I had more excuses than you can imagine for not being used by God. In spite of these excuses, God still used me in powerful ways. Here follows my testimony.
My childhood
I have always believed in Jesus, and had the confession of faith. I grew up in a normal Christian family and attended a local church since my first cry. I appreciate this; it made me feel safe and it helped me in many other ways. Even though I lived in this fine environment, I didn’t experience a good self-image or God-image.
I am not a very talkative person, and I was especially quiet as a teenager. I had an exceptionally strong fear of talking with strangers. I remember a working week at my school in eighth grade when we had to find our way to a working place by ourselves and had to talk with people we didn’t know. I was nervous about it for many days. I practiced the words I would say: “My name is Tore and I will work here this week.” After arriving at the working place and the moment came for me to speak these words, I could not get the words out of my mouth, I was so nervous. Instead, I had to show them the note I had brought with me.
Due to my problem of finding the right words to say, especially when I was nervous, I felt I failed in many areas of my life. Since I felt like a failure, I felt that other people and God looked at me in the same way.
My teenage years
Here follows more stories from my teenage years that weakened my self-image.
There is one episode from my school years, in about fifth grade, that I remember very well. I was not very good in Norwegian grammar, and I had written an essay on my own with no help from my mom. I usually got her to look through my work so I did not have quite so many errors. This time I wrote it on my own. I was very proud when I turned it in, because I did it all by myself and I was sure I had done well. I’ll never forget the day my teacher handed out the essays. I was very exited to see how I had done, but when the teacher handed them out, she said, “Today I will read an essay as a good example on how you should NOT write an essay, and it’s yours Tore.”
When she read my essay with the grammar mistakes, the whole class laughed and I wanted to find a hole in the ground to hide in.
The same teacher wrote to my parents as I started secondary school, “Tore will have great trouble in the change from primary to secondary school, plus he needs to have a subsidiary subject class in Norwegian.” I was the only one in the subsidiary subject class, but as it turned out there was nothing in there for me to do because my Norwegian grammar was not so bad after all. Also, I didn’t have any trouble changing from the primary to the secondary school.
Another episode that contributed to my low self-image happened in high school. There was a person that didn’t like me very much, possibly because I was very quiet. He continually said to me how pitiful I did it at school, and what I failure I was. This was a lie, but after a while I started believing it. When I walked past other people at school I could hear them making fun of me and then start to laugh. The reason they made fun of me was probably because of my outward appearance. I was very thin, had big glasses and lots of pimples; I must have looked like a nerd in an American movie. Because
of my outward appearance and my quiet personality, I was not very popular with girls. This was very difficult in my teenage years. While in high school, I often felt depressed and continued to have a lot of bad experiences. I felt that I was useless and a big failure. One time while riding in a car on the way home from school we were almost hit by a truck. I sat there cold and calm and wished that the truck had hit us, because I felt my life was of no value.
Fortunately, I received help during this tough time. There were two people from my church youth group that really cared about me and helped me.
In spite of this, I experienced two other incidents that increased my depression and my feelings of worthlessness.
After high school I got a job at an engineering workshop, I quit after only three weeks, because the person I needed to work with didn’t like me and my quiet personality. I became very nervous about making mistakes at work, but still made a lot of them. The more mistakes I made, the angrier my co-worker got, and then I became even more nervous and made more mistakes. In the end I could not stand it, so I quit.
At my next job things were much better, but there was a person here that didn’t like me. One time, during a break, while he was talking with some other workers, he said loud enough for everyone, including me, to hear, “I can't stand Tore, he is so stupid.”
These incidents, plus others, caused my self-esteem to plummet. I was looking upon myself as a loser. I watched my friends and saw how successful they were, but I always failed. In my hardest teenage years, from 16 to 18 years old, I had thoughts such as, “I am stupid, boring, ugly, a person without value and useless. I wish I had never been born.”
To be a successful person in this world, I thought I had to fulfill a lot of demands, something I had not experienced.
The feelings of being a loser not only brought about a bad self-image, but also a bad God-image. I was not a very confident person when it came to the Christian ministry either, and I felt the demand that to be a “good” Christian I had to read a lot in the Bible, pray at least one hour a day, be bold and testify about Jesus at the school, have a testimony in my church or for the non-Christian in the street and to pray aloud in my church meetings. It wasn’t that I didn’t do these things, but I felt I didn’t do them often enough and when I did, it was without boldness. I felt a lot of condemnation because I didn’t tell my schoolmates about Jesus, or that I was a Christian. I wanted to, but I was afraid I would be rejected even more. I was afraid that other Christians would find out that I didn’t testify at school. When someone asked me, I always gave a faint answer, “Ah, yes I probably do that” and I felt even more condemnation. I thought I was a lukewarm Christian and God rejects lukewarm Christians as it says in Rev 3:16 (So, because you are lukewarm--neither hot nor cold--I am about to spit you out of my mouth.)
