My testimony

I was born into a Christian home.  When I was very young, both my father and my mother touched the church and enjoyed it so much.  However, when we moved to Mississippi, my mother did not want my brother and I to be “disadvantaged” because in the South, “going to church” is a way to make connections and social things like that.  Therefore, my mother took my brother and I to every denomination you could think of.  I went to Baptist meetings, Methodist meetings, Church of Christ meetings, Pentacostal meetings, and so on for most of my childhood and teenage life.  It wasn’t until high school that I began to really seek the Lord.  What I was reading in the Bible was not seen among my friends.  It wasn’t long after that I found myself meeting with a free-group.  This free group was really zealous.  We had to read a few chapters in the Bible everyday before breakfast to show we desired Christ’s words more than our necessary meal.  We had to memorize verses, pray 3 times a day, and do good things.  A lot of my friends and I started to go and it grew really quickly.  However, it fell apart just as quickly because my friends said, “If being a Christian is about being good, why can’t I just be a Buddhist? A Mormon? A Muslim? There are plenty of good acting people in the world that aren’t Christian.” Therefore, I was even more confused about what it meant to be a Christian.  It was at that time that the brother who brought my father into the church in Taiwan came to visit our family.  He and I talked and he invited me to a large international church conference in Anaheim, CA.  He told me he would pay for it all if I would just go.  I prayed about it and Praise the Lord, I went!  I remember seeing about 4000 brothers and sisters in the Lord from every place on the face of the earth just calling on His name and loving Him!  I’ve never seen anything like it in my life.  The training was on Galatains, which was exactly what I needed to hear.  I still remember the brother expounding on the Word.  Galatians 1:15-16 “When it pleased God…to reveal His Son in me!” It all made perfect sense.  Being a Christian is not about being a good person, it’s about having God’s Son lived out in me; it’s about living by another life!  It’s about abiding in the vine!  It’s not about trying my best to follow all the rules, it’s about allowing the law of the Spirit of Life to free us from everything else! It’s about loving the Lord with everything that we have, and counting all things loss to gain Him!  It’s about growing in Him day by day, moment by moment.  I always heard the phrase “let Jesus live in you,” but no one told me how or even what that meant. People would say that to me, but then we would try our best out of our own effort to live a good life. The key to letting Jesus live in you is to allow your spirit to be mingled with the divine Spirit!  Finally, I realized being a Christian is not an individual journey, but it’s a corporate thing; it’s about loving His Body!  We are all members one of another, and we should love one another, not because we have to, but because the Christ in us does.  When we love one another and live in the reality of the Body life expressed in the local churches, then the world will know that we belong to Christ.