Christy’s story starts out like most of the people who make professions of faith at a crusade. Someone brought her. Yolanda, her sister-in-law had been trying to get Christy to go to church with her at Calvary Chapel Downey, but Christy, who says she never actually said “no” to the invites, never actually made it to a Sunday service. So Yolanda took the LA Harvest Crusade as just one more opportunity to invite Christy out to hear God’s Word. Yolanda told me she just knew that Christy needed the Lord.
You see, Christy had been unhappy for quite sometime. She saw Yolanda and other people happy. She wondered what she was missing. There was an emptiness in her that needed to be filled. She has a 3-year-old daughter and she had recently put her into a Catholic preschool so her daughter wouldn’t feel the emptiness that she felt. She didn’t feel equipped to help her daughter in this area. She felt a void in her life and she didn’t want her daughter to feel it. I asked her how long she felt like she had been searching for something to fill the emptiness in her. She stopped and thought for a minute. “I don’t think I even knew that I needed to search. I was just lost for a long time.”
Pastor Greg’s message really spoke to her because she didn’t believe an afterlife. She figured, “When you die, that’s it. There’s nothing.” Christy was a Catholic and she said that the services she experienced were so impersonal. “It’s like they were not even real,” she commented. Nothing spoke to her. Nothing touched her. But tonight it was different. Tonight it was “real and personal.”
God is real. God is personal. He wants a relationship with you. When Jesus died for our sins He bridged the gap between man and God. There is no need to have a man talk to God for you. Do you use a go-between to talk to your own father? John 16:23 tells us, speaking of Jesus’ death and resurrection, “At that time you won’t need to ask me for anything. I tell you the truth, you will ask the Father directly and he will grant your request because you use my name.” Jesus further explains in John 6:26–27 “Then you will ask in my name. I’m not saying I will ask the Father on your behalf, for the Father himself loves you dearly because you love me and believe that I came from God.” I love that the God who created this universe is right here for me; that He loves me; that He listens and hears me. He loves and hears you too, Christy.
