The Church in Spokane
TestimoniesFilled and SatisfiedSome of my earliest memories as a child include longing to believe in God and knowing that I did not. My mother would take me to Sunday school occasionally, but I wanted to go all the time, and I was envious of other children whose families were able to do this. When I was in seventh grade, I asked a group of men at a young peoples’ fellowship, “But Who is He?” They all sat there silent. I was disappointed that no one could tell me. I continued to long to know Him. In high school I went to an occasional Young Life meeting. My sister had an experience of praying and asking Jesus to be her personal Savior in Young Life, and I could tell she was different after that. Something had happened, but I didn’t understand. In the summer of 1970, home on break from Washington State University, the Lord drew me into His personal presence, like a great magnet. I talked with Him. He knew all along of my longing and He then, in an instant, met it with Himself. I believed in God and I knew it! The believing One now resided within me. Interestingly though, no one told me what had happened. New desires rose up in me: I wanted to read the Bible, I wanted to meet with other Christians and I began to have a sense in my conscience regarding my life as never before. But as I went back to college that fall, I became distracted. After receiving a degree from WSU, I went on to nursing school at the University of Washington. As I began though, something was gnawing deep inside. It was unlike me not to finish what I had begun, but I felt I needed to quit and just work in downtown Seattle. The “magnet” was working. There, I got a job at a medical clinic, and there, I met the Lord again. This was in 1974. He arranged for me to work next to a believer who began to tell me about this One. She was so satisfied with Him. She glowed like no one I had ever known, especially when she shared with me about the Bible and her experience of this Person. I could tell she loved Him. She asked me to a dinner with believers she was meeting with in the local church in Seattle. We sang a song that night that said, “Do you know what you were made for, do you ever wonder why?…you were made with something deep within, a vessel to contain just Him.” It clicked! This answered the question of the universe in me, “Why am I alive?” I had been filling myself with things other than Him. I was made only to be filled with Him. I returned to nursing school and became an RN, but my real goal in life changed. My goal was becoming God’s goal. I wanted to be filled with Him. I must add that since I was very young, I was bothered about the differences I saw among races and mankind in general. I sought answers throughout my life for this seemingly unsolvable problem of division. As I began to meet with the church in Seattle and subsequently with the church in Bellevue, I began to see in the Bible, and through the ministry of Watchman Nee and Witness Lee, that God is one and when He fills mankind with Himself, they become one. The believers in Christ are one. Believing in Christ is the solution to all man’s needs, including oneness. This became my experience. As we take Christ in, the oneness prevails and “He Himself is our peace.” The Lord on the cross produced this precious oneness, and I daily experience it in the local church today. The Lord is continuing to meet all my needs and my longing to know Him personally and intimately; but greater than my need and purpose for myself is His need and purpose for Himself. God has a need to fill man to gain His masterpiece, a corporate expression in the church as the reality of the Body of Christ, His very Bride, which will be the New Jerusalem, His eternal dwelling place, one with man. This is for His satisfaction. Today, my husband and I and our three children are meeting in the church in Spokane, and our testimony is that Christ and the local church only get richer and more satisfying as He continues to be the most wonderful magnet in the universe drawing us away from all else but Himself (reference from a footnote by Witness Lee in the Recovery Version of the Bible, Hebrews 12:2, footnote 2). We are filled and satisfied. Jacquie Kilgren |