Restoration Series #2 - Freedom in Christ — James Robison

The Unwanted Child and the Providence of Life

Recently, while attending Baylor University, Rhonda wrote one of her first brief papers for an English class. And she wrote a paper on situation ethics, where people are moved by the situation, oftentimes disregarding principles and convictions, which really are important.

She wrote the paper concerning a woman who found herself carrying an illegitimate child. The woman was in her forties. She had no husband. She had no job. Several doctors told her if she gave birth to her first child at her age and facing some physical difficulties, that most likely she would die.

As my daughter wrote the paper, she explained that the woman went to a physician and consulted the physician. She requested that the baby in her womb be terminated, a term referred to today very frequently and freely as abortion, problem pregnancy.

The doctor with whom she conferred said that he would not do that and would not consent to it. The woman went home and reflected and thought about it and even said later that she actually prayed about it and felt that it would be wrong to terminate the child.

And so at age 41, she gave birth to a little baby she didn't even have a name for. A few days later, she put an ad in a newspaper and requested that someone come and take the baby into their home. A minister and his wife responded to the ad, came and got the baby, took the baby home with the intention of adopting the child, kept the little boy until he was five, and then the child's mother came and took him away.

And the little boy went to live with his mother where he lived for the next ten years in very difficult circumstances, my daughter wrote in her paper. Then as a teenager, he was introduced to Jesus Christ through the witness of some teenagers.

The boy had already joined a church, had already become a member of a religious group, but his life had not been changed until through the witness of some young people he realized that religion was not the answer.

And what he actually needed was a relationship, a personal relationship with the living God. And the young man trusted Christ as his savior and his life was completely changed. At this time, the boy's natural father had actually come back into the home as an alcoholic, which he had been since he was 19.

And he made the family circumstances so difficult that on one occasion he nearly took his wife's life, the mother of this boy who miraculously found his way into life. On another occasion, threatened to take the life of the boy, and in an argument, the teenage lad nearly took the life of his father.

At age 18, God called that boy to preach. And he began to preach. And the ministry was so blessed that millions of people attended the crusades all over America. Until some reports have been observed which say that this young man preached to more people in this nation face-to-face than anyone in the history of the nation.

Over a million people came to trust Christ through the ministry of a boy that was unwanted and unexpected. And then my daughter wrote in the paper at Baylor University. Had that baby boy not been born, this paper never would have been written.

For the story I'm writing is not a hypothetical case. It is the story of my father, James Robinson. And she said, I think it's important for people in situations of extreme difficulty to be moved by principles and by conviction.

I thank God. I thank God for the convictions of a doctor in 1943. For because of his convictions, I was allowed to be born. I came into this life facing the difficult circumstances that face so many today.

I watched my mother divorce and remarry a number of times. We were extremely poor. I lived with such fear and frustration in my life as a teenager that I often wished to die. And on at least two occasions that I can remember, I tried to take my life.

From Religion to a Personal Relationship with Jesus

And then I met Jesus Christ in a personal experience. It is God's desire that each of us come into a personal relationship with Him. And there is an enemy of God. And there is an enemy of life who is seeking to keep us from entering that personal relationship with God.

And he will often offer us religion as a primary substitute for a personal relationship with Jesus Christ. You must know God personally. And through Jesus Christ, we come to God. There's no other way to God.

There's no other way to life other than Jesus Christ. Jesus said, I'm the way, I'm the truth, I am the life. No man comes to the Father but by me. We do not come to God through religion. We don't come to God through some church association or fellowship.

We come to God through Jesus Christ. And it becomes a personal relationship with a God that we're actually told by Jesus to address as our Father in Heaven. Then we enjoy fellowship with God. And in fellowship with God, we can enjoy fellowship with one another.

But there are many people today who do not enjoy fellowship in this life. Because their life is not filled with meaning and purpose. There's so little purposeful relationships, meaningful relationships.

So little real fellowship among people. There's little fellowship even in churches among professing believers. There is no more distressing sight on earth than to look at the disgrace of one believer, one Christian, one person who professes a relationship with God.

And consider their relationship with one another one of hostility, animosity, criticism, judgmentalism, and division. My friends, there is a healing coming to the body of Christ. We're going to learn to love one another in the name of Jesus Christ on this earth.

And we're going to live in a fellowship of love among believers. And we're not going to come my way or your way. We're not going some preacher's way. We're not going the Baptist way or the Pentecostal way or the Methodist way.

