The following salvation and membership testimony was shared with me by someone who wants to remain anonymous so that the focus of the testimony would be entirely on the Lord. I encourage you to read it carefully and examine yourself to see if you are really saved.
During my teen years, after moving to a new city and my parents desiring to join an independent Baptist church there, I was directed down the Roman’s Road in the Scriptures and prayed the sinner’s prayer with my pastor. But frequently after that time, when reading Scriptures I felt a drawing by the Lord to the Scripture verse Isaiah 55:1, “Ho, everyone that thirsteth, come ye to the waters and he that hath no money, come ye buy and eat; yea come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” The drawing power of that Scripture came time and time [again] during the following years, and I would think that I needed to draw closer to God, to re-dedicate my life to Him—but nothing changed inside. Seeing and hearing my peers at church discuss witnessing to their unsaved friends always put a hunger in my soul to be able to do the same, but I had not the words to say, a seeming inability to do so.
After some years passed following marriage and the Lord calling my husband to Bible school and directing him into a ministry, God graciously revealed what my continuing hunger was. One evening, specifically March 16, 1965, following God’s leading, my husband brought home from his study his large reel-to-reel tape recorder. He sat it on the kitchen table and told me to listen to the message on the tape preached by an evangelist, that it would be a blessing to me, and then went back to his study. The message concerned the evangelist’s own conversion after having been in evangelistic work for 18 years. The moment he stated God’s revelation to him of his own lost condition, my heart was pricked and I was stunned to realize that I, too, was lost. The unknown truth about my spiritual life was at last revealed to me.
Overwhelmed by the guilt and knowledge that all those past years I had not truly been who I thought I was (I actually did not know I was unsaved), and most of all with great sorrow over the fact that my husband unknowingly had married an unsaved person, I bowed my head and prayed for forgiveness and claimed Christ as my Savior. Joyfully, I called my husband on the phone and told him I had truly been born again—saved by the blood of Christ and my sins washed away! He told me that while he himself had been listening to this message on the recorder, the Lord had impressed on his mind “your wife is unsaved.” He then asked me if I would be willing to give my testimony in church the next morning.
At the end of that Sunday morning service, when the invitation was extended for anyone unsaved to answer God’s call for salvation, a hand went up and a 30-year-old lady stepped forward—the only daughter of one of the deacons, who in the providence of God, was visiting her dad that weekend from out of town (as she lived and worked elsewhere). She stated that she thought she was saved as a teenager but upon hearing my testimony realized her own lost condition and came forward to receive Christ.
Soon after that Sunday, I was baptized by immersion.
For a short time afterwards, I did wonder if my imagination had made up the fact that I had not been saved before and sought for assurance from the Lord regarding my salvation. He confirmed to me the reality of what happened in my life with verses from Matt. 7:21-23, causing me to realize with shock and sadness that there may be other people—friends, relatives, who will go out into eternity lost or who had departed this life, who all the while thought they were saved.
“Not everyone that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven——-Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? And in thy name have cast out devils? And in thy name done many wonderful works? [Taught Sunday School, worked in a ministry, even given a witness] And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity.” He also gave me two precious verses, Isaiah 32:17, “That the work of righteousness is peace and the effect of righteousness is quietness and assurance forever.” And lastly, 1 Cor. 15:10, “But by the grace of God I am what I am; and His grace which was bestowed upon me was not in vain.”
But for God’s grace, kindness and love, I had been in a position to go out into eternity lost and doomed—never knowing until too late my condition. Since that time, my heart’s desire has been to be used of God to help others see their need of Christ and that my testimony may be used by the Holy Spirit to touch the heart of an unsaved soul—perhaps there is someone here tonight who is right now in the position I was—you are traveling down life’s pathway completely unsaved under the false illusion that spiritually you are safe. Think on Matthew 7:21-23 again.
God brought me to [this city] to live, and He has given me the privilege of becoming part of a church that is winning and discipling people for the Lord’s glory and sending out laborers to other parts of the world to do likewise. I would like to be a part of [this church] to be used by the Lord as He directs and sees fit. “Now also when I am old and greyheaded, O God, forsake me not; until I have shewed thy strength unto this generation and thy power to everyone that is to come.” Psalm 71:18.
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