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“The Lord is my strength and shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped: therefore, my heart greatly rejoiceth; and with my song I will praise him.” Psalm 28:7

I grew up in the united Methodist church. As a child I learned memory verses, attended youth meetings, and went to Summer camps. I read my Bible cover-to-cover multiple times. My family was at church almost every Sunday, and if they missed I went with my grandparents. I joined the church as a teen and was presented with a certificate as “a member of the body of Christ.”

When I was eighteen, I joined the army. As I left for basic training, the Gideons presented me with a New Testament. I read that while I was away, and even sent money to my church at times. As a young person I didn’t smoke, drink, or even use foul language. I was what you would call “religious, but lost.”

I was married at nineteen and our son was born a year later. One night while home alone with the baby, I sat rocking him and reading that little Gideon New Testament. After I finished Revelation, I noticed a page in the back titled “The Romans Road.” I read it and looked up the verses. It was similar to the following:

1. Recognize and admit that you are a sinner. “As it is written, there is none righteous, no not one” (Romans 3:10).

2. Recognize and admit that you deserve to spend eternity in hell, because of your sin. “For the wages of sin is death; but the gift of God is eternal life through Jesus Christ our Lord” (Romans 6:23).

3. Recognize that Jesus does not want you to spend eternity in Hell—He loves you and died for you. “But God commendeth his love toward us, in that, while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8).

4. Recognize and believe that if you ask God to save you (forgive your sins and offer eternity in heaven with Him), He will! “For whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:13). “The Lord is not slack concerning his promise, as some men count slackness, but is longsuffering to usward, not willing that any should perish, but that all should come to repentance” (2 Peter 3:9).

I was then invited to pray and ask God for salvation, which I did.

Over the years we had a second child, a daughter. My husband was not interested in church or God. He was abusive and drank heavily at times. I was in and out of multiple churches, none of which mentioned what I had learned from that Gideons Bible.

Then the unthinkable happened—my husband left for another woman. I was left with two young children to raise on my own. I continued to attend different churches while making a couple different moves.

One afternoon after attending the church I was raised in, I explained to my daughter that we needed God’s help to find a church that would help us and give us the truth. We knelt together and asked God to guide us. After praying I opened the yellow pages and began searching listings. My eyes stopped on a Baptist Church whose ad simply said “Ye must be born again.” Finally, a church that understood the need! We attended that night and have been there ever since.

After attending several years, we became members and began to serve faithfully. My son came home from a men’s meeting one night and was explaining a lesson they had on repentance and how it is often skipped over when salvation is explained. That conversation with my son led to many days and nights with a nervous unsettled feeling inside me. After grocery shopping with my daughter one Saturday, we drove home while listening to “Unshackled,” which is a ministry of Pacific Garden Missions. It is a radio drama of actual people’s testimonies as to how they came to Christ. That episode was of a lady who was in church and serving faithfully, but was under conviction (that was the unsettled feeling I was having). She knew she was living a lie. She, like me, had never repented of her sin. I could hardly hold back the tears as we carried the groceries into the house. I didn’t even put the groceries away, but went to a room at the end of the house to myself and began to pour my heart out to God. At that moment I knew without a doubt that I was heaven bound. It turned out that my daughter was saved at the same time—listening to the same thing. We share a new birthdate now, August 5, 2006. That’s the day I truly became a member of the body of Christ.

The one thing not mentioned in the Gideons Bible was confession and repentance. Repentance is where Paul was that day as he was on his way to persecute Christians. After realizing his error, he responded “Lord, what wilt thou have me do?” At that point he gave Jesus total command of his life. So many today claim the title Christian but have not made that final step to turn over their lives to Him and turn from their sins. God tells us many times to repent. Acts 3:19, 2 Chronicles 7:14, 1 John 1:9, Luke 13:3, and Acts 17:30 are only a few. We need to give Jesus access to every part of our lives; we can’t retain control of anything. This is simply my testimony of what Christ has done for me.

“The Lord is my strength and shield; my heart trusted in him, and I am helped: therefore, my heart greatly rejoiceth; and with my song I will praise him” (Psalm 28:7).

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