IN those days when the pulpits were hijacked by former witches and repentant warlocks… When crusades were organized with converted ‘deputies of Satan’ as key speakers, and when former satanists and cultist-singers came to preach about the God they had just met and hadn’t understood yet… When the crowds filled the churches to hear salacious stories from those who had been the enemies of believers… I was just a jealous boy.

People who had served God and the church faithfully for years were pushed aside to make place for satanists who just got converted. Young men and women who had labored in the choirs were disregarded in favor of worldly singers who claimed to have just met Christ. The scripture was set aside and the ‘testimonies’ of people who died and went to hell and came back became canonized.

I would hear the ‘testimonies’ and wonder. I would wonder at how these new converts were venerated. Young ones like me were the servants the church recruited to serve these new superstars. I had no salacious testimony. I was never into drugs. I was never into sex. I never even had a girlfriend. It was verboten in the faith I professed. Now someone who was a serial adulterer was recounting his many escapades on the pulpit to a congregation full of fascinated believers with mouths agape. I was never a witch, and never liaised with the devil. I had no ‘testimony’ of having served in a coven, so there was nothing special about me and many like me. I had never drunk blood out of the skull of an innocent victim. I had only been a fighter, and that was too dull a ‘testimony’ for the churches since it would pull no crowd.

Then a faithful friend told me, “Look, it seems that to be relevant in the church, one must have done terrible things, and then get converted. That way, bro, you would be recognized and be invited to speak in churches.”

I gave it a thought. He made a lot of sense — dangerous sense. As for me, my worldview was already formed. I wasn’t going to live that kind of life. “What if you are never able to get back?” I asked the brother. And as young as I was in the faith, I knew much of those ‘testimonies’ were fabricated or exaggerated. That wasn’t the life for me.

Well, I spoke to the Lord about it. He pointed to me the answer in Proverbs 1:10.

“My son, if sinners entice thee, consent thou not.”

When you are lured, don’t go along. He told me clearly, “You don’t have to do it. You don’t have to live like that. Someone will spend part of his productive period to serve the devil before he finally sees the light, but son, you don’t have to be that man.”

That is what I want to tell the younger ones in the church today. Living above evil is not beyond you. You don’t have to be the one who went astray and became the devil’s prey, only to be saved by grace with a lot of scars. You don’t have to be the limb snatched out from the lion’s jaws.

Unless you are already that person, or you have already gone astray, you don’t have to be the one.

Here’s a simplistic illustration: If you go astray and become an armed robber or a drug pusher, and you are sentenced to jail, preachers will come to preach to you in the prison. There, you will become saved, or if you were already saved, you will be restored. You will be a new creature according to the scripture, but the system will still hold you. To the system, you are a convict who must serve his time.

You don’t have to be a former prostitute, or one who used to be the queen in the coven, or ‘Satan’s bride.’

There’s nothing dull in living all of one’s life in manifest righteousness. I have found out that it is actually exciting. So many of those going about sharing the ‘testimonies’ were later exposed to be liars, and those who weren’t lying went back to their vomit because they were never allowed to grow before being thrust into the limelight by a church hungry for exciting tales.

Thank God for those who are rescued from a life of terrible sin. Heaven rejoices for them. Those are the fortunate ones. The Lord washes clean and restores. He welcomes the prodigal, yet He would rather you stayed close and never wandered, for not all prodigal ones make it back home.

“Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy,”  Jude 1:24 (KJV)