Gateway Church's Podcast
From LSD to PHD
Well, praise God, it's been a great joy to be here this weekend and wonderful to be with you. Today, God's doing some amazing things in our midst. As Pastor Albert mentioned though, I didn't start out as Dr. Michael Brown, and there's a picture somewhere along the journey of, as my hair was starting to grow out and my drug bear nickname came about, I want you to think of some, we're gonna leave that up for a second, but not too long. I want you to picture in the mind of God the angels coming together before the Lord and saying, "Father, we have a need that rabbis are raising very serious objections about faith in your son Jesus and we need someone that can be sharp enough to earn a doctorate in Semitic languages and study and write 1500 pages of material to refute the rabbis and debate them publicly and God said, "I've got just the man." And Nancy did not know me at that stage of my life, but some years after meeting me, she saw that picture and she started laughing, and I said, "Now, you're laughing because I look like a woman." She said, "No, I'm laughing because you look like an ugly woman." So we're done with that picture, thank you. So I get to tell my story from LSD to PhD. When the Messiah Jesus was born, the angel of the Lord told his parents, "He'll call his name Jesus Yeshua, for he will save his people from their sins." I'm an example of a transformed life by the power of God. I was born in 1955 in New York City. I have an older sister. My mom and dad, my family is a Jewish family. My dad was a lawyer in the New York Supreme Court. My mom and dad, to the time of my father's death, were happily married, wonderfully married. I had a very stable upbringing, totally loved and affirmed by my parents. We moved to Long Island when I was almost seven years old, and I started living just a typical suburban Long Island, mildly Jewish life, come home from school, play sports with my friends. I got bar mitts for the age of 13, just went through some of the Jewish traditions, but my family would go to synagogue mainly on the high holy days, like a Christian family that goes to church, Christmas and Easter. We weren't that religious. The big thing in my life started to grow and grow and grow. I started playing drums at the age of eight, and by the time I was 13, rock music had come in to America with the Beatles when I was nine, and so I started to listen to more of this music, and I started to kind of take in the culture, and I really got into it. Music is very powerful. It can move you and shape you, and I didn't listen much to the words, but the lifestyle of the rock stars was counterculture, pushing the envelope, questioning things, challenging the status quo, and I kind of liked that. It appealed to my flesh, and at 13 years old, I went to my first rock concert. I saw Jimmy Hendrix perform at the Philharmonic Hall. Man did that impact me, and the drummer Mitch Mitchell with his long hair, and Hendrix in the bass player with his giant Afros, and the power of that music. I wanted to be in a rock band. I was desperate. I just was so caught up in this. Started playing in a band with some of my friends, and taking on more and more of this cultural lifestyle, and someone offered me drugs, "Hey, you want to get high? You want to smoke pot?" I thought, "That would be cool. That's what the rock stories do, and I want to be like this." Look, I was not looking for something. My home life was stable. My own life was fine. I did not need some kind of inner healing or help at that point. As far as I knew, I was just a normal kid, but I wanted to experiment. So I said, "I'll smoke pot." So I smoked pot, but nothing happened to me, so I thought, "That's odd." I was with some other friends, and they were smoking a harder drug, hash, passing this hash pipe around the room. "You want to smoke hash?" "Yeah, of course I want it." And they're all high as a kite, man. This is good stuff, and I smoke away, and smoke away, and nothing happened. You think at that point, you quit while you're a hag. But no, how come I'm not getting high? I've got to try more. So I started doing ups and downs, and then soon enough, still 14 years old, LSD, and man, and opened up a whole vista for me, this whole new life, and tripping, and getting out there. But that was my limit. I drew the line. I'll go that far. I knew there were other drugs out there, but I will not go any further than that. I'm a nice Jewish kid growing up in the suburbs of Long Island. I'm not some street junkie. I'm not some real sinner, and it's amazing how we draw these lines, and we keep changing them. You know, it's one thing about sin and the flesh, instead of satisfying. We always have this notion, "If I could just have this, I'd be satisfied." Come on, how many have ever done that with food? 30 pounds ago. Okay, if I just ate that, how many of you started a tremendous diet tomorrow? And you started with a big meal today, because if