Carter Price's Testimony

Carter Price's Testimony

Several years ago I had prayed one night and asked the Lord to send someone to me that could tell me where I could find the truth in a world that didn’t seem to offer any.  A short time after that the company I worked for hired a manager for the night shift and after a while of working with him I came to realize that he was the person whom God sent in answer to my prayer.  He spoke the Word of God to me and it became clear it was the truth I had been looking for.  We continued to build a friendship over a few years and one year I accompanied him and his wife to a ministers convention held by The Fishermen Ministry at a place called Grace Ranch in Texas.  By the weeks end I was baptized by water and fire and was told by a man named Richard Eutsler Sr. that one day I would be traveling on the highways and byways preaching the Gospel.  Six years later I moved from Colorado to Grace Ranch to do the very thing Richard envisioned.  I have lived at Grace Ranch now for 18 months and have experienced a great multitude of things that have been very different for me.  To keep this testimony under fifty pages I will mention just three things I thought to be the most significant.

First, I will start with grace.  Before moving to Grace Ranch I had spent the better part of the previous fifteen years living by myself and I didn’t think much about how a persons actions affect other people.  I didn’t even think about it when I was around other people whether at work, or with family or friends. Since I moved to Grace Ranch I have been living with more than twenty people and I’ve needed to learn to live and work with them as one body on a daily basis.  Oh, how quickly I saw my need for grace.  Not only from God but from those I now live with because of how my selfish actions and my failure to do right affects others naturally, emotionally, financially, and spiritually;  what I do affects the things they were trying to accomplish.  Hence the desperate need for grace.  And the grace of God has covered every lousy move I have made and will continue to cover every lousy move I will make in the future.  And since we are saved by grace, I would say, experiencing grace in the manner that I have here, from God and others over and over again, as ugly as it may feel to fail, is a process that experiencing has made it well worth leaving the life I had behind.  As hard as it may have been to walk away from the life I had at the time, I knew it was, and still is, critical for me to learn that the grace of God is sufficient for me without any doubt.  I bet that I would have never seen the abundant need for grace, to the measure that I see it now at least so far, if I had never moved here.  Nor would I have had such an opportunity to see it working in my life, and in others’ lives, simply because it is pointed out often by those around me.  Most importantly, living here at Grace Ranch has provided the best chance for me to learn how to receive it and then stand in it.  My hope has been strengthened, since moving here, that I will be able to stand in the grace of God on my day before the Lord.

Secondly, I have experienced the love of God here at the ranch more so in the last year than probably the previous forty-five years of my life put together.  Both in the ways of tough love, through the truth of the gospel, by being corrected when I am wrong in word or deed, and being watched over for my well being and needs not just naturally but spiritually as well.  Simply by being face to face with people who are part of the body of Christ and living with them twenty-four seven has shown me a lot about the difference between the love of God and the love of man.

Last, but not least, is the mercy of God and how His mercies have worked in the lives of all of us here.  I knew God was a God of mercy, however, I had not been around many people over the years who acknowledged that they themselves knew it, and knew how much they needed it, or recognized it when they got it.  To live with several people who do speak of the mercy of God and see that they need it and recognize it when the Lord pours it out upon them has started to teach me to do more of the same than I had before.  And in return, as others receive it, they extend it to me when I need it, which is more often then I would have ever realized if I had continued to live the rest of my life by myself.

As I mentioned in the beginning I have experienced a lot of different things living here at Grace Ranch.  It is a completely new way of living, and I’ve highlighted only three:  The grace, love, and mercy of God and how these blessings have become so much more clear to me.  I see more perfectly now how much I need them, the importance of learning to walk in them, to receive them and to extend the love, grace and mercy of the Lord to others.