This sermon shares a powerful testimony of a man's journey through fear, torment, addiction, and despair, leading to a desperate search for purpose and God's intervention in his life. It highlights the destructive path of sin, the impact of past traumas and wrong choices, and the ultimate realization of the need for a divine encounter to break free from bondage and find true purpose and healing.

I went into the service, I was there, and we would have the little training for the guard duty. I know that during this training that I was in front of a PX, and I simply just stepped from this guard post to go in there and to get a candy bar, a Coke, I don't remember, and I walked out, and later on, it's just such a simple thing, and I shouldn't have done it, but nevertheless, someone did tell on me. And that evening, at night, I remember that these men had me in this room, and they made me believe that they were going to put me in front of a firing squad that night. And I know that there's a trembling and a fear, and I really believe them. I believe this is my last night. This is it. I mean, I've heard of things like this, and I really didn't know, and they knew I didn't know, because they were enjoying what they were watching there. And so, and this went on, and then I would leave the room. They would bring me back in, and it would go through the thing all over again, and finally, late that night, they told me to go on my other barracks. I couldn't believe that they'd just let me go, to go on my barracks. Here I'm waiting to be killed, trembling in fear, and here they were telling me, they were telling me to, that I could go back to my barracks. And then I realized that they had just toyed with me. And then the enemy just put the thoughts, and the hostility, and the hate, and the murder to tear and come against, to tear down. That's the only weapons, I didn't know the weapons of Jesus. I was receiving in my mind the weapons of the devil, to come against these people who had toyed with me and everything. And it built this hostility up in me. I didn't want to drink. And finally, I came to a place where I decided there might be some kind of escape because of the torment I was in. And then, when I started drinking, I did start drinking, and such hostility was in me, it came out of coming back and turning over beds and everything throughout the barracks. It was later, later on, that drinking and driving over in Japan, was there at the occupation of Japan, I was just driving along, I was drinking. And then, as I get evil with a little five-year-old boy, he just jerks loose from his mother, and then I can hear the sound right now of this vehicle that was driving, hitting and killing a little five-year-old boy. And there was just no end to it. There was just no end to it, I can't tell you. I can't tell you. There's no way for me to explain to you the hours and the time that I look at this little five-year-old boy and look at myself. I literally despise myself and everything about myself. And, as I hate to say, let me just continue to tear down and destroy everything in my life. I come out of the service, I knew I was, I knew terrible things were wrong with me. I thought I had already seen the church. And I, the world was telling me, and they already had me programmed to hang in there, hang in there, keep a stiff upper lip, hang on to what they're telling you, hang on to pride, pride. And I was hanging on there. And I was keeping a stiff upper lip. And there was just not much left of me. And the drinking continued. And as I would, I would, I began, I learned about drugs. So I manned on to a truck stop, dropped some in my coffee, and then asked me later on how I felt. And, boy, I'll tell you what, that was a new escape. And then there, before this thing was even popular, and there became something else, an escape. I decided if my throat's in my mind, if I just live five years, five more years, if that's the extent of my life, it beats the torment to live another day or anything like I'd been living before. So I founded in drugs rather than in Jesus. And so as my life continued to spiral downward and downward and into pits of darkness, I came to a place I wanted to kill myself. I couldn't live anymore. I didn't want to live. And I remember in Luton, Chicago, I crawled up on a, I went up to the exits and everything to get up on top of a 60-story building. I was a steel rigger at the time. I liked being a steel rigger because I could move and I could run. My average change of residence was every six months. I never stayed in any place in the time I was 17 until I was 43 years, more than average of six months. I always had to keep moving. I had to keep running. I had to keep going. And I remember I got on this building, and this, and drugs and all, and I leaned over that I'm going to go off this building. And I leaned way over, and I, just one thought, and I could go ahead and jump. Just one thought. Come on. If that thought had come on, I'll end all this right now. As I leaned over this, I think back, I could not. I could not. All I could do is just lean over. And just that little push, just that little help to where I could go on, I couldn't get it. So finally I decided, you know, I'll just run around the coping of this building, and I'll just stumble, and I'll fall off of it and trip. And I did run around. And I didn't stumble. And I didn't, obviously, fall off the building. And I left, and I would go to bridges, different times, always along. And to lean over the bridge. Maybe this is a time that I can end all of this. I remember going through and crossing rivers in freezing weather. I remember one particular time just running, and everything was after me. And just running and crossing rivers in freezing rain. I mean freezing weather, rather. And coming out. And, you know, finally I remember one time I got to a highway, and I put matches in a hat there and everything. And I lit up grass until I literally just burnt the shoes off my feet because it's so cold and so drugged up. And so I began to think about my life. My brother came to get me, I think at the time I was in Detroit. And he came to get me, and I recall as he was taking me to Ohio, that when we passed under the bridges and everything, I would hide down in the floorboard of the car because I figured that people would be on the bridges. They were trying to get me. They were after me. They were trying to get me and to see me, and they wouldn't see me in the car, and I'd hide. And, of course, I went to a mental institution. You know what we tell folks like that? Jesus can't help you. Go to the nuthouse. Or if you get bad enough, they've got a jail for you. The world does. Well, of course, I really wasn't thinking about Jesus. I thought I'd already knew about that. Folks that I saw couldn't even help themselves. How could they ever handle something like me? But I did. I went there so hurriedly. I can't tell you, folks. I can't tell you what I see. And the little I know, I can't come to anyone that when I help them, when the Lord's grace is in my