Faith Can Change Your Life

Faith Helps Those Looked Down Upon

In Ethiopia, two poorly dressed men came to a meeting for worship conducted by Jehovah's Witnesses.  At the end of the meeting a Witness introduced himself to them in a friendly manner.  The men asked for a handout.  The Witness gave them,  not money, but something better.  He encouraged them to develop faith in God, which is "of much greater value than gold."  (1 Peter 1:7)  One of them responded and began to study the Bible.   This changed his life.  As he grew in faith, he gave up smoking, heavy drinking, immorality and the use of  Khat (an addictive stimulant).  He learned how to support himself instead of begging and now lives a clean, productive life. 

In Italy a 47-year-old man had been sentenced to ten years in prison and was detained in a judicial psychiatric hospital.  One of Jehovah's Witnesses who is authorized to enter prison institutions to give spiritual assistance studied the Bible with him.  The man made rapid progress.  Faith changed his life so much that other prisoners now turned to him for counsel  on how to deal with their problems.  His Bible-based faith has won him respect,esteem and the trust of the prison authorities.                                 

In recent years, newspapers have reported on civil wars in Africa.  Particularly horrifying are accounts of young boys who are trained as soldiers.  These children are drugged, brutalized and forced to engage in dehumanizing behavior against their relatives in order to ensure that their sole loyalty is to the faction for which they are fighting.  Is a Bible-based faith strong enough to change the lives of such youngsters?  In at least two cases,it was.

In Liberia, Alex served as an altar boy in the Catholic Church.  But at the age of 13, he joined a warring faction and became a notorious child soldier.  To make himself brave in battle, he turned to witchcraft.  Alex saw many of his companions killed, but he survived.  In 1997 he met Jehovah's Witnesses and found that  they did not look down on him.  Rather, they helped him to learn what the Bible  says about violence.  Alex left the army.  As his faith began to grow, he followed the Bible command:  "Let him turn away from what is bad and do what is good; let him seek peace and pursue it." -1 Peter 3:11.

Meanwhile, a former child soldier named Samson came through the town where Alex now lived.  He had been a choirboy but in 1993 became a soldier and got involved in drug abuse, spiritism and immorality.  In 1997 he was demobilized. Samson was heading for Monrovia to join a special security force when a friend persuaded him to study the Bible with Jehovah's Witness, and as a result, he developed  a Bible-based faith.  This gave him the courage to abandon his warlike ways.  Both Alex and Samson now live peaceful and moral lives.  Could anything but Bible-based faith make changes in lives that had been so brutalized?

Next time: The Right Kind of Faith

Watchtower, 2000