SANDRA'S STORY: JESUS CHRIST HAS SET ME FREE
A Testimony on God's Grace

ever before in my life have I experienced such deep peace until I met Jesus Christ. Coming from a dysfunctional home, I scarcely knew the love that is necessary for a child to live and survive.

My religious upbringing was limited to enforced Sunday church-goings. Apart from that, my parents didn’t care about God, Jesus and the Bible. The Catholic Church portrayed to me the picture of an evil God who was busy all the time with punishing humans for their sins. In rebellion against this God, I began at the age of 7 to pray to the devil (as the good spirit) and contact the spirits of the dead on the graveyard. By this, I experienced early that there is an invisible world besides the visible and developed strongly occult abilities.

When I was 12, I attempted suicide for the first time. I was so desperate because of the violence at home that I didn’t want to live. I was 13 when my parents divorced and I had been sexually abused for 3 years. Rejection, orphanages, more violence and bulimia also marked my puberty. Because I felt unworthy of love and hated myself, I hung around in the streets quite often.

At 19, I joined the gothic scene and made a blood pact with the devil. Some of the scene and I founded a black magic cult and practiced regularly spiritism, seances and black masses.
At the same time I began to smoke, take drugs and developed anorexia. My self-confidence was absolutely zero, my thinking obsessed with death and destruction. The cult was the center of my life, my home, a sort of replacement for the family I never had. At mid 20, I starved myself down to 30kg of body weight because I was sick of my life. The satanic cult fell apart because most of my friends had died. This was a sign for me to orient myself into a new spiritual direction.
However, my mental health was already so severely damaged that I was admitted to a psychiatric facility. The doctors had massive difficulties finding the right diagnosis. They classified me as an extra-ordinarily severe case with symptoms that go through all mental illnesses. They said I would be incurable, just controllable with medication and psychotherapy for the rest of my life.

“Why do they not just let me die?”

“Why do my suicide attempts always fail?”

“Have I got a right to exist?”

“Does my life have any sense at all? Why, why, why…?”

The search for the meaning of life led me into esoterics and the Hare Krishna cult.

Christianity was an empty religion to me. I believed Satan to be the strongest force in the universe, and Jesus to be a weak, defeated looser.

It was at the age of 30 that I discovered God’s grace. When I was once again close to the border of death – this time with a high fever infection – a very bright light person came to visit me on my deathbed and touched me. The day after, I radically quite smoking and had no withdrawal symptoms since. The fever went down and the infection started to go. At that time I knew some Christians who shared the love of Jesus with me. It was hard to listen to them, but gradually I opened up and began to read the Bible. I wanted that love, but because I had the pact with Satan, could never imagine receiving Jesus in my life.

“I’m not worthy of love anyway,” was my thinking.

But I had no other choice than “trying Jesus out”, because I had already tried and gone through all other spiritualities. “OK, why not Jesus?” But out of this trying came more, namely a conversion and a full commitment to follow Jesus.

I confessed to God all my past sins and broke in Jesus’ name the pact with Satan and with all occult practices. When I did that, I sensed HIS love and forgiveness all over me. It was awesome and very powerful!

One year later, I was baptized biblically (Mark 16:16) in order to seal my new identity as a Christian. Since then I have experienced many good things: increasing positive self-worth, love and acceptance of myself and others, joy of living, continuous inner healing through the life force that is in God’s Word.

In a long phase of counseling and exorcism (deliverance ministry) many demons were cast out of me. During this process I lost my eating disorders and this incurable psychiatric illness. I know that the symptoms have come partly from soul damage, but to a greater part from the demons.

Jesus Christ has set me free!

- Sandra