The Life-Changing Power of Jesus

Interview with David Reagan

Tim Moore: So, Dave, as always, thanks again for joining us on Christ in Prophecy.

David Reagan: Well, thank you. It’s good to be here, except that I don’t particularly like to be in the hot seat.

Tim Moore: Well, we like to have you right there!

Nathan Jones: Little comeback after all those years.

Tim Moore: You had everybody else in that seat, so I’m glad that you’re there today. Well, Dave, one of the things that fascinated me is you offer three, many examples, 22, as we said, but you go right back to Scripture to give three biblical examples of lives that were dramatically changed by individuals who Jesus said, “Follow me.” Who are those?

David Reagan: Well, one of them is Paul, the other one is John, and the other one is Matthew. And those three were radically changed. Now, of course, everybody knows about Paul and his Damascus conversion from a person who was killing Christians to a person who began to try to convert people to Christ. But what this book really focuses on is what I call sanctification.

Justification is when we give our heart to Jesus Christ and we’re forgiven, born again and forgiven of our sins, past, present, and future, and we’re sealed for eternity. But what most people don’t know about is sanctification. That’s the second step in the process. And this is where the Holy Spirit moves inside and the Holy Spirit begins a lifelong process of shaping each one of us more into the image of Jesus, does that by convicting us of the areas where we’re outside of God’s Word and commending us and encouraging us where we’re walking with the Lord.

And, so, that’s what I try to show in this book, is the impact of sanctification. And in Paul’s life, for example, people think of Paul as being converted, and, boy, he hit the road and he just started converting people like mad. No, Paul did not become a missionary until 18 years after he gave his life to the Lord.

Tim Moore: Even though he knew Scripture and he was a Pharisee of Pharisees.

David Reagan: Well, but he had to develop a whole new worldview. I mean, he knew Scripture from a Jewish viewpoint. Now he had to view it from a Christian viewpoint, and he had to learn a lot. And also he had to learn how to present it. It says, in the Book of Acts that, as soon as he was converted, the next day, he was in a synagogue debating and…

Tim Moore: And proving that Jesus, yes.

David Reagan: And proving that Jesus, and, you know, you don’t bring people to the Lord, by I can hit you over the head with a Bible harder than anybody else. And so he didn’t convert anybody. In fact, what happened is he made him so mad, they decided to kill him. So he was let down over a wall in a basket. Later on in life, he said that was the most embarrassing thing…

Tim Moore: Very humiliating.

David Reagan: When he became a basket case.

Nathan Jones: Well, part of the sanctification process, it seems, too, is learning how to share the Gospel, too. The fact that these guys, like you said, he was a Pharisee among Pharisees. He came in intellectually, but he couldn’t connect to the common people.

David Reagan: Intellectually, he could do it. He went immediately to Jerusalem. It says he immediately went into the synagogues, began to debate, and he was just tearing everybody up. And again, it said they began to plot to kill him. And finally the Christians got together, collected some money, bought him a ticket home, and, the very next verse after they put him on the ship, it says, “And peace descended upon the Church in Jerusalem.” It’s like everybody sighed and said, “Thank God we got rid of Paul.”

Tim Moore: You know, it was 20-something years ago that I first heard you share that insight and it was like a light bulb went off in my head to recognize that Paul, too, had to go through a period of preparation and tempering for the Holy Spirit to make him ready for the calling of his life.

David Reagan: He had to get acquainted with Jesus on a personal level.

Tim Moore: Yes.

David Reagan: He had to learn how to preach in the power of the Holy Spirit and not the power of his intellect and that took time.

Nathan Jones: Well, you really connected with me with Matthew because I, you know, I knew that Matthew was one of, he wrote one of the Gospels, and he was, but the fact that, as a tax collector, he wouldn’t be accepted by the people, by the own apostles, it probably took a while. Tell us that story briefly.

