Personal Testimony

Personal Testimony

In the small, South Carolina town where I grew up, everyone knew everyone else. It was a community where the entire town helped to raise its children. We all attended church on Sunday and knew what God expected of us from an early age. I feel very fortunate to have grown up in such a place, surrounded by so many people who loved me.

The church I attended, from age three until I was twenty, was an old fashioned Baptist Church. The pastor was a wonderful man whom we all loved dearly. His sermons were quite typical of the Baptist Churches in the nineteen-fifties. He always chose his topics right from the verses in the Bible with great emphasis placed on Satan and Hell. He delivered his sermons with ‘fire and brimstone.’ It was a certainty that you had better be good or you were going to wind up down there in an awfully hot place.

Now, this was scary news for a small child, so I learned, at an early age, to be afraid of God. However, I did not learn to love Him. As a child, the fear of Him kept me on a straight and narrow path. But, as you grow older, fear doesn’t control your actions as easily as when you were young.

Once I become an adult, I married and moved away from my little town. I met several people over the next few years who carried a very deep love for God inside their hearts. I was curious as to how they had learned to love God so much. How were they able to obtain such a personal relationship with Him?

At this point, I began to worry about my own relationship with God. I knew I believed in Him and had for as long as I could remember. However, I realized something was missing and I just could not seem to apply what I saw in others to my own heart.

About sixteen years ago, our choir began to prepare the music for our Easter Contata. One of the anthems within The Crimson Bridge is entitled, “If He Were Your Only Son.” The message goes something like this:

          “If He were your only son, could you send Him to die?
           If He were your only son, could you send Him to die, in the way
                he died, knowing in advance what was going to happen?
           If He were your only son, could you send Him to die, to save the
                souls of the very men who were going to kill him?”

Could you do that? I have two sons and it would be impossible to love anyone more than I love my children. Therefore, I know I could not do it. Loving another person that much is beyond my own comprehension.

So, how can we turn out backs on His wonderful gift over and over again?

As I thought about his love for us, I began to see its comparison to the way we feel about our own children. When they make poor choices, we are disappointed and it hurts us to see them fail. However, our love for them remains fathomless. This realization brought him into the reality of my own life.

I began to feel the love for Him growing inside me. I also realized that each of us has to find our walk with God in our own way.

Since that day, I have grown to understand fully how much it means to love God. If we love Him, we want to please Him because you want anyone you love to be happy. When you make God happy, then your life is going to be blessed. You will make the right choices because they will be God’s choices for your life.

Our love for God and His love for us will strengthen our lives and enable us to understand anything this world directs our way.

When my daughter, Carlyn, was a little girl of seven, she accepted Christ as her Savior. Because of her young age, our pastor felt he needed to sit down and talk with her. One of his questions was, “Where is Jesus right this very minute?” She easily answered, “He is right her on the bench beside me!”

Why do we tend to make it so hard on ourselves when He is right there beside us all the time?

Tags: Faith, God's Love, Testimony