The Delivered...
“My mother shot him, then she shot herself”
My name is Jeremy and I want to tell a story about how Jesus Christ has touched my life. I grew up in a family that was somewhat happy, my parents were youth group leaders in the church, they taught bible class on Sundays and we were, on the outside pretty happy, but my mother was verbally abusive, controlling, manipulative and one of the most selfish people I had ever known. My parents would also fight a lot, most of the time it was about money. My mother couldn’t stop spending money and at one time charged over a hundred and twenty thousand in credit card debt, most of which was for clothing. She had over two hundred pairs of shoes and six closets full of clothes. She would sometimes spend as much as three to four hundred dollars on one sweater or purse, and this was back in the 1980’s. She would always put on a happy church face in church, and when they were teaching bible class, my mother would force us to go to church an hour and a half early so that she could drink her coffee, and prepare herself for class. Keep in mind that they were teaching four year olds. Now I could be wrong, but I don’t think you need this kind of preparation for children that cannot even read, and it is especially selfish to make your family go there every week with nothing to do for an hour and a half. Looking back on it, I do believe my parents tried to raise us the best way they knew how, and I did feel loved growing up, they just didn’t know Jesus and didn’t have any one that they could give them direction or reflect the truth to them. My dad was also a very weak man to allow these kinds of things to go on.
When I got into high school, I would lead songs in youth group, preach once in a while, and I would go to all the church rallies around Montana, Colorado, and Nebraska. We grew up in what many would consider a spiritual home and environment, but one thing I know now is that in church, no one ever deals with the issues and intentions of the heart. I was caught up in lust and pornography from the time I was nine years old and never really felt convicted about it or even thought much about it being sin, I just thought it was one of those little sins that Jesus understood and that it wouldn’t make much difference. I was fifteen years old when I lost my virginity and that never really convicted me either. I knew it was wrong and that it didn’t please the Lord, I just figured he would understand and he would forgive me when I would say I was sorry. I would sing songs at the Lord in church but there was no real worship or real relationship with Jesus. I would listen to preaching every week that never changed anyone and I never heard a testimony from anyone about overcoming sin. I would pray and see the lord answer prayers so I knew he was real. I just didn’t know any different. The thought that I wasn’t saved or that I was lost in sin never crossed my mind. Where there is little or no conviction there is no Holy Spirit. The only conviction I had was from what was left of my conscience, but the word says that our heart gets hardened from the deceitfulness of sin and the sin was definitely piling up in my life. During my sophomore year in high school my mother started having an affair with one of the elders of my church, whose wife was my mothers best friend and their kids were some of our best friends and that lasted for about two and a half years before they were caught. During that time I got more sexually active and got to the place where it seemed normal for church people to have Christian sex. I became so filled with lust that the reason I liked going to church rallies was to see who I could hook up with, and I would pick only the best looking women there I was also extremely vain and all I did was work out in pursuit of the perfect body so that I could attract women and receive the praises of people. I was so consumed with lust, pornography, selfishness, vanity, control, pride, and emotional instability that there was nothing in my life that reflected Jesus at all, good thing I was going to church and singing at Jesus. Notice that I said singing at Jesus versus singing to Jesus. The Lord wasn’t hearing me and he doesn’t listen to anyone that regards sin in their heart.
After my mother and the man she was sleeping with got caught, she was so embarrassed that she wanted to leave and move across the country. She wanted him to go with her but he wanted to go back to his wife, so when she couldn’t persuade him she shot and killed him, then she called my father to tell him what had happened, and told him that it was too late for her and that she was going to kill herself. She told my dad that she was sorry for everything and hung up the phone. She shot herself in the head and had even left a three page suicide note with her will in it. After all this, needless to say, I became very hard hearted from what had happened and became angry at the whole dead church system and what a joke it was. It had never helped me, never helped my family and certainly didn’t help a lot of the other people in church. Being religious never helped anyone overcome sin or the passions that lived within their heart. All dead religion does is clean the outside of the cup. I feel that I must make myself clear on what I mean about this, I don’t want anyone to get the wrong idea. I don’t have a problem with church or church people, what I mean is, is that just being religious, doing obligation and duty, living in flattery and pretense and going to church every week is not going to deal with the issues of the heart. All that is going to do is give you is a false sense of security of thinking that you are going to heaven. The only thing that will ensure you going to heaven is a personal relationship with Jesus. I don’t care what denomination you are in, no person, priest, pope, bishop or pastor can guarantee you a place in heaven because that responsibility lies on only you and Jesus. If you have not ever been so excited about Jesus that all you do is want to please him, then you have not been born again and you are not saved. If you go to church and you can keep on sinning and think that the Lord will understand, then you need to either get saved again, or you have never really known Jesus and you need to repent, ask his forgiveness, and ask him to come into your heart. When you are born again, the Lord puts his spirit within you and you become the temple of the most high. If the Lord lives within you, I guarantee you that you will feel grieved when you sin against the Lord. Look up an article online called True and False Conversion by Charles Finney, he is very clear about the deception of religious pretense, and who is really saved and who isn’t.
