[0:00] Good evening and we're looking forward to hearing from Kuna Kenny tonight as he shares testimony and as he professes his faith in Christ. Kenny can I ask you to step up please and I'm going to ask you these questions and you can respond. Kenny do you believe in one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit and do you confess Jesus Christ as your Saviour and Lord? I do.
[0:27] Do you promise to join regularly with your fellow Christians in worship on the Lord's day? I do. Do you promise to be faithful in reading the Bible and in prayer? I do. Do you promise to give a fitting proportion of your time, talents and money for the church's work in the gospel in this world?
[0:47] I do. And do you promise, we always underline this next bit, do you promise depending on the grace of God to confess Christ, to serve him and to walk in his ways all the days of your life? I do.
[1:03] The Lord bless you and enable you faithfully to keep these promises and as you have made confession of your faith, I do now in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, the King and Head of the Church, admit you to the fellowship of his table. I welcome you into the fellowship of this congregation and offer you the right hand of fellowship. Neither of us are huggers. All hugs can happen afterwards. So it's great to see you come forward. It's great to hear of how God's been working in your life. And before you share your testimony, what you're going to do just now, I'm going to pray.
[1:42] Heavenly Father, we do thank you that you are at work in our lives and we thank you for your work in Kenny's life in particular. We thank you for opening his eyes as he opened your word. We thank you for unblocking his ears as he heard your voice. We thank you for touching his heart and for calling him to come close to you. We thank you for the Lord Jesus who has opened up the way. His life and death and resurrection is the means through which the way into your presence is open. And we thank you that that invitation, that call of the gospel is a call that Kenny has heard. And we pray that it would be a call that many more would be hearing, even through him tonight. As he's taken these promises, Lord, we pray that you would help him in living these out in his life. We are conscious, all of us who are yours, that we, as we have sang, are prone to wander. We are weak, we are frail. When we think we are standing strong, we are in danger because your word tells us that that's the time that we may fall.
[2:54] We are ever dependent on you. Apart from you, Lord Jesus, we can do nothing. So depending on your grace, we pray that you would help us to stay close to you. And Kenny especially, that he would walk close with you, that he would glorify you, and that he would know your hand upon him. We pray for Mags as well, and for Alistair. Bless them, we pray. We pray for Andrew and Seamus, perhaps watching at a distance. We pray that your hand would be upon them also, that you would bless them. And we ask now that as Kenny speaks, that you would give him that sense of your presence, that you would take away nerves, and that you, Lord Jesus, would be glorified through all that is shared. We pray these things in Jesus' name, and for his sake. Amen. Thanks, Kenny.
[3:43] Thank you, David. And thank you, David, for that message just now. And I would say I had a ready testimony. It was only 10 minutes long, but David wanted 20, but we settled on 15. So thank you so much for just allowing me to be able to tell you on how God has worked in my life. Our God is a God who works miracles, and he's still working miracles tonight and today, and I'm testimony to that.
[4:11] A year ago, if anybody had asked me, I would have told them that I didn't believe in God, and I didn't believe in the Bible. I had got that far away from God. And here I am tonight, professing my faith, and telling others of how he worked in my life. It was difficult for me to put this together in a way that would kind of make sense. I think that's because there isn't one single defining event in my life that would say that's where I was saved. My story as I give it tonight will be, it'll span around 30 odd years in terms of God working on me. But most of it that what I'm going to kind of concentrate on will be a period of nine months from around September last year. I'm not sure if I have the right timeline and everything, but I think as another might have said, I have all the right words, but not necessarily in the right order. It's been easy, it's been easy enough to write down the testimony, but not so easy to speak it, I think, as you'll hear a wee shake in my voice. But I would welcome your prayers, and I know that God has put me here tonight. Harris, of course, it's a small community, so some of you will know a bit of my history. Others will have no idea. I guess I'll be starting from the beginning and testify to God's grace and mercy in his dealings with me. And this is not my story, this is his story in me. As the song goes, I am not my own. I was born in 1972. I was brought up in Scalpey. I'm the younger of two brothers. My mother, she was a Christian. My father wasn't when I was growing up, although he did profess faith in latter life. Even though he wasn't a Christian, we did have family worship each day, especially when we were young. We went to church both ends on a Sunday, and of course Sunday school, and back then it was from three to four in the afternoon.