I have this big meal today, then I won't want to eat tomorrow. The big meal today makes you hungrier for a big meal tomorrow. It's the way it is with sin. Sin leads to more sins than to worse sins, and then it enslaves you. Before you know what you're trapped by the sin, you don't have the habit. The habit has you. I was once talking to about 150 young people in Chicago, high school and college age, most of them are not followers of Jesus, and I said, "I want you to be real honest. How many of you are doing things today, sexually, drugs, drinking, lifestyle, entertainment, which a year ago you would have guaranteed me you would never do, and almost all of them raise their hands?" I said, "How can you guarantee me that you won't be doing this and this and this and this a year from now?" That's the progression. I'm 15 years old now, and I'm curious about more drugs. Some of my friends are doing speed. I'm curious about this. I'm hanging out with the new crowd now. My friends are becoming new crowd. Some of these guys are snorting speed. There's white powder, and they're rolling off a bill and snorting it in their nose, and man, they're getting so high, and they're so excited. I just wanted a new high, a new buzz. I had to pursue the new thing, so I thought, "Okay, I'll do that, but that's the limit. I won't go beyond that. I'm fixed, I'm sure." I started to do this. Boy, you had this instant euphoria, and you were just up, and you were just happy, and the world was a better place, and you loved everybody. You said, "Well, what about all the nasty side effects, and what about all the problems?" I didn't really experience that. In fact, I discovered that I could do more drugs than anybody. In fact, I discovered I could do two, three, four, five times what other people could do. Isn't that wonderful? I could put more poison in my system than anybody. This became my identity, I got nicknamed drug bear, an iron man, because I could do more than anybody, and that man, I could get higher than anybody, and I didn't have side effects from it. Wasn't that something? But I had my line drawn. I saw some of my friends shooting speed one time, and I thought, "Whoa, that's nasty." I mean needles, that's like junkie, that's bad. I will never do that. But after all, it seems to be a bit higher, a bigger high, and, well, okay, I will shoot speed, but that's it. I will not go any further. I will not do anything beyond that. I would heroin. I mean, heroin was bad. That is, I didn't know any people shooting heroin. I remember when I was in junior high, these cops came into our school to give a demonstration about drugs, and they're talking, they said, "Now, it starts here with the marijuana, and then it leads to the heroin." And I'm thinking, "These guys are so ignorant. They don't know anything. Here I am, like, 12 years old, and they worked in this for a living." And I'm thinking, "They're so stupid. They don't know anything." You never start with marijuana and go to heroin. I don't know anybody that's ever done that, and here's the exact route I was going. Exact route I was going. I'll shoot speed, but no more, and then I started to be curious about more. Maybe I'll do more. I didn't even know where to get heroin. I didn't know anyone that shot heroin. I'm coming home one day on the bus, 15 years old. I'm the only white person on the bus. I kind of stand out. I got my hippie hairdo the whole bit. And this fellow looks at me and he says, "Hey. Do you know where I can get masculine?" Mescaline was a hallucinogenic drug, but it was pretty rare. You didn't find it as often as LSD. I happened to have some in my pocket. Pouted Mescaline. I said, "I've got some on me." Didn't even think I was so stupid. Didn't even dawn on me to think he could be a drug agent or a cop or something. I said, "I've got some right on me." I said, "Do you know where I can get some dope?" Meaning heroin? He said, "I've got some on me." Now, Christians write about divine appointments when God supernaturally said something. This is one of these satanic appointments. I mean, birthed in hell for that moment. We sit there in full view of everybody on the bus. They're looking at us. I take my Mescaline powdered mess and I give it to him. It could have been laundry detergent for all he knew. He could have given me laundry detergent. We just exchanged this white powder, strangers on the bus, and I said, "How much do I take all of it? Tell him to take all of it?" I was so excited. I got home. I ran. It was about a half mile away where my bus stop was. I ran home so excited I've got heroin, man, and then shooting at my veins, that was another hot. What an experience. I started to get deeper and deeper and deeper into all this, and our band, we would get high and play, and we were like unbelievable. The higher we were, the better we sounded to ourselves. We were going to be a top band. As soon as we were old enough to play and public places had served liquor, we were