If, at this moment, you are trying to justify why you are sinning, why you think the Lord will understand, or that you think you are saved just because you have been baptized, or at one time gave your life to the Lord then you are self righteous and a sinner and need to repent. The Pharisees and Sadducees were the most religious people of Jesus’ day and Jesus told them they were going to die in their sins. They also thought that because they were the descendents of Abraham that they were saved, but Jesus told them that they could no longer rely on that either. That is the same kind of thinking as relying on your denomination to save you. My Bible says that we need to work out our salvation daily with trembling and fear. I’m saying this because I have gone through all of these same reasons myself and they will only deceive you and keep you from hearing and receiving the truth.)
Now, after all this had passed with my mother and her murder, suicide, my time of rebellion had only begun and I started partying and drinking socially almost every night. I also didn’t care who I used or hurt in the mean time because deep within my heart I was hurting so badly and I was so lost. I even got into books and teachings of using the power of your subconscious mind to get you what you want and that you can tap into the mind of god for wisdom. I was so deceived and didn’t realize that I was using demonic forces, receiving devilish wisdom and using the powers of witchcraft and sorcery to get what I wanted. I partied and slept around for about six years and I was moving from job to job, girlfriend to girlfriend, tormented by thoughts of depression, anger, loneliness, anxiety, and had what doctors called attention deficit hyperactive disorder. It got so bad that I couldn’t read without the television on to distract me from the thoughts. Occasionally I would have the thought of suicide though I really never seriously considered it. I got to a place where I realized how unhappy and miserable I was and I felt alone most of the time. It was like having the feeling that no one could understand how I felt and yet not even knowing what I felt or even how to express it.
I remember going to a party, sitting down with a beer in my hand talking to people about the Lord, I know now that I was obviously very confused. I remember sitting at a party one night and I noticed the people around trying to look like they were happy when I knew they were just as lost as I was. The only difference was, is at that moment I realized I was lost and didn’t want to be lost anymore. I just said a simple prayer. I said Lord, I don’t fit in here and I don’t fit in at church. Will you please put me with the people you want me to be with? About two weeks later, I called up a friend of mine named Carson, who I had met through my present girlfriend at the time. We had spent some time together in the past and I knew that he had a relationship with Jesus. In fact he stopped hanging out with me because I didn’t want to change my lifestyle. So I called him up and told him that I was sick of the life I had been living and was wondering if I could start hanging out with him again. Later he told me that the reason he stopped calling me was because he didn’t want me to think that I could live in sin and think that we could be friends and spend time together. I am here today because he held up a standard of true godly love and integrity.