[6:13] I can't say that I enjoyed church, and I probably stopped around when I was 15 or 16 years of age. When I was 19, God did start working in my life. I have trouble here in being coherent in terms of this part of my testimony, and I'm not going to go into great detail of that period, but I do know that he started working in me because this was through a boy that I'd met in Stornoway.
[6:43] He was a young Christian. He was 18 and I was 19. He had just become a Christian, and through just speaking with him and him witnessing to me, things turned in my own life.
[6:56] And two years later, I professed faith, and this is when I was 21. That's back in 1993. Mags and I, we got together around this time as well, and she professed faith shortly after.
[7:11] We got married in 1997. So, for 22 years, I professed to be a Christian. And what did that look like?
[7:22] I think the earliest years, I'm not 100% sure about, but I know the latter years, I'd lived the life of an unbeliever. I might have been going to church, to prayer meetings, but there was nothing there. I've just taken vows to say that I would be praying and reading the Bible. That was non-existent for quite a few years.
[7:47] Unfortunately, my way of living also brought Mags down, and in 2015, we left the church that we had been attending. So, I would say that there wasn't anything big or dramatic that made us do this. It's just that we couldn't take it anymore.
[8:08] And another thing I would note is that it had nothing to do with the church we were in. It was all about us. As far as I was concerned, I wasn't saved, and my life did not reflect the profession I was making.
[8:21] I think now that if I had been left to die in that condition, I could well have been one of those that Jesus spoke of in Matthew 7, where he said, Not everyone who says to me, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but the one who does the will of the Father who is in heaven.
[8:41] So, that was around June in 2015, and we stopped attending church for a couple of months, and then later in 2015, we joined this congregation back when we were meeting in the community centre.
[8:58] Now, I'm not going to give Mags' testimony, but suffice to say that she was very quickly restored. But that was because she had something to be restored to. And since joining this congregation, David has been a constant witness to me.
[9:16] To either come back to Christ or to be saved for the first time, always encouraging me to read the Bible. This was like water of a duck's back for me, and as I mentioned in my introduction, by August last year, I had concluded in my heart that I did not believe in God, and I did not believe in the Bible.
[9:37] At the latter end of 2022, things started changing. There was nothing different outwardly to David asking me to read the Bible.
[9:49] But I was telling him I had nothing, I didn't want anything, I was happy with my life, and I was. I was content where I was. But he simply asked that I try reading it, even if I didn't want to.
[10:00] What was different is that I did read it, and this time when I read it, God was there. There was passages and verses that I read, that I must have read a thousand times, and this time, they had come alive.
[10:17] I was saying, you know, I've never read that. This bit, I've not read that either, but I had. I'd seen them. The Holy Spirit was working now. There was no bright lights, no writings on the wall.
[10:32] On the outside, there was no huge conversion experience, but he was changing me. There were sins in me that he had removed, and that's not to say that I'm not a sinner anymore, but there were certain ones that were removed.
[10:45] God was speaking to me in the Word, and I couldn't, at this point, get enough of the Bible, either reading it or it being preached. And I think this is a reminder to us all that we should point people to and encourage them to read the Bible.
[11:02] We might get resistance face to face, but we have no idea what's going to happen after the conversation has ended. The Word of God has incredible power.
[11:12] I'd say one of the first changes back then that I noticed was that, I think some of you will know that I'm going, I go to America in a couple of months to play a match of golf.
[11:25] And before this, I was looking at it as, right, what's the golf course look like? What's the hotel? I was on Google Maps, Street View, everything, trying to figure it out.
[11:36] But now all I was interested in, where's the churches? Where am I going to worship? I'm only there one Sunday, but that's what I was more interested in. This didn't lead me to a position where I knew I was saved.
