NEXT

Casey Frazier Testimony from Sovereign Grace Ministries on Vimeo.

Download mp3 of Casey’s testimony HERE.

Hi, my name is Casey Frazier.

I grew up in Northern Virginia.  I am the youngest of eight children, raised in a Christian home by two loving parents.  I became a Christian at 8 years old, and like a lot of children that age, the reason was simple: I didn’t want to end up in hell. I think my faith was real, even at that young age, but I followed my selfish desires and made a practice of ignoring God. I believed in Him, but as funny as it sounds, I really didn’t trust that He would be enough to make me happy or satisfied.  I spent the next twenty years trying to make myself happy, always falling short.

Fast forward to this year:  I find myself in a new town, newly single, living alone for the first time, and without the “precious” lifelines of TV or the Internet.  Needless to say, I had a lot of extra time on my hands.  So on February 8th I started reading the Bible with the intent of completing it in a year’s time. My logic was simply that I had never tried it before, and I knew I might not have an opportunity like this again.

Why had I never done it before?  Selfishness.  And pride.  I was content in reading the Bible in bite size pieces that fit into my opinions.  I didn’t want a God that would challenge my own pursuit of happiness and confront the sin in my life. My focus in Bible reading was finding things that would justify me and provide me with a defensible position when I had dialogue with other believers.

So, back to the present:

The reading plan was simple:  Every day I would first pray, acknowledging God’s presence in the reading of His Word, and then read four chapters, beginning with the first chapters of Genesis, Ezra, Matthew and Acts. I promised myself that no matter how I felt, or what was happening on any given day, I would continue to read.  Baby steps.  The end result was delightful and a gift from God—I finished in three months and felt greatly blessed!

I want to share with you some of the blessings that came from that experience:

1. I found a genuine hunger for the Word:  When I made reading the priority, four chapters quickly became five, and then 10, and then 40.  I found that the more I read, the more I wanted to keep on reading.  Soon, in the back of my mind, wherever I was, I was thinking about when I would have another chance to read Scripture.
2. Sometimes you really have to drop the expectations, and just read:  The Bible is perfect, so your reading of it doesn’t have to be.  Sometimes you have to put away the commentary, the journal and the study guide and just read. I found that constant reading trumped focused reading because I had spent so much of my life using the Bible to justify myself, rather than humbling myself before God and his Word. Constant reading dislodged me from my old sinful patterns, took the focus off me, and put it back on God.
3. God’s Word doesn’t leave room for sin:  There is no greater form of accountability than God’s Word.  Soon, on a daily basis, long-term patterns of sin and struggle in my life were forced to compete with the clarity of God’s truth and promises. I found that the more I read, the more sin lost its luster.
4. Fellowship became deeper and more consistent:  I was amazed at how often a passage of Scripture I had never read would have instant application to a particular situation or relationship.  The more I applied God’s truths to the relationships in my life, the more I felt God pulling me into those relationships.  It seems a little counterintuitive that more time in solitude would build community, but spending time in God’s Word is a huge investment in the people in your life.
 

So I know what I’m telling you doesn’t seem spectacular, but it really is.  Those three months brought a huge amount of spiritual growth, and the growth was directly tied to God’s Word at work in my life.  So I want to encourage others, believers and non-believers alike, to read God’s Word and to read it often.  God’s Word is really God’s Word, and it has the power to change you.