This is day 11 of the Prodigal Prayer Mission by Kathie Saari.

Testimonies That Build Faith

Meditate on Matthew 17:20

He replied, “Because you have so little faith. Truly I tell you, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”

Testimony 1

Steve Friskup: A Drinking Man’s Salvation

by Christine McWhorter of The 700 Club

CBN.com – Working as a horse auctioneer isn’t just a job for Steve Friskup; it’s a passion. He also loves calf roiping and spending time with his wife, Robin. But years ago, Steve’s favorite activities were overshadowed by his love for alcohol. “I never was a guy who could just have one drink,” Steve tells The 700 Club. “If I had one, I had two. If I had two, I had 12. If I had 12, then some time in the night I was going to become rich, handsome and bulletproof, all at the same time.”

Steve had his first drink at just 9 years old. His parents were Christians, but alcohol was a big part of their lifestyle and always available in his home. Later, as an adult, Steve discovered alcohol gave him something he had always longed for:

It made me liked. It made me popular. It made me fit in. I may not rope as good as anybody. I may not have as much money as anybody else, but if we’re at the bar, you’re going to like me. That’s just how it is. That need for that attention or something.

But the alcohol didn’t just make Steve popular. It turned him into a man he barely knew. He says, “Anything that alters the way a man thinks and alters his morality — it can’t be good. Alcohol somehow demoralized me. I could see it getting worse and wors. It just dumbed me down to a guy that I didn’t want to be. Every time I sobered up I didn’t want to be that guy. That’s now who I wanted to be and I knew it.”

“Money was a big one. I could spend money on the dumbest stuff. I could buy drinks for everybody. I could gamble, just do dumb stuff with money you didn’t have. You go home and you’re trying to keep the lights on for your wife and your little kids and you just spent the stupid money. I was just making really bad decisions.” Steve’s drinking affected his family the most.

“I used language that a man should be crucified for in front of my children. [It] wasn’t abusive; I was just vulgar. Stuff like that. It’s no good. It was no good. I’ll tell you the worst one. I’ve got two daughters and one of them’s never had a drink that I know of. Pretty sure not. The oldest one can’t say that, because her daddy gave her a drink. Little girls [sic] should have never been given her only taste of alcohol in her live [sic] from her dad. That’s what alcohol did for me.”

After partying one night with a friend, Steve woke up with a hangover and a revelation. He was finally tired of his drunken lifestyle: “I got up that morning, and I was sick with a capital S. It was bad. It was like you hit me right in the forehad with a choppin’ ax. I didn’t have any money left and I just laid there in that bed and I thought, “Now, I’ve got to put my game face on and go auctioneer this horse sale and pretend like I’m fine.” I told that friend I said, “I’m not drinking no more.” My friend kidded me and told everybody, he picked on me all weekend.

But Steve was serious about his new commitment. He just didn’t know how to keep it. On the ride home after the horse auction, he decided to talk to God:

That night I called on Jesus for some odd reason. Nobody’s told me how to pray this prayer. I just called on Jesus and I met Him. You know the first thing that the Lord spoke to me: ‘What do you want?’ I said ‘I want to be a good husband. I want to be a good dad. I don’t want to do another thing away from home that I’m ashamed to tell my family when I get back. Alcohol’s turning me loose to be an idiot and I don’t want it anymore. I want rid of it right now! He said, ‘If you’ll give me all of it, I’ll get rid of that.’ I said, ‘I’m all yours.’

It moves me every time of how awesome it is for a guy like me in a cab of a pickup to have your sins forgiven. Heaven is part of the deal, but I don’t think people realize unless you’ve been an old sinner what it means to be sitting in the cab of a truck and have God tell you that your sins are forgiven.

He drove home that night and began a new life. He began r3ading his Bible and going to church with his family. “It was pretty amazing when you pull in your house and you tell your family,” Steve continued, “Get up. We’re going to church. I just got saved.” You don’t even know what that means. They think I must have snorted something up my nose or something and went crazy.” Steve says he hasn’t had a drop of alcohol since then.

“The fear of the Lord will make a man hate evil. As I’ve grown, I’ve got to where I just despise evil. I’ve gotten that way about the alcohol, because it was so dangerous in my life and i didn’t know it.”

Now, the Friskup home is peaceful, and Steve makes strong decisions for his family. He and Robin are pastors of Muleshoe Cowboy Church in Texas. He says, “It’s just what God’ll do. We run horse sales with grown men walking around telling each other they love each other. That’s just crazy. That ain’t how that goes. But that’s what God’ll do.’