A non-Christian for a week
During the winter of 1987, I decided to not be a Christian anymore. Two things brought this about: my feelings of condemnation along with not receiving a specific answer to one of my prayers.
One evening, on my way home from a youth meeting, I was so frustrated with God that I took my Bible and kicked it away into the street. I said to myself: “I will never believe in God again.”
Fortunately, I had a grandmother that knew the secret of prayer. She had my name written down on a daily prayer list. In the days following my decision, during my grandmother’s prayer time she would pause by my name feeling that something was wrong. At the end of the week she wrote me a letter. She lived about 50 kilometers from where I lived and had no idea that I was not a Christian anymore. In this letter she wrote, “I don’t know what it is, but I feel there is something wrong every time I come to your name on my prayer list.” This letter brought me back to God. I realized that if no one else knew my thoughts, God did and he wanted me back in His arms again. I started to understand something about the father heart of God, like the prodigal son in Luke 15.
My desire to live wholeheartedly for God
In the next two years I still experienced a lot of condemnation, but in addition to this I also had a strong desire to be used by God. I had a dream to go out like Jesus commanded. (Matt 28:20) I had an especially strong desire to teach youth. One time while with some youth, I understood that they did not know very much about a personal relationship with Jesus. Then, I had a yearning to stand in front of them and teach. This dream was actually very distant from me at this time. God could never use me for something like this, or could He?
I had heard that being a Christian was an exiting life where God uses those who are weak, but I didn’t experience this. The Christians I was with couldn’t testify about a life like that either. In the church I went to (and still do) there was not much of the supernatural, such as the use of the spiritual gifts, healing etc. Only tongues and interpretation were used, but the interpretation was so general that it could fit anyone. Because of this, I started to doubt God’s supernatural world.
I would like to add that my church has changed a lot since that time. My church family means a lot to me and are a great blessing to me. They support me both prayerfully and financially.
To strengthen my faith I started studying the “End Times Subject”. I read a lot of New Age literature too, just to see if they fulfilled the prophecies in the Bible. Some of it was quite interesting, but very negative. At one point, I was reading so much New Age literature and seeing how much the devil could do, while at the same time not hearing much about what God could do today, which caused me to doubt even more.
More doubt and frustration
During the winter of 1989, the period of my biggest doubt, a team from Operation Mobilization came to my church. They were talking about teams going to Europe, and about how God had used them to reach out with the Gospel there. When I heard them testifying, I noticed the fire and faith they had, and how they exhibited the exciting Christian life I was dreaming about. After the meeting, the team sold books. I like to read, so I stopped by the table to look at them. A member of the team encouraged me
to buy a book she had read several times called Is it really you God?, by Loren Cunningham, the founder of Youth With a Mission.
When I read the book I got really fired up. It described the life with God that I was dreaming about. It described a thrilling life, where God came and did miracles and answered their prayers in a real way when things were difficult. The book talked about a supernatural God that did supernatural things. He gave ordinary people dreams, visions, prophecy and they even heard the voice of God!
When I was finished with the book, my faith and belief in God had increased immensely and I realized that He really existed. I also felt a stronger desire to be used by God, but there were several things that made me believe that God could not use me for something like this. I thought I needed a much bigger portion of boldness and spirituality, not that the book showed that you have to have a lot of faith and boldness before God could use you. God used ordinary people, but I felt I was under ordinary. I could not even speak English so I could not go to other countries. At times, I couldn’t even put the right words together in Norwegian, plus I had no boldness. As mentioned before I dared not tell my classmates that I was a Christian. How could God use me?
When I was baptized, I had to give my testimony. It was a very scary thing to do. When I stood behind the pulpit to deliver my message, my head was bowed down into the pulpit, so you could only see the top of my head. Also, I talked softly and not into the microphone. Two people started shouting, “Speak louder, we can’t hear you.” This was one of the worst moments of my life and I decided to never, ever stand behind a pulpit again. (I have not kept that decision.)
At this time, I also worked at the local radio station for my church. When I had this program I always wrote everything down that I was going to say. You could tell, because it sounded like a really bad C-film. I also thought that my voice was too slow and boring, so I sped up the cassette player when I was speaking, which made my voice sound like Mickey Mouse. It must have been really funny to listen to.
