Before I was born again (accepted Jesus as my Lord and Saviour), I was confronted with many questions about God. But none of these arguments made any sense to me.
Argument 1: The first time I was confronted with the Gospel, was when I came into contact with the Reformed church. They believe that a person is predestined to go to heaven or hell. God makes this decision before we are born.
God is often portrayed as a Father in the Bible, and I could not understand why God would create a person with the sole purpose to send him or her to a hell that was made for the fallen angels.
Argument 2: After my birth, my parents wanted to baptise me. No “dominee” was willing to do that because my parents were not part of their club. I thouight everybody was working for the same God.
Argument 3: When my grandfather built a church and preached to those who attended his church at Lehlohonolo near Matatiële, the church declared him insane and sent him to an asylumn. My father and his siblings was sent to an orphanage.
Then, after I was born again, I came against the following arguments, facts that God showed me in His Word:
Argument: God no longer does any miracles
Argument: Speaking in tongues are not of God
Argument: The Pentacostals rolled pumpkins under the chairs
Argument: Who are we to have any “gifts”? We are nothing.
Argument: The Holy Spirit does not talk to us.
The problem was that Ina and I attended a course on God’s “gifts” and I promised God I would use my gifts for His glory. Now the preacher is saying we do not have any gifts.
Then came the big surprise: In the church we went to, they use the Heidelberg Catechism (Heidelberg se Kategismus) where they present to the reader questions and then answered each question.
I saw that most of the time the answers did not relate to the questions and I then realised I had to search for the truth. Because Ina knew the Bible better than me, I would show her the question and then asked her whether the answer was relevant to the question. When she agreed, I said: “But this then means …” She quickly answered that she did not agree with my interpretation.
When the Mormons came to the door, I invited them in and started questioning them. After reading their prophesies and other literature, I realised that this did not answer the questions I had.
And so I went from The Plain Truth, the Jahova’s Witnesses, Seven Day Adventists, etc. through as many religions as I could find to find the truth.
Then a colleague invited me to join the Gideons. Because it was a prestigeous, organization, I agreed. He quickly found out that I was not born again and gave me the EE3 evangelism course. It was packed away in a drawer for a year before I finally opened it. I could not believe my eyes! I ran into the kitchen shouting that I was born again. Ina thought I was crazy.
Then I started studying the Bible and even started translating it into Afrikaans to find the truth. I bought Ina the Living Translation.
She got so entrenched in it that when I went home for a tea break at 10:00, I would find her on the bed, in her nighties, reading the Bible. This was the highlight of my day although she jumped up and said that she did not even have time to brush her teeth!
So we were both born again. I lined up our three children at the time and led them all into the Lord’s prayer and they accepted rthat Jesus paid for all their mishaps, sins, and wrong-doings.
Later, when our fourth child was born, he one day followed Ina through the house asking her that he also wanted to accept Jesus as his personal Saviour. She led him into prayer and so our whole family was saved by the grace of our Lord, Jesus Christ.
That was when I found the Holy Spirit, or rather, He found me.
One night I was sitting in the lounge and told God I was going to sit there until I could speak in tongues. I have never heard anybody speaking in tongues before this night, I never went to a charismatic church at the time, I just read about it in the Bible.
After sitting in the lounge for a couple of hours alone in the dark, I decided to go to bed, very sad that nothing happened.
The next day I went to the Kommando offices where I served part time and spoke to the secretary about my search. She invited me to their home cell that same night and asked me to bring my guitar.
I asked Ina to go with me, but she said that I needed to check it our first.
That night, after the Bible study, they started to sing while I played the guitar. Before I realised what happened, I started singin in tongues!
When I got home that night, Ina asked me to speak in tongues. I told her I could not, but that this particular song worked. I started playing it and the tongues came.
We were both very excited.
We ended up going to a church in Vanderbijlpark that had links with the Hatfield Christian Church where we were invited to one of their home cells. Later we went to the Hatfield Christian Church LTS (Leadership Training School).