Hi, I'm Joni, and this is my testimony. Growing up in the church, I said yes in accepting Christ as my Savior when my dad asked me in elementary school, but there was no true repentance and knowledge of God. I did my devotion worksheets, memorized verses, served in ministries, and went on mission trips, but I was caught up in Christian culture.

I knew all the right answers and all the external things a Christian should do, but I did not have the right heart and intention in rendering my life as a living sacrifice to God. And since I grew up in the same church, I had the same core group of friends for over a decade, until my family moved and started attending a different church.

I started to not want to attend fellowship or Sunday service. It was here when I realized that I'd only gone to church because of friends and not because of a desire to worship God. However, in my senior year of high school, my family still commuted to my former church, and it was in this year that I got baptized, but I continued to view church and the Christian life as a Sunday activity.

Fast forward to my first year in UCI. I wanted to find a local church that taught the Bible and consisted of believers who worshipped and loved God, and as one that finds comfort in the people she knows and doesn't like meeting new people, it is truly God's grace that I first had the desire to find a new local church that loved God, his word, and his people, and it's his grace that I attended Berrien.

So in my first small group in sophomore year, we read Holiness of God, and it was here that I came to understand that I was at the hands of a wrathful and holy God who sees my sin as utterly repulsive. I did not deserve to be saved, as it is written, "There is none righteous, not even one," in Romans 3:10.

My sin is cosmic treason against him, and I deserve his wrath. And then I saw the beauty of the gospel. The almighty God sent his son, Jesus Christ, to save this world, making a way for sinners like myself to be reconciled to him. No amount of works or biblical knowledge could make me worthy or better.

Only faith in Christ's death and resurrection and turning away from my former life could allow me to have a relationship with God. From here, there was a difference in my heart because I sought to live for the Lord and die to myself. I began to do my spiritual disciplines in wanting to know him more.

I loved those around me and sought to love others because of God's love, as it says in 1 John 4:19, "We love because he first loved us." My heart's shift in not seeking validation from man, career, or success, but living for the Lord aligned with Paul's heart in Philippians 3, 8-9, when he says, "More than that, I count all things to be lost in view of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord, for whom I have suffered the loss of all things and count them as rubbish so that I may gain Christ." So I'm getting baptized today because I don't think I truly repented for my sins before I got baptized in high school.

My younger self did not deny herself, take up her cross, and follow him as Christ commands in Matthew 16-24. She did not see her depravity, her need for the Savior, nor submit to him. But this conclusion was three years in the making because I was scared to talk in front of people and prideful and not wanting to admit that I was peer-pressured into getting baptized and that I'm a newer Christian.

It was when I was asked recently if I was baptized after I became a Christian that God pressed into me what the meaning of baptism is and that I have been buried with him through baptism into death so that as Christ was raised from the dead through the glory of the Father, so we too might walk in newness of life, Romans 6-4.

Since my life hadn't reflected one who died to sin, it meant that my previous baptism was done in vain and avoiding believer's baptism would mean disobedience. So as I wrestled about this throughout these past months, God humbled me and reminded me of his grace in reconciling me to himself and that he is my king.

Getting baptized now doesn't nullify my justification three years ago, but I want to be baptized to be obedient to my heavenly Father, that I praise him for saving me, continually working in me, and that my testimony glorifies him. For he rescued us from the domain of darkness and transferred us to the kingdom of his beloved son, Colossians 1-13.

And it is here that I love and proclaim him as my Lord and Savior and that I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. Thank you. .