Hello. I am Isaac Wood.

Hello. I am Isaac Wood.  I am the firstborn son of my pastor father, Randall Wood.  Approximately 15 years ago, my dad asked me to share my testimony on a Sunday evening in celebration of my 20th Spiritual Birthday.  This is that testimony as shared that evening.

 

My family & I moved to Dublin, Ohio and started attending a local Baptist Church in the middle of my 1st grade year … over 35 years ago!  As you may have gathered from my previous statement, 20 years before this testimony, at the age of 7, I accepted Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior with the guidance of my dad and our dear Pastor Darrel Gabbard.  In most testimonies, the moment of salvation is the punch line, the peak of the story, the summation of a lifelong search for Truth … well, my story is just getting started ... 

 

For the next 8 or 9 years I attended church twice on Sunday, once on Wednesday, and any other time that the doors were open.  I was a very active member in Sunday School, the youth group, mission trips and to our music minister’s pain and suffering … choir.  I wore Christian shirts to school, didn’t go to parties, and pretty much lived a perfect Pastor’s Kid's life.  One Sunday during my Freshman or Sophomore year in high school we were doing a study of other religions.  This week we were focused on the Mormon faith.  In the midst of studying Joseph Smith, magical rock glasses, and god’s human life on another world I thought to myself “These Mormons believe some pretty crazy stuff, how can they actually believe it?” … almost immediately the following thought popped into my head “Christians believe some pretty crazy stuff, why do I believe it?”

 

I can’t really put my finger on exactly what happened at that moment, but I really started to question what I believed … did I believe it because I believed it, or did I believe it because it is the only thing that had ever been taught to me?  For the next 8 or 9 years from that point I began a slow and steady decline from living my life for Jesus to living my life for myself and becoming a card carrying member of the World and its ways.  Not to go into any great detail on the next couple years of my life, I’ll sum up … I graduated high school, went off to college and after graduation from college I moved to Cleveland, Ohio.  I never completely turned my back on God, but I had Him firmly placed in my back pocket where I would use Him only when I needed to or when I felt bad.  I was fully entrenched in the ways of the World, living my life just like every other 20-something out there. 

 

Now we are starting to get to the meat and potatoes of my testimony.  I recently came across a song that amazingly captured this part of my life in verse.  The song is called Freedom by a Christian band called Run Kid Run.  I am going to plagiarize their work a little bit because their words capture completely what was/is going on in my life. 

 

The first verse goes like this:

All my chains I can't disengage
And I don't believe that I want to
One hand sings your praise
The other brings me shame
I have selfishness to blame
And I'm singing for freedom
I know I'm not the only one
Praying to the one
Who can bring me this freedom
I'm ready for change
 

At this point in my life I had started to re-realize that I needed God in my life.  I started trying to attend church on Sundays and started to pray to God on a semi-regular basis to help me get my life in order.  I found myself in a job that I thought was perfect for me, I had a girlfriend that I was sure I would marry and had friends galore.  I was healthy and active and living an all around great life … or so I thought.  See, I had realized that I needed, even wanted, God in my life.  But I was still holding on to all of the “chains” that I had gathered from the World … and at this point I wasn’t even convinced that I wanted to give them up.  I became more and more convinced that I needed God back in my life in a real way, but was extremely hesitant to actually hand over the pieces of my life that were in His way.  I was trying to find a way to merge God into my Worldly Life.  I became really touched by a Jars of Clay song (another Christian band) entitled Worlds Apart.  The chorus really grabbed at my soul and I started a practice of putting the song on, getting on my knees and praying it to God.  It goes like this:

​

I look beyond the empty cross
forgetting what my life has cost
wipe away the crimson stains
dull the nails that still remain
More and more I need you now,
I owe you more each passing hour
the battle between grace and pride
I gave up not so long ago
So steal my heart and take the pain
wash my feet and cleanse my pride
take the selfish, take the weak,
and all the things I cannot hide
take my beauty, take my tears
the sin-soaked heart and make it yours
take my world all apart
take it now, take it now
and serve the ones that I despise
speak the words I can't deny
watch the world I used to love
fall to dust and blow away
I look beyond the empty cross
forgetting what my life has cost
and wipe away the crimson stains
dull the nails that still remain
so steal my heart and take the pain
take the selfish, take the weak
and all the things I cannot hide
take my beauty, take my tears
take my world apart, take my world apart
I pray, I pray, I pray
take my world apart

 

Be careful what you ask God for.  I was innocently singing an emotional song to God, but he began to very seriously take my world apart.  The economy hit my job hard and I ended up taking a 50% pay cut, the girlfriend that I mentioned was gone, most of my friends moved away and it seemed that everything I tried to do would fail.  I couldn’t do anything right.  One day I was driving home from work, totally broken, angry and confused at why I couldn’t get anything to go right.  I was trying to live a better life, I was trying to do what God wanted … what was the problem?  Worlds Apart came on the radio, and as I had practiced for the last couple of years, I really focused on the chorus and prayed it to God … then it hit me … BAM … God had taken my world apart. 

