What is your relationship with religion?

I think I wanted to be saved as a child. I didn't have peace for my soul, though, and my teenage self knew it. I desired it. I wanted to be saved. I wanted to know I was saved.

I grew up going to church. I hated going sometimes as a child. I remember I wanted to play on the computer rather than go, and that theme would reoccur throughout my life. I don't believe I was saved back then.

When I became a teen, I realized I wasn't sure I was saved. All you had to do to be saved was say a little prayer. I said things, but I didn't truly understand them. I knew I had done wrong. In my secret life as a preteen and teen I was involved in reading and writing all kinds of sinful things. It was enticing. It drew me in. It killed me spiritually.

I felt like I was saved, so I believed I was. Whatever doubts I had, I disregarded and still went to church anyway, but only on Wednesday evenings when it was convenient. I went to see my friends. I didn't go for God. I didn't go for Jesus. I didn't go to hear the gospel preached.

It wasn't. Not in my youth group that eventually disbanded and there were a few attempts here and there to revive it, but all of those friends went off to their lives.

I remember at some point in high school we had a women's ministry, and usually we would have one person give their testimony of how God saved them. I knew in my heart I didn't have one. I knew I had said a prayer and believed I was saved, yet I was living like the devil. I didn't go to church much in those days. I didn't read my Bible. I was reading and writing stories filled with sin. All of my thoughts, words, and deeds were full of sin and I didn't care to change. I loved my sin. It helped me get through the roughest parts of my life.

I stopped going at all in my senior year of high school. I was too busy. I spent almost all my time at home with my online friends who were not godly influences.

By the end of 2016 and going into early 2017, I decided to start going back. That December my church was doing Christmas movie nights so I eased myself in with that. I started wanting to live the life I knew I was supposed to live as a Christian. I wasn't all the way there, but church felt like a start.

I started my first job out of high school and I was going to church and I was just trying to be a nice person and maybe someone would ask me if I was a Christian. No one ever did. The most I ever talked about Christianity at church was when I told an old manager that I didn't enjoy working Saturday evenings because I had to get up early in the morning on Sundays. I remember she said she used to. I wonder what she's up to now.

I got rebaptized. I knew when I got baptized at 11 or 12 that I didn't know exactly what I was doing. The night I got baptized I was up until four am. I began watching Degrassi and that show was full of plenty of things my preteen self wasn't really ready to handle. I refused to let it go even when my then youth pastor warned me against it.

After getting rebaptized at 19, a coworker started showing interest in me. I remember the day I got the gift of tongues and he said he noticed something different about me. I don't think I truly got the gift and I think it was just a counterfeit, which Satan is able to do only because God gives him power to do so. I haven't used it in years.

So this coworker. I remember I prayed for a boyfriend. I had no discernment. I committed the sexual immorality that I never thought I was capable of, but at the time, I wanted to be capable of it.

After this, I became horribly depressed. I was full of shame and despair. At that time, I thought I was beyond hope of salvation. I don't remember when I found out about apostacy, but I know that sent me into great despair. It meant I was godless, like Esau, beyond repentance. It meant my life would only glorify God as a vessel of wrath. It meant I had committed blasphemy of the Holy Spirit and I could not come back to God. It terrified me.

I sat in church and when the pastor would give the altar call, I wouldn't raise my hand. I thought I could not be saved. I thought I was saved, so how could I not be saved? But I could no longer convince myself that I was saved and I was full of shame.

I thought I would feel better if I did this discipleship class, which, fyi, an 8 week Saturday morning only class is not true, biblical discipleship. I thought doing works would help cover up my sin and my shame. It didn't.

A few months after that class ended, it was February of 2019, and I had reached a point where I did not want to doubt my salvation anymore. I had no peace for my soul, so I decided I finally would admit, even though I had taken this class, that I was not sure I was saved. It did not give me the peace I was searching for. I wasn't even sure I was saved afterward since I didn't feel it.

So I said the sinner's prayer in front of my whole church. At the time, a ministry who had no building of its own had been coming to my church since the middle of that discipleship class. They had started going through the gospel of John at a Bible study at one of their houses. I made it out to one a few weeks later. And the woman leading it gave her testimony and I wept. I didn't know why, but I knew it was what I needed to hear. It was the story of the woman at the well, a woman who had engaged in much sexual immorality and yet, Jesus came to her. He evangelized to this Gentile woman whom the Jews looked upon in disgust because she was a Samaritan.

As I'm writing this, I can see God's sovereign hand in this season of my life. How even though I was trying to work my way back to God, He knew that's not what I really needed. God was so gracious and so patient with me and he has been these past few years. He knew that wasn't what was going to work, and He knew I needed the gospel and people who would lovingly give me the truth and point me back to Jesus Christ and the gospel on a consistent basis. He was drawing me to himself through the truth that I am a sinner, I have sinned horribly against him, I've broken his law, the 10 Commandments, and I have to stand before God when I die on judgement day. My good works would have been filthy and a stench before him and could not have saved me and Jesus would have said to me, "Depart from me, you worker of lawlessness." Sin is lawlessness.

However, God offered his only, begotten Son as a sacrifice for my sins. The propitiation, the only acceptable sacrifice. Jesus went WILLINGLY to the cross!! He laid down his own will and only did the Father's Will. He lived the life I cannot live of perfect holiness and love. He was flogged and whipped and beaten and mocked and made to carry his own cross. His own people rejected him and condemned him and he was murdered. They murdered him! His sin against them was blasphemy, but Jesus is God, so what he said was not blasphemy but the truth. He bore my sins, all of them, the full weight of God's wrath was on him and he took no pain killers. It is finished! My sin debt has been paid. He endured the shame of the cross for me and all who repent and believe. He was buried. He is alive!!!!!

All Christians have victory over sin! We have power and dominion over it and we don't have to walk in it anymore!! Romans 6! God has given us everything pertaining to life and godliness. His Spirit, the word, prayer, and fellow Christians. <3

These days my prayer to God is, "If I'm not saved, please save me. If I'm trusting my works, please change the object of my faith to Jesus Christ. If I am saved, please give me biblical assurance."

Religion doesn't save. Jesus Christ does. And that's my current relationship with religion.