Thank God for His great love and mercy . I was just a railer and a blasphemer when I came to God. Year after year, just from a child, I had no peace, no rest. Mom and Dad broke up when I was about eleven years old, and I had nobody to tell me where to go or how to go, so helpless and hopeless, out into the world I went. I started over those old hills in Eastern Oregon in my teens, and went to the lumber camps, the shingle mills, and the box factories with men much older than myself.
I drifted into the depths of sin and it seemed that trouble followed me everywhere I went. From the time I started out as only a lad, God talked to me. I didn’t know it was the Voice of God, but I can look back now and see that it was.
I drifted into the depths of sin and it seemed that trouble followed me everywhere I went.
One day, in 1917, my wife said, “Let’s go to Portland.” We came to Portland, and I later went to work on the east side of the city in a manufacturing plant. I was a sawyer, and they were working on a bonus system. The faster you put that stuff through, the more you made. I was pretty hard to get along with. I tried to make all I could; I was covetous anyway. I used to curse, rant, and rave, and I used to throw things around.
It was there I came in contact with the old-time religion. A young man, sixteen years of age, from the Apostolic Faith Church, came to work across the machine from me, and the life he lived convicted me of my sins. As I watched him day after day, his life preached a silent sermon to me. One day I went around the machine and asked him, “What church do you belong to?” He said, “I don’t belong to any church. I am just a Christian.”
I don’t know what you would have thought about that kind of sermon, but it did a lot of good for me. From that time on I began to treat him differently. I quit throwing things around. I quit cursing that boy. I asked him many questions. He told me how God could come into my life, and how God could save me. I’ll tell you, I listened to that lad. I would say to myself, “If God would do that for me, save me, and give me power to live it, and I could be a Christian without struggling and striving, that is the thing I am looking for; I would know beyond a shadow of doubt that there is a God!”
He told me about the Apostolic Faith people, and how God had saved him and his brothers and sisters from sin. I came among these people for just one purpose, to see what God would do for me. I sat in that meeting, my first camp meeting, in 1926; and these people told me that God could come into my life and set me free from all my sins. I was just waiting for the altar call that I was told about. I went there and began to pray. I didn’t know much about praying, but these people began to pray for me, and I prayed the best I knew how. God heard and answered my prayer and set me free from all my sins, and I knew I was free; I didn’t have to guess about it. God took out the blasphemy and my tongue has never slipped from that day to this. The desire for cigarettes and the booze was all gone. God cleaned me up. It was a miracle that God could come into my life in the twinkling of an eye and make such a change.
“If God would do that for me, save me, and give me power to live it, and I could be a Christian without struggling and striving, that is the thing I am looking for; I would know beyond a shadow of doubt that there is a God!”
I went back on the job the next day and my life was changed. It is marvelous how God can keep you living the life of a Christian. I started back over the old crooked path to make it right. I made restitution for the things I had robbed from a drug store three different times, and to a man I had injured in a fight.
I have seen many miracles. Some years ago, I had arthritis of the nerves. Anybody who has ever had that disease knows how one can suffer. God healed me of that and I haven’t had a trace of it since. I fell twenty-three feet out of a cherry tree and broke a vertebra in my spine. God also healed me of that.
During the world war, I went out on the high seas as a merchant seaman and I spent many years there, and God kept me and spared my life many times. One time He spoke right out of Heaven and told me to take cover. I went under a life boat. The moment I went down, a 20 mm shell came out of the sky and exploded right where I had stood. It would have blown my head right off. I have been over the Pacifi c, the China Seas to New Guinea, and the coast of Australia. I have seen many ports and much sin, but God has kept me from sin. Something was planted in my heart when I first came into the Gospel that never went out. Through His mercy and power, God has kept me, and I thank Him for it.
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