going to be famous. We'd sit there an ego trip and get high and go to rock concerts. You name the group, man. I saw them. We just immersed in all this, but I was not a street-wise sinner, you see. I didn't have that background, so when I decided to break into someone's house, I remember talking to these junkies. This one junkie told me when you break into a house, you stick toothpicks in the keyhole in the lock of the door because when the people come home and they go to unlock the door, they're going to be toothpicks stuck in there, and you'll hear them fiddling and trying to get in, so it gives you time to get out and run. I was so stupid, I call the friend's house, a guy lived down the block for me, I walked down the block, nobody there, I called the house, nobody home, kid, I grew up playing ball with, I'm going to break into the house, get some money. I stuck the toothpicks in the front of the door, and I'm going around, I'm a little scared to do this. I'm about to get in the back window, and all of a sudden I hear toothpicks who put toothpicks in the door. Man, I took off running, it really worked, and the only problem was, I mean, they got in pretty quick. See, I didn't realize you were supposed to break the toothpicks off, see, that's the whole thing, you stick them in and break them off, but I was not a streetwise sinner, so I just stuck them in thinking you'd buy you a few seconds and they pulled them out. Another time a friend and I watched on the TV this story about a guy with this great theft plan, he got caught at the end, but we got inspired, we wanted to try and do it. We wanted to do it ourselves, just like the harmless video games that kids watch, like the Columbine killers just happen to watch brutal, violent video games all the time. You take this stuff in, you want to start to do it, live it out, act it out. So we decided, okay, we're going to break into a doctor's office, we had been talking about it, let's do it tonight. So there's a little doctor's office in our town, we walked over there late at night, we took a key, there was an open window we saw, we took a key and we opened the screen, just cut it open, I helped my friend through the window, he opened the door, man, we're in the doctor's office, no alarms going off or anything, and we took all these drugs and needles and things and then went, next day, run them over to my house and we were pretty pumped to try this. We saw one box marked adrenaline, only administered to someone whose heart has stopped beating. We thought this sounds like it'll be fun. I think we've confirmed I'm the first gateway speaker who mainlineed adrenaline and lived to tell about it. So we mainlineed adrenaline, I mean we literally almost killed ourselves, our hearts almost pounded out of our chest and of course, because my friends did a certain amount, I had to do more because I'm drug-bear iron man, I remember laying on the floor the house upstairs where our band used to play, my heart pounding out of my chest thing and all no, they're going to have to call the ambulance and tell my father what happened, tell my parents, oh no, and we survived it, just another story. You see, we were also good sinners, you see, we had our ethic, so because we didn't need all the drugs, we decided to return what we weren't going to use, so we went the next night and the thing was still open in the window, so we took the drugs and we just threw them back in. See, when I started to hang out with junkies, I learned something amazing. I was talking to one guy who had stolen money from his mother and he was telling me about another guy and he said, this guy, he steals from his own grandmother and I said, man, you steal from your mother, he said, yeah, but I would never steal from my grandmother. And you see, I didn't know the scripture then, but it's written in the word that every way of a man is right in his own eyes and you can read the Bible and you won't find it talking about shooting heroin, which is a wicked ugly thing to do, you won't find it talking about that and you might think, this guy's got a wild story, I'm glad for him, but I've never shot heroin, I've never even touched alcohol, man, I've lived a clean life. You know, the Bible speaks more about self-righteousness than it speaks about drunkenness, the Bible speaks more about religious hypocrisy, you know, one of the worst sins in God's sight, the sin of thinking, I'm better than others, self-righteousness. See, we can sit here and you can look at somebody else and think, man, what's happening to America, all this stuff with same-sex marriages and polygamy, but sir, you can be a polygamist in your heart, you can be lusting after three other women and in your mind, you're having relations with them and yet you're judging everybody else. You can be a homeschool mom, clean on the outside, but full of gossip and sin. See, God wants us clean from the inside out, it's not just drugs and heroin, these kind of things, we all