Exchanging Your Pain & Darkness for Salvation in Jesus Christ
Originally posted on YouTube: Sept 17, 2016
Transcript
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Hi, this is Michael. What you're about to hear is just a simple gospel presentation that I made for a young girl 16 years of age, who reached out to me on the verge of suicide. She'd grown up in terrible darkness, in a very difficult family, even being raped multiple times by her own brother. On the verge of suicide, she found my story video and reached out to me to find out what she needed to do to find God's help.
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I am so thankful, young lady, that you contacted me and I am so touched and moved by your story. At first, I want to tell you that I am sorry that as a young woman, you have already had to go through such terrible, terrible pain and suffering at the hands of your family members and friends. I am so sorry.
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But I also want you to know that if you will give God a chance and I will help you learn exactly what this means when I say if you will give God a chance. Okay. I want you to make a list of questions as you hear this recording, and I will help you. I'll do whatever I can to help you and to help you get to a point where you can understand how to have God's help in your life, and how to have an amazing relationship with a loving God who loves you so much more than you can possibly imagine right now.
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Because right now, all you've known your whole life is rejection, betrayal, abuse, pain, and suffering. But as I said, if you will give God a chance to help you, he can take all of this terrible stuff in this pain that has happened in your life. As you have seen in my story. He can turn it all around. God has the ability to take things that are terrible and make them beautiful.
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It's incredible. It's very hard to understand and it requires faith to believe. And God can do this for you. God can put you in such a place of happiness in your heart and make you feel so fulfilled and so happy and satisfied with your life. It will be unlike anything you could ever imagine. This is what God can do for you.
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Through the Lord Jesus Christ. Let me tell you just a little bit, if I can, about what a relationship with God is all about. I want to try to, as simply as I can, explain to you where you need to start. Okay, right now you've been on the verge of suicide. You've been wanting to end your life. And that's pretty simple to understand.
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Sister. It's very easy for me to understand why you would want to throw your life away when you're in so much pain and you cannot see any way out. It's better to die than to live with the kind of suffering that you've gone through. That is how you feel. That's not the truth. But that's how you feel, okay?
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Feelings are temporary and feelings are real. But they are not always the truth. For example, you may think somebody doesn't like you and you may feel that way, but then later you find out it wasn't the truth. You see, feelings are not the truth. So I want to ask you to hit the pause button on life. I want to ask you to give me and God a chance in your life.
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I can feel how much God loves you. God has been sending me people like you for a number of years, and he allows me to feel his love for you. And I want to teach you and help you to know how to experience that love for yourself, so that you don't have to just hear about it from me or from somebody else, but that God will be your real experience, your real loving father.
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You are an orphan. You've never known your mom and your dad, and you've been abused by those that were supposed to take care of you. I want you to know that because of that situation, you are highly, highly cherished and highly desirable to God the Father, our father in heaven has a huge heart for all people. But in particular, there are two people groups that the Bible says God has a special eye on.
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These are the widows and the orphans. God watches over you and loves you. But God. The way God works is that you have to approach God on his terms. And that first term, the first way that you would approach God is through faith. You have to believe that he exists and that he rewards those like you who diligently seek him.
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This is in the book of Hebrews. In the Bible. And so let me just try to explain to you what faith with God is about. I'm going to assume that you don't know a whole lot about it. So let me just try to explain it. This is basically the story of the Bible. Is that God because he is so wonderful and so creative.
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He makes a creature called humans that are lower than him, and he creates them to be the object of his love and affection. He wants to love them. He wants to be worshiped by them, but he wants to enjoy a special relationship with him. Perhaps you might imagine what it would be like to be a mother. Maybe you don't have any good feelings about that whatsoever.
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Maybe you don't. But for many women across the world, they very much desire and men to have a child, and they choose to have that child. They're choosing to create a child to be the object of their love. And if they have the ability because they're healthy and they have kindness in their heart, they can offer that child real love, and that child can grow up and flourish into a healthy, wonderfully functioning adult that can then turn and repeat the process.
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God gave us that desire. God's desire is that he loves people. God so loved the world that he gave his only son, Jesus Christ, that whoever would believe in him would not perish but have everlasting life. But the question is, how did we even get to that point when God made us? God gave us free will. He gives you free will, and you can choose.
