My Testimony

Acts 15:9

Pastor Ernest O’Neill

It is good for every one of us to give our testimony from time to time, and though you have suffered
mine before, I think that I should give it today.

I was born in Belfast about 46 years ago into a working-class home. My dad worked in the shipyards
in Belfast and we had enough money, but not much more than enough money. I went to the local
Methodist church which was a fairly evangelical, fairly big church. Belfast is a city of about one
half million people. As I came up I began to go to Sunday School from about the age of five or six
and always had a great belief in God and always prayed to God. You know the three prayers you always
do–the “Our Father”, the “God bless Dad and Mum”, and the “Gentle Jesus meek and mild.” I always
did those prayers, especially
during the war years of 1939-45. The shipyard was a target for the German bombers so my dad would go
down there to see how things were, and of course I was very conscious that only God could take care
of him. I certainly believed in God during those early years.

When I was thirteen we had a Sunday School teacher who I would have thought then was just a wild old
Fundamentalist, but the beauty of it was, he believed God’s Word. One Sunday afternoon he told us
about the lake of fire, which was the first time I’d ever heard of it. He said at the end of this
life there was a hell or an outer darkness, a great lonely place where there was no life. Of course,
he presented it as it is presented in Revelation, as a lake of fire where you burn forever in your
own selfishness and what you have become. That
really scared me. He used the verses: “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” and
“The wages of sin is death.” I don’t know that I really felt that I was a sinner; I just felt that
it would be circumspect and prudent to be on the same side as the owner of the lake of fire, so I
stayed behind after that Sunday School class and prayed and received as best I could Jesus as my
Savior, though I could never get the hang of what it meant — Savior. I really didn’t like that term
too much, to tell you the truth. I didn’t like the idea that Jesus was my Savior, but I liked the
idea of Him being my helper and guide.

From 13 to 17, when I went to university, that was my situation. I would say that I was a believer
the way Jesus says, “There are believers but they really don’t do what I tell them to do; they
believe all the right things.” If you had said to me, “Do you believe that Jesus is the Savior of
the world?” I would have said, “Yes.” If you had said, “Do you believe He is your Savior?” I would
have known that you wanted me to say “Yes”, and so I would have said “Yes”, but I didn’t like the
idea of having to be saved by anybody.

At 17 I began to come up against the agony of the old sex thing — a power that I couldn’t control
and a power that did make me feel dirty at times. Through that I think God began to show me other
things in my life that were not obedient to Him and that were in fact sin. I began to see the
meaning of “All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God” and “The wages of sin is death.” I
had already begun at that time to think through the reasons for believing in God and for believing
the Bible, so I did believe that those things were true. I began to see that I was headed for
eternal death because my life was filled with things that were dishonest. I would tell a lie when it
suited me, I would be

unkind and cruel to my brother when it suited me, I would do whatever I wanted to do. I saw that I
was doing things that were disobedient to God day after day, and I began to think, “Now Jesus must
fit into this somehow.” It was then that I came into contact with a guy who asked me that question.
He said, “Do you believe that Jesus is the Savior of the world?” and I said, “Yes, I do.” He said,
“Do you believe that He is your Savior?” and I said “That He died for me?” and he said, “Yes.” I
said, “Oh, yes, yes I do,” but I really didn’t.

So I stopped my ordinary prayer times and I started–even though I was a miserable old
Protestant–to do what you loved ones in the Catholic Church are taught to do from an early age: the
Stations of the Cross. I don’t know the Stations of the Cross, but I certainly in my own mind began
to see that I must somehow see the reality of this death that took place on Calvary; I must somehow
find out what the meaning of this is. I began to spend my prayer time thinking about Jesus dying on
the cross. Of course, I had a skeptical kind of mind and it was hard for me to think this man
actually died, and then I began to think, “You mean there is a place somewhere in this world,
probably in Palestine, where his cross actually made a hole in the ground?” I would try to think my
intellectual
way through to that–this man actually died on a cross in Palestine. I began to imagine Jesus’ death
on the cross. That’s what I did for weeks and months.