fall short, every one of us falls short, measured next to God. We all fall short, we all need mercy. That's why Jesus died for all of our sins, Jew, Gentile, rich, poor, black, white, all of us come the same way through His mercy. God started to work on my friend's hearts. They were going with these two girls whose uncle was a Pentecostal pastor, whose dad had been praying for them for years and they started to go to this little Italian Pentecostal church. I'm getting heavier and heavier into drugs now, more and more heroin and they're starting to pull away just a little bit because they're going with these girls and these girls are going to this church and they really liked the church because it was different. It's Pentecostal, one of them was raised Methodists, the other Russian Orthodox but they didn't know God at all, now they're going to this little church and they're hearing about angels, demons, miracle stories, tongues, it was really interesting and the most interesting thing is they're hearing stories about prophecy, end-time prophecy and they'd say, "Man, we just learned there's going to be this bottomless pit and this beast is going to come out of it." He's like a dragon, he's got seven heads and ten horns and we were enthralled with this because this was what we would see when we hallucinated. This was like drug stories. Listen, when we first got saved, the first books we read were Revelation and Daniel because I was like, "Whoa, this is cool stuff, seriously." So they were into this whole thing but little by little, God was working on their hearts, little by little they were being changed and they talked to me about the Lord, they'd get high some but they were stepping away a little bit. One night we went out together and I was huffing diesel gas to get high, one of the lowest, most stupid things you could do. This was my preparation for writing a commentary one day on the book of Jeremiah, huffing diesel gas. It's the mercy of God that my brain is functioning. I was there huffing diesel gas, high on drugs, we'd go behind these railroad tracks near where I grew up and there was this dirt area where these trucks were parked and we'd open the gas tank and we'd just try to get a really potent one and then we'd huff gas, diesel gas to get high. What a stupid thing to do. Here at this stage in life, I had stolen money from my father on a number of occasions. I found some cash he had in the house and I would steal periodically thinking he doesn't pay attention to it. I betrayed my best friends. I was a wicked, unclean person. I had a reputation for wickedness in my high school. I was full of pride and anger and I remember sitting there high on diesel gas and I'm thinking about what my friends had been telling me and I thought distinctly to myself, if there really is a God, he knows I'm basically a good person. Come on, some of you, if I say, "Come on, what about your own life?" You know what your answer would be? Why don't really hurt anybody? You know what I said to myself, "I'm basically a good person and God knows it because if there's an old lady going into a store, I will open the door for her and if I see some bum on the street, some drunkard on the streets in New York City, I'll give him some change. I'm basically a good person." The Prophet Jeremiah wrote that the heart is deceitful above all things. You can deceive yourself as easily as you can deceive somebody else. I didn't even know the wickedness of my own heart and here's the strange thing. With all the putrid wretched stuff I was doing in my life, I never experienced a tinge of guilt. In fact, I was proud of my sin. Somebody wrote many years ago, "First, we practice sin, then we defend it, then we boast of ours." It's the process of hardness that sets in because I could do all these drugs, drug-bear iron man. I really thought I was somebody. In August of 1971, my friend said, "Come on, come to church with us, you need to come to one of these services." I thought, "Okay, enough is enough with the stupid stuff. The girlfriends are getting serious, my friends are getting serious. It's pulling the band apart. I'm going to go and prove to them this whole thing is just stupid and talk them out of it." I went to the service that night and one of the young ladies that knew me from my high school wrote down in her diary, "Antichrist comes to church tonight." You have to understand, I was an unsafe person, I was full of sin. The drugs were the least of it. Listen to me, I was not a sinner because I was shooting heroin, I was shooting heroin because I was a sinner. Sin can manifest itself in a thousand different ways in our lives, but it has the same effect. It gets us concentrated on self and separates us from God. The only thing that happened that night was the people were so nice, I mean they were all old, like 40, 50, some were even 60 of that, I mean still functioning, it's 60, it was amazing. Strange that I was 51, I got to be careful what I