Your stories....

Here is another of "your stories." As I receive your stories I will post a new one each Saturday morning. I am very excited about this opportunity for the body of Christ to write about what God has done in our lives, so here is another story. Thank you for sharing your stories with us. You can share your story by sending it to FinishingWellStory@gmail.com. -Mike

“For the majority of my life I was a shy, angry and insecure person. One reason for these feelings was a poor education and that made me feel inadequate. In my late teens I started down the wrong road; I started partying, drinking and experimenting with drugs.
I joined the military; it was a way to escape my problems. (I thought!) I was stationed in Germany and the use of drugs and alcohol increased. I began to have people around me all the time, and I felt comfortable with the people I had surrounded myself with. I didn’t have to worry about anyone being smarter than me; we were all either drunk or high. I started telling exaggerated stories; I liked the feeling that people were listening to me. But now I had added another problem to my list of problems, but as long as I could stay high, drunk or both, I could forget about it.
I met a wonderful woman and we were married and after a couple of years we started a family. I thought I had finally found the answers to my problems. But this was just the start of years of new problems. After I got out of the military and we came back to the USA my partying didn’t stop. It wasn’t long and problems started between my wife and me. This caused more anger and guilt within me. This went on for years and one night, sitting in a bar with some of my friends, I began thinking “what I’m I doing here? And calling this fun?” I wasn’t having fun. I was spending money we didn’t have and the guilt was eating me up, being here and not with my family. I realized this wasn’t the way. It wasn’t long after that I dropped the drugs, the hanging out at nights partying and the people I was hanging with. After a while I started thinking “I need to do something more constructive with my time,” so I began a hobby that my son could participate in. I even started night school, to learn to read. I meet new people, but it wasn’t long and I realized I still wasn’t happy. My wife was a little happier, for the first time in years she knew where I was at night. But I still had this emptiness in me.
At my job I was doing work I enjoyed, but I wasn’t getting along with my supervisor. So out of anger I transferred to another department. In the department I transferred to I was placed right in the middle of seven Christians and through the day they would be talking about the Bible. I thought, “What did I get myself into.” Growing up I had only been to church a few times with my grandmother. My idea of God was that He had a lot of rules. He didn’t want you to have fun and all He wanted to do was send people to Hell. That’s all I ever heard from Christians, as for the Bible, I didn’t trust people so how could I trust the people who wrote it?
But there I was in the middle of these Christians listening to them talk about the Bible everyday! As I listened, they would say things like Jesus loves us so much He died for us and how Jesus will forgive your sins and He can give you a new life. The idea of being forgiven and a new life sure sounded good to me. Before I knew it, I got a Bible to see if some of the things they were saying were true. A few of these people I just didn’t understand. They had some real problems going on in their lives, but they had such a joy about them. I didn’t understand it, but I knew if God and this Jesus in the Bible were true I wanted to learn about them. I started reading the Bible and I was listening to a radio program called people to people and before long I was asking them questions. They seemed to really enjoy talking to me, just as I was. I didn’t have to be anything special, just me.
In 1992 I started a great but long journey; I had come to the realization of why I had moved from the work I enjoyed, to this new department. It was God. He had put me here with all these Christians, so I could come to know Him. It wasn’t long, right there at work, I ask Jesus to come into my life, and that I knew He was the Son of God. That He died on the cross to take away our sins, and that I knew I was a sinner and for Him to forgive me, and I needed Him. I started going to Church and Bible studies. After a while I started noticing little changes in me, I wasn’t getting as angry as I once did, there were things I once did that I just didn’t care about doing any longer. God was showing me His peace through some tough times, like when my Dad was passing away. After a while things started changing. I was trying to live the Christian life but the more I tried the worse it seemed to get. I didn’t understand what was going on with me. I mean I would still sin at times and things would pop up in my mind I didn’t want there, I even started doubting if I was saved. I couldn’t get past the words in the Bible “go and sin no more.” How could God love someone like this? I mean Christians don’t have problems like this. It wasn’t long and a whole new set of problems started.
At work they needed someone in another department, so I took the job. I started working long hours and it wasn’t long before I wasn’t attending church as much and eventually stopped going altogether. With making more money I began getting things like a new truck, stereo equipment, etc. My whole life became wrapped up in things. I became boastful, I tried impressing others with what I had and I was jealous of others that had more than I had. I had never been like this in my life. This went on for a few years.