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When you hear what I'm going to tell you. You can choose to believe it and to desire God, or you can choose to reject God. God doesn't make anybody believe in him, and he doesn't make anybody follow him. He invites people in the Bible teaches that when God put Adam and Eve, the first two people in this beautiful garden, he walked with them.
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Can you imagine what it would be like to walk with God, and to be able to see him and touch him, and walk with him and get a hug from him? Can you imagine that? This is what was the reality for the first two people, Adam and Eve, and God gave them one rule. He said, you can eat of all the trees in the garden except for the one tree, the knowledge of good and evil.
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This is where God was giving them a choice. He gave them a choice to choose to obey him or to rebel against him. And there was a devil already. He was known as the serpent. And this is the devil. This is the one who the Bible says comes into the world to steal, to kill and destroy. He is the one that is largely responsible for all of the pain and the suffering that's been in your life.
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Okay. The Bible says he is in control of the whole world. He got control of the whole world in the garden. When they rebelled against God. And they chose to be deceived by the devil, the serpent. And they ate that fruit and they rebelled against God when they did that. They were separated from God. God is perfect. He's pure.
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Imagine the cleanest white wedding dress you've ever seen in your life. And God is a million times more pure and a million times more bright and a million times more clean than that. So when we sinned in the Garden of Eden, it was as if we rolled in the spiritual mud. Imagine for a second you were going to go to a dance with a boy, and you were going to have on a beautiful dress, and you got your hair all perfect, and you just looked beautiful.
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But when you got to the the prom or the dance, you discovered that the boy who was supposed to dance with you had just come from the woods hunting, and he was running late, and he didn't have time to go home and take a shower. And when he showed up, he was all smelly and he had mud on him.
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And he had some even had some blood on him from where he had been hunting. I want to ask you, would you be willing to dance with him? No, I hope you wouldn't. Right. Because he would ruin your dress. You would say, man, you need to go get cleaned up first. Then we can have a dance right now.
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If the boy didn't choose to go get cleaned up, he would never have the opportunity to dance with you. It's the same exact way with God. We have all been dirtied. We are all filthy. The Bible says because of Adam's sin, sin entered to the world by that one man. And death, spiritual death entered into all man. So we are all born separated from God by sin.
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That's what the filth is. It's like mud and spiritual nastiness that separates us. God can't be near it. He won't go to the dance with us, you see. But God loved us so much. He knew we messed up. And he knew that he was going to miss out if he didn't find a way in his love of us to be reconciled to us, to reconnect us, to back to him.
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So basically, over years and years of trying various different methods of sacrificing animals and following all kinds of rules, God realized he was never able to get sinful human beings to have a clear conscience, even if he forgave their sins. They still knew their sins and their mind, and they still felt guilty about it. Have you ever done something bad and then you feel guilty about it?
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Even if you perhaps, maybe sometimes you have felt bad about cutting yourself or some other thing you maybe can think of, and it bothers your conscience, right? That's a spiritual filth. It's spiritual dirtiness that separates us from God because God is spirit. So it's not like we can go to the dance physically with God. And if we just take a physical shower and get our physical bodies clean, that we can dance with God at the dance.
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God is spirit. That's the part of us that's inside. So God has to be able to occupy that part of us that is inside of us, our spirit. And if we are guilty and because of our sin, God will come near it because it's dirty for him. So God had to find out a way, and he knew he didn't have to think about it.
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God is God. God had made a way in the very beginning for us to be cleansed, purified, washed, white as snow from all of our sins. And a human being can know that they need to be washed from their sins by looking at the Ten Commandments in Exodus chapter 20. If we have ever had any other gods in our life and God would say anything we trust in besides him could be considered an idol or a god, a false god.
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Some people, as you know in various countries, have literal false gods. They worship statues and little kind of trinkets and animals and all kinds of stuff. But even here in America, where we we don't do that. People have other false gods. Their bank accounts, their big houses, their businesses, their careers, their relationships. These are things that people depend upon other than God without putting God first.
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And God says he's jealous and we can't have any other gods before him. So if we put our hope in anything besides God, we're guilty. Another example would be if we've ever used God's name in vain. Maybe you have shared, and said something bad about God before, and you've used his name in vain. Okay, then we've broken that rule.
