- Nov 27, 2018
- 13
- 14
- 29
- Country
- United States
- Faith
- Non-Denom
- Marital Status
- Single
WARNING: This is going to be VERY long but would appreciate the help.
I've been in the church my whole life. I grew up going to church every sunday with my family. We have all been believers our whole lives. When I was in middle school I started attending youth group at the vineyard community church. I went to countless youth retreats and really loved God and made a lot of good friends. Two friends in particular were Luke and Jonny. We hung out often and started a bible study. We shared our struggles and kept each other accountable (we failed many times). We learned a lot and grew together.
When I was 16 I had very bad acne that bothered me and brought a lot of stress. People and kids (even in the church) would make comments and make fun of me. This hurt me a lot and I was always insecure. It got so bad that I often didn't want to be around people. I was shy and my social skills suffered because of my insecurities. One day I remember standing in my bathroom angry at God asking him what's the point of my acne. I was mad that I had it because I felt like it was ruining my life. I remember sitting on my bed waiting to hear from God about it. I was very angry and upset because I knew that he could instantly take it away and I often prayed he would.
There I am sitting alone in my bedroom trying to hear from God. I remember hearing, "you should focus on me and not worry about what other people think about you". At first I felt like that was easier said than done but I waited and thought about it. He was completely right! If he loved me and would take care of me and he was who gave me my identity, why would I care at all what other people think of me? Some time soon after this, I remember listening to Phil Wickham. The album was Heaven & Earth and I fell in love with it. I had a thought, " if God is truly real, I need to wake up and do something about it." With my two experiences of hearing God and understanding he is the real deal, I started searching for Him and falling in love.
Every morning I loved reading my bible. I read chapter after chapter falling more and more in love. He was opening my eyes to the scriptures and slowly he was breaking down my walls and taking away my insecurities. Day by day I was becoming more confident in my faith and more confident in my identity. He was on my mind all day and reading the bible was the first and last thing I did every day. I spent my days constantly talking to God and spent my nights crying my heart out and worshiping him. I no longer cared about my acne, which was huge for me. I didn't care what people thought about it anymore. People's comments didn't harm me anymore because my value wasn't in clear skin. It was in my relationship with my creator who knew my heart.
This was my daily routine for months and months and I can honestly say God was my best friend. I was in love and I wondered if other people understood that you could have a relationship like this. I wasn't in fear or worry about anything, just completely trusting God for everything in my life. He knew what my needs were. I would pray for my friends and family often and started praying for the schools in my area almost daily. I wanted everyone to experience what I had. Then all the hurt in the world would be changed to love of God and love of others.
I remember hearing stories of kids in school having sex and abuse and my heart would break. They didn't realise there was more to life than just worldly things. I asked God to keep my humble because I didn't deserve his love, I just listened to him and he showed me truth.
When I first asked God about my acne, it was the worst I had ever seen. I had terrible acne scars too because I didn't know how to correctly care for my skin. I looked up a lot of things but couldn't control my urge to pop a pimple. As time went on and I got closer to God, I remember throwing together this concoction. Someonehow I knew it was going to work even though everyone would have told me I was crazy. as I got closer and closer to God my acne started going away. Eventually it was completely gone as well as my scars.
I remember being so happy, not just that my acne was gone, but that when I focused on God and didn't care about my acne it went away. Completely. That to me, was proof that God cared about the little things and he used what caused so much stress and anxiety to bring me to him. When I obeyed and listened, He took care of everything. It was like the cherry on top of my relationship with God milkshake. We even had a "song" that described my love for him and His love for me. It was Shining by Phil Wickham. Who knew you could worship so much to his music. I realized every song I listened to was a worship song to God. I saw God in everything.
Through this whole time I struggled with watching inappropriate contentography. I hated it and everytime I watched something I would go back to God, sometimes crying, and ask for forgiveness and for him to change me. Luke, Jonny and I would all share our struggles and we tried everything (I mean EVERYTHING) to quit including giving the other two people $50 if we failed. We all failed. Realizing it was nearly impossible, we just continued to fight it and give it to God.
