When I reached my teenage years and went to High School my sin really started to become manifest. I began to despise authority and in many ways rebelled. The Apostle Paul said to Titus a fellow believer “For we ourselves were also once foolish, disobedient, deceived, serving various lusts and pleasures, living in malice and envy, hateful and hating one another” Titus 3:3; this reminds me of myself during those times, I was truly wallowing in the mire of my sin. Once I left High School I went to college in order to study Music Technology as I desired to go into the music industry, possibly to become a sound engineer. Around this time I started to visit the clubs where the music scene was and this was where I began to build my idols. I was totally deceived and spent the next few years chasing one idol to the next. My hedonistic and sinful lifestyle soon caught up with me, my empire of sin began crashing down on me and I felt as though I was being crushed. I was in pain and wracked with fear and anxiety. It felt as though my mind was broken and there was no turning back. In many ways I knew my soul was in trouble and I felt the guilt of my;

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;

I was born and raised in a middle-class family in the Netherlands. My father was a naval engineer but worked in project management and technical coordinator jobs. My mother was a schoolteacher, and she taught me how to read and write in elementary school. As a child, I served as an altar boy in the Roman Catholic church and later as a musician in youth choirs. From an early age, I have always believed that God existed, but, in hindsight, never knew you could have a personal relationship with Him. Early January 2012, my mother passed away after suffering from cancer for almost one and a half years. Optimistic as I was, I remember telling my mother to stay positive, but frankly, she was the most optimistic person amongst us. A few months later, in 2012, my best friend asked me to attend a service at a charismatic evangelical church out of curiosity, and we were both not even Christians. On that day, my life started to change radically for the better. I started attending church services faithfully and, although the charismatic movement had its downsides (I changed church three times in seven years), it was the beginning of my journey in faith. Soon after, the Lord provided me with a 400-year-old house in the city centre of Leiden, and;

I have always believed in God and the sacrifice the Lord Jesus Christ made for sinners, but I did not live my life as though this was personal to me.  I made a mess of my life whilst doing my own thing and this included a marriage breakdown and subsequent divorce. However, I told myself that I would go back to church in my 70s or 80s before I died – what a ridiculous notion!!  What if I had died in my sins and not in Christ before I reached my old age?  Indeed, what if the Lord Jesus Christ had returned before my twilight years? The story I am going to tell now is about my journey back to God. One evening I received a phone call telling me of some tragic and very upsetting news.  The news was that an eighteen-year-old girl I knew had gone home that afternoon to find that her mum had taken her own life – her mum had hung herself.  This was a direct result of sin as her mum had found out that her husband had been having an affair and she just could not cope.  It really is no wonder that God hates sin; it often has damaging consequences for ourselves and others and our sin certainly offends God. Although I;

I was privileged to have been brought up in a Christian home. However, it wasn’t until I was about 15 that I began to believe that everything I had heard was true. It was a gradual realisation, a work of the Holy Spirit, that God was telling me I needed to be living for and loving Him.  I became aware of my failings and faults and realised that only Jesus’ sacrifice could put things right between God and me. It was at this time I was baptised. I would love to say that I continued growing in faith from then on, but the truth is very different. When I was about 20 years old, I decided that maybe I should live my life my own way, not the way that God wanted.  I fooled myself into thinking that, although I still believed in God, I didn’t need to go to church or to follow Him anymore. God wouldn’t miss me, I thought, and I didn’t need Him.  How foolish I was. One night when I was about 22, whilst I was working in a Building Society in South London, I had a nightmare about being in an armed raid. Which was not unsurprising. However, the following morning I went to work as usual and at about 2 o’clock that afternoon;

 From my earliest days I remember hearing God’s word preached faithfully & was taught to memorise scripture & particularly loved singing hymns. There was no question in my mind that God was great and powerful, but I didn’t know Him to be ‘my’ God until many years (& many terrible choices) later! When I hit my mid teens, I no longer had a network of church friends, as my dad had taken up a pastorate on the outskirts of Cardiff, and the great love of my heart became very obvious: myself. After many attempts at a ‘conversion experience’ I decided Christianity was devoid of real power & went off in search of real pleasures! Like the prodigal, I went to the far off land & squandered my Father’s many blessings. I walked away; He remained unmoved, steadfast & determined that His word would not return to Him void. I have no doubt that the prayers of my parents followed me into the many dark places and seasons I walked during that decade. There were moments of very real spiritual awareness, and times where specific verses and hymns would come to my mind, out of the blue! At 25, I had already begun the long journey back from that ‘far off land’ but on the 10th October 2009, my Father ran;

