It is only when we understand that we deserve the wrath of God that the mercy of God really makes sense. The righteous wrath of God makes His mercy precious

"It is only when we understand that we deserve the wrath of God that the mercy of God really makes sense.  The righteous wrath of God makes His mercy precious."

Justin Peters 

- Personal Testimony 

Around 2007 I came across Ray Comfort’s ministry Way of the Master.  I am so thankful for his ministry and enthusiastically recommend it.  Comfort, as many of you know, emphasizes the preaching of the Law of God, the 10 Commandments, to bring about a knowledge and awareness of sin.  When we break the laws of God there is a penalty to be paid.  Unlike breaking laws here on earth, however, where the penalties are temporal, the penalty for breaking God’s laws is eternal because He is eternal.  It is only when we understand that we deserve the wrath of God that the mercy of God really makes sense.  The righteous wrath of God makes His mercy precious.  This made sense to me.  It clicked.  Up until then, my paradigm for presenting the Gospel was basically, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life.”  This is what I was raised hearing and heard it even in seminary.  So, the approach of Ray Comfort, which is the biblical approach, did make sense to me.  It even fit in nicely with the nature of my seminar and I began incorporating it into my preaching and teaching.  Comfort emphasizes the two components of salvation, namely, faith in Christ and repentance of sin.  This, however, is where I had a huge, huge lack of understanding; not with faith in Christ, but in repentance.

I knew that repentance meant to turn from sin.  However, I also knew that salvation was not of works.  I knew that there is nothing that we can do to ever possibly earn God’s favor or forgiveness (Eph. 2:8,9; Isaiah 64:6).  Compared to God’s holiness, our feeble “good works” are not only worthless before Him, but also an insult to Him.  We cannot do anything to earn our salvation. I understood that.  However, when we present the Gospel we tell people to do something, to repent.  Repentance, in part, means that we either stop doing what we are but should not be, or begin doing what we should be doing but have not been.  Repentance therefore, is, in fact, doing something.  It seemed to me to be an enormous contradiction.  I did not understand how we can, on the one hand, preach that one cannot do anything to earn his or her salvation and then, on the other hand, turn around and preach (in the very same message) that in order to be saved, one has to do something!  It was a massive, massive contradiction that I simply could not rectify.  For the life of me I could not figure it out.

So, here I was, Justin Peters – an evangelist with two earned seminary degrees, known by many around the world, and widely regarded to be the foremost authority on Word-Faith, one of the most egregious and widespread heresies in the world today…and I doubted my own salvation.  There was a huge component of the Gospel, repentance, that I did not understand.  I did not know what to do.  I did not know to whom I could go.  After all, I was “Justin Peters.”  I was supposed to have all the answers.  But I didn’t.  I was a white-washed tomb.

see full Testimony here