HOLY SPIRIT TRANSFORMS

Jesus said, "Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost:" Matthew 28:19

Thank you, Heavenly Father, for Your Son and Your Spirit. Amen.

Apologies from the start if this blog includes a lot of "I's," as it is challenging to write a testimony without using "I." 

With that being said, I was a disobedient and unruly child, teenager and adult. When I was around 12 years old, I tried to "kill" myself by taking baby aspirin, which was just a feign attempt at garnering attention, and distracting my mother from my misdeeds, which were really the issue.

After that, I heard my sisters tell my mom that she should take me to church, so we began attending the First Baptist Church. "Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it." Proverbs 22:6. Amen.

The church had Sunday school for children my age, so I began attending. Sadly, even at Sunday school, I seemed to fall in with the kids that were going behind the church to smoke cigarettes. Little did I know that God had other plans for my life. I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior shortly after starting to attend the church. I do not remember if I even really knew what that meant at the time. Then, around the same time, I was baptized in water, in front of the church congregation.

A short time later, the Sunday school class hosted a church camp for two weeks, and I attended that as well. At the camp, they were baptizing people in the lake, so I lined up with my friends to be baptized again. From the moment I put on the white garment and walked into the lake, the whole experience was surreal. When I was raised up out of the water, I can only describe it one way, I was in love with everyone and everything.

I did not understand then, but I can now understand how Jesus felt when He was baptized by John the Baptist, and a voice came from heaven and said, This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased. Matthew 3:16-17. Praise God. Thank you, Jesus.

I could not understand why everyone was not lining up to be baptized, so they could feel like I felt.

After church camp was over, within a couple of weeks of returning home, hanging out with my same old friends, doing the same old things, not nurturing the Holy Spirit inside me, the warm, fuzzy, feelings faded. I spent the next 45 years being disobedient and unruly, running from God and, worse, denying Him. 

In my 20s, my mom would tell me to "get back to God, Melanie," and I would reply with something like, I don't believe in that stuff, Mom. Bless her heart. In my 30's, I began to believe in something, a Higher Power, and I subjected my young daughter to six years at a metaphysical church. Bless her heart, also, because she came to God before I came back to Him, and she has raised her children with Jesus Christ. That has nothing to do with how I raised her obviously, or with her father, whose family is Jewish. Only God could save someone in the face of that adversity! Praise God. Thank you, Jesus.

From my 40's to 50's, I wandered in my sin and lusts, still believing something, but no knowledge or understanding of it, and not having a spiritual home.

Most of my adult life, I have watched all manner of violence and horror on TV, as this was my preferred genre. Then, Ancient Aliens, which led to Biblical archaeology. I was searching for something. It was at my fingertips but I couldn't reach it.

Then, one day, five years ago, at 58 years old, over 45 years after accepting Jesus Christ as my savior, being baptized twice, and receiving Holy Spirit, during a wicked storm in our area that was rattling the walls, the light bulb went off, the light shined into my heart through the darkness surrounding it, and I understood that God, the Father in heaven, IS the Higher Power.

After that, I could not get enough of His Word. Still being blinded by the ruler of this world 2 Corinthians 4:4, I could not understand the King James Bible, so I began reading the easy-to-read Bible, which is written at like a 9th grade level, and it was awesome. Then, I heard of the Amplified Bible, and I loved how descriptive it was, with the footnotes. I now read the King James Bible (almost exclusively), with ease. Thank you, Lord.

At that time, I also heard that if you read the Bible from start to finish, God will give you revelations. Who would not want to hear revelations from God? And, I was still soaking up His Word like crazy, every day, all day, writing blogs, listening to Him, obeying. So, I started to read the Amplified Bible from Genesis to Revelation. I read the entire Amplified Bible in four months, August to December 2021. In the first 10 days, I was already in the book of Joshua, and God was not disappointing with showing me great and mighty things. Jeremiah 33:3

Within the first month of beginning to read, I prayed for and received from Holy Spirit the gift of [praying in] tongues Acts 2:4. It was then that I became aware of the evil and immorality abounding around us. I now understood clearly the scripture, "Love not the world, nor the things in it. For if anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in Him." 1 John 2:15-17. I could no longer watch the movies I had loved for 50 years. I could no longer listen to the same music. I understood inherently that it was all against God's Will and purpose for our lives, and designed by Satan to pull us away from God, to worship idols even. It saddened me to know that I had wasted my whole life running from God, denying Him, and living my life in all manner of vileness.

Praying in tongues also immediately brought my Spiritual journey into a greater reverence for Jesus Christ and His mission to love and serve. I now understood His love for the lost, weary and forgotten, and more importantly, I had a yearning to serve them. I now understood 1 Corinthians 13:13: "And now abides faith, hope, charity [love], these three; but the greatest of these is charity [love]." And, the greatest commandments to love God and love our neighbor as ourself Matthew 22:36-40, because we are all one in Christ Jesus. 1 Corinthians 12:12-27

So, my husband and I began serving the homeless. First, by making Blessing Bags and handing them out to the homeless at street corners. Then, we learned of people who live in tents in our area, year-round, even in the snow, so we started taking food to them and sharing God's Word with them by putting scripture in the bags, or just sharing a kind word and a hot meal, and telling them that Jesus loves them.

I noticed later that I wrote very few blogs during the August 2021 to December 2021 time period, when I was entrenched in God's Word, reading it from Genesis to Revelation in four months.

In December 2021, however, at the end of the reading, God had much to say in my writings/blogs and testimonies about His systems on earth: Seed plant harvest, tithing, giving, His Son, Jesus Christ, His plan for man before time began, and, also, that He is our Source, and we are all one in Him.

He is available to all who seek Him, and He will never forsake us, even unto the day our bodies return to the dust and our Spirit returns to God who gave it. Ecclesiastes 12:7

The "free cost of grace" is that without God's grace, all men would have perished, but with God's grace, or favor to man, given freely to all who believe in His Son, and keep His commandments, all men might be saved.

There is a meme that says, You know the kingdom of God is within you Luke 17:20-21 when you want to obey Him. In my experience as written here, this is 100% the truth. 

Accept Jesus Christ and keep His commandments. Believe and be saved:

John 3

16 "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life.

17 For God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world through him might be saved."

Pray for Holy Spirit to transform your heart from glory to glory in God's image:

"But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord, are changed into the same image from glory to glory, even as by the Spirit of the Lord." 2 Corinthians 3:18

Maybe other people have different experiences. God does work in mysterious ways, and He will keep trying to reach us any way He can, until we turn to Him and away from the sin in our lives. I would love to hear those testimonies.

I pray this word reaches and helps those who need it on their journey to find, accept, believe, obey, and have faith in, God and His only begotten son, Jesus Christ. Hallelujah! Praise God. Thank you, Jesus. Amen.

For an in-depth look at the heart of Jesus, watch the "Jesus Film" (1979) below: