Jesus Christ, My Only Hope

I was born and raised in Liverpool and grew up in a Catholic home. My Mum would tell me and my siblings stories from the Bible and we occasionally went to mass together, especially during Christmas and Easter.

Because of my upbringing, I pretty much believed that I knew God and that I was okay as I was. I would think that because I believed God existed and prayed sometimes and went to mass often I was right with Him.

When I was in my teens the gospel was witnessed to me a few times. I specifically remember a girl around my age asking me where I was going when I die and I couldn’t say that I was going to heaven so I replied, “I don’t know.”

By the time I was 17, I began to feel burdened about the life that I was living. As a teenager, there was nothing about my life that gave God glory. I was truly living a sinful life. It was almost as if the more I indulged in sin as a way to silence the conviction, the more convicted and burdened I became. At this point in my life, I knew that I wasn’t right with God.

I then began to clean up my life and stopped doing the things that I knew were sinful before God. I started going to a Christian church, reading the Bible, praying, evangelising and doing a lot of good things. I somehow thought that if I did all of these things that I would have peace with God but the whole time I was trying to be a good person without Jesus Christ. I was trusting in my works to be saved and not in Jesus Christ alone.