From Selling Heroin in the Car Park to Proclaiming Christ in the Community

From Selling Heroin in the Car Park to Proclaiming Christ in the Community

When I came to Niddrie over 4 years ago there was a young woman involved in selling Heroin outside our doors in the car park. Most of the members were oblivious but I spotted it after about 2.1 seconds! Her name was Charlene and she had two young children. Before long she had heard the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ and was interested in changing her life. At that time she was under huge pressure from her friends and family. Nearly everybody she knew was an addict of one form or another. It was her culture. It was her life. Slowly but surely she began to see the seriousness and hopelessness of her situation and began to understand the reality of the gospel, her sin predicament and the deep, abiding hope that could only be found in Jesus.

One day, after a particularly bad assault on her out side the church, I took her into the prayer room and read her the riot act. She was losing her life to this drug, she had no real friends and she had lost her children to the social services. She was a bum and her life was going down the toilet. Then, with the help of Sharon, our Women’s Worker, she began to get more serious. She attended an evangelistic Bible study and our weekly Recovery Course at the church and the Lord removed the scales from her eyes. She got ‘proper saved’ (as we say in these parts). It’s been a long, hard slog over the last 2 years but, last week, I had the privilege of baptising her. Over 100 people came to the service (some of her old drug acquaintances) and heard her give a clear testimony to the greatness of Jesus. Here is her story. We praise God for his grace and mercy!

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Please pray for us at NCC as we fight the long, hard, trench warfare. Every soul saved is a testimony to the power of the gospel. Every single one is a battle of enormous proportions in the face on an unflinching enemy who has run amok on our scheme. We trust in the Lord and His promise that, ‘greater is He that is in us (you) than he who is in the world.’