when I was 15 or 16, I don't remember exactly.

Is it possible for you to share your testimony ....?

Jacob the twister.....

Active Member

Antman_05

Guest

Reformed Baptist with a Quaker heritage

avid reader

Kingdom Citizen, Spiritual Nomad

Senior Veteran

Jacob the twister.....

mannysee

Guest

Veteran

Jacob the twister.....

Aka "Will" :)

Senior Contributor

Senior Veteran

Newbie

Senior Veteran

Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum viditur

Veritas Liberabit Vos

Similar threads