Music
Andy West from the United States of America was brought soundly under the conviction of the Holy Spirit at the age of 18
through a pastor who gave a challenging message from God's Word.
If you die tonight, do you know when you'll spend eternity?
In heaven or in hell?
Well, I knew right away what hell was because my mind flashed all these pictures of fire and pain and agony.
And I knew that I didn't want to go there.
And I also realized that I had come to a point where I needed to make a decision.
A choice to either believe what the pastor had been saying and follow Christ,
or to choose to deny that and go my own way.
Well, that morning I decided that I would follow Christ.
I went through elementary school and high school basically as a good kid.
In 1981, I finished high school and I moved to Arizona, which is in the southwestern part of the United States.
And it was there that I kind of turned away from the things that I had learned
and decided to go my own way, turning my back on what I knew was right.
And one evening coming home from work I had a very serious motorcycle accident.
I hit a jeep. I was traveling approximately 65 miles an hour.
The reports that I received after I got out of the hospital told me that I should have died in the accident.
Because I had split my face and I had split my head open and I had lost a lot of blood.
And when I woke up three days later in the hospital, I knew that God was telling me He wanted my life back.
Because I had committed my life to Him so many years earlier.
And that my life wasn't my own and He could just take my life from me at any second.
And it was at that point that I decided I needed to go back to church and get right with God.
But it was just my mind telling me that. My heart hadn't changed.
And sometime later I began to realize that it was my heart's attitude that had to change.
And I began to come to the point of understanding what I had done by making a commitment to Jesus Christ
and what it meant to give Him my whole life and to follow Him.
Kim Jean Hee is Korean. She was brought up in a Christian home and has known the Lord from a very young age.
I was brought up like that going to Sunday school every Sunday.
Home, school, church was all my category of my life.
And so I thought I'm a very good girl, Christian, and being very obedient to my parents.
But still there was something missing. And I found it out when I became 14 years old.
When my mother died of cancer and when she died I realized that even my parents cannot be with me forever.
And always comfort me, encourage me. But I had to go through so difficult times, struggling much, and complaining to God why He did that to me.
All my family was Christians. We were good people. We didn't break any rules or law.
But He did that. He took away my mom and we had to suffer so much. We had to go through so much sufferings and sorrows.
And finally I realized that I talked with my father who could advise me very wisely that even though the Lord had taken away my mom,
but He still loves me and He has a special plan for that. And as I prayed to the Lord He assured me that that's right,
that He had a very special plan for my life and He wanted to teach me something out of all these difficulties.
Through those difficulties I got to know what it's like to have a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, my Savior.
Miguel Magallo from Peru, South America found the reality of God during his first few months at military school in 1976.
At the school was the first time that I took in my hands a Bible.
I come from a Roman Catholic background in South America. As you know we don't read the Bible.
We hear the priests, we go to the church, but we never had a Bible in our hands.
At that time the Lord gave us the opportunity to have a Bible.
That was the first time that I read the Bible and I found the answers in the Bible.
During this time at home my older brother met the Lord in a bad condition.
He was actually alcoholic. He was with a big question, what happened? Is his mother dying?
He found in the Bible the answers that we have in the Lord's eternal life.
He knew that and he started to share with all my family about the Lord Jesus Christ.
It was at that time that we became to the Lord, myself and all the members in my family.
Mariana Mlisca from West Germany is the youngest in a family of six brothers and six sisters.
With her parents continually arguing their home life was not a happy one.
What helped me through this time was I always heard from Sunday school that Jesus is reality and that he died for me and that he loves me.
That somehow helped me through this time. When I was around 13 years old I thought life must be more, there must be more fun.
So I started to go out with my friends and started to go to discos and started to drink first a bit then more.
After a while I also realized that this cannot be all, there must be more, that cannot be the meaning of life.
When I was 16 a girl from my school invited me for a summer camp.
I thought maybe there is something that could help me.
So I went there and they had in the morning always Bible studies and then they had some activities.
What really touched me was not so much the Bible studies because most of those things I knew already from my childhood.
But it was really how the people lived and how they loved each other and how I could just sense that Jesus was reality in their lives.
That it was not just something higher being but that he was like a friend to them.
After one morning after Bible study I just went in my room and I thought I have to do something about this.
I also want to have Jesus as my friend this personal way as they have.
I read in my Bible verse that God has the whole world in his hands and he can still the storms and that he is just so sovereign.
So I prayed and asked him to really take my whole life into his hands and that I wanted to trust him.
And ask him for forgiveness for all this year that I was running away from him and looking for forgiveness and other things.
And so I prayed and after that my life I just slowly got this joy in my heart that I was looking for in so many other things.
And it just changed my life totally. I got this security and all these things I was looking for.
And so I knew I don't have to look for these things in other, in drinking or dancing or whatever.
In other things I have what I was looking for, I have this joy that really changed my life and gave me hope.
Thank you.