 

Back to my original song. 2nd Verse:

Broken down I lay, I keep holding my chains
No longer bound, but here I stay
I scream "Father please!, I need rescuing
I need You and You alone"
Still You patiently await
Yet I won't just let go
 

There is a powerful image here.  When Pastor Darrel, my Dad and I prayed that prayer, I was freed from the chains of sin that bound me.  Yet here I was, sitting in a pile of chains, holding on to them for dear life.  The locks had been broken, I could get up and leave them where they lay, they had no power over me, but I refused to let them go.  I wanted to change, I wanted to live a life for God, but I wouldn’t just let go and let God have everything.  There were many days, many nights where I would literally SCREAM out to God.  I didn’t understand why all of this despair was being brought on me and I didn’t see any way out of it.  I finally hit the bottom, at a time where I was surrounded by debt, lonliness, despair and confusion … I felt like I deserved better, I was trying, I really was, but I couldn’t get a break.  My parents drove up one night and listened to my pity party.  Through great wisdom and sympathy, they pointed me to the book of Job and hinted that I really don’t have it that bad.  After they left I immediately read Job from cover to cover and the following passage changed my life:

Job 42: 1-6

Through complete coincidence I heard the story of Job preached at church the next 3 weeks and on the radio 4 or 5 separate times in the next month. (sarcasm)  It finally got to me that God is much bigger than I am.  I finally just turned to God and said, “here, take it all, You know what you are doing and I know nothing”. 

 

I ended up moving home to live with my parents.  I needed a solid foundation to build up my newfound focus of my life and needed out of the day to day trappings that I had surrounded myself with in Cleveland.  I heard Freedom a couple weeks later and this final verse was almost quoting what God had finally got through to me:

Verse 3:

I see You and You alone
Saying:  "Come follow me
Despair has come so you can see release.
The time has come separation lost the war to love
Take my hand, grace has found you where you once began
You're Alive! You're Alive! in the waking of new life
Take my hand, in the end there's only love
There's only love"

All the despair that I had gone through, that I had brought on myself, was worth it to experience the sweet, sweet release of God’s love.  The Peace that passes all understanding now flows through my veins, God is my Captain, Jesus is my King and I have nothing on this Earth to fear.  Grace found me where I once began, 20 years prior as a child coming to Him.  All that I have done, my years and years of sins have been washed away by Gods Grace and I go forward in life … chain free.  For over 10 years there had been a battle going on in my life, between my separation from God and God's Love.  Finally my separation was completely overcome by the undeniable Love of God.  My pile of chains that I once held onto has been replaced by a pile of Love.  I still struggle with those chains, I dabble from time to time with those chains, but they no longer have a place in my heart.  I succeed in God’s Love, I fail in God’s Love, I live in God’s Love. 

 

I really struggled to come up with a way to end this testimony.  The way I see it, this story has just begun and the ending is not here yet.  So I thought that I would leave you all with a challenge.  I know that on a Sunday Night, in a church, I am preaching to the proverbial choir … but I have never seen a choir, proverbial or not, that was not full of sinners saved by God’s grace.  Sinners that struggle day to day with chains of their own.  So my challenge to you is to give your life, all of it, every last corner of your heart over to God.  You may say “God, here is my 10% or even 20% tithe; God, here is my Sunday morning, Sunday night and Wednesday night, you can even have Tuesday nights once a month for GROW;  Lord, here is my 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours a day for a quiet time; but God, you can’t have my lust, you can’t have my pride, you can’t have my judgemental nature, you can’t have my hate, you can’t have my unforgiving heart, you can’t have my impatience.”  Jesus wants access to every room of your life, not because he is selfish and wants everything, but because he wants to bless every corner of your life with the richness of his Love.  What chains are you holding onto?  What parts of your life are you having trouble giving to God?  You have been set free from those chains!  Let go and experience the Love of God. 

 

Thank you for your time, I would like to end in a prayer

 

Lord,

 

Thank you for your Amazing Grace.  Lord, I am a sinner without any hope outside of you.  For some reason you Love me so much that you sent your only Son to die for me.  Thank you for not giving up on me when I had given up on You.  Thank you for overcoming the separation that I had inserted in my life and bringing me back to You.  Lord, I ask that you work in the lives of the people that hear my story, may they become aware of chains in their own lives that need to be let go of, that you may draw them into a life filled with your Love.  If anyone here is still bound by their chains, they haven’t turned to you and accepted Jesus as their Lord and Savior, releasing them from the chains that bind them,  I pray that they would seek out Your Salvation.  Thank you for all that you have and are still doing in my life. 

 

In Jesus’ Name - Amen.