My Testimony

Welcome to Gateway Church's podcast.

Wherever you're tuning in from, we hope you're encouraged by today's message.

Gateway Church.

Thank you so much.

You made me seated.

This is such a special day for me because it's the first, not the first time I'm here.

I've been here so many times, but it's the first time I'm not here as a guest speaker, but as part of this family for this season.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for all the love that you poured into me and Maria.

And we just feel so welcome.

Thank you to all in this room.

Thank you to everyone in the campuses.

I started to start to visit the campuses and get to know you all.

And I can't wait for to just spend time together and to walk with you in and through this special season.

Praise God.

Praise God.

Oh man, I'm excited.

I'm excited.

I can't wait to meet you, to greet you, and to get to know as many of you as I possibly can.

And also, I would like for you to get to know me a bit as well.

Because uh, if I'm only coming in and out, then you can know me as that Swedish pastor with a funny accent and a weird name that nobody can pronounce over here.

That's okay, but if I'm gonna be your pastor for this season, I want to get I want you to get to know me a little better.

So I hope it's okay, but I want to do something different today.

Um, I'm not primarily gonna preach a message or lead you in a Bible study.

I'll get back to that next week and okay.

But but for today, I just want to share my story, my testimony with you, if that's okay.

I want to tell you the story about how Jesus invaded my life.

And I also want to tell you the story about what happened in our church, Word of Life, 10 years ago, that actually makes me relate to you guys and what you've been through very well, but also how to be able to look into your eyes and tell you that God took that valley of tears that He had us walk through and it used it to launch the very next chapter of our church.

And he brought us out not only barely alive, he brought us out healthier, he brought us out stronger, and he brought us out humbler.

And I've asked my my my Dana Stone, who helps me out so much at the offices right now.

I said, Dana, could you actually say humbler?

Is it's is that even a word?

And she looked at me and she said, in Texas it could be.

So humbler, y'all.

Let's get a bit humbler, y'all.

That's great, right?

Um, and also throughout my story, I want to include some elements that I found to be so important as we walk through the valley seasons of our lives.

So let me take you back to Sweden with me a little while.

I was born in Sweden, but not only in Sweden in general, but in the Lutheran Church of Sweden.

That's actually a picture of the church that was my home church growing up.

Now, Sweden has a state church, and I understand that's a confusing concept for many over here because you guys don't.

And when you come to visit Sweden, I'm not saying if, I'm saying when, you will find it hard to believe that Sweden is the second most secularized nation in the world because there are churches everywhere.

But you see, these churches are from the 12th century, the 13th century, the 15th century, and now most of them serve as museums of a time gone by when Sweden was a nation that worshipped the Lord.

Nowadays, unfortunately, the Lutheran church has degenerated from a church until more of a cultural institution.

It's politically run.

Many priests do not even believe in God.

Yeah, exactly.

That's the reaction I hope for.

You might find that to be very weird because it is.

But this is the kind of post-Christian church environment that I was brought up in.

My father was a priest, my my mother was involved in the Lutheran church.

I had four uncles priests.

I have both my grandfathers were priests.

This is as Lutheran as they come.

And I was raised in this church, and my parents brought me to Mass every Sunday, and I did the liturgy thing, and I got used to the pipe organ, and I was singing hymns without understanding the lyrics.

And my mom and dad actually did the best they could from their own perspective because they struggled with their faith as well.

They had no assurance of salvation, they they didn't know God personally, and they didn't really know the way to do that.

So that also put a strain on their marriage.

They were struggling together, and and as I hit the teenage years, I just had enough of it.

I rebelled at 14.

I ran away from God as quickly as I could.

I declared I don't believe in God anymore, and I don't want to take any more part in this Christian charade.

So our little three-unit family started moving in three different directions and started to be torn apart.

And I did my best to run as far away from God as I possibly can for two years.

But then when I was 16, a drinking buddy of mine came up to me and he said, Um, Yoakim, there's a big New Year's party in a city called Uppsala, about three hours south.

And uh there's gonna be booze and there's gonna be girls.

Let's go.

And I said, Sure, I'm up.

Three days of partying, sounds good to me.

So we got on the train and we went down to to uh Uppsala for this party.

Uh, but when we arrived at the door of this party and stepped inside, what I saw was about a hundred teenagers worshipping Jesus.

And I thought, what in the world just happened?

