Saturday, September 4, 2010

Testimony time

I come from a very religious background, a very large and old pseudo-Christian institution that you can probably guess so I'll refrain from naming it for now.  I was raised to believe in a man-made system of rituals and rites, ones that I would later learn were in fact in opposition of Scripture instead of based on it.  My thoughts on the Messiah were that He's only a part of the salvation process, and that His Torah is useless.  To make a long story short, one night a lifelong friend of mine named Jana took me out to a play at a church she was involved in at the time.  Not really understanding what I was doing, I let her lead me into a prayer of repentance afterwards.  As Jana eventually led me to study the Scriptures it was then that I realized how much of what I had been indoctrinated to believe was false, and after about a year of struggling I finally left my previous institution; got immersed and enrolled in a non-denominational "bridal college".  It was there that I befriended two other young men who were studying Messianic things in their spare time, they tried to share with me some matters but I resisted for well over two years; going through one major spiritual change was hard and I didn't want to do it again.  But now I'm openly Nazarene, which I see as more of a movement than a denomination and I've been re-immersed in the real names of Yahuah and Yahushua (God and Jesus both have negative origins which one can see if they study them out objectively).