Stano got to know living Jesus Christ without any encouragement of the church, but he also had a long period of life in the church. He is married, has two daughters and lives in Brezno. He started to read the bible trying to find mistakes and prove that so-called God´s word doesn´t work in real life. However, God´s word started to change his life and he found that Jesus Christ is alive and the bible is a true, perfect and still topical book. He recognized that life with Jesus is the victory and realised that God accepts us the way we are and loves us with unconditional love. Jesus Christ can change our lives when we give ourselves to him and mainly, he sets us free. How the Lord Jesus changed Stano´s life by setting him free from addiction, you can read from his testimony:
Before I got to know the Lord, my life ran in a completely different direction, which now, after a certain time, I can see as the wrong course, but at that time it was the best way of life I could know. Since my childhood, I was attracted by mysterious things such as the unkonwn, universe, caves, chemicals, from which I tried to make some explosives. Then I got into puberty and as a young 15-year-old boy I realized the difference between what the adults taughts us at school and in the family and also in the way they lived. I started to recognize that their speech and their deeds were completely different, just like as the saying goes “they preach water but they drink wine“.
I started to be disappointed and rebellious against the society, because the righteousness I believed in was not there. At that time I met a man who taught me, because I was interested in spiritualism and mystery, how to evoke spirits and it markedly influenced my life. I was deeply involved in this for three years, which changed and orientated my mind in darkness. That´s why I rebelled against society and the regime and began to prefer anarchy.
My friend and I established the punk movement and began to spread rebellion. Many people joined us and so we were followed by the policemen. In fact, this way of life had its dark side: addiction to alcohol, practicing karate, fights, harming people, in which developed a certain pride giving me authority among people and success. At that time I saw it as my personal growth and development and that it was me who knew exactly what to do and what not to do. I established my own rules and principles that made me happy and that way of life seemed really good for me. Because of that way of life, my life was sliding and it was visible at school and in my behaviour towards my peers, elders and parents. Actually, I stopped understanding other people and my friends were just those, who believed in the same things as me – punk and rebellion against the society, fights …
It was like a magic circle, which I didn´t try to escape from until the moment my mother discovered that I evoked spirits and she said we couldn´t live together under one roof. Because she was a believer, she gave me the bible to read. But I didn´t understand it and because it didn´t tell me anything, I stopped reading it and let it be. Meanwhile, I grew up and joined the army, where I met one man, a fellow soldier, who was able to swing a key with his eyes. We all were excited and I said that I was able to do greater things by evoking spirits, had mysterious
powers and they wanted to know more about it so I showed them how to evoke spirits. Some of them made fun of me, some were afraid.
Soldiers were afraid of keeping guard and it caused chaos in a military unit because the commanders were not able to manage the situation caused by the new phenomenon. Many were imprisoned in order to suppress this activity, but nothing happened to me. I was respected by other soldiers and could feel protecting power, because those who had bullied me before admired me and it did me good to meet my needs and have me on their side. At that time I could feel the help of that power.
After finishing my military service, I came home and again became addicted to alcohol. I carried a little bottle of alcohol with me because I wasn´t able to go sober even to a pub. I returned to the old group of punkers, to addiction to alcohol, to practicing karate, to street fights and to harming people and lived the same kind of life as before. But at that time there was the Gentle Revolution (1989) which meant the state coup, allowing people to preach and have freedom in religion. There were several churches preaching their truth and teaching people that they were the right ones, who knew the truth and that it was necessary to join them.
Because I read the satanic bible when evoking spirits, I thought I knew the Bible very well. So I told them that they were true and knew the bible, but I criticized them for being opposed to each other, slandering and not knowing the real God and I promised to read the Bible to show them that their God is different from what they imagined. So I really started to read the Bible, which had been given to me by my mother and which I didn´t understand. So I blew the dust out of it and began to read with the aim of finding mistakes (discrepancies).
I read the verses like: “Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened.“ (Mt7,7-8) and “If you have faith as small as a mustard seed and say to the mountain: Go, throw yourself into the sea, it will obey you.“ (Lk 17,6; Mk11,23).
Because I had a lot of experience with the supernatural world, I didn´t have any doubts that these supernatural things, such as throwing the mountain into the sea, really worked. I was also deeply impressed by the verses “ who asks receives“ because I had been seeking life since my childhood and was attracted by the secrecy and unknown.
At that time I got seriously ill, had temperatures over 40 °C, had a sore throat and a bad cold. I felt so weak that I could hardly move and my first prayer was something like this: “God, if you are the same as in the Bible, I believe that you won´t have any problem healing me.“ Then I was completely healed immediately after saying the prayer.
I realized that the God who I had fought against and whom I had persecuted, was completely different from my imagination, which I had gained from believers from different christian fellowships, who presented God as someone, who rewards those who obey Him and punishes those who are disobedient. So I had thought that God should punish me because I was opposed to him, I evoked spirits, harmed other people, practiced karate or punk, was addicted to alcohol. But instead of punishment, He set me free. He had healed me from a disease. I had never heard before that God would reward in this way, even His faithful. It caused a great change in me and I recognized that God is different from how I had known Him till then and I wanted to know Him the way He really is. I had already begun to read the Bible, not to find mistakes, but to know Him more and He started to touch my life.
