Episode 038 Scott's Personal Testimony-Finding Peace in Christ

In this episode, Scott steps away from the role of interviewer and shares his own personal testimony. He opens up about the struggles, uncertainty, and searching that marked his life before he encountered Jesus Christ. From wrestling with fear and trying to find purpose in all the wrong places to discovering the hope of the gospel, Scott reflects honestly on the journey that transformed his life.

He also shares what changed after placing his faith in Christ—not that life became free of challenges, but that he found something he had never known before: lasting peace, forgiveness, and a relationship with the One who never leaves or forsakes His people.

Whether you've followed Jesus for years, are exploring faith for the first time, or simply enjoy hearing stories of God's grace, we hope Scott's testimony encourages you and reminds you that no one is beyond the reach of Christ's redeeming love.

Let's listen as Scott shares the story of how Jesus changed his life.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hey everyone, welcome to the show. My name is Scott. I'm gonna be your host today. I'm the one that's gonna be sharing with you all throughout our episode. I really appreciate the fact that you're here. This is Project 18, and if this is the first time that you've ever tuned into our podcast, thank you for joining us. I just want you to know especially that this podcast and this space and this platform was created for you. We designed this to be a place where you can ask us any of the questions that are on your heart. Maybe there's some things that you're thinking about constantly and you would just love to have somebody to talk to, but you don't know who to talk to. Um we're here for you. Maybe there's some things that are even a little bit uh beyond just the normal preoccupation of your mind. Maybe there's some things that are giving you anxiety, stress, or fear, or maybe you're just in a spot where you're curious about some questions that you have about matters of faith, whether it's different religious systems, uh maybe it's a questions about the Bible or the Quran or the Vedas, any of those type of things. We would love to be able to interact with you and talk with you about those things. So we made it super easy. All you have to do is reach out to us. There's a link that's in the podcast description. We get those questions and those comments, and then we bring them up on the show and we just kind of talk about those from a biblical perspective, and we hopefully will be able to help you a little bit, provide you a reason to be trusting us uh that this is a safe place. This isn't a place where you're gonna face fear or shame for asking any of the questions that are on your hearts. Uh, we just want to be here and give you a biblical perspective and maybe give you an option on a different way to look at some of the things that you have going on in your life. And so today I wanted to do something a little bit different. Today I wanted to give you a little bit of insight to where I'm at in my journey. There was definitely a time in my life when I was very far from God, and I had those type of questions. I had questions about like, what is the real meaning of life? Is it more than just going to work every day, saving money, spending money, partying on the weekends, and falling in love, those type of things? Or was there like a greater purpose and a plan for my life? I began asking those questions actually when I was pretty young. Uh my brother and I, I only have one brother, he's two years older than I was. Uh, he has since passed away. He passed away at the age of 44. But when we were kids, and we were about 14 and 16 years old, we came home one day and we found that our entire house was empty of furniture except for what was in our bedrooms. And we knew that our parents had been struggling a little bit and that they were talking about divorce, but it really kind of hit us all of a sudden like when we came home and the house was completely empty. My mom had taken all the furniture and she had left my dad, and he kind of just raised both me and my brother from that point on. Eventually, my mom came back and we had some interaction with her a little bit in the years that followed, but not a lot. Primarily, we were raised by my dad. Well, during that time, I began to drift really far from God. We were raised in a church when we were young, very godly grandparents, and yet um my parents who at one time really loved to take us to church, and one time really were into the scriptures and things like that, they kind of abandoned that once they the divorce came and their their struggles began. So we were left on our own um when we were teenagers, just becoming teenagers of my brother and I. And because of that, we kind of drifted, both he and I, way away from anything that we had learned as we were kids about the Lord. And during that time, I made like so many mistakes. I have so many regrets. I really didn't have any guiding force in my life. My dad uh and my mom, they both loved us very much and they did the best that they could, but man, we ran free range over things in our life uh at school. We became involved with the wrong