I also tried to do prison work, but it was not a big success. One time, I was asked one to join the prison group from my church, because they did not have enough people. I really didn’t want to go, but felt I should. We were placed in different groups at the prison and I was put alone in one group of six prisoners. Shy and scared as I was, I did not say anything during the hour; I just sat there. I only listened to how they smuggled drugs into the prison etc. When the hour was over one of the prisoners turned to me, and said, “What are you doing here?” I decided that prison work is something I should not do. I did not keep this decision either. I had many good talks later, but that was after something happened.
I thought that being a Christian was something very difficult and heavy.
As you can see, I had a wish to be used by God, but I failed. So to be used by God, like the people in the book, or like the people in Operation Mobilization, was really far from me. But, God had other plans for my life, and He saw me differently.
In the spring of 1989 I was asked to join a youth counsel in my church. I said yes to this request for some reason, but I did not understand how God could use me in a youth counsel. This increased my frustration.
The breakthrough
I went to a Christian camp that summer, and my frustrations increased even more. One day I went into a forest, near the camp, and I cried out my frustration to God, “Jesus I want to be used by you, but I fail all the time. Lord set me free! Lord set me free!!”
At the evening meeting, something happened that changed my Christian life.
I didn’t have any intentions to go forward for prayer that evening, because I had tried it so many times before and it didn’t work. I had always remained a frustrated Christian.
Because of my frustration, I came late for the meeting and the only place I could find was in the front row, where the camp choir was sitting. I did not get very much out of the speech, because I was preoccupied by my own frustration. When the preacher was finished with the speech, he invited people to come forward to receive prayer, and the camp choir went up on the platform. Many people came forward at this meeting, so they removed the first rows of benches. Suddenly I was in the prayer line, without my wish or intention. It was my turn to be prayed over and the prayer partner asked what my prayer subject was. I felt I had to say something, because it would have been strange to say: I don’t want any prayer I am just standing here. So, I said something that was a desire in my heart: To be baptized in the Holy Spirit, and that happened!
I did not have a strong physical experience like being slain to the floor, or suddenly speaking in another language, but God filled me with a joy that I had not experienced before, and God showed me a truth that set me free.
When I was standing in God’s presence He said to me: “Tore, you are too problem-centered, you always look at your own weaknesses. Instead, start to look at Me, see who I am and what I can do through you.” When I started to appropriate this truth, it was the start of an inner healing and a true picture of God.
The next day I was out on the street telling about Jesus, and for the first time it felt good to do so, not heavy and difficult. Again, the next day I held a short testimony for over 200 youth, which was a big step, but for the first time, I enjoyed it! God could really use me! It was like a whole new world had opened up for me.
God starts to shape me
During the fall of 1989, I experienced a lot of new and exiting things with God. I received the gift of tongues and heard the voice of God. I received the tongues as I was walking back and forth in my apartment and praying aloud as I usually did (and still do.) Then, I started to utter some strange word, that were not in Norwegian (or English). I started to use these words more and more, and after awhile it became a fluent language. It was strange in the beginning, but now I don’t think much about it. I can start speaking it whenever I like. I also experienced God talking to me in the same way. Praying in my apartment, I was holding my Bible and suddenly looked up a scripture that really spoke to me. It was a promise that he would tear down all of the strongholds I had about myself and about God.
This scripture was Is. 25:12
He will bring down your high fortified walls and lay them low; he will bring them down to the ground, to the very dust.
One of the strongholds that was broken early on was my fear of standing in front of people and speaking. From my childhood, I had a dream of standing and preaching the word of God. After my experience with The Holy Spirit, I had a stronger faith that God could use me in this manner.
As mentioned before, I was asked to join the youth counsel in my church, and my responsibility was for the Friday night youth meeting. I put myself on the preaching list, so I had good opportunities to speak. In the beginning, I probably made some mistakes in my eagerness for God, but I know that God rejoiced over my new boldness and I am glad for the endurance my church showed me.
At first, my speeches were not very good, I still wrote down all the things I would say and I usually quoted what someone else had said, because I didn’t believe I could say it as well, until one day. After a meeting one of my friends came to me and said, “Why are you saying that someone else can say things in a better way when God has given you the anointing to speak, why don’t you trust Him to give you the right words?” He was right, so after this day I didn’t quote as much what other people had said, but I trusted in the anointing God had given me. When I started to do that, I experienced God giving me words and a new boldness to say things in front of other people in a clear and interesting way.
