Can I share my Testimony:
My mother is from South America, brought up Catholic. She said the church services back then spoke only in Latin. She could not understood what was said. She came to the US and married my father who left us when I and my sister were very little. Someone explained salvation through faith alone in Christ and my mother believed and for the first time saw herself as sinful and needing a Savior. During this time, as a 4 year old, I must have heard my mother’s conversations and asked our pastor about Jesus. He helped me “ask Jesus to come into my heart and cleanse me from sins.” All through my life - I relied on that experience as a 4 year old as assurance of my salvation. Knowing that my sinful life did not exclude me from heaven but maybe loss of rewards, I sinned freely and without concern. I started getting drunk with friends, experimenting with drugs as an early teenager. Stealing and breaking into cars and occasional houses with friends. Getting into trouble and being wild. I was in a fatal car accident when I was 19. My friends and I were drunk and speeding one night and flew by a cop car - we outran the cop by going 145 mph in my friends Porsche before we hit a dip in the road, lost control, and had a catastrophic crash, where the driver was ejected and died. After hearing his mother screaming at the hospital I said to myself no more drinking. But it didn’t stick, at urging of my friends, back I went to partying. I war arrested for a D.U.I charge a year later and occasionally locked up for the night for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct charges. And so life settled down a little after college when I got married. But I still liked to go drinking on weekends and started getting a bit out of control with gambling and wasted most of our wedding money and usually the overtime money I made at work. Then when I was 36 years old, with a good job and pretty wife - I was still feeling like something was wrong with my life. I found myself praying a prayer I never had before: I asked God to save me from myself and take control of my life. I was sick of being in control. And if I was afraid to obey Him, please give me a desire to obey and make me love the things He loved and make me do the things He would have me do ( I was praying this way because I was nervous he might make me a missionary! Might send me to Africa. Lol) I believed I was a Christian, of course, but now I was letting Him be “Lord.” How foolish my thinking was then, as I was about to learn. A few weeks later, I heard a pastor say something i didn’t believe, and looking it up I started reading about something else:
Matthew 7:21-23 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord,Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven but he who does the will of my Father in heaven....and then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!”
And I read things like 1 Corinthians 6:9-10:
“Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.
And the Scriptures warn us to, “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you? - unless indeed you are disqualified.” - 2nd Corinthians 13:5
And so my blind eyes began to see that I was “self deceived” and I was a mere “hypocrite.” I had never believed with a faith which was characterized by repentance. If I had died when I was 19 or a few other times in life, I would have been surprised to hear the Lord say, “depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!”
Listen, please understand, many people are like I used to be: believing a sinner’s prayer offered as a child or a baptism is assurance of their salvation. No. One must be born again. It is not our doing. It is a work of God. If a person had departed from the faith - this is worrisome. It is ill advised to say, “You left the faith, but God is still faithful.” Maybe the person left the faith because, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us.”
- 1 John 2:19
“You will know them by their fruits.”
We should examine the fruit of our lives - not my warning, but God’s warning. Departing from the faith is very worrisome fruit. If a person belongs to God, God will keep that person to the end. You do not maintain your own salvation - God maintains it - through faith in Christ.
My mother is from South America, brought up Catholic. She said the church services back then spoke only in Latin. She could not understood what was said. She came to the US and married my father who left us when I and my sister were very little. Someone explained salvation through faith alone in Christ and my mother believed and for the first time saw herself as sinful and needing a Savior. During this time, as a 4 year old, I must have heard my mother’s conversations and asked our pastor about Jesus. He helped me “ask Jesus to come into my heart and cleanse me from sins.” All through my life - I relied on that experience as a 4 year old as assurance of my salvation. Knowing that my sinful life did not exclude me from heaven but maybe loss of rewards, I sinned freely and without concern. I started getting drunk with friends, experimenting with drugs as an early teenager. Stealing and breaking into cars and occasional houses with friends. Getting into trouble and being wild. I was in a fatal car accident when I was 19. My friends and I were drunk and speeding one night and flew by a cop car - we outran the cop by going 145 mph in my friends Porsche before we hit a dip in the road, lost control, and had a catastrophic crash, where the driver was ejected and died. After hearing his mother screaming at the hospital I said to myself no more drinking. But it didn’t stick, at urging of my friends, back I went to partying. I war arrested for a D.U.I charge a year later and occasionally locked up for the night for public drunkenness or disorderly conduct charges. And so life settled down a little after college when I got married. But I still liked to go drinking on weekends and started getting a bit out of control with gambling and wasted most of our wedding money and usually the overtime money I made at work. Then when I was 36 years old, with a good job and pretty wife - I was still feeling like something was wrong with my life. I found myself praying a prayer I never had before: I asked God to save me from myself and take control of my life. I was sick of being in control. And if I was afraid to obey Him, please give me a desire to obey and make me love the things He loved and make me do the things He would have me do ( I was praying this way because I was nervous he might make me a missionary! Might send me to Africa. Lol) I believed I was a Christian, of course, but now I was letting Him be “Lord.” How foolish my thinking was then, as I was about to learn. A few weeks later, I heard a pastor say something i didn’t believe, and looking it up I started reading about something else:
Matthew 7:21-23 “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord,Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven but he who does the will of my Father in heaven....and then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!”
And I read things like 1 Corinthians 6:9-10:
“Do not be deceived. Neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor homosexuals, nor sodomites, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners will inherit the kingdom of God.
And the Scriptures warn us to, “Examine yourselves as to whether you are in the faith. Test yourselves. Do you not know yourselves that Jesus Christ is in you? - unless indeed you are disqualified.” - 2nd Corinthians 13:5
And so my blind eyes began to see that I was “self deceived” and I was a mere “hypocrite.” I had never believed with a faith which was characterized by repentance. If I had died when I was 19 or a few other times in life, I would have been surprised to hear the Lord say, “depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!”
Listen, please understand, many people are like I used to be: believing a sinner’s prayer offered as a child or a baptism is assurance of their salvation. No. One must be born again. It is not our doing. It is a work of God. If a person had departed from the faith - this is worrisome. It is ill advised to say, “You left the faith, but God is still faithful.” Maybe the person left the faith because, “They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us; but they went out that they might be made manifest, that none of them were of us.”
- 1 John 2:19
“You will know them by their fruits.”
We should examine the fruit of our lives - not my warning, but God’s warning. Departing from the faith is very worrisome fruit. If a person belongs to God, God will keep that person to the end. You do not maintain your own salvation - God maintains it - through faith in Christ.
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