My Testimony,
As a child I was brought to church with my Grandma and sent to church by my Momma which I do not regret one bit. When I was a youngin (that’s what Grandma called us) I was happy to go to church just to be with kids my own age and play. I got saved probably more times than I can remember! It was a good experience but when I reached my teenage years, you know the ones, I knew everything and didn’t really need churching any more. In fact, I had grown to despise the church in all my wisdom and I hate to say this but, I did not love God. I had no doubts that God was God, I mean, I knew He was real and that the Bible was for our instruction but that’s about as far as I wanted to go and I left the church, walked away from God and decided that if God had an issue or wanted to find me then He knew where to look!
I got married at the ripe old age of 16. Yeah, I know, that’s young, but when you’re as smart as I was (lol) then you already know, I had it all figured out. Now hang on a minute, I am very happy to report that I am STILL married to my loving wife of 25 years. She deserves all the credit, I gave her a hard time. I love her very much and hope that she will come and join the forum one day too! We had a lot of ups and downs but not the kind you might think. We hardly ever have had an argument, most of our troubles circled around finances and the like. Not too many family members believed we would last very long and with each passing year we earned their respect concerning wether or not we were going to make it. I met my wife at the ripe old age of 10. We lived in the same neighborhood. I wrote her a note one day and told her that we were going to get married and have babies but, you know when you are 10 and the girl you love is 12; you are the last thing on her mind and she laughed at my love note, poured blow bubble juice on it and that was that....till a few years later, hah! Now I said all l this because it plays a huge part in my testimony. Remember that I walked away from God and church. So, some years later, in all my wisdom and knowledge that I had collected over time, I came to be a drunk fisherman barely making it from paycheck to paycheck and from drunk to drunk. My wife on the other hand begun to go back to church and tried on many occasions to get me to go with her to no avail. A fellow fisherman who was also a local preacher came around every so often to try to intimidate me into coming to his church but I think he finally got the picture and gave up on me. Not my wife tho. She just kept nagging and nagging me to come with her to church. I thank God for that nagging very much! I cannot thank God enough for my wife!
So there I am, a drunk and in a drunk, late one night. I had finished a beer and was going for another one, opened the refrigerator door and.....a voice as clear as a face to face encounter says to me, ‘You don’t need that anymore’. Now, me being a beer lover had no intentions of agreeing but all I can tell you is I reached for the beer, heard the voice, starred at the beer for a minute as if maybe I did not really hear what I heard, knowing full well that I DID HEAR, and then I shut the door and went to bed. Now that wouldn’t have much of an impact had I got up the next day and went back to the same old me which by noon or a little after, I was needing my first beer. Noon came and went and still no desire of a beer! That day I poured out the rest of my beer and walked away from drinking completely. Praise God! If you know drunkard then you know that the only way that could have been possible is by Gods hand. If it was left up to me, I had no intention, desire or want to, in any shape, form or fashion even to cut back on, much less quit my beer all together. I’ve heard many many times over the years that nobody ever fully recovers from alcohol addiction. Well I don’t believe that for one minute! Also, I knew that God had found me and He had an issue to take up with me! I knew that my deliverance from drinking, even tho I did not ask for it, was a gift and a sign from God. I knew that I was, after that night, going to go to church with my wife.
My wife had been attending one of the local Baptist churches and they were having a revival meeting. She asked me to go and to her surprise I agreed. I didn’t know it at the time but it was just then at that point in life that I was beginning my journey to Bible Truths. We went to the revival meeting. The Traveling Evangelist that was speaking was a well spoken fairly young man bout 35ish and he is telling a story about an encounter that he fully believed that he had involving angels, IN A BAPTIST CHURCH! I had never heard of such a thing myself being brought up a Baptist. I believed all those kinds of things never happen these days and that those sort of things only happened in the days of the Bible but, I believed the Evangelists story, how could I not? I had encountered my own angel of a sort just a few nights before through the voice I heard. I knew a great change had happened in my life that I had absolutely nothing to do with! I could not explain it, only live it.
After that night at the revival my wife says to me, ‘so what do you think, are you gonna join the church with me?’ I said no but, I think I would enjoy looking for a church for us to go to together. Well she was happy, I was happy, my mom was happy to hear her son had stopped drinking and was looking for a church so much that she joined us in the search. I knew we needed something different in a church just not what exactly. A different denomination maybe? We went to a non-denominational church one day and wow! The air was filled with excitement. I’d never seen so much goings on in a church. There was CLAPPING, the preacher played a Sax, there were men playing electric and acoustic guitars and a drummer. It was awesome! I got all choked up and teary eyed, I believed in my heart we had found a new church home and we stayed there for a good long while. The preacher taught a slightly different kind of message. Although he did believe in tithing, he never passed an offering plate. There was a box by the door you could put your tithes and offerings in and that was cool to me. He taught that there was no such thing a secret rapture and he could prove it. I took hold of that like a GI Joe with the kung fu death grip, I loved it. Something different, a new way to believe, a revelation that I knew beyond a doubt, it was true. While we were members there we were all challenged to expand our understanding. Every year they would give out a Bible calender that you could use to read the Bible from cover to cover in that year if you stuck with it. I did, for three years. Man some of the Old Testament books are tough to get through! The preacher and his wife were great people and pushed the members to build on your personal relationship with God. Well, when that took root with me, that is when my troubles with the church started and a deeper search and understanding for the hidden treasures of God began!
