My name is Sean Swart (42 years old) and I’ve been living at Vistarus Mission Station in Port Elizabeth for almost 7 years now. My story is a modern echo of the story Jesus told in Luke (15:11-32) about the prodigal son. Do yourself a favour, go read it in the Bible. It will explain the heart of what I am about to testify to.
I grew up in an unchurched home, neither my parents were believers, nor even vaguely religious. But my grandmother loved Jesus and showed it. She would later become instrumental in my own story of finding freedom again.
I always lived with the awareness that I had a secret in my closet that I had to hide. I was different from all the other boys I knew. Since I can recall I have experienced same sex desires. In my heart I knew this was not the way things were meant to be, so I hid my feelings. I am sure everyone else knew I was different, but I thought I was hiding it well. At least I tried to. It was a shame driven endeavour that… and ultimately that pride mixed in with fear would be a dangerous trap.
I first heard the Gospel in primary school, the story of God: His holy hatred of sin, the reality of heaven and hell, the solution of Jesus. The gospel is much more than that, but those are the parts I grasped in the first days of forming a concept of God and eternity and the burden of my guilt. Each time I heard of it, my heart would respond, but because I was not yet grounded in Biblical truth, learned from regular church attendance, I didn’t form assurance of salvation in the first years where I would hear of Jesus and called on His Name. Even reading the Bible confounded me. I remember in school looking at this complicated book with numbers for the first time, not even owning one myself, wondering how it works.
My family didn’t attend church like other families. I remember how scared and ashamed I felt when a primary school teacher asked the class about their church affiliation for some administrative purpose. I had none, and this confirming my fear that I was odd, somehow weird and lesser. Yet, scattered through all these years of secret, inward shame, when I heard of Jesus, I longed to understand salvation, but it never really clicked until high school. On 13 September 1992 my gran and I attended an evangelical meeting. And I responded to that altar call, as I had a few times before, throughout my life on those occasional times I would go with Gran to church. Things were different now, as I had a bicycle, and I was able to attend the church close to my home. And I did so with regularity and enthusiasm. I had found a circle of people who loved and enjoyed me and allowed me to learn about Jesus. During this time a foundation of promise was laid in my heart as I studied God’s word.
At the end of 1994 things changed. I had just matriculated and moved from friendly Port Elizabeth to the metropolitan city of Johannesburg. The laws of our country changed, our secular constitution changed a lot of things. Much of it was right (equality of races), but being secular, it also legalised a great deal many things that were never intended for man by his Creator. Essentially, I was exposed to pornography and a whole range of activities that I knew in my heart were contrary to the truth of the Gospel. Specifically, in the backdrop to this, the LBGT movement had gained strong foothold in South Africa, and a slippery slope of postmodern secular values became enshrined in our countries relaxing moral laws. Homosexuality was not only accepted now, it was becoming increasingly celebrated in media and culture throughout the Western World. Today this worldwide agenda has become more aggressive and aims to unravel any resistance. The move to tolerance proving itself to be quite intolerant.
Of course society’s laws cannot be blamed for my disobedience, it was fully my responsibility to avoid worldly activities that dishonour and deny the Creator as highest authority. Instead, I started loving the lies of culture more than the truth of God’s ultimate standards and spent more and more time compromising and doing the very things I knew were forbidden, because these yielded immediate gratification. I ignored their damaging effects to my spiritual life, integrity and freedom. I was fast becoming a slave to the things I did. That’s what happens when you play with sin. It lurks, then lures, it deceives, then delivers its bait, it numbs, then enslaves, then destroys. This is true whether it’s pornography or any other form of sexual immorality, deception, spiritual apathy or compromise. I started a long journey straddling the fence between the Kingdom of God and the offerings of this fallen, godless world. No house divided stands, and when I started experimenting with drugs the secret in my closet broke loose and turned rogue. I broke out in defiance to all the restraints of God, as I perceived them. I believed the lie that I was defined by my own sexual desire and that what I wanted was right. Desire defined me… my feelings determined truth for me and not the other way around, as it should be. This is where the world is greatly flawed in its ways. To culture, truth is relative and men are slaves of feeling. Our feelings are cruel governors. Our hearts, when disengaged from God’s word, have no limit to the wickedness they as disposed to pursuing.
I knew that I could not hold on to two diametrically opposed worldviews. So, consciously, I rebelled and not only turned from God but became His aggressive enemy, as I had been building a resentment toward God for not allowing me to claim the right of self-identifying with a sexuality He did not condone. It’s very simple, I wanted to follow whatever thought and desire rose in my heart and rejected the notion that the Creator had any say. I also had hardened my heart to Him and quenched any possibility of faith that He was worth obeying and able to sustain me through obedience and that in fact His love was better than life (Psalm 63:3).