types of people that didn't do anything healthy for us. We just got us into worse trouble than before. And by the time I was 17, I was really um pretty far from God. I could party a lot every weekend, and I was living on my own. I had quit high school, moved out on my own, was living with a couple buddies of mine, just that life at 17 years old. And then one day I got really super sick. Uh, I got pneumonia that was so bad that I had to go to the hospital. They tried to extract it from my lungs. They used this huge needle that I had to lay on my stomach. They went through my back to try to extract the fluid from my lungs. I remember them kind of bouncing off of my ribs when they went in there. Super painful, lost a ton of weight, and literally I almost died at that time. Well, I obviously needed care to get uh back to health, back to normal. So my dad, that was a little bit beyond uh the care that he could provide for us at the time. So I went to live with my grandparents, my mother's parents. Now, my mother's parents were super godly. They loved the Lord, they're always in church, uh, they're always praying for us. There's not a day of my life, I think, that uh I wasn't prayed over by my grandparents. So just a quick shout out here to you. If you are listening and you're a parent or grandparent, and the children or the grandchildren that you love the most are kind of far from God and they're struggling a lot, don't ever give up on them. I still remember to this day the sheer love of my grandparents and the love of my parents uh that just kind of was there no matter what. There was nothing that I could ever do where they would stop loving me. And I tested that quite a bit. And to this day, those are some of the best memories I have during this dark period of my life, even though I didn't engage with them, I didn't respond immediately to them and the prayers that they had for me. Um, and even my grandparents passed away before uh they really saw me get into ministry or anything like that. Remain faithful to those kids and those grandkids and any other family members or friends that you have that are going through a hard time. Anyway, I went to stay with them for about three months or so when I had pneumonia when I was super young, and um they just loved me back to health. I remember them. They fed me like delicious home cooked meals, got my weight back on, nursed me back to health till I could get to a point where I was breathing normally, and they saw me through that whole illness. And one of the things that was really attractive about those three or four months that I spent with them was that every morning for breakfast, they would sit at a table. They had a tiny little house, they would sit together, there was only room for like three people because the table is up against the wall. They would sit across from each other, I would sit there in the middle of them, and they would open up the Bible and they would just read a little bit of the Bible. They're in the habit of um reading the book of Proverbs, which is in the first half of our Bibles, which is called the Old Testament. There's 31 Proverbs, 31 chapters. I remember them distinctly reading a chapter a day for whatever day of the month it corresponded with. And then they also read from the Psalms, but they just held each other's hands across from the table. They prayed sincerely to God, and they prayed for me at that time. So by the time that I was ready to go home, the time that I had regained my health, I remembered what I saw there. And to me, I saw a completely different lifestyle than what I had lived. Uh I remember going home, I had a really cool Chevelle at the time. If you're a car person, you know that sometimes them old Chevelles had swivel bucket seats on them. They would actually swivel to let you in, and then they would swivel and lock into place so you could drive them. Well, the center council of that was just filled with all kinds of drug paraphernalia. I had, you know, that's back in the day when marijuana was illegal and I was into that scene. I had a lot of drugs there. And I remember just being so convicted that I went home, my car was in the garage at my house. Uh I went back to live with my dad rather than staying in an apartment with my buddies, which I could no longer afford. And I remember just opening up the center console of that car, just being hit by the aroma of all kinds of drugs that were still in there, uh, roaches that were in there, and just the aroma of it hit me, and it was like it was calling me back into that lifestyle. I remember just sitting in that car, I wasn't a person of prayer at that time, and just reaching out to the Lord and asking him, Alright, you just showed me something else, you showed me something different, you showed me something beautiful about life. I really want that in my own life. I don't want this anymore. Like I saw a different way, a better way to do life. And so from that time on until where I'm at today, uh God has been working in my heart and changing me. It hasn't always been easy, it hasn't always been perfect for sure. Um, I still continue to make really bad mistakes all the time. Um, I'm not perfect, nor will I ever be. But something is different because now I realize that