And what I didn't know is that my drinking buddy, who was also a grandchild of God, who had like tried to run away from God and the church environment just like I did, the last few weeks he had had conviction of sins.

And he really wanted to get back with God somehow, but he didn't know how and he didn't know where God was.

But then he heard about a Christian youth conference.

You have to understand this was an unknown concept for me.

I never heard about a youth conference because in my church there was not a young person, and here I am in this room, and he wanted to come and check out this Christian youth conference, but he didn't want to go alone, so he lied to me in Jesus' name and had me show up thinking it was a party, and I turned to him and said, We need to have a talk about the definition of a party.

And and I looked at what's going on, and that nothing in it correlated to my brain, to my intellect.

These young people were lifting their hands.

I've never seen that, I've never seen anyone do that.

They were singing worship songs.

I never heard a worship song in my life.

Nothing that was going on in this room made any sense to my mind, and even though my first impression was to punch my friend in the face, and also that nothing in this room related to me in any way, I was overcome and overwhelmed by a presence in this room, and my heart immediately knew Jesus Christ is here, and I didn't know how to process that, I didn't know what to do with that information.

This guy stepped up after worship was done and he gave a 15-minute message from the Bible.

It was the first time I heard a Christian message that made sense.

He talked about Jesus and becoming a Christian and becoming a follower of Jesus and leaving your old life behind and accept the forgiveness of sins.

And halfway through his message, I was already on it.

I just everything in my heart just said, How do I get on board?

What do I do?

How do I embrace this?

How do I make this my own?

Because I had no idea, I had no clue.

And then he came to the end, he said, if you want to accept Christ, you can come to the front.

I was already there, crying my heart out like a baby, accepting Jesus Christ as my Lord and being filled with the power of the Holy Spirit.

And now I realize and I fully respect that we all have a different path in coming to know Jesus.

For a lot of people, this is a process, but for me, let me tell you, Gateway, it was a one-night revolution.

It was God grabbing me by the ankles, holding me upside down, and shaking me lovingly but violently, until all of my sin and rebellion and darkness just fell out.

And all that was left was a 16-year-old boy passionately in love with Jesus.

And actually gateway.

The Lord has led me back to that point so many times.

And I realize, especially when we're going through a season of shadows, that's exactly where we need to end up.

Simplify.

Simplify.

Come back to the simplicity of walking with Jesus and loving Jesus.

In our season of valleys, we don't need to spend our time dissecting weird prophecies about current world events.

We don't need to spend our time diving into rabbit holes about Christian conspiracy theories.

The only thing we need to do is to fall in love with Jesus again and again and again and again.

But then he said, But you have forgotten your first love.

And then it says in Revelation chapter 2 and verse 4, repent and do the things you did at first.

Revelation 2 · chapter mention

Return to that innocent love, return to the state of your life because before it got all complicated, and just fall in love with Jesus again.

So we stayed for the three-day conference.

We went to every section, we took notes.

Half of them I didn't even understand, but I took notes anyway.

I spent all the money I had buying every single Christian book on the book table.

They were all in English, all from the US, because there were no books in Swedish about God at the time.

Thank you so much, by the way, United States of America, for helping out when I was 16 years old.

And then after three days, we got on a train and we went back to our little town where I grew up.

And uh, I have to remind you, Gateway, this was way before cell phones.

I hadn't communicated to my father or mother throughout these three days.

They had no idea what had happened to me.

But my father came to pick me up at the train station, and he had his long black priest robe on, and he expected young Joachim to probably stumble out of the train red-eyed and hung over.

And here I come out of the train and I go, Dad, praise the name of Jesus forever and ever.

And I remember my dad go, and then he ran up to me, looking around and said, Who saw that?

And he grabbed hold of me, got me to the car, opened the backseat door of the car, and did like a U.S.

cop movie thing, hand on the head, pushed me into the backseat.

We went back to the vicarage, he sat me down by the kitchen table and he sat down next to me.

He said, Joachim, what has happened to you?

And I told him about Jesus, and I told him about the power of the Holy Spirit, and I told him how I knew that I knew that I knew that by faith in Christ I am a son of God, and my sins are forgiven, and everything has been made new.

And as I shared, he started started to tear up.

Now he had tears running down his face, and he asked me, Joachim, would you pray for me?

And I got to pray for my dad, and he was filled with the spirit, and I got to pray for my mom, and the Holy Spirit just stepped straight into our family and he healed us.

He healed us.

