My life without Christ By Alex Torres
Once before I was lost indifferent to God and blind to the wonders that God had done through His Son. I was born in Monterrey, Nuevo León Mexico. In a family where my parents did not know the Lord. I am the older brother of my parents’ three children.
My parents, in their limited knowledge, instilled in me to study in the Catholic catechism at the age of 10. I was serving and I was also involved in the theater plays of the church. I had never read the Bible but my interest in biblical stories was very great.
When I was 13 years old, I started a life of disobedience to my parents and my authorities. I was nothing applied in the Elementary School and in Junior High School. I had three attempts to enter the High School and all three attempts I failed. My circle of friends was many of disorder, drugs and pleasures.
Everything was in decline when I was 15 years old and at the age of 18, I became rampant and became so inconsiderate with my family that it reached a point where I used cocaine and whole bottles of whiskey.
Until one day in high school playing American football, God made my life change. In my sin I did not understand that God was already working with me. Now I understand that God had mercy on me by using a young man from the team to begin explaining the 4 spiritual laws (a superficial gospel).
God intervenes in my life
The moment God began his good work in me, I remember that the young man named Gerardo Alvarado was so insistent, trying to invite me to his church. After three months I told him that I would attend, just so he would not be bothering me anymore.
The moment I went to his Church, God broke my heart because something was different from the Catholic Church. The music and the people who were in that place were different and everything changed completely. My understanding of a "Church" had a radical change. Now, what I am explaining is essentially what happened back then.
My convictions clung to what I had understood at the time (a Pentecostal, charismatic, Interdenominational Church). From my 18 years to my 20 years I was completely involved in that church. My life of sin had changed in part. I no longer had my previous friends and the practices I had before were no longer to my liking.
But God had not changed my heart yet. I was someone who had known about Christianity and knew how different it was from Catholicism, but I had not yet been converted by the glorious Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
New life in Christ
One day, at 20 years of age, someone showed me the “Shocking Youth Message” by Paul Washer on video. After serving the youth pastor and attending retreats and events of Christian artists, after all that it was that in that Paul Washer sermon, God confronted me and made me see that I was a false believer. I never had such a big conviction of sin and I never understood the holiness of God and what His Son did for me on the cross. He received the wrath of God in my place and gave me His salvation by grace and justification only by faith in Him.
After that day everything was different. God granted me repentance and faith in the Gospel. My longing to know more about the truth of the Gospel was insatiable and now everything I had learned in Christianity I saw that it was false and superficial in its great majority. My greatest desire was for me to have a local Church where they could preach Christ and the glory of God. In other words: humiliate the sinners, exalt the Savior and proclaim His more glory.
I tried to find local biblical Churches and found nothing. A few weeks later God saved a young brother (Mario Castro) who also through Paul Washer came to know the true Gospel. Together we left our churches. He was in a Methodist church and I was in an Interdenominational. God led us out of our churches, and we met for a few months in a small bookstore where we had studies of the Gospel and we tried to pray for biblical churches in Monterrey.
A longing to serve Him an
