Sizwe is a graduate of Bible Institute of South Africa in the Cape area, and is Xhosa by heritage.  He and his wife, Sethu, are planting Makhaza Reformed Baptist Church in Khayelitsha, one of the largest townships in Cape Town.

Testimony of Salvation

I grew up in a Christian home, my father being a Baptist minister, so I was regularly exposed to the gospel. I knew about the triune God, salvation, sin, judgment, and hell. Nevertheless, I was an unbeliever, having no regard at all for the gospel, enjoying the pleasures of sin. As a teenager, I was beginning to be actively involved in all the wrong things in the community. I was on the road to destruction, because I wanted to prove to my peers that being a pastor’s son does not mean that I am a Christian or Christianize. Had not the Lord saved me at that time, I do not know what would have happened.

During this period, when I was eighteen years old, I began to ask myself serious questions about my life: why am I still alive? If I would die now, what will happen to me? Where would I go? However, by God’s grace, I knew the answers to all these questions since I was taught the way of salvation from childhood. The Spirit of God awakened my deadness and enabled me to respond to the gospel. That is when the splendor and the beauty of the Gospel made such a contrast with the dirt that was in my heart and exposed my loftiness and self sufficiency. I began to realize how empty my life was without God. The Lord has graciously sustained me thus far.

Call to Ministry

After my conversion, I was exposed to the “Christian” unbiblical material of the “word of faith” movement. Instead of answering the questions that I had on biblical texts, they made me more confused. In 2004, while I had my devotions on the book of Acts, I began to inquire about the other Apostles that are not mentioned in the book. Through searching for answers, I found a book on Church History. It was through this reading that I came across other doctrinal matters I was not looking for – justification, imputation, predestination, the sovereignty of God, total depravity, limited atonement etc. By then I had been a Christian for five years, but I had never heard about these things before. I began to read the book of Romans with the help of the commentaries by John Gill and Calvin, and listened to John Piper’s audio tapes. It felt like I was hearing the gospel for the very first time in my life.

I began to be frustrated, using every opportunity I had to teach and expose believers to the doctrines of grace. This frustration grew much stronger as I saw township churches in need of biblical sound teaching. I began to have a great desire to make a difference, even if it would be in one local church, hoping that through that local church, other churches would be reached and exposed to the true gospel. The Lord graciously opened doors for me at the Bible Institute of South Africa to be trained and equipped for ministry. I then received a call from a church in Khayelitsha, and the Lord was good. To cut the story short, things didn’t go well. In the end, we had to start again planting a sound biblical in Khayelitsha, in the Makhaza area, at the beginning of 2016. The church is called Makhaza Reformed Baptist Church. And the Lord has been helping us since. My prayer is expressed in the words of C.H. Spurgeon saying,

“Oh that I may serve Him, and delight in Him.”

C.H. Spurgeon