Testimony from the GraceLife Conference, June 2004

Christ sets captives free!

Ron and John,

How do I begin to express what I feel after attending the five-day retreat you hosted? Thank you does not even begin to describe the immeasurable gift God has entrusted you to steward in freeing me from all of the lies that I have constructed in the last nineteen years.

The fact that I have been an active and happy participant in the gay life for seventeen of those years is only the beginning. Fifteen of those years I was in a deeply loving and giving relationship with my life partner. I had everything I could have wanted in a "husband." There is nothing that he would not do for me. Between the two of us we owned four homes and a coffee house business, and I was being groomed to take over the vice presidency of product development for a 200 million dollar a year automotive textile firm. I had it all, but it was not enough. I was looking for something more, but I would not find it within my relationship. So I thought that I would find it someplace else and I set my sights on a new home.

I left that relationship, and our business interests to pursue greater things in Miami, Florida on July 3, 2001. A year later God brought me down to almost nothing so that I might look to Him for a solution, which I found in Christ. The problem was that although I was a believer in Christ, I never thought I would be totally free from the gay lifestyle. All that I thought I had to look forward to was living the rest of my life from failure to failure, maintaining some false sense of sexual celibacy between my sporadic and torrid sexual escapades with other men. What could I do to get over these feelings? Was I doomed to be a Christian that never had victory over my sex drive and my sexual desires? Would I continue to struggle with masturbation and Internet pornography? Would the next handsome man that caught my eye send my lustful thoughts into overdrive and hyperspace?

Through prayer and supplication, my sex life was almost driven to nothing, but I still struggled, although with much less frequency with these addictions. When I did give into the urge I would go on a binge so strong, that it is a miracle that I even managed to get back on the path of righteous living, and then it was a precarious walk at best and downright disastrous at worst.

Then God led me to New Heart Expressions and my life has forever changed.

What happened to me during those five days was nothing short of a miracle. I was given a step by step insight into why I was struggling through my spiritual life instead of living a victorious Christ centered life. I was given counseling precept upon precept, shown the foundation to establishing Christ in my life illuminated with deep spiritual and Biblical truths that pierced me to my soul. I had an entire process laid before me that showed me in such simple and sublime beauty how I could not only walk in purity, but also have and use spiritual tools for living a life that was abounding in grace, love, peace and sexual victory over the patterns of my past.

I was set free.

I had been given a means for living in Christ and what He did on the cross at Calvary as my source for living in a way that no other individual, church, friend, brother, or spiritual mentor could have ever shown me. God inspired and manifested through the staff of New Heart Expressions a miracle in my life. Those five days were one of the most important milestones in my life. I can never thank you enough, Ron, for hearing the call of the Lord and for answering it so beautifully through your desire to set a man like me free. I have already had many complete victories since I have been back home in Miami. I will never forget what you have done for me and I will always be grateful. I could never explain the totality of the experience in this letter, but if this is enough to inspire just one person to make that decision to experience what I experienced, I promise that man will have a reckoning with Christ that will forever change his life. Being set free will never be a question in my life again, it is the reality for the rest of my life and now I know it with a level of depth that is only getting better each day. Thank You.

Your friend and brother in Christ,

Michael

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The conference was co-taught by Ron Browning and John Woodward. Ron is an alumnus of the GFI conference, workshop, and Solomon School and is enrolled in the GFI Counseling Institute. He ministers through NewHeartExpressions.com]