Testimony
I was born February 17, 1972 and named Douglas Skinner. My parents had both experienced true salvation some time before my arrival and recognized the value and necessity of making me wise unto the ways of salvation. Thus, I began attending church in Missionary Baptist Churches at the age of 2 weeks. My drug problem began there as I was drug to church from then on!! Truthfully, I enjoyed church and much of my childhood revolved around church and church people. I ignorantly thought that all children lived just like me. 
My Experience of Salvation
By Doug Skinner
June 26, 1989
The Greatest Day that I will ever live!
Sometime, I am guessing, around 9 or 10 years of age, I was convicted of my sins. I believe in a person knowing when they are accountable for their sins and I knew that I was, although I cannot pin a specific date as I only remember thinking, “You’re not lost” as far back as I can remember. The fact was that I was indeed lost. Days became weeks and months and years. I found myself in 1989 a 17 year old young man in a youth group at Calvary Missionary Baptist Church where I had been since I was ten. I was lost…still…and the ONLY one my age remaining in that condition. I was an obstinate, hard-hearted sinner. Yes, my grandfather was a deacon, my grandmothers Sunday school teachers, and my own father a pastor….but it didn’t seem to be helping me a bit! Weary of the struggle against sin without avail, I went once again to revival services. It was the end of the second week of an effort meeting at Calvary and I figured that I “had it made” in surviving another revival. During an invitation hymn one night, my Dad came back to me, put his arm around me and said, “Bud, don’t you think it’s time we took care of this?” Those were the words, but what got me was a crushing hammer of the Holy Spirit which shattered my heart into a million pieces. I WAS lost and I DID need to be saved. I had run from God too long. I ran to the altar and began to seek the Lord with many bitter tears of remorse and contrition. I didn’t feel any different afterwards and nobody tried to tell me that I did or that I was saved. My folks had always told me as a boy that “You’ll know’ when you are lost before God and you’ll also know when He saves your soul. God hadn’t said that to me yet! I went to the altar the next couple of nights, again without completing surrendering and finding peace. That following Monday, June 26, 1989, I went to my summer job a miserable wretch of a sinner. Somehow surviving the day, I went home, crawled into a sleeping bag in the basement and began to listen to a gospel cassette tape. My soul grew heavier than ever before and I began to pray. Outwardly, there was no noise. Inwardly, there was a great uproar as my soul cried out for mercy unto the Lord. After having exhausted myself and feeling very hopeless and dejected, I groaned within my spirit and I gave up…ready, I suppose, to go to Hell….as I had tried everything I could to be saved and I was still lost. The very split second that I quit trying to DO something and just “gave up”, God SAVED ME!!!! That heaviness and burden that I had carried for so long were GONE!!!!!!!!! In its place was a strangely and wonderfully new PEACE and QUIET. I knew that I was saved. Nobody told me, the Lord didn’t speak in an audible voice, and I didn’t suppose that to be the case…..I KNEW I WAS SAVED!!!!
That was about 6:00 p.m. on that Monday evening in 1989. That peace is still there and exactly the same as that moment it first entered. That is my surety of heaven and life eternal after this brief sojourn is ended. It is all I have…and all that I will ever need. I have felt the Lord in wonderful ways since that time, but that night was the first time that I felt the love of God as MY Savior and MY friend. I hope that He is not a generic God to you as you read these words. He must also be YOUR Savior and friend as well.