Thinking back now, I realise that I held very simplistic views of the bigger picture of the nature and impact of sin and redemption. I simply was not grounded deeply enough in truth to combat temptation and deception at that stage of my life. Of course, the heart follows what it delights in, and for this time, I chose sin over the Saviour, darkness over the King of Light. I was bitter, angry, rebellious, stiff-necked. I stopped searching for His truth or relying on His grace… I loved my idols and the darkness growing in my soul’s mirror more than Jesus.
In terms of a timeline of my life and spirituality, this was a very conflicted time, I can’t really draw a neat timeline here… I revelled in the feeling of exploration without bounds. The irony is that a part of me tried to hold on to God, for a while, in the sense that a person holds onto a manmade image of God (which really is no more than an idol) in his pocket, whilst partaking of more and more lies and wickedness, loving and loved by the world. I even recall being asked to read and comment on a pro-gay theology dissertation of a man whom I had befriended, who was at once an ordained Methodist minister but also an actively gay man.
It is from this man that I first heard the term “postmodern” … the concept that truth is subjective and evolving. Whether it claims belief in God or not, man is the centre of that thinking or valuing in this system of thought – what the (human) self says is right, that is what is right. Man defines God, not God defines man. [THAT ANCIENT ERROR SINCE EDEN] This friend firmly believed that the church had misinterpreted Scripture with regards homosexuality and its practise. His version of Jesus was very convenient and together we started a “gay house church”, promoting these ideas. Strange times indeed. Frightening now that I look back. This was the phase where I convinced myself that I can have it all, my sinful way along with God’s blessing… This is the state that many in the Western Church are slipping into, playing with forms of godliness, whilst denying the power of the Cross.
This proves to me that one can disseminate Scripture and come up with all kinds of twisted lies that suits the conscience yet not actually be loyal to the God of Scripture and Truth Himself. How easy it is to be deceived, holding the Bible in your hand but not having the Word in your heart. This season did not last, I kept moving deeper into the darkness through my behaviours. Eventually, as I said before, my growing lust encountered the fuel of drugs and this tore off the last restraints that kept my life even vaguely stable. I made a series of conscious decisions to break with Truth as it was no longer convenient.
More so, the drugs gave me the boldness of insanity whereby I could admit seething hatred of God’s holy terms. Pride and deception had been hiding a building bitterness toward my Maker for years. I chose to turn my back on Him, to actively rebel, to blaspheme His Name and corrupt everything good. I was something of a loose cannon, but for me it was very real. It had become my mission to destroy the hope I had known in my youth. I slept around, I didn’t care what the consequences for me or others were, I hated God and I showed it with flagrant insolence. I naturally became exposed to HIV, but I didn’t care. I revelled in the idea of casting off all moral restraint in pursuit of perverse pleasure, I kept wanting to go deeper, closer to the edge of the abyss, from which there could be no coming back.
All the good of my earlier years had come undone and I loved my sin more than life. I took up theft and church vandalism as a secret hobby. My dealings became progressively more perverted. For the sake of thoroughness I must insert here that I turned to blatantly occult and Satanic practices. I am not going to dwell much on this, here, but I insert it to prove how dark things became, how compromise had turned to rebellion, how much of an enemy of God one can become when you don’t live in His light and take seriously the dangers of sin or value truly the work of the Cross. I did so many evil things back in those days… Now, I can thank God I didn’t manage to do all the things I sought to do. But certainly, this was a madness that no man should play with. Once I crossed a line in my soul, I gave up thought that I could ever come back. There was no way I would be able to find my own way out that dark place by myself…and for the most parts, I didn’t want to.
Of course, we reap what we sow, and there came a few torturous points where my family, friends and colleagues would eject me from their orbits, some out of disgust, but mostly with sorrow and the need to self-preserve. They didn’t recognize the animal I had become. I left Johannesburg. Tried to restart my life without God in Cape Town, that didn’t last and the dog returned to its vomit, soon enough. The cycle continued, orbit of decay spiralled faster this time. Health wise, I was running out of time. And so, leaving Cape Town, with the last options failing, I ended up in the city of my birth, Port Elizabeth. The kingdom of darkness and now the world was about to spit me out, I had outlived my usefulness even to the evil I had worshipped. Professionally I was bust. Physically I was falling apart. Suffering from the second bout of TB, stage four AIDS. Early signs of dementia. Physically incontinent. The world had spat me out and I was left in the proverbial ditch waiting for death.
After even being ejected at most shelters in Port Elizabeth, I was finally dropped off at Vistarus Mission Station. It was a place where people come to have their lives restored by finding God. I was there, but I had no interest or hope to reconcile with God. I was an empty husk of a man, my soul cold and broken and disconnected. Physically alive, but even that was running out. After a few months at the Centre, I was drug dry, but still slowly dying, for all intents and purposes. My spirit was dead and my failing body was booked into a frail care centre. (Vistarus was was not equipped to medically serve people like me.) I considered suicide secretly so often.
