Venival shares his testimony: “I’m married, and I have now two daughters. When Jesus started working in my life and the life of my family, I only had one daughter and a marriage that was completely destroyed,” he says. “Jesus came into the story right at that moment.”
Through the witness of a local pastor, Venival and his wife heard the Gospel. After giving their lives to Christ and getting involved in a local church, Venival and his wife found encouragement through a cell group from the church, a small group of believers who meet in homes to grow together in their faith.
Venival and his wife found mentors in the church group, and they learned about the teachings of Christ, which helped them to better understand the love of God.
“Through discipleship, [my wife and I] have been able to recover the love that we had lost between each other,” Venival says. “Jesus started doing a work our lives through out marriage. With our marriage before, it was a life of unfaithfulness, lack of forgiveness, and lack of respect. We had nothing.”
Venival says that he and his wife learned to respect each other as precious in God’s eyes, and they were able to approach their marriage with a fresh perspective.
As these changes were happening in Venival’s life, his church started training its members to participate in My Hope World Evangelism Through Television, a program that would be broadcast on nationwide television.
During the My Hope broadcasts, Christians served as hosts invited friends and family who didn’t know Christ into their homes to watch the broadcasts.
Hosts shared their personal testimonies after the broadcast and invited their friends to receive Christ as well. My Hope takes a lot of courage, but Venival was up to the challenge.
“We involved all of our cell groups,” Venival says, “and it had an amazing result. We multiplied the cell groups, all from My Hope. And now we’re already starting to plan how we’re going to do more projects like My Hope.”
In Venival’s church, there was one cell group where only the leader was attending regularly. No one seemed to be growing in their faith. The leader was thinking about giving it up. But when they watched the My Hope program in the group, so many people gave their lives to the Lord that the group had to split into two groups in order to accommodate everyone who wanted to attend.
Venival is a group leader, too, and he shared the Gospel in his home through the My Hope Brazil broadcasts this past November. He says that opening his home to others to tell them about Christ has been an amazing experience he plans to continue.
The My Hope broadcast brought an amazing response in Venival’s community, one that he never could have imagined. “I saw something happen, which was something like I imagined that the second coming of the Lord would be like,” he says. “The Bible says that everybody in the world will hear about the Lord.”
Today, Venival has an unquenchable desire to share the healing that he has found with others.
“When Jesus came into our lives, things started to change. And today we disciple several couples who are going through the same problem that we used to have,” he says.