One day I was on facebook talking to a friend that was a girl. I don't remember how it got to this point but we started to talk about something sexual. At this point I'm almost 17 so you can imagine my hormones going crazy. I knew it was wrong so I stopped and went into my room and asked God for forgiveness. I felt terrible and never wanted to do it again. Eventually we did and it became a normal thing. I would always feel terrible about it and ask for forgiveness.
I never told any of my friends in my small group which was the biggest mistake in my life. The devil got a foothold in my life and I was alone. I felt so ashamed and if I had confessed it, I believe that would have stopped it dead in it's tracks. This was around the time when Iphones were getting popular and I had just got my first Ipod touch. I remember asking my friends to pray for me because I knew it would be temping to use it for things like inappropriate content. I still ended up buying one and mainly used it for texting friend through the texting apps.
Eventually I downloaded an app called opinionated. It was an app where you could post a picture and get people's opinions on it. No nudity was allowed but it was fun to meet new people and make new friends. I remember there was an attractiveness catagory and so I started rating girls. That led to me having conversations with a lot of girls where I would compliment them and they would reply with very nice replies like "thank you that's so sweet!' It felt really good to make someone feel good. I made a lot of friendships with girls where I would just flirt with them 24/7 and they would flirt back and it made me feel so amazing. Eventually that led to me talking sexually with girls which was VERY addicting. I was homeschooled to so never experienced the real world honestly.
This whole time I still loved God but I spent less time with him. 1. Because I felt guilty and 2. Because this was so physically satisfying that I was slowly replacing God with my feelings. I remeber eventually it led to me sending and recieving nude pictures with a lot of girls. The girl I had originally talking to sexually on facebook, we ended up getting physical. I remember thinking that as long as I don't go too far I'll be ok. THIS IS A LIE!! ANY SEXUAL SIN IS TOO FAR! I continued to talk to girls online sending and recieving pictures and I was completely addicted.
I started to get depressed without God yet I was addicted and couldn't stop. I didn't share much of what I was going through with anyone even though I was in a small group with a lot of strong christians. I hid what I was doing not knowing that they would just love on me and help me instead of judging me. I started meeting up with girls and doing sexual activities and again thought " as long as I don't have sex I'm ok". At first I would always repent of my sins and ask God to help me. But I got so addicted I didn't care anymore and just wanted to feel good. I shut God out and didn't feel him anymore. I was so depressed 24/7 and my friends could tell. I would try not to sin but I was only happy when I was satisfying my sexual desires. I remember a friend at church told me I looked happier and deep down I knew it was because I had been giving into sexual temptation. I would repent sometimes but other times I would be stuck in a rut, sinning intentionally and ignoring the holy spirits warnings.
I got so depressed I lost all desire to live. I didn't know what I believed anymore and I felt completely lost. I talked to my parents about my depression but didn't tell them what was causing it. I talked to my parents about all my doubts but they never knew the source. I continued giving into my desires and still struggled with inappropriate content addiction. But I was also searching for God and wondering why he abandoned me. I was so angry at God but then I would think to myself " God didn't leave me, I left him." It got to the point where I didn't even know what reality was. I thought that maybe my whole life was a big dream and that nothing was real. By this time I was 19. I was always in my head 24/7 fighting with my thoughts. Months and months would pass with no progress. I eventually told myself if I didn't stop thinking, I would start getting seriously sick.
I ended up forcing myself to stop thinking and stop searching for God because all that did was make things worse. At this point I was working at chirck fil a and that was good for me. I started coming out of my depression slowly yet I still didn't have much of a sense of worth. A friend introduced me to Ravi Zacharias who is a Christian Apologist. He helped me start believing in God again and eventually my faith was back but I was still in sin and couldn't seem to control it. Time went by and I was increasing if faith but still didn't feel close to God. I never felt the same as I did when I was 16. I talked to a girl for 8 months but I had too many problems so that ended. A year later I started dating a girl that would often come into church fil a. Her cousin worked with me so I asked if she was a christian and she was so I got her number and we started talking. We soon started dating because I thought I was ready.
