King James Bible
King James Version (KJV)
Testimony: Before And After
Chris H's testimony "Before And After" on 2/28/2018, 6:23am...
Beforehand:
I was born and raised in the north of England and, after college in the 1960s, moved south with my family. That was my father, mother and younger brother. I'd applied to join the Police Force, was accepted but left within a year as it wasn't me at all. I started at one of the state-run regional electricity companies after a few other odd jobs but I'd no real idea what I wanted to do. But I did enjoy the work outdoors and began socialising. It was there that I began to be drawn into the drug scene. I was young and searching for something that I couldn't put my finger on and thought I might find it there.
When the lease ran out on our flat we moved back north. My father's drinking, which had always been bad and had caused an awful lot of unhappiness, became even worse so that when we arrived back in the north he took off and left us in the lurch. My mother became very ill with the strain, all which left my brother and I having to make some sort of sense of what was going on. We lived with our grandmother while mum was ill, but our extended family weren't very helpful. Despite the three of us being in trouble none of them volunteered to help. We were having constant rows with them while they wanted us to move from our grandmother's place, and eventually we did, ending up living in our small car with a few possessions which were then stolen.
So ... we were left with nothing in the world but the clothes we wore. We'd no money, no work, no home; the car was a wreck and wouldn't move. For the first time in our lives we tried state help but we were just told, ˜tough. We were really lost and didn't know where to turn something like this had never happened to us before. I was 21, my brother 19.
What the three of us did come to realise was that we had each other; and that was lesson number one, the one that really mattered. If you've got love and stick together when times get tough, you've got it made. Nothing else is anywhere near as important.
We fought back, moved back in with our gran for a very short while we got some work and a roof over our heads. Plus mum started to get a lot better. Within a year we moved south again; we no longer felt at home in the north. I was bitter for a long time about how things had gone when we were so low.
We moved into a small house, set up home and continued to work and to use drugs, mainly cannabis and LSD. And I became more and more interested in eastern religions. Even though I'd achieved a kind of peace, I was still searching; even then I knew that there was something wrong with drug use. I just couldn't see it.
I can remember attending church as a child and growing up with Christian assembly each morning in school I loved singing but I'd ultimately dismissed it all out of hand. I was obliged to study Christianity Religious Knowledge as it was then termed as part of the school curriculum; this being a time when the UK was still a Christian nation. But I thought of it as a waste of time and that the Bible was the dustiest, driest, most boring book I'd ever read in my entire life, and this from someone who loved reading anything. I couldn't make any sense of it; I thought it completely irrelevant to my life and schooling. Every other subject at college had always been a cakewalk but since the Bible was the basis for the course and I simply couldn't relate to it at all and I failed hopelessly. I have to smile to myself now when I realise that it's the only exam I ever failed.
As Paul says:
˜The natural person does not accept the things of the Spirit of God, for they are folly to him, and he is not able to understand them because they are spiritually discerned' 1 Corinthians 2:14
One night I borrowed a friend's car to go to a Buddhist class that I'd been attending for a while. It had gone well and I thought that I was going somewhere. When I got back to the car to go home, it wouldn't start at all. No matter how I tried it just wouldn't go; and this was a reliable car. So I started walking the ten miles or so back home, me being young and it being late at night and very dark. I tried to thumb a lift but had no joy, except for this one guy who pulled up, backed up, and then offered to give me a lift home.
During the journey we started chatting, and I mentioned the meeting I'd attended. He had the clearest, most penetrating eyes that I'd ever seen. It looked as if they were on fire and, to tell the truth, I was a bit afraid. We finished up talking about why people were dissatisfied with life. I explained my particular point of view, while he believed that people were separated from God through their own sin and that our lives were ultimately meaningless since we were meant to live in fellowship with the One who had created us. He explained that Jesus was the only way to restore that fellowship with God.
We were getting along pretty well though. When he stopped outside in the road near home he turned off the engine, pulled out a Bible and began quoting passages. Since I was getting pretty scared by now I thought that I'd better go along with what was happening.
