Signed in as:
filler@godaddy.com
My Story
MY STORY
When I was a child my parents would read me Bible stories and teach me about Jesus, but I did not live in a perfect Christian home by any means. When I was around 7 or 8 my father began to struggle with alcohol and he turned out to have a serious addiction to alcohol. When I got into Middle school I found a youth group at a church that me and a friend started going to. I didn't go because I was seeking after God or anything, I was going just so I could get away from stuff going on at home, to have fun and meet girls. Every time we had a youth group the youth pastor would sit us down and preach at us for about 15 to 20 minutes. Everyone, including myself, usually had the attitude of, hurry up with your speech so we can get on to having fun. I was hardly interested in what he had to say. I had been going consistently for a couple of years and then one day out of the blue when the youth pastor was preaching to us it was like all of a sudden God opened the eyes of my heart and like God was speaking to me through what the youth pastor was saying. I don't even remember specifically what he was saying but I remember coming into a deep understanding that Jesus died for me and that I was completely forgiven of everything that I have ever done wrong and that God loved me in a way that was overwhelming and that I did absolutely nothing to deserve or earn it. The result of this was I began to draw close to God and I could feel and sense Him drawing close to me. There is a scripture that talks about this as well (James 4:8) “Draw near to God, and He will draw near to you”. I began to have a deep intimate real relationship with God even though I could not physically see Him. I experienced peace like I had never known, love that I had never experienced and it permeated through me for other people. I remember thinking as a middle school kid that I would gladly give my life for someone that didn't know Jesus just so they would have the chance to know Him like I did. He was more real to me than anything. Even though I had this powerful life changing encounter with God I never really got into the Bible, so I didn't really learn how to walk spiritually according to God's word. I didn't realize at the time how important the Bible was. The Bible says in (Romans 12:2) “be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind”. Everyone has a philosophy on this life and beliefs that they hold as truth, but most of them are lies and far from truth which is why the Bible says how important it is to renew our minds according to God's Truth. Jesus said I am the way the Truth and the life, no one comes to the Father except through Me. Jesus also said continue in My word, then you will know the Truth and the Truth will set you free. So because of my ignorance I neglected the important step of renewing my mind with God's Truth and I began to struggle with lust for girls and sexual temptation. I sincerely did not want to be tempted by such things because something was different in me. I deeply desired to be pure before God and fought and struggled with will power and failed over and over. I didn't know how to fight these temptations and didn't understand why I was having such a struggle after having such an amazing experience with God. I began to feel guilty and ashamed before God and felt like I was growing distant from Him. When I was about 16 I met a girl that I became good friends with. I really had a heart to lead her to Jesus, being that she wasn't a Christian. I ended up eventually developing strong feelings for her and made the decision that I wanted to be with her even though I knew that it wasn't God's will for me, I just gave into my temptations because I was tired of fighting and didn't know what else to do and my relationship with God just took a back seat. We were together for a couple years and moved in together for about a year after graduating high school. After about a year of living together and getting engaged she broke up with me. I was devastated and heartbroken because I gave her my whole heart. We got back together almost a year later which lasted another year then she left me again. I then started going out with friends to bars and drinking, going to strip clubs and being promiscuous. But the whole time I was living like this I was miserable and just wanted to be back to that place of overwhelming peace, love and joy that I had experienced with God when I had that first encounter with Him but I didn't know how to get there. I would sometimes come back to my apartment from going out with friends and just cry out to God. Around a year of my recent break up I ended up meeting my wife at a bar. We started getting serious and ended up moving in together. I still had a deep hunger to find my way back to God. There was a good friend of my family that had been going to a Bible study with an older lady, so I thought to myself, maybe doing a Bible study would be a good place to start. So I asked if I could start going to this Bible study and me and my girlfriend who is now my wife started going to this Bible study. I began to devour God's word and God began to move in my life again. I began to learn a lot spiritually that I had never learned before. Even though I was growing significantly I still didn't seem to be back at that place of perfect peace, love, and joy like I had experienced with my first encounter with God. My girlfriend and I got married by the lady that was doing Bible study with us about a year after starting the Bible study in 2005. Then in 2011 there was a friend of the family that was dying of cancer and it was on my heart to talk to her about Jesus because she didn't believe in Jesus. So I was looking through some scriptures in the Bible to try and share with her and I came across two scriptures in the book of Hebrews that caused me to think that because of the decision that I had made to give into temptation and be with my first girlfriend putting my relationship with God in the backseat that I was cut off from God forever with no hope. I had come across some scriptures like these a few times before that caused me a little bit of doubt, and concern but I was able to brush it off and lay it aside, but for some reason this time was different. It was like this supernatural fear came over me and consumed me. For about a month and a half I was tormented by a deep dark spiritual fear, depression, and hopelessness.