I decided it was important for us to give to a foreign ministry and had one in mind. I wanted our church to give to and help that ministry and asked the preacher about it one Sunday morning. He cut me off like a light switch! He bluntly stated, we can’t afford to give to any more ministries and that was that. I was offended greatly because I was a hard core tither and not only a tither but a giver also, you know, the amount you right the check for OVER AND ABOVE what you OWE in tithes. I thought that I was part of the program and had a voice there! I was pricked, pickled, angered, and hurt. It was EXACTLY what I needed. I prayed, studied and read my Bible daily but was troubled about this problem I was having dealing with the foreign ministry thing. We just could not afford to give any more money other than what was going to our church and I so wanted to give to the foreign ministry. I prayed even more asking God to show me a way out of that and more of His truths, to lead me, even if it meant learning that the truth was different than I knew it to be. Remember that voice from a while back? It came back again! One day while reading my Bible the voice, again as clear as a face to face encounter said to me, ‘do a study on tithing.’ Without delay, I began a word search, verse by verse every one concerning the tithe. I could not believe what I was learning. I was enlightened, excited, I got mad at the church, and I was happy, I had to tell my wife! I was at work offshore at that time, this was a few years back, I called home and asked my wife to do a search on the internet concerning tithes, she said there were thousands and thousands of links concerning exactly what I had found in the Bible about tithing. That tithing was unscriptural was from that point on, no doubt to me. When I got home and did my own internet search on tithing I came to a L. Ray Smith site. Wow, oh my word! Can this guy be for real? He not only nailed the tithing thing down with a big hammer so much better than I had but all this other stuff....the LOF series and everything else. Wow, L. Ray had letters written to famous talking heads of the church and he spoke to them with such conviction and authority! He was against the grain like I had never seen it before and and I loved him! His sarcasms, his humor, his ability to express the wisdom that God gave him in a way so appealing and easy for me to grasp. What could I do now? How was I going to handle the new understanding that God brought me to?
Sadly, not very well. I got brain overload, the message was so powerful to me it drained me. After all the trouble my dear wife had went through to get me back in the church I knew that I had to once again, leave it. This strained our relationship. My wife wanted to believe but could not take that step to leave the church and join me in all the new found truths. My relationship with my mom was and is to this day not the same. Other family members think I’ve gone off the deep end. I didn’t care as much about the other family members opinions as I did that of my best friend, my confident, my soul mate, my wife. I struggled to keep my thoughts together, to keep on keeping on the road and well, I slid off the road a bit. No, that is not the same as falling off the wagon! I had to make a choice. I could not keep sliding one way or the other on the truth and the only reason that was happening in the first place is that I needed desperately guidance and even tho I was a member here then for a short time a long time ago, I was still too proud to ask for help. My decision was to wait it out and see if God would do something, He had already done so much maybe, just maybe the voice might say something. Nope, no voice, nothing. For a long time, nothing. Why? I don’t know.
My wife and I are no longer a member of any church. She still goes to church every now and then and I have even agreed to go with her but that is not what we need to be doing and we both know it. We have two grown and gone from home children and a six year old. Who says God doesn’t have a since of humor huh? He, the six year old is so not like our other two. He just recently came to his Momma and said ‘Momma, I want to be born again’, how does a six year old child come to that conclusion without being in a church or without any outside influences? I tell you I believe the voice came to my son the six year old! God truly does work in mysterious, albeit wonderful ways, in His time on His dime and that is the way it has always been and will always be no matter how we all might have it to be! That is one thing I know for sure wether or not I have a full understanding about it. My wife say’s to me, what are we going to do about J.T? (Our six year old) I tell her, well I tell ya what we ain’t gonna do is allow him to go the same route you and I have gone through the church. We are going to teach him the truth and let the cards fall where they may. Praise God, she agreed with me and this has all taken place in the last month and what can I say except I know God has found us again and he has a few issues that I’m sure He is about to address with us, once again, praise God. Please pray for us!
Just a Lump of Clay,
Stacey
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Topic: My Testimony (Read 7343 times)