saved. All these old people, I couldn't, and their suits and ties, ladies and dresses, less than maybe 50, 60 people there, I come in my whole hippie look and they just loved on me. They were so nice and I thought, "You know, they're so nice, okay. You have your religion." That's what I told them, "You have your religion and I have mine." As if I'm now a religious Jew, so I'm a religious Jew, when you're confronted with another faith, now I'm religious. And I thought, "All right, if my friends want to go this way, let them go this way, I know the way I'm gone." I didn't know though that people were starting to pray for me. Few days after, within a couple of weeks, we were getting ready for school, I had gone on strike, helped lead a strike in our school, the previous end of the previous year, and now we have this radical new school. If you read my book, Revolution the Call of Holy War, the first chapter I talk about it, we had this unique school with no formal classes, you could just go and get high and get an A for it. I mean, it was crazy. We were going to play with our band to open things up. It was the weekend right before school was going to start, early September of '71. So my friends were hanging out and partying at this park near our high school, and one guy had a big bag of powdered mescaline, and he was just giving it away for free. And he said, "Whatever you want to do, do it." So I was asking them, "How much are people doing?" They said, "Well, some of the girls that are a little shy, they'll stick their finger in and twice it and lick it off, and they're getting really high. Some have done up to 10 finger licks." I said, "Really?" I said, "How much can I do?" He said, "As much as you want." So I took two handfuls, two handfuls. We calculated afterwards, it was enough for 30 people. And I completely lost touch with reality. Everything became a massive hallucination. Fireworks coming out of the ground. I thought my body was made of sand. I had no idea what was going on anymore. And my friends thought, "This is so funny." He finally took too much. They got the biggest kick out of it. Well, I lived about 20 minutes away from there. The last bus was getting ready to leave, so they walked me to the bus stop, arm in arm, walked me to the bus stop, and put me on the bus alone to go home. I came to on the bus and everybody's staring at me. I thought, "I don't know what I've been saying." Everybody's just looking at me on the bus. So when we got near my hometown, we were about two or three miles away from my home, we got close. I thought, "That's it. I'm getting off the bus. I'm near it. I panicked." And now, remember, my friends have been preaching to me, and they've been talking to me about heaven and hell, and being lost, and so on. I'm walking home, but it's a long walk now, and I'm completely disoriented. I don't know what's going on, all kinds of visions and crazy things, all drug-induced. I'm going around this long bend, this long bend, and I concluded it's over. I've died. I'm in hell. I'll never come out of this. I'm just forever I'm going to be walking around this long bend, and I couldn't take it anymore. I thought I'm losing my mind, and I sat down. It's one in the morning, nice Jewish suburbs, this particular family. I'm sitting on the front lawn as a Catholic family, one of the rare ones in our community. I used to play ball with a kid that lived there, a nice family. One in the morning, suburbs of New York, and I'm screaming at the top of my lungs, "I'm roasting in hell! I'm burning in hell!" Until my total surprise, a man comes walking his dog down the street. I remember distinctly saying to myself, "Why is he walking his dog in hell?" It's a strange thing. I knew he was Jewish. I knew his son a little bit, but I forgot his name. So I said, "Hello, Mr. Goldstein, as close as I could come." He just looked at me with his mild shock and walked on. And then I thought, "Okay, I cannot take this anymore. I can't take this. I've got to end this thing." And I thought, "You know, I'm going to do like they do in the movies. You know, a car is going to come by. I'm going to jump in front of the next car that comes by. I'm going to end all this." And sure enough, not long after that, I see headlines coming down the street. I was at a corner house, and I hear the breaks as they're turning around the corner. They're going pretty fast. I jumped in front of the car. I mean, it comes to a screeching halt with an interest in me. It was my parents. This Jewish guy had gone over to my parents' house in a state of great concern and woke my parents up in the middle of the night, and they came looking for me. Listen to me. If it was anybody else, I wouldn't be here today. I would have been dead. I would have been gone. They wouldn't have known to be looking for me. It would have crashed into me. It would have been over. You say, "Man, that would have been a terrible waste of life. Sixteen years old, cut down just