Testimony: Rachel Wright
Today I’m going to be telling you the story about how God changed my life. How he has always been pursuing me and leading me towards His grace and mercy.
I grew up in a loving family, my mom and dad both were followers of Jesus and they constantly were teaching me and my siblings about the Lord. We would have Bible time as a family, we would read children’s books about Bible stories, we would even listen to CDs and watch DVDs that talked about Bible stories. We would go to church every Sunday. Around age 5 was when I began to understand the concept of sin. I remember that I had this little ballerina leotard that had a skirt attached to it. I came to my mom and told her that I wanted the skirt cut off so that I could be like the gymnastics girls. So she helped me cut off the skirt so that it looked like a gymnastics leotard. I tried it on and was instantly filled with regret and anger. I was so angry because I realized that I had liked it better before! I yelled at my mom and became so angry with her even though it was my idea to cut off the skirt in the first place.
After calming down, I felt sorry that I had been angry with her and I came back to my mom and I apologized. My mom told me, “Rachel, I forgive you. But there is someone who can forgive all of your sins.”
My mom then explained the idea of the gospel. She explained that every person is sinful and has gone against God’s design for us. She explained that since God is perfect we can never doing anything ourselves to fix the broken relationship that we have with God. And she told me that the amount of good that I do cannot fix the sinful brokenness in me. BUT there is someone who has paid the price needed to bring us back into a right relationship with God. Jesus. Jesus who came down to be both fully human and fully God lived the perfect life without ever sinning so that He could die for our sins. He took on my sin and the sins of the whole world and died on the cross in my place. But not only did he stay dead, he rose to life again, defeating death so that whoever asks for forgiveness of sin and trusts in him will be saved. After my mom explained this to me, I prayed with her and asked the Lord for forgiveness. But that’s is not the end of my story. Honestly, I don’t think I truly understood God’s grace. I knew that he died for me, but I didn’t know the reasoning behind why. I didn’t understand God’s love for me.
Growing up since that point, I began understand my sin more, but failed to understand God’s grace. I was constantly anxious about “what if God doesn’t truly forgive me?” “What if God doesn’t REALLY love me?” “And what about Hell?” Hell terrified me. I was so nervous that I would go to hell or that my sisters and brother would. I was stuck in a cycle of praying and asking God for forgiveness but not actually believing that He forgave me. I was terrified of God. And I thought that there was no way that God would forgive my sins, I was too sinful to be forgiven.
During this time, I had been going to AWANA which is a program where kids learn the Bible verses and memorize them. And in the summer after 5th grade, I finally was old enough to go to AWANA camp. I was so excited to make friends and have fun, but little did I know that God was going to reveal His amazing love to me. On the second to last night of camp, the Pastor gave a sermon that spoke directly to the fears that I had been having. He shared the story of how Jesus died for our sins and he emphasized that there was no sin that God couldn’t forgive. That your sin wasn’t too big for God to wash away. And that God loved you more than you could imagine. I was sitting on the edge of my seat. I was listening to every word that the Pastor said. And the Holy Spirit was moving in me. After the sermon, the Pastor invited any of the kids that would like to talk with him up to the stage. I was timid and scared of talking to adults. But something in me prompted me to get in the long line of kids so that I could share my fears with the pastor and ask him the question that was on my heart: “Does God really love me enough to forgive every single sin? Can he forgive me– a person who sins devery single day?”
I asked this question to the Pastor and he gave me the answer that I had been searching for my whole life. I had heard this answer in church so often and from my parents, but it never really sank in until this moment– He looked at me in the eyes and said “Rachel, there is no sin that God cannot forgive, He loves you more than you can imagine and He WANTS you. He wants to wipe every sin away, all you have to do is ask.” After that I told him that I wanted that, I wanted to have a relationship with Jesus and I wanted him to forgive my every sin. I prayed with the pastor and in that moment, my life was forever changed from that point on.
I walked out of that room with the TRUTH in my mind, with no fear. I knew that the God who created me, the God who created the universe loved me. I looked up at the stars, walking back to my cabin feeling the most peace and joy that I have ever felt. God had saved me and brought me into a relationship with Him. I could never go back, His love changed me, I was born again into a new life with Him. My life would be to glorify Him for the rest of my life.
I continued to grow and I believed that God forgave my every sin– past present and future. But I still struggled every day with my sin. Overcoming temptation is a constant battle. The biggest struggle that I had was my anxiousness and feeling like my mistakes defined who I was. I had a difficult time truly believing that when God looked at me He didn’t see my sin, he saw Jesus living in me. I was anxious about my life, I was anxious about what other people thought of me. I was anxious that the world was out to get me. I was anxious that God just wanted to take every opportunity to give me hardship and make me struggle. I thought that if I could control my life, that it would be perfect. I thought that if I could try to never mess up, my life would be perfect. But sure enough, every day I made mistakes and one day while I was at a church high school camp, all these thoughts came crashing into my mind when my friend and I figured out a way to win a competitive team game. Basically we found a way to win a team game by cutting a few corners, but the game leader considered it cheating. One of the youth leaders teased my friend and I that we would have to go up on stage, say we cheated, and apologize to the whole camp of 80 high school kids. This terrified me and it was the tipping point of my anxiety.
I went into my cabin bed and cried. I had messed up and I couldn’t get that thought out of my head. As I cried i thought “all I do is mess up all the time, I hate myself, I hate myself.” But while I was sitting there crying, God saw me, He heard me. And my self loathing saddened His heart. It breaks His heart to see His precious children thinking those thoughts when He himself–WHO IS PERFECT AND WITHOUT FLAW– LOVES us beyond what we can even imagine. God cared so much about me that he spoke to me that night through the words of the sermon. Feeling miserable I went into the room and got prepared to hear what God had for me that night, expecting to hear nothing. The first words of that the pastor spoke were “this is for those of you who feel like you mess up all the time” and he went to pray and he spoke the words “God, help the people who feel like they hate themselves to listen to this tonight.” The pastor spoke word for word what I had been feeling just an hour before. During that sermon he said two things that I will remember forever:
He said “God uses even the most broken, messed up people for HIS PURPOSE, HIS PLAN, and FOR HIS GLORY.”
He then said “God doesn’t say ‘clean yourself up and then come to me,’ He says “come to me and I will clean you up.”
I want to leave you to think about these things. God forgives you, He wants you, He loves you. He will clean you up, He will make you new. He has a plan for your life. He is waiting for you to come to Him. And He is constantly pursuing you. SO when you hear that tug at your heart or feel God speaking to you, don’t ignore Him, run to Him.