Saving My Family

I wonder if the best place to start is at the end, today, thru faith and saved by the grace of God, my immediate family, wife, son and daughter and I are saved by the grace of God through our Lord Jesus Christ, our walk to him was not short and certainly not easy. We have experienced blessings and trials which tested our very being and sanity, both from The Lord, by visions, visitations and by evil, thru demonic experiences which I will relate to the reader in this book. The bible states, Ephesians 6:12, for we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of darkness of this age, against spiritual hosts of wickedness in heavenly places. It is this one verse that sets up our entire story, it states the challenge my family was about to be put into, however it also is the very footing I needed to keep me based in the word of the bible, to remember who the enemy truly was in our struggle, and to remember Jesus, who was really in control of everything. How does one know when you receive these visits from either good or evil? The only way I know to explain this is when truly experiencing it for the first time, it’s so far out of the normal that you will understand what John said during his explanation of revelation saying, “Immediately I was in the spirit”. To those readers who have not yet come to call Jesus your Lord and savior yet, John is one of the apostles of Jesus and this passage refers to John being taken to heaven in spirit, not bodily and shown what is to come in the end of the age, in other words the end of the world as we know it today. Revelation is the last chapter of the bible explaining what will be our future here on earth. In our story I was shown visions in this manner. BACKGROUND At a time in the past, none were truly saved or aware of what had to be done to be with God, we weren’t bad or doing any crazy stuff that one would associate evil with, we would be considered normal by all means of the word, a normal middle class family having middle class problems, not enough money to meet the bills, kids getting ready for college, not attending church, but still wanting some kind of supernatural help to get all the things wrong in our lives straight. Of course Jesus wasn’t about to answer that kind of prayer before he put us thru trials that would move us to where he could use us. At this point in time I had started a small business that’s still small today, we had overwhelming debt in credit cards, to the tune of better than $40,000 from business and personal, 2 mortgages, and a growing IRS debit in excess of $80,000 (it’s a long story), it seemed no matter how much I made there was never enough and the balances never came down. Then the beginning to the preverbal yellow brick road to in this case heaven, was made available. Out came the first installment of the very popular “left behind” series, so this is the moment our story begins in the spring of 1996 when I actually began to read the books, I didn’t actually seek it out, my beautiful wife went to the local library and brought home a copy of the book, in CD form, I really hate to read, I’m a listener not a reader, if I hear it I will remember it, if I read it, stuff usually leaks out quickly. So I started to listen and was quickly hooked. I remember somewhere in the middle of the series the means to be saved was revealed, I got down of my knees and reaffirmed what I thought I had already done, and gave my life to Christ, it felt good, it felt right, only this time I prayed out loud speaking it with my lips. Before this moment I always considered myself one of Gods children, but truly I was not, one very important piece was missing, I had not prayed the prayer of salvation or sinners prayer with my lips, speaking into existence by declaring Jesus as my Lord and savior, asking him to enter my life, I thought just knowing about him and praying to him asking for things to be done was enough, big mistake. I needed to confess him before men so that he would confess me before the father. This is when the Holy Spirit truly entered me for the first time. Saying this prayer with your lips is important, looking at Genesis 1: 3 Then God said, “Let there be light”, and there was light. God speaks things into existence and therefore so must you when saying and asking for eternal salvation through Jesus. Romans 10: 9-10 that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. 10 For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. As one reads through our story here in the book none of our experiences which are told in our book happened before this point, it was when I was truly saved that things started to heat up, so to speak. Up unto this point I had failed my family, not being its pastor, not taking the responsibility to help save their eternal souls, it really hadn’t entered into my thought process before this point, however I’m positive that the Holy Spirit entered me at this time and began to move me onto a track that would lead me to become strong in the word of Christ and instill a desire to teach and move my family to him. Even though Sharmalie (my wife) brought the book to me, at this point in time she was the farthest from God of any of us, the mere mention of God or church brought on a verbal assault, which usually lead to her leaving the room or house not wanting to deal with the subject.