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Praise the Lord my brother and sister. Moses here from Christian Motivation, I hope and believe you are doing fine.
So the last time we talked I shared with you about myself, and I promised that I will be sharing with you about my testimony. So in this podcast I briefly want to share with you my testimony, so at least you get to know how I give my life to Jesus Christ.
I grew up in a single parent home, and I also grew up in a home that was really full of love. I had parents that surrounded me with love. Now realize I said parents; and the reason why I said I had parents is because I grew up not only with my mom but my uncles, aunties, and my grandparents, all surrounding me with their love and supporting me.
When I look back to my childhood, I’m really so grateful that I grew up in a family that truly loved me and cared for me. My mom loves me so much. It’s one thing when somebody says she loves you, somebody says they love you, it’s another thing when they really demonstrate that love to the point that you feel loved, and that’s what I grew up with. I grew up with a mom that not only said she loved me, but she demonstrated that love to me.
I also grew up with grandparents that loved me, that demonstrated their love for me. I grew up with my uncle and my aunties all demonstrating love to me, and I’m so grateful to God for giving me the opportunity to grow up in that environment. You see, I’ve heard the statement made that you cannot choose your family. Well, even though I wasn’t able to choose my family, I am so grateful to God that that is the family I grew up in, because I believe that who I have become and what I have become has been a result of the love that was implanted in my life at an early age.
And so I just want to encourage the parents out there – and this is on a side note – that you really learn to demonstrate your love towards your children. Even though you may not be the direct mother or the direct father of a child, but if you are maybe the uncle or you are a family friend, or you are an aunt or a grandparent, whatever role you can play in a child’s life, I think that is important because I have personally seen it operate in my life that who I have become is really as a result of growing up in a stable and loving family.
I know that every family has some weaknesses here and there but I never felt that while growing up. But the challenge of growing up in a Christian home may be that when you grow up and you have always been going to church, you may mistakenly think that just because you go to church that makes you a Christian. You may think that just because your parents are Christians that makes you a Christian. At least as far as I know everyone who surrounded me was a Christian, we would go to church every Sunday, it’s a day we looked forward to. We would pray together every day, before we had dinner we would just come together in prayer and pray and share from the word of God and just learn more about God. And so from my early childhood I got to know about God.
Now I remember I saw a billboard one time that said that a family that prays together stays together. That was true in my family and in my upbringing. We always prayed together every day. I also remember – I don’t know if it’s Hillary Clinton that wrote a book or she just said something like, she quoted something that says that it takes a village to raise a child. To me that is so – it is so true in my life that it took the love and the support of all these family members in my life, and I just am so grateful to God for them.
But so when I go to high school, you know how teenagers are, so when I became a teenager I started really – yes, I loved God, and I had a reverence for God, but you know he wasn’t a priority in my life. I still went to church every Sunday, those are disciplines that had been instilled in me as a young child and so when I grew up they were still disciplines that I treasured. You know how The Bible says that you train a child in the way that they should grow, and when they grow up they will not depart from it? Well I still had the reverence for God. I remember in my high school some kids would be making fun of God, I wouldn’t have even dared try to make fun of God, I wouldn’t have even dared try to make fun of God, I wouldn’t even want to be involved in those conversations where they were making fun of God because I had a reverence for God.
But the time came where I can truly say that I seriously and intentionally surrendered my life to Jesus Christ. And that day that leads to that, the day I give my life to Jesus Christ was July the 21st of 1996. But before that, I remember the night before that was a Saturday, we had been to a dance. The school that I was in used to prepare dances where we would just go out and dance. And I remember we had been to this particular dance, and I had left the dance at around maybe 3 o’clock in the morning, going back to the dormitory. I was in a boarding school, so I went back to the dormitory. And so by the time I get to bed it was probably around maybe 4 o’clock or 5 o’clock in the morning, and by 7, 8 o’clock I did not have any more sleep. I just couldn’t sleep for some reason.
