My Testimony

From the time I was a young boy, I remember hearing Bible stories and learning about the life of Jesus.  I said all the prayers, sang all the songs, and memorized scripture.   My father was a minister of music, and my mother worked alongside.  I grew up surrounded by believers and had a basic knowledge of living a Christian life. 

I began to consider the possibility that I may be lost.  How could I?  I've been in church all my life.  I've been "involved" in various types of ministries since I was a child.  What will everyone else think?  With the exception of a few years during which I went through a slight rebellious phase that included excessive drinking and other forms of immoral behavior, I had pretty much lived a decent life.  Those days were long gone, but that night I realized there was a missing piece to the puzzle.  I asked God to take me to the place where I came to know Him and accepted Him as my Lord and Savior.  I struggled with this and I just couldn't pin point a time when I had done so.

Over the next few days I had searched every scripture I could that would reveal my situation.  When I got to Luke 15, I noticed that Jesus describes three different types of lost people in His parable of the lost sheep, the lost coin, and the lost son.  The son became lost out of his own selfish desires, the coin became lost through no fault of its own, but the sheep was lost because it wandered away.  This became very real to me.  I dwelled on this scenario for the next couple of days, and I soon came to understand that I was that wandering sheep!

On the evening of Friday, March 14, my wife invited her friend Stacie over to our house.  She shared her testimony about how the Lord dealt with her.  After realizing that my struggle was very similar to hers, we prayed together.  I accepted Jesus into my heart, at the age of thirty-one, to change me forever.  Since that day, the struggle with sin sometimes still exists, but it does not have control!  The only true satisfaction I have found in life is only in Jesus Christ.

"As you therefore have received Christ Jesus as Lord, so walk in Him, rooted and built up in Him and established in the faith, as you have been taught, abounding in it with thanksgiving."