There is no sin so great that God cannot redeem and restore us from it.
In a recent livestream, Isaiah Saldivar spoke with Richard Matthews and heard his powerful testimony of leaving the LGBTQ+ community and coming to Christ.
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Matthews shares how growing up, he didn’t have his father present in his life, which led him to feel abandoned and alone. Living in a single-parent household, he says he grew up fairly quickly, having to be independent as much as possible. He got into performing arts, which he says was one way of being able to mask and hide the deep-seated rejection lying within him.
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Eventually, pornography was the door that led Matthews down a deep, treacherous path.
“Pornography was really the door that was opened up for me,” Matthews says. “And the reason why I got into pornography [was] because those years of bullying I was called gay and it was like, ‘Well, what does this word “gay” mean?'”
Matthews also says that at the time, church had not been helpful for explaining to him what biblical sexuality looks like. He notes that the consequences and the seed of sin had not been explained in an impactful way.
“My pastor ended up having sexual misconduct and just allegations against young boys at my church, and the whole church imploded and fell,” he says. “We stopped going to church; my mom stopped going to church. It was a really big scar for us.”
After dealing for years with sexual immorality, anxiety, nightmares and depression, Matthews finally started going back to church, where he heard the message about the woman who dealt with the issue of blood and her desperation to be healed.
“I was desperate, like nothing was working,” he explains. “There’s this desperation, you’re hitting a wall, there’s this obstacle that you’re trying to get around that you have to go through, and the only way for you to go through it and face your obstacles and trials and traumas and triggers is through Jesus Christ.”
While Matthews still dealt with wanting to be both gay and Christian, he finally came to a place where he honestly told God he wanted to come to Him but was afraid to do so. He knew he needed transformation.
“I opened up my heart in repentance to the Lord to come and do the work and clean my temple,” Matthews says. “I heard the Lord say, ‘Just come to Me. We’ll worry about the other stuff later.’ And this is very vital because I didn’t come to Jesus to be straight. … I came to the Lord for Jesus. And in the process of coming of coming to the Lord, the Lord has sanctified and transformed me in ways that I couldn’t even imagine from the inside out.”
This testimony is a reminder that there is no one too far gone for the Lord, and that He alone is the portion we need to fill our hearts and minds.
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Abby Trivett is content development editor for Charisma Media.
Stephen Strang