And even though I've seen so many miracles after that gateway, this miracle is the most beautiful I've ever seen.

Because when the spirit comes, we are united.

You know, the word the devil, diabolos in Greek means divider, one who tears apart.

But the Holy Spirit is its opposite.

He's a uniter, a unifier.

Why?

Because the Spirit always exalts Jesus, and Jesus prayed that we will all be one.

Gateway, in this special season, make sure you're on the right team.

Make sure that what you do and what you say is serving the uniter and not the divider.

Amen.

Let me tell you, if Gateway was a soccer team, and that's a beautiful thought for a European like myself, if Gateway was a soccer team, let me tell you, we should be called Gateway United.

Amen.

So I went back to my high school, and now I'm sharing the gospel of Jesus with every one of my friends.

And within one year, 45 uh young people had accepted Christ as their savior.

This is a small community.

This youth movement brought shock waves all around the community.

And my biggest challenge now was that I didn't have a church to take them to.

I couldn't take them to the Lutheran church, that would be spiritual suicide.

So, so since I didn't have a church, I started one at the age of 17.

If there was any teenagers in the room, not recommended.

Okay, not recommended at all, but I had no option.

So I started a church with my mom and dad.

And we started growing a beautiful work of God.

We had a genuine wind of revival in our back, and we served the Lord, building this church for the upcoming 10 years.

These 10 years were also the time where I met my amazing wife Maria.

Beautiful, would you stand to greet the church?

We've now been married for 37 years.

And also we had our two baby daughters during these 10 years.

I got a present-day picture of my family right up there on the screens.

That's uh us and our two daughters, Evelina and Julia, our son-in-law Toby, and our two grandsons, Zion 8, and Samson 6.

So after 10 years of serving, and also we connected our church with that small church plant that had arranged that youth conference where I encountered Jesus.

A little tiny church plant called Word of Life in Sweden.

And we became sister churches.

After 10 years of serve serving, uh, Word of Life asked me and my family to move down to Uppsala and come on the team as associate pastor.

And we spent another 10 plus years doing that, and we loved every second of it.

Um, that brings us to 2013, 11 years ago.

Uh, the founding pastor of Word of Life was about 15 years older than me.

Uh, he asked me if I would take the church and become the new senior pastor at Word of Life.

We prayed about it, we felt it was the Lord, so uh we took the church.

And initially we had an amazing time.

Especially we saw the next gen just flood into the church by the hundreds.

We grew bigger than we've ever been before.

And the deal was that me and the founding pastor would preach alongside one another like every other weekend.

But then, about six months later, on a Sunday, the founding pastor was speaking, and all of a sudden, as a shock for the church, he announces that he will convert to Catholicism.

He had uh realized, he said, that the Catholic Church is really the church that Jesus founded, and that our church, word of life, was not really a church in the full sense of the word.

He said he would start praying to Mary and to the saints, and basically recanted the evangelical foundation of his teaching up until now.

And our church was thrown into a complete shock.

Because you have to understand, this is the man who had defined our whole existence, our spirituality, our theology by his books and his teaching.

So this was more than just an individual changing his theological mind.

This became a crisis of identity for us.

Without him, and with him now recanting his former teaching, where does that leave us?

And the whole church just came into this whirlwind of bewilderment and surprise and confusion and grief and anger and all kinds of emotions.

To top that off, just a some time later, it was revealed that the old board of our church had secretly granted themselves retirement deals that were out of this world that basically stated that our church needed to pay them full salary for the rest of their lives, even though they now were leaving our church.

Secular media got hold of this and they had a field day.

Because up until now we always kept a high level of integrity because we realized the secularized media would love to drag us through the mud, and all of a sudden they had something.

And even though no one of us knew about this, for weeks and weeks we were front-page news and on every single news station in the country.

And to top that off, sometime later, one of the key pastors, the right-hand guy of the founding pastor from day one, now our marriage and family pastor, married and the father of six, the model family of our church, basically.

He now announces to his wife that he has he's had an affair with another woman for two and a half years.

He's now leaving her, his wife, and her and their six kids to go and live with this other woman.

Three shockwaves right after one another, each one of them enough to break our church into small pieces.

And I hurt so much for our church because I saw them going through the motions, going through the grief, going through the confusion.

Gateway, I've never felt so small in my life.

I've never felt so insufficient because I wanted to hug them all and hold them all and try to be there for each and everyone.

