In December 1971, my wife and I were hippies with no ideas about heaven or hell. I remember thinking that somehow, when I die, I simply pass to another fun place to enjoy anything I want, forever.
When three of our friends died, my wife became concerned about life after death. My assurance that all was okay did not calm her. A new resident of the apartment complex we managed while I was in graduate school in Davis, California, had commented that if we ever wanted to talk about life after death or the Bible, to let him know. My wife took him up on his offer and asked him to meet with us. I put a fresh new mix of “solids” (tobacco and drugs) in my hookah pipe and grabbed another cognac as we waited for him to arrive.
When he came in, he asked what we wanted to talk about, to which my wife responded, “What happens after we die?” He said something like, “That’s simple. Are you perfect?” We all laughed a bit and agreed that, of course not, no one is. He then said that was the problem: that the creator of mankind and everything we see is perfect, and we are imperfect and therefore owe Him a fine. We pay this debt by burning in pain in a lake of fire forever, or we let Him pay off the fine with a big bag of money he earned by dying on the cross–we choose. All we need to do is ask Him to pay it off with the bag of money, and then we join Him in heaven after we die and have fun with others; the choice is ours. He then invited us to meet regularly with him and learn about what the Bible says.
We agreed to meet with him weekly, and after he left, I looked at my wife and said, “Either he is wrong, or he is right.” Amazing powers of logic even when stoned and drunk! I said, “If he is wrong, it does not matter, and if he is right, it could matter, so just in case…” We then talked to God and asked Him to pay off the debt of our imperfections so we could go to Heaven when we die, instead of the lake of fire.
What happened next is supernatural. Both my wife and I lost the desire to drink; in fact, we dumped out and tossed all our booze. Our lives started to change as we discovered what the Bible said and simply did those things. Please do not think all went well, and we lived happily ever after. There were challenging and difficult times in life after this decision. What did happen was that both of us got “saved.” We moved from lost to saved!
The road from that moment to today has been over 50 years, and I will confess that I had some tragedies and periods of rebellion against the Lord. Each time, God has been faithful in sending me men who have helped me again see His great love for me and help me get back on track.
It has only been in recent years that I have come to see how so many things I learned and have been involved in fit together to be like what Jesus had modeled for us with His disciples. I am now beginning to ask the Lord to use me to start the multiplication of generations of disciple-makers who will continue for generations. It is with humility and a heart to help others that I have written this book so that others might have the opportunity to learn from what God has taught me and perhaps do a better job earlier in their life to follow Him and be used to train up disciple-makers who will themselves train other disciple-makers, continuing for many generations so that many lost are reached.