I got saved November 10th 1976 when I was 26 years old. What drove me to Jesus was primarily never being born again, the culmination of 9 years of drugs and ungodliness, and beginning an interest and study of the occult that further opened a door to a demonic attack on my mind.
Sometime in early 1975 after eight years of filling myself with drugs and rebellion against God and how I was raised as a child, I began a seemingly harmless interest into UFO’s. It wasn’t long before the harmless interest turned into a consuming passion reading everything I could get my hands on concerning UFO’s. Much of the material tried to link UFO’s with God, “Chariots of the Gods” (Erich von Däniken), “Spaceships of Ezekiel” (Joseph Blumrich), were two of the many authors that tried to link God to alien beings. Many others did not attempt to link with spiritual things, writing material that remained entirely scientific. J.Allen Hynek, who actually came up with the scale of the classifying UFO encounters discouraged giving UFO’s a spiritual or religious tie. The more material I consumed the more I noticed much of what I read veered off into other areas of the occult, witchcraft, and demonology. It was during the last six months of the year and a half occult reading binge that I began to lose control of my thoughts and began hearing voices.
About a year into my studies I began having horrible thoughts and suggestions that would terrify me. They began very infrequent, but as the weeks and months passed by, they became more and more frequent until all my waking hours were filled with thoughts or suggestions of the most horrible behavior of every kind, some of them crimes and blasphemies against God. Also during this time the unmistakable drawing of the Spirit of God for me to give my life to Christ, that he was my way out of the torment.
One of the things that held me back was my reputation. What would people think, I would lose all my friends. “Hey did you hear, Monk is a religious fanatic now.” I feared I would become a laughing stock. I had a knowledge of God, I went to Catholic grade school and Catholic high school, but I was not born again. I wasn’t a Christian. But I had a knowledge of God.
In the days immediately preceding me getting born again I was emotionally and mentally falling apart, with frequent times of being overcome with grief and remorse and many tears, my spirit pleading for help all the while the unmistakable voice of God calling me to repentance, which I resisted. Fortunately for me I was a spray painter and worked in a booth by myself so no one saw me breaking down, no one saw what I was going through. About a week before I got born again I asked my ex-wife to contact her grandmother who was a Christian and have her church pray for me, which she did, but things only got worse. The day before I got saved I came home from work and locked myself in the bathroom and cried, desperate for relief. I remember thinking while in the bathroom , that if I did not get right with God that my choices were either suicide or end up in an insane asylum. I decided to get right with God. That night Tuesday November 9th I had my ex-wife ask her grandmother for her Pastor to visit me.The next evening, November 10th after their Wednesday evening service he came to our house and we talked.
I shared with him what I was going through and within minutes the conversation led to my need of accepting Christ. We prayed right then. As he was leaving he passed by the library of books I had collected. Occultic books of many subjects. He said, “You’re going to have to get rid of those books!” In my heart and out loud I said, “Done!” After he left I spent the rest of the evening ripping up the books, destroying all my drugs and drug paraphernalia, gathering up my music collection of about 230 albums and prepared to give them away. What should have been done is they should have been destroyed, but whether they should have been destroyed or given away, deep down I knew that to totally leave my former life behind and follow Christ it required me to get rid of the books and music that encouraged and helped me descend deeper into darkness. In the days and weeks following my salvation experience I gathered up all my 100 or so copies of Rolling Stone magazine and selected all the album adds that had a spiritual elements to the ads and albums. It was truly remarkable how many there were. To this day 47 years later I still recommend to Christians that they not listen to any music whose lyrics and music, instill and celebrate rebellion against God’s word. Not every song of course is of the devil, but a great many of them are. Music is a powerful medium, I challenge you to find out what the lyrics of some of the songs you like to listen to, you may receive an education. In my personal experience, it would have been hard for me to praise God while listening to “Sympathy for the devil” by the Rolling Stones; “Manic Depression” and “Voodoo Chile” by Jimi Hendrix; “God” and “Imagine” by John Lennon; or “Saturday Night’s Alright” by Elton John; “Born under a bad sign” , Paul Butterfield, or the many other songs that celebrate rebellion against God.
As the days and weeks went by, a disturbing development dawned on me, I realized my though life did not change, I was just as tormented as before I got saved. I knew I had gotten saved because there were definitive changes in my life. My desire to smoke dope just left me when I got saved. I had a very filthy mouth that I could not keep in check before I got saved but it too just dropped off the radar. Three days after my conversion I put my cigarettes down and didn’t pick them up again, the difference was the struggle and desire to smoke stayed with me for months, though losing its power over me little by little as the days and weeks passed. It was these victories in my life in the days, weeks and months of me getting saved and the infrequent sensations of feeling the presence of God that carried me and sustained me. At night I slept with my Bible under my pillow and began reading my Bible during the day while at work, averaging 50-60 chapters a day. It was nothing for me to read through the New Testament in a week or less which I did hundreds of times. That pace was continued for about seven years with intermittent periods of reading good books and studying more than just reading. Books by E.W. Kenyon, Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, Gordon Lindsay, E. F. Bosworth; David Wilkerson are some of the authors who fed me spiritually then and also now. In March of 1977, 4 months after I got born again I began attending Williamsburg Pentecostal Church. It wasn’t long after we began attending WPC that I confided in Pastor Jerry that I was greatly tormented in my thought life. He said “Don, all you need to do is renew your mind in the word of God.” We prayed and he shared with me a couple of Scriptures, Romans 12:1, 2 and 2 Corinthians 10:3-6, along with out authority in Christ. I not only memorized those passages, I recited them so often to myself I imagined that I branded them on my brain. From that moment on, relief began, slowly but surely and eventually I got total victory in my thought life. The total time was about 3 years. No tormenting thoughts, just peace. Praise God for his faithfulness to his word. Looking back, I believe I was healed of paranoid schizophrenia. Praise God for his faithfulness to his word. The answer to all mental illness is the word of God. I am not against doctors, my own brother was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia in 1990 and lived with it until the day he died. When he was compliant the medicine the doctors prescribed for him he did well, they were a great help.
Probably one of the most important lessons I learned as a baby Christian is that we are three part beings, spirit, soul and body (1 Thessalonians 5:23). We are spirits, we have a soul, and we live in a body. When we are born again, God recreates the human spirit (Titus 3:5; 2 Corinthians 5:17), after we get born again it is our responsibility to renew our minds in the word of God (Romans 12:1, 2; 2 Corinthians 10:3-6), and empowered by grace to walk in obedience (1 Peter 1:13-16).
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