But I just felt I even if I duplicated myself, if I cloned myself in a hundred copies, I would not be enough to handle this situation.

There were so many emotions, there was so much grief, there was so much sorrow.

And um as pastors, we worked as hard as we could, but it was so heavy.

And I I'm a positive guy, but I still remember when I came to the low point, and um I had been working 14 hours shifts for seven days a week for months now, trying to help and steward and pastor our church and take care of its bleeding wounds and it's it's grief.

And I remember coming home one night at 1 a.m.

And I was so tired.

I was drained physically, emotionally, spiritually, and I stumbled into my kitchen and I didn't even have the strength to turn the light on.

I was sitting there in the darkness of my kitchen that night, and for the first time in this whole process, the thought came to my mind we're not gonna make it, we're not gonna come out of this, we're gonna dissolve into thin air, and all that's been will be left is a memory of a church that once was an amazing thing, but now is completely gone, broken into pieces and disintegrated.

And I felt grief and I felt hurt and I felt disappointed, and I felt so much self pity because I thought I didn't cause any of this, but here I am having to clean up someone else's mess, and the only Constructive thought I could think was I need to call Pastor Larry Stocksville of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, one of my spiritual fathers since 20 plus years.

And I realized it's daytime in Louisiana, that's why I called him.

And he picked up and I poured out everything that was on my heart, uncensored and unfiltered.

And he heard me out, he heard every single word.

And then when I was done, he uh said in that amazing southern accent that I can never mimic, he said, Pastor Joachim, I'm gonna pray for you right now.

And Pastor Larry started to pray, and he poured his heart into mine.

And after a few minutes of prayer, I got up and I started walking around the kitchen, and I started to feel the presence of God filling the kitchen.

And after yet a few minutes, I was slain in the spirit, which doesn't happen a lot, and very rarely all alone in my kitchen.

But I was lying there on the floor, crying like a baby, and I heard this spiritual father praying, prophesying, proclaiming the word of God into my life.

Church, he prayed for two solid hours that night.

God found one man who was willing to pray for two solid hours, and that brought the whole change in my life.

Because after the two hours, when I got back up again, I got up with the assurance that we're gonna make it.

And God will make a way where there was no way, and whatever valley needs to be exalted, and whatever mountain needs to come down, there will be a pathway for the glory of God.

So we kept on walking through this season and kept on doing it as to the best of our capacity, and finally, after a number of months, the storm started to subside and stability came back.

And as it did, the beautiful thing was that we realized that we cannot just move on like nothing happened.

We actually, as leaders, need to revisit this time of crisis and ask ourselves what do we need to change?

What elements have this crisis revealed that we need to deal with?

How can we redefine ourselves and make sure that we reposition ourselves for the next season?

And we brought in hundreds of leaders.

We had honest, hard conversations, one-on-one or in groups, talking about who we want to be for the next season.

One thing that we realized is that we had put way too much faith in one single individual.

And that had left us vulnerable.

We all pointed to that person to say what the Lord was telling us as a church at this point.

We were trusting in his teaching and his books, and we realized that when he left dramatically, we were left vulnerable and exposed.

So we need to rethink and re-evaluate leadership in our church.

And we made some major changes that actually gateway because we did a couple of years ago.

This is the reason I can be with you this fall.

Because back home at Word of Life, there are three senior pastors that lead the church and they're doing a great job.

And when I told our church two weeks ago that we're actually gonna spend this fall with Gateway, and I'm not gonna speak a single Sunday this whole fall, the whole church went, Way.

I was almost a bit offended there.

Come on.

I'm saying I'm not gonna be here this fall, and you go, hooray.

But actually, for me, it's a testament to the changes that we made and the health that followed those changes.

We realized we needed to redefine our culture, we needed to become a little bit less of an army and more of a loving family.

And we implemented all these changes.

We took our time, months and months, because we didn't want to rush through this.

We wanted to really do our homework.

And then we presented all these that we've come up with 18 months later at a church meeting.

I mean, we kept the church updated throughout the whole process, but after 18 months, we looked at it and we said, okay, we've we think we've done a decent job in addressing every single weekend, every single uh weakness from the full toxic elements to this minor adjustments that we need to make.

And we presented all these changes for the church on a Monday night, and the church really responded well because they realized we hadn't tried to take a shortcut, but we really wanted to work our way through this in the fear of God and also ensure accountability and transparency in the process.

