• Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.

  • CF has always been a site that welcomes people from different backgrounds and beliefs to participate in discussion and even debate. That is the nature of its ministry. In view of recent events emotions are running very high. We need to remind people of some basic principles in debating on this site. We need to be civil when we express differences in opinion. No personal attacks. Avoid you, your statements. Don't characterize an entire political party with comparisons to Fascism or Communism or other extreme movements that committed atrocities. CF is not the place for broad brush or blanket statements about groups and political parties. Put the broad brushes and blankets away when you come to CF, better yet, put them in the incinerator. Debate had no place for them. We need to remember that people that commit acts of violence represent themselves or a small extreme faction.

..and testify that the Lord is my personal friend and Savior

L

LivingMartyr

Guest
I was born into a Christian family and came to the Lord at a very young age. But To be completely honest, I think I should have waited until I was a little older before accepting the Lord as my savior. Just because I didn’t understand what being a Christian was really about. Don’t get me wrong, I understood who God was, and I knew all of the different children’s Bible stories. But Something I didn’t understand was that having a personal relationship with God, was one of the most important things I could ever possibly have. And for a long time I lacked some key elements for any degree of friendship between God and I.

The first was openness to God. One thing that I’ve always had a problem with was stress and worrying over the smallest of things. I would never go to God for guidance and strength, I would always charge blindly into the problems with little clue about how I was going to go about fixing them.

The second was complete interest in God. I would occasionally read the Bible, but I would seldom get anything out of it. I know now that in order to grow closer to Christ, you have to immerse yourself in his word, and actually understand what you read. Someone once said “…If Christ is not the focus of our lives, then our relationship with God is either nonexistent or very shallow…”

Lastly, the third was respect for God. Without respect, you can’t have a strong relationship with anyone, and I wasn’t showing God respect with how I was acting and behaving outside of Church. I now understand and believe that proper respect for anyone or anything must begin with God and His Word. If I do not respect my God, who is the ultimate power in the universe, than how can I show respect to any other lower authority?

For a long time, I was what we know to be a weekend Christian; I would go to Church every Sunday, Pray, and worship God; claiming to walk under the banner of Christ, but however my faith was empty. At that time, if you had asked me why I attended Church, I’d probably tell you because it felt like the right place to be on a Sunday morning, or that if my parents went, why shouldn’t I go?

I think it was around the same time that I started coming to the Emmanuel Baptist, that on a Wednesday Youth Bible Study, something “Clicked” mentally and I begun to realize that what I was doing was taking me down a dead end road. I began asking my Christian friends, both at school and at youth, about Faith, God and how a Backslider could come back to Christ. I started praying a lot more and reading the Bible, and I started to realize that the God who made the heavens and the earth, had no trouble being seen and heard by those who honestly wanted to know him. The personal relationship that I didn’t have for the longest time began to form in me, and I’ll never forget how comforted and calm I felt when ever I’d open my heart to God and release the burdens I carried inside. A lot of the stress, anger and bitterness I had towards people and life began to be replaced with hope and happiness. I felt healthier, mentally and most importantly spiritually; it’s hard to explain unless you’ve experienced it, but I felt completely changed.

One thing that I’ll always regret not doing was going to my parents for help and advice when it came to God and Faith. I left them in the dark for along time, and I shouldn’t have. I don’t know if it was foolish pride, or the fact that I was scared that I had let them down, but I kept my troubles boxed up inside. I realize now that no matter how disappointed they are about the choices I’ve made, they’ll never stop loving me, and they’ll always be there for me.

Someone once said to me that “…You can’t tell someone about God and expect then to listen. You have to show them God. You have to live for Him and let then see…”. I don’t consider myself a believer today because of someone who taught me the gospels or of the things I’ve heard in the different Churches that I’ve been to; although those things did give me a foundation to start rebuilding on. But the most important reasons why I can stand in front of you today, and testify that the Lord is my personal friend and Savior, are because I saw the life I could live in Christ, I saw the amazing ways God could work through me, and I saw the hope and love that only comes with a saved life.

Living Martyr - Testimony for Baptism, 2006