Jose and Laura are a young couple that came to our church not long ago. Neither of them is from Rosario, but they live here now because of their university studies. Their history with us is pretty short. Almost within a month of being with us, Jose began to express serious uneasiness about his salvation. In his own words, he told pastor Ariel, “Christ is everything for you guys, but He is not everything to me.” But in a very similar way to Florencia [in my previous post], one great Sunday, something happened. Jose was impacted during the first part of our Sunday meeting, the time that we devote to prayer together for revival. Hearing the prayers of some of the brothers in the church that were hungry for more of Christ, he was profoundly convinced of his own misery and of his deserved condemnation, so much so that under great anguish he cried out to Christ to rescue him.
Later, during the preaching, the Lord came to him through the exposition of the Scriptures and opened his eyes in such a way that he could see his urgent and absolute dependence on Christ for his salvation. As he heard the preaching from Philippians 3:10 on our need to know the enlivening power of Christ’s resurrection, Jose surrendered himself completely to Christ and confessed his inability to save himself and cried out to be raised from spiritual death. As the musicians led us in music after the sermon, for the first time, as he told us later, Jose was able to praise the Lord with all of his being. Jose’s praise to God was the cry of one who had been reborn!
Days later Laura had an experience of conversion. Together with Jose, she decided to listen to our radio program, in which my wife Andrea was telling her testimony about how the Lord freed her from the deceit in which she found herself as a false convert, and how He saved her with His strong hand. Laura identified herself with Andrea, and she realized that she was in same place Andrea was before her conversion. But she began to resist the conviction of sin and appealed to her supposed personal righteousness before God: “I am not that bad; I am not lost.”
But Jose, now that he viewed things with new eyes, began to explain the gospel to her and to plead with her to not be superficial and to not excuse herself, but instead to confess her need of a Savior. Finally, Laura surrendered. She recognized her looseness, and she was broken and humbled before God. She cried out to Him to be saved from condemnation and from the power of sin. Today, despite the fact that only a month ago Jose and Laura were slaves of sin, both are manifesting the desire to follow Jesus no matter the cost. They want to be members of the church; they want to know the Lord Jesus; they want to serve Him; they want to live in the fullness of the Spirit. Oh, how worth it is to serve the Lord and to be a servant to men! It is worth it all if only to see one more sinner repent and be washed in the blood of Emmanuel!
