About(part 5)

     I know this is getting ridiculously long, but this is the best part if you read this far. The Lord used Cumbey's book to knock me over the head. The next thing was checking out the book's references which included Marilyn Ferguson's book The Aquarian Conspiracy.  Cumbey's book also included many biblical refernces  to the New World Order(NWO) and the end times scenario. But there was this constant urge for me to read the bible. I started by obtaining a copy of Gordon Fee's How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth. The book suggested I read the bible in a way that I would be reading the Old Testament and the New Testament at the same time. In other words, read a section of Genesis and Matthew in one reading. I cannot stress enough how  powerful this urge was to start to read the bible. I found an easy to read version called The Living Bible  and went to work highlighting verses that I started to see in the OT and NT. I discovered many verses quoted by Jesus in the NT from the OT. I also noted that the prophets were foretelling the same things even though they wrote at different times. In April 1985 I had read through the Gospels and was reading the book of Isaiah. I was at chapter 53 in particular. Isaiah is describing "a man of sorrows" that suffers horribly so that man can be redeemed, This man shed His blood and suffered the worst beatings and disfigurement because of His unconditional love for the lost. Suddenly, as if blinders were lifted off my eyes, I understood that this prophet Isaiah was describing a person that would suffer and die for His people more than 500 years in the future! It all suddenly made sense to me. That the Gospel, the Good News of what Jesus did was for ME. All the prophecies written about Jesus and His first coming back 2000 years ago had ALL been predicted and had all come to pass! Where He was to be born, where He was to live, how he was to be betrayed, how He was to die and even how he was to be buried. When this TRUTH finally was made clear to me, I had many emotions come over me. I wept because I had missed this TRUTH for 30 years of my life. I knew that Jesus had saved me at that moment that He revealed Himself to me through reading the Word of God. I then also knew that God's Word is absolutely TRUE in every sense. I was amazed that I had missed the most important thing in this world for anyone to accept: that Jesus died not only for the sins of the world but for MY sins. The absolutely Holy, sinless God Himself came into this world as a MAN and provided the ONLY WAY OUT of darkness and death. I was amazed that all I did was finally understand this wonderful thing that God had done for ME. I was so grateful that this saving grace was  
was absolutely a free gift. I could not earn it or work for it or ever be good enough to deserve it. In conclusion, I realized that I had been born again. A new creature had been created. (to be continued...)

About (part 4)

     After graduating college in 1980 and starting my career as a pharmacist, things were good. We bought a new car, went on a cruise and bought a house. In 1981 our daughter was born. Our son was born in 1983. By 1985 we were living in a nice house across from a park. We had two children and a dog. Life was good.......and yet...  There was something I felt was missing. I had the feeling that there was still something more in life that I yearned for but I did not know what it was. Even though I had no complaints on the surface, there was a hole in my soul that I could not define. I wonder how many people out there go through this feeling of "something lacking". Many people are drawn close to God in times of personal hardship, turmoil, crisis and sickness. I was drawn to the Lord in a time of "peace and prosperity" relatively speaking. God does indeed work in mysterious ways.
       One night at work the assistant manager came back to my area and asked me why I was listening to that awful rock music. Well that was just regular listening pleasure to me at the time. I knew she was a born again Christian and she thought rock music was satanic. I really do not recall why I stopped listening to the music channel after that but I did. I started listening to "Talk Radio" which was very popular at the time. One evening they had on as a guest Constance Cumbey, a Detroit lawyer and recent author of a book called:
 http://archive.org/details/HiddenDangersOfTheRainbow. You could say that the Lord started changing my life after listening to the author then in reading her book. I had always been interested in Bible prophecy and I had read The Late Great Planet Earth  by Hal Lindsey back in high school and knew that the rebirth of Israel and the wars they had fought in the last several decades had prophetic meaning, but this book made me really want to read the bible all the way through. Her book was about the New Age movement, which would culminate in a New World Order and the reign of the Antichrist. This book really opened up my eyes as to how this new age network worked. She backed everything up with scripture. I got a hold of a very simple to read paraphrase of the bible and began to highlight all the verses that she used in her book. I read her book through at least three times and I began to see evidence of this "New Age" everywhere I looked. I'm afraid I was like the Mel Gibson character in "Conspiracy Theory"(the movie) at this point. (To be continued...)