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If you've ever dishonored your parents, even the ones that were called to bring you up, if you've dishonored them, then that would be a violation of God's law. If you've ever stolen something, if you've ever lied about anything one time, if you've ever desired somebody else's stuff or taken somebody else's stuff. If you've ever murdered somebody, then then you would be guilty.
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In fact, Jesus says, And I'm going to talk to you about him in a minute. Jesus even came with a higher standard than the Ten Commandments. Jesus said, if you're even angry with your brother, meaning another human being that's hurt you in some way, then you are guilty of murder in your heart. So you can see that we're a sinner.
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If we've broken any of God's commandments, and in the Bible it says, if we've broken one of them, we've broken all of them. Why is that? It's because if we break one rule, it's spiritual filth. It's dirty. It's that one thing that will prevent us from being able to go to the dance with God. You see? So again, God, because he loves you so much, he does not want you to be separated from him, either from somebody else's sin or your own sin.
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Most of what's happened to you so far that I've heard in your story is a result of other people's sin. Okay. But we have to deal with your sin first, and then we'll talk about how to deal with the other people's sin, okay? Because, see, God wants you to know him. He wants you to know him. And the way that you know him is through the person of Jesus Christ.
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See, God made a way for you to have all of your sins forgiven, all of your guilt taken away, even if you haven't done very many things. I know you can probably think of some, and even just one will prevent God from being able to be your father. From being able to be close to you. So God sent Jesus Christ, His son, to pay the ultimate price for your sin and for my sin.
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It was God's way of wiping out all of your debt. Imagine for a second that you owed somebody a $100,000, and they told you, if you will come and visit me, and if you'll believe that I'm going to pay all your debt off and and get rid of all the debt you owed me. If you will come to my house and see me, I will absolve you or forgive you of all the debt.
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All you have to do is believe me and come and see me right? This is exactly what God does with Jesus. God brought Jesus Christ into the world, and Jesus came in and told everybody he says, repent of your sins and put your faith in me, and you will have life everlasting. And what he means by repent is to turn away from any sin in your mind and in your actions.
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So you come into agreement. You would know God is convicting you of your guilt. You would know, oh, I'm guilty. I have sin in my life and in my heart. And the Bible says that I can't go to heaven if I have sin in my heart. I want to go to the dance with father. I want to know Jesus Christ.
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I want to live forever. I want to know happiness in my heart. Then we have to deal with this sin in your life. Okay? And that's what Jesus came to do. Jesus Christ came and walked on this earth for about three and a half years. And he taught all kinds of amazing things. And one of the things he said was this.
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He said, if anyone keeps my words, which means if anyone obeys my words, he will never see death. And he also said that nobody can see the kingdom of God, and nobody can go to heaven and enter the kingdom of heaven unless they are born again. And what that means is you have to put your faith in Jesus Christ, confessing him to be your Lord.
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He wants to be your Lord. He wants to have the final say in your life. He wants to save you not only from eternal life, eternal death, but he wants to save you from sin. He wants to save you from all of the pain and the brokenness and the darkness in your heart, sweet sister. He wants to save you from all of that.
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He wants to wash you white as snow, inside and out. He wants to cleanse you from all of the spiritual filth that's in your life. He wants to wash your memory with his blood. He wants you to know wholeness. He wants you to know love. He wants you to know how much he loves you. If you will put your faith and trust in Jesus Christ, and you become like a little child before him.
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This is what Jesus taught. He says, I tell you the truth, unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of God. And what he meant by that is that we have to humble ourselves and cry out and recognize we are a sinner. We have we have spiritual filth in our life that's preventing us from having a relationship with God, and that will end us up in hell.
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Ultimately. The Bible teaches that God created this holding place in eternity called hell. It's the lake of fire and he created it for the devil who rebelled against God. And one third of all the angels who rebelled with the devil. Hell was never meant for people, but God has to have a holding place in all of eternity, forever and ever and ever.
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For all of the men and women that will refuse to put their faith in Jesus Christ. It's not that God delights to send men and women to hell. It's that all men and women have sinned, and they fall short of God's standard of his high holiness. Remember, we talked about the wedding dress a million times more beautiful, a million times more white.