I tried once but couldn’t figure out how to do the knot to hang myself. Pathetic. See, I lived alone in an abandoned bungalow because no one could deal with living in the same space with this this smelly, incontinent mess. I can remember being taunted by small children if they’d discover I’d had a gastric episode in the passage, which happened way too often. Early stages of dementia were also diagnosed at the local clinic. I needed someone to keep reminding me to take my washing in, get supper, go shower, etc. This was my rock bottom. Used up, washed up, alone, lonely, unwanted, scorned, cast down.
Have you read the story in Luke 15:11-32 yet, about the prodigal who ended up living among the pigs? Ironically, or perhaps prophetically, the bungalow that I lived in during what I had considered to be my last days was called the “Vark Hok”, or “Pig Pen”. Derelict, soon to be demolished, just like my life…
I can remember, even in my foggy thinking, this was my “no man’s land”… that final slope before death. I knew that pursuing the dark things of the occult placed me a risk of betrayal by those powers… and there I was. Spat out by my former lovers, human and not. Indeed, I did not end up getting “all the kingdoms of the world” if I would worship the Evil One. And as a joke, having been used up, even the darkness cast me out… That’s how I felt. Drugs will do that to any man. But I had a somewhat deeper story line than just the danger of active chemical addiction. Mine was a triple alliance of sexual perversion, chemical and spiritual bondage…
And then the thing that once lived in a closet in my soul, once loud and proud, beaten down now, waiting for its host to die, just like the virus in my blood… This was the dead end I had reached after drugs, rebellion, pride, lust, pornography, occult, vandalism, self-will and thievery. If you ask anyone from Vistarus, I was a rambling, confused, not someone you wanted to spend any time with. Kids teased me, scoffing because I was the guy who couldn’t make it to the toilet in time.
I knew what I had done, the cost of my guilt, so I believed God would never take me back. I had gone too far… These were my sombre thoughts, even as Vistarus would send me for medical check-ups at the Clinic, arranging a disability grant for me. The grant was arranged so I could be booked into a Frail Care facility. Frail care, as much as I ignored its looming, meant the last short lap was approaching. Suicidal thoughts wandered in an out my mind. Days became long, empty, meaningless… to the point where I’d have to ask multiple times daily what day of week it was. I had lost my internal point of reference. I didn’t feel human anymore. More like a soulless body just wanting to eat something and sleep, but grimly waiting for the last night. I think it was in this time where I started having epileptic seizures… I vaguely remember waking up with bruises on my face a few times, in the dark outside my bungalow… another time on a hospital bed…dazed and confused.
But then one evening a group of people from an outside church came to share the Gospel in 1 to 1 manner, as was their regular arrangement. Among them, there was a police woman, a lady named Adri. I am not sure why I didn’t get to see them sooner after my arrival at Vistarus, because even though much of that time is hazy to me, theoretically I was supposed to have seen these people early on in my stay. However, this must have been by God’s design: He needed to unravel me first, bring me right to the edge of myself, so I would stop fighting His grace. I can remember seeing the lady that Thursday night. I was actually lucid and talkative when we met. She was friendly. She asked me my story… I knew why she was there… I knew where she was taking this conversation… but I was done fighting, all I could be was honest.
I spoke openly about my past. She was a stranger, she was safe and didn’t seem shocked by the details of my past. I also poured out to this policewoman all the reasons why God could not possibly love me, why He couldn’t possibly draw me back to Himself. I wasn’t arguing for the sake of arguing. I knew God was real. I believed Jesus had died on the cross. I believed in heaven and hell. I knew I had sinned and was convinced that I had gone way too far for this Saviour to save me. I was no longer arrogant, but I held nothing back, I didn’t sugar coat my sin. I had fought with Heaven and lost, and admitted it. I had resigned myself to slipping away and that was that, I thought.
At our last session she asked if I wanted to pray and give my heart to Jesus. I remember hesitating before simply saying, “Sure, we can pray”. So we did. It was a sincere prayer, but not very hopeful on my part… Yes, I wanted relief for my soul, I wanted peace… but I honestly didn’t think God would accept the prayer. Why would He forgive me? I knew what I had done… Surely He wouldn’t… It was like sending a letter to the President of America or the Queen of England – it wouldn’t be received, it wouldn’t be read, it certainly wouldn’t receive a reply. But I prayed with her, asking for forgiveness. That was the Thursday night.
