Vision Logo Circle
Vision Logo Circle

Transformed by God’s Love

by | Sat, Feb 22 2020

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What’s the difference between knowing about God and actually knowing Him? Roy Tosh was brought up in a Christian family, so he knew a lot about God. He also knew a lot about his hero, the basketballer Michael Jordan, but he never actually met him face to face. ‘And so that’s what God was to me. I never had a personal relationship with Him.’

But in 2005, Roy was struggling to find meaning in his life. ‘I really was just so empty, and searching, and trying to find satisfaction in this world through drugs, through alcohol, through women, and just really lived kind of like the prodigal son honestly.’

A pastor literally dared me through an email to get alone with Christ Jesus. I took him seriously. I had nothing to lose, and cried out to Jesus, and my life has been radically transformed—not perfect—but totally transformed from that moment on.’

Roy sees his music as a vehicle for bringing that transformation to others. His song Like You Do is an anthem to God’s love. ‘I consider myself the worst of sinners,’ he said. ‘I’m like you, so if God can love someone like me, He can love anyone. And He does love everyone.’

‘I don’t really know why You love me like You do,’ Roy sings. But he’s still in awe of the power of that love. ‘There’s a verse in 1 John that says “God is love” and that sums up the totality of God’s nature, of who He really is.’

Knowing God, and knowing that love, is what transformed him. In Look at Me Now, Roy talks about the way God has changed him. ‘Look at what God has done in my life. I’m not the same person that I was ten years ago. God is consistently changing me day by day, and He has ever since that first encounter with Him.’

how glorious is it that we serve a God that also suffered

Some of those changes have come through joyful experiences, like the birth of his son, which taught him a lot about what a father’s love looks like. But Roy recently went through a terrifying but transformative ordeal. ‘It was a really difficult time for my family. My dad was super healthy, and then just out of left field, they gave him a less than ten per cent chance of survival.’

‘And so it’s really a testimony of God’s faithfulness. By the grace of God, he went through six major surgeries over a three-month period. Five different times we were told that he wouldn’t make it through the night. And so it was crazy. A lot of pain, a lot of ups and downs, a lot of long nights.’

‘But God is true. His Word says he’s an ever-present help in the midst of trouble, and I tell people, look, suffering’s going to happen. We live in a broken world. We’re not guaranteed a perfect life. And so how glorious is it that we serve a God that also suffered. Jesus died on the cross for us. He suffered one of the worst deaths you can imagine. So He can relate to our suffering.’

Roy also felt a new understanding of how personal God is, how He’s walking beside us through our longest nights. ‘We could sense the presence of God with us every single step of the way. We could sense His love surrounding us, and literally giving us strength just to survive, sometimes for the next minute, when we’re in the waiting room.’

Throughout that time, Roy felt helpless and hopeless, but in a medical miracle, his father survived. It’s a powerful reminder of the way we can draw on God’s strength when we feel weak. ‘If we look to Him, in the midst of the worst circumstances, we’ll find that He’ll actually give us the grace to rise above those circumstances, as opposed to drowning.’

Listen to Roy’s new single here