Good day to you all!
My name is Joshua, I am 20 years old, and I am from New Zealand. I found the CLE website around this time last year (late Dec 2018) after doing a google search and finding the article "Videogames: Causing Witchcraft to Prosper". This article wasn't what I was hoping to find from that search.
My older sister had just entered my room and ranted to me about how she was "tired of [my] witchcraft". As she was giving me this rebuke, I was playing one of my videogames, which you may have guessed, was full of witchcraft. Though she was more emphasizing the figurines of imaginary spirit beings I had recently purchased at a videogame convention (context: I am living with my sister and her family, and earlier that year I bought a book that caused some paranormal activity in the house, but that's another story.)
Having my conscience rattled, I immediately sought to justify myself by seeing what other Chirstians had to say about the matter so I could try and convince myself that what I was doing in my videogames "wasn't real witchcraft". Needless to say things didn't go as I had planned and I thank the Lord that it didn't.
After having the truth pointed out to me plainly (of which I was already aware) I couldn't look past the wickedness of witchcraft in the videogames I played any longer. I then became very sorrowful, but not towards God; it was a sorrow of the world, where I grieved over my videogames, and how I knew I would have to give them up. Rather than grieving over how I had wronged God. I then continued on to read "Fantasy Novels: An Invitation to Hell", where I discovered that I cherished a lot of other wicked things. I continued to look at more articles and quickly found the audio/youtube section, which was such a blessing at the time as I was strawberry picking the time so having hundreds of hours of teachings to listen to was fantastic (and still is as I listen to them whilst driving, walking, or doing stuff around the house.) I was becoming so surprised at all the different things I was learning and how ignorant I was to the truth of many things, and how wicked and lukewarm a lot of people that call themselves chirstians are. And it was slowly occuring to me that I was one of them too.
What the game changer was for me was listening to the "Is Repentance part of Salvation?" teaching. Everything started clicking and making sense.
I met this strongly conservative, philosophical PhD student that year who was raised in a weakly catholic/religious household. I ran into him on my way to church one day and he told me he was convinced the Bible wasn't true because he had said the sinner's prayer and "accepted Jesus into his heart" and what not, about 7 times, but nothing happened he told me. I had no answer for him, and I found that very troubling.
I myself was lead through a sinner's prayer by my mother near the end of my last year at highschool (about 2.2 years ago, which I remember cringing while saying), and then also again a few months later by one of my best mate's from highschool. But neither events were dramatic. It was just like, "Well I guess I believe in Jesus now."
However, once I had been given the knowledge that I needed to repent for my sins, I asked God, while confessing my sins and acknowledging my guilt, for repentance. Later that night in late Januray I woke up suddenly and I just started weeping and crying with sorrow unto God for all the wrong I had done unto him. I wrote down a confession and apology to God for all the sins I was concious I had broken (very many), with a strong emphasizing my sin of witchcraft and idolatry through videogames, whilst at the same time calling myself a Christian, and thus taking the Lord's name in vain. This was when I came to true faith and repentance in Jesus Christ, given to me by him, of which I am so grateful, and shall be so eternally.
Since then it has been a process of removing sin and worldy things out of my life and sanctifying myself from different things and different people. It's been quite the struggle; my wicked heart was and is fond of many things of this world, but I thank the Lord for his grace and mercy and his patience with me in this process. Yet I am still in that process and really feel like I need the advice of other Christians, which is one of the many reasons I finally decided to join the forum.
I will be asking questions on the forum later on, but now I will go into more details about how I got to this point and a bit where I've been since.
(I realise this post is already quite long and it's about to get a whole lot longer for which I apologise greatly for those reading on! Also I apologise for any inaccuricies and gramatical mistakes, but I think I got most of them now.)So now I will go into a bit of background of my upbringing and my journey up until this point. I am from a family of 8 children (I am number 6.) Both of my parents were raised going to churches. When I was around about 4 or 5 years old, we stopped going to the church we had been going (it may have been a baptist or alliance church, I'm not sure) because my parents had discovered that Christmas celebrations were an abomination unto God. So thankfully I grew up with very little to do with Christmas celebrations and things of the like. But we did end up "celebrating" was probably just as bad.
We then began attending this church building of the denomination "The Living Church of God". I remember few specifics of what they taught, but it was very culty. From what I understand from what my sister told me, to join you needed to do weeks (may have been a year) of home "bible study" using their resources and recordings. Then you needed to have some interviews with them, and you also needed to pay a significant portion of your income for tithe (more than 10% I think.) I have also heard that they were a precursor to the Hebrew Roots movement; the church taught to meet on and "keep" the Sabbath day and the holy feasts (including The Day of Atonement), and follow the dietary laws, but I don't think there was too much else. We were there for about 6-7 years until, for some reason I'm unsure of, we decided to stop going.
