My Testimony

In the early years of my childhood, going to church was a regular part of my life. We regularly attended as a family and the highlight of Sundays was getting to dress up and play with my friends at the church playground. Though initially a happy childhood, my parents divorced when I was nine years old. From that point on, my siblings and I were constantly traveling back and forth between two houses, experiencing frequent conflict between our parents. As a result, I felt stuck in the middle, not knowing how to deal with them and feeling sorry for myself. As I saw how imperfect they were, my frustration grew. 

I blamed my parents for the turbulent feelings I experienced because I was different from the other kids at church. I blamed them for making life hard. But the root of the problem wasn’t any of these people or my parents. 

At church, I was an excited kid in the youth group but everywhere else I was primarily concerned with the things of the world – particularly attention in dating and popularity. I had my circle of friends at school and I still went to church frequently but my priority was to be liked and I would place that above obeying God. Towards my parents and anyone who stood in the way of me being happy, I was angry, bitter and prideful, especially in my speech. I did consider myself a Christian. I had the seemingly right actions on the outside by knowing all the praise songs and was doing my best to be a nice person, but inside my heart there was no evidence that my heart had really been changed by Christ. Matthew 7:16 says that you will no a tree by its fruit. The fruit of my heart was bitterness and envy, manifested through unrealistic expectations of people and not forgiving them for not meeting them.  I justified it with my difficult childhood. I lived my life, not in pursuit of God but in pursuit of what made me feel good about myself. 

At church summer camp right before starting college, I heard several messages from the Sermon on the Mount from the Bible in Chapter 7 of the book of Matthew. Though I had heard it before, I was challenged with the gospel from those sermons. God was the creator of everything and He has authority over all His creation. We were all created was for the purpose of worshipping Him and honoring His perfect and pure character.  We are called to be holy because He is holy. Yet I willfully chose to rebel by making myself the authority in my own life. This rebellion, or sin, had earned me separation from God and I was sentenced to endure His wrath for an eternity. However, while I was hopeless in my condition, God had sent His son Jesus Christ to live a perfect life and to die in my place by taking punishment that I had earned by sinning against God and His holiness. Jesus died for me and took my place in suffering the consequences for my sin. 

Through the preaching of the Bible, God made it clear what His terms were for accepting salvation. They were to live for Him alone, to forsake man’s opinion. His terms were to love Him with all my heart, soul and mind and to have no other gods before Him, especially myself. There was only one other choice – to reject the gift of salvation that was offered through Christ and to know that end of the end of my life I was going to endure the punishment that I had earned myself. 

However, upon returning home from camp, still being dead in my sin, I said “Not right now”. I thought I would deal with it later and I and spent that summer doing what I wanted and avoided feeling guilty. I threw all my energy into having fun with the time I had before going to college. I stopped going to church and reading the Bible. 

When I moved into the dorms at UC Irvine that fall, all the pleasures that I had been living for were removed. I realized that everything I said I believed was contradicted through how I lived. God sobered me up and I saw the pointlessness of a life void of God. Making friends was hard and He used my loneliness to lead me to reading the Bible. Through the book of Romans and Philippians he showed me the truth of my condition – I was unhappy, not because of other people, because of my sinfulness. I was hopeless – not because other people didn’t accept me as I was but because I was in rebellion against God and I had no way to make things right on my own. Instead of feeling pressure from the messages I had heard at college camp, I finally saw hope in the gospel message. 

The hope came in realizing that Christ had done everything on my behalf. THERE IS NOTHING I could do to make up for the things I have done. I started to understand the depths of God’s mercy and faithfulness as He still chose to reveal the truth of the gospel to my dead heart even though I had been incredibly unfaithful in calling myself a Christian but having an ungodly life. But I found hope in Jesus Christ. Jesus suffered the wrath of God so that I could go free because He took my punishment upon himself. With a humble and changed heart, I repented, or turned away from my sin. Being able to live a new life was purely because of His grace in forgiving me and adopting me as His child as Christ’s righteousness was credited to me. 

Throughout my college years, he taught me more and more of what it meant to be His follower. God made it clear that I have to give up my love for sin. It means constantly laying down my pride and preferences to love others. It means hoping for His will (not mine) to be done and trusting Him to help me in areas where I was afraid my life would be made more difficult through by obedient to His commands. And by his grace, I slowly started to be able to say “Yes, Lord” and he changed my heart from seeking self-fulfillment, to understanding that the Christian life is not about comfort and personal happiness. Since I’ve moved to San Diego and came to Lighthouse in 2006, I really came to see that its not about me choosing Him for my purposes. Like it says in 1 John 4:19 I love God because he first loved me.

Being challenged by the teaching at Lighthouse has helped me to move forward and pursue God’s glory as the consistent goal of my life. God has drastically changed me. I am still a sinner, but through seeing the beautiful of God’s holiness and seeing the whole of His plan through the Bible, I am hating sin more each day. Instead of continuing to be bitter at people and demanding them to meet my expectations, I just see that we are all sinners before God, incapable of perfect love on our own and we all are equally in need of His grace. My life is only an instrument for God to use to communicate His love and grace for sinners. These past few years have brought many lessons in learning to give up the things that keep me from loving Christ and seeking His kingdom. He has become my greatest treasure and simply said, He is what I am living for.

    “But I do not consider my life of any account as dear to myself, so that I may finish my course and the ministry which I received from the Lord Jesus, to testify solemnly of the gospel of the grace of God.”

    – Acts 20:24