Dan’s Testimony

What do you really understand about love when you are seventeen?  Well, that is where my faith-story begins.  I was in the process of discovering that I knew almost nothing, and at the same time, quite a bit, about that mammoth issue.  I started dating Karen after we graduated from High School in the same small town.  She went off to Penn State’s Main Campus in the Fall and I went to the local satellite campus.  I knew I would miss her, but I wasn’t prepared for the intense feelings of emptiness and longing that I felt.  I really started to ask myself what these feeling could be.  My friends and family assured me that it was just ‘puppy love’ and it would subside with time.  When it didn’t, they said, “Boy, you must really be in love”.  That confused me further; what is love and how do you ‘fall in it’? 

So, what I understood about love was that I was in it.  What I didn’t understand was what ‘it’ was!  That is how the first few months of my freshman year of college passed.  Then in the early winter, I got a letter from my girlfriend saying that everything in our relationship was about to change.  Great!  That is exactly what I did not need to hear in all of my turmoil.  She said her life had changed and it would affect everything about us.  Well, at least she felt there still was an ‘us’.  That was a good sign.  When she came home a few weeks later, she told me that she had gone to hear a talk sponsored by Campus Crusade for Christ called “Maximum Sex”.  She had filled out a card at the end asking to learn more about a ‘personal relationship with God through Jesus Christ’.

She told me she had accepted Jesus as her personal Lord and Savior.  She shared a booklet called the Four Spiritual Laws that described how you enter such a relationship.  She told me that: 1.) God has a plan for my individual life, 2). Sin has separated me from God and I can’t achieve this plan on my own 3.) God made a way for me to enter back into fellowship with Him, through the death and resurrection of His Son Jesus, who is both God and Man. 4.) To get what he offers, I have to personally pray and receive His gift.  That way I could begin to know and experience Him and His purpose for me.

When she was done sharing, she asked if I would want to pray to receive Jesus as my Lord and Savior.  To her astonishment (and mine!), I said yes I would.  This is going to sound too trite and simplistic, but in my individual case, it is the truth!  I did not go into that discussion craving a personal relationship with Jesus; I just wanted to understand what love is.  However, in that moment, the Holy Spirit touched me and changed me forever!  I became a new person in Christ by asking Him into my life to take control of my messed up way of thinking and acting.  I asked Him to forgive me of my sin and change me into the kind of person He wanted me to be.

Again, to my astonishment, He immediately began to answer that pray.  I could see real and striking differences in the way I thought and acted.  I had a real hunger to know and understand the Bible, God’s Word.  And I wanted to be around people who thought like me.  God provided for this desire for fellowship by leading me to a small group of Christians meeting on Campus lead by a professor named Jim Munz.  His wife Nancy played guitar and we sang songs and prayed together every week.  In three short months, I went from a lost and searching irreligious guy to a Christian seeking to love and honor God with my whole life.  That is no credit to me; that is a clear evidence of the power of the Holy Spirit in a broken and yielded heart.  I learned what love is in1 John 4: 10-21:

This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.  We know that we live in him and he in us, because he has given us of his Spirit. And we have seen and testify that the Father has sent his Son to be the Savior of the world. If anyone acknowledges that Jesus is the Son of God, God lives in him and he in God. And so we know and rely on the love God has for us.  God is love. Whoever lives in love lives in God, and God in him. In this way, love is made complete among us so that we will have confidence on the day of judgment, because in this world we are like him. There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.  We love because he first loved us. If anyone says, "I love God," yet hates his brother, he is a liar. For anyone who does not love his brother, whom he has seen, cannot love God, whom he has not seen. And he has given us this command: Whoever loves God must also love his brother.

God is love and when we love Him first and foremost, He pours out His love to others through us.  I married that girl who shared this love with me, and we have had a deepening relationship as we have raised our four daughters in the love of Christ.  And now they are each walking with Him in the love that He has for each and everyone of us.

 How about you? Do you have a testimony of turning your life over to Christ, or a witness story about how God increased your faith?  Put it in Patty’s narthex mailbox or e mail to: pattykissinger@centenniallutheran.org

Note:  Have you just read this testimony and want to respond to the author – send me your reply and I’ll see that they get it!  Blessings, Patty