Hello! Before telling you my witness I want to introduce myself. My name is Gaspare, I’m 40 and I live in Ludwigshafen. Since I was a child, my mother used to take me to the meetings to the Evangelical Church, the Church where I grew up. I believed in the existence of God and I always tried to live the way He likes. I used to pray, to sing, to read the Bible and I used also to invite my friends to the church.
When I was 14 I began to go to the Catholic Church on Sunday mornings, to the Evangelical Church on Sunday afternoons, and sometimes in the gatherings of the Jehovah’s witnesses ( I also went to Sicily for two of their congresses). I wanted to know what did these religions taught, in order to compare them with what it is written in the Bible, but soon I realized these two religious groups didn’t teach or do anything about what the Bible says, at least for the things I knew back then. At the age of 16, I began to attend the Youth Evangelical Meetings and after a while, I went to a youth congress in Otterberg (near Kaiserslautern) in which there was a preacher from Italy who evangelized for the entire week.Do you know what I learned, or better, what God made me understand that weekend? I was religious, but I was not a Christian! How could it be? How was it possible? Salvation comes not from reading the Bible, praying, singing, attending the meetings, inviting people to gatherings, doing good works.., like I did. To become a Christian, you only have to put your faith in Jesus. Faith, as in believing Jesus died for our sins and He raised again. We can’t please God with our good works. God, through Jesus’ blood spread on the cross, sees us just. If I were dead, or Jesus had come back before that congress, I wouldn’t have been saved! What’s reading the Bible, praying, singing, and not having faith in the One who died for me? It’s useless! I was lost just like the other ones who don’t want to serve God. The Bible says in
Galatians 2:16 “However, we know that a person isn’t made righteous by the works of the Law but rather through the faithfulness of Jesus Christ. We ourselves believed in Christ Jesus so that we could be made righteous by the faithfulness of Christ and not by the works of the Law—because no one will be made righteous by the works of the Law”.
Ephesians 2:8-9 “You are saved by God’s grace because of your faith. This salvation is God’s gift. It’s not something you possessed. It’s not something you did that you can be proud of.”
I learned this truth in that congress: good works are not useful in God’s eyes if you have not faith! Now I don’t do good works forcedly in order to gain my salvation, but I do them willingly, to serve the Lord. Now the faith I have in Jesus makes me act positively, I try to do God’s will, never forgetting that I am a man that makes mistakes and the Lord has already forgiven me!You, who are reading my witness: are you a Christian or just a religious devoted man like I was? My practical life hasn’t changed a lot, you know, but now I have faith. You can be a good person, but the Bible says that if you don’t put your faith in Jesus Christ, you’re not just in God’s eyes and for this reason you cannot be saved! I thank God I could know His Grace and I can now be called Christian and children of God.