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God's Grace | |
| It happened one night, just before my 24 birthday. I was going out with the boys and I was going to meet up with them in Launceston, I lived about 45 minutes out of town. I was just arriving into Launceston when I remember thinking that life was pretty good to me at this time, me and my wife were getting on good we had our first healthy child, we were about to build a new house on our land, I had a good stash of drugs from a healthy crop, my job was okay but paid well. all of a sudden I started crying. I continued to drive to where I was going and the crying turned into uncontrollable sobbing, so I had tears streaming down my face all the time thinking this is crazy, I have lost the plot, so I turn down a road that I knew went to an abandoned wharf and as I was travelling down this road I had this thought not a voice but something was telling me that all these tears and the uncontrollable crying was cleansing me and relieving me from past sins and guilt from certain areas of my past that I had no control over. The next thing was again not a voice but an overwhelming feeling that there is a God he does exist there is life after death and he does love me. By this time I was parked on the wharf and I can only explain that I sat in the presence of God for around 20 minutes, feeling totally free. totally amazed and totally at peace, the most highest experience I have ever had. Now to say that life was easy and I did every thing right from then on would be a total contradiction of what happened from here. I was on a spiritual high for around 2 weeks, feeling just on top of the world and then it all changed. Looking back I know God was there all along but at the time it felt as if he had left me and I couldn’t understand why, I thought I had done something wrong, so I then went on a 2 year journey to find this God again.So after 2 years of trying to win Gods approval by works I just basically had enough, I didn’t have a relationship with him I had a knowledge of him and of course it just wasn’t working, I burnt out and gave up, not in my belief in God but in trying to live as a Christian. It wasn’t long after I gave up trying that I started falling back into my old ways, I drank every night of the week for basically 5 years. I lost my licence and wrote off our car in a drunken stupor, and despite Audras pleas to cut back on the drink I still persisted in what I was doing. During this time things went from bad to worse Audra had lost her faith in me (understandably) and we separated. I remember sitting on our bed, I had just arrived back from Melbourne and Audra was telling me we had grown apart and it was too late to make it work. As she walked out of the room my head went into a spin and for the first time in my life I felt lost and hopeless. I had been with Audra for 15 years, and we had the 3 children I still loved her and the last thing I wanted was for my kids to be brought up in a broken home. But the damage had been done and I had ignored all the warning signals and now was powerless to stop it. For a split second I remember sitting there with all these wicked thoughts running through my head from murder to suicide. And then I said something that changed everything, I don’t know why I said it, it wasn’t a prayer, I didn’t say it with much conviction or hope but what I did say was WHAT NOW GOD. And that very instance I felt this calmness take over my whole body a peace that only God can deliver and he said to me quite clearly get up and go deal with it. So I did, I went out and we calmly talked how we were going to go about the separation and we separated in the most calm mature way possible if there is such a way. We were now separated and even though I was trying to be reconciled to Audra, she wouldn’t have it, she was quite determined that we were never getting back together. We separated for a period of two months and in this time God gave me 9 verses out of the bible that I clung to as Gods promises and I will share them in my words as I understood them to mean to me. I did not search for these verses God simply gave them to me and where to find them and every time they spoke to my heart and gave me hope that everything was going to be alright and he was in control. 1/ Corinthians 2:5 So that my faith might not rest on men’s or my wisdom but in Gods power. During this time I had a lot of good intentional people giving advise from going out and getting laid to getting back into the church. But God was saying to me it doesn’t matter what everyone else was saying to do or not to do or what you think you should do because the only thing that’s going to change this situation was the power of God. 2/ Hebrews 10:36 I need to persevere, so that when I have done the will of god I will receive what he has promised. This I relate back to the broken promise I had made to God a few years earlier. God was saying fulfil your promise and I will fulfil mine and I believed Gods promise was to restore my marriage. I believe this was an important step not because God needed me to fulfil my promise but because he wanted to release me and set me free from satans grip. Once I had fulfilled the promise I was free accept Gods promise without Satan tripping me up or reminding me of the past. Basically God was getting rid of the foothold I had given Satan. 3/ Proverbs 6:29 So is he who sleeps with another mans wife , no one who touches her will go unpunished. At the time I got this I was a bit puzzled. Not until later did it come into play for me. Yes Audra did have an affair with another man. I did have suspicions at the time but dismissed them. If God had not given me this verse in advance, before the truth came out I believe my human response even with God now in my life would have been to get revenge, for jealously and anger would have overrode commonsense and I could have easily ended up in prison for my actions. God was telling me that it was not up to me but him to avenge the wrongdoing. ( Proverbs chapter 6 and 7 goes into detail about this.) So relying on God for my vengeance at the time gave me some peace and the focus to make the right decisions. 4/Ezekiel 11:19 I will give Audra an undivided heart and put a new spirit in her , I will remove from her, her heart of stone and give her a heart of flesh. God had revealed to me ( not that I didn’t know it but I wouldn’t recognise it) that through my past actions over the years I had hardened Audras heart towards me. She wouldn’t allow herself to soften towards me because of her past hurts.( God revealed later past hurts from me but also in her childhood). But God was saying that he will break through the hardness, not change her free will but change her heart so she can feel loved and give love again. And this is exactly what he did do, how he done this is Audras story to tell. 5/ Corinthians 2:3 I came to you in weakness and fear and with much trembling, my message and my preaching were not with wise or persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the spirits power. What this scripture meant to me was I couldn’t stop praying. I was constantly asking God for his help and thanking him for his promises. This was definitely not from myself but the holy spirit inside of me giving me the words and the persistence in my prayer life. 6/ Psalm 21:2 You have granted me the desires of my heart and have not withheld the request of my lips. God was simply saying to me that my prayers were answered that my desires and my petitions to him for us to be a family again was going to happen. 7/Psalm 22:4 In God our fathers put their trust; they trusted and God delivered them. They cried to God and were saved, in God they trusted and were not disappointed. Again God was saying to me he was going to fix the mess we had made. Still Audra was adamant that we were never getting back together, but God was telling me that regardless of what the situation looked like to me (hopeless ) if I put my trust in him, God was not going to let me down. 8/Psalm 67:1 May God be gracious to me and bless me and make his face shine upon me. This was a strange request for me. Previous times I had always felt not good enough or spiritual enough to ask for Gods blessings. But one day in a quiet moment God asked me to pray for him to bless me and then took me straight to this passage. I have since worked out that is what God wants us all to do, to ask God to bless us regardless of our situations or how we perceive ourselves as worthy or not. For one we all have free will so to ask God directly for his blessings on our lives allows God to bless us, and as we are blessed we are free to go and bless others. Ask God for a fish he wont give you a snake. ( Mathew 7:10 ) 9/ Psalm 57:17:18 I was enraged by your sinful greed. I punished you and hid my face in anger, yet you kept on your wilful ways. I have seen your ways but I will heal you, I will guide you and restore comfort to you. This basically summed it all up for me God was saying that he’s seen my past and my sins, I have turned my back on him twice and have suffered the consequences for it and still he was prepared to show me the way out, to bring us all into a better life with him, to bring healing and a wholeness to myself and to my family. Which he has done and continues to do up to this day.
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