Watch: Renata’s testimony
Renata describes how the Holy Spirit led her to renounce her family gods and lies, and the freedom and joy she experienced afterward. Praise God!
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Video transcript
With each lie renounced and more truth filling my soul, spirit, and mind, I felt lighter and it appeared like I could see better than before!
My name is Renata and I was born in the U.S. I was taught and raised with Christian principles instilled by my Bible-believing Christian parents. This included attending church on a regular basis, and various children and youth programmes.
At the age of 15, I felt called to baptism to make a public confession of my faith. As part of my faith journey, I served at a local Chinese church on the worship team and a teacher in the children’s programmes. During my junior and senior year of college, God led me on a journey of understanding His truths and dispelling lies in my life, with the help of my college pastor and his wife.
It was the first time I truly understood that God loved me, in spite of my sins and failures.
Understanding and believing this truth gave me a new sense of freedom and security in Him.
Post-university years gave me a chance to seek God’s will and call on my life, especially in the area of vocation. He revealed through a variety of experiences that I would be a music teacher and go overseas to teach music and spend time witnessing to my unbelieving grandmother. This is where I came to reside and teach music. Recently, I was told that my job responsibilities were being cut but I would not be fired.
At that point, I felt that all the work I had put into helping students succeed and enjoy music was not being recognised.
In fact, I felt like I was being punished.
Around this time, I also noticed my soul and my spirit feeling heavy, weighed down, and tired. I had to really make an effort to smile at my students. At the same time, the Bible verse, Ephesians 4:31, was on my mind a lot. It says, “All bitterness, wrath, anger, clamour, and slander must be removed from you, along with all malice.” But nothing specific was revealed as I meditated on that Bible verse on my own.
This is when I decided to begin the process of seeking the Holy Spirit’s counsel together with some friends who are mature believers, since I could no longer bear with the heaviness on my own.
On the day of our prayer time, I was looking forward to breakthroughs and revelations, but felt super tired and bloated.
It seemed like no matter how many hours I slept, I never felt refreshed.
The Holy Spirit had shown my friends that I had carried a spirit of rejection from inter-generational traumas my family had experienced and this had opened doors to other spiritual strongholds through fear and anxiety. So we prayed to cast out any spirits behind fear, anxiety, manipulation, control, fear of not being good enough, rejection, lies in my mind in Jesus’ name.
At that point, a tingling sensation overcame my body as if a hole in my soul had opened up and I was being operated on.
God is faithful and He immediately started to work on me to set me free, as we prayed.
My friends led me to renounce the gods my family had worshipped on both my dad’s and mom’s side. This also included any activities done and prayers my relatives and family had made for me from previous generations. I was led to renounce all rituals my ancestors had done in honouring the dead, especially my uncle who had died before birth. I was also led to renounce participating in all the ungodly rituals of my grandmother’s Taoist funeral.
God calls me to love Him with my heart, my soul, and mind. Although my relatives were not believers, “… we have sinned against the LORD our God, we and our fathers, since our youth even to this day. And we have not obeyed the voice of the LORD our God.” (Jeremiah 3:25).
Any of my participation in rituals that glorifies and worships another god is sin and disobedience to our Holy God.
He called me to confess my sins that day because “… the Lord God, compassionate and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in faithfulness and truth; who keeps faithfulness for thousands, who forgives wrongdoing, violation of His law, and sin…” (Exodus 34:6-7). Praise God for His grace and forgiveness!
In one part of the session, my friends led me to renounce eating foods dedicated to idols, and at that point, I felt lighter. However, I still felt tingly, like someone whose heart was open for surgery but it was not complete.
Throughout the session, my friends were asking and teaching me to renounce lies and ask the Holy Spirit to fill me with His truth. I felt I needed to say the right words in the correct order.
I kept renouncing the spirit of perfectionism and fear, but I just kept feeling blocked. I then asked them for help.
They told me to simply come to Jesus and be honest with Him. As I did, the song came to mind, “Just as I am.” I felt the Lord calling me and asking me to come “just as I am, without one plea,” as the lyrics indicated. At that moment, I just sensed Him beckoning me to sit at His feet. As I just sat in God’s presence, having that song sung to me and singing it together with my friends, I could sense He had been waiting to pour and speak truth into my life.
Because of the spiritual oppression as well as the lies I had heard and believed in the past, God’s voice in my spirit had been muddled. Once I sensed that God was pleased with me, “just as I am,” I could continue the prayer session, knowing He would give me the words to renounce areas of sin and spiritual strongholds.
I felt more confident and lighter. My friends commented how much brighter I looked and how many more teeth I had in my smile.
From that point, whenever I was asked to renounce something, I had the confidence and power from Christ to be able to do so. I could also forgive those who had hurt me in the past and bless them. I renounced sickness and illness in Jesus’ name, and asked God to give me life. With each lie renounced and more truth filling my soul, spirit, and mind, I felt lighter.
At the end of this session, something also seemed to “pop” in my left eye and it appeared like I could see better than before!
Before my prayer session, I felt like I had to force a smile but now, I could just smile naturally, for no reason.
The security and love Christ provides continues to give me joy and make me feel lighter and cleaner and more energised.
I am more sensitive and aware to recognise lies, such as anxiety and fear, and to renounce them in the mighty name of Jesus, our Saviour. As I have testified, God speaks and reveals lies, sin, and strongholds in my life and in the lives of many others. Through the process of renouncing and casting down these untruths, you too can live and experience peace, love, and freedom and security only Jesus can give.