In the following years, I hungered after the Word of God, and I soaked in all the teaching I could get. I realized that going to a bible school soon would be beneficial. I chose a Pentecostal church in Oslo, in the year 91/92. Here, God tore down more strongholds in me. My biggest challenge, and the most exiting, was to go to another country on outreach.
As stated before, my knowledge of English was very poor at this time, but I had a strong desire to say something. So, I tried to hold a testimony in Czechoslovakia. 
When it was time to say it, I completely forgot the English words and I didn’t even remember the words in Norwegian. It was an embarrassing experience and it took almost two years before I dared to have a testimony in English. Despite my nervousness, the next time I had my testimony in Russia, it was very good.
A dream fulfilled
From the time I read the book: Is it really you God?, I had a dream to be a part of what the book was describing such as going to other countries and witnessing God performing miracles. When I read about the mercy ship, Anastasis, I had a desire to see and experience this ship.
In the spring of 1993, I saw a flyer about a Go-festival; this was a festival that YWAM held in the summer time. When I saw the flyer I said to God: “I want to go there this summer, but give me a person I can bring along.” Some weeks later, I went to a farewell party at a Bible School. At this party I heard someone talking about going to the Go-festival YWAM had that summer, but he had no one to bring along. I went over to him and told him my thoughts. He said that he had heard that I was going to go on the team, and he knew there was a team going to Stockholm and Lithuania and they were going to spend one week on the ship Anastasis. I got really fired up, and we decided to go together to this festival and Go-team. I soon understood that God knew about my desire to see and be with the ship.
I also experienced a very exciting week onboard the ship. On one of the outreaches from the ship in Lithuania, we saw a girl, about 9 years old, with a paralyzed tongue, which started to speak. Her mom said that it was the first time in many years that she could move her tongue.
Youth With A Mission fascinated me in many ways, but I didn’t feel that I was ready to quit my job and start fulltime in YWAM. To quit my job and trust only in God was a huge step, because to start in YWAM I needed to raise my own salary and I wasn’t ready for that.
More frustration and the road further on
I had known for a long time that God had called me to teach and preach, so I went to my pastor one day to ask how I could develop these gifts. He sent out a letter of recommendation to several churches from my denomination. Also, I had the opportunity to speak at a few Sunday church meetings at my own church. In the beginning, I received invitations to speak at other churches, but I was asked less and less. Most of the time, I spoke to elderly people, whose average age was sometimes 70 years old. However, my heart’s desire was for the youth. It wasn’t that bad speaking to the elderly, but it’s a different challenge to speak to youth. I also had a desire to work fulltime for God and not pack chocolate in a chocolate factory, as I was doing, for the rest of my life, so my frustration continued.
In 94/95 I went to a New Year Festival Youth With A Mission held in Norway. During this festival there was a lot of advertisement for a new kind of DTS (Discipleship Training School) that would start the next fall. I thought this sounded interesting, I prayed about it, and made the decision to go for it. So, I took a big step of faith by leaving my job and starting in YWAM.
My first big economical miracle happened some days later. At the factory where I worked, they had to fire some people, but if you quit the job voluntarily you would receive money. It was about 65 000 Norwegian kroner, approximately $5,500 U.S. dollars (before tax). I used this opportunity to get this extra money before I left. It helped me pay for the school and allowed me to keep my car for another year. This was a big confirmation that God was involved in this. I have worked 8 years now in YWAM (by 2003) and I have never lacked anything, actually I almost feel that I have more money now than when I was working in a secular job. In this period I have been to other countries at least 11 times. (E.g. four times in Thailand).
And I have and will work with an unreached people group in Thailand and Burma.
My new adventure
The fall came and I started on my new journey with God. When you are about to enter into something new, you will always meet resistance. I experienced resistance during my first month of DTS. The old strongholds, which I thought I had worked through, plagued me such as my bad self-image and losing faith that God could use me. I had some dreadful periods. Despite this, God gave me a lot of encouragement, often in a way I did not expect or had ever experienced before, which is typical of God. Several people prophesied over me and said that I was a man of God, even though I didn’t see it myself.
My situation improved in DTS and I had a great outreach. I was able to preach a lot and see God deliver people from demons. This was new for a western Christian. I also saw a lot of people get saved.
Before I went on this six weeks outreach, I was asked to join as DTS staff at the main YWAM center, Grimerud in Norway. At first I said no, but after the outreach I felt I should do this and I called them and said that I’m in.
