My Testimony

I truly believe that telling your testimony is one of the most important and crucial things you can do as a Christian. Therefore, I want to share my testimony. I tried my best to summarize it, as I can easily write for hours upon hours about my journey to and through faith. However, I may post later with more details or to speak more in depth about certain aspects.

I have found that my faith journey, my story, my testimony, can be described as a struggle with doubt, among other things. For the sake of clarity, I am going to follow a sort of outline that helps me stay on topic and effectively share my testimony - an outline with the theme of doubt. 

I originally wrote this version of my testimony during my mission trip over this past summer, and I shared it one night each week at chapel. I had a first draft that I used for about half the summer, but then my grandpa passed away and, suddenly, I didn't feel like my first draft was what God wanted me to share the next week. So, I rewrote my testimony (same story, different perspective) with God's guidance, and it is as follows. 

My testimony:

In my middle to late teenage years, I fell in with a group of friends who were not following God at all. Just like the Israelites*, I got distracted and walked away from God. I fell into some pretty bad cycles of sin, and it took me a while to break free from that. One summer, my best friend told me that she no longer believed that God existed, and that she didn’t want me to even mention Him, even though I rarely did at this point. This was my wake-up call. I had been doubting for a long time, just like my friend did, whether or not God actually exists. Hearing my friend tell me that she believed that God did not exist made me question everything that I knew and every decision that I had made over the past couple years that had caused me to stray from God. I started small, looking at the tiniest details of creation, and worked up from there. How could a world with so much order and beauty and detail possibly exist on its own? It couldn’t. Now, I’m the kind of person who needs to know the facts behind a claim before I believe it, and I’ve done my research. It’s too much to get into right now, but I encourage you to check out sources** that confront evolutionist claims that, when you start to dissect them, are flawed in so many ways.

Doubting that God exists is only one form of doubt. Ever since my friend walked away from God, I have struggled with the second kind of doubt: doubting whether or not God forgives me. There was so much I could have done to change her mind, so much I could have said…but didn’t. This is something that is talked about so many times in the Bible and, despite my anxieties, I know in my heart that I am truly forgiven. 1 John 1:9 says that “If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” This is just one example from the Bible, and I am certain that I am forgiven, but doubt still creeps in sometimes, and the enemy is always fighting for control over my mind and emotions. This part of my testimony is not from a “been there, done that” point of view. It’s from a “been there, done that, and I’m still working through this” point of view. So, that’s just to say that if any of you are also struggling with this kind of doubt, I want you to know that you’re not alone, and that truth is found in the Bible, in God’s Word, and not in our feelings or emotions. That’s something I remind myself of every day.

The third kind of doubt that I have struggled with is doubting the goodness of God. I don’t know if any of you have been through a very difficult situation, and if you have, maybe you’re stronger than I am, but it seems to me that every time a difficult situation falls on me, I doubt the goodness of God, despite all of the ways in which He has been good to me in the past. Earlier this year, my great-grandma passed on to Heaven and, a few months later, my grandpa did as well. These are just recent things but, throughout my life, there have been many other complicated and stressful situations that I’ve been through and I have found that I am so much like the Israelites in that I am constantly doubting God‘s goodness. Yet, I have found a way to overcome this kind of doubt. Do you remember that verse from the song we sang earlier, about the Ebenezers?*** 

These lines from that song really speak to me:

Here I raise mine Ebenezer

Hither by Thy help I'm come 

Allow me to explain my understanding of these lines. In the Bible, an 'ebenezer' is a monument to remember something that God did in the past. For example, in Joshua 4, the Israelites piled up rocks as monuments after God allowed them to miraculously cross the Jordan river so that, in the future, when their children asked what the rocks were there for, they could tell them the story of what God had done for them. So, in this song, it essentially says "now I remember all the great things that God has done for me, and it is only by His help and His grace that I've made it here". This is a powerful thing for me to remember, especially when I'm going through dark times. I have only come this far because God has brought me here, and He will see me through, help me through, whatever comes. 

To break free from all doubt, I have to remember who God has shown Himself to be in the past, and I have to remember all the things He’s done for me. I have to remember those Ebenezers, those monuments to remember God's love, and I encourage you to do the same. God has shown his love to me in so many ways throughout my life, in both big and small ways. In the darkest moments, I have to remember how good and faithful God is, and how He has never abandoned me. I encourage you to remember the Ebenezers in your life, those moments in your life, when God blessed you, and has shown His goodness to you, so that you have that lifeline when you go through moments of doubt. 

Doubt comes in many different forms, and you’re not alone if you struggle with doubt just like me and just like the Israelites. God understands, and He is always faithful to us, and He never gives up on us. I encourage you to find your truth in the Bible, and not to believe the lies of the enemy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*before I shared my testimony, I read a scripted portion of the chapel message that explained how the Israelites (in the Old Testament of the Bible) kept straying from God and returning to Him, straying and returning, over and over. They kept getting distracted from God by things of this world. For example, when Moses went up on Mount Sinai for 40 days, the Israelites doubted he would return, so they made a golden statue of a calf (a baby cow) from their jewelry and worshiped that instead. 

**links to examples of such sources: 

https://answersingenesis.org/ 

https://billygraham.org/

https://www.gotquestions.org/

***before the message began, we sang worship songs and one of the songs, my favorite from the entire summer and the only hymn we sang, was "Come Thou Fount"  

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