I asked Jesus into my heart in 1974, but I did not read the Bible or do the things that the Bible would have taught me to do. Later in that same year, I started smoking cigarettes, and the following year, I started smoking marijuana. About every six months I would start to feel guilty enough to go to church, but my friends would be waiting for me and hand me beer or drugs after church and then say things like, look a beer drinking Christian. I would throw the Bible down for the next six months. As time went on I started doing more and more drugs, until I could not go one day without them. I tried for several years to quit. I tore up a hundred packs of cigarettes, and poured out gallons of beer and whiskey, but I would go and buy them again. I swore never again so many times that I did not even believe myself when I said it.
After thirteen years, my life was such a mess that I took a loaded 38 and stuck it in my mouth and would have pulled the trigger, but down inside I knew if I pulled the trigger I would wake up in Hell. I thought there was nothing I could do, but I said O.K. God I will give you a try.
I started visiting different churches. On November, 9th 1988 I pulled up to a church with 14 pounds of marijuana in the trunk of my car and a loaded 38 in my jacket pocket. I walked into the church and at the end of the service, I said Jesus come into my heart, and he did. I spent so much time reading the Bible and listening to Christian progams on the TV and the radio that I was learning very quickly. About three days later I opened the trunk of my car and found a carton of cigarettes, I picked them up and said, hey I don't smoke anymore. I then realized that I did not even have to quit the drugs, I just did not do them anymore. It has been almost 30 years since that time and I am still free.
It does not matter what color you are or what country you are from Jesus loves you and he wants to be with you forever, but he will not force you to be with him. You must make that choice for yourself. If you decide that you do not want to be with Jesus, you will still live forever because you are an eternal spirit that is living inside of a temporary body, however, you will live without light, love, peace, hope, and without any of your friends or family, and with the knowledge that Jesus had paid for your sins and that the only reason that you are in Hell is because you rejected him.
