A Life Transformed by God's Love
Manwin, English Church Plant
Manwin
My name is Manwin Sidhu, a member here at the ECP. Been part of RHC for about 10-11 years. Married to my lovely wife Kanak for 20 years. I have 3 kids—2 boys (Shaan and Kavi) aged 16 and 13, and a daughter (Lara) aged 8. And I have a younger brother who lives here in Singapore and who is also a Christian. I work in real estate private equity (22 years in finance). Most important thing about me: I love Jesus, I love this church, and I am very excited to be on mission for Jesus with all of you here at the ECP.
I would like to share two thoughts on testimonies.
(1) In this testimony, keep in mind God is the hero. Not me. God is the central figure. He is the hero. He is the miracle worker. God is the one who acted, pursued me, put events in motion. In His grace, He miraculously drew me to Himself, He removed the scales from my eyes, He saved me and made me His own. Not me. God did it all.
(2) My hope and prayer is that this testimony and evidence of God’s miraculous work in my life will be an encouragement to all of you, and that it will in some small way draw you closer to Jesus, help you remember ways in which Jesus has worked wonderfully in your life and allow you to marvel at God’s heart, His love, and majesty.
This is a story about a sinner. It is a story about a guy in search of his identity, worth, purpose and belonging. It is a story about straying away and rejecting God. It is a story about falling to anxiety-filled and guilt-ridden lows. But it is also a story about the answered prayers of faithful saints (my dear parents and younger brother). It is ultimately a story of victory—God’s grace and victory in pursing and lifting this sinner from the lows to heavenly heights.
So, on that note, let me take you back.
I was born to Christian parents (the only two Christians in our entire family at the time). Because of my dad’s job, we moved around the world quite a bit when I was growing up from the age of 7 to 18. It wasn’t easy moving so much – making friends, losing friends. But the one constant and foundation for me was my family – my mother, father and brother. We were a closely knit family. While my parents identified as Christians, I don’t recall us having a particularly active church life—Sunday service was quite irregular, and a church community was noticeably absent for me growing up. But when I look back, God was already planting some early seeds. I vividly remember my mother praying for my brother and for me in the evening before bedtime and in the morning before school. I recall on many occasions, my mother diligently engrossed in her Bible. I remember my father reciting the Lord’s prayer from time to time. In hindsight, I am grateful to my parents for teaching my brother and me stories from the Bible, modeling prayer and showing us what spiritual disciplines looked like.
When I was young (right through to high school), I found it difficult to make close friends. Constantly moving and being one of the new kids in school didn’t help. In addition, I struggled with my weight, often mocked and teased for being overweight. It affected my confidence and self-esteem. As a result, from a young age, I struggled with my identity, constantly seeking and searching for attention from the world outside of home. While I saw my parents exercising their faith at home, my walk with God from childhood, right through to National Service, university and through my 20s was a back-and-forth mess—no consistency whatsoever. For one, I had never once read the Bible. I would sometimes seek God in prayer during the tough seasons of stress and difficulty, mimicking how my parents prayed. But I would easily flip the other way too, wandering away from God, not praying, when things were going well in my life, choosing instead to lean on my own abilities. There were even times when I flat out rejected God, questioning the Biblical truths and promises that I had learned as a child. If I am perfectly honest, I had no relationship with God.
Then came national service and university in the US—a new chapter in my life and my first taste of freedom living apart from my family. That was a formative stage of my life where I started to build some self-confidence and come out of my shell. It was a season filled with some positive milestones. I learned to live on my own. The best thing that happened was that I met my now wife Kanak in college—we started dating. I graduated with a degree in Systems Engineering and Economics. I became a life-long Philadelphia sports fan. I also met a great group of guys and we formed a close relationship – we are still close to this day. This was big for me, because I had always been craving a community of some kind, and these guys helped to meet some of that need. But life in university was also filled with some not-so-good moments. I was still very preoccupied with wanting to be accepted, seeking the approval from others, wanting to be popular, seeking some sort of identity and belonging—something that had been lacking for much of my life till that point. I was always so sensitive about what people thought of me. These were some of the insecurities that I continued to struggle with. I still craved being part of the “in crowd.” While I started to “fit in” a bit more with my new group of friends during my college days, this season of life perpetuated destructive and unpleasant behaviour. I did things I am not proud of. I struggled with lust and pornography. Excessive partying and alcohol consumption. I would mock others and put them down in the way I had been treated as a child and teen. I was constantly behaving in a way to make myself feel superior and at the expense of others. Most notably, my faith life in university was completely inactive—the dial was turned to zero. I had no time for God in my life. All I cared about was my reputation and how people perceived me. College for me could have ended quite badly. I did not make good decisions—even cheated on an exam, but I know now looking back that God was there, watching over me, guiding me, ensuring I would not completely implode. I know this because my mother told me many years later after I had come to Christ that she had prayed for me constantly, as did my father and brother.
