Easter 2025

This Easter Sunday morning I am in Florida for the weekend in a VRBO with my children, their spouses, and grandchildren. 29 of 31! Pretty wonderful!

The sermon is a short one from Keller followed by 5 amazing Easter testimonies. I’d love for you to listen to it through the week and come and share what stood out to you. I’m simply going to give the link and the text and let you come on as you can! Here is the link: 

https://gospelinlife.com/sermon/easter-sermon-testimonies/

And here is the text. Feel free to begin with a God Hunt and then listen and share as you will all week! If you don’t have time for all of it, skip to the testimonies.

Sermon (Monday)

I’d like you to turn to John 20. Let me just give you a couple of interesting principles. Before I read it, let me tell you what the relationship has been every single Easter Sunday evening to every Easter Sunday morning. Every year when we get to Easter Sunday, the morning and evening services have two different focuses. They don’t say the very same thing. In the morning we talk about Easter as a historical event, and then in the evening we talk about it as a transforming experience. That’s extremely important to get across to people, because Christianity itself refuses to fit into the category of being either a left-brained or a right-brained religion. It’s neither really an Eastern or Western religion. It’s not really a religion that is essentially a mystical experience and therefore it eschews rational categories, nor is it a religion that’s basically only a set of very logical doctrine and standards as opposed to mystical experience. Christianity is too mystical to be rationalism, and it’s too rational to be mysticism. That’s the reason why when you get to Easter you have to realize Easter is, first of all, a historical event, but not just that. Paul will say it really happened. The tomb is really empty. Jesus has really risen. “If he has not physically risen, you’re still in your sins,” he says. It has to be a historical fact. Then it’s the same Paul who says, “I want to know him and the power of his resurrection.” To Paul, a resurrection that’s a historical event but not an experience, or a resurrection experience, nebulous as it is, which is not a historical event, is not Christianity. Actually, it’s not a religion of power, one without the other. This morning I had a chance to look at the place in Matthew where it talks about how Mary Magdalene was amongst the women who were the first witnesses of Christ. Matthew uses Mary to get across the fact that the Easter event really happened, that the resurrection truly occurred. But I think John takes this same woman, Mary, and fills out the details and shows us how, when you meet the risen Christ, you get resurrected. The Christian gospel is that when you meet the raised Christ, he begins to raise you. When you meet the risen Christ, he begins to pump his own spiritual power and spiritual life into you, and it begins to replace the deadness. John looks at Mary … It’s the same person and the same basic event, but the way in which he fleshes it out, he shows us a picture of all of us. In other words, John 20:10–18 … Let me just read it to you, and just let it get on your hearts. This is the resurrection of Mary. All of us who meet him go through the very same basic pattern. I sat out there reading this passage and listening to the testimonies, and I want to share with you there’s a pattern to all of the testimonies, and it’s the same pattern as Mary. The Easter event is not just a historical event, but it’s also a pattern of personal, spiritual resurrection when we meet Christ. Just look. Look at verse 10. 10 Then the disciples went back to their homes, 11 but Mary stood outside the tomb crying. As she wept, she bent over to look into the tomb 12 and saw two angels in white, seated where Jesus’ body had been, one at the head and the other at the foot. 13 They asked her, “Woman, why are you crying?” “They have taken my Lord away,” she said, “and I don’t know where they have put him.” 14 At this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, but she did not realize that it was Jesus. 15 “Woman,” he said, “why are you crying? Who is it you are looking for?” Thinking he was the gardener, she said, “Sir, if you have carried him away, tell me where you have put him, and I will get him.” 16 Jesus said to her, “Mary.” She turned toward him and cried out in Aramaic, “Rabboni!” (which means Teacher). 