from some stupid drug overdose and craziness. It would have been a terrible loss of life." You know, there's even worse loss of life, which is to live to be 70 or 80 and just live for this world. You have a nice life and maybe your family's healthy and maybe you had a good career, but you didn't know God. He was not the center, and Jesus was not the purpose of your living, and you come to the end of it all, and you've got nothing. You come to the end of it all, and you walk into eternity, totally lost, and there's no way back, and there's no way out. God had mercy on me, and then the weeks that followed, something started to happen. My parents took me to the hospital that night. I was so incoherent. I kept saying, "Take me to the hospital." Fine. They heard me muttering in my room. They took me to the hospital, wheeled me in in a wheelchair. I was just ugly and profane to my father as they did, and the doctor said, "What did you take?" And I was not going to tell. I thought I was captured by the enemy, and I was not going to divulge any secrets, so I wouldn't tell what drugs I did. Finally, my parents found out for my friends who were hysterical, laughing about the whole thing, and the doctors gave me some drug. It knocked me out that night. I slept the next day. The day after that school started, I'm with my band. We're playing. I did enough drugs for 30 people. Look at me. But something started to happen. I'd get high, something that would keep me up at night, and normally, if I want to go to sleep, I want to sleep. And if I wanted to stay up, I stayed up, and I'd think about all the neat things I did, like steal money from my father and betray my best friends, and I thought I was so cool. Now I'd be high at night, and I tried to go to sleep, and I couldn't. And suddenly, it wasn't the drugs. It was the torment of the unclean person that I was. I didn't know it, but people were praying. It's what's called conviction of sin. You ever, ladies, maybe you put on your makeup in the morning, but the room's a little dark, or God's, you shave, or something like that, and then you get in your car to drive away in the bright sunlight, and you look in the rear view mirror, and you're, "Oh, no. What I do?" Because it's bright light, and you can see clearly. That's what happens. That's happening to some of you today. Your life seemed okay. Everything seemed all right, but God's been working on you. Suddenly you're very uncomfortable with that. Suddenly you realize that that internet relationship you've been having is unclean. Suddenly you realize that they're just living your own life and calling your own shots. You're away from God, and he's putting the holy pressure on you because he loves you, and he has a better way. I started to feel unclean, and I couldn't shake it. I lay in bed, and I'd think, "How could you do this to your father? How could you be so cruel to your parents? How could you betray your friends?" The only thing I knew to do was quit doing drugs that would keep me up at night because I couldn't take this. God was working in my heart. November 12, 1971, my friend John calls me on the phone, "Mike, come on, come to church with us." I said, "I'm not going to church with you." I said, "You don't even hang out with me anymore. One's the last time we got high together. The one's the last time we parted together." He said, "Well, I can't do that now." I said, "I'll make a deal. You come with me this week. Let's get high together. I'll go with you to church next week." He said, "I can't do that." I said, "Fine." I hung up the phone on him. This was nothing for Antichrist. This was nothing for this ugly character that I was. I did crueler things than that every day of my life, and yet suddenly just hanging up the phone. I felt bad. I called him. I said, "I'll go to your church with you." The end of that service the pastor gave an invitation, just like we're going to give today. Little did I know the transformation that was awaiting me. He said, "If anyone here wants to receive Jesus, this is Lord. Come forward." I thought, "I don't believe any of this." Now, God had been working in my heart deeply, but I said, "I don't believe any of this," but all these old people have been praying for me, and I'm like known as the chief of sentencing. If I go up, they'll really think this is cool. I'll go up. They'll get all excited. This guy came up, and then I'll leave, and that's the end of it. I came up to pray. As I said the words with the pastor, I suddenly realized, "You know, I believe this is true." At that point, I didn't know all the evidence that Jesus was the Jewish Messiah and the Savior of the whole world, something was just going off of me. I believe this is true, and then I prayed this prayer, and I said, "Okay, I've got a problem. I believe it's true, but I'm not willing to change." I mean, there are some of you sitting here looking and agreeing, but that's exactly the frame of mind. You're maybe raised in