Life Changing: “God, in His mercy, has given us a new St. Paul for our times” – Christine Watkins shares soul-stirring teachings from Jesus through Marino Restrepo and his story!
God, in His mercy, has given us a new St. Paul for our times, Marino Restrepo—a man, approved by his bishop, who is a bright light in the present darkness. If you read his mind-boggling story below of how he was a Hollywood player, kidnapped by Columbian rebels, you will see how this is indeed so. Through Marino, the Lord has given us teachings that He wishes us to know for our times. A new book, Winning the Battle for Your Soul: Jesus’ Teachings through Marino Restrepo, a St. Paul for Our Century, has a key selection of these: some of the most soul-stirring, salvific and fascinating insights into the human soul, the sacraments, what happens at the moment of our death, and little known knowledge of how our ancestry affects how we come into this world. Internationally renowned author, María Vallejo-Nájera, writes in the book’s foreword, “This book is an authentic jewel of God!” Archbishop-Emeritus Ramón C. Argüelles also writes with enthusiam: “I most willingly say, this book should be widely disseminated, all for God’s glory!”
There is simply no story like that of Marino Restrepo. (To read his spell-binding story in its entirety, see. The Warning: Testimonies and Prophecies of the Illumination of Conscience with the Imprimatur.) Born in Colombia to a large, well-to-do family of coffee growers, Marino’s early life was steeped in the Catholic faith and Colombian culture, where his family remained. But Marino moved away from his roots, not only physically but spiritually. First, his family sent him to Bogotá to finish high school. It was the 1960s, and he was fourteen. Taking advantage of his sudden freedom, he discarded the “trappings” of the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and shortly thereafter, the Mass. Then at sixteen, he met an American girl, a hippy with bright blue eyes, who introduced him to all she knew about sex and marijuana.
Having flung open a few doors to the demonic, Marino succumbed easily to the lure of harder drugs and the “enlightened” practices of the New Age movement. Worldly success and wild women threw themselves at him, and he embraced them all in return. In time, Marino landed in Hollywood, California. There he stayed for twenty-nine years, climbing the ladder of the entertainment industry into the life of a record producer and the belief that he was the coolest guy in town.
Then one Christmas Eve night in Colombia, when he was home for a visit in 1997, everything changed. Marino was kidnapped by Colombian FARC guerillas. Tied up with rope and blind-folded, he was led by his captors for miles into the hidden depths of the Amazon jungle. When they finally stopped, he was tossed into a dilapidated shed filled with bats, excrement, cobwebs, and thousands of crawling insects that bit him mercilessly from head to toe.
Just days into his hellish captivity, God came to Marino. As night closed in and the bats awoke, spreading their wings to take flight in the darkness, the Lord guided him through an illumination of his conscience. Unaware and disbelieving that God even existed, Marino was shown his entire life of sin. Then he was taken before the Tribunal of God, where his sentence for eternity was hell. As he sank into a horrifying web of the demons he had lived most of his life, yet whom he was seeing for the first time, his Mother in Heaven pleaded with him to accept her Son’s extended hand of Mercy. Marino had lived in such grave sin for so many years, his conscience had degraded so precipitously, that he found this offering of merciful love terribly difficult to accept. But he did.
What followed was even more extraordinary. Marino received a signal grace that few, if any, have ever known. In the span of one night, God infused his soul with a vast amount of divine knowledge of which he hasn’t forgotten a drop.
When dawn came, Marino was an entirely different man. It was not his time to die. After nearly a half year in captivity, he was mysteriously released. In time and after much healing, he was called upon, to his surprise, to tell his story and to begin sharing the teachings that God had given him. Today, Marino’s greatest desire is to spread the love and knowledge of Jesus Christ and His Church to the far corners of the Earth until his very last breath. At the Lord’s request, he has traveled to over 100 countries sharing his testimony and the teachings he received during his overnight encounter with the living God.
The teachings in this book come from Jesus, not from Marino Restrepo. Other than scattered lessons, quickly forgotten, from his youth, Marino never learned his Catholic faith. He never took a course in theology, never studied the Church’s teachings, never opened a Bible. He never watched religious programming on television or fraternized with Christians. Marino’s sojourn into spirituality was focused solely on learning and spreading New Age and occult beliefs and scoffing at “outdated Catholic nonsense.”
The Lord also called Marino to found a fraternity of lay missionaries, called the Pilgrims of Love, committed to the urgent task of the new evangelization, help for the poor, and the revitalization of the Church through prayer and faithfulness to its magisterial teachings. On June 16th, 2011, the Ecclesiastical Court, headed by Cardinal Ruben Salazar Gomez, approved the Pilgrims of Love Foundation as part of the Archdiocese of Bogotá, in Marino’s home country of Colombia, where he resides.
Winning the Battle for Your Soul contains some of the most edifying and invaluable gems of wisdom that unfold the mystery of who we really are as human beings. The reader will emerge equipped with spiritual weapons for the fight for salvation—a battle each of us must undergo in order to reach heaven, our true home.
As Marino states in the last four paragraphs of Winning the Battle, every moment of the fight is worthwhile…
…We are called to carry the silence of the cross by offering our pain, trials, and tribulations to the Lord, instead of giving them away to others. Whenever we share our cross with our neighbor, not only do we waste spiritual treasures of merit and true healing, but we accumulate darkness for our souls because of the lack of charity and respect for our neighbor. The silence of the cross invites us into the true silence of the spirit, which is the gift of inner peace in the midst of this painful world.
Only in God will we be able to face the absurd misery that is part of our human existence. With His support, we will transcend to the divine and find meaning, even in our suffering and pain. I can testify to His infinite love—a love that would calcify our existence if we were to receive it all at once. That is why He dispenses His love to us little by little, like the sun, which gives us life and sight and warmth through its rays, without burning us in its incandescent fire. That love is our very life. The only thing we can retain from our earthly existence is the love from His rays that we give away.
The human being living in God’s territory is offered a sure solution to every human dilemma that presents itself. The longer a person continues to be in the state of grace, the greater light that he assimilates because his company of angels and saints ever increases, turning him into a true fountain of goodness and possibility. If he fights continuously to maintain the light of the Holy Spirit, it will shine like a lamp over every step of his journey. At the same time, he opens up an accessible path to everyone around him, generating a sea of light in union with Light itself, which is radiated by the great numbers of heavenly hosts who surround him.
The entrance of a soul in the state of grace before the Tribunal of the Lord is like the triumphal entrance of a soldier returning from war, escorted by a great army of warriors who kept him company during battle. It is the triumph of the soul, the day of crowning for the Christian. Through the legacy of prayer and good works left behind on earth, he continues from heaven the battle for souls, until the day of Jesus Christ’s final return.
Christine Watkins
© 2020
For more information about WINNING THE BATTLE FOR YOUR SOUL, see Queen of Peace Media at www.queenofpeacemedia.com/winning-the-battle.