As I began to come into those verses in Isaiah that say He was despised and rejected of men and He
carried our sins–and then I began to see the words that He cried out on the cross, “My God, my God,
why hast Thou, of all people, forsaken me, of all people?” I began to see him speaking to the Roman
soldiers and saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” Then it was a miracle I
suppose of the Holy Spirit, but I sensed that He was speaking right
down the centuries and looking at me and saying, “Father, forgive him for he knows not what he
does.” Somehow I didn’t know why He had died, I didn’t know what it had to do with my sins being
forgiven, but I knew that He had died for me, and that if I had been the only person in the whole
world, He would still have died for me. I just had a great sense that He was my dear Friend end
Savior. I would say, loved ones, that that was the New Birth experience for me. My heart was changed
inside and I began to want to please Him and to love Him, I began to read the Bible and pray and to
give my life to Him more and more. So when He appeared to be saying that I should go into the
ministry, I wanted to go into the ministry.

We didn’t have a lot of money in our home to send people to seminaries, so the only way I could ever
get to the university was by getting a teaching scholarship. So that’s what I did. At 17 I got a
teaching scholarship to Queens University in Belfast and I studied English literature. I then went
to teachers training school and then back to my old high school and taught English there for two or
three years. It was during my second year at the university
that it seemed to me Jesus was saying, “Nevertheless, impossible though it is, you have to come and
be a minister.” I said “Yes” to Him and began to do examinations in connection with the Methodist
church. At the same time as I graduated from the university and from teacher training college I
candidated for the Methodist ministry. For the next five years I spent the time in what we call
probation work at the university in Belfast, and then the last three years I went to seminary and
did the divinity degree.

During all that time, loved ones, I became more and more conscious that though I knew my sins were
forgiven, there was a great struggle inside me. I was always aware of the reality of Romans 7:15:
“The good that I would I cannot do, and the evil I hate is what I do.” I was aware of that. From the
early days in the ministry you have to smile. That’s the big thing–smile all the time. (We had

smiling classes at seminary — No, we didn’t.) But if somebody criticizes you, you smile. If
somebody is unkind to you, you smile. So I did that and kept on doing that even after I was
ordained.

I was ordained in Dublin in 1960. I met my dear one through Jesus just showing us that we were for
each other, and that was a miraculous thing too. We married and served in Donegal for a year. At
that time I sensed that God wanted us to go to London so that I could do Old Testament studies at
London University, so we went to London and spent two years there. I always wondered, how does God
work in people’s hearts and how does He move a church into life and into dynamic relationship with
Himself? And so when an opportunity came to take a church in London, I again took a church and gave
up the studies. We served a church
in London and came to the end of that year, and then the question was whether to go back to Ireland
or not.

At that time I began to ask God, “Lord, where do you want us to go?” and I would say even though I
was in a half-hearted state in my relationship with God at
that time, God always answers you if you really want Him to answer you with all your heart, if you
pray and are willing to do whatever He tells you, it seems whatever state you are in He somehow has
pity on you. I asked Him what he wanted us to do and after days and nights in prayer He said, “Go to
America.” I didn’t want to go to America because America had lots of money and I felt if you are
following Jesus you don’t spend time in places with lots of money; you spend time where people are
in poverty. So it was very hard to eventually say “yes”.

I did say yes and went to a neighboring pastor and asked him if he knew anybody in America, and he
said he knew the Bishop of Minnesota who would be in London the next week. We had dinner with the
Bishop of Minnesota the next week and then I came to America in 1963. I served a Methodist church in
Minneapolis for about a year and a half and then was an associate pastor in a downtown church for a
year. During that time I became aware more and more that I was not what a Christian was supposed to
be, especially after I arrived in America and I met “a man with a shining face.” That’s the name of
a book written by another man
who had the same experience. I met a man who seemed to live in victory; that is, he seemed to live
outside what he was inside. I was not. I could smile if you criticized my sermon but my knuckles
would be white, gripping the chair to hold myself back from asking you how many lectures you had
done in homiletics or in theology. It was the old pretense, the old hypocritical life.

I was free from outward sins, more or less. I don’t think you could have pointed a finger much at my
outward life, but my problem was inward sin. Anger never
showed itself outside, because we were always taught at least you should have the control that Plato
and Socrates had over their outward life. We were taught that self-discipline should enable you to
be a gentleman to people on the outside–so I could control that stuff, but it seethed within.
Resentment rising inside when somebody criticized you. Unclean thoughts–outwardly a life of
cleanliness, but inside a life of uncleanness. Thoughts that shouldn’t be there–not thoughts that
just pop into your mind and pop out again, but
thoughts that I entertained and welcomed. I just sensed that there had to be something better than
this and indeed came to the point where I felt, “I’ll go insane if this continues” because I could
be praying to Jesus and sinning in my own thoughts at the same time. I felt there had to be an
answer.