I thought my challenges in DTS were enormous, but the things I encountered as staff were even more monumental. One of my biggest challenges over the next months was to lead a DTS outreach team all by myself. This alone could be a challenge, but I also had to go to a difficult country. Here follows a summary of the newsletter I wrote after my visit.
To Belarus
“We will never get the visa to Neamen,” I thought. At a team gathering in Belarus we discussed visa problems, especially for our Ethiopian student, Neamen. He needed a visa for Latvia, Lithuania and Finland. We tried for a month to get the visa, but it was difficult. Keth, a co-team leader (in Norway, not on outreach), had just been in Oslo to talk with the different embassies about the visa, but she could not manage to get it done. With only four days left before our departure, he still didn’t have a visa. This got me to thinking about all of the challenges we would encounter leading a team to an unknown country. I didn’t know the language or what kind of danger was awaiting us. I prayed, “Lord, I desperately need to depend on You, I can’t do this by myself.”
The visas we needed came at just the last minute, and I felt that my faith increased. We developed a slogan for the outreach:
Eph 3:20
20Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us.
During the outreach we really saw this scripture at work.
I have always been a person that doesn’t like to take risks; I’ve always wanted to have a safety net in everything I did. I worry very easily when I can’t plan everything out in detail. This outreach put these feelings of uneasiness to the test. It was as if God was taking away every frame of safety, I could only put my trust in God.
“You have to be out of your mind to do what you are going to do?”, I thought before I left the YWAM center in Norway. I started to think about how many things could go wrong: We did not have a lock at our back door (not a smart thing when you are traveling in Eastern Europe), our boat ticket hadn’t arrived in time, so we only had a fax copy, we didn’t have a proper map to find our way through Estonia, Lithuania and Belarus. These thoughts along with many others were wandering around in my head as I drove the car to the Swedish border.
If I did not know that God had called me to do this, I would never had done it. But, it is very exciting to take big risks with God, and it is worth it. I have found that I have no excuse to not be used by God.
We stayed in Estonia for one week before we left for Belarus. We called some missionaries in Belarus before we left Estonia. When we called they were kind of surprised, because they thought that we were coming one week later. It was very late when we had called them, just before we left, and we were all tired, so we had communicated in error. We needed a visa for Belarus and we were very dependent on them to get it, because they needed to arrange something for us in a border town in Latvia. But now they were not sure if they could arrange something. We left and prayed about finding a place where we could sleep and finding people to talk with. Fortunately the missionaries got in contact with someone and we met the person that could help us. When we talked to this person he said that we probably wouldn’t get the visa tomorrow. One team had tried two weeks ago and they did not have any success. But we knew that if God had led us this far, and he had promised that he would be with us, so in faith we said that God would provide the visa the next day. And we prayed!
When we came to the Belarusian consulate the next morning the general consulate was very suspicious, he started to ask (through our interpreter), “Who are these spies that come into our country all the time?” Other teams had come this way earlier to the same place we were going. One of our team members was from the USA and that didn’t make it any easier. In the beginning it really looked difficult to get. They did not want to give it to us at all. We were all mentally praying and we tried to think of something that could help us. We “accidentally” had our homemade student card with us, proving that we were students, which was true. There was no reason for us to bring these cards, because they were just valid in Norway, but we all did. I know now that God had made it so.
When we showed them these cards we finally got the visa.
When we went to the consulate we still didn’t have the road map of where we were going. It was a small town and we had to take undersized roads to get there because there wasn’t a main road from where we were coming into Belarus. The road map came by fax to the consulate just before we were to leave, and it proved to be vital in finding our way. We also experienced a lot of inspiring things on the way to, and in, Belarus. I will always remember this outreach. My faith increased greatly; we saw people saved and set free. One day we went to a home where there were demons. A lady who had previously been a witch, but who was now saved, was hearing noises and voices in her living room at night. We prayed for the house, and the demons disappeared.
In the last years I have had some incredible adventures with God, and I have seen the fulfillment of the visions God had given me. I am going to different parts of the world now, (particularly Asia) to do discipleship and teaching. I still have many dreams and I know they will come to pass one day.
I really recommend a DTS; this is a school that gives you more than just head knowledge about God, it gives you a lot of challenges so you grow in your Christian life and in your relationship with God and others.
See this link for mor info about DTS.
What I want to tell you through my testimony is that God can use you, despite how insecure or shy you are, and its like this: When you feel weak, He will be strong in you! Through Him you can do tremendous things! You actually have no excuses to not be used by God, and he has a strong desire to use YOU!
