The Return of a Prodigal Son (Part 3)

February 26, 2018

Ruth, United States

In 2014, after my son was born, my fights with my husband intensified because there wasn’t breast milk to feed our child with. Every day when my husband would return home from work, the first thing that he would say was: “How is there still no milk? There’s no milk for our son to eat, and that will lower his immunity.” This was the first time I had experienced my own incompetence, and it made me feel as though I was entirely unfit to be a mother. I saw Western doctors and Chinese doctors, I even searched for home remedies online, but not a single method got me to produce milk. I felt hurt, sad, angry, as if I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and I felt that if I continued in this way then I would truly soon go insane. During my entire convalescence after childbirth I was washing my face with tears nearly every day, and no matter what I did I couldn’t get over why this was happening to me. I often felt an indescribable panic come over me, and all it took was for me to hear words such as “mother’s milk” or “feeding,” and I would immediately burst out sobbing, completely unable to control myself.

After my mother learned of the difficult situation I was in, she came overseas to look after me. When she saw how I was suffering she said to me: “Have you ever thought about why your days are growing darker and darker and becoming more and more filled with suffering? It’s because you are a person who verbally claims to believe in God but you do not seek the truth, you have no knowledge of God, you still resist God in every respect. You do not accept God’s new work, you have lost God’s care and protection, you live under the domain of Satan, you can only be afflicted or fooled by Satan, filling your life with more and more suffering.” Hearing my mother say these words cast a silence over me. In the days that followed, whenever mother would put my child to sleep, she would play some hymns of God’s words for me to listen to. A wonderful thing happened, my mind unexpectedly started to slowly find peace in the wake of the merriment of these hymns. One time, I listened to this hymn: “The heart and spirit of man are too distant from God. Therefore, even as man follows God, he unknowingly remains in the service of Satan. None actively seek out the footsteps or appearance of God, and none wish to exist in the care and keeping of God. Rather, they are willing to rely on the corrosion of Satan and the evil one in order to adapt to this world and to the rules of life the wicked mankind follows. At this point, the heart and spirit of man are sacrificed to Satan and become its sustenance. Moreover, the human heart and spirit become a place in which Satan can reside and a fitting playground for it. In this way, man unknowingly loses his understanding of the principles of being human, and of the worth and purpose of human existence. The laws from God and the covenant between God and man gradually fade away in man’s heart and man no longer seeks or pays heed to God. As time passes, man no longer understands why God created man, nor does he understand the words that come from the mouth of God or realize all that is from God. Man begins to resist the laws and decrees from God; the heart and spirit of man become deadened. … God loses the man of His original creation, and man loses the root of his beginning. This is the sorrow of this mankind” (“The Sorrow of Corrupt Mankind” in Follow the Lamb and Sing New Songs). Every line of Almighty God’s words penetrated my heart, and I could see that I was in the situation being described by God’s words, that I had recognized God with my lips, but in reality my heart had been completely possessed by Satan, all my thoughts and feelings were about matters of the flesh, what I was pursuing was also the flesh, and what I was going down was the secular path. In the Holy Bible it says: “For to be carnally minded is death; but to be spiritually minded is life and peace” (Rom 8:6). “Know you not that the friendship of the world is enmity with God? whoever therefore will be a friend of the world is the enemy of God” (Jas 4:4). I thought about how there was nothing about any of my actions that conformed to God’s will, how they all ran counter to God. I came before God and prayed: “O God, today I’m faced with this kind of environment because I view my degree, identity, marriage and other things of this world as so precious, thinking that so long as I obtained these things then it would be enough. I simply have not sought out the truth, nor have I pursued the knowledge of God, to the extent that each time You have knocked on the door to my heart and arranged the truth of God’s word before me I have not understood the value of this. When I heard that You have arrived to carry out new work I was obstinate and self-opinionated, and made baseless judgments. I was fully aware that there was reason in my mother’s fellowships, yet I stubbornly held on to my own conceptions without inspecting the true way. O God, all I cherished was Your grace while rejecting the truth, I really was so stubborn and disobedient! If You will still give me an opportunity, I will certainly inspect Your work as best I can.” At that time I didn’t know if this kind of prayer would be heard by God, but I still kept on crying out to God in this way.