David Reagan: Well, tax collectors were considered to be on the level with prostitutes, if not worse, because, after all, they not only were sinning because they were greedy, but they were traitors to the Israeli people. They had teamed up with the conqueror, with the occupiers…

Tim Moore: With Rome.

David Reagan: And they were just considered to be the scum of the earth. In fact, in the “Chosen” TV series…

Tim Moore: They do a good job with that…

David Reagan: They have a good job of that because they show this, Matthew, as a young man and he’s living in a mansion, of course, and he’s very wealthy. But when he goes to work every morning, he pays the guy to come by in a cart, pulled by a donkey, and he gets in the cart and covers up with a tarpaulin because he knows people try to kill him. That’s how much they were hated.

And for Jesus to suddenly just stop and say, “Come and follow me,” I suspect he had been going out to the fields and hearing some of the sermons. And, boy, he immediately followed. And I’m sure it was an extremely difficult thing for the other apostles. I mean, this guy was the tax collector in Capernaum. He was cheating Peter, James, and John every day, and they hated him with a passion.

Nathan Jones: But they didn’t let him handle the money, right? They gave that to Judas Iscariot?

Tim Moore: You know, you mentioned one person who you didn’t select, but I’ve always used as an exemplar of somebody whose life was changed and not immediately, in any case, because it always took three times to get through his thick skull, which is why I identify with Peter.

David Reagan: Oh, yeah.

Tim Moore: And Peter was also dramatically changed. We could say that about all the apostles. But you have wonderful examples from these three, and yet you have so many others. So you came up with historic examples of five individuals who are no longer with us, but whose lives were also dramatically changed.

David Reagan: Yes, of course, I could have selected many more than that, but I wanted to use, focus, really, on contemporary individuals. So, yes, I selected five that I knew pretty well, although, I thought I knew John Newton, but I didn’t. All I’d ever heard about John Newton.

Nathan Jones: Wow, that was a story.

David Reagan: All I ever heard about him was that he was a slave ship captain, yeah. Huh, boy, he was much more than that. He decided there was more money in capturing the slaves and selling them than the transporting them on ships, so he just set up camp in Africa and started going in and getting the slaves and then selling them. And, at the height of it, he was making so much money, he didn’t know what to do with it. He had, like, 16 different African women who were serving as mistresses. He was so degraded, it was unbelievable.

And all of this came from the fact that his mother, who was a devout Christian, died at a very early age when he was eight years old and his dad didn’t know what to do with him. His dad was a ship captain. He was not a slaver, he was a commercial ship captain, but he didn’t know what to do with him. So what’d he do? He put him on the ship with a bunch of sailors, 10 years old, and he learned how to curse. Boy, he could cuss better than anybody in the world. And he served his dad on this ship with these sailors’ time after time and it just completely corrupted him.

And I told a story in there about when I was 12 years old, and my dad hired me to work in the summer and put me with a bunch of sheet metal workers. And they’d sit around at lunch and talk about the women that they had bedded the night before you and everything was cursing, and it was a terrible atmosphere for a 12-year-old. But sailors would be 100 times worse.

Tim Moore: You’ve got to think that he also had some resentment against God because his mother, who was devout.

David Reagan: Oh, absolutely.

Tim Moore: Was taken at a young age.

David Reagan: Absolutely.

Tim Moore: And so how many people today do we know, personally, who have this deep sentiment of resentment toward the Lord because they blame Him for some tragedy in their life, perhaps taking a beloved parent or child, and so they resent God, they run away from God, and they get into all sorts of debauchery.

David Reagan: Well, with John Newton, his father knew a lot of ship captains. So he put out the word, “Find my son.” And one day, a captain walked into where he was living and said, “Hey, are you John Newton?” “Yeah.” “Your dad sent me for you. We’re going back to England.” And he said, “I don’t want to go to England. I’m on top of the world here.” He said, “Well, one of your relatives left, one of your mother’s relatives, left you over a million dollars.” And he said, “Really?” He said, “Yes, and it’s going to go to somebody else if you don’t go back and claim it.” “I’m going!”