17 Jesus said, “Do not hold on to me, for I have not yet returned to the Father. Go instead to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am returning to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’ ” 18 Mary Magdalene went to the disciples with the news: “I have seen the Lord!” And she told them that he had said these things to her. I tell you, if we had Q&A tonight (and we don’t) there would be a lot of questions you’d ask me about the passage. Let me just tell you the things that are so wonderful. There are a lot of interesting questions, but just the basics. Look at what Jesus does. Here’s how he raises her. He gives her faith, he calls her by name, and he gives her a new mission in life. 1. He gives her faith She doesn’t have it. She is like all of us in our natural condition. She is an example of all of us in our natural condition. Listen. Mary had been with Jesus for a long time. She had seen him raise people from the dead. She had seen him make promises and always come through. Always. She heard him predict he was going to rise from the dead in three days. So she comes to the tomb, she finds the body is gone, and what does she say? Does she say, “He did it”? No, what did she say? She says, “This is the last straw.” This is our natural condition. Don’t you see it? We are not capable of faith unless he helps us. Can’t you see yourself in here? Those of you who do believe, see yourself here and realize it’s only because Jesus came to us and helped us … Resurrection begins when we want the resurrection. Faith begins when we want to believe. To want to believe is more than we can. Jesus is already beginning the resurrection in us when we say, “Oh, how I need resurrection from him.” The spiritual resurrection starts the minute you believe, even the minute you get upset about the fact you don’t believe. Do you know the place where the father brings his little boy and says to Jesus, “I want you to cast the demon out,” and Jesus says, “If you believe,” and he says, “I do believe; help my unbelief”? What does Jesus do? Do you remember that story? The apostles were not able to cast out the demon. They didn’t have enough faith. The father going to Jesus and saying, “I have no faith,” has more faith than the disciples thinking they had faith who were not going to Jesus. Jesus says, “Okay, that’s the faith I need.” The point is Jesus has to help us with faith. Faith happens when you come to him and say, “I don’t believe.” He’s already working. The spiritual resurrection begins at the very, very, very beginning of even seeking him, because in our natural condition we can’t see him. Here’s something else to apply. There are some of you who are here tonight … I don’t know what you’re doing here. It’s Easter night. All sorts of people come to churches on Easter who don’t usually go to churches. Maybe you’re like Mary. Your life is falling apart. Everything is confused. It seems like everything is going wrong, and you don’t know it’s Jesus. It’s Jesus doing it. It’s Jesus trying to wake you up. Do you see that? In fact, what does it mean when it says, “Supposing him to be the gardener”? She turns around and says, “What have you done with him?” What does that mean? She turns to Jesus and says, “You’re the enemy.” Did you not hear it in the testimonies? Jesus gets in there and makes your life kind of chaotic, and you don’t realize it’s Jesus. In fact, you can turn to him and think he’s the enemy because of what’s going on, and you don’t see it’s Jesus. That’s how he starts. That’s how he brings us to faith. That’s how he begins the resurrection in us. 2. He calls her by name Who are you, really? What’s your identity? Do you know what they say? “You’re nobody till somebody loves you.” Remember that song? That’s theologically true, but on the human level that doesn’t work at all, because two human beings are both nobodies trying to become somebodies by getting somebody to love them. Think about this. When I try to find somebody to love me and that person is trying to find somebody to love them because we feel like nobodies and are nobodies until somebody loves us … So two nobodies trying to become somebodies, trying to get somebody to love us, but of course the person out there who we’re trying to get to love us is a nobody trying to get somebody to love them. You know what? We’ll all be killed. The only real Somebody, the only non-contingent being, the only Person (here’s the odd thing) who doesn’t need you who says, “You mean the world to me,” is Jesus. Jesus says to her, “Mary,” and she knows who she is. If you live for your work, your work will name you. You’ll get your identity, your name from your work. If you live for romance, your romance will name you. If you live for marriage, your marriage will name you. If you live for children … Whatever you live for. You get your identity, you get to know yourself, out of finding something bigger than yourself. But anything but Jesus is fickle. Your career will name you success now, but maybe next year it’ll say, “Failure.” Jesus comes … He’s the one Somebody who really is a somebody, somebody who doesn’t need you, somebody who still says, “You mean the world to me.” What I love about this is Jesus names her. Do you know what’s funny? She’s saying, “I don’t know where he is.” It doesn’t matter. He knows where she is. She says, “I don’t know who I am.” It doesn’t matter. He knows who she is. He comes to her, breaks through, gives her faith, gives her an identity. That’s the second part of the resurrected life. You say, “What does this resurrection mean?” It means the things that used to name you, the things from which you got your identity, no longer have that kind of power over you. The one who names you is no longer fickle. The one who names you is the real Somebody. It’s not another nobody trying to become somebody through your “nobodiness.” That’s resurrection. That’s psychological resurrection, and we see spiritual resurrection. 