I told her I wanted our relationship to be based on God and she agreed so we started to date. A week or two later we had our first kiss. We instantly became very physical and did everything under the sun except intercourse. about 8 months into the relationship we had sex for the first time. We both felt really bad about it and we broke up because we knew it wasn't right. A week later we got back together and said we would do things differently. Obviously nothing changed so we were stuck in a vicious cycle having sex very often. I broke up with her 4 times and on the last time it was final. I knew we weren't bringing each other closer to God and so it would never worked out. Also I never felt as strong of conviction for sexual sin as when I was younger, I feared I just got numb or pushed the Holy Spirit out. I hope I didn’t.
I was single and I knew God wanted to work on me. I had never stopped going to church but I rarely spent time with God outside of sunday. 8 months later my world is shaken. I start reading verses in Hebrews that seem to say if you are a believer and continue to live in willful sin, there no longer remains a sacrifice. That night so much fear crept into my mind and I was positive I was going to hell. I read many verses that seemed to go along with that idea and so fear and anxiety was constantly with me all day. I always thought that if I came back to God eventually that I would be safe. 2 weeks straight of complete fear that I was going to hell. I spoke with my pastor, both my old youth leaders, my parents and my two sisters and told them everything. They were all praying for me but nothing they said comforted me.
I had just gotten off the phone with my sister. I had told her what was going on with me for the past 7 years and how I felt completely doomed. She told me she has felt like she lost salvation although she had different struggles and that it was the lies of the devil. I couldn't feel it but I hoped it was true. After I got off the phone I went upstairs to take a shower. I felt a heavy weight and pressure in my chest and just anxiety and feeling like there was no hope for me at all. I get in the bathroom and turn on worship music not expecting to feel anything or have any breakthrough, I just didn't know what else to do. As I was listening to the music i began to sing along. I started to feel the words in my heart and eventually started to worship. At first it didn't feel powerfull but it grew and I just started remembering how much God loved me. Immediately a verse came to me about when Peter saw Jesus walking on water and he told Jesus that if he were the lord to call him out onto the water.
Jesus called him so he began to walk to Him. Peter got scared from the waves and started sinking, he cried out for Jesus to save him and he immediately extended his hand and grabbed him. Jesus says, O you of little faith, why did you doubt? then they get back into the boat and the storm calms. After I remembered this story I realized I didn't feel the weight or preassure in my chest at all anymore or the anxiety and I began to just worship and I felt like god was telling me that even though I was close to him and turned away into sin, that he still loved me. The desciples were literally with jesus and he didn't get onto them for having doubts but forgave them. Even later peter denied jesus 3 times. God was showing me that if they had room for doubt and rejecting Jesus even though they were with him, that my doubt and rejection wasn't too much for him to handle. He also spoke to me about me not being a pharisee which I worried I was.
The pharisees were literally with Jesus and saw his miracles and knew he was doing them by the power of God and still rejected him and told lies about him. He showed me that their hearts were completely hardened and even though I had turned to my sin and doubtd because of that, I never fully hardened my heart like the pharisees did and it's to God who deserves all the glory!!!! He could have let me go into my sin and leave me there but in my distress I sought him even though I didn't feel hope or even feel like doing it, he met me there and gave me hope again.
I told my family all that happened and they were so happy. I asked them to continue to pray for me Because I knew doubts would try to settle back in. Just like I thought a few hours later the doubts were back and I felt completely doomed. I thought that maybe It wasn't God speaking to me. I once again woke up shaking with fear and anxiety. Later that evening I called my sister and we talked for awhile. She assured me that it was oppression. After that I started praying and worhsiping again and immediately all fear and anxiety were gone and I continued to worship and thank God over and over and over again. The next morning I woke up without any fear or anxiety. I read the Bible and felt like God was speaking to me and loved me and that I wasn't doomed. I talking to God all day and thanked him over and over.
That was 3 days ago and since then doubts are back but the anxiety and fear aren’t. A little fear at moments. and all I can do is worship God and seek him even when I'm not sure if it's too late for me. God please help me, have mercy on me God, a sinner.