church, maybe a kid growing up, just starting college, maybe your spouse really loves the Lord, and you know this is true, but you feel the same way. I know it's true, but I'm not willing to change. So I said, "God, you know when I get home, I'm getting high tonight." I had just purchased a large amount of cocaine. I was starting to deal that. It was the new drug that had come in. I had this PCP angel dust that said, "You know when I get home, I'm going to get high, but God, if you don't want me to, don't let it have any effect on it." Now, I don't recommend that prayer. Don't put a gun to your head. If you don't want me to commit suicide, when I pull the trigger, don't let anything happen. I don't recommend the prayer, but I was brand new and didn't know anything, and I prayed those words, and then I went home, and I tried my best to get high, man. I smoked this PCP, and I shot a large amount of cocaine. My heart just started to beat a little, and then everything stopped, and I realized something's up here, and then the battle began, then the battle began, five weeks. I know what's right, but I'm fighting it. I know what's right. I'm fighting it, and along the way, a friend called me, he had just gotten a large amount of really good heroin, and he said, "Hey, Mike, I'm going to come over and we'll get high. I'll give it to you for free." I mean, free heroin, man. That was a dream, but I was going to go to church that night. See, I would normally get high one night, go to church the next, back and forth, back and forth, and God convicted me this whole time. I had never gotten high and gone to church, but this night I was going to do it. He came over to the house. He got there late. The people coming to pick me up for church got there early. They pull up as he's in my house with a needle in his arm. I said, "Get out of my house, man. I kicked him out of the house. I don't want your drugs. Get out of my house. I made a decision." Listen, I was reading a testimony of a former homosexual, and for years he battled with same-sex desires, wanting to be free, and he kept saying, "God, please take these desires out of my heart, change me, and I'll do what's right, change me, and I'll do what's right. One day God said to him, "Do what's right, and I'll change you. Do what's right, and I'll change you." He's saying that to many here, "No, it's not just going to just change, it leaves your heart one day. Make the decision to do what's right. Come clean, confess, make a break, and then God will give you all the power you need. He'll draw you and empower you in the process." Shortly after that, I went to a service. It was December 17, 1971, and I couldn't wait to get there for that church service. I was so excited about it. Why? Just a little group, 50, 60 people, pastor's wife playing piano, and look, in those days, my music, I was consumed with Led Zeppelin, dazed and confused. Jimi Hendrix, purple haze, man, that was my music. Now we're singing in this church, "In my heart there rings a melody." Sunshine, sunshine, in my soul, they make me a blessing. Now I'm telling you, singing these songs as joy is pouring out of my heart. This is service. I've been with you now five times this weekend, and these services, as we sing each time Jesus paid it all, my eyes just well up with tears, because I go right back to those days of singing those little songs and the love of God flooding my soul, and I felt this joy, this pure joy, the joy of being clean, the joy of being right with God. I never felt anything like this. Remember, I got as high as a human being could get high and gave myself to the flesh, but this was different. I quickly thought of every drug high, I thought, "No, this is different." I thought of the good feeling you get, just being a good person and helping someone, having a friendship, relationship, winning in sports, so I thought, "This is the joy of the Lord that everybody in this church talks about. This is it." And I thought, "What an ungrateful wretch I've been. Here God loves me enough to wash me, to cleanse me, to put these clean garments on me, and I'm going out and playing in the mud. What am I doing?" Right then and there, I said, "God, that's it. This giant mountain, this drug life, and putting a needle in my arms, the whole thing, became like a little molehill." I said, "God, I will never put a needle in my arm again." Two days after that, I said, "I will never get high again, didn't go through any program, no rehab, nothing," because Jesus is the liberator, Jesus can set us free from sins. You can use programs and all that, but it's just power that sets us free. And I'd go home so full of God I'd be reading the Bible and praying and late at night, laying in my bed with this divine love, flooding of my soul, thinking, "Man, if any of my friends in high school can experience what I did for one day, they'd never go back to their whole lifestyle." A few months after that, one day I said to myself, "You know, I