One of my friends came and asked me if I could go with him to the scripture union. He wasn’t actually my friend but you know how you are at school where almost everybody’s your friend as long as you know eachother, then you call yourselves friends? So this guy was Christian, and he saw that I was in bed but I was awake, so he asked me whether I could go with him to a fellowship. And we had a fellowship at school; it was called Christian Fellowship, that’s where the students would meet just to pray and to fellowship and to talk about God. And I remember telling him that I wasn’t interested in going to the fellowship, so he left and went. But I realized, well, I did have sleep, I was kind of bored, so I decided after he had gone to just dress up and go to the fellowship.
And when I got there, I remember I think they were coming to the close of the worship service, you know like the praise and worship, and I just went and sat at the very last desk in the classroom that we were in, and I remember I sat while we were praising and worshipping. But from the moment I entered the classroom and sat down, the one thing that really caught my attention, I had never ever seen young people that were truly passionate about the Lord Jesus Christ. I had been to church, and I had other people that were in church – I don’t know what to say, but let me say that there were old people, but I don’t mean as in that they were very old, what I mean is that they were adults, I think that’s the word I’m looking for.
All the people that were in church and were passionate about God were adults. I had never seen a service where it was only young people, teenagers, that were truly passionate about the Lord Jesus Christ. And so for some reason, I was surprised to see that there were people, and there were young kids, who were so passionate about God. And I remember sitting there and listening to them testify of what God was doing in their lives, I remember listening to them, they would give scriptures, they would quote scriptures, and tell you exactly where that the scriptures are from.
Now I had been to church and I knew what the Bible says, but this was totally different. The way these guys were and these gals were was amazing. I mean you just know there’s something special about their lives, there’s something that God has really done in their lives. This isn’t something that they were just talking about, but they really had a relationship with God. And I remember the guy who preached, for some reason he decided to preach about music and he was telling us all these things about music and about Lucifer and how Lucifer fell, and all about the music industry. Remember, the night before I had been to a disco, I had been to a dance, so this guy starts talking about music and he was talking about things I had never heard before. So after he preaches, then another girl comes to close the service and I remember she spoke a scripture, and I can never forget the scripture. I remember her standing there and saying that “I want you to remember.” And as she said this she almost was like she was looking at me, as if she was talking to me, and I was at the back of the room and I was just sweating. I mean, sweat was pouring down, I was on tension, and she was saying “I want you to remember, Jesus did not come to save those that are righteous. He came to call us sinners to repentance.” And I was looking at her and I was wondering why is she looking at me and why is she speaking to me. And she gave an altar call and I did not go.
Now because I grew up in a Christian home, every time, I remember every time I used to go to a church and they would give altar calls I would go for the altar calls because I just felt like I needed to rededicate my life to Jesus once again. But for some reason this time it was like I froze in the back of the seat and I was just sweating, sweat was pouring down me, but I did not go up there. And I remember the service closed and I left that place.
But it’s like I left, and something had just clicked in my life, something had changed in my life. I left, I went back to the dormitory, I couldn’t even go to have lunch. And that evening – back home inUgandawe have times, you know like we would call them preparations. But in boarding school, at the school I was at, we used to go out and study. This was mandatory, we had to go and just have a study time every evening from 7 o’clock to 10 o’clock. So I remember, when I went for study I went with my bible and I was reading the Bible.
And after studying, at 10 o’clock, I remember we had kind of a field, a soccer field close by our dormitory. And I remember, when I was done with studying instead of going back to the dormitory to sleep I just went in that field. And I remember just kneeling down and pouring out my heart to God, and I was just crying and weeping, and asking God to forgive me, and telling him that “I dedicate my life to you Father.”
I was just thanking God for Jesus Christ, and I was thanking Jesus Christ for dying for my sins, and I was just weeping, and I was crying to God and asking for forgiveness. I knew there was something that had changed in my life, and that day I decided that my life was going to be dedicated to the Lord Jesus Christ.
I remember when I was praying one of the teachers came by, and he was wondering what I was doing in the field. He came, he looked at me, and he saw me, I was just crying and calling on God. And he looked at me with kind of amazement, and he just walked away. And I stayed there for I don’t know how long, maybe an hour or so. And when I left that place I knew from that day onward I was going to walk a different kind of life.
