Tina's Testimony

I’ve been a Christian since I was 9 years old and this is my first official testimony. I was baptized with my mom and my dad and being the youngest in the family, I did what they did. So even though I’ve been a Christian for 9 years, I really haven’t known Christ for that long. At such a young age, I didn’t know why I was attending church, reading the Bible, singing songs, etc. As I grew older and started to be more familiar with this person named Jesus Christ, I began to grow this curiosity of understanding more and more. I’m not those kinds of people that went through a traumatic past and knew Christ that way. I’m a normal girl whose life was perfectly laid out for by my parents and never had to go through suffering. In other words, my life felt perfectly fine with or without Jesus. At times I’d attend conferences, my fire would burn strongly for God, and it’d just disappear soon after the conference. I didn’t know what it meant to live a lifestyle and have a relationship with Jesus Christ. This Summer I recently attended a conference at Dallas called the Jesus Culture Conference. A session in this conference we had to worship God, not with any instruments, but with our spirit. As we went forward closer to the stage, he asked us to close our eyes and ask God, “How much do you love me?” I continued to ask God over and over again and 2 images popped in my head. One of those images was of my mom, and God said, “More than you could ever imagine”. I knew that my mom loves me, God was telling me that He can love me like that, but MORE. That made an impact because it was the first time that I had direct contact with God instead of ‘hearing about Him’. I truly believe that God is continuously working through our lives, even though we don’t know it at the moment. This whole Summer I never took any vacations to go anywhere and instead, I stayed in Houston taking summer classes and attending a lot of church activities such as Friday Kids Bible Study, Sunday School, Friday night Youth Bible study, Sunday Church, Tuesday Thursday Saturday morning prayers, helping out with Chinese School, Wednesday prayer meeting, as well as offering a tenth of my income. As you can see, every single day I was serving the Lord, which I have learned to appreciate. Even though this felt like a huge burden in the beginning of the summer, I quickly fell in love with the mornings I went to the prayers. Not only did I get so much closer with a few of the adults but I got closer to God. Once you’re forcing yourself to get up at 5 am and go read the Bible for a few weeks, it actually becomes pretty interesting on studying God’s personality as well as evaluating my own. A few weeks ago, my family and I were talking about financial issues worrying about how I was going to be able to pay for rent, food, and everything else. Since I’ll be going to school, I can’t work as much as I’d want to pay for these things. The next day my financial aid money, money from the government, completely came through and God definitely gave me much more than I had expected. I was only expecting about 1 or 2 thousand in return but in the end, God gave me a total of $4,096 in return just for this semester. Along with this, God has made sure that all of my classes at UH were right next to each other, instead of running around lost in the heat. God saw me stressing out about college and worrying about these little things and laid it out for me. He has really provided more than enough, and I believe in testifying that I believe He did this for me by offering more than a tenth of my offerings up to Him. To me offering my money is a huge sacrifice since, if you didn’t know, that I am very stingy with my money. But this verse came to mind as I was praying to God one night when He told me to offer up MORE than 1/10 because He gave me more than what I expected. Hebrews 13:5 “Keep your lives free from the love of money and be content with what you have, because God has said “Never will I leave you; never will I forsake you.” I believe, without a doubt, that God feels everything that I’m feeling and He rewards those who follow closely by Him. Although of course, sometimes God doesn’t always give us what we want, but even then, it’s important to learn that we must continue to praise Him. Everything I do isn’t to make my employer pay me more or so that I can brag to my friends, but instead, I’m doing everything to glorify God’s kingdom. In Matthew 6:33 it says “But seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you as well.” Here’s what I’ve concluded: God loves us SO much and he wants to give us EVERYTHING we desire, but in order to give us what we want, He wants us to seek him whole-heartedly first and foremost above all things, such as money, relationships, and our time.