Then came the following Sunday night. Up to that point I would dread going to church. This time things were different. I usually kept to the back, rolling my eyes at the message, wanting it to pass. This night was different, I stood in the front row for some reason. I mention it, as no one around me could really see what was happening on my face. The pastor played the guitar in worship, starting on song that I knew from the days before my rebellion. It was a song I used to love singing… I listened to the song, then started singing along quietly… something I had not done for a very long time. I don’t think I sang very loudly, because I think I knew how unworthy I was to sing. At one point, I closed my eyes and a longing came to my heart, a desire to behold, one last time… I wanted to enter the Presence to behold Him, but had no right. Eyes closed, no one watching, I lifted my cupped hands before my chest and whispered softly the first unprompted prayer in years, “I know I may never come home again, but may I see the Throne one more time, may I offer worship one last time… Whatever happens after this, I accept…” Simple… honest… childlike…but no expectation, no pushing or shoving or demanding… I had no rights. He wouldn’t answer, I thought.
But He did. He spoke… Not with thunder or lightning, but with words welling up in my heart and spilling past my lips with authority not my own, “If I have forgiven you, then I have forgiven you. Come back.” Invisible, deep inside, without loudness or drama seen by anyone outside, I lifted my hands and sang from the heart, again, after so very long, to the King of all Creation. Inside, in my heart, I had stepped into His invisible presence. I tasted His mercy, able in that moment to worship again honestly. Deep within I had come alive again. I sang with conviction now, I couldn’t hold it back. I was pardoned and my heart alive again to God. I must admit, I kept this secret, I didn’t run telling anyone, at first. I wasn’t even really sure what this meant, but I had a brief audience with the very King Whose glory I had blasphemed for so long, and there was mercy, there was kindness and grace. I had access to the Father again, peace and hope and joy had seeded in the secret place of my heart. I could pray again. Now, when I sat in spiritual classes, instead of falling asleep right in front of the pastor, I was fully alert. Scripture leapt of the notes and resonated with my heart again.
That moment the course all my own undoing changed, my heart turned 180 degrees, my mind started clearing, something deep inside broke into His light as He regenerated me sovereignly by His Spirit. His Words made sense again. Light came in. My soul could exult again in the King. My health turned the corner. Hope revived. My spirit touched Life Himself and was thirsty again for Truth. Today, I am alive, because of Jesus. Eventually I lost my disability grant as I didn’t die from the AIDS that had ravaged me before. I care about right and wrong again, objective truth holds authority, His will is better mine, the insanity of my will subdued. An ongoing process, to be sure, but really happening. I love this incredibly merciful Saviour. My family relationships are restored today. My perspective continues to clarify, I have sustainable purpose and meaning. I experience daily grace and hope.
In Christ I have access to perfect love, strong peace and resilient joy and lasting purpose. I live because He lives, it is well with me in every way that really matters, forever. The journey has not always been easy, but God as Father is unmatched in His patience and wisdom, He keeps proving Himself faithful and true… I have learned to find my identity in the Father and what Jesus has done, and am able to walk uprightly in obedience. Although I still experience temptation and same-sex desire, I am not defined by it. It is not my core identity. Jesus is. I can live free from engaging in a lifestyle I had thought previously was not only my right, but inescapable. I am able to live celibate and faithful to Jesus. I am able to say no to drugs and pornography, something I had never thought would be possible, before. God has been Fathering me ever since. He continues to build and restore the parts of my mind and heart and personality and life I thought were forfeit, but now, on His terms, renewing in the image of this precious and breathtakingly patient Jesus.
I have never thought I would be a father to anyone, but now have the privilege with the help of Vistarus Mission Station of fostering an abandoned 14 year old young man, called Alfie. I never thought I would be of worth to anyone again, I am now working for the same Christian organisation who took me close to my end, when no one else would. I am learning to navigate the daily challenges of life without grasping the old lies and idols. I praise God Who truly has not only saved me from myself and all the warped lies of the old life, but Who is restoring the least worthy person. God is so good, He is so holy, and that is beautiful and terrifying and wonderful and liberating at the same time. Jesus gave me a washed, sanctified, justified new life and identity rooted in truth… He will do that for who anyone who comes to the end of themselves and let the Creator be God, those willing to forsake their life to follow His. God is as merciful as He is holy, as real as He is wise, as much Father as He is the LORD. Jesus is the Way and the treasure of life. There is no other name like His. “I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us.” Romans 8:18
This was the personal testimony of Sean Swart. We hope that it touched you the way it touched us and so many others. Sean, thank you for sharing this with Jesus to my Rescue Ministries and the whole world. Let us all continue standing in prayer for Sean. If this testimony touched you and you want this same powerful, merciful and forgiving Jesus in your life, please click here now! You can contact Jesus to my Rescue Ministries at support@jesustomyrescue.com