>> Hi, this is William Wood with Global Awakening.
I want to take a few moments
and share with you my personal journey to the Lord.
And every single one of us has a story,
every single one of us has a journey,
a process to the Lord. Well, mine started in Alabama.
I grew up in a, in a home
where both of my parents were were alcoholics,
and I grew up in a drug culture.
But not only that, both of my parents were atheists.
They taught me that God was not real
and the only time I ever really heard the name Jesus or God
was when it was used in a sentence with a curse word.
And that was really the context of my upbringing.
But one of the things that really stuck out to me
as an atheist and one of the reasons
that I was an atheist was the fact that I saw my church
on every single corner in the state of Alabama.
But I don't remember not one time
ever remember meeting a Christian
or at least one that blew their cover.
And I remember growing up I would see these churches
and I always thought they were funeral homes
because it was always a white building
and had a cemetery behind it. And I'm thinking,
Well, I guess you just go there, you die
and they put you out there in the backyard somewhere.
And so that was kind of my idea of the churches.
And, but it also proved a point to me, if God is really real
and if he has really filled his people by his spirit,
with his spirit, then where are they?
Why don't they live different than the rest of us live?
Why don't they demonstrate that God is real?
And so for me, it really hardened my heart
even more toward the concept of God,
to the point it was pushing me into a lifestyle of alcohol,
a lifestyle of drugs beginning at the age of 12.
And when you have a void in your heart,
you're going to try to fill that void with something.
You see, pain is always directed to something.
If your pain isn't directed to God,
it will be directed to something in your life.
And that's exactly what I was doing with my pain.
That's what I was doing with my hurt,
is I was directing it toward what I knew
because the culture of my life was drugs, it was alcohol.
I lived right down the street from some drug dealers,
so I began to do drugs at the age of 12.
By the time that I was 15 years old,
I was living in and out of crack houses and at the age of 20,
I had this supernatural encounter that changed my life.
And it happened actually right after I overdosed on drugs.
I had been up for five solid days on drugs without sleep.
I was walking along the side of the road
and I began to overdose.
When I overdosed, I fell into the highway,
a car hits me, knocked me off into the ditch.
The next time I wake up, I'm in a hospital
and the doctors are looking at me.
They said, William, your kidneys have completely failed
and your liver is failing on you.
Matter of fact, if we cannot get your kidneys
and your liver to function properly, you may die.
And this is kind of what the doctors told me,
because of the size of the town that I grew up in
was a town of about 2000 people, the hospital that I was at
wasn't necessarily capable of handling my situation,
so they sent me to another hospital two hours,
three hours away.
I get there, they put me in intensive care
and every single night I begin to have this thought,
I hope I'll wake up to see tomorrow.
Now, remember, I'm an atheist at this point.
I don't believe in God. I think it's all foolishness.
So I wasn't in the hospital crying out to Jesus.
I wasn't asking him to come save me.
I wasn't asking him to heal me.
I thought all that was just foolishness.
And so I was in intensive care for two weeks
every single day, I don't know if I'm going to wake up.
And every single night I have this thought, I hope
I'll wake up to see the next day.
Well, after two weeks of being in the hospital,
I had this thought, and before I closed my eyes to go to sleep,
all of a sudden a bright light formed
right in front of my hospital bed.
Now, to be honest with you,
I've done a lot of drugs in my life.
I thought I was going back on another trip,
you know, just to be honest with you.
But there was something different about this light.
There was an atmosphere that this light carried
that was a glory, that was a love
and a presence to this light that I could not explain.
So I began to focus on this light.
It gets bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger
until it's the size of a person.
And then all of a sudden I began to see a figure of a person,
a figure of a man walking toward me through this light.
And so I lean into this light and I'm looking at it.
What in the world is happening?
Within just a few seconds, a man steps through the light
into the hospital room where I am laying.
He has a white gown on. He has brown hair.
His face was lit up with such light
I couldn't see the features of it
because it was just so much light from his face.
But as soon as he stepped into the room,
my body begins to tremble, just like this, under the power,
under this power, this trembling, trembling.
At the same time, there was so much love
accompanying with this power that I knew whoever this guy is,
he's not here to hurt me, he's here to help me somehow.