I just knew he'd know if I was faking, so at his prompting I said the sinner's prayer and accepted Christ into my life. He was so happy and congratulated me, telling me that I was now a Christian. He let me out, said goodbye and I breathed a sigh of relief. He started the car, drove off and I never saw him again.
Next day it seemed that nothing fundamental had changed in me. I was still using drugs from time to time but found them more and more unappealing. I was still going my own sweet way though. I wondered why I thought about Christianity so much when I was in my normal state of mind and so little about it when I took drugs.
Our little family was still together after all that time. Dad had since died in the north though and I only got to see him once after he left home, in the street, and his regret at the way things had gone was plain to see.
We worked and travelled a great deal, mainly to escape English winters. We loved it. I'd given very little thought to what had happened to me the night the car wouldn't start and I got a lift home from a ˜Jesus freak'.
A couple of years later I broke my wrist at work and, having nothing to do but rest while it healed, was wandering around a bookshop in town. The next bit was really weird: I remember being drawn to a section on eastern religions, and it really was if there was nothing there but just an awful darkness surrounding them. I carried on looking, then right in the middle of all these books I caught sight of one Christian paperback that was glowing; there was just no other way to describe it all the one bit of light in all that darkness.
I'd read very few Christian books but I read this one at one go and bought it there and then. It was Hal Lindsay's ˜Late Great Planet Earth'. Three parts of the way through it when Hal made the call for the reader to ask Jesus into their life, the penny finally dropped. As difficult as it is to believe I finally understood what had really happened those years ago when I'd accepted Jesus and asked Him to come into my life after that lift and that at last I'd found what I'd been looking for.
I bought a Bible, the first in a line, and became like one of the believers that Luke writes of:
˜Now the Berean Jews were of more noble character than those in Thessalonica, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true. Acts 17:11
I read everything, checked everything. I couldn't put it down, I pored over it: Old and New Testament from start to finish. And grew to love it as no other book I've ever read. The very book that I'd dismissed out of hand as a kid came gloriously alive thanks to the Holy Spirit. Everything made perfect sense.
Afterwards:
We still travelled during the winters. But one year, my dearly beloved kid brother accepted Jesus into his heart on a holiday in the Canary Islands, Spain. Within a week or so of this we were all on our way back home to the UK and a cold winter just as surely as if someone had put their arms around us and guided us there; it really and truly just felt like that. We haven't been back since.
We all realised that something had changed. I knew I had to join a church to fellowship with other believers, but the Anglican Church in the UK was lukewarm despite the Pastor being a very good guy and some of the Church members being a blessing. I attended as it was very close by, but within six months or so I became disillusioned. I thought I was going nuts really, I was unhappy and I just couldn't work out why.
I think much of it was down to me as I had issues with trust, being introverted and having a poor father/authority figure at home. And spiritual attack which I understood nothing about then but do a little more now. Satan doesn't really want you to leave his grip.
I eventually left and began to backslide, not to drugs God had broken the chain completely by then but in other selfish ways.
It went on for years and I was becoming more and more unhappy. I still read the Bible, prayed and tried to follow Christ but the experience I'd had with the church didn't make me want to join again in a hurry. I'd attended an outdoor meeting one summer and wanted to go to a Pentecostalist church in the town where we were living. I can remember walking along, just about to go in when Jesus spoke to me as clear as crystal and said:
˜What do you want?' John 1:38
This was the same question He'd asked of two of John the Baptist's disciples who were following Him when He first started His Ministry.
I was stunned. It was the simplest, most penetrating question that I'd ever been asked. I couldn't answer and walked home really puzzled. I thought about it for years after. I didn't go to the church that evening.
I became more and more involved with my work over time. Eventually I got a job in management in the same field I'd been doing most of my life the Electrical Supply Industry but on a much larger scale than I'd ever really done, a huge project. It was way outside of any frame of reference of mine.
