Testimony Tuesday: Surrendering to God’s conviction

By Bella Agnello

Alivia Jones is learning to desire God’s conviction. She knows that through conviction, God will make her heart look more like his. And as she surrenders to God, he reveals his heart to her and draws her into deeper compassion for others. Now studying Exercise Science at Cedarville University, Jones looks back on her life and reflects on God’s faithfulness.

Jones grew up in Maine as a pastor’s kid. She experienced a lot of pressure to be perfect and began to pressure herself in that way, too. Crumbling under this weight, she grew more defiant and made poor decisions.

Yet, almost every night, Jones prayed that God would forgive her from her sins. It was not until she was 12 years old that God would convict her through a sermon about Hell.

“I always knew about Hell growing up, but I didn’t have assurance that I’m going to be in Heaven,” Jones said. “In my head, I had it ingrained that my salvation was dependent on what I could do, and it wasn’t dependent on the Lord.”

Wrestling with the message later that night, Jones sat in the bathroom and talked to her parents about salvation.

“I remember finally nailing it down,” Jones said. “There’s literally nothing I can do. I just have to believe.”

Even with this new understanding, Jones still viewed salvation as a “Get Out of Hell Free Card.” Her life did not start to change until a few years later when COVID hit. She saw God breaking down her walls to expose sin issues.

“This is so crazy to admit now, but I genuinely thought that I had no sin,” Jones said. “I just accepted Jesus because I needed a way out of Hell.”

Jones’ prayer life grew in response to what God revealed in her. Instead of just praying about the problems her friends had, she prayed for God to intervene in her own life and make her look more like him.

As God convicted her and taught her wisdom, Jones’ relationships with her family started to change. She grew closer to her mom by looking to her for wisdom, and her love for her sister grew as she spent more time with them.

“My relationship with everybody around me started to change when my relationship with God started to change,” Jones said.

God led Jones to surrender more of her life to him. Soccer is one of her biggest passions. In high school he revealed that soccer had become an idol.

“God just started working, but my stubborn nature resisted that,” Jones said. “God in his grace kept chasing me down.”

Jones broke one of her ankles, sprained both ankles multiple times, tore both ligaments in her knees and got a concussion – all within two years.

“I was really mad at God because as a high schooler soccer was all I wanted to do,” Jones said. “God used that to show me he is so much more important and he’s so much more worth it.”

Jones found encouragement in Isaiah 27:3-5, where God promises to expose idols in order to protect his people, draw them close and bring them peace.

“When I do start to produce thorns and briars, he’s gonna work against it,” Jones said. “I just have to come to the point where it’s like, ‘Ok, I want to make peace with you. I want to follow you.’”

Jones stopped fighting and let God teach her how to become more dependent upon him, and to let him become her greatest passion.

“The coolest thing about sanctification is as he shows you piece by piece about who you are he in turn shows you more of him and it makes you fall more and more in love with him,” Jones said.

During her senior year, Jones looked for colleges to attend. The one that kept coming to mind was Word of Life Bible Institute. Jones’ parents went there, and though she did not want to leave home, she felt led to go there in the fall.

“No amount of encouragement or hyping it up got me excited,” Jones said. “It was more just like, ‘Ok, here we go.’”

At Word of Life, Jones experienced blessings upon blessings. Despite her previous injuries, she was able to join the soccer team and lasted an entire season almost injury free. And, she had the opportunity to spend four days street evangelizing in New York City with her classmates. Though sharing the gospel in a major city proved challenging, God grew her heart for people by letting her cross paths with an elderly Jewish man. They talked for a while about Judaism and Christianity before the man thanked her and went on his way.

“I remember watching him walk away and my heart just breaking because I was like, ‘He’s right there – he knows everything,’” Jones said. “I don’t think I’d ever really felt so heavy for the lost before that.”

Jones started praying that God would give her such a love for people that would move her to evangelism.

“It’s hard to adequately evangelize if you don’t have a heart for people because then your heart’s not in it,” Jones said. “I’m not just evangelizing because I’m told to, I’m doing it because I love the Lord and love people.”

During her spring semester, Jones started thinking about her plans for the future. She planned to only attend Word of Life for a year and then enroll in the community college near her home. That is, until Dr. White came to teach on Ephesians in one of her classes. She heard about Cedarville University several years prior, but she began considering it as an option for the first time.

Jones sent in her application to Cedarville in March and prayed for God’s plan to be revealed. The next day, she got an email saying she got accepted. Not only that, but God worked out the finances, and she met her current roommate at Word of Life.

“God totally worked out all the pieces and made it doable in a way that I never could have if I tried to work it out on my own,” Jones said.

Jones is studying Exercise Science. She plans to go back to the New England area to be near family, and she wants to work in a secular environment to share the gospel.

God is still working on Jones’ heart by convicting her to seek out more gospel opportunities and teaching her to surrender her desires to him. She is leaning into Philippians 3:10, where Paul says his goal is to “know [God] and the power of his resurrection, and may share his sufferings, becoming like him in his death.”

“He’s continuing to reveal my weaknesses and then show me more of who he is,” Jones said. “It’s so cool to look back at where I was five, six years ago and be like, ‘Wow, this is what I knew then. This is what I know now.’ And it’s even cooler to think that that’s how it’ll be five, 10, 15, 20 years from now. I’ll just continue to look back and be like, ‘Wow, look at all that God has done.’”

Bella Agnello is a junior Broadcasting, Digital Media and Journalism major with a concentration in Journalism. She enjoys thrifting, listening to records and reading classic Russian literature in her spare time.