We're going God's way and we're going to have the mind of Christ. And we're going to love one another. In the 10th chapter of John verse 10, Jesus says, I am come that you might have life and that you might have it more abundantly.

Conversion and New Birth

I was privileged to be born into this life miraculously through the conviction of a doctor. I thank God for the privilege of living. But it was as a teenage boy that I came to find the life of Jesus Christ.

I had already become religious. I had already tried to change my own life. I had already identified with the church. But I did not have a personal relationship with Jesus. A pastor's wife with a broken heart made her way up an aisle.

Tears flowing down her cheeks. So freely did those tears of love flow down her cheeks that she actually held her glasses in place. And as the tears coursed across her cheeks, she put her hand on my shoulder and she said, James, don't you want to go to Jesus?

I was seated in a chair similar to the ones you're seated in here tonight. I was on the end of a row. But I was shy. I was fearful. I couldn't imagine walking forward and saying before hundreds of people, I give my life to Christ.

I was terrified. But I saw the very love of Jesus in her expression, in her countenance. And as I looked at her tears, I realized how much God loved me. And that night, I stepped out with her assistance.

And I walked down that aisle and publicly said, I give my life to Jesus Christ. As a teenage boy without a home. A boy without a father. A boy with no hope. A boy with no future. That moment, in Jesus Christ, I was born again by the word of God.

I was spiritually transformed. I had lived with an alcoholic father. I'd watched him strike my mother when he didn't realize what he was doing. I'd heard him lash out at me again. He didn't know what he was doing.

I didn't want to be seen with my father. I had a very difficult time forgiving him. I had saved some money as a little boy. We didn't have any money. We were so poor. And I'd saved just a few dollars.

And I can remember the exact amount because for me, it was a tremendous sum of money. I'd saved $7. And one day, it was missing. My mother thought I'd left it at school. We couldn't find it. I didn't find out until several years later that my father had taken all the money I'd saved in my life.

And he went and got drunk on it. All of these things had occurred in my life, and there was tremendous hostility there. But when Jesus Christ came into my life as a teenage boy, I can remember going home.

And I can remember looking at my father and saying, I don't know you, but I love you. And I did. My life was so changed that I began to share Jesus Christ with my friends. One of my friends also had lived in a broken home.

I led him to Christ. I didn't even know how to witness. I simply shared that Jesus changed my life. And God called me to preach, and I began preaching all over this country. And I began to preach that Jesus Christ has come, that you might have life, and that you might have it more abundantly.

When I began preaching as a teenager, and I started at age 18, I was so full of the love and life of Jesus that I could barely travel down a street, even a busy street, without stopping my car, getting out of the car, walking over to people and asking them if they knew Jesus.

And I began preaching. I received so many invitations that I was preaching not only in large churches within a matter of months, but by the time I was 20 years of age, I was preaching citywide, cooperative crusades all over the country.

And we began to see 5, 6, 7, 10 ,000 come and attend, thousands come to Christ. I began to be so used by the Spirit of God, and so invited by men, that I became so busy, I found myself unknowingly being caught up into a web of busyness and activity, even in the religious realm.

The Dangers of Religious Busyness and Spiritual Warfare

And I want you to know what happened very suddenly. I can remember as I'd gone off to school to study, and in those early days of my ministry, even as a student, I was very busy. But I would get out there in the piney woods of East Texas, and I would walk alone, and tears would roll down my cheeks.

Late in the evening, as the dusk atmosphere was heavy, I would walk through the trees, and I would just love Jesus. And I remember saying, Lord, if you use me, and you bless the ministry, I said, I'll always come back and walk alone with you, and just love you, Jesus.

And the Lord began to show me that I was going to preach to very large crowds of people. I began to see the thousands coming. And I said, Lord, if you bless me, I'll always come back here, and I'll love you, and I'll spend time with you, just the two of us.

But I want to confess to you that I got so busy doing good things, ministering, preaching, conducting crusades and revival meetings, that I began slowly to move away from that time of intimacy in this Word, in the Word of God.

And I became a very busy religionist. I never intended it to be that way. But I want you to know some tragic things began to happen in my life as a preacher. Not tragic in the sense that some people identify tragedy as some of the gross and horrible things that can happen.

But I want you to know that I realized that in my life there was nothing that couldn't have occurred because I found myself so vulnerable and so weak before the enemy of God, Satan, and spiritual powers, that I oftentimes felt at any moment I might crash.