The first steps of getting to know Jesus Christ were accompanied by several healings in my life. I believed the gospels the way they were written and now, after a certain time, I can see that I was lucky, because I wasn´t brought to Jesus by any believer and so nobody could form me by their opinions about what God is like and how I have to live as a christian; that as a christian I cannot listen to punk, that as a christian I cannot practice karate, that as a christian I cannot drink … I wasn´t formed like this by anyone and so I read the Bible, enjoyed Jesus Christ, who healed me repeatedly, demonstrated himself in my life; I was happy and did the things that I had done all my life before. I thought it was the meaning of my life, but I realized that the more I knew Jesus Christ, the more I admitted Him into my life and the more He entered my life, addictions to alcohol and punk gradually disappeared. At that time I listened to punk all the time – when training, eating and when falling asleep. I couldn´t imagine my life without it, but I somehow didn´t miss it. It was disappearing from my life naturally. The group of friends who were like my second family, I didn´t understand anymore and I realized that the Lord was changing my life and now, after a certain time, I can see that He did it naturally without forcing me to do things that I as a christian should or shouldn´t do. He knew perfectly what I was able and ready to do and cleansed me from those things gradually in absolute freedom and I felt happy.
About two years after knowing and experiencing personally Jesus Christ, I joined one protestant church, where I went for 13 years and gradually learnt their rhetoric and practices, because every church has their own doctrinal points, and their way of knowledge by which they convert new people. There I was taught what I was allowed, what I was not allowed, what I could do as a christian and thus I started to experience the life of a believer, the life with God, but the personal contact with Jesus Christ, which I experienced at the beginning, disappeared into some theorems. I recuperated when the twin towers collapsed in America in 2001. It shook the entire world and I realized that it was the sign of the last times and who could be saved?
What I am experiencing with God now is, in fact, about morality, some keeping and guarding, with my personal joy from experiencing and knowing the freedom with Jesus Christ, who accepts me the way I am. He demonstrated himself at the beginning, although I wasn´t the righteous and perfect christian, but the opposite was true that I was bad and He accepted me the way I was. He humbled himself to me, gradually cleansed and got rid of evil; it was not because I wanted to get rid of it with my own strength or because I was encouraged to do it from the pulpit. I started to miss it and tried to seek the living God in my life, Jesus Christ, who loves me despite my faults and the bad things I had done.
With this freedom, God suddenly started to send into my life people. Unknown people, who started to open themselves to me, to speak about their problems, to cry in desperation that they couldn´t handle their situation and asked for advice. Because I didn´t want to form those people the way the church did it, and also because I could feel a lack of freedom and loss of the living God in that church, I didn´t tell them doctrinal points or what they have to or don´t have to do, but I told them about Jesus Christ who had changed my life, who loved me and accepted me despite my bad deeds and that He changed my life.
I started to lead those people this way, through my personal experience, they were impressed and wanted to meet with me to tell them more about it. Although I didn´t have any theological preparation to teach them the Bible, the Lord led me to tell them about my personal experiences and what He had done in my life and thus gradually we started to read the Bible, to pray and the Lord explained the word, to let us know what we needed for our lives at that moment and those people cried and were excited. Their lives changed and the Lord added more and more people, they came by themselves and now I know that the Holy Spirit led it as it is written in the Acts of apostles that the Holy Spirit led Peter to Cornelius and to Cornelius said that Peter would come (Acts 10, 19-22) and that the Lord used me for people, who couldn´t be touched in any other way and that I could demonstrate, by my life, that Jesus Christ was able to lift me completely out of the mud and that it was Him who lifted me out of it, not by my effort nor my church with its doctrines.
Those people grew in the Lord, but they had their own problems and Jesus let me know, that the same way He set me free and removed all my addictions by His power, He is able to do with the lives of those people. I taught those people that the Bible is the basis and that they have to build their lives on it. We read in the gospels that Jesus gave the power to His disciples (Mt10,1 & Mk6,13) so that people could be free and I was gradually placed in this ministry and admitted by the Lord, so that what He did with my life, He is able to do in other people´s lives. He gradually taught me and I experienced people being delivered and physically healed from various disorders. When those things happened, the news about it spread very fast and people wanted to know living Jesus Christ more and more, because many of them, like me at the beginning, were tired of various churches which offered guaranteed truth, but people´s lives weren´t changed. They were expected to do something all the time, but they didn´t experience freedom, happiness and change in Jesus. When people experienced it in the groups, which the Lord gradually gave me, they demonstrated it by their lives and showed their relatives and neighbourhood that, in Jesus, a man can really be happy without being told what he can or cannot do. Do´s and dont´s. They were led to freedom. When I experienced this, I had nine groups and seven days a week. Sometimes two groups in one day.
So many people came to know living Jesus Christ. They arrived from different parts of Slovakia. So the Lord led me and is still leading me to ministry among people who, as I usually say, can hardly be converted by classical evangelism, because they have a lot of negative experience with various churches and have different problems, by which they weren´t helped by preaching the word. They literally needed to be delivered by the power of Jesus Christ and Jesus gave us that power and if we accept it, the power is manifested through us and I am very glad, that despite my faults and weaknesses, the Lord uses me this way to spread His name and His word as it is promised in the gospels. For me, the basis is the Bible and living Jesus Christ who is manifested through the Holy Spirit, who He promised and said that He will lead us (Jn14,26) as He led his disciples 2000 years ago.
So I enjoy my everyday life with Jesus, I am happy that I can experience these sorts of adventures and experiences when people are set free. If people want to experience the adventure, with Jesus Christ it is really the greatest one because it changes people´s lives, blesses us either at work, in a family or wherever we are. He makes our way straight and blesses other people through us and thus the light is spread and people can know and praise Jesus Christ, accept living Jesus Christ who is able to change their lives.
-Stano-
Stano prays for every born-again person to be able to join a lively christian community. He also prays for the particular needs of people and God´s power heals many people through him.
Many people experienced the Lord´s touch through this God´s servant in a new miraculous way and it gave them a new dimension of knowledge. At present Stano teaches in several biblical groups, leads people to freedom in Jesus and is open to meeting new people so that they may know the living Jesus Christ.