3. He gives her a new mission in life He says, “Go tell my brothers what has happened.” She has a new meaning in life. She goes to them and says, “I have seen the Lord.” Now she has something to live for. Anything else you live for is going to burn up when the sun burns up, and the sun will bun up eventually. Those things done for him will last forever and ever and ever. Don’t you want to do something that lasts? Don’t you want to have a mission that can’t fail? Don’t you want to change the world? Or are some of you getting old? Are you as old as I am? Remember when you were a kid and you wanted to change the world? Then you got a job. You can be a Christian and get a job and get very old and still know, “We can change the world.” “I have seen the Lord.” Now what does she have to do to receive this? I’ll tell you, and this is the thing I love. She stays. That’s the other thing I heard in these testimonies. Didn’t you hear that? She is totally confused. She is very upset. She has everything upside down, and she goes to the tomb and stays there. What is she doing? If you listen to the testimonies, you see this is basically the way it works. There’s always a process involved. There’s a lot of confusion when you’re coming to Christ. All you’re supposed to do … Mary does not have a moral record. She has a lousy moral record, by the way. She was demon-possessed and a prostitute. That’s a pretty bad record. She also didn’t have a lot of common sense at the time. She clearly was kind of out of control. She wasn’t wise. She wasn’t spiritual. She wasn’t moral. She wasn’t smart. She didn’t have discipline. There’s only one thing she had. She wanted to find Jesus, and with tears she sought him. She didn’t know which way to go. She got it all wrong. She says, “I’ll go get him.” Actually he has to go to her. She gets it all wrong. The one thing she knows … She goes to the last place she knew a truth. She went to the last place she found truth, and she stayed put until another truth came along. The resurrection life comes by you doggedly saying, “I don’t know which end is up. I just know I want him.” She wanted him, and she found him. Do you remember that story of the man who was blind and Jesus touches him and says, “Do you see right?” He says, “I see men, I think. They look like trees walking around. No, I don’t see right,” and Jesus touches him again. In other words, he admits, “I still don’t get it. I got it partly, but I still don’t get it.” What if the guy had said to Jesus, “Oh no, everything is fine,” and Jesus said, “Well fine, if you don’t need me.” There’s a process to finding Christ. Mary stayed. She stayed with tears. She stayed though confused. She stayed though she didn’t know what to do. All she knew is she had to find him. She was doing everything wrong, but she was trying. Those of you who have found him, don’t you remember you went through a period like this where you said, “Tell me what to do. Do I have to go pick him up and carry him? I’ll do anything.” Of course you found out all of the things you were trying to do were wrong, but the important thing was you said, “I still don’t see right.” You stayed near the last place you heard a truth. You stayed there. You sought him. You sought him with tears, and eventually he came to you and told you his name, and he told you your name. Jesus Christ will raise you even as his Father raised him. Let’s pray. Our Father, I thank you for the people who shared their spiritual resurrections tonight. I thank you that these same principles occurred in their lives too. They stayed put. They sought. There was a great deal of confusion. They tried to find him; he found them. They tried to do something to merit him; he came and broke through and saved them by grace. He called them by name, he gave them faith, and he gave them a new mission. We pray everybody in this room would experience that same resurrection, that same spiritual resurrection that comes through your Son. Oh, that we might know him and the power of his resurrection. We make the same prayer as Paul for ourselves and for everyone else here. We ask it in Jesus’ name, amen.