You see, I had been trained, without even knowing it, to ignore the real enemy. I'd been trained to ignore Satan. I knew he was real. I knew he existed. But I had no idea what he could do to a believer.

I didn't seem to understand why God had written this entire Bible and that every part of it was relevant. I didn't seem to understand that God had written the Old Testament to teach the New Testament believer how to effectively win the battle in spiritual warfare.

He didn't simply give us a neat history of Israel. This is not simply a picture of the Jewish plight and pilgrimage. But rather God says in 1 Corinthians 10, I wrote these things for your instruction and they happened as an example for you.

And we find in 1 Peter that Peter says that the prophets who prophesied knew that they were not serving themselves, but they were serving you. They were actually writing for us, the believers. And that this book was not written to teach us how simply to overcome a physical enemy, to fight communists, or how to overcome the believers up the street in the other church building.

It wasn't a book written to teach us how simply to fight against our own nature, our own tendencies. But rather it was a book written to teach us how to fight in the spiritual realm with principalities and powers of darkness.

Not only how to fight in that realm, but how to fight in the whole armor of God by recognizing the enemy, resisting the enemy, and overcoming the enemy. And that's what God wills us to do. I didn't understand that.

I honestly, I'd honestly been somehow deceived into believing that our struggle was with one another. And I thought my struggle was with myself. And I began to detest myself. I began to say, why can't I think right?

Why can't I act right? Why can't I do right? Why can't I live right? And I found myself totally overcome in my thought life. I found myself overcome in my attitude. It was so un-Christ-like so often.

In my life, I found I was facing tremendous defeat. Jesus said in the 8th chapter of John, verse 32, You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. We quote that verse in Christian circles so freely.

You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free. And people say, I'm a Christian, I know the truth, so I'm free. But I want you to notice the significance of this verse because it's very important for every one of you at this moment.

Jesus didn't merely take that statement, You shall know the truth, and the truth will make you free, and ask that statement to stand alone apart from the total teaching of Scripture. He put it in perfect context as he does everything that he says.

And that's why it's so important that we preach the whole counsel of God, not just our favorite parts. You see, the 32nd verse of John, chapter 8, is preceded by the 31st verse. And the 32nd verse, You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free, is only relevant, it's only true when you understand the importance of that first verse.

Verse 31, listen to it. Jesus says to those Jews who believed in him, If you abide in my word, if you abide in my word, then you are truly disciples of mine. If you live in my word, you're my disciples.

Everything we do in our life is to point people to Jesus Christ. We are to be expressions of his nature and his character. I'm confessing to you, I was not an expression of his nature. I was so often not an expression of his character.

Because the enemy had come in and assaulted me in my own personal life. The enemy I'd been taught to ignore. Verse 33 says, The Jews responding to Jesus, who delivered this message to them in the context of the conversation.

The Jews answered and said, We're Abraham's offspring, and we've never yet been enslaved to anyone. How is it that you say you shall become free? That could be the most hilarious verse in the entire Bible.

Do you see the significance of what they just said? Jesus said, You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. And they said, We're Abraham's offspring, we've never been enslaved to anyone.

Can you find many times in human history and biblical history when the Israelites were not enslaved to someone? They were enslaved to Egypt when God sent Moses to deliver them. They experienced all of the assault of the various national enemies, and they were held captive by the Babylonians.

And when these Jews made this statement, they were the subjects of the Roman Empire. And they said, We've never been enslaved to anyone. We've never been enslaved. Now that's the testimony of most Christians today when you say, The truth will make you free.

What does it mean to be free? It means you're free from the power of the enemy. You overcome the world, the flesh, and the devil. You're an overcomer. You're not overcome, you're an overcomer. And if you're not an overcomer, you're being overcome.

Now I'm confessing to you, I was overcome. I was overcome in my thought life. I was overcome in my appetites. I was overcome in my actions. Now because I'm a believer, and I think if you're a believer, if you've ever been born again, you'll be as disturbed as I was.

I was disturbed that I was overcome. God had destined me to bring forth fruit, and that fruit would remain and glorify Him because it'd be good fruit. And I found what this Old Testament taught to be a reality in my life.

Now listen closely. It took God one day to get His people out of Egyptian bondage. One day to get them out of Egypt. It took Him 40 years to get Egypt out of His people. 40 years of wandering around in the wilderness of unbelief.

