Christian Paul Osburn’s Personal Testimony
When I grew up, we as a family went to church faithfully until I was about 7 years old. Slowly as I grew older, I grew farther away from my Christian roots. I got connected with the wrong crowd as a youth, and as a teen I went into a lifestyle of drugs and gangs. Every day at this point I lived to get high, I loved the pleasurable feeling that came from drugs. I did anything to feed this feeling of being high, whether it was alcohol, marijuana, prescription pills, cocaine, LSD or whatever. I would go through great lengths to get drugs, including stealing money from my parents, pawning personal belonging as well as stolen property, stealing drugs from friends and enemies and stealing alcohol from convenience stores. I would do whatever it took to feed that desire for pleasure that I found in drug and alcohol abuse. One day when I was 19 years old, I was lying on my bed pondering my life. During this time I was facing some pretty serious charges and facing some serious jail time. I was also tired of the drug and gang life as a whole, constantly watching my back from prowling enemies and the police, living a life of paranoia, always trying to hunt down the next high, it was truly exhausting. At this point in my life I knew very little about God and the Bible, only vague memories of children Bible stories such as Noah’s Ark and David and Goliath. I did not know it at the time, and I was not looking for God to be in my life, but by God’s wonderful and great grace, the Holy Spirit was convicting me. It was the Holy Spirit that was bringing all my troubles to my mind and reminding me of how sick and tired I was of being sick and tired. As I lay on my bed pondering my messed up life and how sick I was of it, all of the sudden out of nowhere (at least that’s what I thought), I had a desire to pray. At night as I lay on my bed next to my sleeping girlfriend, I said a simple prayer in my mind “Jesus I don’t want to live like this anymore, I want Jesus in my heart”. To this day I am not sure where I got that prayer from other than direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. As soon as I said this prayer in my mind I could feel the weight of my entire sinful life lift right off me and for the first time, I could remember I felt the Presence of the Living God. That night I encountered Jesus and felt Him there in the room with me as I gave my life to Him. As I said before, I was not looking for God, it was just a small moment of God’s great grace that redeemed me that night. I woke up the next morning feeling totally different. As I looked around, even the colors were brighter and everything seemed to be in focus more. I didn’t understand the Trinity, or know the “Romans Road”, or even have a good doctrine at this point, I just knew that I encountered Jesus, and the feeling that I had in that moment of His Presence was better than any drug I had ever done! The ecstasy and sheer pleasure of His Presence was all this thugged-out drug addict needed to follow Jesus. I remember praying a prayer shortly after this encounter that sounded something like “I don’t know much, but I know I encountered Jesus that night, and I want Him.” My life was completely changed after this encounter.
“I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. Then you will live in the land I gave your ancestors; you will be my people, and I will be your God.” Ezekiel 36:26-28 NIV
Christian with some friends before Christ.
Christian with some friend before Christ.
Christian about 3 months after Salvation.