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We all fall so short of that. And so the Bible says that we will die eternal death, and we will live separated from God forever. Because God says nothing impure will ever be able to enter into heaven. He's preserving himself, and he's protecting heaven from all spiritual filth. So no sin will ever be allowed to enter into heaven.
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You want to get this taken care of? Sister, you want to know that if you died in a car accident, or from a freak airplane accident or an, heart attack, whatever you want to know every night that you have a father in heaven who loves you so much. And he died for you. He sent his son, Jesus Christ to die a deadly, horrible, bloody cross.
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Death. He died and shed his blood. Thinking of you. It's true. And you know it's true by putting your faith. And then Jesus Christ will make himself known to you. You can have an amazing, amazing relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ. You can know a love in your heart that you've never known and is not even humanly possible.
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You can know a piece and a rest. Jesus said, come to me, all of you who are weary and burden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me. For I am gentle and humble and heart, and you will find rest from your souls. He said to the sinful woman at the well in John chapter four.
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This is one of the books in the New Testament. The second half of the Bible. He said, anyone who drinks this water, regular water coming from a well or from your water fountains. He said, anyone who drinks this water will be thirsty again, he said, but whoever drinks the water, I give him will never thirst. Indeed, the water I give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.
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Jesus is speaking of anybody that will put their faith in him as their Lord and Savior, and put his teachings into practice. You have to begin to learn of his ways. You can't just like a lot of Christians today. They just think that because they believed in Jesus, they're okay. No sister, that is not what faith in Christ is about.
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It's a it's a giving your life over to him. It's saying, my life hasn't worked the way I've done it. Lord, you made me. I've been bought at a price. I want you to be my lord. I want you to be my master. And Jesus takes it a step further. He says, not only will I be your Lord and your Savior and your master, I will be your friend, and I will be your big brother.
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You'll get to have Jesus as a big brother, and you'll get to have God the Father. I love him so much. He's done so much for my life in my heart. He's blessed me so much. I have the greatest life. I just want. I just want you to know I have the greatest life of any human being. I know.
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Honest to goodness, I'm the most blessed person I know in my heart. I know the father. He walks with me each day. He speaks to me and gives me guidance, not audibly. He speaks to me through my spirit and through His Word. And I live every moment of every day with a conscious presence of him in my life, meaning I perceive that he's with me as if he was a friend at your house all day long.
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I'm never alone. He guides me. He gives me specific direction about what he wants me to do with my life. He has a plan for my life. And he has a plan for your life. You want this, sister. You want all that God can do for you. And here's what I want to tell you on that point. You are the exact kind of person that God longs to help.
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The people that have been rejected. People that have been despised. People that have been abused. Sister, you know what I've been through? I've been sexually molested myself. And I don't think I told all of this in the story, but I've been sexually molested by both sexes, by women and a man, a young man, a teenager who had taken advantage of me.
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So I know the pain of sexual abuse. I know what it feels like to be rejected by your family and to be thrown away. I know what it is to be beat up. You saw my testimony and there's more that I haven't shared. But sister, I can tell you, no matter what you've been through. God can bless you so much and turn all of this garbage into an oil of gladness, into beauty, and to jewels in your life.
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All it takes is faith and patience. It doesn't work overnight. You have to be willing to seek God for your whole life, and you have to be willing to do things on his timing and according to his ways. The most important decision you can make right now, as somebody who's hurting is somebody who's needy, is putting your faith and trust in Jesus Christ.
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Crying out to him. The Bible is loaded with stories of people who had diseases. People who were blind. People who couldn't hear. People who had no money. People whose children were possessed by demons. People whose children were on their deathbeds and had terrible sickness. People who hadn't walked in 38 years. People who had been bleeding for 12 years.
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And they all humbly came to the Lord Jesus Christ. And they said, Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me. Have mercy on me. Jesus Christ tells a story of some people that were confident of their own righteousness, their ability to earn their trip to heaven and right standing with God. And he says, two men went up to the temple to pray, which would be like church.