I started going to these men’s meetings and listened to the first testimonies I had ever heard about Jesus helping them to overcome sin in their life. And there was such sincerity in the way that they were sharing that I couldn’t help but be captivated. I was experiencing the love of Jesus for the first time in my life and I remember being so excited after three hours of preaching that I didn’t want the meeting to end. After about a month of coming to meetings, Carson gave me a book by Derek Prince called “Spiritual Warfare” and it opened my eyes to the spiritual realm of how we are daily influenced by the forces of darkness, even the apostle Paul stated in Eph. 6:12 that “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” and it opened my eyes to the enemy that had been influencing me for years. Another week went by and Carson and I went to a park to walk and pray to the Lord and I noticed that I was so distracted by lust and thoughts that I couldn’t even pray, and I asked the Lord to show me what was wrong with me. Later that day, Carson gave me another book called “They Shall Expel Demons”, by this same author Derek Prince. I read the book over the course of the next few days, the whole time having the television on to drown out the thoughts. It was telling a story about how he got into the ministry of delivering people of demons and gave examples of how ordinary people, many times Christians, needed deliverance from demons and demonic influences. Reading these stories I started identifying with the people in the book and I had many of the same problems these people did. It came to a place in the book where it gave instructions on what to do if you think you need deliverance. So, without really thinking about what I was doing, I went through the instructions and did them. Number 1. I said “Jesus I repent from my sin and turn from them right now and ask you to forgive me for all of my sin. Number 2. I needed to forgive everyone by an act of my will, that had ever hurt me or wronged me, and say it verbally, this took me a little while but I wanted to be forgiven so the Lord requires that we do the same for others. Number 3. I needed to look to Jesus alone as my deliverer, and confess out loud that not one thing I could do could ever earn my salvation, but that it depended solely upon what his death did for me on the cross. This dealt with my thinking about works getting me into heaven. Number 4. I needed to pray to Jesus and say “Lord Jesus, I renounce any evil spirit that has gained any control over me, and I claim your promise of deliverance. Number 5. I commanded every unclean spirit in the name of Jesus to depart from me. And then read a little further and said that some people don’t receive deliverance because they didn’t meet the previous conditions, most of the time, because they didn’t forgive other people. So I double checked that one and reaffirmed that and asked the Lord to reveal it to me if there was anyone that I had not forgiven. So about fifteen minutes after this I was getting ready for bed and started getting sick. I felt something rising up my chest and after a few more minutes, I felt an unseen rush of air coming out of my mouth like that of a really long yawn, only I wasn’t yawning. This happened six or seven times throughout the night as I would wake up each time another one would come out. I was really freaked out by this, especially because I had never heard of this happening to anyone outside of the stories written in this book, and I thought that maybe I just imagined it at first and that I was just dreaming. So I got up and went to work, and after a few hours, I realized that for the first time in my life, the thoughts were gone, and I had absolute peace and faith, and the depression was gone, the anxiety was gone, the attention deficit was gone and I could concentrate with ease. I had absolute faith, and knew that for the first time in my life, that if I died, I would be in the presence of the lord forever and I didn’t care. All I wanted to do was please Jesus, and be with his people. Also, all of the desires for sexual sin was gone. From that day on I never slept with another woman and even though I kept the same girlfriend for another two years afterward, I never slept with her again. All I can say is that the Spirit of the Lord was, for the fist time dwelling in me.
I eventually got engaged with this woman that I was seeing and after breaking up and getting back together three times, I felt that the lord was showing me that she wasn’t the one for me She really didn’t love me, all she wanted was someone to marry and it didn’t matter who it was with. I had more fear of her leaving and finding someone else than I did love for her. I didn’t really love her, I thought I did but I see now that the Lord was trying to deliver me from a terrible future with the wrong woman, a woman that was very controlling and vengeful, and had a wondering eye. I see that I was following in the same footsteps as my father. I am so thankful to Jesus because I see that he is real, his Holy Spirit is real, and that the gifts have not ended. What a dead religion that is, worshiping the “god” that doesn’t heal, doesn’t get involved personally in each person’s life, a “god” that doesn’t speak to anyone, and doesn’t do any miracles. Some of usneed to find another “lord“, because the Jesus I serve does do miracles, does heal the sick, does fill us with his Holy Spirit, and loves us like a real father should. He does set the captives free, he does set the solitary in families and he does bring out those who are bound in chains. I know that the Lord does want to see us fulfilled in our lives, to see us walk in our gifts and callings.
Jesus has given me a ministry of my own by allowing me to have a remodeling business, to serve my customers, share the testimony of Jesus with them and bring the presence of the Lord into their home and pray for them while we are there. I’m so blessed to be a part of his kingdom and to experience his grace and mercy and love, he has set me in a family, he has delivered me and brought me out of bondage, he has helped me to become the man that I have always wanted to be and has given me everything that I have asked for according to his will. I am most certainly fulfilled when I “seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness”. Bless the holy name of Jesus Christ.
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