This is me....a Christian woman
...and where I'm heading
At my age, the journey towards my faith in Jesus could fill pages.....so I’ll give you the outline…
I married in 1977 and, not long afterwards, suffered the loss of a baby at 15 weeks. Shortly after that my husband wanted a divorce. It seems he didn’t want children after all; despite my thinking he would come round to the idea. (Ladies talk before you marry, talk a lot!!)
My hairdresser – because isn't that where all women go when they’re depressed and need cheering up? - invited me to his church some 26 miles away. I have to say I found it all intriguing, but what was it with all the hugging?
Two lovely ladies told me Jesus could fix my marriage and asked if I wanted them to pray with me to accept Jesus. It seemed like a good idea - and to be honest, a pretty good deal – so I thought “Why not?” I did feel that perhaps something happened, but…....
I'd repeated a prayer, so that was it - my ticket to eternal life was firmly clutched in my hand......or was it?
In Acts 16:31, Paul says, “Believe in the Lord Jesus, and you will be saved,” But the very next verse tells us, "And they spoke the word of the Lord to him"
Does this suggest that the Philippian jailer first needed to hear who Jesus was before he could truly believe in Him? After all doesn't faith need content, look at Romans 10;17 “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the word of God” I take this to mean that the jailer could not intelligently believe in a Saviour of whom he had no precise knowledge.
Romans 10:9 add another piece of the picture: “If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”
Now, things are beginning to become clearer. Salvation is rooted in the person and work of Christ – His death and resurrection. And before we can understand what it means to be saved from our sins, we must surely recognise that we are sinners in need of a Saviour…or what else do we need saving from?
I can't remember exactly when I realised that I was a sinner, when all this clicked into place. After all, I hadn’t lived what many would call a wildlife. I didn’t sleep around, didn’t take drugs and the most potent drink I ever consumed was the odd Cinzano and lemonade (don’t judge, it was the 1970’s and Joan Collins with her slapstick advertisement sold it to me!)
It was easy for me to think I wasn’t that bad.
It was sometime after those two kind ladies had prayed with me that the penny finally dropped.
What I wanted was for God to fix my marriage. But what God wanted was to fix me. He wanted to show me His incredible love – a love demonstrated in the sacrifice of His sinless Son on the cross for me.
He showed me that by placing my faith and trust in Christ, I was no longer under God’s wrath or the penalty my sin deserved.
Instead, I had become a recipient of His saving grace.
I stood justified before God, clothed not in my own righteousness but in Christ’s. His perfect righteousness had been credited to me.
Despite my rather limited understand of Christ at the beginning, God was far more faithful than I could ever have imagined. Over the months and years that followed, he patiently taught me just how amazing His grace really is.
I don’t have what many people would describe as a dramatic testimony, and for that I am deeply thankful. My story isn’t one of being rescued from addiction or a life of obvious rebellion. But every testimony is, at its heart, a miracle of God’s grace. Whether God saves us from a visibly broken life or from a life that appeared respectable on the outside, the rescue is no less remarkable. We are all equally lost apart from Christ.
One of the wonderful things about sharing our testimonies is that they point people to what God has done. Our stories are important because they display His grace in countless different ways. The greatest part of every testimony is never the details of our past but the greatness of our Saviour. In the end, the message is not that God is great because of our story, but that our story has meaning because God is great.
So, how did it all work out?....you'll have to stick around to find out!