Jesus did something for me. He loved me so much that he cared for me, he lived a life for me uh with no sin. He died as what we call a substitute in my place for the penalty of my sins, and that cleared out all the debt that I had and all the guilt that I had and he welcomed me into a relationship with himself. I know that he didn't stay dead after he died on the cross. If you've had any familiarity with the Bible, uh you know the story of Jesus is one where he is born to us. We celebrate Christmas because of that. He was born to a pretty uh poor family, and he came into the world to live a life with no sin as God, die on the cross for us, and then he was resurrected three days later, and shortly after that he ascended back up into heaven. All of that proved the ability that he had, the power that he had to be able to forgive sins, and I know that because I put my loyalty and my trust in him, that my life is now changed, and that one day when I die, I will go to be with him where he is, and he will welcome me with a human hand, um uh a godly hand, as having accepted the forgiveness that he gave me. That changed everything in my life. I just started tracking in a whole different direction. If I was to use like kind of modern terminology, and if I used like the um the cyber term now, I was like um the master of my own um game, the master of my own agenda, and I really was changed because then I started to see Jesus as having a profound love for me and a desire that I have a relationship with him. So since that time, I'm gonna be honest, no matter all the difficult things that I have, the anxiety that I have is supplemented by the peace that I have in Christ. I know that whatever is going on in my life, nothing is allowed into my life except by his hand, his loving hand, that he's trying to deepen me in my relationship with him. He's trying to grow me and help me along as I mature in my own faith. This is something that churchy people call discipleship. And I'm being discipled by a lot of other people in my life, but his spirit is now within me, and he is discipling me to grow in my knowledge of him, my affection for him, and my devotion to him as well. And that changed everything. I began to um get more and more excited about understanding who he was. I began to read the scriptures, uh, began to study the scriptures. I went back to high school, graduated with a GED in the same classes I was flunking out, failing out, didn't care less about. I was getting A's in, and from there I went on to uh Bible school and went on to get uh theological education and biblical degree, and uh I just began to be like a sponge, absorbing as much as I could possibly find out about God. And the journey from there, um, like I said, it wasn't easy, and it still isn't easy. We face a lot of difficult things, but long story short, I'll get into some of the details in future episodes. But uh he led me. I was in a really good vocation, I had a really great career that I was in. Um, I was paid very well as a purchasing manager for uh a building material supplier. Uh literally, I could walk into any store. Uh we weren't wealthy by any means, but we weren't poor either. Uh, we were able to, as my wife and I, we could buy our kids anything they wanted, and uh there was a satisfaction in having worked long days and being able to provide for our family, but there was something a little bit more going on in my heart. Uh, I felt that God was saying, this isn't everything that I want you to do. And so that gnawing within me led me into full-time vocational ministry. I began to do um what we call short-term missions trips. That's where somebody will go with either on their own or with one or two other people as part of a team into different countries around the world. And the purpose of those ministries are vast. You can either do building projects uh in uh developing nations, or uh in my case, we would do uh biblical training for people that are in ministry in places like Africa, in India, where they didn't have full-time um theological education available to them. So we would go and provide just-in-time training to them on how to understand the scriptures, how to communicate the scriptures. And I began to fall in uh fall in love with doing that. Uh I remember these short-term missions trips, they would be like one to two weeks long for the most part. Some of them were three weeks long, depending on how far we went in the world. But I would come back always like a little deflated to come back home and see how life uh where in America really was, because I got to see some of the most beautiful people in the world going through really difficult situations like not knowing where food would come from, not having uh preventative health care, not having access to clean water, um, having questions about being raised in faith systems that left them wanting and left them desperate for more knowledge. We worked with some of the major religious groups of the world, talking with people who grew up in that type of uh household and answering some of the questions that they had about their faith. And so God began to really burden my heart to do more for him. And I remember sitting at my desk uh in my office uh when I was uh a purchasing manager and