TESTIMONIES
TO CHRIST
He [Christ] is my reason for waking up!
Eugenia Price
What Jesus means to me is this: in Him we are able to see God and to understand His feelings toward us.
Charles Schulz
Christ helped me win over myself. It’s so clear to me now why in all things I must be a mirror of his teachings.
Stan Smith
It will be an ill day when our brethren take to bragging and boasting and call it “testimony to the victorious Christian life.” We trust that holiness will be more than ever the aim of believers, but not the boastful holiness which has deluded some of the excellent of the earth into vainglory, and under which their firmest friends shudder for them.
C.H. Spurgeon
The greatest discovery I ever made was that I was a lost, guilty sinner, and that Jesus Christ, the savior of sinners, is my savior.
James Simpson
Discoverer of chloroform, on being asked what his greatest discovery was
Testimonies
Testimony to Conversion
Patrick, missionary to Ireland
“I was sixteen years old and knew not the true God and was carried away captive; but in that strange land (Ireland) the Lord opened my unbelieving eyes, and although late I called my sins to mind, and was converted with my whole heart to the Lord my God, who regarded my low estate, had pity on my youth and ignorance, and consoled me as a father consoles his children…Well every day I used to look after sheep and I used to pray often during the day, the love of God and fear of him increased more and more in me and my faith began to grow and my spirit stirred up, so that in one day I would pray as many as a hundred times and nearly as many at night. Even when I was staying out in the woods or on the mountain, I used to rise before dawn for prayer, in snow and frost and rain, and I felt no ill effect and there was no slackness in me. As I now realize, it was because the Spirit was glowing in me.”
Patrick’s Confession
Missionary to India
Amy Carmichael, the Irish missionary to India, was converted after hearing Anna Bartlett Warner’s hymn Jesus loves me at a children’s mission in Yorkshire, England.
Woman prison reformer
“I think my feelings that night…were the most exalted I remember…suddenly my mind felt clothed with light, as with a garment and I felt silenced before God; I cried with the heavenly feeling of humility and repentance.”
Memoir of Elizabeth Fry
Reformer
“Night and day I pondered until I saw the connection between the justice of God and the statement that ‘the just shall live by his faith’ (Romans 1:17). Then I grasped that the justice of God is that righteousness by which, through grace and sheer mercy, God justifies us through faith. Thereupon I felt myself to be reborn and to have gone through open doors into paradise. The whole of Scripture took on a new meaning, and whereas before the ‘justice of God’ had filled me with hate, now it became to me inexpressibly sweet in greater love. This passage of Paul became to me a gate to heaven.”
Martin Luther
Apologist of the 2nd and 3rd centuries
After meeting an old man by the sea who explained the weakness of Plato’s philosophy and spoke about prophets more ancient than Greek philosophers who spoke about the truth about God and prophesied about Christ’s coming, Justin Martyr wrote: “straightway a flame was kindled in my soul; and a love of the prophets, and of those men who are friends of Christ, possessed me; and whilst revolving his words in my mind, I found this philosophy alone to be safe and profitable.”
4th century theologian
Then I ran back to where Alypius was sitting; for, when I left him, I had left the apostle’s book lying there. I picked it up, opened it, and silently read the passage [Romans 13:13–14] I first set eyes on: “Let us behave decently, as in the daytime, not in orgies and drunkenness, nor in sexual immorality and debauchery, not in dissension and jealousy. Rather clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ, and do not think about how to gratify the desires of the sinful nature.” I didn’t want to read any further, and it wasn’t necessary. As I reached the end of the sentence, the light of peace seemed to shine on my heart, and every shadow of doubt disappeared.
Confessions, Augustine, Book 8, Section 12
Matter-of-fact conversion
William Booth’s name became synonymous with some of the most amazing conversion stories in the pages of the history of Christianity. However, Booth’s own conversion was straightforward and unemotional. He was wandering home at about 11 pm one night in 1844, when quite suddenly his soul was filled with God’s Spirit. It was like Saul’s Damascus Road experience. He experienced the light of God’s forgiveness in his heart as he confessed his sins. He knew that he was now a follower of the Lord Jesus Christ.
A very “strange” incident
Bristol, 1788: About the middle of the discourse, when there was on every side attention still as night, a vehement noise arose, none could tell whence, and shot like lightning through the whole congregation. The terror and confusion was inexpressible. You might have imagined it was a city taken by storm. The people rushed upon each other with the utmost violence, the benches were broken in pieces, and nine tenths of the congregation appeared to be struck with the same panic. In about six minutes the storm ceases.
It is the strangest incident of the kind I ever remember, and I believe none can account for it without supposing some supernatural influence. Satan fought, lest his kingdom should be delivered up.
The Journal of John Wesley, 3rd March 1788, recording an incident during one of his evangelistic meetings.
Watergate politician
After Charles Colson had served a prison sentence for his part in the Watergate break-in and cover up, he was racked with doubts about Christianity. He could not get the phrase “Jesus Christ is God” out of his head. In the best way he knew he had surrendered to God and asked him to take over his life. However, he had no certainty about his faith and he spent the next week studying the Bible. During this time he felt as if he made massive spiritual progress in his understanding about Christianity. Then he was able to articulate a prayer which he thought would never pass his lips. He told Jesus that he believed in him, and accepted him. He asked Jesus to come into his life, and he committed his life to his Lord.
Colson immediately had a sense of God’s comfort and the knowledge that he could now face life with Christ in a totally new and reformed way. Colson now knew what it was to be born again in Christ.
Bible translator
In 1779 a National Day of Prayer was called, as England was at war with Spain and France. William Carey went to a prayer meeting in the small meeting-room of the local Dissenting congregation. One of the members read Hebrews 13:13: “Let us go forth therefore unto him without the camp, bearing his reproach.” The words were familiar to William, but now they found a deep resonance in his heart. The world was still rejecting Christ, but William knew that he had to commit himself, not intellectually but with his heart. It came as the climax of several weeks of searching, and he realized that at last Christ had found him and given him peace.
Professor of English
C.S. Lewis was alone in his room at Magdalen College, Oxford, when he found that his thoughts kept returning to the subject of God, whom, he says, he did not want to meet. He gave in to God in 1929 when he knelt down and acknowledged that God was indeed God. He felt as if he was “dejected and reluctant convert in all England”.
At this stage Lewis thought of God as being other than human, and he did not think about Jesus Christ being God incarnate.
As he saw the truth of Jesus being man as well as God, he again put up resistance, just as he had before he was prepared to admit that God was God.
This final step in Lewis’ Christian conversion took place while he traveled on a bus to visit Whipsnade Zoo. It was a lovely sunny morning. When he left Oxford he did not believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. By the time that he arrived at Whipsnade he did believe that Jesus Christ was the Son of God. Yet Lewis recalls that he had not spent the journey deep in thought. He did not have any great emotional feelings linked to this change of heart. Lewis says that some people are very unemotional about some of the most important events in their lives. He likened his conversion experience to being like a man who, after a long sleep, still lies motion
Baptist preacher
I sometimes think I might have been in darkness and despair until now had it not been for the goodness of God in sending a snowstorm, one Sunday morning, while I was going to a certain place to worship. When I could go no further, I turned down a side street, and came to a little Primitive Methodist Chapel. In that chapel there may have been a dozen or fifteen people. I had heard of the Primitive Methodists, how they sang so loudly that they made people’s heads ache; but that did not matter to me. I wanted to know how I might be saved, and if they could tell me that, I did not care how much they made my head ache. The minister did not come that morning; he was snowed up, I suppose. At last, a very thin-looking man, a shoemaker, or tailor, or something of that sort, went up into the pulpit to preach. Now, it is well that preachers should be instructed, but this man was really stupid. He was obliged to stick to his text, for the simple reason that he had little else to say. The text was, “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth.”
Then the good man followed up his text in this way: “Look unto Me; I am sweatin’ great drops of blood. Look unto Me; I am hangin’ on the cross. Look unto Me, I am dead and buried. Look unto Me, I am sitting at the Father’s right hand. O poor sinner, look unto Me! Look unto Me!”
Then he looked at me under the gallery, and I dare-say, with so few present, he knew me to be a stranger. Just fixing his eyes on em, as if he knew all my heart, he said, “Young man, you look very miserable.” Well, I did, but I had not been accustomed to have remarks made from the pulpit on my personal appearance before. However, it was a good blow, and it struck right home. He continued, “and you always will be miserable — miserable in life and miserable in death — if you don’t obey my text; but if you obey now, this moment you will be saved.” Then lifting up his hands, he shouted, as only a Primitive Methodists could do, “Young man, look to Jesus Christ. Look! Look! Look! You have nothing to do but to look and live.”
I saw at once the way of salvation. I knew not what else he said — I did not take much notice of it — I was so possessed with that one thought. There and then the cloud was gone, the darkness had rolled away, and that moment I saw the sun. Oh, that somebody had told me this before, “Trust Christ, and you shall be saved.”