My pastor shared part of my testimony in church on Sunday. I have shared my love for Jesus but I have not shared publicly what happened. When I think about it, it still shocks me. I had a road-to-Damascus experience, where God intersected a hellish experience and saved my life (physical and eternal). When I say hell, I mean it! My story reflects the very real danger of new age practices and testifies to how God saved me from this hellish experience that cost me my marriage and nearly destroyed my life.
Romans 10:9 NLT If you openly declare that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
This is my testimony of being saved by our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ and about the spiritual dangers of the new age movement. I was a Christian who got swept up in the new-age healing movement. I didn't know the Bible and therefore was not armed with the knowledge and understanding of God's warnings against these dangers (Deut 18:9-12), (Isaiah 47:13-14) (Lev 20:6) (2 Cor 11:14). My sinning and disobedience created a separation from Him and because I didn't know His word I was unable to discern right from wrong. I started engaging in the new age healing movement - astrology, kundalini yoga, mediums, chakra, and energy healing. Despite my ignorance and disobedience, God saved me, pulling me out of a horrifying experience where I was told I was going to die and I believed it! He swooped in redeemed me, healed me, and restored my life. The healing that I received from Him surpassed anything I could possibly imagine.
The Moment Everything Changed
After being saved everything changed. My life suddenly began operating under a new framework. It was very apparent that God had taken the wheel and was firmly in the driver's seat of my life. Because we walk by faith and not by sight (2 Cor 5:7) this radical transfer of power can be hard to put into words but the proof is in the change that occurs in born-again Christians.
I had years of striving and at 51 stepped into the biggest pit of hell a person could ever imagine. I had strayed so far from God's commandments. My sinning and disobedience created a separation from Him and because I didn't know His word I was unable to discern right from wrong. I started engaging in the new age healing movement - astrology, kundalini yoga, yoga, mediums, chakra, and energy healing. This new age healing is not just wellness it is spiritual, connected to deities and these deities are not God they are demons. Chakras and Kundalini are based on the Kundalini Shakti deity, which is a coiled snake. Mediums state that they speak with your dead loved ones but God prohibits this (Lev 19:3). Here is an article from John Piper (a theologian, pastor, and chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota) speaking about the power of spiritual beings that are not from God where he speaks about Apostle Paul’s warning about demons Do All Religions Lead To God.
I believe that new age healing is the gateway drug to satan. As with all drugs, these things started off feeling good but quickly turned into a controlling and horrifying experience. My human rebellion reached a red line. I unknowingly crossed over into a very dangerous, realm that I thought only existed in fiction horror movies. I was told I was going to die and I believed it. Not only did I believe it, I wanted to die. I was told that I was going to go to heaven. As things progressed I started to experience visions and things that I couldn't see touching my body. At some point, the experiences turned dark and I started to be attacked physically and sexually by things I couldn't see. I was terrified and desperately needed help, I needed a Savior!
With a dear friend's help, I asked Jesus into my heart and asked Him to be my Lord and Savior. That was the moment everything changed! God came in like a force reached down and pulled me up out of the pit of hell I was in and resuscitated me. I was awakened into a new life. One centered on love, forgiveness, healing, correction, and protection. Everything started to look differently; my relationships, my behavior, my priorities & my discernment of what was good and not good all changed. I started to see how many aspects of my life needed an overhaul. The miraculous thing about that is that God did all the heavy lifting. These changes were things I couldn’t imagine doing on my own, and I didn’t have to - He did it. He picked up my cross and He carried it for me.
God brought new people into my life to help me navigate this new way of living. He changed my desires and corrected them to be ones that were good for me and in accordance with His perfect will. My unhealthy habits and behaviors became unappealing to me and were replaced with healthy ones. My priorities changed with God becoming first and everything else second. I began caring more for others instead of being so selfish and the things that used to be important - my home, material things, my body image, my glass of wine, my career, me, me, me were not so important. This was a whole new way of living and it was incredible. I had always been obsessed with my body image and feeling like I had to be perfect and when God entered my life I learned that I was fearfully and wonderfully made (Psalm 139:1) just as He made me. For the first time in my life, I felt loved, accepted, and protected in a way that is hard to describe. I felt secure and anchored to something unshakable which is what happens when you become a child of God. (1 John 3:2)
Correction: It is important to always make the truth clear so I want to correct a statement that I made. In the video I said that Lucifer wanted to be like God, the correction is that he wanted to be God.
It has not been an easy journey but it is the most rewarding one. I have gone through a deliverance process lasting months and I have had to live with the destructive consequences of this experience including severe trauma and severed relationships. Satan roams around like a roaring lion looking for someone to devour (1 Peter 5:8). His motives are to steal, kill, and destroy (John10:10) - he stole plenty from me, but by the grace and mercy of God, he didn't destroy me.
Letting go of the things that had given me a false sense of comfort for decades was sometimes a battle. I had plenty of discussions with God (pleas of whining and pouting) about whether or not this thing needed to go or why I couldn’t have a glass of wine every night. Fortunately, He has endless patience (1 Tim 1:6). This statement that I read in one of my devotional books sums it up perfectly, “Have you learned nothing O’ stubborn and rebellious child… return to Me and trust Me”
In the end, I obeyed Him. I gave Him what was rightfully His. He saved me and I owed my life- physical and eternal to Him and more important than that, I loved Him beyond anything I could possibly imagine. And that love means that everything that I have and everything I am going to do for the rest of my life is going to be about Him and for Him. Amen!✝️💓