This is Mary Culver’s story before she was baptized on April 4, 2021 in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.
I was raised in a Catholic church and thanks to my mom and dad, who are here today, I do not remember a time in my life when I did not know who Jesus is or that I did not call him Lord and Savior. I do not have a grand testimony of being saved from a string of radical sin and blind unbelief. But, I can testify how the Lord Jesus has continually sanctified me, correcting my own misinterpretations of my sin and the gravity of that sin against a holy and righteous God. He is continually changing my desires from loving my sin to hating sin, changing my heart to love Him more everyday and to turn to Him and His word for the questions I didn’t even know I was asking at the time.
The biggest change in this regard happened in 2019. This is the year that I experienced the biggest changes in my faith and I believe God providentially placed several people in my life to help me through some of the most suffering I would have gone through until then. People that would help me grow in my relationship with Jesus, bringing me closer to Him and learning to trust in Him more and more.
One of my uncles was murdered in January of that year and while my family had experienced terrible losses and suffering before, it was nothing compared to the pain of that kind of sin committed against my loved ones. Experiencing the effects of that kind of sin and how painful that was opened my eyes to how grevious my own sins are against God. More than anything, it revealed to me how gracious our God is to forgive us of our sins at all.
We know that our Father brings us from death to life as Paul says in Ephesians 2:1-5, “And you were dead in your trespasses and sins in which you previously walked according to the ways of this world, according to the ruler of the power of the air, the spirit now working in the disobedient. We too all previously lived among them in our fleshly desires, carrying out the inclination of our flesh and thoughts, and we were by nature children under wrath as the others were also. But God, who is rich in mercy, because of his great love that he had for us, made us alive with Christ even though we were dead in trespasses. You are saved by grace!”
Since 2019, God has changed many of my fleshly desires. He has worked through people like my husband Aaron to expose my habitual sins, many that I had loved. But He has also made it possible for me to wrestle with those sins by changing my desires, to begin to hate them and to actively mortify them. By God’s grace, my desire for some of my habitual sins, one that I had clung to for over 15 years, were literally killed overnight.
Today, I am thrilled to follow Christ and in obedience to him, be baptized as a believer. As Romans 6:3-4 states, “Or are you unaware that all of us who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? Therefore, we were buried with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, so we too may walk in newness of life.” I am excited to participate in this symbol of my faith before you all today, walking in the newness of life that Christ gives us.