Then at my job, they started downsizing and I watched people I had worked with for years lose their jobs. I became very critical of the company. I had to train a man from another department, who had more company seniority for my job. After his training was complete, I had to go on nights, and he took my job on days. I became very angry and hateful and I was complaining all the time. There I was angry, upset at the world and all alone on nights. It was like a curse to me, being on nights. With the downsizing, my job had changed dramatically; it had become a monitoring job. So I had a lot of time with nothing to do. So to past the time I started reading books, it didn’t matter what, just anything to pass the time. This went on for weeks and my anger was starting to affect all parts of my life. After a while, I started becoming very emotional, I could be watching TV, driving or at work and I would just break out in tears. I didn’t know what was going on.
One night at work I went to pick up a book and I looked over on the bookshelves and there was an old Bible, one of my old work mates had left behind. Memories of what it was like when I had first opened my heart to God and had let His Word guide my life ran through my head. I picked up the old Bible and started reading. I read familiar verses like John 3:16, “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” then for some reason I looked up the Ten Commandments. I start reading them and I just broke down in tears as I finally realized I had broken every commandment. I hadn’t murdered anyone but I sure had hatred in my heart. And I realized what a wretched man I am without God in my life. I asked God to forgive me and to take control of my life. I started reading the Bible every night, and God started opening my heart to verses in the Bible like never before. At times I would think, “How did I miss this before?” Like the doubts I had been having, Jesus told the disciples when they asked, in Matthew 19:25-26 “Who then can be saved?” Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but with God all things are possible.” And John 3:15 says “that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”
I also started seeing that I wasn’t the only person that struggles with temptations even after becoming a Christian. Paul said in Romans 7:15 “I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.” And you just can’t imagine how relieved I was to hear that. Paul gives the answer to our struggles in Romans 7:25 “Thanks be to God--through Jesus Christ our Lord!” That was the answer, it has nothing to do with me but it has everything to do with Him. I can’t live the Christian life without Him. That had been my problem. I had started trying to do it myself. We have to turn our life over to Christ Jesus, and trust in Him and what He has done. When we come to trust in Jesus, The word of God tells me we were crucified with Christ and dead to the Mosaic Law. Our life is no longer self-effort as to keeping the Law; it is a life powered by the Spirit of Christ in us. Now we are to live by faith, Faith in the Son of God. The death of Christ upon the cross was not only paying the penalty for our sins, He was not only the sacrifice for sin; He was the substitute for all who believe. Like Paul said in Galatians 2:20 “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.”
I am learning to just live each day for Christ Jesus; we live in a troubling world. But we just have to learn to rest in His word, Matthew 6:34 says, “Therefore do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own.” We will never have peace until we come to trust in Him. He alone can provide what we need to live and work with peace in our hearts, no job, no position, and no material things will ever be enough to give us the kind of peace we long for. He said in John 14:27 “Peace I leave with you; my peace I give you. I do not give to you as the world gives. Do not let your hearts be troubled and do not be afraid.” God just keeps opening my eyes to verses in the Bible I didn’t understand before and I am now living in a peace, one like I have never known before. The hate and anger that was in my life is disappearing and material things, “I thank God for what I have but the things I have just don’t seem as important anymore.”
It turns out that working night was not a curse but a blessing from God. It has given me a lot of time to be alone with Him and study His Word. I know there will be temptation in my life but I also know that as long as I keep my eyes on Jesus he will be there to pick me up when I fail. I look back on my life as lessons from God to make me stronger in my faith. My prayer is that my heart and mind will be much more open to Him, in the future.
I’ve learned I cannot be confident in man, but I can be in Him! It has been a long road but I know it was God, through all of this, showing me what I am capable of on my own. He let me go from one extreme to another, and this I know for sure, God has never turned His back on me but it was I that turned my back on Him by trying to do things on my own.
There is a quote I hear a lot at the church I attend, that says it all. “Christ gave His life for us, to give His life to us, to live His life through us.” I would just like to say, if you haven’t come to know the Lord Jesus and if you have doubts about the Bible as I did just open your heart and mind to His Word and He will reveal the answers to you. As it says in Psalm 34:8 “Taste and see that the LORD is good; blessed is the man who takes refuge in him.” And if we trust and believe God, that He sent His Son Jesus Christ to die on the cross for us, to pay for our sins and He raised Him from the died to give us life.
And if from our heart we confess our sins to Him, 1 John 1:9 says “If we confess our sins, he is faithful and just and will forgive us our sins and purify us from all unrighteousness.” Then you can count on what it says in Philippians 1:6 “being confident of this, that he who began a good work in you will carry it on to completion until the day of Christ Jesus.””


Thanks be to God

This is my story, Joe
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