TESTIMONY
AJ Nichols: Free Indeed
By Gorman Woodfin
The 700 Club
CBN.com
– "I was just doing anything I could to have sex with someone."
AJ Nichols loved to party. He lived a wild lifestyle of sex and drugs, in part to make up for his lonely childhood. He grew up fatherless. His mom and dad divorced when he was six months old.
"I felt a real void in my life, because of my dad’s lack of participation," AJ tells The 700 Club. "We didn’t really have much of a relationship. I remember wishing that I had a dad a lot."
He went to church as a boy; he even prayed to become a Christian. But as he grew older, he turned to drugs to find fulfillment.
"Started with marijuana, and then from there my drug use escalated. I started doing LSD.
From LSD I moved on to ecstasy. I started going to raves at about that point."
Along with the drugs, he began experimenting with sex. He recalls, "I felt this emptiness. I had such a lack of male affection in my life. I would always want to make what I called 'best friends' with guys that were in my life. That actually ended up growing into an obsession with their affection, because I was so hungry for that. It got twisted up somehow."
AJ eventually turned this desire for the same sex into physical relationships.
"For me, being gay wasn’t gay at all, because I was actually miserable inside. I was every day waking up having to do drugs just to get through my day."
When AJ reached his lowest point, he checked himself into a rehab program. He says, "I did learn about a relationship with God, and I learned so many foundational things that still help me every day. But there was still this lack, because deep inside I still had these homosexual urges. I still had the desire for intimacy with other men."
Even though he recommitted himself to Christ, he still had major issues that were controlling his life.
"Eventually I couldn’t deal with the struggles anymore. I got on the Internet, and I started looking for people to meet up with, looking for quick sex I knew deep down inside that what I was doing was wrong, but I didn’t know how to stop. I didn’t know how to quit."
Even when he was living as a homosexual, AJ knew he needed God in is life and went to church.
"It changed everything," he says. "When I realized that He really loved me. It was His love for me that was motivating me more than anything.
I would work my job, I would come home and just press into God. I would spend a lot of time alone with God. I would read my Bible and pray. That was my whole life at that point. So I just prayed a simple prayer, 'Lord, would you fill me with Your Holy Spirit?' I had no idea what was about to happen. It was like the most intense love that I’ve ever felt before.
I didn’t realize that you could feel that with God. I heard people talk about the joy of the Lord a lot. But I just somehow didn’t realize that it was a tangible joy."
After that prayer, AJ says he was able to step out of the homosexual lifestyle.
"The number one thing that helped me was just to believe that God will change this in your life. For me, I never believed that God would actually set me free from this. I thought that it was something I would have to struggle with for the rest of my life.
"If you want to be free, God will set you free. 'He who the Son sets free is free indeed.'"
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