After university, in 2000 I moved to New York to start a job on wall street. Kanak and I got married in 2003. This was another chapter of my life with both ups and downs. A career in finance can be a dangerous one filled with temptation—full of ego-feeding prestige and promise of great wealth. I dove right in and embraced it. I was ok at my job (not great at it), but I sure liked making money. I was addicted to making money. But what I had never seemed to be enough. I kept wanting to make more and more and out-do my peers. And this kept feeding my pride and arrogance. I was like one of those stereotypical, arrogant, egotistical investment banker types you see in the movies. I was not a pleasant person to be around. I was living a life defined by material possessions, partying, alcohol. Again, I had no interest in God. I was worshiping money, fame and the New York lifestyle. Don’t get me wrong, I was having fun, but deep down in my heart, I was unfulfilled, something was still missing. I was still searching for something more. I was still searching for identity, purpose, belonging, and approval from people to tell me that I was worth something.
Kanak and I moved to Tokyo in 2006 and then to Singapore in 2008. Throughout these early years of my working life, there were times of intermittent off-and-on prayer, but a lot of that prayer was very empty, Scripture-less and lacked “heart.” When I look back, even during the difficult seasons living in New York, Tokyo, and Singapore when I felt like I needed God, I didn’t really love God and honour Him for who He is. I never looked to the Bible for spiritual nourishment, and I didn’t really know Jesus as my personal Lord and Saviour.
So, here I was in Singapore—married, with kids, working a new job—a very high-strung, high-pressure and stressful job in finance. At this point, I was around 30 years old and I was still struggling with the same old things in my heart that had plagued me all my life. Pile onto all of that—the pressures of being a husband and father, and the pressures of needing to prove my worth at a new job, a job where I was surrounded by highly capable over-achievers. My escape and outlets were still the same—alcohol, partying till 2-3 am in the morning, pornography, fits of anger and rage at work and at home. At this point in my life, I really struggled with anxiety. The pressures of work and needing to be a strong, capable husband and father was eating away at me. I also felt a tremendous amount of guilt and shame for not being the fully engaged and loving father and husband that I wanted to be, that I knew I needed to be. There were periods where I would hide in a corner and just cry because I didn’t know what to do and how to manage it all. I wasn’t able to hold it all together. I was also afraid to speak to anyone and get help because I didn’t want to look weak. This was me at the utter lowest. At that point, I recognised that my lifestyle was leaving me unsatisfied. Anxiety, anger, frustration, guilt, and shame were all getting the better of me. I knew that I needed change in my life, but I wasn’t sure how to go about it.
About 10-11 years ago, a friend of mine from college (John Kim) invited me to RHC. Around the same time, my brother moved to Singapore and he also started attending RHC. Two people within the span of a few weeks had invited me to this church. So, I decided to go check it out one Sunday, partly because two people had mentioned it to me and partly because something inside me was saying that I needed God at this point in my life. Something was pulling me to church on that one particular Sunday.
Right from the first Sunday at RHC, what immediately struck me was the warmth and love of the community, the people (goes back to my long search for belonging) and the quality of the preaching (thank you Simon Murphy). The first Sunday led to a second Sunday. That led to another Sunday, and another Sunday. God kept bringing me back. Before I knew it, I was regularly attending Sunday services. God started working in my life and I felt my heart slowly softening towards Him. No more rejection and de-prioritising Him. In fact, quite the opposite—I wanted to know Him more. For the first time in my life, I started reading my Bible regularly. I started attending a weekly Tuesday morning men’s group in Raffles Place. I joined a CG—hosted by the lovely Alex and Keri Mitchell. I began attending monthly book studies with other men from the 1st congregation. (I remember studying John Piper’s book Desiring God with a bunch of guys from RHC. That experience had a deep and profound impact on me). I felt an incredible sense of belonging and love from all these brothers and sisters that God had placed into my life. The more I read God’s Word, the more it came alive to me. I wanted to know more about Jesus and so I dove into the Gospels of Matthew and John. As I read through these gospels and heard words directly from Jesus, I felt my love for Jesus growing as I began to comprehend what He had done on the cross.
