My Testimony

From Heathen, to the Thorns, to The Good Soil

I thought that the best way to start is to tell you about my spiritual journey thus far.

My Youth

I was born into a non-Christian home, the youngest of six children. I have four sisters and a brother, none of which know Jesus.

My mother was a non-driving housewife with no ambition to be otherwise. She loved me and my siblings with acts of service. My father was an Accountant at a local chemical factory. Mum and dad were not particularly sociable, with rare visits to uncles and aunts in my childhood. We were quite insular.

My dad became the town drunk during my youth, and I remember several occasions when he smashed cars while drunk. I became a keen golfer in my teens and practiced every day after school until sunset at the local golf course.

Golf became an outlet to insulate me from the reality of a fatherless life. Dad was drunk nearly every night and Saturday at bowls, so he never really took much of an interest in my golfing prowess.

He worked at the same place for over 40 years, then one day he was gone and disappeared for over a week. We found out later that he had an addiction to not only alcohol but to poker machines. He embezzled a lot of money from the local bowling club (he was the Treasurer) to feed his habit. He was so embarrassed he left home and tried to drink himself to death. He could not even do that properly.

I was about 16 when this all blew up. He managed to straighten up a bit and support Mum for a few years but died aged 63 from a massive heart attack. He was also a chain smoker. He was lucky he lasted as long as he did really.

I have now forgiven him for his lack of leadership in my life, but it took a while.

Young Adulthood

I met my first girlfriend at 18 and had my first sexual experience with her in the front seat of my Ford Escort. Wow! I fell in lust and we married soon after. She was a great young lady with a great functional family. Maybe I was in love with what she had.

In my early twenties, I was unfaithful many times to my great shame. My marriage ended when my infidelity was discovered. I started another serious relationship with a lady 7 years my senior who was 6 months pregnant when we got married.

Around this time, one of my best mates growing up became a Christian. I thought he had gone mad, but my heart was hard towards God. We saw each other now and then thereafter, but nothing lasted. He found a different course.

My new wife and I moved a lot. We moved to Perth, built a house for the kids, got homesick, and moved back to the north coast of NSW and raised our 2 sons and daughter.

Then one fateful night after work driving home into Ballina, a seven-year-old girl walked straight in front of my car on the main road. She came from the clouds it seemed and she didn’t make it through the night. She died of internal injuries including a ruptured spleen.

That night changed the course of my life. I lost it for a while. I could not work, and when I went back I was useless. So my wife and I decided to move back to Sydney where the family would help me get my life together. My wife decided that I would move first to establish myself in work, and she and the family would follow.

What a fool I was.

I did my part of the deal, but when it was time for her and my family to move, she decided not to come and we divorced sometime later. I found out later from the kids that she was having an affair with one of her colleagues.

Before I left Ballina, I was placing my kids on the school bus one morning when my neighbor from a few doors up was also putting his kids on the bus. We had not met, so we introduced ourselves and he invited me in for a coffee. He was in a wheelchair, so I asked questions about his circumstances. He became a paraplegic following a bike accident in Dubbo some years ago. He began explaining how doctors had said he could not have children following the accident, but God had intervened to provide him with his 3 kids. I was struck by his calmness and willingness to talk about it to a total stranger.

This conversation was my first serious discussion about a loving Jesus that could make miracles happen. It changed my life.

Jesus Found Me

When back in Sydney, I enrolled for a University degree in Accounting, and in my first class I met a young guy from Queensland who shared with me his faith in Jesus. He introduced me to a faith Pastor that led teams in India on missions, and he shared with me much about the miracles he had witnessed.

I was hooked.

About a year later, I committed to Jesus and was baptized. This was around 35 years ago now, and my spiritual journey has been very cyclical. I completed my degree and built a career in sales in the IT industry. I met a girl in my first home group meeting that became my wife and we have 3 boys together to add to my other 3.

My First Church

I was baptized at Northside Community Church in Crows Nest Sydney, a church modeled very much on Pastor Robert Schuller’s The Crystal Cathedral. Northside was a “name it and claim it” style church with no stained glass windows or turned collars, great contemporary worship music (entertainment), and being a young businessman, this message resonated with me.

I believed that Jesus was my sugar daddy. All I had to do was pray for my heart’s desires and the heavens would open and bless my every want. I became very disappointed when this did not happen. I attended church every Sunday, participated in men’s groups and home groups, and read my Bible often. What more could I do?

I was into God for what I could get, not what I could give. When I gave, I expected blessings to come my way.

What a pathetically weak form of Christianity I had been inducted into. After conversion, I got on with my life as normal, fully expecting God to show up and bless me when needed.

The Refreshing

After about 30 years of this at various churches including Hillsong (I am a very slow learner), God arrested me one day when I was at a spiritually low point. God used The Lord’s Prayer sung by Andrea Boccelli to stop me in my tracks and refresh me spiritually. I was a blubbering mess that day and repented my unbelief. Since that Sunday afternoon, the scriptures have come alive for me and God has blessed me with a fantastic capacity to understand and bring alive Scripture.

I am now a semi-retired truck driver with a caravan, tripping the highways with my wife as much as possible seeing this great Australian landscape, and writing about the Kingdom of God as often as possible.

I feel I have just begun my life.

I am enthused by God every day and cannot wait to see how I can help others move from the thorny ground and reach the good soil.

Matthew 13:22-23 TLV “But the one sown among the thorns, this is the one who hears the word; and the worries of the world and the seduction of wealth choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful. (23) “Now the one sown on the good soil, this is the one who hears the word and understands. He indeed bears fruit, yielding a hundredfold, some sixty, some thirty times what was sown.”

The Whole Gospel

I spent the vast majority of my 35-year Christian journey in the thorns. I believe this is due to only recognizing half of the gospel message. The allure of the good bits, the undeserved forgiveness of sins by grace, is a beautiful message to one as riddled with sin as I was.

However, repentance means that we change the way we think. The Greek word we translate as “repent” is metanoia, which means to go back to the highest level of thinking. “Meta”, as in metadata, means the highest level, and “noia” means thought. Our English word “repent”, and “re” means to go back to, as in redo or repeat, and “pent” as in penthouse, the highest level apartment.

We are led to believe by most of our sermonizers that repentance is the confession of our sins and asking God for forgiveness.

So if repentance is feeling sorry for my sins, a big tick for me.

However, changing my life to exercise faith and living from the faith of Jesus; was a big cross.

I only had half the gospel.

James 4:4 TLV You adulteresses! Don’t you know that friendship with the world is enmity with God? Therefore whoever wishes to be a friend of the world makes himself an enemy of God.

The above verse had never made an impact on me until after my refreshing. I will expand on this more in my regular postings.

The Future

I see myself as a tool for the unification of our faith under Jesus, bringing all Christianity together under the authority of Christ Jesus and His Word.

The world is hurtling towards the end of the age, and our churches and their attendees are, in the main, ill-prepared.

Let us all pursue God with all our hearts, minds, and strength; and love all mankind as ourselves. These are the simple commands of Jesus.

Why do we complicate it?

Come Yeshua of Nazareth, come!