I remember the church building and the people there as feeling very bleak and cold, and dull, even when the sun was shining. The services seemed to stretch on for eternity and I never learned a thing. But they sang enough to keep me somewhat entertained and there was another family with young kids that were fun to play with. Yet probably the most lasting impact the church had on me that it gave me an existential fear of the end of the world. It was like this impending doom that could descend upon on at any moment, very unbiblical. It really filled me with anxiety from an early age and had quite a significant impact on me.
At the same time we stopped attending that church, my granny started needing full time care so my parents, me, and my younger siblings would stay at her house to look after her for a portion of the week in collaboration with extended family. From here my family just stopped attending church buildings altogether. But my father got even more sucked into the Law of Moses "keeping", and we started doing a few more things, like reciting the Shema every day, nailing the Torah to our house and gateposts. My dad got me and my younger brother (he did himself too) to write out the commandments of the Torah, all 613! It was a pretty tedious task for an 11 year old and I find it so strange to think back upon these days. Yet though we thought we were keeping the Torah, obviously we really weren't. Neither were we diligent in doing so (after reading the "Should Christians Keep the Sabbath?" article I can't help but laugh at our "sabbath keeping".) Year after year we were more slack with "keeping" the commandments of the Torah. We'd forget more and more holy days, and eventually all our Torah keeping was reduced down to saying the Shema in the morning (as a family, when we'd remember.)
This whole time I understood nothing about Jesus Christ, who he was, what he did or why it was so crucial. I grew up with the impression that the entire New Testament was false. My dad fell for the "Paul was a liar" junk and would repeatedly say "The Lord our God is one Lord" with the implication that Jesus couldn't be God because then that would make God more than one.
But we didn't study the Old Testament scripture itself either. Any "biblical knowledge" I had heading into my teenage years came from what I remembered from bible stories, read from story books rather than the actual bible.
Heading into high school with such a weak biblical foundation wasn't great, though it definitely could have been worse. My siblings and I had all been homeschooled up until the point where we were of age to go to high school, however I had missed the first two years of high school because I insisted that I wouldn't go to highschool until we moved up to my parents farm (a safer place to be for the end of the world I thought.) Which I am thankful because my older siblings were sent to a Seventh Day Adventist high school (my dad sent them there because at least they kept the Sabbath, and therefore no sports on Saturdays etc) cause I would have went there as well.
My incredible social awkardness from being homeschooled my whole life and the lack of effort by my parents to socialise managed to score me some kind and behaved friends.The Lord also put in my life two Christians (though maybe not at the time), whom I value highly, into my life, that began shifting my perspective and philosophies away from the leftist communist philosophies I held.
Yet I made more friends with people who were into a lot of the same wicked videogames, movies, tv shows, etc that I was into myself, which lead me into the wickedness of drinking among other things. I remember very clearly thinking of an excuse before I commited some sins "oh I'm pretty sure that's only in the new testament." So much about my thinking was wickedly wrong, and I was ignorant and unsure of things, but I didn't care to check of course. I had no understanding of sin or it's consequences, nor did I seem to care.
Eventually my mother realised that our family had really gone far off the track with our Hebrew Rootsish beliefs (though very lukewarm they were at the time), and that's when she got me and my little sister to say a sinner's prayer and to accept Jesus as our Lord and saviour. I did so willingly because I realised our hypocrisy and failiure in "keeping" the Torah, and could clearly see there were no good fruits beared from my family by doing so. Though I wasn't saved at this point, I do believe God started working in my life more from this point. One of my best mates (one of the two Christians), explained to me how sin separates us from God, and why Jesus had to die on the cross. (Though my understanding was that sin was the problem, and not me who comitted the sin.) He also got me a bible (unfortunately it was an NLT and not a KJV) and over the summer holidays I read through the New Testamant. Looking back, not much of it sank it or convicted me much at all (probably partly because it was not the KJV and I went through it quite fast) but I do remember I found it fascinating how much Jesus rebuked the scribes and pharisees. At that time I already had an understanding of the hypocrisy of pastors and christians, but also the catholic priests and their child abuse scandals.
This was the summer between my last year of highschool and first year of university (summer in NZ is from December to February.) At the moment I have finished my second year of university where I'm doing a bachelor of science, majoring in physics and chemistry (though it's science, since I'm not doing anything biology related thankfully evolution almost never comes up. Though with physics often big bang talk will come up and stuff which is annoying but it's rare enough to be tolerable.)
Seeking to meet more christians I sought out a university chirstian club to join. However, I left it a bit late, and only remembered on the very last day of the clubs expo in the late day of the afternoon. So I made my way over to the stalls and there was only one christian club remaining, named simply "Christian Club". So I joined without much thought and started attending there meetings. What I didn't realise was that nearly all the club members consisted of members from this singular denomination filled with more a lot more heresies than your average church building. From one cult to another I began attending their church building for about a year (until early 2019) and was baptized by them.