Testimony 2

I don’t know if anyone else has noticed this but it seems to me that a lot of people have come to know the Lord at the age of around 20. Maybe it’s just the ones I’ve met? But that is when it happened to me. I was just approaching my twentieth birthday, twenty years ago nw, when someone came right up to my friends and unashamedly told them that he had given his life to Jesus. My friends at that time knew this particular young man and made the most of ribbing him and giving him a hard time. I just listened quietly in the background and when they had finished their taunts I asked him some questions of my own: “What about starving millions? Why doesn’t God do something about it?” and I can’t remember what else. I don’t think his answers impressed me, nor anything particularly of the whole event, but all I know is that at that moment in great simplicity I said within myself, “OK, I believe you, there is a God.”

I had not thought much about it before and I had special intention of ‘going away to think about it’ at that time. However, the next I knew was, wherever I went, whatever I was doing, all that kept going through my mind was, “There really is a God’, ‘there really is someone called Jesus, there really is a heaven and there really is a hell.”

My knowledge of the Bible was pretty much limited to what the cover looked like of a little Gideon’s Testament I had among my possessions (somehow!). My only previous use for this was to press a four-leaved clover inside of it and occasionally tuck it under my pillow at night, in some vain attempt at procuring some comfort from a state of paranoia about my health and death.

My concern for my state of health and fear of death did have some basis in reality. I had severely traumatized y own body by a lifestyle of drug-taking and had on two previous occasions overdose on amphetamine and once at an evey younger age tried to completely asphyxiate myself with my head in a bag of solvent.

Mine is the case of the typical broken-home scenario. I’ll spare the details of the early years, suffice to say that by the time I was 13 I was headlong into crime, girls, self-abuse and the care system, complete with D.C. (detention centre) — the short, sharp, shock treatment. By the time I was 19 I wasn’t looking as though I was going to improve much.

So we come back to my little encounter above. A lone off conversation with nothing especially much to impress, but during the 2 weeks that followed that brief encounter something was still progressing inside of me. In the course of that time that “voice” (not audible but none-the-less very real) did not let up at any moment. It was saying every day : There really is a God, there really is someone called Jesus, there really is a heaven, there really is a hell.”I somehow knew as if by instinct (or the young man told me, I can’t remember) I must repent of all my sins, ask Jesus to forgive me and live a completely different life.

The idea of “giving up” all my vices in life was almost too much to contemplate, but there was something much more powerful growing inside of me that I knew I couldn’t escape — the fear of Hell. I am not saying that the whole purpose of my Christian life now is simply to escape Hell, I am not saying that such a thought is a wonderful motive for giving your life to Christ; but the bottom line for me and my particular thought processes at that time was this: It doesn’t matter how bland, boring, dull and difficult life will be, it will only be temporal — but after that comes the eternal! By comparison there was only one thing a self-seeking sinner could do — turn my life over to Jesus and be saved. Such was my reasoning and such was God’s method of reaching into the depths of me and making me repent of my sing.

The time had come; I knew what I must do, so, alone in my flat one night I decided that I was going to do it. One final thought struck me. It was late in the evening and I had a habit of making resolutions last thing at night about changing my lifestyle. Not for any moral reason, but simply for the sake of my health, which as I said I was somewhat paranoid about. I would make my plans to live a cleaner, healthier lifestyle at bedtime and in the morning would go my way in pursuit of besetting sins. So that evening I said to myelf, “If I really mean this, then I’ll mean it just as much in the morning. ” So I did nothing that night and went to bed.

That was the beginning for me. Needless to say, many are the lessons along the way. Jesus said that He is “The Door”, but He also said that He is “The Way”. One of the most valuable lessons I had to learn as a young Christian was that it doesn’t matter how radical and striking your conversion experience is, unless you continue to walk with God day by day then you are still powerless to live righteously before God. I was greatly helped by reading a book by the title of Abide in Christ. Of course, ultimately it is God Himself who sees to it that you and I will hear the right thing, read the right book, meet the right people at just the right time in order to teach us the things we need to know, as we are able to receive them. Jesus also said that He is “The Shepherd”. The Holy Spirit is our Teacher. God Himself has promised to guide us into all Truth. May He guide you along the paths that to everlasting life, too.

Possibly Related Posts:

• The Sights and Sounds of Enabling
  by Diane Viere and Elaine Altman-Eller
• Counterfeit: Lies We Believe About Work
• Day Twelve of The 12-Day Prodigal Prayer Mission
• Day Ten of The 12-Day Prodigal Prayer Mission
• Day Nine of The 12-Day Prodigal Prayer Mission