One morning in late 2013, I was reading Romans 8 at a café near my office. And it hit me like a ton of bricks. First, I saw all the years of my sin, guilt, and shame. Then, I saw my years of searching for worth and identity weighing heavy on me. And then, I saw God’s love and saving grace abounding even more. I will never forget that morning. I was unable to hold in my emotions. I sat there and began to cry and shake uncontrollably—an out-of-body experience. I saw how great my sin, guilt, and shame was and I was overcome by the fact that Jesus Christ had suffered and had been nailed to the cross for MY sins. Jesus had taken the punishment that I deserved so that I could be set free from the shackles of sin, guilt, and shame. And all of this because of God’s immeasurable love and mercy towards me. The Gospel became so real to me that morning that I cried out in repentance— saying sorry to God for falling away from Him, saying sorry for sinning against Him, and asking Him for forgiveness. I couldn’t stop crying. God’s love for me felt so close and real that morning, so much so that I felt like a mountain of pressure and anxiety had been lifted off of me. God said to me that morning: “My son – you are mine. I love you more than you can imagine, so much so that Jesus gave His life for you. Come to me and find your rest and peace. You don’t ever, for the rest of your life, have to manufacture your own identity, purpose, worth and belonging from within yourself. I give it you freely and willingly. You find it in me.” Here was Jesus coming after me and bringing me back into God’s fold. United with Christ Jesus, God started to change my heart’s desires as well. I was no longer living to seek anyone’s approval nor looking to material things to satisfy me. Instead, I found myself wanting to respond to God’s grace in my life by living for, loving and serving Jesus who had laid His life down for me. Just like Paul writes in Romans 6—I am united to Jesus in his death, for the death he died, he died to sin, once for all, so that I am no longer enslaved to sin. At the same time, I am united with Jesus in his resurrection, walking in the newness of everlasting life, alive to God in Christ Jesus.
When I look back—people probably looked at my life from the outside and thought it looked pretty good. But little did people know that I was struggling on the inside, constantly searching for some sort of grounding and foundation. For the longest time, I was looking for it in places other than in God. But God kept pursuing. God honoured the persistent prayers of my mother, father and brother, and I’m sure of countless other people that I don’t even know. God showed up and met this sinner at his lows. After all my searching, straying from Him and rejecting Him, Jesus didn’t turn me away. Instead, He opened his arms wide and lovingly received me. He allowed me to fall to my lows before lifting me back up and back to Him, in His way, and in His timing.
My story doesn’t stop there. Those of you at RHC who have walked with me during my 10+ years here know that there have been bumps/trials along the way. But God is faithful, loving, and trustworthy. For this I know without a shadow of a doubt, my God is for me, not against me. Those are stories and testimonies for another time over coffee or a meal.
Today, my joy and satisfaction is found in lovingly serving, encouraging, and pouring into the people that God has placed in my life. God, by His grace has made me into a better husband, a better father, a better son, a better brother, a better friend, a better man in Christ. Spending so much of my life searching for community and belonging, I am so humbled and thankful to God that He has placed me into this church body at RHC and now the ECP. And I am so incredibly grateful for all the friendships formed. I have my family at home—my wife and 3 children whom I love deeply. In addition, this church, this ECP—you are my spiritual family in Christ. It is truly a joy to serve you and to walk with you on this journey Jesus has us on.
I would like to end by sharing words from an old hymn by the great Charles Wesley, which he wrote in the 1700s to celebrate his coming to faith. It’s a hymn that has always spoken deeply to me. I believe it best encapsulates my journey and expresses my heart’s response to God’s saving work.
And can it be that I should gain an interest in the Saviour’s blood?
Died He for me, who caused His pain? For me, who Him to death pursued?
Amazing love! How can it be, That Thou my God, should die for me.
He left His Father’s throne above, so free, so infinite His grace.
Emptied Himself of all but love, and bled for Adam’s helpless race.
Tis mercy all, immense and free, for O my God, it found out me.
Long my imprisoned spirit lay. Fast bound in sin and nature’s night.
Thine eye diffused a quick’ning ray. I woke, the dungeon flamed with light.
My chains fell off, my heart was free. I rose, went forth and followed Thee.
No condemnation now I dread. Jesus, and all in Him is mine!
Alive in Him, my living Head. And clothed in righteousness divine.
Bold I approach the eternal throne. And claim the crown, through Christ my own.
Amazing love! How can it be. That Thou my God, should die for me?
This is God’s story for my life. Only the resurrected Jesus can do such deep-rooted, radical, transformative work at the heart level that I have experienced. Thank you for listening. I hope it has been an encouragement to all of you. All praise to Jesus Christ, to the glory of God the Father!