Testimony 1 (Tuesday)

Female: I pretty much fit the cultural stereotype of a New York Jew. I went to Dalton uptown here for 13 years, and then was a premed who went to law school. You get the idea. So I’m a pretty bizarre person to be standing up here telling you about my testimony with Christ. My story starts in the summer of my first year after law school when my immune system inexplicably fell apart. I became extremely susceptible to infection, I developed four autoimmune diseases, and I became allergic to everything. Not just pollens and molds and dander, but ink and perfume and pesticides and carpeting and paint. In fact, I pretty much became allergic to everything in the modern world. I went through years of conventional medical treatment and through the gamut of alternative treatments. I won’t list them here, but it included ozoning my blood, so you get the idea. After several years, I was even sicker. At the advice of my doctors I moved to more and more remote environments in order to feel better. I lived in a glass-lined room in rural Texas for over a year and in a foil-lined trailer in the Arizona high desert. During this time, I never met anybody who’d been healed completely by doctors, but every once in a while I met someone who said they’d been healed by Christ. This made me furious because I was Jewish, but it also made me curious enough to start reading the New Testament. After about a year of this, I came to the conclusion that Jesus was more than likely the Messiah to the Jews, so I said to him in a very tentative, intellectual way, “Father, if this is your Son, then I accept him as my Savior. If he isn’t, then please forgive me.” That was my conversion. Well, I got a lot sicker. In fact, I became intolerant of water and began to consider whether it was time to die, just end it all. At that point I met a Christian woman who told me she’d been prayed for for 16 years and only recently been healed of the same illness through prayer and repentance and forgiveness. A few years earlier I would have dismissed her as a kook, but at that point it made sense to me. So I started to read the New Testament in a new way, and I noticed that healing is a pretty common topic. In the Old Testament as well, but especially in the New. God does it a lot, and Jesus never turned away anyone who sought it. I also noticed we’re not always supposed to be passive in the process. We’re told to forgive, and then we shall be forgiven. Repent, and then we shall be healed. So I went through a time of searching myself, and repentance, and forgiveness of those I thought had wronged me. I also found a group of Christians to pray with me. They started to pray with me in January of ’92, and by April I was completely healed. After that there was not a trace of any of the four autoimmune diseases left in my blood tests, to the disbelief of my doctors. I lost all of my allergies, and I have to admit I love it when my colleagues at work now suffer with hay fever and I’m fine. I work at a job where I often work over 70 hours a week. My stamina is fine, and I’m rarely ill. People ask me if I have to watch what I eat or be protective of my health. I might have to live like that if I’d been healed by Smith, Kline & French, but he whom the Son has set free is free indeed. People often remark after hearing my story that I’m special, and that’s absolutely the wrong conclusion. I’m not so special. What God has done for me, he has done for everyone who accepts Christ. Christ redeems us from the pit and gives us a new life. Not just an eternal life, but in breaking bondages in our human life. My story is just a physical reminder of that.

Testimony 2: (Wednesday) Male: Hello, my life before coming to Christ could be described with one word: emptiness. Complete, utter, dark, deep, hopeless emptiness. I did just about anything to fill this terrible void. Mostly I drank. As I poured liquor into the emptiness in my life, it became deeper and darker. Eventually the loneliness and depression caught up with me. I started attending AA. However, I didn’t stop drinking, and the emptiness continued to get worse. There I was, broken and powerless, with the heavy, dark, oppressive weight of emptiness that had wedged itself into my very core. I cried out to God and said, “Lord, you said, ‘Seek and you shall find.’ Well I’ve been searching and I haven’t found anything.” I can’t attribute what happened next to anything except the providence of God. Like many a stranger to God before me, I reached up and opened the Bible and began reading the first words my eyes fell on, which began in Isaiah 40:28. “Do you not know? Have you not heard? Yahweh is an everlasting God. He created the boundaries of the earth. He does not grow tired or weary. His understanding is beyond fathoming. He gives strength to the weary. He strengthens the powerless. Young men may grow tired and weary, youths may stumble, but those who hope in Yahweh renew their strength. They put out wings like eagles. They run and do not grow weary, walk and never tire.” I read these verses over and over again. For the first time in my life I felt the healing power of God’s sovereign mercy. That night I knew I could put my hope in God. My wonderful friend who was witnessing to me about her relationship to Jesus Christ and the joy she now felt, invited me to Redeemer. I began attending with her. I felt like a deer caught in the headlights, or like a baby who has just opened his eyes and is seeing the world around him and all its wonders for the very first time. As I learned more about God, I learned more about myself. I began to recognize my problem was not just drinking, but my sin. Standing at a bus stop on 8th Avenue and 58th Street, the hot sun streaming down on the city, I was suddenly hit with the reality and enormity of my sin. Like a cockroach who’d been in the dark all of his life and had wandered onto a white kitchen counter when the lights were turned on, I froze. Where could I run to escape my sinfulness? For the first time I realized I didn’t have to run. Although my sin was exposed in God’s light, I was also in his love. I was the most loved cockroach in New York City, a cockroach who has been accepted into the family of the King. I no longer had to run. I know now that God sees me for who I am. He sees all my fallenness and all my flaws, and yet loves me so much I cannot begin to fathom it. I am God’s adopted son, Jesus is my older Brother, and I now have a family who prays and worships with me every week. My emptiness has been forever filled with love.