At a meeting in North Minneapolis I once shared this, and a man at the back explained that he was a

missionary in Bolivia and had for years lived the same hypocrisy, and that there was an answer. Bit
by bit he told me about his own experience and then gave me some books to read written by old
Methodist bishops years and years ago in America. These books explained clearly to me that the
problem in my life was that there was something inside me that never had actually been changed or
touched by God. At first I couldn’t believe it,
because I felt I had given myself to Jesus and received Him into my heart. These books said, “Ask
the Holy Spirit to show you what is in there.” I was taught in seminary to believe in the Holy
Spirit, but I thought “It” was a force. I know I should have known better. I know He is called the
third person of the Trinity, but I felt that the Holy Spirit was an “It”–a force or an atmosphere
that comes upon a meeting at certain times. These books said, “No! The Holy Spirit is a Person.”
They pointed out that Jesus said, “I will send to you the Holy Spirit. It is to your advantage that
I go away, because if I don’t go away the Comforter will not come to you. But when I go He will come
and He will lead you into all truth.” Jesus called Him the Counsellor. These books said, “You should
ask the
Counsellor to show you what is inside you that has not been touched by God.”

That is what I did. I started to ask the Holy Spirit in my prayer time to show me what was inside me
that I had never yielded to God. Over weeks and months I saw things that I could not believe. The
Holy Spirit was faithful and He will be faithful to you if you are willing to look. The Holy Spirit
began to show me that it wasn’t just the outward sins that were the problem, but there was in me
inward sin which was me. I couldn’t believe that. I felt that a feeling of sin was a feeling of sin,
or a desire for sin was a desire for sin, or a sinful act was a sinful act, or a sinful word was a
sinful word, but I could not believe that I was sin. Then I began to see verses such as Isaiah uses
where he says, “I
am a man of unclean lips.” Not just “I speak unclean words” but “I am a man of unclean lips.”

The Holy Spirit began to show me that when I would waken up in the morning with praise on my lips it
was pride in my own insights into Christianity and my ability to explain it to others. I would see,
“This is hopeless. If I’m that corrupt, I can never clean myself. If I am that proud I can never
overcome it, because it is self itself that is proud.” I knew the lust–that was clear and easy; but
I didn’t know the depth of my selfishness, the selfish ambition. I don’t know how you men are, but
the ladies are supposed to be proud of the way they look. We men are supposed to be proud of what we
can achieve and we always have this burden to achieve something. I had that: selfish ambition to be
successful and to be well-known. I saw that there was such dirt and rottenness in me that there was
no way in which I could separate it from myself. It was true what the Holy Spirit was saying: I
myself was sin!

Loved ones, I became utterly convinced it was me that was the problem. It was myself. In spite of
the fact that I appeared to live for God, I really lived for myself. I wasn’t really living for God
at all, I was living subtly to elevate myself and to gratify myself and to get others to exalt me
and not to exalt Jesus. Bit by bit the Holy Spirit convinced me that there was no way in which I
could deliver myself from this.

Then a whole area of truth opened up to me that I had never seen before; I just never knew of it.
That is why I share it with you, because it was so absolutely new to me. We were taught in Northern
Ireland that Jesus died for you. I always reckoned that was so that I wouldn’t have to die. I was
relieved at that. I had never heard, even though I had read it in the Bible often, that I died with
Jesus. Now you: say,” People must have told you!” They must have. I must have read it somewhere in

books, but it never came to me. Likewise it will never come to you until you are in desperate need
for that experience. The Holy Spirit pointed me to a chapter that I had never understood–Romans 6.
I read there: “All of us who have been baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death.” I
always read that as being baptized into the benefits of His death. Then I began to see that the
Greek word “baptizo” means to be immersed, and it means we are immersed in His death. Then I read
these incredible words in verse 6: “We know that our old self was crucified with Christ so that the
sinful body might be destroyed, and we might no longer be enslaved to sin.”

