Joseph Pearce has recently started coming along to our church and has found our preaching to be life-changing for him. He has set up his own blog and shared his story there. I found it very encouraging, do pop along and say hi to him and welcome him to the blogosphere. His blog will appear in a new list in my blogroll of blogs by people I have met. Heres part of his story?
“Just 7 weeks ago, I decided to try a different church completely. This Church was different to others. I felt a presence of Love and acceptance within the fellowship. I felt like part of a big family, people I had only known for weeks seemed like friends I had known my whole life. The very first time I came to the Church (which is set in one of the screens at the local UGC cinema), I felt that God was speaking right to me through the sermon. It was exactly what I needed to hear at that time, almost like it was perfectly planned by God for me alone.
The second week of coming to the Church, there was another speaker instead of the senior pastor. His confidence was magnificent, his preaching, the sermon, spoke out to me again. The sermon was on being complete in your faith with God. It was perfect for me as I had up to this moment in time felt something was missing from me. He spoke about the time in Acts, when Paul comes up to the Christians who didn’t seem right. There was something missing from them too. Paul realised that they had not been Baptised in the Spirit, but in the Baptism of John.
That was it! I finally realised what was missing from my life, I had never really felt the Holy Spirit working within me. I knew that as a Christian I had already received the Spirit, as promised by Jesus, but I had never felt it working in me. At the end of the Sermon there was a time where people could raise their hands if they did not feel the presence of the Spirit, or if there were people who wanted to recommit thier lives to Christ.
I really felt like I needed to be prayed for, so I was the first to raise my hand. There turned out to be 3 people who had their hands up and we all came down on to the stage to be prayed for while the last song was being played.
All I can tell you about the next part was that an amazing thing happened! I felt a strong sence of something passing through me and I found myself falling to the ground with overwhelming Love. I had someone praying over me in tongues. I felt like I had a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. It felt like I was free of all the burdens in my life. I felt so light and at Peace with everything. I felt so great! What an experience! It took me a while to work out what had happened, and so I asked the speaker afterwards what I had felt. He told me that I had been overwhelmed with the Spirit. Wow! I never knew something like that could happen!
Ever since that day, I started to pray in tongues. I feel so free when I am praying like this. I can feel like presence of the Spirit so much now. I never knew that I could feel this way. My life has changed so much over the last 7 weeks. God has been working so much in my life. “
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