He walks right to the foot of my bed.
He doesn't say anything to me.
He turns like he's going to walk out the door.
Instead, he sits down on the floor.
He crosses his legs and he holds his hands like this,
sitting on the floor. And I'm looking at this,
and you may be wondering right now,
like, okay, when you say you're seeing these things,
is this an aspect of your imagination
or are you visibly seeing this with your physical eyes?
I'm seeing this with my physical eyes,
just like you see a person.
I am seeing this with my physical eyes
and I'm seeing this man,
he's sitting over there with his hands like this,
sitting in the floor,
and he turns over and he looks to the right side of the room.
So I look over to the right side of the room.
When I do, the wall opens up,
a river of water begins to flow from the wall
into the room right in front of where this man is sitting.
He sticks his hands in this water.
He begins to wash his arms.
He begins to clean himself and an audible voice says this
The waters that you see will purify
and cleanse you if you receive
Jesus the Christ as Lord and savior.
And as soon as I heard that voice speak to me,
something inside of me just resounded with this, Yes.
And I just screamed out yes to this voice.
Now, let me just stop right here for a moment.
And remember, I'm an atheist. I've never even heard the name
Jesus spoken to me. Never.
Not once in my life. Or at least that I can remember.
I'd never even heard the gospel before in my life.
And so now my first introduction to this is
Jesus himself, walking into my room,
sitting there, and the audible voices calling me,
calling me into salvation.
You see, he didn't come there to judge and condemn.
He wasn't mad that I was a sinner.
While you were yet a sinner, Christ died for you.
Jesus thinks you are to die for because that's exactly what
He did on the cross.
He wasn't offended at my unbelief.
What did he do? He came and created a moment
in which faith could respond to his gift of salvation.
And I heard that voice, his sound of his voice.
Romans chapter ten, verse 17, says,
Faith comes by hearing and hearing by the word
or the spoken word of Christ.
And so when I heard the voice of God,
faith was created in me to respond
to his gift of salvation. And as soon as I said yes,
this power that was on my body that was trembling,
I could literally feel it going on the inside of me.
I could literally feel my organs begin to tremble under this power.
It gets so intense it knocks me out.
The next day I wake up and I was out for 12,
maybe 13, 14 hours.
And when I woke back up, the doctors were shaking me
saying, William, William, wake up.
And I wake up and they said, We don't know what to tell you.
We've been doing tests for the past ten hours on you.
Not only are your kidneys better, not only is your liver better,
but it's as if you've never done drugs before your entire life.
It's like you have new organs on the inside of you.
Now, even at that time, I had a little bit of wisdom on me
and I knew not to tell them about the man that appeared to me.
They were already trying to send me to another little white building
I didn't want to go to strapped like this, you know?
And I was like,
Well, I'm not going to tell them what happened.
But they looked at me and said,
Listen, you have no reason to even be here in intensive care.
They unhooked me from all the different things
and they told me, Hey, please, leave.
And at that time, I hadn't seen my dad
probably 7 or 8 years at that time,
other than a few times here and there.
And our relationship was really broken.
When you have a life of drugs and alcohol,
you burn all the bridges that you have.
Well, what I didn't know was my father
just got saved the month before I had this encounter.
And so I called my dad to come and get me at this hospital
because he lived about two hours away.
And he gets to the hospital, he picks me up,
we go back on our way to his house,
he begins to give me the father-son conversations.
Hey, William, if you get off the drugs
and I'll help you get a job, I'll help you get a home.
And so we have this agreement
that I'm going to live with him for about three months.
And I go there, and again,
I haven't mentioned anything about this man
that appeared to me. I didn't know where to put this.
I didn't know what to tell people about this.
The only thing I know is this man appeared,
and all my life got changed and transformed.
Well, I get to my dad's house and I realize
I'm not going through any withdrawals from the drugs.
Within three days, one of my friends comes,
comes over to hang out
because I haven't seen any of my friends or family
in quite some time at this point.
And so my friend comes over, we're sitting on the couch
and we're just having a normal conversation
and all of a sudden I start speaking
in different languages to him.