Well, I knew I was enslaved to sin. Then I saw that my old self was crucified with Christ, and I
could not believe it. It was double Dutch at first to me. How could my old self that I was
experiencing now, be crucified with Christ? Then I saw it was the same way as my sins. My sins were
borne by Jesus, but they weren’t taken away from me, they weren’t forgiven until I believed it and
was willing to let go of them. Se I saw it was the same with myself. I was crucified with Christ but
I would have to bear it in my own being and personality until I was willing to let it go. I saw that
it had been crucified with Christ in eternity–the self that was proud and selfish and lustful was
actually destroy in Jesus, and it didn’t exist anymore except in the deception that I was under in
allowing the ghost of it to remain and to retain an influence in my life.

Bit by bit I began to see that it was true: my old self had been crucified with Christ. There was
actually no problem in getting rid of it. God had already done that and the Holy Spirit would take
the things of Jesus and make them real to me if I wanted it. That was the crux — if I wanted it. So
I began to wrestle with whether I was really willing to live no longer for myself but for God. I had
often said I wanted to live for God, but the Holy Spirit began to point out the thousand little ways
in which I drew attention to myself in conversation, the thousand little ways in which I was worried
more by what people did to me rather than by what they did to God. The thousand little ways in which
I wanted people to think well of me, the thousand little ways in which I lost my temper not because
God was being abused but because somebody was getting in my way.

The Holy Spirit showed me that it meant letting go of all these things, and then I began to see a
little of the Cross. I’ve shared often with you the whole business of anger. We get angry because
things aren’t going our way and we want to pull them back under our control, so we think we will
make them fearful because of our anger or our bad temper. I began to see that that was my
life–always concerned with whether I was in control or things were going my way. The Holy Spirit
came more and more home to me, “Are you willing to die with Jesus to yourself and to your own
satisfaction? Are you willing to live only for His glory?” Loved ones, I don’t knew what it will be
like with you, but I was 30, so I had masses of controlled surrenders that I had subtly arranged in
my life. I had a hard-packed soil of rejection — and resistances to God’s will that I had built
over the years. The Holy Spirit had to go down through all that stuff. There would come days when I
felt I was willing, and the next day I’d be back in the old anger and temper and envy and
selfishness, and I knew that I wasn’t willing. These books kept saying when you get to the ground of
your heart the Holy Spirit will witness that you are there. I would get to a place where I would
feel I was there, and the next day I would know I wasn’t there; I was back in the old life.

Gradually over a period of weeks and months the Holy Spirit dug down underneath the layers,
underneath all the mass of that inward self, until one morning in North Minneapolis in the
parsonage, the Holy Spirit put me the question: “Would you be willing to be nothing for Jesus’
glory?” Self, of course, always pops up and says, “What good would that do, being nothing?” By that
time I’d begun to listen to the Holy Spirit and to hear Him over the noise of self and He said,
“That isn’t it. Would you be willing to be nothing, to be a failure, not be known at all, to be

ignored, to be an absolute failure for the rest of your life if it was for Jesus’ glory?” I at last
whispered, “Yes.”

Loved ones, I think that was full consecration, just presenting my body a living sacrifice which is
our reasonable service. I was at last saying, “Lord, I will live for you only because this is the
only purpose of our lives, and there is no point of me building up a little temporal kingdom that
will end after seventy years. I am here for your use and for whatever you want.” It was the lifting
of the center of my life from self unto God. I just had a quiet assurance that the Holy Spirit had
come in and cleansed my heart.

God is always so good. The next morning, I received a letter from a colleague whom I was ahead of
academically in Belfast but he had concentrated on getting the doctorate in psychology while I was
slogging my way trying to find out how God worked in churches. Every time I received a letter from
him I thought “I should have done that,” and the old envy always popped up. I received the letter,
opened it and there was no envy — nothing! That was good. So it is real! The Holy Spirit can
actually cleanse and fill your heart. He can take away the selfishness and the hatred and the
resentment and He can bring about in your heart love, joy, and peace so that it comes from inside.
The issue is not, “Do you sin?” I’m sure I sin a hundred times. Before I couldn’t help sinning
because of the mess that was rising inside. Now if I sin it is my own fault–just my own
fault–because now there is a desire to obey God rather than to disobey Him. That’s the change,
loved ones. It is not the issue of whether you never sin. The issue is that you are free from the
power of sin. You are at last free not to sin if you so choose. It’s natural to obey, where before
it was natural to sin.