Testimony 3 (Thursday) Female: Hello, last Easter I was not a Christian, and I had no intention of ever becoming one. To me, being a Christian meant rules and rigidity, and above all it meant being boring and like everyone else. Throughout my life I ended up making it a constant goal to aspire to be different from everybody as a form of conscious rebellion. In third grade, I refused to learn how to write in script because I had already developed my unique style of handwriting, which was unlike everyone else’s, and I wasn’t going to change it. When it was time to go to college, I went to an arts college in Vermont that didn’t have grades or exams. When I was 21, I became a Buddhist. One of the sad lessons I learned in my pursuit of becoming more special than anyone else was in college when I realized there were other unique, creative, and different people in the world besides me. This realization broke my heart, and I found that instead of being inspired by being in a creative environment, I did not feel special enough to be able to create. I ended up not pursuing my creative interests. In the nine years since college, I found myself sinking into great despair. I was disappointed with my life, and I felt that my creative aspirations were only just a childish fantasy. What added to my despair was that I found myself, over the years, in a number of broken relationships. At this time last year I was in one of the most difficult relationships I’d ever been in. It caused me such pain that I found myself constantly searching for peace. During that period, I would spend my lunch hours in the chapel across the street from work, and I would just sit in silence there, focusing on the peace that surrounded me for relief from my anguish. Months went by of going to the chapel, and then one day last summer, someone at work told me about Redeemer, and I ended up going with her to one of the Sunday evening services, because I was interested in hearing what she described as “a really cool sermon.” When I heard the first of the many sermons I would hear Tim Keller give, I found myself stirred up in a strange way, and certain fragments of things would gradually sink in and make sense. It is these gradual understandings about Christianity that have kept me coming back to Redeemer, and I’ve been coming back ever since. The process of becoming a Christian has been a very strange experience. I think what got me first was the concept of having a relationship with God. As soon as I heard about having an intimate relationship with God, I started wanting to have one, and as soon as I felt this desire, I discovered what has been the most nourishing and beautiful aspects of my conversion. I discovered that my longing for a relationship with God, that the longing itself was satisfying, just as C.S. Lewis has described. I don’t think in my whole entire life I’ve ever been satisfied with longing for anything. Longing for sex has never satisfied me. Neither has longing for chocolate. But strangely enough, longing for God did satisfy me. How do you explain this? This is an example of one of those profound mysteries Christianity suddenly presents to you. I’ve also found that, although there are still so many unanswered questions, my new relationship with God is nourishing me in a way I’ve never experienced before. I look forward to the adventure that lies ahead. The other funny thing about Christianity is how, when I look back on my life, I can now understand more clearly why I desired for such a long time to be special. I now understand that my longing to be special was actually a longing for God. I’ve also realized that, in all of my strivings to be different, I was actually rebelling against belonging to this world. Now I see that, although I’m still living in this world as I did before, I do not belong to it as I did before. I now belong to God, and in belonging to God I’ve found, with great delight, that I’ve become a new creation, and a very special creation at that. Thank you. Male: Hi, we’ll be reading an anonymous testimony of a husband and wife. Female: “I grew up in a very strange and turbulent home. Alcoholic father, overwhelmed mother, seven siblings who all sought sanity in their own way: alcohol, drugs, sex, sports, whatever they believed would hold them together. I chose church. I knew at 8 years of age that I would find safety and sanctity at church. I knew Jesus was protecting me and loving me and always accepting of me. Yes, I knew Jesus was with me intellectually, but it would be years before I chose to know him as he knew me. I lived my life recklessly, unwilling to resist any temptation. Suffice it