Hopefully someone here has a similar story and has overcome. Most people I read about became Christians way younger so not sure if it was saving faith. Mine was at the beginning.
I've been in the church my whole life. I grew up going to church every sunday with my family. We have all been believers our whole lives. When I was in middle school I started attending youth group at the vineyard community church. I went to countless youth retreats and really loved God and made a lot of good friends. Two friends in particular were Luke and Jonny. We hung out often and started a bible study. We shared our struggles and kept each other accountable (we failed many times). We learned a lot and grew together.
When I was 16 I had very bad acne that bothered me and brought a lot of stress. People and kids (even in the church) would make comments and make fun of me. This hurt me a lot and I was always insecure. It got so bad that I often didn't want to be around people. I was shy and my social skills suffered because of my insecurities. One day I remember standing in my bathroom angry at God asking him what's the point of my acne. I was mad that I had it because I felt like it was ruining my life. I remember sitting on my bed waiting to hear from God about it. I was very angry and upset because I knew that he could instantly take it away and I often prayed he would.
There I am sitting alone in my bedroom trying to hear from God. I remember hearing, "you should focus on me and not worry about what other people think about you". At first I felt like that was easier said than done but I waited and thought about it. He was completely right! If he loved me and would take care of me and he was who gave me my identity, why would I care at all what other people think of me? Some time soon after this, I remember listening to Phil Wickham. The album was Heaven & Earth and I fell in love with it. I had a thought, " if God is truly real, I need to wake up and do something about it." With my two experiences of hearing God and understanding he is the real deal, I started searching for Him and falling in love.
Every morning I loved reading my bible. I read chapter after chapter falling more and more in love. He was opening my eyes to the scriptures and slowly he was breaking down my walls and taking away my insecurities. Day by day I was becoming more confident in my faith and more confident in my identity. He was on my mind all day and reading the bible was the first and last thing I did every day. I spent my days constantly talking to God and spent my nights crying my heart out and worshiping him. I no longer cared about my acne, which was huge for me. I didn't care what people thought about it anymore. People's comments didn't harm me anymore because my value wasn't in clear skin. It was in my relationship with my creator who knew my heart.
This was my daily routine for months and months and I can honestly say God was my best friend. I was in love and I wondered if other people understood that you could have a relationship like this. I wasn't in fear or worry about anything, just completely trusting God for everything in my life. He knew what my needs were. I would pray for my friends and family often and started praying for the schools in my area almost daily. I wanted everyone to experience what I had. Then all the hurt in the world would be changed to love of God and love of others.
I remember hearing stories of kids in school having sex and abuse and my heart would break. They didn't realise there was more to life than just worldly things. I asked God to keep my humble because I didn't deserve his love, I just listened to him and he showed me truth.
When I first asked God about my acne, it was the worst I had ever seen. I had terrible acne scars too because I didn't know how to correctly care for my skin. I looked up a lot of things but couldn't control my urge to pop a pimple. As time went on and I got closer to God, I remember throwing together this concoction. Someonehow I knew it was going to work even though everyone would have told me I was crazy. as I got closer and closer to God my acne started going away. Eventually it was completely gone as well as my scars.
I remember being so happy, not just that my acne was gone, but that when I focused on God and didn't care about my acne it went away. Completely. That to me, was proof that God cared about the little things and he used what caused so much stress and anxiety to bring me to him. When I obeyed and listened, He took care of everything. It was like the cherry on top of my relationship with God milkshake. We even had a "song" that described my love for him and His love for me. It was Shining by Phil Wickham. Who knew you could worship so much to his music. I realized every song I listened to was a worship song to God. I saw God in everything.
Through this whole time I struggled with watching inappropriate contentography. I hated it and everytime I watched something I would go back to God, sometimes crying, and ask for forgiveness and for him to change me. Luke, Jonny and I would all share our struggles and we tried everything (I mean EVERYTHING) to quit including giving the other two people $50 if we failed. We all failed. Realizing it was nearly impossible, we just continued to fight it and give it to God.