My life just changed from then. I never had trouble until then, of course. I never had problems. I
never had difficulties with the congregation, because I always preached so nicely that I persuaded
everybody to agree with me. Then I started to preach that sin was a problem in our lives; that we
did not obey God and we wanted to elevate self and play all kinds of spiritual games instead of obey
God. Then, of course, the trouble came, but I never had such glory until then. I never had such
outward trouble. I eventually left the Methodist Church, taught in Benilde High School and preached
in a Presbyterian church on the campus, fought most of my way–but never such peace in my heart,
never such freedom from inward conflict.

Maybe a year or two later I spoke in tongues in my own apartment, but that is nothing. Don’t get
caught up with spiritual games. They don’t matter. Don’t get caught up with demons and all that
stuff. The Holy Spirit came to cleanse our hearts and make us pure within, and somehow when you are
cleansed and your heart is pure, then you are ready to be used by God. Loved ones, until then He
doesn’t bother telling you what to do in your life. God doesn’t waste words when He knows fine well
you can’t hear Him, or if you do hear Him you won’t obey Him anyway. God is only able to tell you
what to do with your life when you get through to whatever you want to call it. I frankly think
“fullness of the Spirit” is maybe one of the best word because, in a sense, the Spirit has come into
you when you were born of God but He isn’t filling you completely. Whether you call it the fullness
of the Spirit, baptism of the Spirit, a clean heart, full surrender or full consecration, it doesn’t
matter.

The fact is, most of us have had the same kind of experience as Saul on the Damascus road. We met
Jesus as Savior and then there was a gap before we met Him as our Lord. Only when we were ready to
meet him as the Lord of our life and allow Him to take over our lives completely was He able to fill
us with His Spirit. It is only then that power comes into your life–power for service. I would just

tell you God has given us a great vision. We are a privileged people. It really doesn’t matter
whether you are just a little one starting off in the body; we have a very clear and exciting
vision. It is not a vision that actually anybody needs to back off; it is just a vision of getting
10,000 of us living abroad, doing our jobs, involved together in businesses or schools for Jesus.
Any of us can take part in that.

Here is the point: you would just be a hindrance if you are not filled with the Holy Spirit. You
would just be a hindrance until your heart is clean. But when your heart is clean and when you have
entered into that crucifixion with Christ, Jesus will baptize you with the Holy Spirit and you will
have power to do things you cannot do at the present. Until you are baptized with the Holy Spirit,
you really will not only have a powerless life on the outside, but you will have an impure, defeated
life on the inside.

Now loved ones, there is no mystery to it. You just start seeking Him. The first thing I did was to
settle in my mind that the Bible promised this. The Bible said, “Blessed are the pure in heart, for
they will see God.” The Bible promises clean hearts. Acts 15:9: “And God who knows the heart bore
witness to them, giving them the Holy Spirit just as he did to us; and he made no distinction
between us and them, but cleansed their hearts by faith.” “Create in me a clean heart, 0 God, and
renew a right spirit within me.” The first thing is to settle: Does God want this in your life? The
second thing is to go for it with all your heart and not to pity self or cry over self or protest
that you have a right to sin or rationalize your sin. The` thing is to go for it with all your
heart. God will answer. Jesus promised, “Blessed are they that hunger and thirst after righteousness
for they shall be filled.”

For those of us who want to continue the old half-life, where we want to be good Jews who have our
sins forgiven but do not have victory over sin, the Bible doesn’t give much reassurance. That’s up
to you if you choose that life. I don’t know that it is actually an alternative. I think you either
go all or nothing. You have to decide. It doesn’t matter how long it takes you. It doesn’t matter
even if you are in it this moment– but are you hungering for it?

If you say to me, “Well, brother, if you are going to keep at this I’ll have to leave” –well, you
can choose whether to leave or not. You don’t have to leave. It seems to me what God wants is a body
of brothers and sisters who love each other and are understanding and tender towards each other and
give each other all the time in the world to get the victory. God wants a group of people who are
hungering after this with all their hearts. It is not whether you are in it or not, but whether you
are hungering after it. John Wesley used to ask the preachers who were going to candidate for him,
“Are you hungering with all your heart for cleanness and purity within?” He didn’t say, “Are you
crucified with Christ?” but “Are you hungering for this with all your heart?” That’s what I’d say to
you. Are you hungering for this with all your heart? If you are, then welcome to the family, and let
us go for purity and cleanliness and for the fullness of the Holy Spirit.

Minneapolis, MN, USA – 1980