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I've been meaning to write my testimony and put it up here for quite a while now but I just haven't done it, why I don't know, but I'm doing it now. Some people have these really impressive testimony's about how they lived so deep in sin since they were like 3, starting with drinking and they ended up killing their family and all this junk and then got saved and totally changed, well, I don't have one like that, but I could have. I have lived in a Christian home all my life and since before I was born I went to church, it's been a large part of my life in many ways. I have been home schooled since the first grade, so it is where I made friends, it's where I went on Sunday morning and nights, Wednesday nights, and whenever else there was something going on at the church we were almost always there. When I was eight years old I made a profession of faith, I accepted Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior in my life and I asked for forgiveness of my sins. That was the Saturday before Easter in 1998, the next morning I walked the aisle and made my decision public. Shortly after that I was baptized. Now, I was eight, I really didn't completely understand what had happened in my life, I knew that I loved God, I knew that I was going to Heaven, I knew that I was forgiven for my sins (At the time I thought that was stuff I had already done, kid things like lying to my parents about something and stuff like that,) and I knew that I was supposed to live like a Christian. But I didn't fully understand it. I have always strived in some way to serve God and to obey His will, but I have always fallen short. About the time I was 9 I went to a R.A. camp and during the decision service the last night there I went forward and rededicated my life to God. The next year it was basically the same thing. By the next year I began to realize that God wanted more and I made a commitment to full-time Christian ministery, not that I knew what that was. Time passed and I basically forgot about my commitment, I remembered I had made it but I thought it really didn't matter, perhaps later in my life, after I was an adult, then it would matter, or maybe I had made a mistake, maybe God didn't want me to serve Him full time. Well, as I grew older and became a teenager I began to fall away from God. I rarely prayed on my on and I read the Bible even less. Now, most people when they reach this age tend to be ashamed of their Christianity and they sometimes act like they aren't Christians when they are with their friends, but I was different. See, when I was 10 my family moved to seminary, a theology school, a place where people go to become pastors and music ministers and missionaries and other people in the monastery, so I was surrounded by Christians there, and since I was home schooled I had no non-Christian school friends, all my friends were from church or lived on the seminary. So I had peer pressure or adult-pressure to be a Christian, so that's what I was, on the outside at least. On the inside I was rotting and decaying. I knew that my life was not right, I knew that I needed to be closer to God, every summer I would make a commitment or rededication of some sort on some mission trip or at some revival, but it never happened. I would commit to read my Bible for so many minutes a day or daily for so many days, but I would usually get through a week and then start to fall away again and within a month I was usually back to where I had been before. Sometime around the age of 14 or 15 I became involved in a sin, I won't say what that sin is and it doesn't need to be known, all that needs to be known is that I was deeply involved in it and couldn't get out. This sin held me captive and when I would try to get out I couldn't, I was trapped. It ate away at my life and eventually I stopped even trying to break free from it, though I did keep trying to grow closer to God, but now, more than ever, it was useless, I couldn't get anywhere. If I was moving at all it was further away from God. Still on the outside I kept up the facade of being a great Christian, I began to take on leadership positions in the youth groups I was involved in and I think that a lot of people thought I was a real strong Christian. I got on the internet sometime in late 1995 and began to get on the IRC, or Internet Relay Chat. I found a chatroom that I felt comfortable in and starting coming there regularly. The people weren't that bad, most of them were Christians, or said they were, and the others were relatively good. Sure, they would cuss occasionally, but it wasn't that bad. Then I started going to another chatroom that wasn't quite as clean but still not too bad, they cussed often, but.. does it really matter? I mean, it's just a word or two, there's no real harm. They talked about stuff that wasn't all that great either. And I didn't realize it, but Satan had begun to gain a foothold in another area of my life. Another area of my life that he had taken over in my life was music. I got tired of the music they played on the Christian radio station in New Orleans, it was either stuff I had been hearing for years of it was boring to me, so I started listening to secular radio. For two years I listened to secular radio, and that's all I listened to. This combined with the friends that I was making on the internet was taking my thoughts off of God and on to worldly things. Sometime in the fall of 1996 I heard about a radio show that our Christian radio station was getting, ZJam. ZJam is a radio show for teens that plays really awesome Christian music, rock, alternative, ska, anything that's cool. So I started listening to it and I started chatting on the chatroom. I was hooked. I started chatting there all the time and stopped going to the other chatrooms that I frequented at the time. I made new friends, Christian friends, I lost contact with a lot of my old internet friends and I had a lot less contact with the others. Things in my life had begun to change for good. But everything wasn't quite right yet. I was still not reading my Bible or praying, and there was still a sin in my life. I stopped listening to the secular music though and that helped a lot. Then ZJam had a ‘block party' in New Orleans in 1997 and the DJ, Bill Scott, was the speaker, he talked about being spiritually mature and needing solid food, not baby food. He talked about needing to get rid of the sin in our lives. This really spoke to me and was the first major turning point in my spiritual life as a teenager. The first of many. That summer our church went to Centrifuge and I really felt God calling me back to Him and I gave Him my life. And God spoke to me again that summer through some of the songs we sang in the all state choir. But shortly afterwards I was back to where I had been before. Things stayed pretty much the same in my life until the spring of 1998. One Monday I was talking with a friend of mine, Carey, and he told me that he had received revival in his life. He had asked God for revival and he had given God his life. He was urging me to do the same, I told him I needed to think and pray and I went for a walk, I ended up at the prayer room on the seminary and went in and prayed, I begged God for revival and then I realized, I have to give Him control of my life if He is going to be able to revive me. It was hard for me but I gave Him control. God is awesome, I am listening to this CD by Mercy Me as I type this and as I get to the part about giving God control I hear these lyrics, "Take my life and form it, take my mind transform it, take my will conform it to yours oh Lord." So I did that, I gave Him control of my life, I said, "God I give you my life, do with it as You will." And each morning I would pray that and read a short passage in the Bible. Everything went well for about a month and then once again I began to fall away. What I didn't realize is there was still a sin in my life that I hadn't taken care of, I kept going back to it, it still had a hold on me. It wasn't until recently that I confessed that sin to a good friend of mine, no one else knew about it. He urged me to tell my dad and as hard as it was for me to do, after much prayer, I told my dad and he has been praying for me, as has my friend, and others. Through this and the accountability that my dad and friend have given me I have begun to break down the stronghold this sin had in my life. I have begun to grow closer to God and have loved it! Also I have re-realized my call to ministry. When I was turning my life over to God daily I realized that God had called me into ministry, even when I was ten, even when I was four and used to say I was going to be a preacher when I grew up. And it really became clear to me that God wanted me in some kind of ministry when I started to look for a college and choose a major. Over the past ten years that I have been saved I have grown spiritually in knowledge and maturity, I have learned that I need to seek God and not just seek His will with all my heart, because if you seek Him He will make His will known to you. I have learned that I need to let God have control and He will bring me to Him. I have learned that if there is a secret sin in my life that I need to find someone to tell it to, in the book of James chapter 5 verse 16 says, "Therefore confess your sins to each other and pray for each other so that you may be healed." (NIV) These are just a few of the things I have learned in the past ten years. I have also learned that we never stop learning, God is always teaching us something new, and sometimes He has to continue to teach us the same thing over and over because we never get it into our hard heads. I pray that this helps you in your walk with God in some way, and if you do not know Him I pray that He will speak through this to you and will bring you to Himself. If you have any questions feel free to e-mail me, I am always glad to try to answer them as best I can, and I will pray for you of course. God bless. Nick Gosey |
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