I felt terrified of failure and that I'd be exposed as incompetent and then fired. But I kept praying to God when I started, saying that it that it was His job, not mine, and that I needed only His help to get me through it. I knew I couldn't do it by myself. And God did it beautifully. Near the completion of the job when people were packing up and moving on, I was thinking in awe about what had happened. I just stood and said a silent prayer of thanksgiving to the Lord. I knew He'd done it, not me. I remain absolutely convinced of it.
However despite being tempted with a position of authority and responsibility, I began to think that it was time to leave; financially, it was a well-paid position but it was no good because I was doing something that I didn't really want to do any more. I was unhappy; work had taken over my life and I was often putting in crazy hours, something that affected our family, especially my dear mother.
So one day I just quit. The firm didn't want me to go, they were very happy with the job I was doing and tried to change my mind, giving me time off etc. but I needed a long rest to get back to some kind of sanity, and that then I'd go do a steadier job.
Basically I'd been putting money before love, something Jesus speaks quite plainly about:
˜No one can serve two masters, for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and money. Matthew 6:24
And that is the truth, and He was saying it to me, something I hadn't realised since I'd be too wrapped up in the world.
When I quit it was at the depth of the last recession and within a year or so I'd gone through my savings. I didn't want to go back to doing the old way, the old thing, searching for something in the world.
So I just got down on my hands and knees one day at last and asked Jesus to take over my life completely and to lead me where He wanted to go, something that I'd never really done before.
Sure, I believed in Christ for years but I hadn't truly followed Him, and there's a big difference.
I'd always had a problem with a dirty mouth; I'd always wanted to but couldn't ever stop. That day I stopped cursing dead.
I didn't want to carry on living the same way as I had been doing for years. And I also knew that I'd have to wait. Only this time I meant it. And this is what I'm doing now, waiting for the Lord to direct my life as He knows best.
I'm retired now, and the Lord has seen fit to provide for us all the time. We're an elderly family mum's nearly 90 but our little family is still together, thanks to God working wonderfully in our lives. We bow our heads and say prayers together each morning, something we never used to do. He directs our lives and we don't go it alone any more.
My brother Tony and I took up cycling when I first retired, and almost every day would see us riding for miles around the wonderful countryside near home. Along the way we would always encounter so many friendly people, just about all of whom would go out of their way to smile, wave and toot their horns as they passed by. In the end we got to recognise them by sight.
It was while riding around that I began to be drawn to a little chapel near the entrance to one of the villages that would go through that seemed very attractive. It would always draw me. I would repeatedly visit and look at the notice board in front and check out what was written for that month.
I was being led more and more to find a church at the Holy Spirit's urging. And in the end I went one Sunday morning at the beginning of 2016 and walked through the chapel's doors, to be greeted by a bunch of saints. I asked if I might worship there. They were delighted and the rest of the small congregation made me, and always have made me, feel very much at home, welcoming me as one in Christ.
Soon my brother and mother began to attend church on Sundays too; now we feel very much a part of God's family, loving and belonging and worshipping as one, growing in Christ together.
And finally, after many years of ˜umming and ahhing, I obeyed God's instruction and was baptised at Alfold Chapel, Surrey; a wonderful day where we were blessed to meet so many saints eager to share so much love.
I was asked to relate what Jesus has done for me. Well, the truth is everything good in my life; it's all been for the better. He saved me when I was completely lost and looking for Him and I didn't even know what it was I was looking for, and has never let me go. Even when I was like the Prodigal Son and had I'd tried to get away from Him. And now I know that He'll never let me go or ever let me down.
He loves me and I now know this for a stone cold fact. He saved me from my many, many sins and let me realise it was He who had done it by hanging on the Cross for me.
He's changed me from the frightened little worrier that I was, to a new creation. And if He can do it for me then, believe me He can do it for anyone.
All that you need to do is just admit you're a sinner, confess it to God, put your trust in Him and ask Him to come into your life and let Him take it over. I stand on God's word and my own experience that it will be the best thing you'll ever do.
May God bless you always.