Rooted Testimonies: Jeff Durbin's Story

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My name is Jeff Durbin. I'm the pastor of Apologia Church and started

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Apologia Radio, Apologia Studios, and End Abortion Now. End Abortion Now is a ministry of Apologia Church that has raised up almost 500 churches nationwide and globally that go out to the abortion mills to preach the gospel, to offer help and hope to mothers and fathers.

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It has been responsible for saving thousands upon thousands of children from death, and we're working to ultimately end, once and for all, to abolish abortion.

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And God has used Apologia Church and our online platforms to reach millions upon millions of people.

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The gospel has gone to a number of different cults, from Mormonism to the Watchtower. We've been able to engage with atheists and secular thoughts, and we've seen many, many people come to Christ all over the world out of those different worldviews and perspectives.

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And God continues to give us a lot of grace and a lot of opportunities to reach a lot of people with the gospel.

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I came to Christ a little later in life and was adopted into God's family after a pretty significant drug addiction.

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And my story, I guess, not belaboring it, but going back sort of to the beginning,

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I wasn't raised in a Christian home. Under the hearing of the gospel, going to church,

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I had very little understanding of the message of Jesus or who He was. My dad was

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Air Force, in the Air Force, and so I spent most of my time growing up on military bases.

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And I grew up in Holland and traveled a lot, Germany, Ibiza, all over the

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United States. I grew up in Japan, northern Honshu, Japan, in Misawa Air Force Base. And everywhere we went, there was a

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Bible that sat on top of our stereo, no matter where we were in the world. And this was a

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King James Bible that just basically collected dust wherever we went. But that was what

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I knew, that was the Bible and that was this man named Jesus, that was

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His book. My father was atheist.

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My mother was sort of what I would say woo -woo spiritual. When things would get tough, she would mention that there's a

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God and there's this person named Jesus. My understanding of who

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Jesus was and what His message was was really from movies like King of Kings, Ben -Hur, that sort of a thing.

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And like I said, I didn't grow up in church, so I didn't have any real understanding about what the message of Jesus was or really who

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He was. And I was a world champion martial artist.

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I've been doing martial arts since I was four years old. I started in judo. And growing up in Japan, I grew up doing two separate martial arts systems at different martial arts schools.

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My whole life was martial arts. Every day of the week, I was training at these two different schools in Japan.

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And it was everything that I loved and always wanted was martial arts and to be the very best at it.

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So when I came back to the United States of America, I began competing and then got connected to one of the best coaches in the world.

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And he trained me and I became a national champion, an international champion, a world champion, and was competing full time.

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So really throughout my teenage years in through high school and into my early adulthood, my whole life was professional competition.

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I went to the Junior Olympics. I was on national karate teams. I was paid to compete and to win.

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And I won everything there was to win in the martial arts world.

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I won the same tournaments that made Chuck Norris famous, Battle of Atlanta, the

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Diamond Nationals, all the big ones. That was my whole entire life was martial arts.

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And so as a teenager, I barely remember high school because most of my time was actually missing high school to travel around the country to compete professionally.

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But I also for work, I would teach at different martial arts schools all over Washington, D .C.,

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Maryland, Virginia. And I also had my own karate school. And so I didn't spend a lot of time at home, to be honest.

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And one night I came home real late from teaching and I was eating and I remember it vividly.

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I was eating dinner by myself, watching television and flipping through the channels. And I saw

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Billy Graham. And I don't know what ultimately would cause me to stop at that age, but I did.

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And I heard the message of Jesus that he died on a cross, rose again from the dead, and that you can have eternal life through trusting in him, believing in him.

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So I repeated that prayer when I was watching Billy Graham. And I remember

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I called the phone number, the 1 -800 number afterwards, and they sent me the Gospel of John and a scripture memorization package.

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And that's where I had, for the first time, a really deep love

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I felt for the Bible. And I was studying it profusely.

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And I remember that I had a very public profession of faith in Jesus.

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I began to understand who he was. I understood that he was God in the flesh. That was a revelation to see that.

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And understand what he did and what the Bible was. And I had sort of a profound interest in this message of the

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Gospel. But what was, I think, taxing and also contradictory in my life was the fact that I had sort of two sides to myself.

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I had the Jeff who had this new profound profession of faith in Jesus, a professed love for the

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Bible, a passion, it seemed, externally for that. And yet I had also this other side of me that didn't seem to understand what submission to Jesus and his lordship really meant.

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And so if you would see me during the week, I'd be reading the Bible and saying I believed in Jesus.

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But ultimately, I would still be sleeping with girls and really doing whatever I wanted.

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And I ended up moving to Arizona, and I was doing different things.