One day I was on facebook talking to a friend that was a girl. I don't remember how it got to this point but we started to talk about something sexual. At this point I'm almost 17 so you can imagine my hormones going crazy. I knew it was wrong so I stopped and went into my room and asked God for forgiveness. I felt terrible and never wanted to do it again. Eventually we did and it became a normal thing. I would always feel terrible about it and ask for forgiveness.
I never told any of my friends in my small group which was the biggest mistake in my life. The devil got a foothold in my life and I was alone. I felt so ashamed and if I had confessed it, I believe that would have stopped it dead in it's tracks. This was around the time when Iphones were getting popular and I had just got my first Ipod touch. I remember asking my friends to pray for me because I knew it would be temping to use it for things like inappropriate content. I still ended up buying one and mainly used it for texting friend through the texting apps.
Eventually I downloaded an app called opinionated. It was an app where you could post a picture and get people's opinions on it. No nudity was allowed but it was fun to meet new people and make new friends. I remember there was an attractiveness catagory and so I started rating girls. That led to me having conversations with a lot of girls where I would compliment them and they would reply with very nice replies like "thank you that's so sweet!' It felt really good to make someone feel good. I made a lot of friendships with girls where I would just flirt with them 24/7 and they would flirt back and it made me feel so amazing. Eventually that led to me talking sexually with girls which was VERY addicting. I was homeschooled to so never experienced the real world honestly.
This whole time I still loved God but I spent less time with him. 1. Because I felt guilty and 2. Because this was so physically satisfying that I was slowly replacing God with my feelings. I remeber eventually it led to me sending and recieving nude pictures with a lot of girls. The girl I had originally talking to sexually on facebook, we ended up getting physical. I remember thinking that as long as I don't go too far I'll be ok. THIS IS A LIE!! ANY SEXUAL SIN IS TOO FAR! I continued to talk to girls online sending and recieving pictures and I was completely addicted.
I started to get depressed without God yet I was addicted and couldn't stop. I didn't share much of what I was going through with anyone even though I was in a small group with a lot of strong christians. I hid what I was doing not knowing that they would just love on me and help me instead of judging me. I started meeting up with girls and doing sexual activities and again thought " as long as I don't have sex I'm ok". At first I would always repent of my sins and ask God to help me. But I got so addicted I didn't care anymore and just wanted to feel good. I shut God out and didn't feel him anymore. I was so depressed 24/7 and my friends could tell. I would try not to sin but I was only happy when I was satisfying my sexual desires. I remember a friend at church told me I looked happier and deep down I knew it was because I had been giving into sexual temptation. I would repent sometimes but other times I would be stuck in a rut, sinning intentionally and ignoring the holy spirits warnings.
I got so depressed I lost all desire to live. I didn't know what I believed anymore and I felt completely lost. I talked to my parents about my depression but didn't tell them what was causing it. I talked to my parents about all my doubts but they never knew the source. I continued giving into my desires and still struggled with inappropriate content addiction. But I was also searching for God and wondering why he abandoned me. I was so angry at God but then I would think to myself " God didn't leave me, I left him." It got to the point where I didn't even know what reality was. I thought that maybe my whole life was a big dream and that nothing was real. By this time I was 19. I was always in my head 24/7 fighting with my thoughts. Months and months would pass with no progress. I eventually told myself if I didn't stop thinking, I would start getting seriously sick.
I ended up forcing myself to stop thinking and stop searching for God because all that did was make things worse. At this point I was working at chirck fil a and that was good for me. I started coming out of my depression slowly yet I still didn't have much of a sense of worth. A friend introduced me to Ravi Zacharias who is a Christian Apologist. He helped me start believing in God again and eventually my faith was back but I was still in sin and couldn't seem to control it. Time went by and I was increasing if faith but still didn't feel close to God. I never felt the same as I did when I was 16. I talked to a girl for 8 months but I had too many problems so that ended. A year later I started dating a girl that would often come into church fil a. Her cousin worked with me so I asked if she was a christian and she was so I got her number and we started talking. We soon started dating because I thought I was ready.