It takes God one instant to save you, but it may take years to get the world out of a believer. Because we are being programmed by the God of this world rather than the Holy Spirit of God and the Word of God.

We're being programmed and manipulated by men rather than controlled by the Spirit of a living God. We're listening to the words of men rather than the Word of God. And we're not living by the Word of God.

We're picking and choosing who we associate with. And we're not bringing forth fruit that looks like Jesus. There is an atmosphere, there's a force that's warring against people on this earth that is a demonic, spiritual enemy orchestrated by the God of this world, Satan himself.

And He is literally sending against you right there in your home, those of you here tonight, He is sending against you legions of the hordes of hell who destroy, who rob, who deceive, and who kill. And as surely as the atmosphere is saturated with atomic energy, the atmosphere on this earth in the spiritual realm is saturated with the influence of the powers of darkness.

And those powers have come to cut you off from fellowship with God, to keep you from entering a relationship with God, to keep you from enjoying a wholesome relationship with others on this earth. And this enemy has come to sever your relationship with those in the body of Christ, and destroy any possibility of loving fellowship on this earth.

He is a deceiver, and that is his method, and his motive is murder. He wants to destroy you. And that's exactly what he's doing to so many precious lives. He wants to destroy the possibility of you producing any good fruit in your life that looks like Jesus.

And he's done it. So many believers are so frustrated, even in religious circles. You can't know how many preachers we're ministering to right now, who are absolutely coming to wit's end, at the end of their life, they don't even want to live.

And I reach that point. I reach the point in my life as a preacher that I prayed to die. I even asked my wife if she'd pray I'd die. What a foolish request. I did not want to live. And yet I was, quote, a successful preacher.

How does anyone reach this place? I know the enemy will come against you with constant condemnation. He'll come against you trying to divide you from the people you love. Every married couple here, every married couple listening to me, the enemy's trying to divide that marriage relationship.

He's trying to pit brothers against sisters in your family. He's trying to pit the children against the parents, and the parents against the children. And the enemy in his deception tries to make you think one another is the enemy.

And he disguises himself. And I found this so true in my life. I was so empty, so frustrated. And I was not bringing forth fruit. Oh, I could preach. I'd get up and preach. People would come responding to the good news of a wonderful Savior.

But I found they were entering the same bondage that I was in. Jeremiah, writing in Lamentations, said, even the little ones are led away captive of the adversary. We get people into our churches, and within a matter of months, they're just as worldly as the people outside the church.

Have just as worldly an attitude. The same atmosphere prevails in many religious circles that prevails in the country club. The Gallup Poll has recently revealed that religion and spiritual life is growing in our country, but churches are not.

It's an exception when one does. But people are coming to God, the Gallup Poll says. They're coming to God. They want a relationship with a living God. They don't want a dull association with a dead religion.

They want to know a living God. And I want you to know that God is going to free us. He's going to absolutely, absolutely free us from the bondage of traditionalism and religious ritual that has not the life, the vitality of a living God.

And I found myself trapped. I was zealous for causes, but I was trapped. And I needed to be delivered. Just like the Israelites who finally got out of the wilderness and went into the promised land. And the promised land is not a picture of heaven.

The promised land is a picture of the overcoming Christian life. When they entered the promised land, they found themselves continually in a battle with the enemies to keep the enemies out of the land.

Deliverance from Temptation and Spiritual Strongholds

When you become a Christian, this is the land you're to conquer. You're to possess this vessel with honor. This is the temple of God. Not a building. This is the temple of God. This is God's field. This is God's vineyard.

And it is this vessel that you're to possess with honor. And it's this life that most Christians are not possessing. And I was not. I was defeated. Boy, I was defeated. And then the Lord sent help. You know what the Lord sent for me?

A defeated preacher. He sent deliverance. He sent the deliverance that Jesus told his disciples in the model prayer in Matthew 6 where we pray, Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come.

Thy will be done. In that prayer, Jesus said, Pray this way. Father, lead us not into temptation, but deliver who? Us. From who? The evil one. The fact is that the enemy gets ground in the lives of believers.

Just like the enemy got ground in the promised land. God's people's possession. And they're to be driven out. I repeat, this is not a war manual to teach you how to destroy people. It is a spiritual manual of love and it's a spiritual manual for spiritual warfare to teach you how to drive the enemy out of your life and your land.