to say that much of my adolescence and young adult life is still a blur. Life did go on. I sobered up. I grew up. I went to college, got a job, fell in love, got married, and had children. Each day I thanked the Lord for my good fortune, for giving me the ‘normal life’ I’d always dreamed of. Jesus watched over me, this I knew. Marriage was not as idyllic as I had hoped. The wonderful, thoughtful, intelligent man I had fallen in love with had become a cocaine addict. Professionally, he had risen to a high level executive position in a Fortune 500 company. Personally, he sank to the lowest depth imaginable. He suffered his addiction, and we suffered the brunt of his anger. His abuse was his indifference, his impatience, and his inability to nurture his young children.” Male: “I was consumed with a dependency on drugs and alcohol. As far as I knew, no one could tell my life was being controlled by substance abuse. Even though professionally I was excelling, I was slowly destroying my spirit, mind, body, and threatening the loss of my family and life. At times of introspection and weakness I would sense God trying to get my attention, and I knew I could not get through my personal problems alone. I also began to admit that what I deemed as social use was really in fact a dependency on drugs and alcohol. I tried to stop, but the habits had formed over too many years.” Female: “In the midst of this havoc, my neighbor invited me to her mom’s fellowship group sponsored by Redeemer. It was at this group I was introduced to Christ in a new way. My relationship with Jesus had always been about me and about what Jesus would, could, and should do for me. It never crossed my mind this was supposed to be a reciprocal relationship. Intellectually again I knew Jesus was with me, but not until I let the Holy Spirit into my heart and accepted him as my Lord and Savior did I really know him. I haven’t the words to describe the moment I knew I wanted to give back to Jesus all of the love he had given to me. It was so glorious, so pure, and yet so simple. I so loved him; I wanted to tell the world. I told my husband over and over again. I told him how Jesus had come into my life just because I asked him to, plain and simple. I would read from the Bible, and he would roll his eyes in despair because his wife had become a Jesus freak. It didn’t matter though. I knew Jesus would take care of us. Over the months, the drug and alcohol abuse did not abate. He depleted our savings and sunk deeper and deeper into the darkness. I decided to leave, to take my children away before they could understand their father’s self-destruction. Our dear friends and neighbors encouraged me to stay. They said the Lord would want me to stay and try to change him with love, and that I pray for strength to forgive him, and that I make him accountable for what he was doing to his family. They knew, as I did not, that the Lord would be there. I figured they knew more about what would please Jesus, so I went home. I told my husband I loved him and that I would never leave him, and he broke down because of my forgiveness. I told him he needed to be accountable to me, to the Lord, and much to his chagrin, to our Redeemer neighbors. He told me he would never forgive me for telling them about our problems. He told me things would never be the same.” Male: “Our neighbor and I had been talking about faith in God through Christ. I was very open, but my desire for drugs was more compelling than my desire to know God. He had taken me to listen to a speaker share his faith, and it was there I really realized God could help, but a drug and alcohol dependency is not easy to break. I needed a catalyst to begin the process. My wife had threatened to leave me several times now because of sudden drops in our bank accounts and my promises to stop. Finally, through an intervention by my wife and this neighbor, I was finally ready to stop and learn how God could change my life. My neighbor offered to hold me accountable and help me know God and grow in my faith. We began to meet one on one and go through a foundation study on knowing God. I also began a program of prayer and Bible study each day and began attending Redeemer’s services. Being a methodical and logical individual, a formal and consistent approach was adopted, and thank God, it has worked. Each Redeemer service I attended even seemed to be designed just for me and what I needed to hear.” Female: “My husband is a Christian now. I’m not sure what went on when my neighbor approached him. They spent hours talking. He was right, though. With Christ in his life, things were never the same again.”

