Connecting the dots.

-Jennifer Toledo

 

How many people would say they are Christians and they love God but they don’t look any different than the world?  How many people in America just say a prayer and go to church every other Sunday but never actually experience freedom? 

 

This is how I lived my whole life until my sophomore year of college.  I knew the King, and he had saved me but I lived in such religion.  I was bound to my performance and how to earn God’s love.  I didn’t even know I was doing it, but this religious spirit had deceived me for such a long time.  I didn’t get the FACT and TRUTH that my identity in Christ was based on Him and not me, or that His love did not depend on me and what I did but on Him and what he did.

 

Then I got to college and a combination of this need to be good enough for God’s love and getting trapped in sin completely wrecked me.  I was tormented for months, believing lies about my identity and my victory.  I lived a defeated life, feeling like a failure because there was absolutely nothing I did that could get me out of my sin.

 

And one day in a prayer room, out of complete desperation I cried out to my King.  I needed him to save me but I couldn’t see how it was possible.  I’d prayed a million times before and nothing had changed…how would this time be any different?  But I persisted.  And what happened was something I didn’t realize until just yesterday. 

In that moment, sitting and crying by myself in a prayer room, not only did the King meet me but he brought to me his Kingdom.  And that was when transformation came. That is when my life was rescued not to be put back into slavery ever again but to live in the freedom and the fullness that is in God’s Kingdom.  My King adopted me and made me his daughter…no longer looking into his house wishing to be free but living inside with him.

 

 

Now I am taking this Kingdom in which I live and prosper in to the nations.  It is my home and the only source of love, joy and freedom.  And my King has opened his home to every person who desires come in and when we enter into his Kingdom and live in his Kingdom, we are transformed.  I desire to see the nations of the world transformed, encountering the Kingdom of God. And I have found that evangelism is really about living and bringing the Kingdom of God wherever I go. 

So Africa, that is my intention and my goal with the grace of God to bring to you freedom and peace and love and joy and all that there is in the Kingdom of my God, my King, my Dad.

 

 

“In the Kingdom of God, it is so simple. 

If you want to receive, you have to give. 

If you want to live, you have to die. 

If you want to be great, you have to be a servant. 

If you want to encounter God, you have to seek Him.

…seek first the Kingdom of God”