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Adult Testimonies

Audrey’s Testimony

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This story shows how God works in different ways to bring people to Him.  Audrey was a  middle aged home help and addicted to smoking, coffee and T.V. She never gave God  a thought.  She began  working for an elderly God-fearing lady. This lady never spoke to Audrey about her faith, but Audrey saw the Bible beside her bed, and noticed  her gentle loving manner.

     One day she gave Audrey a CD  of  testimony to take home and listen to. As usual that evening, Audrey immediately turned the T.V. on, made her coffee and lit a cigarette. Before going to bed, she decided to listen to the CD, and heard the speaker tell how God had given him the strength to give up smoking. She thought, “If God did that for him, perhaps He could do it for me too!”

    Waking up the next morning, she didn’t think of her cigarettes once. After a while, she thought in wonderment, “I haven’t had a smoke yet!” and stretched her hand out for the packet. While taking the first breath of smoke, she found it was utterly horrid to her, and she  threw it down. Twice more she tried to smoke with the same result.  After this, she never smoked another cigarette. She took the CD  back, not telling the lady of her experience.

     Shortly afterwards, her daughter arrived back from Australia and stayed with her. Usually they wouldn’t be together  for five minutes without verbally sparring with each other. But this time, Audrey held her tongue when her daughter baited her.  “What’s happened to you Mum?” she asked “You’re different!”  Without even stopping to think, Audrey replied, “It’s the love of Jesus”.  With that confession of the name of Jesus, the light dawned on her soul, and Audrey was never the same again.  She found she had a totally different outlook on life. Now she wanted to be with other Christians, and to go to church services….something she had never done before. She wanted to learn what was in the Bible, and found it was a really interesting book to read….she just couldn’t put it down.

     Audrey had heard vaguely about Moses….after all they had made a film about the story of crossing the Red Sea, but she had no idea what led up to it. Of course she had heard something about a boy called David killing a giant, but she didn’t have a clue exactly what happened. Then there was the story of the whale swallowing Jonah, but she had thought that no-one with any sense would take any notice of a story like that! But now she read in the New Testament that Jesus had said it really had happened.                        Every page she read opened her understanding further. She couldn’t get enough of it. As she read the book of Psalms, she found to her amazement that David was just like we are because sometimes he was terribly happy and other times he was right down in the dumps. She found that Peter was always opening his mouth and putting his foot in it. He never knew when to shut up!                                                                                                                     

    Then there was that young man called Saul who hated the early Christians so much that he was dragging them off to prison and if he could,  he would have their heads chopped off. Yet one day God called out to him from the sky, and he fell to the ground. When he got up he found he  was blind. He knew that it was Jesus Himself who had called out to him. Then there was the man who went to him and touched his eyes, making him see again. What a difference it made to  him once  he believed in Jesus and began to preach about him!  Audrey knew she was like every one of those people, and she knew that what God had done for them, He would do for her!    We see from this that God treats each one of us as individuals….He has made each person unique and He deals with each one of us according to our needs. Yet there is only one way to Him even though there are many different ways He brings us to this point, and that is through the Lord Jesus Christ. Our understanding may be limited, but we must be willing to accept Him and His way.

Adult Testimonies

Where Would YOU Be?

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       A very dear friend of ours went to be with the Lord last Sunday. It was most unexpected although we had seen that he was gradually losing weight and getting more feeble as the months went by. We can’t always choose the way we go, but we CAN choose where we go! You might ask how a person can be so sure of this.

Bill had lived a hard life, and was a real he-man. He had gone in for chopping competitions in his younger years and had worked his way up to being the New Zealand champion for some years….a fact that he very rarely talked about in later years. “That belongs to the old life”, he would say with a wry grin, and go on to talk of other things.

He had put everything he had into his axe chopping training and other things, including his family, had taken second place. It wasn’t until his wife nearly died after the birth of their youngest child, that he stopped to think about what would happen if he died. But like so many people, he brushed the thought aside.

He came across a young man in the course of his work, who would periodically sidle up to him and talk about the Bible. After some months of this, Bill began to wonder if there was really something in all of this. Around the same time, a Christian worker began to visit them in their home, and Bill became convicted of his need to do something about all this talk.

Meantime, his wife had turned to the Lord and was quietly, in her own way, showing him the difference in her life. One day, he was out in the bush in the course of his work, and really felt that God was with him there. He remembered a Bible story he had heard about a woman who obeyed what God told her and as a result she was able to save all her family from a  sure disaster. He knew then that he could run away from God no longer, and so there in the bush, he confessed that he needed God in his life.

From then on, Bill was a different man. He showed love to his family in a way that he hadn’t before, and all his friends could see the difference in him. He left his job as he had a strong urge to devote himself to working with disadvantaged children and so they moved north to another area and took over running a children’s home for some years. After he retired, he then took up delivering Sunday School lessons to children in out of the way places.

As he grew older, a lot of Bill’s friends and relations started dying off, and at the funeral services, Bill was often asked to speak. Being rather shy, he started learning devotional  poems, and he would stand up and with a smile would recite these off. He had such a great manner with him, that no-one could take offence, and he got his message across in a way that others couldn’t have done.

Now he has gone. What a way he went! As usual, last Sunday he drove to the chapel he attended, a twenty minute drive through the town, went inside and greeted everyone. He sat down and commented that his hands were very cold. Then he gave a little gasp, and his head fell backwards, and he was gone. Just like that! Quietly, with no fuss, just as he had lived.

We know for sure that he is with his Lord….his life showed it in everything that he did. Will our family be able to know for sure where  we are when we have gone? Because when this life is finished, our spirits and souls are still well alive, and it is up to us to leave our loved ones in no doubt where we are!