The Pastor’s Piece – June 18, 2023

The Pastor’s Piece

FCFI

June 18, 2023

We had a guy at our church last Sunday who gave his testimony about how he found the Lord. Actually, he’s a missionary we support. He works through his church in Des Moines, Iowa where they have a campus ministry on a couple of the college campuses there. Their campus ministry involves making themselves available to students who are searching for meaning in life and sense a void inside that nothing has yet been found to fill. 

This young man told of how as a small child, just three years old, his mother was declared to be an unfit parent. She was schizophrenic, bipolar, delusional, didn’t work well with others and was incapable of taking care of children. She had left him, his sister and their new-born brother alone. His new-born brother was found deceased and as a result she lost the rights to take care of them. He was then adopted by another family. And that was where he was exposed to the concept of God. He remembers every night they would have him say the same prayer:  “Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.” 

That prayer instilled in him the idea that there was a higher power out there somewhere who could somehow hear him, but it didn’t explain or describe how he could have a relationship with that Being. It didn’t give him the understanding that he would need to turn to Christ as his Savior. However, for reasons beyond his control, his adopted family gave him and his sister up for adoption at age 7. For the next several years they were cared for by foster parents, until at the age of 10, he and his sister were adopted by their present family. This was when he began to be instructed by the gospel. He was told that Jesus died for his sins and if he would accept him into his heart, he would be saved. He believed and prayed to receive Christ at age 10, but, he said, he still did not understand what sin was or how it was an offense to God and that he needed to personally take responsibility for his sin. 

The way he understood it, was that what was wrong with the world was what was being done to him, instead of what’s wrong with the world being done by him. The righteousness that Christ gives us as a free gift, accredited to us by faith, was irrelevant to him. He was trusting in salvation on his own righteousness – he believed all the wrong being done wasn’t by him – but it was being done to him. His heart became hardened to the things of God and he plunged into sinful life choices in search of meaning and acceptance. And he began to wonder why he was even alive. And then, after his sophomore year of college, he somehow “remembered” that he believed in God. He also realized that he had nothing to offer God and finally he surrendered everything to Him. He realized that Christ died the death he deserved. Christ had paid his debt – the debt that his guilt and shame had pointed to. God took him as he was and forgave his sins in Christ. And for the first time, he found peace and meaning in life. He now serves in campus ministry helping others who are struggling the same way he was.

(See the full testimony on our web page, martintowncommunitychurch.org – Title: “Stand Up”) 

(Kevin Cernek is Lead Pastor of Martintown Community Church in Martintown, Wisconsin).