That was a Monday night, Tuesday morning on a regular Bible school teaching session.

We have a few hundred Bible school students on in our daily Bible school.

Students are 19, 20, 21 years old, gap year students.

On a regular Bible school teaching session, all of a sudden, the Holy Spirit moves into the room.

Without anyone trying to manipulate this or creating something that wasn't there, organically, the presence of God just filled the room, and every single one of these students encountered the presence of God.

This became a move of revival that invaded our youth and our young adults.

And when I saw this happen, Gateway, it was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen.

Because my mind went back to 2 Chronicles chapter 5, when Solomon and his team have constructed the temple, the structure part of the temple.

2 Chronicles 5 · chapter mention

They've done anything they could do from a human perspective.

They lined up the priests, they'd done everything according to the principles of the Lord, and now they just had to step back.

And when they did, the glory of the Lord filled the temple.

This move of revival went on for one solid year.

Our youth services became four to five hours because nobody wanted to leave.

Every single Sunday for a solid year, I dismissed the church by saying, okay, service is technically over, and if you need to go and want to go, you're free to go.

But if you want to stay and encounter the presence of God, feel free to stay.

And then I asked all the teenagers to come to the front and have them pray and minister for the church to the church because the hand of the Lord was upon them.

After that, a new wave came of missions.

As tens of thousands of Muslim immigrants, refugees came from the Middle East into Sweden, and we reached into that community, we preached the gospel of Jesus, and uh in two years we prayed with over 900 Muslims to come to know the Lord Jesus as a personal favor.

We started a former Muslim Bible school, and we have since graduated 450 ex-Muslims from that Bible school.

People who used to bow down to worship Allah, but are now bowing down to praise and give worship to the lamb that was slain, Jesus Christ.

A brand new focus came for our next generation, and so many things started to happen, and we realized as we look back that God really used this season of the Valley of Tears to launch the very next chapter of our season.

Now, Gateway, I'm not saying that our journey will be a copy of yours, that your journey will be a copy of ours, but still I pray that what we went through after having been in the depths of despair and the beauty that we now see in our church, I pray there will be a wind of hope right into this church.

And when the elders reached out to us three weeks ago and asked if we could come and walk with you in and through this season, it felt like the most natural thing in the world.

Because I know what you've been through and where a lot of you still might be, but I also know in my heart that God will use this season to give birth to something new and beautiful and precious, and the Holy Spirit is ready to step into this church.

Can we just stand to our feet in the presence of God?

I simply want to pray a simple prayer over you and all over the campuses as we head into this fall and head into all that God wants to do.

You know, let's come back to that simplicity, let's come back to that element of prayer that Pastor Larry poured into my life.

We're just starting out now the 40 days of prayer and fasting.

I want to urge you, do whatever you can to be present at all the campuses for prayer.

Because there will come a day where we will look back upon this season, and you will want to be able to say, I was not a spectator, I was a partaker, I was one who prayed, and one who did all I could, and now look what the Lord has done.

Would you place your hand on your heart, please, and just let me pray for you.

Father, I pray for every single one in this room and all over the campuses right now as we humbly and brokenheartedly approach your presence.

Father, I thank you for the honor of being here in this church in this season and bringing whatever hope and whatever support we can bring to this church and this local leadership.

Father, I pray right now for everyone in this room or in the campuses who are still hurting, because it's okay not to be okay.

We all heal differently, we all heal according to different timetables.

Father, for those who hurt, I pray you will take them by the hand and gently lead them on through this valley and into all you have for their future.

Father, I also want to pray for every single one who feels like, yeah, I'm I think I'm I'm ready to move on now.

I think I'm ready to walk on into the next phase of gateway.

Father, I pray for them as well because it's okay to be okay.

Father, I ask you that wherever we are in this process, that you will bring us together as one gateway united before you, and that you will launch a brand new chapter and a brand new season, not by the power of any man or any individual, but by the power and presence of the Holy Spirit.

We yield our lives to you, we commit our lives in this upcoming fall to you.

We say, Holy Spirit, have your way.

Not our way, but your way, not our kingdom, but your kingdom.

Touch us, lead us, and bring us into the fullness of your plans and purposes for this season.

We pray all this in Jesus' mighty name.

And all people said, Can we give some praise to the Lord Jesus in the house of God?

Thanks for joining us today.

If you'd like to connect with us, text Connect to 71010 or visit gatewaypeople.com.

We hope you have a great week.