Why is God faithful?

While involved in my pursuit of godliness I just wanted to share with other people why God's glory is so important in my life.

Wednesday, November 26, 2003

I thought that I would give everyone the priveledge of hearing my testimony. God has worked in my life in so many ways and I just wanted to share with as many people as possible the goodness and wonders that He has worked in my life.

I was lucky enough to be one of the individuals who had the chance to grow up in a loving Christian home. Unfortunately, stupidity won and I didn’t recognize this fact until recently. My father is and was a preacher, so that makes me a preacher’s kid (PK). Some times being a PK means a lot, for me it seems like it was. Whenever someone would ask me if I was a Christian or not I would answer him or her by saying, “Of course I am, I’m a PK.” So in effect I grew up thinking I was a Christian because I was a PK. I had prayed a prayer a couple of times during my childhood: once when I was five, thirteen, and even sixteen. I don’t know that those were the exact ages, but I did it more than once. The similarity of all these prayers was that I was expecting my life to completely change without any effort on my part, the laziness starts there. I grew up knowing that I was suppose to read my Bible every night, I knew that I wasn’t just suppose to go to church on Sunday, and I knew that being a Christian wasn’t easy; however, for some reason I thought I was the exception. So growing up, going through school, attending AWANA, my high school years, and a year or so after I graduated I continually struggled with sin and could never understand why I couldn’t get rid of this sin in my life. I look back upon my life and I can remember a real strong desire to not sin any more, I don’t recall my motives though. To this day I’m not really sure whether or not I was saved from my sins back then. I have struggled with this tidbit of information, but I have come to the conclusion that it really doesn’t matter, I am assured of my salvation now and that gives me a joy that I cannot express.

Now I’m out of high school I’m working about 65 hours a week and I’m doing absolutely nothing with my life. I drink whenever I get a chance, smoking wasn’t going to affect me, I date whomever I please, and I still go to church every Sunday (by the grace of God drugs stayed clear of my life). Somewhere along the way I get completely fed up with my actions and decided that I need to change my life. I still didn’t want to go to school for some stupid reason, again stupidity and laziness win. I told myself I would never join the military, but if I did I would join the Coast Guard (CG). I started researching the CG and found that it sounded really interesting I even found a job that I was always interested in and that would give me great training for a job when I decided to get out of the CG. So I signed my delayed enlistment papers and I was going to be going to CG boot camp in six months. My life continued on much the same as it had for the previous years and then my six months was up and I left for Cape May, NJ. Boot camp was a life changing experience but nothing spiritual happened there. After boot camp I went to Yorktown, VA amidst all of the battle fields and attended Fire Control Technician A-school and C-school. When I first arrived in VA one of the first things that I did was looked for a church, mainly because I could count the number of Sundays that I had missed throughout my life on one hand, with the exception of boot camp. So I went to this one church and attended Sunday school, it was really small, only three people in the college group and only two of them seemed interested in why they were there. I had fit in with them pretty well so I just kept going instead of looking around for other churches. Our Sunday school teacher was a lady by the name of Paulette (I didn’t agree with it then or now, but I just didn’t seem to care that much then). She ended up becoming a very memorable person in my life, she was kind of my mom away from home, which was pretty nice. We also didn’t have a mid-week Bible study and I was kind of used to one of those so I got everyone interested in that before too long. At first Paulette led it and then she got too busy to lead, so I took over. This is the first time I had ever taken on an opportunity like this and I had no idea where to start. Since God wasn’t really working in my life at all I had to start somewhere so I decided on Genesis 1:1 and tried to work my way through the rest of the Bible. Lets just say that for the first couple of months there wasn’t any fruit seen from the Bible study.

During this time I had also become increasingly interested in a certain young lady. I had been single for almost a year, which is completely abnormal for me. I had actually given up on women in the sense that they weren’t what God wanted for me at the time. It had also been a long time since I had been with another Christian woman so this seemed to be the right thing for me. So not really knowing what to do or how to lead a godly relationship I got into one and tried to lead it in that direction. If anything about the past couple of sentences has led you to believe that I did lead our relationship in a godly direction, I’m sorry, because I didn’t. It started out that way, we had read our Bible together and that’s it, we just read it and didn’t try to apply it to our lives or extract any practical information from it. So throughout the next five months we dated and I tricked myself into thinking that we were having a godly relationship when it was the furthest from being godly as it could have been. Unfortunately for me she figured this all out before I did and she broke it off, this didn’t go over too well with me because she was the one, I was convinced of that. So now I was a complete wreck and I didn’t have a clue what was going on with my life. I was completely lost and I was starting to figure out how lost I really was.

I had also set my sights on service in the church. Now I’m helping with the youth as well and feeling like I’m giving a lot back to them. They were also going through a video series on “I Kissed Dating Good-bye.” Since I was one of the leaders I thought that I should read the book, so I did. As I was reading this book I seemed to figure out what was wrong with my life, I don’t know how I got this from “I Kissed Dating Good-bye,” but I did. I found out that I wasn’t living my life for God and in this realization I had also figured out what I was doing by not living my life for God. I realized that I was living my life in sin and I also realized what my sin was doing to God. I also realized that I was the person responsible for putting Christ on the cross, I was the person he died for. These are all things that I knew my whole life, but I never really understood them and how they applied to my pursuit of holiness. So now I feel completely lifted from my torment. This wasn’t instantaneous but it was a time that I could really feel God tugging at my heart. I really don’t know when I was saved but this seems to me to be the time in my life that was really life changing and not just hypocrisy. I’ve really just made this realization recently within the past couple of weeks. Now looking back on this moment in my life this is when I started to see fruit in my life, this is when I started to pursue God in my own life, and this is when I started to actually feel like a Christian and not just a hypocrite.

I still struggle with sin in my life to this very day, some of these sins are the very sins that I struggled with back when I lived in VA. What’s different now is that I’m not trying to not sin any more, I’m not trying to conquer these sins on my own. One of my earliest struggles was how do I let God take control of my life, I can say it all I want but there has to be something in my life that changes in order for God to really take control of my life. The breakthrough that God helped me realize is that I need to be more godly, in order for God to take control of my life and be my author and finisher I have to be more godly. How do I become godlier: read his Word, meditate on it, understand it, apply it to my life, and memorize it. I also need to spend time with godly people, read books written by godly people, and help others to become godlier. I have found the closer I am to God the less I struggle with sin. When I focus on the sin the more I struggle with it, but when I focus on God the sin just seems to disappear. We still need to be conscious of sin in our lives, but also be conscious of how to get rid of it. One of the verses that has helped me to discover this is John 14:15 “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (NASB). We show God that we love him by keeping his commandments, but we keep his commandments by loving him.

Throughout the past three years since I was saved I have been reading and understanding things that I have known my whole life. I’ve also learned to learn from other people’s mistakes rather than learn them myself. I’ve found that this way is much more enjoyable and intelligent. I’ve learned to look toward God for guidance and not just my friends. I’ve learned to appreciate my parents for what they are godly people who desire nothing but the best for me. I’ve learned the importance of daily Bible study, prayer, and time with God. I’ve learned so much more and I’ve learned how much more I don’t yet know. I look forward now to the day that I will see God in His complete glory. That day I will be able to see how much of a sinner I was and therefore I will be able to worship God in the entirety that he deserves, and worship him for eternity, -oh what a joy that will be.