And conquer the land is more than conquerors. That's what this book is about. God wants you to be an overcomer. All of you living an abundant joy-filled, spirit-filled, spirit-controlled life, bringing forth the fruit of the Spirit, which is love and joy and peace and patience and goodness and kindness and meekness and faithfulness and self-control.

The Garden Illustration and Authority over Evil Spirits

I want to show you an illustration of deliverance if you would let me. If you had a flower bed bringing forth beautiful flowers and you loved your garden. I don't care if it was a vegetable garden or a farm.

You plant, you water, you break up the ground and then you expect to get fruit from the plant bringing it forth in season, right? If it's a flowering plant, it brings forth flowers, beautiful blossoms, right?

Now if you love your garden and you go out there one day and you look in your garden and right there in the midst of your garden you see this growing. Doesn't that look beautiful? And you love your flower garden and you want it to bring forth fruit.

You know what this weed does? This weed not only takes away the beauty of this flower but this weed takes away the nutrition intended for these plants. It robs them. It's a trespasser. Do you understand it's a trespasser?

Now would you like me to show you what Jesus means when he says cast out the demons and cast out the evil spirits? If you love your garden you take the weed and you cast it out and you protect your garden.

Do you know that God let me know that even this weed is doing what he designed it to do? This weed is pointing out for all the world to see the horror of an intruder. This weed is pointing out the importance of a bind dresser.

Somebody to get the weeds out. That is the purpose of every believer on this earth to keep the enemy out of the garden of God. And we are to see the fruit brought forth in our lives that looks like Jesus.

Now that is what deliverance is. Get the enemy out. Do you know that as believers we can visit those in prison? And I was in prison. And did you know that I had become so infested with weeds in my life that the fruit of my life was being destroyed by a trespasser walking all over me?

And you know what I had in my land? I had fortified cities, strongholds. And God said the weapons of our warfare are not carnal, they're not fleshly. But they're mighty through God to the pulling down of what?

Pulling down of strongholds. Tearing down speculation. And everything that does what? Exhausts itself against the knowledge of God. And doing what? Bringing every thought captive, obedient to Jesus. God wants to take over your thoughts and bring your thoughts obedient to Jesus.

Healing, Faith, and the Word of God

Here I was, a well known nationally known evangelist. But you know what? James Robinson, even though he looked good, was a defeated man. The enemy had gotten into my land in sicknesses. I carried infection in my body.

I lived with chronic throat infections, chronic stomach disorders. I lived with sinus infections. I can't even describe to you how desperately fatigued I felt in my body. I often said I felt like somebody's drawing the blood out of my body.

The vitality was leaving. People could describe a disease to me and the next day I would have all the symptoms. Man, I was so vulnerable to the enemy. I mean, he was running over me. And I felt like I was dying.

And I walked in and heard a Baptist preacher say, the power that raised Jesus' dead body from the grave lives in you. And he said, you're content to live sick, defeated and depressed. And he began to cry.

He said, you don't have to. Jesus is healer still. And that day I realized the power that raised Jesus from the grave lived in me. And right there I received in my sick body the healing of Jesus. I'm telling you his healing was released in me.

Listen, I'd been turned off by healing. I knew God could heal. I believed God was a healer. I believed God could still perform miracles. I never believed miracles passed away. But I simply did not believe that we could come to God in faith and receive the healing that is promised in the Word of God.

I had watched the merchandising of healing. I'd seen so many people lining up and lining up. And you know what God revealed to me recently about all these prayer lines? The only reason people lined up to be prayed for is there's so few people willing to pray for sick people.

When we have a revival, there won't be people lining up to be prayed for. We'll be lining up to pray for the sick. We'll want to pray for them and see them healed with the power of God. It's the Word of God that's health to your whole body.

The Word of God that's health to your bones. Right now, right now doctors are feverishly working to find out what triggers this brain to release the secretions that drive all diseases out of the body.

Doctors have recently uncovered that in your brain there is the potential to release a secretion that will drive out any identifiable disease. There are literally thousands of various secretions that can be released into the body by thought impulse to the brain.

Drive out cancer. Drive out infection. Drive out all manner of sickness. And so doctors are working feverishly now to try to find the trigger for the mind and the brain. The trigger that will release this beautiful healing secretion from the brain into the body that God created to drive out sicknesses.

Doctors are trying to discover the trigger to trigger your mind. My friends, behold the trigger. It is not it is not psychic phenomenon. Some of the sicknesses may indeed be psychosomatic, but Jesus Christ heals the mind.

