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When I was young my parents got a divorce, and that was hard. Harder once I got older,
I didn't realize how hard it was when I was young. I wanted to be able to argue against
the existence of God, thinking that it was just something that people had made up to
get power over other people. I pretty much concentrated on my efforts and immersed myself
in action sports, whatever I could fill my time with, and I loved it. You know, I had
some experiences as a child, my, I was eight years old and I was a young kid, and like,
like I said, I didn't spend a bunch of time in church or really knew what the Bible said,
but my grandma, I called her Billy Grandma, she was just a Jesus freak, just talking about
Jesus 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. And I was stealing something out of her purse one
day and she caught me and she says "What are you doing?" and I said "I don't know" and
tried to blame it on my, on my cousin who wasn't even in the house. And so she took
that opportunity to sit me down and she said "You're rebellious towards God in doing things
like that, in your actions." And she says "You have a problem in your heart." I didn't
understand much but I did understand that whatever was wrong with my heart I wanted
to fix, and so I, I, you know, I asked God, you know, forgive me of this rebellion, this
sin that's in my life, whatever it is, and make my heart right, make my heart white as
snow, like, clean me. And so I understood that "clean me" concept, making me right.
As
I got older, I started listening to the things that people say, the things that my teachers
said, the things that the television tells you, the things that my friends would say
and people would say about the Bible contradicting itself. And so I started to believe there's
no God. Just to prove that to myself, though, I wanted to make sure, I didn't want to be
a fool and just believe what I saw on tv or what my friends had said, so I decided to,
to get some Christian books, and picked up the Bible and started to read it so I could
find all these contradictions that I always heard about. I thought the truth would lead
me to that God didn't exist, and Jesus was fictitious or something, but it backfired.
And I started to see that the Bible in it's pure form is, is hard to dispute. Through
my life, I, I think God is reaching out to me. I, I see God's hand, I see people saying
things, and people doing things that were irregular, and weren't normal, people loving
me that otherwise I'd never experienced. And I see God, God's hand in my life. We were
born inheriting this problem of rebellion, it's called sin, in our English Bible, in
other languages it's called something else, but what it means is missing that mark of
perfection, God is perfect, and He can't allow for imperfection to be within His presence.
What we earn from our rebellion is death, and we're born into it, we're born dead. And,
Jesus said a man must be born again to see the kingdom of God, and that means that we
spiritually come alive and the way we do that is by receiving that forgiveness that He gave
to every man when He died on the cross and shed His blood. His blood represents life,
and it's by faith, it's by trusting in Him, that we receive it. It's a spiritual thing,
we can't see it, Jesus Himself said it's like the wind. We can't see the wind but we can
see the effects of the wind, and that's what spiritual change means. We all have opinions
and we all have experiences, but I wanted to know what the absolute truth was. And a
lot of people say there is no absolute truths, and even that statement is an absolute. And
Jesus Himself, He said "I am the truth." And He said "I am life." And you cannot make it,
we cannot make it into life, this life that's beyond what we experience in our bodies, that
life after death, you can't experience that eternal life with the Creator God outside
of who Jesus Christ is and what He did for us on the cross. The hope that I have is beyond
this life and beyond it's troubles, and it lies in Jesus Christ and what He did, bringing
me back into a relationship with God