could live a clean but empty life, maybe that's how some of you are living, or I could give myself to God. Hear me, young people, hear me, all the folks, I could give myself to God as unconditionally as I gave myself to drugs." And I took the plunge in, I began to read the word and pray. By the time I was saved a year, I was memorizing 20 verses from the Bible a day. This is the guy that could have killed my brain with all the drugs and junk. By the time I preached when I was 18, I read the Bible cover to cover five times. Instead I had the joy of preaching around the world, writing commentaries on parts of the Bible, debating rabbis, sharing this testimony, even in Buckingham Palace with royalty. When I was 19, God brought a wonderful woman to the church. She was a Jewish atheist whose mom had been married four times. God saved her, brought us together. We've been married 30 wonderful years, two great kids, three grandkids, a fourth on the way. My life has been blessed by surrender to God. I'm going to tell you this last thing and then close, 1998, I went to a 25th anniversary reunion from our high school. I had to see most of these people in 25 years since graduation. Some of them sat around at the table and had a discussion, "Who is the most memorable character from high school?" They voted for me. Because when I sinned, I sinned, and when God saved me, I was a transformed man. We talked, we hung out. It was heartbreaking, two-thirds to three-quarters were divorced, broken families, broken marriages, so many broken lives, and almost all of them had just gone around in a little circle. Oh, yeah, they were working their jobs and they were having their lives, and they had gotten older. Some had died of drug overdose along the way. They were lost, but there was no meaning. There was no purpose. They were just living. They were just surviving. They haven't grown as human beings. It was heartbreaking to say. So I call on you today. There's a divine appointment. This day has been set aside by God before the world began, for some of you to know Him, some of you to be changed, some of you to be transformed, some of you to enter into new life for the first time ever. This is it. And some of you are sitting here. You may know the truth about Jesus. Maybe even believe you're saved, but you've never surrendered. You're still holding on. You still haven't said, "God, whatever you want to do with my life, here I am." This is your day. If you've never known Jesus, if you've never been part of His family, if you're coming from another religious background like I was, if you've been raised in church, never surrender, if you feel that you know the Lord, but there are sins separating you and you need to get right now, this is your day. People have been coming through the weekend, the first service this morning, a young boy came together with his mom and dad all to surrender together. Let God do something fresh and new. Let this be the beginning of your wonderful story today for now in the world to come. Close your eyes with me, please. Close your eyes, everyone in this place. If you are not 100% sure that if you died, you'd go into God's presence and be accepted with Him. If you're not 100% sure that your sins are forgiven and you're right with God today, if you know the truth, but you have never surrendered your life to the Lord, I'm going to ask you in a moment to pray with me. I'm going to ask you in a moment to take that step. Jesus paid it all, all to Him I owe. He gave everything so that we could be clean and free and whole and changed, and that's why we do what we do so that you can know life eternal life the same as we. If you've never received Him, if you're not right with God today, if you need to make that surrender all over this place right now, I want you to raise your hand. Just raise your hand. Be honest before God. Thank you. Come on. Raise your hand. Put it down. Others. Raise your hand. God bless you. Come on. Others. Raise your hand. I need to get right with God. God bless you. Put your hands down. Come on. Some of you are holding on to your life, holding on to your will, holding on to disobedience. It's time to get free. You can be clean. Anyone else. God bless you. Anyone else. Young people. This is your day. God bless you. Anybody else? Anyone else. Raise your hand. Put it down. I want to surrender. I want my life clean. Clans washed. Anyone else. Thank you Lord. We're going to pray. We're going to help you. We're all going to join in this prayer. And you're going to say this to God. All right? A prayer of surrender. And we're going to join you in solidarity. Say this out loud with me. Heavenly Father, I acknowledge my sin before you. I make no excuses. I ask you today to wash me clean and give me a brand new start. I believe Jesus died for my sins and rose from the dead. And I confess Him as my Lord. Make me your child. Take me in your family. I surrender my life to you in Jesus' name and Jesus' name.