Please come and share your personal tetimonies of salvation and/or your stories of answered prayer for yourself or others.
The Book of Remembrance
At that time those who feared the LORD spoke with one another, and the LORD listened and heard them. So a scroll of remembrance was written before Him regarding those who feared the LORD and honored His name. “They will be Mine,” says the LORD of Hosts, “on the day when I prepare My treasured possession. And I will spare them as a man spares his own son who serves him. So you will again distinguish between the righteous and the wicked, between those who serve God and those who do not.”
Malachi 3:16-18
As an unsaved kid contemplating my future I often thought about religion and heaven. I knew that I wanted to go there, but I just didn’t know how. I was not satisfied with the trappings of the Catholic church. It did not make sense to me that I could sin like the devil all week long and go talk to a priest behind a shade and recite a couple of prayers by rote and somehow, I was set.
I started to hear snippets of opinions about being good enough to go to heaven. I’d make a personal commitment to do right and within an hour I found myself back to where I was before I made the commitment. I said, “Heck, this is impossible! There is no way that I’ll ever be good enough!” So I basically gave up trying. Why bother?
When I was around 12 or 13 I went to a free movie at the local theater sponsored by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and was exposed for the first time to the concept that even though I was powerless to live the righteous life, Someone else had already done it for me and that I could live vicariously through Him. It made some sense to me and I’m really not sure if I acted upon it or not. I mean, I might have prayed the prayer at the end of the movie—but I doubt that I meant it. If nothing else occurred, a major league seed was planted in my soul that day which lay dormant for a decade.
Then when I was 23, I found myself in the Mormon church trying to deny the existence of hell and sin — but I could not do that. They were too real to me — and the flames of hell were all I could think about in the silence. About that time Campus Crusade for Christ started their “I Found It!” Campaign with billboards, pins and bumper stickers everywhere. People would ask, “What did you find?” and the answer was “I found a new life in Jesus Christ!”
I received, and read, the Four Spiritual Laws by Bill Bright and that old Billy Graham experience returned to me. At 3:45 p.m. I woke up from a nap wherein I dreamt of hell and fell to my knees by the side of my bed and asked Jesus Christ to be my Saviour. We’ve been walking together now these past 42 years and I’ve never had to look back or wonder why I couldn’t last at least an hour . . . He was doing it for me!
Since then my wife (who is now with the Lord due to ovarian cancer) and I have gone to Bible College in Springfield, Missouri, I pastored a church for five years until health issues drove me to an online ministry where the Lord led in the establishing of BaptistBibleBelievers.com an online library with hundreds of old, out-of-print books in the public domain. No one needs to actually join the site, but you can download the books by chapter to your own computer and use them in whatever way the Lord leads.
Unfortunately, it is very difficult to minister online because of ecumenicity. My most recent online endeavor was ended abruptly when it was decided that my ‘doctrine was too much over the top.’ Sadly, almost every shade of New Ageism and works-based theologies are much akin to weeds choking out the Gospel wherever it can.