Steve and Jenny have been the pastors of the Victory Fellowship in New Zealand since the end of 1995.
And has been teaching the love of God and the Salvation God Has for every man women and child through Jesus Christ.
This is Steve and Jenny's testimony to show the love and grace God has for everyone.
Our Testimony.
Jen and I never had any doubts about the existence of God. In fact both of us had been to Sunday School during childhood, and we both believed in Jesus. I had also suffered four years of compulsory church at Boarding School. Besides which, in the days when Jen & I were first together the guy who had originally turned me on to dope had got saved and he and a couple of mates were going hard to get us saved (I think mostly for his own conscience sake.) So our experience with ‘orthodox christianity’ turned us off big time! To us they came across as legalistic, patronising and paranoid. We failed to see anything about their lives that we wanted.
Most people are seeking something real – an encounter with God, and unfortunately very often the local church is the last place to find it. Check it out – you’ll find that a large number of the people involved in cults came out of churches. They didn’t find what they were looking for.
I had studied Buddhism before I met Jen. Been into Ananda Marga (an extreme yoga cult) and all kinds of other so-called ‘paths to enlightenment.’ Then together we studied the teachings of Guru’s and learned transcendental meditation. We still didn’t find what we were seeking.
Then one day a friend who had been into all that stuff at the same time said to me: "Those gurus and teachers are all men. When they die their bodies will decay. But there was only one man who left an empty tomb, and His name is Jesus." A simple observation, made almost off-handedly, certainly without any insistence or pressure, changed the course of our lives.
So we called Jesus ‘Lord’ but our lives didn’t change a great deal until some years later. We had tried reading the bible. It seemed to me to be a dry law book. (John 3:3 "Except a man be born again he cannot see (know, experience, or be aquainted with) the kingdom of God." -our ‘spiritual eyes’ had to be opened.) Life never made much sense to us. The whole world seemed to be in a rush to get to nowhere, and trampling one another in the process, and we weren’t interested in joining the free-for-all. We were hippies, living in a farmhouse without power, fairly self-sufficient and growing a bit of weed on the side to bring in a few dollars to put new tires on the car or whatever. One day when we were tired of eating the fruit of our own way, we decided the only hope was to find out Gods way, so we put on our Sunday best (home made dungarees and gumboots) and went to church. It never occurred to us there was any difference between this church or that one down the road, so we went into the first one we came to. The people there were good honest folks, and welcomed us, but man they were crusty! But the Pastor and his wife – John & Robyn Twemlow - were a precious couple that loved us and accepted us unconditionally. Never made an issue of the fact that we weren’t married. (We had two children by then.) Or even that we smoked dope. His attitude was: "I think you’re crazy, but that’s between you and God."
( The Word tells us clearly that it’s the Holy Spirit’s job to convict of sin (John 16:8), not man’s, and we are warned not to judge one another.) I thank God for John & Robyn, because after our many encounters with religion, at the first sign of pressure we probably would have bolted.
After a time we got a piece of land up North, at the head of a valley next to the native bush, with a stream running through it. We seriously prayed about it and submitted to God, not wanting to ‘do our own thing’ even though the land was our heart’s desire. We were determined that God would use it for His Glory. We moved on and built a cabin while Jen was about eight months pregnant. No power nor even hot water initially.
The babe was born in due course, but I didn’t have much time for him, being so busy keeping bees and working odd gardening jobs to bring in some money, and doing the countless other things involved in Homesteading.
And Jen was busy washing our clothes by hand in the stream, looking after three children etc.
Then the babe died when he was about 9 weeks old. Officially it was put down to cot death, but we knew he wasn’t well and had taken him to a Doctor a few days earlier. He basically told us we were being paranoid. He has since been struck off for malpractice.
Back then we held the same erroneous belief as most Christians – that everything that happened was God’s will for us (which has more in common with Buddhist doctrines than it has with the Word of God.) We didn’t understand it, but we accepted it as somehow being part of God’s plan, and soldiered on. Good things were happening in our community, and a small scale revival was taking place. In our valley many of our neighbours were turning to Jesus a family at a time. And the same thing was happening in the next valley over. But at home it seemed I had the King Midas touch in reverse. Nothing I set my hand to turned to gold, it turned to something else! The car engine packed up so we got a reconditioned one and also packed up. I got a Gravelly Mower for the Orchard, and got that reconditioned, but it wouldn’t work for me. Was given a petrol engine to run a washing machine and a 12 volt alternator for lighting etc., got that reconditioned also, yet it wouldn’t run for me. Then I put my back out and endured torment – I couldn’t lie down for more than 3 or 4 hours because my back muscles would cramp up, ( it felt like an iron band round my chest, constricting my breathing and hurting like crazy) so I would have to get up in the middle of the night and light the wood stove and sit with my back against it until the cramping stopped. I couldn’t tend my beehives or do much of anything on the land. And during all this we were still faithfully trying to get to church every Sunday. I remember a typical Sunday. The car got stuck in a muddy patch on our driveway. So I went to get the truck (old faithful) to tow it out, and the truck wouldn’t start (unheard of!) So I thought to jump on the motorbike to go and get my neighbour with his tractor, and the motorbike wouldn’t go!