He gets on the ship, by the time they get halfway back, he’s alienated everybody on the ship by his blasphemous language and everything, and then suddenly, one morning, they wake up and the ship’s sinking. And I mean, it is sinking. And he cries out to the Lord and it just astounded the captain and everybody else said, “This guy cries out to the Lord for to save him and suddenly the wind changed and blew the ship right into a harbor in Ireland.” And that changed his life.

Tim Moore: Wow.

David Reagan: And so he became one of the best known ministers in all of England. 40 years, Church of England, he served and he wrote a song before every sermon, every sermon. He had thousands of songs that he…

Nathan Jones: What’s his most famous one that we always sing?

David Reagan: Amazing Grace.

Nathan Jones: Amazing Grace.

David Reagan: And so he is a, just a complete, total turnaround. It’s like, I read a statement by Philip Yancey, a famous Christian author.

Tim Moore: I know him.

David Reagan: And that statement really sums up this book. The statement was this. “The grace of God, like water, always descends to the lowest level.” And boy, that was the case in John Newton’s life and so many lives I have in here.

Nathan Jones: Now, my father’s favorite movie is “Bullet”. He loves that car chase. Can you quickly tell us about Steve McQueen, just because he’s watching right now and, you know, he wants to hear one of his heroes.

David Reagan: Well, I tell the story in there that I met Steve McQueen many years ago in the sixties when my dad wanted to go see “Bullet”.

Nathan Jones: There you go!

David Reagan: And of course, the most famous thing…

Tim Moore: Oh yeah, the car.

David Reagan: Was this almost 15-minute car race that’s just unbelievable, up and down those hills in San Francisco. So we’re all waiting for the car race, and suddenly the whole thing goes up on the ceiling. It was Christmas Day and I guess they had a, you know, an assistant, somebody they had hired to come in.

Nathan Jones: Oh, in the projection room?

David Reagan: And we figured he went to the bathroom and didn’t lock down the camera.

Nathan Jones: Oh, no!

David Reagan: And people were screaming, they were cursing, they were, yelling!

Nathan Jones: The big scene, no!

David Reagan: And people were lined up for blocks outside to get in and, of course, everybody stayed to see the movie again.

Tim Moore: Wow.

David Reagan: So anyway, yeah, Steve McQueen was– got off to a bad start in his life. His mother was a teenage alcoholic prostitute. And the moment he was born, she dropped him. She gave him to an uncle, she didn’t have anything to do with him, and he chased his mom every time. He would escape and he would go where his mom was. And she would have nothing to do with him.

Finally, he was sent to reform school, he became a member of Los Angeles gangs and stealing and burglarizing. So he became… he went to reform school. He got out of reform school; he found his mother was in New York. He goes to New York; she won’t have anything to do with him. He works as a taxi driver and things like that. And finally, he has a ballet girlfriend who says, “Why don’t you join the Marines or something?” So he joins the Marines.

Well, he spent most of his time in the Marines in the brig because he was always insubordinate to some officer. And finally, he gets out, he goes back to New York and he works as a dishwasher, as a taxi driver, ditch digger, and this ballet gal says, “You know, you’d be a good actor. Why don’t you go to acting school?” So he uses his GI Bill to go to acting school, he’s a natural-born actor, and in no time at all, I mean, no time at all, he is heading up a major TV series called “Wanted: Dead or Alive”.

And then Hollywood calls him and he becomes determined to get everything that life has to offer. And by the mid-sixties, he did it. He was the highest paid movie star in Hollywood, he had all the women, in fact, he had so many women that he had a room reserved at the Hollywood Hotel, and he had a different girl every night. In fact, when he got married, two days later, he came in, bragged to his wife that he laid two women the night before.