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I was doing stuff for martial arts. I was trying to do things for television,

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Ninja Turtles. I was Michelangelo and Donatello for the Ninja Turtles franchise.

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I did the stunts and choreography for some of the franchise stuff. I did some video game production things.

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I was teaching for karate schools in Arizona, and sort of in the martial arts world at the top of my game.

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But still this tension between Christian Jeff and then the Jeff who would ultimately still do what he wanted on the weekends.

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Well, things really changed dramatically for me. I married the girl that I've known since she was 11 years old.

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I was 13 years old. So I got married, and I married somebody that I've known since she was 11 and I was like 13.

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She was the niece of my best friend and the guy I used to compete with around the country.

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And so I've known her and her family since I was really, really young. Well, we got married very young ourselves.

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She was 18. I was, I guess, 19 or 20, somewhere around there. And we had a son.

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And at this point in my life, we were both professing Christians, but still that tension was there in terms of fully committed to Christ, submitted to His Lordship, and still doing what

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I wanted. And I remember that at this point, I never would have been the kind of person that would have gone and done hard drugs.

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It's something that I really would have probably said is kind of icky and dangerous at the time.

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And so I really never thought that'd be a part of my experience. But I was still very much wrapped up in the martial arts world and had friends all over the country and friends from California.

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There were movies and things like that. And one weekend, a bunch of these friends came out and we went out to Scottsdale to some clubs one night.

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And I remember my wife had said she didn't want me to go, but of course, I do what I want.

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And so I went anyways. And so we went out this night to this club and got completely blasted.

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And I remember being at one club and I got so drunk that it was blackout drunk.

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I don't remember anything that happened. But when I came to, I was at a different club and it was really late in the a .m.

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hours. And I remember that as I'm kind of coming into like, where am I?

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What's going on? I'm at this different club and I'm in a crowd of people surrounded with people and I have a pill in my hand.

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And I see one of my close friends with me, he's got a pill in his hands and I'm sort of kind of coming to the realization of like, what's really happening here?

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And I see security kind of running over to us with their flashlights.

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And I remember that there was this moment where I thought, well, I can either take this pill and make it disappear or I could throw it on the ground and maybe get caught.

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So I took it. And about 45 minutes later or so, ecstasy.

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That's what I took. It was ecstasy. And so I didn't come home till the next day,

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I think till afternoon or something like that. And that one weekend turned into let's try it again the next weekend.

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And so that next weekend began a series of, well, let's just do it the next weekend.

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Then it was like, let's do it in the middle of the week. And then I started getting dealers. And essentially this led to about a year long pursuit of depravity where I was hiding all of this from my wife.

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I was disappearing from home for days at a time. I was taking anything at that point.

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I was drinking every day. I was taking numerous tabs of ecstasy for it to even work anymore because you sort of tap out your serotonin and you can't, it doesn't really work.

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So you have to just take a lot more, which is where it gets deadly. Actually, you can overheat and die. And so I was taking ecstasy.

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I was taking cocaine. I was taking pills, marijuana, alcohol, really anything I can get my hands on.

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I was abandoning my now pregnant wife and my very young son and disappearing.

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And that was my life for about a year. It was just a life of depravity. And so near the end of this year, things began to change in terms of everything around me was falling apart because I was falling apart completely.

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And it really all hit a wall one night when

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I was at an after party after going out and clubbing and using all night. And I had taken a lot of ecstasy that night, a lot of ecstasy, a lot of ecstasy and a lot of vodka and rum and things like that.

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And one of the things that ecstasy users know is that you can die from an ecstasy overdose by overheating.

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You sort of cook yourself from the inside essentially. And so you're always sort of on the lookout if you're a seasoned ecstasy user for dehydration and overheating and those sorts of things.

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So you're always drinking water and you're always trying to keep cool and stuff like that. Well, I'm in this after party with some friends and some strangers.

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It's completely dark and it's in the early a .m. hours. And all of a sudden

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I realize that my heart rate is jacked. It is it's going out of control.

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And it feels like someone has their foot on the gas pedal and it's it's not it's not letting up.

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It's not stopping. It's just going faster and faster and faster. I look down at my hands and my arms and they are just completely blood red.

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And I realized that my body temperature is just elevating and elevating and elevating. So I'm trying not to panic and I'm trying to keep myself calm.

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And so I go and I turn the A .C. down as low as I possibly can and I run and I grab a bag of ice and as much as I can from the freezer and I go into the bathroom and I pour this cold water bath and I dump all the ice into it and I put a fan even by the bathtub and I get into it and I'm trying to bring my body temperature down.

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But it's not working because my whole body is just absolutely blood red. I am profusely sweating in an ice bath and my heart rate it just feels like it's my heart's about to explode.