[11:51] I spent quite a few months here just having no idea where I was. There was like a fog around me. And even though I was trying to do everything secretly, I was like, my Bible was on the phone on an app.
[12:05] I'd be listening to podcasts when I was out on the walk on my own. Everything was done in secret. But Mags knew. She had spotted this very early on.
[12:16] And when I asked her, how did you know? All she said was, you've changed. You've changed. I mean, I was looking at myself a bit like a, if you think, a thousand piece jigsaw, where there's 999 pieces make out the outside frame of it.
[12:35] And there's one central piece that fits in and completes the whole picture. That's what I was missing. And that central piece was Jesus. I was trying to understand what it meant to follow and believe Jesus.
[12:49] And I'm not sure who I heard speaking about this, but they spoke about the calling of Matthew, the tax collector. Matthew was sitting in the tax booth when Jesus passed by.
[13:04] Jesus said to him, follow me. Matthew, he got up, left all that he had, and followed him. This is what I was trying to get to. What does that actually mean?
[13:14] What do you mean by what would he have done when he got up and followed Jesus? Well, it meant that he went where Jesus was. He listened to him speak. He spoke to him, and he joined with his people.
[13:27] That's what I was wanting. At this point, this is what I was wanting. I was wanting to be where Jesus was. I wanted to hear his words. I wanted to speak to him. And the most obvious thing is that I wanted to be with his people.
[13:42] I knew at this point, I knew that we are presented in the Bible with a standard that we are to live by. We cannot meet that standard, but Jesus has already met it for us.
[13:55] He's lived the perfect life that we cannot live. He's died the death that we deserve. He rose and has ascended up to heaven. And there he intercedes for us.
[14:07] It's all about Jesus. I was looking for something emotional happening, that I would somehow feel like a Christian.
[14:17] I did not, and I do not. Another thing that changed in me, and it was quite an obvious change, was when I thought about heaven.
[14:33] Before this, and before last year, I would think of heaven, I would think, no, not for me. Worshipping Jesus for eternity, not for me. Now I imagine heaven as one of the most exciting prospects ever.
[14:51] We do enjoy worshipping Jesus today, but what will it be like when we worship him, when we no longer have sin? Today, everything is tainted with sin. Everything we do, from coming out to worship, to praying, to standing here, is full of sin.
[15:08] But when we go to be with him, we will be perfect, and we'll be perfect in every single way. All our anxieties will be gone. The eyes and the ears that are feeling will be restored.
[15:22] Those bones that are hurting will hurt no more. And I know that there is hurts in here that are hurting. They will hurt no more. While I recognised all these changes, I was still worried that I would be the same as I was last time.
[15:39] And God in his providence put a podcast before me for testimony by an American preacher. This man, he spoke of being saved at seven years of age.
[15:55] In his teens, he went to seminary and became a preacher for ten years. And he was preaching for ten years before he knew he had not been saved. And this is what he said.
[16:05] So here I was, an evangelist with two earned seminary degrees, known by many around the world, and I doubted my own salvation. There was a huge component of the gospel that I did not understand.
[16:21] I did not know what to do. I did not know to whom I could go. After all, I was supposed to have all the answers, but I didn't. I was a whitewashed tomb. He mentioned there about a huge component that was missing from his life, and this is, this component that was missing in his life was missing in mine, and that was repentance.
[16:41] He goes on to describe repentance like this. The classic definition of repentance is a change of mind. That is true. It does literally mean a change of mind, but it is more than that.
[16:55] When God grants repentance to us, our minds are changed, but everything about us is changed. Our hearts are changed. Our desires are changed. We begin to love what God loves and hate what God hates.
[17:09] We desire to grow in Christ, and when we sin, it grieves us. So for me, repentance came just, I mean, as I said at the beginning, the timeline I'm not sure about, but it's all around the same time, around November last year, and repentance came to me when I was listening on a sermon speaking about Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane.