It was unbelievable. And he was on drugs, he was on alcohol, he was spending money like mad, he had collections of motorcycle, collections of guns, collections of all, you just name it. It reminded me of Solomon, who had all these collections and all this money and he looked back at the end of his life and said, “It’s all vanity, all vanity.”

Tim Moore: Exactly.

David Reagan: That happened to Steve McQueen.

Tim Moore: Emptiness.

David Reagan: One day, at the height of his career, he looked at it all, he says, “I’ve achieved everything and I’m still empty and I’m giving it up.” And he gave it up. He said, “I am finished with Hollywood.” And he and his girlfriend bought a 100 year-old house on a ranch outside of Los Angeles and people kept sending him scripts. Say, “I don’t want scripts.” Finally, he said, “I will charge you $50,000 to read a script.” Then one day, two lawyers knocked on the door and they said, “Sir, you have a contract you signed to make five movies and you only made two. You’ve got to do three more.” He said, “I’m not making any movies.” They said, “You got to.”

So he walked through them. They were so bad, one of them was never even released. He didn’t want to have anything to do with it. So he goes out into the country and he decides the thing he wants to do is he wants to learn how to fly a plane. Biplane, biplane. So he buys a biplane and he calls, and then he finds out that the best biplane instructor in the United States is located only five miles from where he’s living. So he calls the guy. Steve McQueen is in his late forties, about 45. This guy is in his, 65.

Tim Moore: I’m sure.

David Reagan: So he says to Steve, “All right, I’ll teach you how to fly a plane, but I’m a born-again Christian and I’m going to talk to you about Jesus the entire time we’re in the air.” He did and Steve McQueen gave his life to Jesus. He started attending church, he and his, and first thing he did, he said, “Got to get married.” So he got married, he got baptized, he and his wife would go to church 10 minutes late and sit in the balcony and leave 10 minutes early because they didn’t want to just cause a distraction.

And the second thing he did besides marrying, he called Billy Graham, and said, “I want to meet you.” And Billy Graham said, “Well, I want to meet you.” And for seven months they tried to meet each other, but their schedules were too hectic. And so finally, about six months after he gave his life to the Lord, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, the lung cancer caused by breathing asbestos.

Tim Moore: Asbestos, yeah.

David Reagan: And he started developing tumors all over his body. This was six months after he accepted the Lord. And he, everybody just wrote him off, said, “You’re dead.” And so he finally went to a doctor in Mexico who was treating him. And so, finally, one day, Billy Graham called him and said, “I’m here.” And he came out, he spent three hours with him. They read the Scriptures, they prayed together, Billy Graham gave him a Bible, and then he went with him back to Los Angeles because he was getting ready to fly to Mexico.

And he got on the plane, prayed with him, he flew to Mexico. Next day, he had an operation, they removed five or six tumors successfully. The next morning they came in, he was dead. Died of a heart attack. They pulled the cover back and he had the Bible in his hand.

Nathan Jones: Wow.

David Reagan: That Billy Graham had given him. Ain’t that something? That is the life-changing power of Jesus.

Tim Moore: You know, people see his life on the screen, or they see pictures and press reports and they don’t understand the depravity, they don’t understand the emptiness, and quite frankly, I think that is so indicative of many in Hollywood, in any kind of entertainment industry. And I’m not being their judge, but they will testify, once they come to their senses, that all of that is indeed vanity and yet the Lord can change anyone, whether it’s Saul, whether it is John, Matthew, Steve McQueen, you and me. So, powerful, powerful testimonies.

David Reagan: The Lord gave me an idea for ending that chapter. Steve McQueen was always known as the King of Cool, cool guy, and I ended it by saying, “The King of Cool has now met the King of Kings.”

Tim Moore: Amen!

Nathan Jones: Well, what about, you have quite a number of contemporary, I mean, people that we know. One of our dear friends of the ministry was Jack Hollingsworth and, you know, he used to, Jumpin’ Jack, he used to sing. You know, I heard you share that his testimony all the time. Do we have time for you to share his testimony?