And looking back probably I handled this the wrong way, but one of the things that I did that I remember is I almost right away cut off all my friends that I had been working with, and I got new friends. I started hanging out with these guys that were Christians from the fellowship, and the more I hung out with them the more I felt a hunger to know God more, because these guys would quote scriptures, they would tell you where scriptures are in the Bible. Whenever we would pray – we used to meet for prayer – they would pray the word, and I was kind of like lost because I was looking at these young kids who knew the Bible and who knew about prayer, how to communicate to God, and I didn’t know any of this stuff. That drove me so much that I really decided to just go after God. And honestly speaking, for the next two years in my – for the next year actually, because that was my senior six. For the next year I spent, it’s almost like I gave up on books. And I remember I would be in class, the teacher would be teaching and I was fiercely reading the Bible.
When we left class and maybe went on break I would hang out with these guys and I would listen to them talk to the Bible. It’s like these guys did not talk about anything else other than the stories in the Bible and scriptures and the revelations they were getting. So you know I would hang out during break. And then during lunchtime they would be going out to eat, I would be going in the bushes to pray and read the word of God. I would fast; I would seek the Lord out. I remember I would wake up late in the night at like 3 o’clock and I would spend like an hour, two hours, three hours, just praying in the night in the cold, because I was so hungry for God. I cut off my old friends and I just wanted to be with guys that knew God, I did not want to fellowship with guys that didn’t know God. I probably handled some of these things the wrong way looking back, I was immature, but something had changed in my life.
And from that time going forward there was a fire within my life, because I just knew I was experiencing something I had not experienced before. And so my life started to change. And within probably a month, two month, or three months – I mean it was within a short time – you could not differentiate me from these guys who are talking about the Bible because it’s almost like everything they had to say about the Bible, it was like I could remember where scriptures were, I could quote some of the scriptures, I had started to learn to pray according to the scriptures, I just felt like I was now part of these guys. I was so passionate and God was working in my life to the point that these guys, I think they also forgot that maybe I hadn’t been a Christian, and by saying I hadn’t been a Christian I wasn’t attending with them, you know like their fellowships, I wasn’t part of them. They forgot about that because they almost thought I had been with them maybe two years or so, because they started calling me in on meetings where they wanted to make decisions.
They started trusting me – I remember they would trust me with money to go out and do shopping for the fellowship – I mean they started taking me as if I was a part of the committee. Because I remember one time – I think they were going to reorganize the committee, and they were wondering what position I held in the committee, and they realized I didn’t hold any position. I mean, they were perplexed to know that.
But the reason was is because I had grown so much in love with God that God was doing wonders in my life. I remember they started giving me opportunities to preach the word and to share the word of God, and I would share the little that I knew. So I was so much on fire and from that time my fire for God just grew deeper, I just wanted to be with God, I wanted to spend time with God. So that’s how I give my life to Jesus Christ.
Now what I want to do in the next podcast is kind of to show you how myself for God, and how that changes in 2007. So when I do the next podcast, it’s going to kind of be a continuation on this podcast. So I want to leave you with this: that I was so serious for God, and I just wanted to do as much as I could for God, and in 2007 something changed. There was something that changed in my life, and that’s what I want to share with you, what really changed in my life and how maybe that’s when I will also show you how I got to start Christian Motivation.
So I hope that gives you an idea of how I came to give my life to Jesus Christ. I’m really so grateful to have the opportunity to share with you. Again for those of you who may be hearing this for the first time, I just want to encourage you to go to the website, ChristianMotivation.TV, you can fill in your name and your email so that we can stay in contact with one another. There are other maybe blog posts or resources out there on the website that you can share with others, let others know about the website, about the resources. I encourage you to also communicate to me, I would want to know about you, so feel free to write me something, and just maybe introduce yourself, let me know about you. Feel free to comment on the things that I put out there, feel free to share the resources that I put out there. I just want us to be in love with God and I just want us to be in fellowship with one another.
This is Moses here from Christian Motivation, I’m saying that you stay blessed, and keep the faith. Go out there in life and reign, because we are meant to reign. God bless you.