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And I realized that very shortly after I got into the bath that I've just melted this ice bath and it's not doing anything.

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It won't even touch what's happening to my body. And so I start to feel like I'm fading at this point.

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Like I'm starting to lose it. I'm starting to lose consciousness and nothing is helping.

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And so I'm trying to keep myself as calm as possible. Keep my pulse points under cold water and keep myself cool.

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And it's getting worse and worse and worse. So I remember that I even grabbed a telephone and I was about to call 9 -1 -1.

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And so I go into this bedroom. I'm completely soaked from this bath and I sit on this bed and I have the phone next to me and I'm about to call 9 -1 -1 before I completely fade out.

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And I remember I had this moment where God's presence and the reality of what

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I was doing and who I was was so vividly clear in that moment. When you're about to die your own mortality is very very clear and the presence of God is very very clear.

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And so at that moment I had this very clear picture of who I was, who

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God was, what I was doing, and what I was guilty of. And I knew that it wasn't simply the addiction that was the problem.

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I knew that the biblical message clear enough to know that this is a problem of my sin and my rebellion. So I remember sitting on the bed.

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My body is going out of control and I remember asking God to not kill me.

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And it's a very simple prayer actually. It was, I know that I'm guilty. I know that what

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I'm doing is sin and I know that you have every right to kill me. But I said please don't kill me yet.

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Please just don't kill me yet. Please get me out of this. Restore my life but don't kill me yet.

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And just please be merciful to me. And after praying that, if you could understand the switch, how dramatic it was, you would understand how shocked

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I was. I go from a place where my whole body is red, my heart is going out of control, and I feel like I'm fading out of consciousness.

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And all of a sudden when I ask God for mercy and not to kill me, everything turns off.

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I mean I went from this drunken ecstasy laden stupor where my body is overheating and I'm ODing to as sober as a

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Baptist preacher on Sunday morning. I came completely out of it.

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My heart went back to normal. My skin went back to normal. I stopped sweating and I was completely fine.

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And I was stunned by it to the degree that I was like, wait, this doesn't happen.

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This doesn't feel right. Maybe it's going to start again. I remember I went into the other room. Everyone's still partying and doing their thing.

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And I remember I just sort of kept to myself, just thinking to myself, is it going to happen again? How did this just turn off like that?

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Because now I was fine. I'd like to say that I turned to Christ there and I stopped.

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And everything was amazing, but I just didn't want to die. And so I still didn't turn to Christ and submit to Him.

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And so I kept going. And so it was a matter of a very short time period later, maybe a matter of two weeks or so, where God finally crushed my life.

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I asked Him to destroy my life that night, to bring me back to Him. It's another part of my prayer. Please destroy my life and bring me back.

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And then He did. It only took a couple of weeks. And then He did. One day, I woke up to my electric shut off.

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I woke up to our water shut off. I woke up to my car being dragged away and repossessed.

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I had an eviction notice on my door. My phone was shut off. And the place I was working for decided to essentially let all their employees go and said, we're not paying you.

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If you don't like it, sue us. And I didn't have any money to sue anybody. So that would be kind of hard. So I'm sitting now in an apartment with my wife, my newly born daughter, my son, no electricity.

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It is just silence and we have nothing, no money, no nothing.

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Now, I gave my wife every possible reason in the world to leave me and she would have been right to do so.

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But she was still there and she was still praying and still encouraging me.

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And so I'm sitting now in this apartment with all the devastation that I've caused. Now, my heart was still in a place where I still would have gone out had

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I had the opportunity gone out and used and disappeared. So it wasn't like people say like, oh, you hit bottom.

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No, like I still wanted to do it. But I was finally in a place where I was in quiet, no more noise, no more music.

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And it was just me and a Bible. And I remember that I had these quiet moments where I'm sitting on the couch with my wife.

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Miraculously, weirdly, people would show up at my door to give me money to turn the lights on.

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Weird. There's some miraculous stories behind all this in terms of what God was doing.

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But all I had now was my wife sitting next to me on the couch and I have a Bible. And I'm starting to read the Gospels again for the very first time.

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And I'm finding something so odd, so strange. Why didn't I see this before?

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Like what I understood about the Gospel doesn't seem to be what I'm seeing here. Like I seem to have a perspective at the time, like if somebody just acquiesces to beliefs about Jesus, like affirms those things are true, like just factually, that's true.

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I believe that. They're like, that's it. Like that's what it means to believe in Jesus. Like I miss the whole part of like coming to Him to trust in Him to save you from sin.

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And I'm seeing this and I'm seeing Christ call to come and die, right? Like if anyone comes to me,

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I'm gonna take up the cross, do the death march, come die to follow Him. And the crowds just totally leave

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Jesus. Like He has an opportunity for mega church and He just completely whittles the crowd down back to 12 again.