David Reagan: Well, you know what? That’s one of the reasons I wrote this book is because I put together a sermon about Jack Hollingsworth and how radically God changed his life. The first time I preached it, people were weeping all over the place. The Holy Spirit descended and I just couldn’t figure out what had happened. And then the second time I preached, it was at a church in California, and we had over 150 people come forward.

Tim Moore: Wow.

David Reagan: And I thought, “Man, there’s something to this story.” Well, you know, Jack Hollingsworth was a fellow who was born in Mississippi. And when he was a teenager, he went on a camping trip and one of the boys brought along some beer and he drank a beer and he liked the taste of it. And he got high and he thought, “Man, this is the greatest thing I’ve ever discovered.”

And he became a raving alcoholic and to the point that he finally became homeless. And he lived on the streets for 20 years, just on the street, drinking anything. I mean, he would drink hair tonic, he’d drink anything he’d get his hands on. In fact, one time he drank a whole pint of rubbing alcohol, crawled under a truck, and laid down to die. And the next morning he was alive. He couldn’t believe it. He wished he were dead, he felt so bad. He crawled out and looked, and it was a Salvation Army truck. He later said, “God wouldn’t let me die under salvation.”

So finally, one day he’s in Lexington, Kentucky and he’s begging, you know, people on the streets. And when they say, “You go in this building right here, they’ll help you.” He goes in and there’s this lady, that’s a state detox center, and a little lady, four-foot-10, I called her Shotgun, 4’10”. Anyways, four-foot-10, and he starts conning her and she looks him in the eye and said, “You can’t con me. I know all you guys and I know all your stories, so, just forget it.” And he kept coming.
So one day she stuck her finger in his face and she said, “Let me tell you something, Jack. In the name of Jesus, you will never be able to get drunk again.” He said, “Lady, you’re talking to a professional drunk.” And he turned around and walked out. A week later, he came back and said, “Tell me about Jesus. I’ve been drinking nonstop and I can’t get drunk.” And she told him about Jesus, he accepted Jesus, what, about a year later, he got him a job, first job he ever had in his life.

A year later, he comes, knocks on her door, and she says, “Who is it?” She’s washing dishes. He says, “It’s Jack,” she said, “Come on in.” He walks in, he says, “I don’t like you, I’ve never liked you, but I think God wants us to get married.” She said, “I think so, too.” So they got married, they formed a ministry called Acts 29, they spent 20 years traveling all over the nation, living on faith, singing, and ministering to prisoners and homeless people.

Tim Moore: And he had such a tremendous voice. In spite of all those years of abusing his own body.

David Reagan: That’s amazing.

Tim Moore: The Lord allowed him to preserve his voice.

David Reagan: Plus he never stood still. He danced while he sang.

Tim Moore: Oh, he truly did.

Nathan Jones: Jumpin’ Jack.

Tim Moore: Jumpin’ Jack. You know, Dave, what about your own testimony? I mean, you closed this book with your testimony about how you had accepted Jesus as Savior, but not really allowed him to reign as Lord.

David Reagan: No, I quenched, I quenched the Spirit.

Tim Moore: And so you didn’t have the power.

Nathan Jones: And it’s really shocking to me, reading this, is that I’ve heard your testimony many times, but this is the raw, unedited version that most people don’t know. So if, wow, you just kind of like, I really didn’t, thought I knew you, but I guess I didn’t.

David Reagan: Well, I always said, I make Jonah look like an amateur in running from God because I grew up at church. I was before TV. That’s all we had to do. We went to church Sunday morning, Sunday night, Wednesday night, all the time we were at church. So I knew the Bible backward and forward, I was a walking encyclopedia of the Bible, but I didn’t know God, I didn’t know Jesus.

