Do you ever wonder how your life would have been if you had known God before you did?
How did you come to Christ? I figure it was because you had the seed planted and then it grew. So an inception happened, but when you were a certain age it made sense to you and you believed. God can't make us believe for ourselves, we have to believe ourselves. What if God had been trying to make you believe but you kept making sinful decisions? What if you were going to meet your wife but in others, maybe better, circumstances?
We tend to think that just because something happened a certain way, then it was God's way, instead of realizing He's been calling us since we were born.
Also, what talent is a sin?
I can give a brief overview of my life, sure. I grew up as a kid semi believing in God, I was raised in a Catholic family but I never really completely shared my mother's faith. Nor did my sister. Afaik she's still agnostic. Anyway, my sister and I left Sunday school at a very young age (I think we were both around 10 when we left). I wanted to leave Sunday school so that I could spend more time playing video games (Not the greatest thing to do but God has always placed into my heart the love/talent of video games.) and my sister left because she didn't see the point in it as she didn't believe at all. Church was long and boring to us kids with no real point to it at all.
Anyway, after I left Sunday school I still occasionally prayed to God despite not really completely believing in God. Especially when my dog died when I was 16 (I had him literally my whole life. My mom got him when I was a few months old) and yes, I would ask God to bring on messages to my dead dog. Probably not the best thing to do and my dog probably never got any of my messages, lol. I completely stopped believing in God at the age of around 20 because of comedian George Carlin and several of his Atheistic points about the existence of God. I was an atheist for about seven years. During those seven years I did many, many, bad things much of which I will not confess here but God knows each and every horrible thing that I did.
Eventually over the course of time as my soul became more and more corrupted with sin I came to Christ in November of 2013 at the age of 27 mostly because I couldn't stand living in sin anymore. Exactly why I converted from Atheism (Which I was completely content with and thought was the "right" move) to Christianity remains a mystery to me to this day. I just say that I didn't choose God but God chose me. But what I do remember about my conversion was that I started to become more and more interested in the afterlife which as an Athiest I mostly rejected. But over the course of time reading several articles on the various opinions of the afterlife I came to a few articles on Christianity. One was an apparent "revelation" from a woman who apparently prayed to Jesus so much that Jesus gained favor with her and took her to hell and showed her what it was like. Apparently she saw a 80 year old woman who was rich during her life and received many pleasures in her life but had now been in hell for over 100 years. She asked Christ when her punishment would be over and he apparently said "never." Idk... it was just a weird website. Oh and all the people there were skeletons *eyeroll*. The bible says that people in hell have actual physical bodies so ofc this particular woman was full of it. Oh, apparently at the end of the vision Christ told her to write a book about it.
But I believed it at the time and it obviously scared the pants off of me (But, honestly this woman probably just wanted to sell copies of her book. Had Christ really told her to write a book I highly doubt she'd charge almost $40 for it and it'd be available for free to get the message out) so that's how Christ got implanted into my brain.
My mom eventually took me to her Catholic Priest and I asked him various questions about God and Christ and he told me some REALLY bad stuff to believe in. Like, how to be saved we don't need to accept Christ all we have to do is ask Christ for forgiveness and he will forgive us because he is a "loving God" (Not true at all had this "priest" picked up a bible in his life he would have seen that this wasn't the case),. That our sins basically don't matter because God will forgive us after we die anyway... just stuff like that. Anyway what the priest said satisfied me for about a week. Until I became more and more uneasy. I found myself googling Christianity again, found a prayer on how to accept Christ, Weighed my options and decided to go "all in" I repented to Christ like you wouldn't believe and I talked to him for what seemed like an eternity although it probably was 3-4 hours. I told him everything. Got on my hands and knees told him I accepted him and begged him to please forgive me and save me and to help me leave my old life of sin behind. Ever since then I've seen multiple evidences of the Holy Spirit being within me up to and including actually witnessing myself receive the Holy Spirit the very night I converted. Over the years I've grown to completely stop doing various sins like Masturbation and inappropriate contentography (I used to be mega addicted to them but I've been completely clean for about a year now) belief in the deity of Christ and belief in the Trinity (As some of you might remember when I first came to CF up until about 2 years ago I didn't believe in either of these things. I literally just woke up one day believing), A complete and total transformation of my life no longer do I commit many of the sins that I commited as an atheist or throughout my life. Just lots of good stuff. There has been MANY fruits of the spirit in the last six years I've been a Christian.
I always felt like God promised me that day to leave my life of sin and he's kept most of that promise. Although I still play video games, spend lots of money on computers, and enjoy building computers ..etc and I believe that God's plan must evolve around video games and computers because those literally, are the only talents that he's given me during my life. Plus, if he does enjoy watching me practicing my gifts well... my gifts have ALWAYS been video games and computers since I was less than a year old. My gift in computers wasn't discovered until I was about six years old because computers hadn't come out yet but yeah, very young age.
Oh yeah, I've also noticed over the course of the last six years that I don't spend 18+ (sometimes 48+ during my youth) hours a day playing video games and on computers anymore. I spend at max 6 hours a day playing video games now. So God has reduced my gaming time. So if playing the video games that I play are a sin than, why hasn't God removed them from my life like he removed literally everything else? It's that or sometimes his plans include sin.
But yeah, I met my wife because of sin. I didn't really explain before because I was embarrassed but I can explain. There was a time when both my wife and I thought we were asexual so we met each other on a message board called AVEN which is a message board that promotes virtually everything from homosexual equality, to transgender equality, to cisgendered equality, to satanism... etc. But the main thing they promoted was asexuality. Which of course, is against what God originally designed humans to be which makes it obviously, a sin. But if it wasn't for that website my wife and I wouldn't have known that we existed because she played completely different games than I did, lived in Massachusetts and
What I as a fresh Christian was even doing on a website like that, idk. But I'm glad I did because I met many friends there, was able to preach the gospel there before I got perm banned for my Christian beliefs (Despite them promoting equality for literally everything else), and I met my soul mate there. I will always thank that website because if it wasn't for it, I wouldn't have met some friends or met my soul mate there. So God used sin for good in that case in my life.
Oops that wasn't in any way, shape, or form brief
. Now I'm late and the wife has been calling me for almost 20 minutes now. Lol See you later.