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He's not apparently very good at building mega churches in His day. And I'm seeing like the contrast between what

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I thought the Gospel was and how Jesus is actually calling people to come to Him in faith to trust in Him to receive this gift, but you're coming to Him to be joined to Him to be forgiven of your sin.

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And I'm like, whoa, this seems different. Now, I've only recently thought about this.

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I don't know how I got this book. I don't know because I didn't buy it. There was a book on my shelf and it was the

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Gospel According to Jesus by Dr. John MacArthur. Now, I had of course loved and respected

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MacArthur, knew who he was, and really appreciated his ministry over the years as I heard things from him and everything else.

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But I don't know how I got this book. And I pick up this book and I'm reading and everything that I'm seeing

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John saying is what I'm seeing in the Gospel call from Jesus.

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And I'm like, that's the difference. Coming to Christ to trust in Him to save me from sin, coming to Him as Lord and Savior, like He's my master, my boss.

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So I come into a place where I'm beginning to question whether my profession of faith was genuine. And I come into this deep conviction of my own sin and my need to come to Jesus to be reconciled to God, to be saved from my sin.

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And so I just, I went into the closet, overwhelmed with a sense of my own sin.

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And it wasn't a magical prayer. I didn't read it off a tractor like that. My heart was completely grieved over my sin and my need for Jesus.

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And my prayer was pretty simple. I remember that I said to the Lord, I said,

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I'm guilty. You're right. I have nothing to offer you. And I said, please save me from my sin.

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Please save me. And I said, I don't want it anymore. I want you. I don't want it. And I remember it was very simple.

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I said something like, you're the boss. You tell me what to do. You take over my life and you run it.

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You own my life. And that's where my life began to change, legitimately change.

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And God took me from a place where I couldn't not use.

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I had to use. And he took me to a place where now I hated my sin.

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Like I despised it. I didn't want it. I was warring now with it. I wanted him and only him.

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And God began to sanctify me and change and transform my life. It was many years later, many years later,

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I had no desire. Whatsoever for this ministry, I didn't think about pursuing this ministry.

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It was something God just sort of presented. I never even knew it was an opportunity.

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Many years later, I actually had told my wife. I don't want to do ministry.

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I don't I don't want to pursue full time ministry. I'll just I'll run a great martial arts school.

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I'll be the best at it and I'll do ministry and evangelism and just serve Jesus. I remember I sat on the couch with her once many years later.

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And I said to her, I said, I said, babe, I'm happy to just scrub toilets at church and hand out bulletins.

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And run a great business for God's glory. And just do evangelism at every opportunity.

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Go out hit the streets and just run my business. And I don't have any desire to teach or be a pastor. I don't want to do that.

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I didn't feel like I was worthy of something like that. And I remember she said to me on the couch.

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She said, I don't see that. I said, what do you mean you don't see that?

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That's what I see. She was like, I don't see that. I think God has something very different for you.

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And you need to keep your heart open to it. And I was like, well, I'm not. I'm not going to do it.

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And it was a couple of years later that a pastor that I was at church with serving with told me, you're going to start teaching.

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And I was like, no, I don't want to. He said, no, I'm not asking you. I'm telling you, you need to start teaching. So my way into ministry was through great resistance.

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I didn't want to be a teacher, a pastor. I never wanted to plant a church. I resisted it because I didn't really feel like I was worthy of such a thing.

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At any rate, years later, I was pastoring at a church. And I got the opportunity to pastor and chaplain at a drug and rehab hospital.

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And I wasn't looking for this opportunity. Never saw it coming. Truly never saw it coming.

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But I was asked to come take over chapel just for a night at this drug rehab hospital. And I went to preach the gospel to a room of people that night that were me.

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I was looking into the eyes of myself. And again, it was a shock to me because I didn't anticipate this opportunity.

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But then shortly after I preached the gospel this night, and all these addicts came to Christ, they asked me to take over as chaplain at the hospital.

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So I was pastoring at a church and I was a chaplain at the hospital, both full time. And I was seeing so many people getting saved out of addiction through just the gospel, right?

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Not AA, not a celibate recovery. It was just the gospel and then basic Christian discipleship.

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That was happening in such a powerful way that long story short,

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God essentially created Apologia Church out of a drug rehab. And so over 10 years ago,

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Apologia Church started because somebody that God had delivered from drug and alcohol addiction and so much more had been redeemed from it, was placed into another place preaching the gospel with the same message, with the same understanding of what they were going through.

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And this whole church, everything that's happened here came because of all of that experience, because of what

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God did through all of that. God saved one person through one experience, put me in front of the same people, saved them, and then formed all of this.