I’m very happy to share my testimony with you guys today. My testimony is a little odd because even though I can say that I officially accepted Christ as my Savior at around five years old, it wasn’t until middle school and high school that I really began to grow in my relationship with Christ. I’ve basically spent my whole entire life here at Chinese Grace Bible Church (CGBC) alongside my whole family: my older brother, my older sister, and my mom and dad. My parents even grew up attending CGBC as youngsters. Therefore, growing up attending church became simply a tradition to me. At around five years old, I accepted Christ as my personal Savior through my parents who sat with me and led me to accept Him. I had a very poor perception that what I was doing at that time was going to be the most important decision of my life; however, all I wanted was to just have the security that I’d be going to any place but hell.

For the next seven or eight years, church was a tradition to me, and God simply was a myth. I learned a lot about the Bible and was able to understand all the stories, but I couldn’t see the big picture of how I really fit in it. The stories of the Bible were repeated so often that they eventually lost all meaning, and along with that, the perception that God was real. During that time, I didn’t even realize that God had become literally just a word that I would pray to. I thought that I was doing everything right. To me, this thinking didn’t prove a problem because life was going well. I had a lot of friends, got along fairly well with my family, smiled at church, and enjoyed school. This type of living continued on for a while until I was first truly challenged in my first year at Chinese Bible Mission (CBM) Camp. It was the first time that I saw people take Christianity seriously. People actually had passion for this religion, and it was crazy to me.

That was the first time that I really started to think about Christianity and religion. For the rest of the middle school years, Christianity started to become real to me. I started to really think about what it meant to be a Christian and exactly what the Bible commanded us to do. Even though I found myself convicted by many different aspects of being a Christian, I ceased to give my full devotion to God because I didn’t want to just believe whatever the church said about Christianity because I still didn’t see it as truth.

Entering into high school, it became apparent to me that being a true follower of Christ was no joke, and that it wasn’t just doing silly acts to look holy, but that it required me to fully devote every single aspect of my life to God. Not just my actions, but also my thoughts were all for the glory of Him. It was here at the start of high school that I began to take my faith seriously. I began to observe how people who I thought were Christians, didn’t act like it at all at school. This really made me start to question the truths about Christianity. I began to research and try to figure out the facts that supported whether Jesus’ death and resurrection were true, or whether the Bible was really trustworthy. After finding overwhelming evidence of the truths of Christianity, faith followed. Along with faith came my growth and relationship with Christ. Although I was rapidly having a better relationship with Christ, along the path, so many questions were brought about that I felt needed to be answered. I began to think about Christianity a lot, and I felt like I was about to explode with all the thoughts in my head. I was so confused by why Christ all of a sudden seemed so much more real to me. He no longer was just a word or mythical being that I prayed to, but now my Creator and God.

Now as I’m entering my senior year of high school, I can say that God has truly blessed me through all the thoughts that I may have had about Him. God has used every aspect of my life in order to draw me closer to Him and know him better. One of my favorite verses in the Bible is James 5:17 “Elijah was a human being, even as we are.” As I struggle today as a Christian, it has been easy for me to live a life in which I tell myself that God can’t work through me because I’m no prophet of the Bible or an extremely special person. But realizing Elijah was a human, just like I am, has wiped away any of my excuses and has caused me to pursue a life that solely lives for the glory of God. Today, I am taking the step of baptism to proclaim to everyone that I am a believer in Christ.