The denomination/sect (they considered themselves non-denominational) is known as the Local Churches, or the Lord's Recovery. I looked past a lot of the red flags; they had their own unique bible version (the recovery version), their own publishing company (Living Stream Ministies), their bibles contained more footnotes of their church father (Witness Lee) than actual scripture (no joke, there were some pages where there were one or two verses and the rest of the page was footnotes), they had really strange definitions for different biblical terms (like they defined grace as "God as our enjoyment", like what?). But I went along with it because I got along with them fairly well and they were nice and friendly (though I never really connected with any of them in a meaningful level) and also because I appreciated ways in which they were different from other church buildings. After coming to repentance however, I found the testimony of an ex-member who went into detail about a lot of their heresies (the most shocking one for me was that they reject the authority of certain scriptures, such as James and a number of the Psalms.) Since then I ceased contact with any of them.
Some good came from being there though. They had a sermon on idolatry when I was visitng their bible school (yeah they have quite a few around the world) which really shook my conscious because I had to admit myself the truth that I had made many things my idols, my videogames, music, etc etc (though I do believe they weren't teaching correctly on the matter either.) During the sermon I was overcome with this intense anger, so much so that it gave me a headache for like a good two hours! Never experienced anything like it. But it laid the ground work for when I came across the videogame article, because I came across it about two weeks after.
That brings us to the year just past. As I mentioned before, I have been slowly becoming more sanctified and ridding myself of sin, for which I thank God because I largely haven't done so willingly but by conviction from the Holy Spirit. Videogames took a lot longer to deal with; I admitted some of them were wicked but it took longer for me to admit others were too, (and that took A LOT of conviction.)
I also am very cautious of who I spend my time with now and seek to avoid people (which has been the most difficult but God's grace is sufficient) as I am seeking to be sanctified. Yet this is an area where I could really use some guidance, specifically in how I should go about setting boundaries with certain people etc, (but I will ask this in another post!)
The main reason with this is area is a headache for me is because I have gotten myself very involved in the prolife movement on campus. So we have a prolife club at my university, the most popular club on campus! (it has had, I think 5 disaffiliation attempts by various socialists and feminists over the past decade lol.) I discovered the club existed in my second semester and was quite eager to get involved but I didn't really do much because of times constraints. At the time my first cousin's once removed cousin was running the club (maybe don't both trying to figure out what the means.) I knew him because a lot of my dad's side of the family attends the same Reformed church building as his family. I knew him through them and I also attended the church's scouts program they had when I was younger (around 5-8.)
Towards the end of that year he was quite desperate for someone to take over the club, so he offered it to me (he must have been really desperate.) In complete shock but also excited by the idea of getting so heavily involved I eventually accepted. However, as Chris rightly points out in his article on abortion, being involved in prolife movements means yolking up with catholics and such like them. This was another thing I didn't want to hear at the time I heard it. But slowly over time it has bothered me more and more. I am supposed to be heading the club next year as well, and I'm not sure how I'm going to get myself out of it, but I will go into more detail later.
For many various motivations and reasons, none of them being very legitimate, I attended the Reformed Church for a few months (I stopped going about one and a half months ago so this was recent.) It was the church life that could have been; a nice and normal church building to attend like the rest of my extended family, as opposed to the wacky Hebrew Rootsy church we went to.
But I knew it was leavened, just from witnessing the fruit of my uncles and aunties and observing how my cousins turned out, but I suppose I wanted to have a look myself. They preach tithe, every sermon they'd have the offering baskets and it made me sicker and sicker each time, even before I knew how bad it was. Among some other strange things, they are also calvinist, which I think contributed to the deathly cold vibes I got from the place. They don't have any significant forms of evangelism besides inviting people to church. It seems the thinking is, "God will save who we will save therefore there's no point in trying to get people saved." It was very difficult to talk to people and the conversation often felt superficial.
I used to tell christians that me and my siblings grew up with "unstable theological foundations" after explaining to them the strange cherry-picked Jewish traditions of my parents and how they seemed to have drastically different beliefs every 5 years. But I've now realised that there is far fewer people with stable theological foundations because they are not truely resting upon Jesus Christ.
There are so many people I know and cherish, whether they identify as a Christian or not, that I desire so strongly to share the truth with. But there's so much I have to learn, and yet so much work needed to be done on myself as well.
Which is why I'm so happy and thankful unto God there's a whole bunch of people here online that I can trust to help me with that! Thank you for reading my very long introduction and I hope I didn't bore anyone too much; I may have overshared a fair bit but it seemed good to share what I have.
I so appreciate Chris', Lorraine's, and everyone else's continual hard work they put into this ministry and I thank and praise the Lord for it. I've already learned more than I've ever known my whole life and I look forward to learning even more about the truth of God's Word.
I pray that one day I would be a blessing to you all some day and I look forward to conversing with everyone!
God bless you all!
