“He Saves Us,” a one-minute video that has millions of views on Twitter and YouTube, depicts the redeeming, restoring, and transforming work of Christ in people’s lives.
While Paloma Faith’s knockout cover of INXS’s “Never Tear Us Apart” plays in the background, the video shows black and white photos of 12 individuals who used to live in sin and darkness – witchcraft, drug addiction, homosexuality, atheism, pornography, hatred and violence – but who have now been lifted out of darkness, their lives forever changed by Christ’s saving work on the cross.
Jamie Bambrick is an associate pastor at Hope Church Craigavon, in Northern Ireland. The evangelical church is part of the Church of Ireland, a province of the Anglican Communion. Bambrick told the Daily Citizen he’s been overwhelmed by the response to “He Saves Us”:
The response has been incredible. I expected, at best, that it might reach 5,000 views mostly among those who already know my work. Instead, it’s got almost 2 million views on X, 270k on YouTube, and various versions have been posted on Instagram by different accounts with maybe a couple of million more views between them. It’s been crazy.
Bambrick has about 8.3 thousand YouTube subscribers and 8,210 followers on the social media platform X. He explained:
Just over a year ago I started a Youtube channel to try and engage with cultural issues from a Christian perspective, and then started posting on X (Twitter) a few months later. The channel has done reasonably well without being massive.
Speaking of the response to “He Saves Us,” he told us:
I’ve been so encouraged by the positive responses from across the body of Christ. We can have plenty of disagreements, but the thing that really unites us is that Jesus has saved us. People have been sharing their stories in comments, talking about their former lives that Christ delivered them from, and it’s been just glorious to see.
It’s incredibly moving to watch the video and think about God’s love in saving these individuals – bringing them out of darkness and into light. Several in the video will be familiar to followers of Focus on the Family and the Daily Citizen, such as Rosaria Butterfield – “Former Lesbian,” Laura Perry – “Former Transgender,” Kat Von D – “Former Witch,” and Josh Timonen – “[Atheist Richard] Dawkins’ Former Right Hand Man.”
Others featured in the video include Jeff Durbin – “Former Drug Addict” a black-belt martial arts champion who played two of the “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” Michelangelo and Donatello. He believed in Jesus but got caught up in drug addiction. After almost dying from a drug overdose, and losing his home, car and job, Durbin finally called on God, crying out, “Please save me, save me.”
As God Reports tells Durbin’s story:
That was the beginning of transformation.
“I would have kept going until I was dead in the dirt,” he says. “There’s no question about that. Why am I not getting drunk today? Because my passions were totally transformed.”
Today Jeff is a pastor at the Apologia Church in Phoenix. He and his wife have been married for 20 years and have a large family.
Kevin Whitt is featured in the video as a “Former Drag Queen and Prostitute.” A sensitive and sickly child, he was abused and rejected by men, so Whitt “rejected all things masculine,” “coming out” as gay-identified at age 15. Heavily engaged in cross-dressing, drag performances, prostitution and pornography, Whitt says, “One day, while working in a gay male strip club, one of the stripper boys invited me to go to church.” He went, despite the fact that he hated Christians.
He explains:
A few months later, I got invited to church on Easter Sunday. God grabbed my attention through a modern-day version of the resurrection of Christ being played out on stage, and I began to cry. I saw all that Jesus had done for me. That was the first day of my journey away from transgender identity.
Brittni De La Mora was performing in strip clubs and pornography videos, but, as Fox News reports, “De La Mora’s life then took a dark turn as she started abusing drugs like cocaine and heroin to cope.
She explained to the news outlet, “I just reached a breaking point at my three-year mark [in porn].” So she “began attending church with her grandfather, where she said she met ‘Jesus as my Lord and Savior.’”
De La Mora fell back into sin, but then she heard God speaking:
Brittni, this isn’t the life that I have for you…know that I have something so much greater in store for you but I need you to give me a step of faith today. I need you to quit the industry and I promise you, your life is going to turn around.
Now married to a pastor, she and her husband authored a book, A Call to Purity: Living a Lifestyle of Purity and minister to others caught in sexual sin.
The “He Saves Us” video has links to all 12 stories of God’s grace and redeeming power.
Bambrick told the Daily Citizen why he put together the video:
I released the video largely because I felt like the original Super Bowl commercial [“He Gets Us”] was a big missed opportunity. …
I’m a big NFL fan so I saw this and it grieved me, as it did many other Bible-believing Christians. I had just been praying about my channel and asking and a friend of mine, Josh Daws, put out on Twitter that someone should make a better version, and I felt the idea come together.
I wanted to make it very clearly as close to the original as possible but with what I believe to be a much better message. …
We asked Bambrick if there had been any response from those pictured in the video. He replied:
One or two responses. Kevin Whitt (the former drag queen) retweeted it and said he was so honoured to be in it, and Joshua Timonen’s mother (the former atheist, right hand man of Richard Dawkins) said on YouTube that she was so delighted to see her son in the video and he’s still walking strong with Jesus.
“He Saves Us” ends with a montage of statements about Jesus, saying He saves, transforms, cleanses, restores, forgives, heals, delivers, redeems and loves us. It ends with a quotation for I Corinthians 6:11, “And such were some of you.”
The verse goes on to affirm our God’s powerful work, as demonstrated by the testimonies of those in the video,
“But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.”
Related articles and resources:
Allie Beth Stuckey, Kat Von D and the Benefit of Not Watering Down Truth
Laura Perry Smaltz: Addressing Gender Identity with Honesty and Compassion
Never Give Up Hope: Kat Von D Baptized After Turning from Witchcraft and the Occult
Richard Dawkins’ Right-Hand Man, Formerly an Atheist, Comes to Christ
Rosaria Butterfield: Accepting My True Identity in Christ (Part 1 and Part 2)
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