[17:30] You know, this is just before he was arrested and being tried and crucified at the cross at Calvary. He knew that this was ahead of him and he prayed, My Father, if it is possible, may this cup be taken from me, yet not as I will, but as you will.
[17:49] The sermon went on to describe Christ looking at our sins in that cup. He was looking at the sins of mankind that he was to suffer and die for, and I was seeing my sins there, and this wasn't just sins from the recent past.
[18:07] This was long-forgotten ones. They were there vividly before me in the suffering of Christ. So my relationship with sin was changed by him, and I was changed by him.
[18:20] This is absolutely and undeniably a work of God. And I can only give praise to my Saviour, Jesus, for his long-suffering and patience with me.
[18:33] We easily cast people off who wrong us. We are slow to forgive people. How different we are to him. So then I was looking at in terms of professing faith again.
[18:47] Now this is something I did find very difficult. I wanted to do it earlier this year, but I was still concerned about my past sins, and I was also concerned about being a lukewarm Christian.
[19:00] I spent so long professing faith while doing things that were just plain wrong, while living the life of an unbeliever. One day I will know whether I was saved in 1991 or in 2022.
[19:15] Right now, I don't see salvation in my earlier days, but I don't know because God was working. What I do know is that between last March and today, God has taken all uncertainty away from me in regards to my faith and regards to my profession.
[19:33] Again, no big dramatic messages, just another miraculous, quiet change. So on Wednesday just past, as David mentioned, I was to meet with a session in preparation for tonight.
[19:46] and this was going to be done after the prayer meeting and before the prayer meeting, I was at home, I was reading the Bible and asking God to help me and this is the verse he put before me and it's found in 1 Timothy 6, verse 12.
[20:02] Fight the good fight of the faith. Take hold of the eternal life to which you are called and about which you made the good confession in the presence of many witnesses.
[20:12] It was one of those moments where I said to Max, come here, hear this, see what God's saying. He doesn't leave us to ourselves. When we need him, he's there. And when I met with the elders, I had a calm assurance of the profession I was making.
[20:31] Again, after the meeting, God again reassured me. I'd been listening to a podcast on the way up and when I got back to the car, when I put the car back on, the podcast started up again and the person was quoting the late R.C. Sproul when he was asked, What do you do with people who come to you when they are haunted by their past and it is stopping them moving forward?
[20:57] His reply was, This is what I tell them to do. If you still feel condemned, then pray to God again. But this time, don't ask him to forgive you for the sin that is haunting you.
[21:10] Rather, ask him to forgive you for insulting his integrity by refusing to accept his forgiveness that is found in Christ. When God promises to forgive his people after they repent, he is not playing games.
[21:26] If you want to get past your past, you have to release your past to God and Jesus. So as I come near the end here, I could say his story in me is that he started working in me when I was 19 years of age and not only did he not give up on me after years of disobedience, but when he granted me repentance, he released me from the guilt of my past.
[21:53] Just to finish, I'll give you a wee analogy and try to summarise it. Most of you, I think most of you are from Harris here and if you're not, up the Clisham Road there, there's a bunch of turbines.
[22:08] So, first time I went up to the turbines, I reached the path just underneath the first one and there you will see the turbine. You can look up and see the other ones and see the Clisham maybe.
[22:20] See down to the main road but that's about it, not much to speak of. The next time I went up, I went beyond that first turbine by only 50 metres and there the vista opens up.
[22:35] You can see everything clearly down the west coast, the beaches, out to Tarency and beyond to the Atlantic. A quite stunning view and this speaks to me of my life.
[22:47] At 19 years of age, God started working in me but I stopped at the first turbine. When I repented of my sins, everything opened up before me and I could see the wonder, the mercy and the love of God in Christ.
[23:04] If you do ever go up there, you will see what I mean and if God is working in your life, don't stop at the first turbine. Don't be like me. Today, if you hear his voice, do not harden your hearts.
[23:18] If you confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved. Amen. Thank you.
[23:31] Amen. Thank you, Kenny.