The Faith & Redemption Angle

From the Darkest Four Years of His Life to the Presence of God: How One Man's Testimony Is Reaching Believers and Skeptics Alike

Every so often, a book comes along that isn't trying to entertain you it's trying to reach you. Real-Life Testimony: How God Saved My Life From The Demons That Tried To Kill Me, the debut book from author Edger Gunther, is exactly that kind of book. It is, at its heart, a story about what happens when a person is stripped of every human resource pastors who turn him away, a church contact who never returns his calls, a sister who has to step back because the attacks against him start following her too and is left with nothing but the choice to keep calling out to God or give up.

Gunther chose to keep calling out. That choice is the real subject of this book.

Raised in a Pentecostal church in San Francisco, Gunther was no stranger to faith when his four-year ordeal began. But nothing in his upbringing prepared him for what he describes: years of relentless spiritual attack that began at a friend's house and followed him home, into his bedroom, his living room, his workplace, even his phone. What makes his testimony resonate so strongly with readers of faith isn't the horror of the attacks themselves it's what he did in response to them, and who showed up when almost no one else would.

One of the most striking threads in the book is Gunther's search for help within the institutional church and the doors that closed on him. A pastor told him his situation was "beyond his pay grade." A Catholic church gave him a phone number for someone who specialized in cases like his; he called repeatedly and was never once called back. It's a sobering, honest passage, and it's part of what makes this testimony feel so unvarnished: Gunther doesn't pretend that organized religion had all the answers. He tells you plainly that he "very quickly realized" he was on his own.

But he wasn't entirely alone. His younger sister became what he calls his prayer partner, staying on the phone with him for hours once, an entire night, from ten at night until six the next morning as they prayed together across state lines. It's here that the book turns from a story of horror into a story of relationship: with a sister who stood by him even as she began experiencing attacks of her own, and, most centrally, with God.

The turning point of the entire book arrives in a single sentence. In the middle of one of his worst attacks, something forces its way toward Gunther's throat. He's terrified, certain it's another demon. He tells his sister. And she says something that changes everything: "Let it go down your throat, that's the Holy Spirit."

Gunther describes giving permission, in that moment, for it to enter him and feeling it arrive instantly in his stomach, where he says he still feels a distinct, physical response whenever he prays or hears the name of Jesus, to this day. It's a moment that readers of faith describe as one of the most powerful passages in the book: the instant a man who had spent months believing he was under demonic siege realized that God's own presence had been fighting for him, in him, the entire time.

From there, the book becomes something genuinely rare a firsthand account of what it looks like to hold onto God when every circumstance argues that you should let go. Gunther describes a vivid, overwhelming dream in which he experiences through sound and sensation alone, since he "couldn't see" his guardian angel fighting on his behalf, speaking with a voice that was somehow his own, driven by what he calls a love "mingled with anger" for the person being protected. He describes the demons' power to kill him fading once the Holy Spirit entered him, even though the attacks themselves continued for years afterward. And he's honest brutally honest about the seasons when he drifted, including a stretch in jail where he admits he "took God for granted," and about how the attacks always intensified in the exact moments he pulled away from prayer.

That honesty is what elevates Real-Life Testimony above a simple deliverance story. Gunther doesn't present himself as a flawless vessel who triumphed through unwavering faith. He presents himself as an ordinary, flawed, frightened man who kept returning to God again and again, after every failure, after every dry season and who found, every single time, that God had never actually left.

His closing reflection is simple and direct: don't isolate yourself from God, family, or friends. Keep your doors open. Pray. Believe. It's advice earned the hardest possible way, across four years that very nearly cost him his sanity and, by his own account, his life.

For believers wrestling with spiritual attack, doubt, or isolation and for skeptics wondering whether any of this could possibly be real Gunther's testimony offers something increasingly rare in Christian publishing: an account that doesn't flinch from the darkness in order to arrive, credibly and hard-won, at the light.

Explore Edger Gunther's full testimony at reallifetestimony.com, and get your own copy of Real-Life Testimony: How God Saved My Life From The Demons That Tried To Kill Me on Amazon: Order the book here.