Our Testimony
Over 20 years ago we were both happily living Godless lives. I was a Police Officer in Liverpool, England and Pat was a traffic warden. We were very popular LOL! I had been brought up as a Roman Catholic and Pat had no experience of religion or church at all and was anti anyone who spoke to her about Jesus. God used a donkey to talk to Balaam (Numbers 22:28) and He certainly used many false prophets and Christian teachings to reveal Himself to us.
It was in 1999 that we both independently met with Jesus as He simply revealed Himself to us through us reading ‘positive thinking’ books that had splatterings of false Christian messages. I clearly remember one of the books I was reading was, 'How To Be Born Again', by Billy Graham. As far as we know, no one prayed for us; no one laid their hands on us; we didn’t ask Jesus into our lives, say the 'sinners prayer' nor repent of our sins. It’s as if He just gave us the belief in Him and we were very excited that we both believed at the same time.
As new believers, we didn’t know what to do, so on the following Sunday we got dressed up in our best clothes and went to a local church service. We walked straight in and sat in the front row. We were the only ones in the front row as we hadn’t yet realised that church pews usually fill up from the back rows first. All I remember from the service was that we sang ‘Amazing Grace’. It was very emotional and we were both in floods of tears as the reality of the words hit us and I felt the love of God overwhelm me. We didn’t stay for tea and never went back but the Lord did use that church service to speak to us.
To cut a long story short, we ended up in an Anglican church and actually moved house to be nearer to it. We ended up as leaders in this church but the more we learned about and got involved in ‘church life’ the more we became uncomfortable with it. It was all very controlling and we felt the Lord telling us to leave. So we did, with love in our hearts and without any fall-outs or so we thought, but from the day we left, we were shunned by the vast majority of the church members, who we found out later, had been told to steer clear of us because we were trouble.
We started a house church, the All For Jesus Christian Fellowship, which met in our house for a while but then we felt the Lord telling us to sell up and move to the north of Scotland. YIKES, that was scary. But we obeyed and the Lord got us there at just the right ttime to buy the farmhouse He was giving us.
We thought we were in Scotland to work for God and expected a revival to occur, but it didn’t happen. We visited all the local churches and remained at some for a while, but we just couldn’t continue fellowship with them. Every single church was following the false prosperity TV evangelist preachers and the Lord showed us that these preachers were of satan, ‘wolves in sheep’s clothing’. I would say that we still called ourselves Christians at this stage but we were increasingly uncomfortable with the concept of a loving God tormenting billions of people for ever in hell and only being the Saviour of a relatively few people.
So from then on (2008) it was just me, Pat and Jesus. As we grew in our faith, the Lord revealed more of His truths to us and led us to Ernest L Martin’s site Associates for Scriptural Knowledge and then The Concordant Publishing Concern (I consider the Concordant Literal Version of the New Testament to be the best translation available).
It is here that our concerns about ‘Christianity’ were confirmed, especially the false teaching of hell and eternal torment, human free will, the trinity, death and the immortality of the soul. It was at this stage that I stopped calling myself a Christian.
And we then learned that we were members of the body of Christ with a celestial future where we will be sharing the multifarious wisdomof God with celestial beings (Ephesians 3:10). Wow, I hadn’t heard anything like that in church and I got very excited! And of course, once the Lord showed us that there were two gospels in the Bible, one for the Jews and one for the gentiles, everything became a lot clearer.
Finally, it was through Martin Zender that the penny dropped and I realised that the Christian religion is a false religion, all of it.
I was shocked to discover that what I was taught is contrary to a correctly translated version of the Bible. I was deceived for years and this truth only hit me in 2022. Christians believe in an angry God who is going to torment unbelievers for eternity in a fiery hell whilst the truth is that He sent His son, Jesus Christ, to save sinners (1 Timothy 1:15).
I was now able to understand and believe the real good news. Everyone will share eternity with God, whether they believe or not. Paul wrote to the Corinthians,
'For even as, in Adam, all are dying, thus also, in Christ, shall all be vivified.’ 1 Corinthians 15:22.
Vivified means raised from the dead to die no more.
Not everyone will be raised at the same time. Believers get in early.Evil people like Hitler will be punished for a time but there is nothing in the scriptures to say that any punishment or separation from God is eternal. The word eternal is a false translation and should read 'eonian', a time period that has a start and an ending.
I could now believe in a God who loves all of humanity and 'Who wills that all mankind be saved and come into a realization of the truth.' 1 Timothy 2:4