We had another babe – a girl this time. When she was just a few days old she got the flu really bad, and was so stuffed up she stopped breathing on us several times. You can imagine the torments we went through, after having already lost a babe. The Doctors weren’t much help. So we went to the only other person who we thought could help us. One night about midnight when the babe was at her worst and we feared for her life we took her to the man who called himself our Pastor. I will never forget him standing there in his pyjama’s, holding our precious babe in his arms. With a bleak look in his eyes he said to us: "What did you bring her to me for – I’m just an old man."
Luckily she recovered okay. Our older daughter (5yrs) developed an ear infection that attacked the bone behind the ear and nearly took her out. Only massive doses of antibiotics pulled her through, but it took a long time to get her back to full health.
Then things started to change for the better. I met a guy who believed in healing, and he asked me if he could pray for me, and God would heal my back. He laid hands on me and I was delivered from that bondage!
We went to see an evangelist who was operating in the gifts of the spirit – powerful words of knowledge and miracles of healings. He was about the middle of the Hall when he said: "There’s someone up the front with a back problem. Your vertebrae are frozen together and you cannot bend over. A woman stood up and said it was her. And from where he was standing, some 20 metres away, he prayed for her in Jesus Name, and then said to the woman: "Bend over and touch your toes. You are healed" And she was! And I was thinking: "This is it. This is what has been missing. The power of God. This is real.! (Friends, where we live today should be no different from the book of Acts. Because that is a record of the Acts of the Holy Spirit, and He’s still in the same business!) And then I had a divine appointment with some true bible believers so that for the first time in four years of being a Christian and being involved in Church, God’s word began to be opened out to us in its simplicity and its power.. By that stage I had boxes and boxes of Christian books about everything and nothing that people had given to us. But I had found they all were self contradicting and charged with traditional thinking and unbelief, so I dumped them all. After being halfway through the umpteenth book and realising that it had as much error in it as it did truths, I decided that the next book I read apart from the Bible (or more accurately, with the bible) was going to have to be by someone who I could trust implicitly. Who would take me where I wanted to go. Yes I know they say to eat the hay and spit out the sticks, but any farmer will tell you those sticks can choke a cow to death! I seem to recall that at the Auckland Zoo a hippopotamus choked to death on a topsy stick!
We had believed that the death of our child was God’s will for us. And we are forever grateful to Doug for straightening out our thinking. He showed us John 10:10 where Jesus said: "The thief does not come except to steal, and to kill, and to destroy. I have come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly." A Loving God didn’t send Jesus for any other reason than to bring us life in all its fullness. Satan is the one who is in the killing business. And while our babe Sol is in heaven, and we will be re-united, we were robbed! No-one ever taught me about resisting the devil. As foolish as a soldier going to war without weapons or training is the believer who thinks to make a difference without knowing how to take authority over the devil, and enforce his defeat. "Submit to God, resist the devil, and he will flee from you!" (James 4:7)
And through ignorance I had allowed satan to clean me out – health, finances, peace of mind – even children.
Hosea 4:6 – "My people perish through a lack of knowledge."
Doug introduced us to an anointed teacher, Pastor Colin Miller, who would ride 40 – 50 kilometres on a farmbike to sit around a kerosene lantern and teach - sometimes two families but mostly only Jen and myself - the Word of God. And he would ride home at 1 am with frost on the bike and on the ground!
We learnt that it is not by observing a bunch of rules and regulations that we are made righteous. That God made us righteous through the Blood of His Son, so that we could come into His presence with no condemnation. (2Corinthians 5:21) "For by Grace you have been save through faith, and that not of yourselves; it is the gift of God, not of works, lest any man should boast. We learned that when Jesus paid for our sins, He also paid a price for our healing with His Stripes (1Peter 2:24). And not only had He redeemed me from the curse that was on the earth through Adam’s transgression, He made me a spiritual child of Abraham and inheritor of all Abraham’s blessings. (Galatians 3:13,29) We learned that He has delivered us from the power of satan and given me authority over him in Jesus Name! (Colossians 1:12-14, Luke 10:19)
We came to know the truth, and the truth set us free! (John 8:32) "Woe unto you scribes and pharisees, for you lock up the kingdom of heaven against men. For you neither enter in yourselves, neither do you allow others to enter in." (Matthew 23:13) The church is still trying to shake off middle age theology. We were fed doctrines of man that come from religious tradition and held no relation to the word of God, and in fact made the word of God to no effect. (Matthew 15:6) Beliefs that – rather than enabling us to live in Victory, caused us to co-operate with our own defeat.
But more than anything else we learned, we came to know the Father. We had been led to believe that Jesus was protecting us from a distant and avenging God, who had a problem with us because of the sin in our life.. But the truth is that God sent His son to reconcile us to Himself, that He might have His family back! Jesus said: "I am the way the truth and the life. No man comes to the Father but by me." (John 14:6) Jesus is the way, not the destination.