And more than the symptoms, he cures the root cause. My dear friend, this is not psychic power. This is supernatural spiritual power that brings health and healing to the whole body. And I'll say to you, every person in America, every believer, every preacher, you had better find the healing power of this word because diseases and sickness and pestilence is going to become so rampant on this earth, even among believers who will not walk and live in faith, it's going to become so rampant that doctors will not only be unable to treat the diseases, they won't even be able to adequately and accurately diagnose them.

We're going to find the healing in this word. I want you to know that in Jesus, in him, there is healing of every disease and any disease that troubles you. You can know that. You can receive it, and I want to help you.

A Personal Deliverance Experience

Do you know what happened to me? When God sent this layman to see me, my life was full of weeds. And in a motel room one night, this layman just said, James, could I pray for you? And I said, Milton. Milton Green is his name.

I said, sure, Milton. And that layman just walked over, asked me to get up and sit in a chair. And I got up, and I sat down in a chair. And Milton Green simply laid his hands on my shoulder in a loving way, and he began to pray for me.

And in a few moments, Milton Green began to address the powers of darkness, the powers of the enemy. He began to address the demonic influences. Don't cringe at the term demon. Jesus called them spirits.

These evil spirits that come against us. Jesus said, you have authority over them. You can walk over them. You have authority over them. But you see, we don't exercise that authority because we ignore them.

We think we're too sophisticated to acknowledge demons. Doctors do. Psychiatrists do. Even Hollywood did. Nobody knows what to do with them. But Jesus said, I'll tell you what to do with them. You can cast them out.

You can get rid of all those powers of darkness. And he began to address those powers of darkness. He began to address those demonic spirits, and I thought, oh no. Oh God, he's talking to the devil. Lord, this man is exercising authority over demons.

Now see, we can't see it. We've made it some mystical way out, banging off the wall, swinging from the chandelier, some kind of excessive something or other. But Jesus said, it's simple. That man was standing there getting the weeds out of my life.

He was saying, get out! Get out! Get out! And he has that authority over all those powers. And as he began to take authority over all those things in my life, I first thought, Lord, I hope these walls are soundproof in this motel right here.

Lord, I don't want anybody to find out this man's in here praying for me, and he's talking to the devil. When he got through praying for me, he sat down on the bed in front of me, looked over at me, and he put his hand up here on my leg, kind of patted me on the leg like that.

He said, how do you feel? I said, fine. He said, do you feel like anything sort of left you? Do you feel like anything sort of came off or out or just went away, a heaviness left you? And I said, Milton, I don't feel anything.

I said, Milton, I feel nothing. And old Milton doesn't live by sight. He lives by faith. Because once you've seen Jesus, you've heard the word, and you know you have authority. You don't wonder if you have it.

You know! When you hear God, that's where faith springs. The letter killeth, but the spirit gives life. Old Milton knew. And old Milton just leaned over. And he went like this, just right in the open eyes.

He said, son, he said, the scales are coming off. You're going to be able to see. You're going to be able to see what God's saying and what he's doing, son. You're going to see through spiritual eyes that don't have scales on them anymore.

It's going to get clear, son. And then he went like this, kind of just over my head. He said, all that traffic coming against your mind, he said, that old claw that's in your brain, and I told my wife and my closest friends, I said, I feel like I've got a claw in my brain.

I feel like there's a vice on my head. I feel like something's got me. I couldn't think like I wanted to think. I felt like I couldn't use my mind. I said, I've got a claw up here. My appetites were not what they ought to be.

And he said, that claw, that traffic, it's over, son. And he stood up, and he said, it's all over, son. And he walked out of the room. And I sat there, and I thought, huh. And I woke up back at home two days later after I'd returned to Fort Worth, where I live.

And I woke up at the break of day, early in the morning, and when I woke up, I was quoting scriptures. They were just flowing out of my mouth, scripture passages that I didn't even know I knew. I was just quoting scriptures.

I'd read them. I knew they were the word of God, but I didn't know. I'd memorized them. And I was just saying scriptures, the word of God. And tears were rolling down my cheeks. I woke up crying and saying scriptures.

They were just flowing out like a river. And I turned, and I reached over, and I grabbed my wife sleeping there next to me by the shoulders, and I awakened her. And as I awakened her, she looked in my eyes, and her eyes filled with tears.