I grew up in a church that taught cessationism, radical cessationism. Everything ceased at the end of the first century when the last Apostle died, no more miraculous intervention by God, no more tongues speaking, no more gifts of the Spirit, nothing of that nature. And so we were taught that we just had to live on our own ingenuity and by reading the Word of God. But the Holy Spirit was something that we never talked about. Our preacher said, “You know, we talk about the Holy Spirit, people start getting crazy. So we don’t talk about the Holy Spirit.”

And furthermore, the King James version was the only version we had and it referred to the Holy Spirit as the Holy Ghost. And I thought ghosts were bad. Ghosts were, I never could figure out this Holy Ghost until one morning I went to a movie at the Strand Theater in Waco, Texas to see a cowboy show. And when the cowboys show was over, they had a comic strip. And the comic was “Casper The Friendly Ghost”. And I thought, “That’s what the Holy Ghost is. He’s the friendly ghost!”

Tim Moore: Yep, I remember that.

David Reagan: He’s there to help us with everything. But anyway, God called me as soon as I graduated from University of Texas in history and government, through a bizarre series of circumstances, I ended up as the pastor of a small little country church that only had two families who hated each other. It was a baptism of fire on my part. And I knew God had called me in the ministry, but I said, “Here am I Lord. Send anybody in the world but me because I know what I want to do. I want to be a politician,” and so forth and so on.

So I went my way and I found out you can be successful in many ways, but no matter how much success you have, you’re miserable because you’re outside of God’s will. And so I ran for 20 years until I finally got totally exhausted. And that’s when I finally gave my life to the Lord. And, boy, I wish I had done it 20 years earlier.

Tim Moore: I appreciate what you say about knowing the Lord. Just yesterday I heard a sermon contrasting the sons of Eli, which Scripture says, in 2 Samuel, or excuse me, 1 Samuel 2, that they were worthless men, that they did not know the Lord. And then in chapter three, it talks about Samuel who was raised up from just a boy to serve in the house of the Lord.

He was serving the Lord, wearing an ephod just like a, a little prince, or a little a priest, I should say. But Scripture says he did not know the Lord. Serving the Lord, but he didn’t know the Lord until the Lord called him and he responded and instantly became a prophet. But he came to know the Lord personally. And that’s what you’re talking about.

David Reagan: Well, I often illustrate it this way. I’ve probably read every biography that’s ever been written of Billy Graham. I know everything there is know, I think, about Billy Graham, but I don’t know Billy Graham. I never met him, I never sat down and talked with him, I never asked him what kind of food he liked, what kind of movies he would go to see if he’d go to a movie, and so forth. There’s a difference in knowing about somebody and knowing somebody.

Tim Moore: Amen.

David Reagan: And I had to come to know Jesus. And at that point, I gave my life to Him because I really wanted to serve Him. And, as a result of that, the very first book I ever wrote was seven years after we established this ministry. We established this ministry in 1980 and 1987 I wrote my first book and it was entitled, “Trusting God: Learning How to Walk by Faith”. And now I’m at the end of my life and at the end of my career, and I’ve written my second book that’s not on Bible prophecy.

Tim Moore: Well, I have this question, having studied all these lives and really dived into their backstory, what surprises you most, the fact that lives can be radically changed by the power of the Holy Spirit and the power of Christ, or the fact that no one is beyond the love and grace of Christ?

David Reagan: That’s it, no one’s beyond the love and grace of God. If you’re watching this program and you think that you can’t become a Christian or you can’t get close to God because of all the horrible sins you’ve committed in your life, let me tell you, they’re nothing compared to some of the sins I mentioned in this book by these people.

God loves you, He wants you to come to know Him, He wants you to become a member of His family. And no matter how horrible your sins are, God will forgive you. All in the world you have to do is summarize very quickly and very precisely, in Romans 10:9, “If you will confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised Him from the dead, you will be saved.” Heaven is not for good people, Heaven is for saved people.

