Testimonies

FROM LIFE HERE TO LIFE ETERNAL! By Vijay Anands I am from Madras, a fairly large city in southern India. My parents are Hindus by practice and faith. I came to Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio to pursue my M.S. degree the spring of 92. I was acquainted with Christianity through my fiancée Ammu, a Christian, in India, but as a Hindu, I could accept Christ as one of the many gods. After coming to Cleveland and being away from my family, I missed the ¡®religious experience' of going to a temple and worshipping idols. So, that summer, I started attending various churches in the area where I lived in Cleveland. The Lord brought me to Cedar Hill Baptist church where I noticed a genuine friendship and hospitality and love that I had not felt in any church or religious place that I had attended before in my life. I started attending Cedar Hill regularly, and I was introduced to Dave Ferguson a Campus Bible Fellowship staff worker. We developed a friendship, and I shared with him that I wanted to learn more about Christianity because of my fiancée. He encouraged me to attend CBF meetings on campus every Friday and I slowly learned many concepts from the Bible. My idea until that point was that to become a Christian, one had to read the Bible, write some exam, and once you pass the exam, they give you a certificate and you become a Christian. All of that changed with my Bible studies at CBF and the worship services at church. I gained a lot of knowledge about the Bible, saw genuine love among the students at CBF, and developed great friendships. One morning in the fall of 1992, I was walking home from classes and listened to a Christian radio program on my Walkman. The message caused me to realize for the first time that I had committed acts of sin every day. I went to my apartment very distressed because of my sinfulness. I called Dave, asked him to pray for me, and we met the next day and discussed the new realization that I was a sinner. Dave showed me from the Bible that "all have sinned and fall short of the glory of the Lord" and "while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us." That night I was not ready to accept Jesus as my Savior, and he did not push me. I went home and spent the next week thinking about all that I had learned in the past few months from the Bible. I came to believe that the Bible is truly God's revelation to mankind, and the words of the Bible challenged my intellect and stirred my soul. That weekend by a series of events I came to realize that relationships on earth are only temporal, and the Bible promises an eternal relationship with Jesus Christ. On September 20, 1992, which happened to be a Sunday, I came to realize that I was a sinner whose actions deserve death and that Jesus Christ died on the cross for my sins. I had been reading the Bible almost all night. At noon I walked over to church and met with some friends. It was there that I confessed my sins and asked Jesus to be my Savior.