I told her I wanted our relationship to be based on God and she agreed so we started to date. A week or two later we had our first kiss. We instantly became very physical and did everything under the sun except intercourse. about 8 months into the relationship we had sex for the first time. We both felt really bad about it and we broke up because we knew it wasn't right. A week later we got back together and said we would do things differently. Obviously nothing changed so we were stuck in a vicious cycle having sex very often. I broke up with her 4 times and on the last time it was final. I knew we weren't bringing each other closer to God and so it would never worked out. Also I never felt as strong of conviction for sexual sin as when I was younger, I feared I just got numb or pushed the Holy Spirit out. I hope I didn’t.
I was single and I knew God wanted to work on me. I had never stopped going to church but I rarely spent time with God outside of sunday. 8 months later my world is shaken. I start reading verses in Hebrews that seem to say if you are a believer and continue to live in willful sin, there no longer remains a sacrifice. That night so much fear crept into my mind and I was positive I was going to hell. I read many verses that seemed to go along with that idea and so fear and anxiety was constantly with me all day. I always thought that if I came back to God eventually that I would be safe. 2 weeks straight of complete fear that I was going to hell. I spoke with my pastor, both my old youth leaders, my parents and my two sisters and told them everything. They were all praying for me but nothing they said comforted me.
I had just gotten off the phone with my sister. I had told her what was going on with me for the past 7 years and how I felt completely doomed. She told me she has felt like she lost salvation although she had different struggles and that it was the lies of the devil. I couldn't feel it but I hoped it was true. After I got off the phone I went upstairs to take a shower. I felt a heavy weight and pressure in my chest and just anxiety and feeling like there was no hope for me at all. I get in the bathroom and turn on worship music not expecting to feel anything or have any breakthrough, I just didn't know what else to do. As I was listening to the music i began to sing along. I started to feel the words in my heart and eventually started to worship. At first it didn't feel powerfull but it grew and I just started remembering how much God loved me. Immediately a verse came to me about when Peter saw Jesus walking on water and he told Jesus that if he were the lord to call him out onto the water.
Jesus called him so he began to walk to Him. Peter got scared from the waves and started sinking, he cried out for Jesus to save him and he immediately extended his hand and grabbed him. Jesus says, O you of little faith, why did you doubt? then they get back into the boat and the storm calms. After I remembered this story I realized I didn't feel the weight or preassure in my chest at all anymore or the anxiety and I began to just worship and I felt like god was telling me that even though I was close to him and turned away into sin, that he still loved me. The desciples were literally with jesus and he didn't get onto them for having doubts but forgave them. Even later peter denied jesus 3 times. God was showing me that if they had room for doubt and rejecting Jesus even though they were with him, that my doubt and rejection wasn't too much for him to handle. He also spoke to me about me not being a pharisee which I worried I was.
The pharisees were literally with Jesus and saw his miracles and knew he was doing them by the power of God and still rejected him and told lies about him. He showed me that their hearts were completely hardened and even though I had turned to my sin and doubtd because of that, I never fully hardened my heart like the pharisees did and it's to God who deserves all the glory!!!! He could have let me go into my sin and leave me there but in my distress I sought him even though I didn't feel hope or even feel like doing it, he met me there and gave me hope again.
I told my family all that happened and they were so happy. I asked them to continue to pray for me Because I knew doubts would try to settle back in. Just like I thought a few hours later the doubts were back and I felt completely doomed. I thought that maybe It wasn't God speaking to me. I once again woke up shaking with fear and anxiety. Later that evening I called my sister and we talked for awhile. She assured me that it was oppression. After that I started praying and worhsiping again and immediately all fear and anxiety were gone and I continued to worship and thank God over and over and over again. The next morning I woke up without any fear or anxiety. I read the Bible and felt like God was speaking to me and loved me and that I wasn't doomed. I talking to God all day and thanked him over and over.
That was 3 days ago and since then doubts are back but the anxiety and fear aren’t. A little fear at moments. and all I can do is worship God and seek him even when I'm not sure if it's too late for me. God please help me, have mercy on me God, a sinner.
Hopefully someone here has a similar story and has overcome. Most people I read about became Christians way younger so not sure if it was saving faith. Mine was at the beginning.
