Son<\/i>ia\u2019s Testimony (Not the Sonia we know\u2014this Sonia lives in Australia and has a degree in Chemistry)<\/i><\/p>\n
Creation magazine opened my eyes to the Gospel!\u00a0 <\/i>My Mother went to church once a week. She basically believed the Bible to be true (although did not read it, nor I suspect had any real understanding of it), and had the Christian \u2018world view\u2019\u2014no sex before marriage, no drugs etc. Most people accept this view as \u2018Christian\u2019. My Father was not a Christian, so during my growing up I did not see how a Christian family life should be\u2014where the children are taught from the Bible and have family prayer time, etc.<\/p>\n
I suppose I was a typical \u2018church kid\u2019. Went once a week to Sunday school and heard Bible stories. I was also confirmed at thirteen because it was the thing to do and it made my Mother happy. I also attended a \u2018Christian\u2019 school where I was taught evolution as fact in Science. It was also generally accepted that we descended from apemen\/cavemen in history. I found it interesting that these Christian teachers had accepted evolution and could still believe the Bible. As far as I was concerned, I thought they were a bunch of hypocrites. It didn\u2019t make much sense since even I could see that evolution and the Creation of the world as written in Genesis could not possibly be the same.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t realise it then, but these teachings, along with the subtle evolutionary teachings from TV documentaries, museum displays, newspapers and magazines such as the National Geographic<\/i> and World<\/i>, all played a major influence on my view of the world and how I should live it.<\/p>\n
The message of Jesus made no sense to me because as far as I was concerned \u2018sinners\u2019 were those murderers in gaol and I was not one of those. I realise now that the reason I didn\u2019t understand is because I had no foundation. Sin was whatever I wanted it to be since I had no definite, clear description or definition of it. The reason I didn\u2019t have a clear definition is because I was told that Genesis was a myth. That the people back in \u2018those days\u2019 were not intelligent enough to understand the creation of the world, so God had to tell them in a way that they would understand. When I questioned my mother about the days of creation, she told me that they represented millions of years. Basically what I was being told was that Genesis (particularly the first 11 chapters) was a big fairy story and not historical fact. This was further impacted by the millions of years, cavemen\/ape-men influences from school and other areas. This led me to believe that the Bible was a big lie. If God couldn\u2019t tell the truth from the beginning, then when did he start?<\/p>\n
Later on I concluded that people had made God up as a crutch. The reason they needed this crutch is because as far as I could see, this life led no-where. We are born, we live a short finite time and then we die\u2014no before-life, no after-life. To me it seemed futile and purposeless. So I figured that the Bible was man\u2019s way of coping with this dilemma. Surely if we were made from some primordial soup then God didn\u2019t exist.<\/p>\n
Once I had rejected the Bible and its \u2018Laws\u2019, I became rebellious. This led to smoking, drinking, drugs and worse. All this was \u2018normal\u2019 existence by today\u2019s standards. The only problem would have been if the police caught me. Quite frankly I couldn\u2019t understand why the law didn\u2019t permit all these practises. Surely the law was old and outdated and not keeping up with the times. To me the rules were all relative. As long as I didn\u2019t hurt anyone else, I didn\u2019t care what I did. As far as I was concerned, I had the right to do whatever I wanted since it was my own body. What I didn\u2019t realise was that I don\u2019t actually own it, God does!<\/p>\n
Eventually I left my slovenly lifestyle and became career orientated. This was after realising that even though this life was purposeless I might as well do something with it while I was here. Also, I saw so much sadness, violence and hopelessness in the people I lived with and hung out with that I realised that I didn\u2019t want to be like them in ten or so years\u2019 time.<\/p>\n
When I met Darren, this view was radically changed. At first I didn\u2019t know he was a Christian but it soon became clear that he was after an incident at work. I was walking through part of the laboratory one day and an enthusiastic Bible Basher was talking to someone about Jesus. To me it was quite obvious that he didn\u2019t have a brain if he subscribed to that rubbish. I said to Darren, \u2018This guy is a fruit-loop, keep him away from me.\u2019 Darren told me that he just had a different perspective on things than I did.<\/p>\n
Then Darren started to talk to me about animals, plants, the universe etc. He would memorise articles from Creation<\/i><\/a> magazine (or photocopy long ones and bring them to me the next day). He would share the information and then tell me how they had to have been made by a creator. Darren witnessed faithfully to me for about two and a half to three\u00a0years before I became a Christian! The process was interesting in that once I realised that Creation could have happened\u2014thereby removing my evolutionary foundation and replacing it with the Creation foundation, I then found it easy to accept the entire Gospel message. This did not happen overnight as I was thoroughly indoctrinated with evolutionary ideology and had already rejected the Bible.<\/p>\n Many Christians consider that the Gospel is solely Jesus death and resurrection and nothing else but it is not. It is far broader, as the Gospel begins right in the first chapters of Genesis, as Paul proclaims in 1 Corinthians 15:21\u201322. In fact the last reference to the Gospel is in Revelation 14:6\u20137 where we are instructed to amongst other things \u2018worship him who made the heavens \u2026 \u2019 If you preach Jesus\u2019 death and resurrection alone it is like watching only the climax of a movie, missing the beginning (therefore having no foundation and understanding) and missing the end so you don\u2019t know exactly how it finishes. It is an incomplete account. All you can do is guess or accept someone else\u2019s view. You don\u2019t know the truth. If you dismiss any of it as \u2018side issues\u2019 or \u2018red herrings\u2019 then you are not obeying the command in 1 Peter 3:15 and Collossians 4:6.<\/p>\n It was God\u2019s grace in using the information from Darren which destroyed my faith in evolution and allowed me to see, for the first time, the power of the Creator God, as shown in Genesis, which brought me to commitment in Christ.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sonia\u2019s Testimony (Not the Sonia we know\u2014this Sonia lives in Australia and has a degree in Chemistry) Creation magazine opened my eyes to the Gospel!\u00a0 My Mother went to church once a week. She basically believed the Bible to be true (although did not read it, nor I suspect had any real understanding of it), … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[15,22,20],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":203,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions\/203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/edmonton-adventist.org.au\/wpcontent\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}