I decided to get born again in late 2017 after reading a book by Kenneth Hagin called ‘The Triumphant Church’. I went out for an altar call at a youth convention I had been invited to a few days after reading the book. The pastor who made the altar call said a prayer that stuck in my heart though it sounded funny at the time. He said something like‘ God, please give them spiritual multivitamin so they always stay hungry for You and Your word.’
I believe his prayer was answered because sometime in 2019, I started feeling really hungry and dissatisfied with what I was being fed at my home church during sermons and church meetings. I felt like the excessive focus on fleshly desires rather than on spiritual growth was off, shallow, and false, and I desperately desired to know the truth. I remember myself literally weeping during church meetings and begging God for even an inch deeper understanding of Him than I had at the time.
In 2020, I got into a relationship which was going to lead to marriage, but God dragged me out of it. I was also living in habitual sin because I didn’t really understand what it meant to fear God and obey His commandments.
When the relationship ended in November 2021, I was broken. I couldn’t recognize myself without the young man because I had a very unhealthy soul tie with him. I felt like I was going crazy, I started having paranoid and suicidal thoughts.
I wasn’t someone who liked to stay in the University hostel, but I decided to get a space in my close friend’s room that same November 2021 and move into the hostel for fear of succumbing to my loneliness and depression and trying to hurt myself.
Despite how difficult that season was for me, I was so sure that God did not want me to be in that relationship because I had just started hearing Him speak to me, and He kept on giving me the assurance of peace if I would obey Him and move on.
God later showed me why He wanted me out of that relationship. One of the reasons was because I was actually idolizing the relationship with the young man, and my relationship with God had become very shallow. I felt broken when I discovered this, so I decided to start afresh with God.
Those days, in my new hostel space, I could stay all day, studying my Bible and Christian books, singing hymns and talking to God. God became my best friend, and He still is. One of the first Christian books I read in that season was the book by Kenneth Hagin that led me to God about 4 years earlier. The book has tens if not hundreds of verses from scripture in it, but only two really stood out to me, Isaiah 26:3 and Ephesians 1: 17-19.
Ephesians 1:17-19 in particular stood out to me so much that I wrote it down on a piece of paper and pasted it on my wall in the hostel to be reminded to pray in that line every single day. Little did I know that that was a frequently said prayer at the Church group that God would soon be leading me to, a prayer for ‘eyes to see and ears to hear’.
In my new room, I also had frequent discussions about God and His Word with my new roommates. That was when I met sis N, a member of God’s Lighthouse. Her grasp of scripture surprised me. I was always in awe. Even her behaviour, and that of her friends intrigued me.
Many of my roommates said really bad things about her Church but I knew the fruits I was observing in her and I knew that such good fruits just could not have come from bad roots. I often contemplated visiting her church to see what they were being fed that made them so devoted in worship and service to God, but I would wave off the thought because from our discussions, I ascertained that her church was a charismatic church.
During my season of seeking God, I discovered many different versions of the “truth”, and the ones that subconsciously stuck with me were Cessationism and Reformed Calvinism. Cessationism in particular. So, I would listen to hours and hours of teachings by John Macarthur, Paul Washer and the likes. In fact, I was jumping from falsehood to falsehood in the name of seeking the truth. I quickly subscribed to these schools of thought because at that time, they were the most solid critics of the shallow Nigerian charismatic culture that I had grown to become so dissatisfied with, and also because I simply was not studying my Bible well enough.
Despite all of that, God was still merciful to me by teaching me personal lessons on most of the things that are constantly hammered on here in God’s Lighthouse before I even thought of attending a church meeting here. My friends would even sometimes tell me that I might be a religious extremist because of the radical views I had on subjects like exam malpractice, human hair, dating/relationships, giving, money, poverty, modest dressing and so on. My comfort was in the fact that those things had been revealed and confirmed to me by God through His Word.
I began to understand the importance of God’s Words over the schools of thought of men. God truly began answering my prayers for eyes to see and ears to hear.
Honestly, in the past when I got revelations of really deep stuff, I would get really scared and feel lonely in my faith because no one else seemed to understand. I would ask God questions like “Lord, now that You’ve shown me this thing, what do you want me to do with it?” because I felt like I was really weak and had no accountability and so would not make good use of the knowledge God was so graciously giving to me, and I would therefore be flogged with many strokes on the day of judgment.
I was amazed when I finally came to God’s Lighthouse in late 2022 to hear most of what God had taught me in my little corner being steadily hammered on. I couldn’t believe that a church group like this even existed, talk more of existing in my very own hometown, Uyo! I had so much desired the accountability this church group offers and I’m so grateful to the Lord for leading me here.
He has surrounded me with really amazing older brethren, and this has taught me humility because many people outside would often refer to me as a mama. But after attending my first Believers Bible School class down to the last, and then watching the lives of the older brethren, I realized I wasn’t so much of a mama, I was most likely even still a small pikin in the spirit realm.
I experienced my own little dose of persecution after I started telling people about my involvement with God’s Lighthouse. What didn’t I hear? From “those people that sing cele songs” to “those people that steal people’s girlfriends and turn them to holy Mary”, to “those people that distract students from school”. Apart from my normal human understanding of truth and lies, God also was kind enough to counter all of those claims, reaffirm His Truth in my heart and comfort me through it all.
God is washing me with His pure Word and setting me free in many different areas of my life by His Truth. I would not trade this for anything at all. I am so grateful to Him for all these! May His name be praised.
— Sis I.E
10th June 2023
©God’s Lighthouse 2023