My mind started being consumed with blasphemous terrible thoughts against God which made me feel even more guilty, ashamed and condemned. One night I was asleep on the couch and I heard a voice speak to me and say depart from you cursed into everlasting darkness. A few nights later I heard another voice in the same way when I was asleep call me son of perdition. I didn't even know what son of perdition meant at the time, I looked it up after I woke up and it is a reference to Judas, the one who betrayed Jesus. Basically it means destined for damnation. I would cry out to God and it felt like He wasn't there at all. I was not in a good place at all, I was being tormented night and day, I was unintentionally isolating myself from my family. I couldn't bear to go to work, my wife didn't understand what I was going through, I didn't understand what I was going through. I became hopeless and desperate. After suffering through this for about a month and a half I stumbled across an upcoming conference online called the Jesus Culture Awakening in Chicago, it was only four days prior to the conference. I didn't know anything about the conference or any of the people that would be speaking at it but I had an intense feeling that I had to go to it. It seemed like everything came against me to try to get me not to go. At the time I could not afford to go and my wife and I had young kids at the time. My wife didn't want me to go. The day before I left I had a few hundred dollars in my wallet for the conference and I ended up losing it at Walmart. I couldn't get time off work, but I didn't have a choice. I was not in a good place and I had to do something to try and get out of this debilitating state that I was in. I had no idea if God would meet me at this conference but I knew I had to do something and had a glimmer of hope that He might, so I went. When I got to the conference my wife called me enraged because our electricity had gotten shut off because we didn't have the money to pay the bill. I ended up getting our power back on but it was like everything was trying to keep me from going to the conference. I got there in Chicago and it was a huge conference in a big arena like where there would be a big concert. It was a three day conference and there were about eighteen thousand people there. The second night of the conference everyone had just got done praying corporately and there was a guy that was sitting a couple seats down from me. I had never met him before and didn't tell him anything about me or what I was going through. He came up to me after we had all got done praying and he said to me that God told him that God is crying out for me and that He wants to use me in revival. So I sat down and thought to myself, well if that was really God then maybe there is hope for me, maybe God has not cut me off from Him. A few minutes went by and a thought came through my mind that said that probably wasn't God, that was probably just the guy thinking that God told him to say that. Literally as soon as that thought finished in my mind the same guy came up to me and said God told me to tell you to not let the enemy tell you that that word was not from God. So I was encouraged by that and had more hope but I still had this heaviness on my heart and did not yet feel free. The same night after the conference was over I was walking through the parking lot to my car and saw a small group of people praying over each other and I saw these two girls laid out on the pavement like they were checked out in a trance in a state of pure joy. It was weird because I hadn't seen anything like that before, so I went over and was watching. As I was standing there a kid came up to me and asked if he could pray over me because God was showing him stuff about me. So I said sure. I didn't tell him anything about me or anything that I was going through. He then began praying and speaking over me. He said that God was showing him that there were these bars up all around me and that God was getting ready to give me freedom from this prison that I was in lately. He also said some other things that lined up with me as well that he couldn't have known. So I was encouraged by that but I still had that heaviness on me and did not yet feel free. The next day, the last day of the conference, during a break there was another guy that was praying over people and he prayed for me. He put his hands on me to pray and he took them off right away like he was surprised and he said God has something specific for you. So he went by himself quickly and prayed then came back and began praying and speaking over me. I also didn't tell him anything about me or what I was going through. The first thing that he said to me was God says that He has given you a clean slate. That is what I desperately needed to hear. At this point it wasn't like it was just people speaking these things to me, it was like God was literally speaking these things to me through people. Prior to me going through this dark time I would often spend intimate time with God while I was driving back and forth to work and I would often talk to God and sing praises to Him from my heart. The next thing the guy at the conference said to me was that when I sing to God that He quiets all of Heaven just to hear me sing. At this point I felt pure joy, peace, love, freedom and that heavy hopeless darkness that was on me for the previous month and a half just disappeared. I felt like I did again when I had my first encounter with God that I had been searching for for so many years. While this guy was praying this stuff over me there were hundreds of people in this lobby during the break and I felt some girl come out of not where and put her hand on my back and start praying for me. She pretty much started almost word for word describing all of the things that I had been going through over the previous month and a half. I believe God had sent her just as a confirmation that all of this was God. I left the conference that night filled with love, joy, and a peace that surpasses understanding, it was amazing. Not long after the conference the enemy began trying to work back into my mind with doubt and unbelief to steal the freedom that the Lord just brought me back into. I began to struggle with some of my beliefs about God that I had built up over the years and it seemed like God was trying to challenge some of those beliefs and reveal the Truth of who He is to me. I began to really seek God for the Truth and he led me to a book called Destined to Reign by Joseph Prince and God used it to really open up my understanding of the Bible and the new covenant and finished work of Jesus. I hardly ever read books at the time and I finished this book in two days. God was speaking to me throughout the whole book. I realized that I kept falling into a performance based mindset regarding my relationship with God and that would often steal my love, joy, peace, love for others and freedom. I realized when my focus was on myself and my inadequacies relating to God, I was miserable and I had no love, joy, peace, patience or freedom. I felt distant from God and couldn't hear His voice. When my focus was off of me and on Jesus and His grace the opposite happened I was filled with love, joy, peace, patience and freedom. I felt so close to God and I would hear His voice so clearly and His love flowed out of me for other people and it was all effortless. Light the world with love came out of this revelation that when you're focused on God's love for you and the finished work of the cross and not on your own works, then you become full of every good fruit that comes from God. Then a person can truly light the world with love through the supernatural power of God through the finished work of Jesus. Ephesians 3:17-19 “That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith and that you being rooted and grounded in love, may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the width and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, that you may be filled to all the fullness of God.”
COPYRIGHT LIGHT THE WORLD WITH LOVE 2024