Testimonies 4 and 5 (Friday)

Male: “As I began to get to know Jesus Christ through the studies, prayer, church, and reading of the Scriptures, I really sensed the presence and the power of the Holy Spirit in my life. The wisdom and love in the Scriptures and messages I used to scoff at when my wife shared them with me I found to be inarguable. It was and is a beautiful experience, but also a challenging one in trying to balance my personal feeling of insignificance in God’s eyes but knowing I always had been and will be loved and forgiven. Mercy and grace in today’s world are not easy concepts to understand, let alone live by, but this is the core of what I now rely on as I continue to develop as a child in Christ’s kingdom. The difference Christ has made in my life is hard to describe at this point, but I’m beginning to understand his love for me. His words now guide me through life and are leading me to become a better person, husband, father, and even professional. I’m now at a point in my relationship with Christ where I’m learning how to yield to him and rely on his guidance, strength, and support. I’ve been sober since the intervention and receiving Christ in my life. He really is a Lord and Savior and has answered all of my and my family’s prayers. I’ve yielded my life to him, and he has become a driving force of existence for me I never imagined could be so loving, peaceful, and consuming.” Female: “He has become the most loving, most involved father I know. His children no longer fear him. They seek him out. They look to him for comfort, for love, for guidance. He is by far their favorite person to be with. This is a far cry from the children who would whisper to me that they wanted a new daddy, someone who liked children. Now I look at my husband and I see the man I fell in love with 10 years ago. Our family is again strong and safe and secure. We know it’s only through the power and majesty of the Holy Spirit that our lives have become whole again.”

