John Dowd

God Is Faithful to His Promises

Year Signed Covenant: 1981

Passed into Glory: 2014

I was brought up in a Catholic family. There were six boys and seven girls. I was the third oldest and the first son. My mother was a convert to Catholicism but my fa­ther was taught by Jesuit priests. I did not understand my Catholic faith even though I went to Catholic schools.

I met my wife at the age of 15 and we dated until I was 19. We then got married and started having children right away. I also started drinking at the age of 15. I be­came a heavy social drinker and usually got drunk every time I indulged.

While still in high school I worked part-time in my father’s gas station. I then got a job working for a tree pruning company. As I worked my way up in the com­pany God used my job to teach me the art of pruning and removing trees. I soon had my own tree business but my drinking was getting the best of me. My marriage was falling apart. Nancy threatened to leave me because I was so abusive. I was not even earning enough money to provide food for my family because most of it went for pot and alcohol. We went on food stamps.

Nancy started going to Neurotics Anonymous. She met a woman whose witness for Jesus changed her life. We watched this woman become transformed by the love of Jesus right before our eyes. She started coming to the house and sharing Jesus with Nancy. The Lord used that woman’s witness to call me to Himself. I was invited to a prayer meeting, then a Life in the Spirit Seminar, and I went. That seminar was the beginning of my personal walk with Jesus and my personal search of Scripture.

Once I understood the difference between the Old and New Testaments and their covenants, then it all began to make sense. The New Covenant from God to mankind said that Jesus came to save us from our sinfulness. The only way to get to heaven was through trusting in Jesus as my Lord and Savior. I knew that I could not be good enough on my own or in my own strength.

I had been slipping into deep despair. My life was crumbling all around me. Everywhere I looked, my life was hopeless and joyless. Once I understood that God will never take back His promises to save us if we turn from sin and trust in Him, then Nancy and I began to become alive again. I hadn’t gone to church for years. I knew that I was heading for hell. I could not understand how anyone like me could get to heaven. I felt that God could never forgive me.

As Nancy and I called on the Holy Spirit and studied Scripture we were able to hold on to our marriage cov­enant. As God is our witness, we covenanted for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health until death do us part. We started to become active members of a prayer group. We began seeking the Lord’s will in our lives. I was not free from alcohol or pot but God was beginning to heal me and strengthen me to choose rightly.

As I prayed about our life as a couple with three young sons, I knew God wanted us to experience more of His love through a deeper commitment to Him on a covenant level. He wanted us to be a part of the people of God. He wanted us to commit our lives, with other believers, to serve each other and Jesus. I had no idea where God would lead us but Nancy and I were ready to do whatever we had to do in order to get there. God showed me in 1973 that He was preparing a place for us where we could work out our salvation with other believers.

The people in our prayer group were feeling the same deeper call. We decided to try to find an example of covenant community. An older couple in our group had a daughter who lived in Conyers, Georgia. She had heard of a group of people called the Alleluia Commu­nity who were trying to live out covenant community. Our leader made contact with the community and made arrangements for us to visit as a group. I could not go at the time, but I sent Nancy and my oldest son with the group. When Nancy came back she thought that Alleluia was the place where the Lord wanted us to be. I said that I would have to check it out, so a year later I called Dale Clark and arranged another visit. After staying for five or six days I discerned that this was our spiritual family.

One year later on July 5, we arrived in Faith Village. We stayed with Gary and Louise Muir for two weeks while our house was being readied. We claimed that house for the Lord and have been living there for the Lord ever since. God is faithful to His promises.

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