In April 2015 I went with my mother back to China because of a health issue, which gave me an opportunity to get in touch with The Church of Almighty God. I thought about how I had fought and struggled in this world without attaining happiness, and how within religion I had not found the truth that could dispose of the darkness and emptiness in my heart, and there was a kind of strong premonition in my heart that perhaps it was because I had continuously refused to accept Almighty God as the Savior Jesus who helped me test into college and let me go to America! As I thought about this, I told my mother that I wanted to take part in church activities at The Church of Almighty God. Before long, brothers and sisters from The Church of Almighty God would come meet with me, and I saw that when these brothers and sisters got together what they read was the word of God, what they fellowshiped about was the truth, and what they put into practice was the truth; no matter what they did, God’s word served as their standard and the truth served as their principle; they did not act according to the flesh, and they didn’t take part in secular dealings. The Church of Almighty God is the good land of Canaan where the truth rules. In this place, my spirit is filled, I am provided for, my heart is no longer empty, and I have a sense of fulfillment.

One day, I once again met with some brothers and sisters, and sister Wang read this passage from the word of God: “The Almighty has mercy on these people who suffer deeply. At the same time, He is fed up with these people who have no consciousness, because He has to wait too long for the answer from humans. He desires to seek, seek your heart and your spirit. He wants to bring you food and water and to awaken you, so you are no longer thirsty, no longer hungry. When you are weary and when you begin to feel the desolation of this world, do not be perplexed, do not cry. Almighty God, the Watcher, will embrace your arrival any time. He is watching by your side, waiting for you to turn back. He is waiting for the day your memory suddenly recovers: becoming conscious of the fact that you came from God, somehow and somewhere once lost, falling unconscious on the roadside, and then, unknowingly having a father. You further realize that the Almighty has been watching there, awaiting your return all along” (“The Sighing of the Almighty” in The Word Appears in the Flesh). This passage from the word of God moved me deeply, I felt that Almighty God was just like a loving mother calling out for her missing child, waiting for His child to someday soon return to His side. I heard that this was the voice of the Lord, that Almighty God is the Lord Jesus who helped me time and again to get over the crises I faced, that He never left me a single step of the way, and that every day He called out to me, persistently waiting for me to turn back. I thought about how I believed in God yet I didn’t seek the truth or believe God’s word, rather I believed online rumors, I believed the words of pastors, and I acknowledged the bandit as my father, and joined the CCP government and religious pastors in disparaging and attacking God, who has been caring for me night and day, and I forsook God’s salvation. I truly was so blind and ignorant. I still believed in God according to my conceptions and imagination, I believed that the Lord Jesus had helped me successfully test into college and guide me to go abroad without a hitch to pursue my studies, that in every moment I must hold on to the Lord Jesus’ name, and that this alone was being loyal to the Lord. I relied on my conceptions and imagination to look upon things, when God changed the age and changed His name I did not recognize God’s work, and time and again I refused God’s salvation of me. By no means did I believe in God by acting this way. Wasn’t this me believing in myself? All that God has given me is love, yet time and again I have hurt God, I owe such a great debt to God …

I couldn’t help but kneel down and cry bitter tears as I prayed to God: “Oh Almighty God! Before, I was blind and ignorant, I believed the rumors of the CCP and the religious world and forsook You and condemned You, I relied on my own imagination and conceptions to delimit You, I refused Your gospel of the last days, and I am a modern-day Pharisee. On the basis of my actions and deeds I should be destroyed together with Satan, but, because You love me, and have not punished me based on my actions, You have instead time and again given me opportunities to repent. Oh God, I am willing, just like the people of Nineveh, to come before You ‘in sackcloth and ashes’ and truly confess my sins to You and repent, and ask You to have mercy on me, I am willing to cooperate with You, and be cleansed and saved by Your word.”

The Return of a Prodigal Son 

After this, brothers and sisters from The Church of Almighty God would come meet with me three times a week, this went on uninterrupted for over four months. During this time I read several passages from the word of God almost every day, and as I came to understand more and more of the truth, my relationship with God became more and more normal, and my original faith was restored, I felt at peace in my heart, and I no longer felt anxious or desolate. Through reading the word of Almighty God and meeting to fellowship about the truth, I came to be absolutely certain of God’s work in the last days, and that Almighty God is the Lord Jesus whose return I had looked forward to. I firmly decided that I was willing to follow Almighty God to the end of the road, and repay God’s love by serving as a truth-seeker.

In 2016, after returning to America, I got in touch with brothers and sisters of The Church of Almighty God through their website and started taking part in activities at their church. Thanks be to God! It was God who led me each step of the way to where I am now, so in order to repay God for His love, I am willing to offer all of my strength to carry out the work of spreading God’s gospel, so that more people who thirst for and seek the truth can come to know that Almighty God is the returned Lord Jesus, and at the same time I will tell them that they should not follow in my footsteps: Blindly believe Satan’s rumors, join Satan in resisting God, and in the end the only one who will be at a loss will be yourself.

Source The Internet