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One was a Pharisee, which was a very legalistic, religious man. And another one was a tax collector, which would be known as somebody who is very, very sinful, like a prostitute or a drug dealer. That's how they were looked upon. Okay. And he says, the Pharisee looked up to heaven and said, God, I thank you that I am not like other men, robbers, evil doers, thieves, or even this tax collector.
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But I fast twice a week and I give a 10th of all that I get. Then the tax collector wouldn't even look up to heaven. But he beat his breast and said, God have mercy on me, a sinner. And Jesus said, I tell you, this man went home justified before God, not the other. God looks for humility. We have to come into agreement with him.
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If I said to you, you are, you're an Argentinian. As soon as you said yes, Michael, I am. That means you just came into agreement with me about the truth. Right. But if you said no, I'm not. I'm not in Argentina. And you started to argue with me, then we would have no basis for a relationship or a conversation.
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Does that make sense? So we have to come into agreement with God about the current condition of our soul. And right now, sister, you would be considered lost. Again, this has nothing to do with all the horrible things that people have done to you. But you cannot go to heaven on compassion because God looks at you and says, oh, I'm going to forgive you because you were treated so badly.
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That's not how it works. The Bible says all of us have fallen short of the glory of God, and that the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus. For all who believe that if you confess with your mouth Jesus Christ as Lord, Amen. And you believe in your heart, you will be saved.
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So that's what you need to do is put your faith in Jesus Christ. I'm not going to. I can't force you. Nobody can force you to do this. This is something you have to do between you and the Lord Jesus Christ. I would encourage you to do it sooner rather than later. Make the decision to put your faith in Jesus Christ.
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He waits for you, and then he can offer you help and he can offer you healing. You do not have to throw your life away. You do not have to live in depression and in darkness. But what you do have to do is come to the light of Jesus Christ. There's no other hope in this life, sister. There's no other escape from darkness.
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You got to come to Jesus, and all you have to do is when I hang up this recording, you get on your knees. You get on your knees and you look up to heaven. In faith. And you say, Jesus, I know you're there because I've seen in Michael my soon to be big brother's life. I have seen that you are real.
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And Lord Jesus, I want to know you the way Michael knows you. And Lord, I want to put my faith in you. And Lord, I see that I'm a sinner and I want to turn from my sin, and I want to have eternal life. And Lord, I confess you as my Lord and my Savior. Now come into my heart and save my soul, and I will walk before you all the days of my life.
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In Jesus name, Amen. Whatsoever you ask for in prayer, Jesus taught, believe you have received it and it will be yours if you reach out with the best that you have in prayer, just ask Jesus. He will touch your heart and you will be born again. And then you will learn how to walk with Jesus in obedience to his words, and will want to find a place for you to become baptized.
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And that symbolizes the death of the old life and the raising of the new life in Jesus Christ. Okay, so we want to find a place, some church that can help you get baptized. All right. So I'm going to end this recording. Now I want you to send me any questions you have about this. And then I'm going to send you another recording where I read a story that will give you so much hope about, even though your abuses have been so horrible that Jesus Christ can turn it all around and help you to live a wonderfully happy life.
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Sister. Okay, listen, I love you. Other than that, there is no complicated process. You just get on your knees and you look up to heaven and you say, Jesus, I put my faith in you. Save my soul. I want you to be my Lord and Savior, and I believe in you. Jesus. Help me to know you and to walk before you.
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That's it. Just something so simple. Just putting your faith in Christ. Okay. God bless you. Now I want to pray for you, father. My father. Oh my God, I thank you so much for this precious young lady. God, I thank you, father, I. What an honor, Lord, that you would bring her across my little story, Lord, so that you could show her your love, father.
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That you could save her from the darkness. That the devil has tried to trap her in God, that you could give her the hope that all of the dark in her soul can be dispelled with light. It can be removed. Father, I'm asking you in the name of Jesus Christ, to save her soul. I'm asking you to save her soul.
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Lord God, show her how much you love her. Daddy. Show her how much you love her. I know she has to do her part, but father, your word says no one can come to you unless. And nobody can come to Jesus unless you first draw him. So, Lord, I'm asking you to draw her home. Bring her home, Lord.
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Bring her home. Help her know God. There is peace. There's joy, there's rest. There's life to the full waiting for her. Bless her. In Jesus name, Amen.