Testimony 5

Female: In 1993, two and a half years ago, I became a Christian. This story is going to focus on how in the world that came to happen. I begin the story four years earlier. The year is 1989. That was the year I met my friend. She called herself a Christian. What a strange word. I was 37 years old, and I had never met anyone who called themselves a Christian, but I had heard about Christians on the news, so I knew they were part of a dangerous political party. “Oh no,” I said to her when she told me. “You must be mistaken. You seem like a pretty cool person.” I all but put my hand over her mouth, because we were in a downtown gym at the time when we met, and the gym was full of healthy, liberal-minded people like myself. What if they heard her? “But I am,” she insisted, “and it’s not political. It means I love God, my Savior, Jesus Christ.” Again, I tried to help her. “Please. Don’t call God that.” I was full of sincerity, and I was concerned for her. Surely she didn’t realize what she was saying. Surely she didn’t know who she was lining herself up with. She and I didn’t have much in common outside of the gym, but we were both regular gym-goers, so we saw each other every morning at 6:00 a.m. five days a week. Bit by bit I poured my soul out to her, and she began to perceive how much pain I was in. She listened to me with extreme kindness as if she loved me, as if she really cared. So I tried to extend a more rounded friendship to her. I invited her to join me sometimes in a downtown rally, helping to defend an abortion clinic, or at one of the many parties I gave, but she always said, “No,” and within her explanation I came to see how different we were. Some of her beliefs angered me, but she was very intelligent, and she seemed to have a great deal of information and insight about people and about life. We ended up discussing a lot of issues that touched both of us deeply, and although she clearly disagreed with me about many things, she never became cruelly angry with me, the way I wanted to with her. She watched me go off to fight battles in the world, in my personal life and in my professional life, and they always ended up in frustration for me. Yet somehow I sensed she was not surprised. She seemed to know better than I what was going on. So I continued to talk with her about my hurts, my fears, my friends, my lovers, about my causes and my beliefs, about my homosexuality, about my heterosexuality, my artwork and the art world. I watched her go through a lot of struggles too, but she always trusted in that God of hers. One day she gave me a Bible. I was mortified. It was big and it was red and it wouldn’t fit inside my gym bag. But she’d been listening to me for well over a year by then, so this Book, this Bible, this unwanted gift, well, I just couldn’t refuse it. I saw something else in Leslie that day. She loved that Book. She presented it to me with such joy and delight. In giving that Bible to me it was like she was giving me a part of herself. Of all the things she said to me, one thing I remember above all else. She told me in no uncertain terms that God loved me. It would make me cry. I said to her, “I’m sure you believe that God of yours loves you, and I’m sure he could love you, but he could never love me. You have no idea. He could never love me.” By now almost four years have gone by, and we’re back to the year 1993. I haven’t told you why I was in so much pain and why my world was falling apart. In short, I was 41 years old and life had never really made any sense to me. Who are we all, and why are we spinning around on this little planet, killing each other, accumulating things, and waiting to die? So you see, it wasn’t so much circumstances. I had love, but I ached. I had work and a career, but I was angry and frustrated. I had friends and health, but it wasn’t enough. The real truth was I just wanted off this planet really badly. My friends and my family would have been shocked to have found the note I wrote. The note said this: “I’m very sorry. I know I misled you, but I am profoundly unhappy. I know I said that beauty was worth living for. I know I implied that the mysteries of life were great fuel for my art, but the truth is I am not strong enough to handle this despair any longer. I am afraid all the time. I am losing my ability to hide my true self. I am very ugly inside, and I do not want any of you to see the horror that I know.” So you see, when she told me about this God of hers, I was very far from knowing him, but he was not very far from me. Right after I wrote that suicide note, I professed to her that I was hopelessly lost. Instead of reacting with grief or panic as I thought she should have, she put her arm out to me, and there was love in her voice as she invited me to come to church with her. Church? You know, I thought that was a preposterous idea. How in the world was a church going to help me? But I said, “Okay.” The following Sunday I attended Redeemer Presbyterian Church with her. I felt self-conscious. I was uncomfortable with all the singing, and I couldn’t really understand what they were talking about. At one point a tall gangly-looking guy named Jeff White announced he was about to begin teaching a series of classes called “Discovering Christianity.” The description of the classes caught my attention, so the following week I attended “Discovering Christianity.” I could never have predicted what followed. Jeff White began explaining answers to questions I had never thought of asking. What really surprised me was that everything he taught he substantiated in objective facts and truth. I was amazed. I knew I was hearing things that were remarkable. I knew somehow too that what I was hearing was more important than anything I had ever been taught before. I heard that Jesus Christ was real, a historical figure who really had walked this earth, and he truly did call himself God, thereby making him either a lunatic, a liar, or who he said he was. “But how could that be?” I kept thinking. “If he really called himself God, if by chance he was, why wouldn’t the whole world know about this? Why would I have never heard about it before?” What happened next was beyond my imagination. Shortly thereafter, in the middle of the night while struggling with my usual despair, I remembered some of Jeff White’s words. He said, “If Jesus ever comes into your heart, ask him to stay. He will lock the door from the inside, and he will never leave.” So right then and there in the middle of the night I said right out loud, “Jesus, I know you’re real. Please come into my heart, and please lock the door from the inside and don’t ever, ever leave.” Forty-one years of scales fell from my eyes as Jesus Christ took me from despair into joy, from human defeat into eternal hope. You should have seen me the next morning after Christ came into my life. Nothing describes it better than the way Charles Dickens describes Ebenezer Scrooge that Christmas morning. I wanted to run out into the streets and tell everyone what it was like to become brand new. I wanted to shout, “There is eternity! Jesus is real! He’s exactly who he said he was! God exists!” I grabbed that big red Bible she had given me months earlier, the one I had never been able to read. I opened it up, and I could not put it down. Who is Jesus Christ? He is my Lord and my God. Now I know what that love was I saw in her all those years. Her God, whose name is Jesus, told her to love her neighbor as herself. I was her neighbor. I was different from her. My ways and my language surely could have put her off, but she loved me as Christ calls us to love. Christ has chosen to put his treasure in earthly vessels, jars of clay. How can we make his love be known? Like she did for me. For four long years she was a vessel. She set herself aside and let Christ love me through her. She listened to me instead of judging me. She had compassion instead of hate. She knew God’s love.

Saturday: Testimony your most identified with or resonated with and why: