Given I spend my days in front of two computers, one for work, and one for me, I’ve started listening to Christian conversion testimonies on Youtube when I have busy work to do. For reasons related to my Christian fundamentalist past, I’ve tended to downplay the importance of conversion testimonies. In the early years of my Christian life, experience seemed to take precedence over the objective testimony of God in Scripture. The focus, I felt, was too much on our subjective experience of God to validate the truth claims of Christianity, rather than his revealed truth in Scripture. I now believe that’s wrong, and a false trade-off. God’s truth revealed in the Bible is validated by people’s experience, and of course it would be if the Bible is true! And oh how true it is! Many of the testimonies I’ve heard bring me to tears because of how real God makes himself to all kinds of people in all kinds of ways, to as the Apostle John says, every tribe and peoples and language. If Christianity is true, this is exactly what we would expect, God having a real impact on real people in ways that defy predictable explanations.
It becomes apparent as you listen to people testify to the reality of God in Christ in their lives, that mere ideas can’t transform people like that. Jesus told us why. He told his disciples before he went to the cross, trying to comfort them that his going away would be a benefit to them, that he would be sending them the Holy Spirit. God in the person of the Holy Spirit broke into history at the Pentecost prior to the first sermon in history by the Apostle Peter. He has been building his church ever since, against which the gates of hell shall not prevail!
In our post-Christian secular culture a lot of publicity is given to “deconversion stories,” high profile Christians who’ve decided Christianity is no longer for them. These people follow a predictable path to rejecting Christ, and it always reflects the person embracing the secular culture’s moral values, especially when it comes to sex. The beauty of conversion stories of people coming to embrace the glorious gospel of God’s grace is how unique they are, God making himself real to his people in every way imaginable. It’s a beautiful thing. Here are a few examples to get you started. This young man was a gangster, dyslexic, and didn’t even know how to read(!):
This young women grew up a Muslim in Britain, and God revealed himself to her in powerful way when she was rejected by her family:
Here is an ex-Mormon who realized that without the objective revelation of God’s truth in the Bible there is no authority on which to base what we believe:
Paul’s Road to Damascus experience continues in the lives of these precious people, and millions more all over the world every single day!
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