I began coming to a saving knowledge of Christ during my first year of University. Reading Psalm 22, the words started to carry weight, which I had never experienced from the Bible before. Of course, I did not understand the words much at first, but I continued to be drawn to them like a magnet and began studying them to discover their meaning. Martin Luther once described his experience of understanding the letter of Romans like savagely beating on its doors until it opened up its meaning. Similarly, I applied myself to Psalm 22, and it was during this time God began drawing me to Himself. However, I continued to live for myself, but my religious facade had begun to show its cracks. A series of seemingly insignificant circumstances of rejection proved to be like a hammer to my pride. God was making me sensible of my sinful nature. This gracious wounding of my pride made me miserable as I continued to cling to my self-righteous life. God kept exposing my arrogance, and I kept quickly trying to cover it up. I would go to bed bothered why such thoughts had entered my mind and where they came from, yet I couldn’t deny their truthfulness. Other times, I would go to bed exhausted of my spiritual restlessness. I was tired of;

I was born in Southampton and my family and I moved to Cheshire when I was 7 years old as my Dad took a new job at the Christie Cancer Hospital. I am the youngest of 3 children and we were very fortunate to grow up with not only loving Christian parents but all 4 grandparents’ firm believers also. Growing up we went to church as a family and I remember also praying and reading the bible and Christian books often with my parents. Despite this, my siblings and I often spent Sunday lunches in particular bickering and trying to disprove God’s existence. This was understandably the cause of great difficulty and sadness for my mum and dad who had been so consistently loving and had tried so hard to help us understand. Eventually my older brother and sister stopped coming to church with us but Mum and Dad encouraged me to still come and perhaps knew deep down that I desperately wanted a real relationship with God. I attended many youth weekends away with the church and always felt encouraged and motivated to read my bible more and understand God. As many new Christians do, I started by reading Genesis but a few chapters in I felt entirely puzzled and confused. I constantly had doubts about whether God was;

In my early teenage years, I started to ponder on many difficult questions about the world and our existence and if there is any God out there who created us. At the time I had never heard the true gospel. I have a Catholic family background and I attended a majority Muslim school and so that influenced me to believe that God is someone we are supposed to win over through our works. I knew nothing of salvation through faith alone. I would have probably described myself as agnostic although I certainly lived my life as if there is no God. I lived solely for my own pleasures and with little regard for others because my heart was not right with God. With time I started to see a lot more evil around me. It became apparent that the world was filled with hate, selfishness, and sexual immorality. Although I didn’t believe in God at that time, I knew that this wasn’t what I wanted the world to be like and so I began to search for answers. At first, I believed we could create a better world through our own efforts, as I didn’t see that sin is inherent to our nature and I always blamed others for everything that’s wrong in the world because I didn’t know of;

I was raised in Nigeria by Christian parents. I grew up hearing about Jesus, about his life and death on the cross. I grew up hearing that forgiveness for sin is found by trusting in Jesus and looking to him for salvation. Yet, I was, as a child, apathetic toward him. Christ’s call to obedience in his word was met with indifference. I was raised in a wider culture that saw the gospel as a tool for self-exaltation. Coming to Jesus meant getting my heart’s desires. It meant becoming wealthy, healthy, prosperous. Jesus meant, to me, a way to satisfy my idols. I thought, if I ‘trust’ him, I would never fall ill; I would get whatever I desired in life. I was wrong. I had a convoluted view of God. I saw God, not as my creator, the eternal, holy One through whom I live and move and have my being. I saw him as a distant, cold, detached figure ‘out there’. To me, he demanded obedience, and I would try to give it if I received my idols in response. It was merely a transaction. At the bottom of all this, I would come to realise, was not only an unbiblical view of God, but also a deficient view of man. I did not see God aright and,;