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Conviction and condemnation can feel similar for a Christian. Conviction is from God and is necessary for joy. It should be cultivated. Condemnation is from Satan. It is a lie and should be resisted and thrown off. How do we tell the difference in our own lives? How do we help students discern the distinction in their hearts as well? An Example The night Christ was arrested, Peter and Judas both committed big sins. (This example isn’t perfect because Judas wasn’t a true Christian, but he was a professing believer and a member of Christ’s discipleship group. There’s much we...

CBN.com – Mark Mynheir has worked in law enforcement for seventeen years. In that time he’s seen his share of ugliness. From busting drug dealers to investigating grisly murder scenes in his hometown of Palm Bay, Florida -- Mark has done it all. But twelve years ago, he came to the realization that the ugliest thing in his life was the darkness in his very own soul. “At the time, I was a young, arrogant cop. As a former Marine and wannabe tough guy, my world revolved around busting bad guys. Spiritual issues were far from me,” he recalls. “Back...

CBN.com – The date was September 16th, 2003. “There were seven police officers and myself. Twenty-seven shots. Twenty-seven bullets. I thought I was gonna die.” Tommy McGouey wasn’t the only person thinking about death that day. The police had a difficult situation on their hands – a unique suicide attempt. Tommy was in the cross-hairs. His life was on the line. “I had planned to have the police shoot me,” Tommy recalls. “I didn’t have a gun. I didn’t want to take drugs and overdose. I didn’t have the resources to do that anyway.” What lead to Tommy’s suicide attempt?...

CBN.com – “We went bar-hopping, and I started doing two shots of Beam and a shot of Budweiser. I started to get ripped, and we went to the go go bar down the street and smoked a couple of joints. I left the go go bar and was doing 85 miles an hour down the road. I went to take a turn, and I don’t know if I yelled Jesus or God. I yelled something out, and the bike turned and catapulted. I almost went over a power line and landed on my feet. I fell back and had no...

CBN.com – Mary Forsythe grew up in rural Kentucky where family was celebrated and life was simple. But despite her “good life,” Mary felt she was some how “different.” “I always felt like I was odd in a bad sense. I felt like something was wrong with me,” she says. “Something was defective. Even though I went through the motions, inside I was in really pain and torment even from a young child.” Mary says she always felt rejected even though she never understood why. So to compensate she became an overacheiver -- a performer. For most of her adolescence...

CBN.com – “I was searching for truth, the meaning of life. There’s something missing in my life. I didn’t know what it was.” Cyril Gordon embarked on a spiritual journey to fill that void. “It vacillated at that time in my life, in my late teens," Cyril tells The 700 Club. "Dabbling in existentialism, which says there’s no God. Also got drawn into eastern religion and philosophy, Zen, Daoism, Buddhism, even shaved my head back then, got into the Timothy Leary thing of taking hallucinogenics to find the truth.” Cyril was Jewish, but had strayed far away from the path...

CBN.com – As children, Charles Dudrey and his siblings endured every form of abuse at the hands of their own father. One violent episode sent Charles to the Mayo Clinic. His father slammed Charles’s head against a wall, sending him into a seizure. “The diagnosis for me was grim, and the doctors wanted to do a frontal lobotomy on me to scrape the scar tissue off my brain from the physical abuse," Charles tells The 700 Club. "But my mother said no.” At the age of 11, Charles witnessed the unthinkable, his mother’s murder. He later discovered that his father...

CBN.com – Two different religions, with two very different points of view. Fatima Devanbeigi learned the truth about each of these religions in her search for a genuine relationship with God. “On the inside, I felt like there was a huge rock hanging in my heart,” says Fatima. “It was real, and it was painful. It was like something that would draw me down and wouldn’t let me live. There was no hope in it. And there was no hope for the future.” Fatima was raised in Iran as a Muslim. “Being a Muslim is not by choice, it’s by...

CBN.com -Stephen Christo never wavered in his devotion to the array of Hindu gods and goddesses. And he wanted nothing to do with other religions, especially Christianity. “Because they were the only ones keep talking about their god. I said to people, hey, you got one. I got millions. I don't need your one." When Stephen turned 19 he left his home on the island of Trinidad, bound for the US. Naturally, his parents were worried but they also had good reason. Earlier in his teenage years, he developed a recurring illness that had been triggered by the common cold....

Fittest Man in the World Owes His Success to a Fall CBN.com -Rich Froning has earned the title of “Fittest Man in the World” for four consecutive years. And, he’s the only competitor to ever accomplish that feat in the CrossFit Championships. But, Rich will tell you that his road to first, started with a fall. Rich was raised in a large Catholic family and had 24 male cousins. In his family, competition was the name of the game. “There's a lot of boys in that group there, so there’s a lot of testosterone at family get-togethers and it was...

