My conversion testimony (as requested)
I guess you could say that for about 20 years of my life I considered myself someone with Christian beliefs. That is to say, that I believed in the existence of Jesus Christ and that he performed miracles and was God in human form but that was the extent of it. I didn´t go to church. I found church-going Christians to be too preachy and judgmental. I remember being evangelized to as a 17 year old but thought Christians were a bunch of weirdos. (Now I know what people think of me now. lol)
I still wanted to live a worldly life. I was young and wanted to live the life that Christians weren´t supposed to live. None of my close friends were Christians. I considered what Christians considered a sinful life of pre-marital sex, drugs and alcohol, to be a normal part of growing up and being a young adult.
I remember my first supernatural encounter with the Holy Spirit was at a church with one of my University friends who was a Christian. She invited me to watch Hotel Rwanda at her church with her. I didn´t have many friends since I had moved away from home, so I went along. At the end of the movie everyone prayed for the genocide victims, as we were praying I remember feeling a "force" in the room, that caused me to get goosebumps and my hairs to stand on end. I remember thinking in that moment that God was real as I already had believed and that what I felt was the Holy Spirit. That wasn´t enough for me to convert though, and I continued to live my worldly life.
Fast forward to 13 years later, I am not sure how it started but I started watching Christians street evangelizing on Youtube. I found the videos addictive and kept watching them. I considered myself a non-practising Christian at this point without realising that I hadn´t truly converted. I was what Christians refer to as "lukewarm". Typically these types of "Christians" believe in Christ as God but they reject his teachings on sin, and have a "live and let live" attitude. They don´t impose/evangelize their Christian beliefs on or to anyone because it doesn´t align with their own moral views or what society considers acceptable.
One day, I watched another Christian Youtube video. The street preacher was evangelizing to someone and said to the guy, that he loved his porn and other sexual sins too much to give it up, and for some reason in that moment, I felt convicted. I had watched porn since my mid teens, and never thought of it as being sinful, even though deep down I knew it was wrong. It was just another thing that you are introduced to when you are young so you feel like its the normal thing to do and that "everyone does it" so it can´t be bad.
I am not sure how much longer after that moment happened but I decided I wanted to quit watching porn. I just cold turkey quit. It was much easier than I thought it would be. After I quit porn, I still couldn´t quit masturbation because the urges were too strong but I was doing it way less and in my mind I thought its pretty much impossible to stop and I thought it couldn´t be a sin because no human can refrain themselves from doing it.
Around this time I began to read and study the Bible. Fast forward a few more months to late February of this year. A huge anxiety came over me, I wondered if I was still being sinful. I knew if I was still sinful that I would be condemned to hell when I died. So for a couple of days, I was consumed by this anxiety. I decided I was going to pray to God. During prayer, I felt tremendous sorrow for my sins. I prayed to Jesus to ask if I was still sinning if he could tell me if I was still sinning or at least guide me into not sinning anymore.
After my prayer I went to sleep. The next day I woke up with tremendous peace inside me, that no drug on Earth is capable of producing. The worry about salvation had completely gone and I realised I had received the Holy Spirit. I realised that I was now a child of God.
There were a bunch of noticeable behavioural changes after I had received the Holy Spirit. The urges to masturbate had completely gone, indeed I have not engaged in the act since I converted over four months ago. I used to swear alot. Swearing was a huge part of my life and I never thought of it as being bad or wrong but after I received the Holy Spirit, I found it unpleasant. I also found blasphemy unpleasant. I never blasphemed much but I notice every time someone say OMG and it hurts to hear it, you just want to tell people to stop but you know you can´t without them thinking you´re crazy.
Before my conversion, I would have been too scared to evangelize to people for fear of being judged even with the anonymity of preaching online. Sharing something like this testimony would have never have happened either. But now I don´t care about myself or what people think of me since I am now a servant of God who wants as many of his lost flock to come to him before they die. It won´t let me post more but feel free to ask further questions.