Tim Moore: Amen.

David Reagan: You have to be saved and the only road to God is Jesus Christ. He said Himself, “I am the way, I am the truth, I am the life. No other way to God except by me.” The world is teaching today there are many roads to God, the Pope is teaching, right now, there are many roads to God, but that’s not true. There’s only one and it’s very simple. You can’t earn your way, there’s no way you can do it, except accept Jesus as your Lord and Savior.

Tim Moore: You know, Dave, some of the folks watching today may actually feel jealous, a little holy jealousy of those who have dramatic conversion experiences and testimonies. And as someone who grew up in a Christian home and says, “Well, I just, I’ve always followed the Lord. I trust in Him, I make Him Lord of my life, but I don’t have a great testimony,” what would you say to them? It’s not about their testimony, it’s about the greatness of God who saved…

David Reagan: I would say to them, “Praise God for that.”

Nathan Jones: What are they protected from over the years?

Tim Moore: Yes.

David Reagan: Yeah, amen. Many rewards they are going to receive, there’s no doubt about it.

Tim Moore: Well, I say, even if your testimony is not great, you have a testimony in a great God.

David Reagan: That’s right, absolutely.

Tim Moore: So don’t make it about yourself. Talk about Him, point people to Him. He is great. Well, Dave, you end with a brief overview of the Blessed Hope. We’re all anticipating, we proclaim in this ministry, the snatching away of all the those who put their trust in Christ and that will lead to the ultimate change, which is eventually our glorified bodies. We are gathered to Him.

Nathan Jones: And that’s the end of our sanctification, right?

David Reagan: That’s right. Really, salvation’s a three step process. One is justification, where you’re saved and you are saved from the penalty of sin. And then sanctification, you’re saved from the power of sin if you will allow the Holy Spirit to reign in your life. And then finally is glorification, when your body is glorified and you receive an immortal body and never be able to sin again and, oh boy, what a day that will be.

Tim Moore: What a day that will be.

David Reagan: Oh, do we, Hallelujah!

Tim Moore: Well, Dave, it’s always a delight to have you on Christ In Prophecy. Obviously both of us, Nathan and I, and countless others scattered around the world are so grateful that God called you to this ministry. And we know that the power of Jesus not only changed your heart, but you’ve allowed it to radiate outward into the lives of so many others.

David Reagan: Well, thank you very much, Tim. It’s a joy and a blessing for me to be here. It’s deja vu all over again.

Tim Moore: It certainly is! Yogi Berra himself, huh? Fantastic.

Conclusion

Tim Moore: You may know someone who has resisted the Gospel. Perhaps deep down, they think that they are beyond the love and mercy of Jesus. They just can’t believe that God would save a person who has done the things they have done. This book should dispel such wrong thinking.

Nathan Jones: Every person, regardless of the extremity of their apparent sin, is in need of the saving power of Jesus Christ. But God seems to take special delight in saving those the world would consider beyond hope. Only He can take people and lives that are irrevocably broken and make them new again.

Tim Moore: We know that He who sits on the throne is making all things new. If you are watching and realize that you are broken and in desperate need of the life-changing power of Jesus, call out to Him today, this instant. Simply tell Him that you need Him to save you and then trust in the Lord Jesus Christ. He will save you. And as you let Him reign as Lord, the power of the Holy Spirit will be unleashed in your life.

I can’t think of a better way to close out this confused and chaotic year than to point to the singular truth that Jesus Christ is Lord and He saves sinners. So triumphant is that Gospel message that King David wrote, “Great is the Lord and highly to be praised, and His greatness is unsearchable. One generation shall praise your works to another and shall declare your mighty acts.” The greatest of His acts I know is that He saved a sinner like me. I pray that is your testimony as well.

Until next week, this is Tim Moore, along with Nathan Jones and Dr. David Reagan, saying, Godspeed!

End of Program