CBN.com – When John Collier was a child, his house was not a home. It was more like a battle zone. "My father had a background of violence," John tells The 700 Club. "He abused alcohol and drugs. He was a womanizer, and he pretty much terrorized our home." John’s anger toward his father grew. He stayed in trouble at school and ran away from home twice. "There was always that little boy in me that loved my dad. Then there was that other side of me that started to hate him and never want to be anything like he...

CBN.com – “My whole family was racist, especially my step-grandfather on my mother’s side. He was a very hateful man and he hated Black people with a passion.” Johnny Lee Clary was taught to hate and fear. His family was racist and their household was full of aggression. “There was a lot of alcoholism in our home and fighting all the time,” Johnny Lee tells The 700 Club. “My mother was constantly cheating on my father. My mother drove my father into bankruptcy, and then my father was faced with losing everything he had worked hard for. I watched my...

CBN.com - Home movies show the few happy times in Kelly Carroll’s childhood. But no one dared turn on a camera when their father started beating one of them. “I was very fearful of his unpredictable temper.” says Kelly Kelly’s father could be kind, but the slightest transgression sent him into a violent rage. There was no mother to comfort or protect the children. She left when Kelly was two years old. “She was gone. I don’t even remember having a mother I was just lonely so I tried to create my own little world in order to survive.” The...

CBN.com – “I’m inside of a building in the cell block looking up 60 to70 feet. I smell the burning toilet paper. I see the dirt and the garbage, ‘Oh my goodness, what did I just get myself into?’” says Michael. Michael Bryant spent a third of his life at San Quentin, one of America’s most notorious prisons. “I’ve been to prison 9 times for drugs, vehicle theft, and insurance fraud.” Michael’s says his life growing up was challenging. When he was 10 his mother robbed an armored car. Before the police came looking for her she left town for...

CBN.com -“How do I stop using? How does a person that has a couple hundred people around him that buy drugs from him every day, just stop?” It was a question that tortured Jared Bellan for years. He made $5000 a day selling drugs. He wanted to quit using them, but he was hopelessly addicted to heroin. In the beginning, drug use wasn’t a prison for Jared, it was an escape. Living in a rural town was boring, and for Jared, marijuana was the perfect distraction. He started smoking when he was 13 years old. He eventually tried alcohol and...

CBN.com -As a relative newcomer to Christian music, Brandy Allison is already making waves. Her second single, Walking on Faith reached number 9 on the Christian charts. As a Christian artist, she loves sharing her faith through music. But there was a time she sang for a different reason. “When I got on stage, every bad thing, everything that was on my mind, disappeared. I went into the song and I became somebody else,” said Brandy. That’s because for much of her life Brandy felt liked she didn’t belong. “Nobody liked me. And there were times that I thought, ‘if...

“Having my cousin commit suicide opened up like a new reality to me, that you could end it, that things do end, and that is an option.”It was an option Jeremy Benson had never considered. His cousin was his hero. But one Christmas Eve his hero ended his own life, leaving Jeremy with questions and no answers. “Although I was born into a Christian family and I had a concept of God in my mind, when you hit some of those bumps along the way, it’s hard to see how God’s relevant. And if He even understands some of the...

CBN.com -Paula Abbott was only a child, but she was suicidal. “I was laying on my bed and I wrote a note that says ‘Why doesn’t my daddy love me?” And I looked at the fingernail polish remover and drank the whole bottle because I didn’t want to live anymore where my daddy didn’t love me. And my mom looked at my dad. She handed him the note and my dad said, ‘You can take her to the hospital if you want to, but I’m not going.’ And my dad sat down and he turned the TV on and he...

CBN.com – Don Teague and RafRaf Barrak. Ten years ago their lives were as different as could be. Don was a respected journalist, with a family and the American dream. RafRaf Barrak was a young Muslim woman living in Baghdad--struggling to find herself in a war-torn existence. Then it happened… September 11th, 2001. Don says, “When September 11th happened, I had an overwhelming feeling that my life was going to change. It was shortly after that, that I ended up being hired by NBC News, and I was going to find myself in a war.” RafRaf was a world away,...

“When I was a kid, sometimes you go out playing and then you forget it’s time for the prayers.” Hephzibah Agai was the daughter of a strict Muslim imam. “He will go and then pray and then when he’s coming back he will have a cane. Then he will come and use it on you. Very hard. So make sure you do your five prayers every day.” When Hephzibah was five years old, her mother died. Her father and grandmother raised Hephzibah and her eight siblings in Ghana, West Africa. Her father sent her to an Arab school where she...