“Six Months with Amazing Facts
Beat Thirty Years on My Own!”
Learning Bible truth was not a new idea for Tim Horton. For decades he had been reading God’s Word and believed the things plainly written inside, but none of the religious people in his life ever agreed with the information he found. He counts it a blessing and a miracle that one day he stumbled upon Amazing Facts and learned he wasn’t crazy for believing what he had found after all.
Tim’s paternal grandfather was Jewish, but due in part to family conflicts, Tim ended up attending a Christian church with his family. By age seven, however, Tim knew he’d had enough. “When we were in Sunday school, Jesus loved me. But when we went to the ‘big building’ for worship, suddenly I was a terrible sinner who would burn in hell forever. And I didn’t know why.” One day he told his father he was done with church. Tim’s father was a violent man, but Tim insisted that his religious training was over, regardless of the beatings he would have to face as a result. Sure enough, Tim didn’t seek God again for a decade.
A Perilous Path
Until he was 23, Tim was involved with “every kind of drug you can imagine,” he says. He was also married “several times,” explaining, “I never knew I was supposed to find a spouse who shared my beliefs.” And since he didn’t know what he believed, it seemed impossible.
As he got older, he worked for large corporations and earned decent money but was never fulfilled. He began drinking heavily around age 30, and this continued for 15 years. During this time, he would read his Bible, looking for meaning and truth, but he was constantly discouraged by the people in his life telling him that his understanding of the Scriptures was flawed. “I had no mentor,” Tim remembers, “and when I would speak to people about it, I was always ‘wrong.’ They told me the Bible says something other than what it plainly says, and no one told me otherwise.”
Tim experienced God for the first time in 1995 at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. “It was Bible based in many ways, just a little watered down. I found a different God than the one I knew as a kid,” he says. One day, as he was alone setting up the room for a meeting, he was aware that the room became supernaturally silent. Then he felt a warm grow inside his heart and spread to his body, like a physical manifestation of love. “It was joy,” he says. He was so overcome by this that he knelt down and wept, pouring his heart out to God and asking for deliverance. “The next day,” Tim recalls, “I had no desire to drink. And I’ve been sober ever since.”
The Next Step
Although freed from the chains of alcohol, Tim’s search for God wasn’t over. He continued to read the Bible and became even more convinced of its plainly stated teachings, even as others continued to try to “correct” him every time he shared what he was learning.
Despite the decades of discouragement, Tim didn’t give up on the Word. He knew he wasn’t hearing the truth, but he would watch YouTube and Christian channels on TV anyway because he figured, “A little truth is better than none.”
Then one night, in his daily search for a little truth, Tim found Pastor Doug. Unlike all the other nights, what he found was way more than a little truth—it was the culmination of nearly three decades of searching! Within just a few days, Tim felt moved to contact Amazing Facts with this remarkable testimony: “After listening to and watching your recordings and sermons for four hours, I was ready to break down and cry. All these years I felt I had nowhere to go and no one to be with that believed as I do. Once I watched you on YouTube, I figured out I wasn’t reading the Bible wrong. I just wasn’t buying in to untruth!”
In a short time, Tim came to understand that he had been right about his understandings of many important Bible truths, such as the validity of the Ten Commandments, the Trinity, God’s forgiveness of even the worst sins, and the true nature of repentance, speaking in tongues, death, and the Sabbath. Now he says, “I want to become part of this church body. After 61 years, I’ve found a home.” Tim plans to join Sacramento Central and wants to enroll in the AFCOE program so he can learn how to better share his faith with others. “I learned more in six months about truth, researching the Bible, using the Bible as the standard, not idolizing the pastor or messenger but the message, than in my whole life to that point,” he says with amazement.
For others who are on their own journey for Bible truth, he has this to share: “Test the waters before committing. Search different churches and what they teach before jumping into one. Find someone you can trust, like Pastor Doug.” Tim was amazed to find a man and a church that answered his questions and concerns about the Bible. “Amazing Facts also answered all my questions about how they use the donations they receive. Would you believe no one else ever did that?” Tim knows God led him to Amazing Facts. But he also knows that his journey with God has only just begun.