life, that I can't see some part of my life that anybody, that hurting person can understand somebody else that's hurting. And, brother, I know it. And so the Lord, in his grace, I went to this. Everything that's in my life, I began sharing and relating. I was told to just tell it all to this psychologist in this mental hospital. It was a veteran's hospital. It's a mental part where they dealt with psychology. And then I did. I told him intimate things that I have never related to anyone in my life. And this went on for six months. At the end of six months, I came to a place where finally, this is the day I get the answer. This is the day I sit across from a desk and I have the answers to why I'm so different, to all the torment and all the bondage. I sit across the desk from this psychologist, and quite naturally, I leaned over because I put everything I had into it that six months, and I was wondering if I'd left anything out. And here's the way he started out to me, and he knew I was eager and anxious for the answers. And he said, Milk, when you first came here, and you started relating to some of the things to me about your personal life, I'll tell you what, I believed you was lying. I'm going to be honest with you, Milk. And I bothered to call and check in your part of the country with the things that you've been relating and sharing with me, and I found out they were true. I'm waiting for the answer. And I leaned over and he said, Milk, what you need is a religious experience. And I was thinking religious, I was thinking God. And he said, but you can't have one. The only answer he wants from me, and right then I couldn't have it, because he said you can't have faith. I was talking to the powers of darkness. But he spoke a curse on me because I received that in my heart. I received those words in my heart, and I believed that even God couldn't help me. And bad matters became worse, and then the hostility and everything that was there and had been there began to come out in a form of looking for bullies and things like that, and the people had always hurt other people and everything, because I couldn't see the invisible powers of darkness behind all these circumstances that had involved my life. Quite naturally, bad matters became worse, and I was in another mental institution there for several months. I left there, my life continually got worse and more bondage. I even got to Atlanta, Georgia, and I'm telling you, when you become a robot, and when you belong to the devil, you act like the devil. You're the image and likeness of him, and I want you to tell you that he had my life. He totally had my life. Lock, stock, and barrel, and I was being destroyed for the minute. And in Atlanta, Georgia, and I'll go into detail, I couldn't even stay in Atlanta, Georgia because of the trouble and everything that I was in in Atlanta, Georgia. And I left Atlanta, Georgia and went to Blue Ridge, Georgia, and I was on a lake, and I remember I was spending some time with myself, and I walked through the woods, and I'm thinking about here or far, far. I was over 40 years old, and I look back at my life, and I look at this world, and I say, you know, I didn't know anything about God, but I knew this world was phony as a $3 bill. I'm telling you, when I was sick and tired of these roads that I was playing, that hang in there and keep a step up or lift and everything, and I started looking at the roads that this world, but everybody's playing a role. Everybody's acting, and everyone is playing. And you know, and everything, and I think, and I thought, there's got to be some purpose. Something's made me. Someone has put me here. And I got to thinking, if all there is for me to live this life and then die, I'd been better off never to be born. There's got to be some kind of purpose in my life. Immediately I think of God, and when I think of God, I think about the people in church. And I remember, Lord, I just got my mind past them long enough to say, God, and I've never asked anything more serious in my life. I said, God, if you're real, please show me, and as ignorant as I was, the only thing I knew to do was just look for a tree to move or a light to flash. That's the only thing I knew. And I know I looked, and I didn't want to miss it. I was alone. There was no one watching me, and boy, I wanted to make sure I didn't miss that light or the tree move or something like that, because that's the way I was looking for it, but I called on God. I'd been involved already in two broken marriages. I crippled everything I ever got around. Why not? I was crippled. And then a girl that I'd met years before, my wife Joyce, Joyce and I came together, and I know that the Lord was in there. But you know, I wanted to talk to her. I wasn't around anybody to talk about God about. But you know, I knew she taught Sunday school. Of course, at the time, I didn't know she was a lost Sunday school teacher. But anyway, I could talk to her, and I remember that when I'd start talking to her about the Lord, things would just stir up in me, and I couldn't stand it. I just had to, and people today don't understand that why that someone begins talking about the Lord and everything, what stirs them up, that they got to go, and they just can't stand it. See, I was so demonized. I was so under the control of powers of darkness, and just a little bit, I was speaking with all that I could right there, not understanding, but I always believed that there's some kind of invisible force that was destroying my life, and I didn't understand anything about it. I didn't understand about God, and my mind was just gone, practically. We married, and shortly after we married, I had a heart attack. I was taken to the hospital in a short time. I had open heart. They prepared me for open heart surgery. They said I was like sitting on a powder cake. This was when open heart surgery was new. And as I found out later, mostly from the nurse, and some of the things from the doctor, that I had been on the heart and lung machine longer than anyone had ever survived it in that hospital. The surgeon finally come out to my wife right there, and just leaned up against the wall. He's so weary because he couldn't sew into my arteries. I had the arteries of over a 90-year-old man from that, being the alcohol and the drugs and the destruction and everything that the powers of darkness had put me through to my body. They left me on the operating table. Later, they moved me into coronary care, and my heart stopped two different times, and they call this code where they shock the heart back, and they shock it back. I stayed there just a few days, and they sent me home. Doctors, they didn't complete the surgery, and the surgery they didn't complete wasn't even working. And I went home a dying man. And I'll tell you something else that happened in my life. I had the fear of God in my heart. I knew there was a God. I want you to know that I knew there was a hell, because I'd lay there at night, and I'd watch my wife go to sleep. I'd know I'd just like something you'd take in time.