looking at my door uh because my kids would often visit me. We just had two children at the time, my son and my daughter, our son and our daughter. And I would have those tick marks on the back of my door of like, okay, here's what they were when they were four years old, five years old, six years old. You know how that goes and you that you do that. And I remember thinking to myself, it's like all of a sudden it hit me like a tidal wave. Um, is this all that I'm ever gonna do in life? Not that it's bad, but is it what's best? I have a buddy in the ministry that says, are we doing what's our highest and best calling in our life? And for me and my wife, we began to pray through that, and we decided that no, God is really calling us into full-time vocational ministry. And so I remember having conversations with some of my family members. I'm like, uh, I can't do this career anymore. I have a calling in my heart and in my life, and God is calling me to do some deeper things. And I got all kinds of responses to that. On the one hand, I got people that were like, all right, you know, awesome. We'd love to see what happens next. We want to see the next chapter that God writes in your heart and in your life. Um, go for it. You know, everything is cool. And I had other family members that were like, Are you crazy? Uh, you can't do that. You have to provide for your family financially to be able to do that. Well, we knew that we would take financial hits being able to go into the ministry like that because again, we were walking away from a really good career. And so we prayed through that. One of the last things that we wanted to do before we went into full-time ministry was to adopt a little girl from China. And so we did that. We went through the adoption process. Sammy came home to us, just one of the most beautiful stories. I'll have her share her story here sometime. But um, we began to pursue God and full-time ministry. So for many years after we left our vocations, we were missionaries. We would uh live here in the United States, and yet we would lead teams abroad uh many times throughout the year. At the peak, I was going uh every other month or sometimes twice a month to take teams of people to minister in areas that were 2% or less evangelical Christians, or they were closed communities where evangelizing and proselytizing were against the law of the land. So we would do work in countries um where people were set up. We worked with pastors and teams that were already existing in those countries. We'd bring our folks in there in order to serve them. We would follow their directions, we would go into places where we were able to um help them out and share the gospel with them. And God began to open up those opportunities uh for us to be able to do that. And um, since that time, we've made a pivot. Um now I'm full-time in the pastoral ministry at a local church. I still do uh international missions trips and teams. If you're interested in going on a team, go ahead and message me and we'll set you up with some trips that we have coming up. But all of that to just say that God never gives up on a person. Uh the Lord has some amazing things in store for our life. It doesn't always lead to full-time vocational ministry, but it does always lead to fulfillment. It leads to a life that flourishes by his standards, not by my own standards. It leads to a life where, again, not everything is easy, some things are very difficult, but at least you have a peace and an understanding that at the end of the day, you get to live your life when you follow Jesus and you get to bank every single day for eternity. And so I'm gonna wrap up with that. If you're in a spot right now where you're you're asking some of those similar questions, like, is this all that there is to life? Does the Lord have something more in store for me, or what's that look like? I just want to encourage you, as some guy that grew up pretty far from God, pretty distant from God, and then at one point in his life had people that loved him and shared the gospel with him and responded to that gospel, that God has something amazing in store for you as well. And so if you're tracking today and you're like, I really want to know what that is, I want to explore this a little bit more, please reach out to me. I'd love to interact with you, um, pray with you, help you understand what that might look like. Um, and if you've got somebody in your life and they're really struggling right now with some of these same existential questions, again, I'm just gonna encourage you to stick with them, love them because um Jesus loves us without condition, and we are called to love people without condition as well. And again, thank you so much for joining and listening in today. If you have any questions, please reach out to me. But uh in the meantime, I'm hoping that you're gonna join us for future episodes. We're gonna be looking soon at doing um a workshop that's entitled, You guys will like this, Aliens, AI, and the future of the world. So if any of those subjects or topics are interesting you, tune in for future broadcasts that we have and join us in that discussion. And in the meantime, thank you so much again for joining us today. Take good care and God bless.