I mean, I just want you to picture right now
you're sitting on a couch having a normal conversation
with your friend, and all of a sudden you're like
>> (speaking tongues).
>> I didn't know what was happening to me.
Well, it began to happen for five minutes,
and my, my cousin's one of these people
that carries mace on his keychain,
and he pulls his mace out, like this.
And he's trying to spray me with it
because that's how he is. And I couldn't speak English.
And so I'm there and he's trying to, trying to spray me with this
and I'm trying to tell him to call 911.
>> And I'm like, (speaking tongues).
>> And this goes on for a period of time.
When I finally get where I can speak again, and he said,
What in the world was that? I said, Well, I think
I need to tell you about this man that appeared to me.
He says, Yeah, I think you need to tell me about this man.
And once I explained it to him and said his name was
Jesus, this is what he said to me.
He says, Well, it sounds like you're a Christian.
I didn't even know I was a Christian.
I didn't know what it meant to be a Christian.
I had never met a Christian, so I had no context to put this.
And so I asked him, I said,
Well, well, what do I need to do?
He, and he gave me the best advice I believe
I've ever received my whole life.
And it's this, He says, I want you to go to Walmart.
I said, Walmart, What's at Walmart? He says,
Well, there's a book there that you need to buy.
It's a black book. It has gold letters.
It says, Holy Bible, you need to buy this book, read this book
and apply this book to your life because it's going to tell you
everything you need to know about being a Christian.
It was the best advice that I've ever received
because I thought that's what Christians were supposed to do.
They were supposed to read and apply the Bible.
I didn't know we were supposed to just go to church,
sit there and not do anything with it.
Of course I'm joking here,
I hope you're picking up on my sarcasm of that.
And so I get to Walmart, I go over to the book section
and sure enough, I find the black book,
like he said, gold letters. I grab it and I get home
and I'm excited to start reading this book.
And I open it up and guess what?
It's in Shakespeare. You know, the King James.
I don't know if you've ever tried to read
The King James, but I was like, Man,
the man at the hospital wasn't talking like this.
He didn't show up and say, Oh, brother, where art thou.
You know, he wasn't speaking like that.
And so I'm like, Man, Christians are complicated.
What do I need to do? I go back to Walmart.
I find another translation, the NIV and I get home
and I open it up. And in Genesis chapter one,
I see that there's a good God that's made a good world
and formed man out of his good image
to be in divine fellowship with him.
And all of a sudden the presence and the power of God
right there in my home,
the same presence that I felt in the hospital was right there.
And I just began to devour the Word of God.
I read the entire Bible in about 40 days.
Over the course of those 40 days,
I received a letter from the hospital
and I had a $55,000 hospital bill
that was mysteriously paid for in full.
When I went to the hospital, when I overdosed,
I had drugs in my pocket,
and so I had charges pending against me.
They couldn't lock me up or take me to court at the time
because I was in the hospital dying.
So I had a court case over the course of this 40 days
as well that I had to appear at.
Well, I get to the courthouse and it's my turn to plead guilty
or not guilty. And I get before the judge.
And because it's such a small town,
the judge's seen me 2 or 3 times,
I already had two felonies at that point anyway,
so I was looking at a third felony,
possibly a 3 to 5 year prison sentence.
And I'm standing before there,
before the judge and the judge says,
William, I've been looking forward to this
because I want to make sure you do some time.
As soon as he makes that statement,
a police officer walks into the courtroom,
walks up to the judge, whispers something into his ear.
He drops his head like this, and then he looks back up at me.
He says, William, I've just been informed that the evidence
that they found on you, they have lost it
and they don't have anything to charge you with.
And I was sitting there. I was like,
Well, I didn't have any drugs. I wasn't going to confess to it.
Right. Of course, I'm kind of joking there.
But and then he looked at me. He says, However,
I am going to have to charge you a fine for being here
because this is called charging the state money. He says
You're going to have to pay a fine of $666.
I had no idea what these numbers represented
or symbolized at that point.
The only thing that I knew is that the evidence was gone,
that my father was there in the, in the courtroom with me
because he took me there and he stands up.
My natural father stands up and says,
I'll pay his debt in full.
What is this a beautiful picture of?
This is exactly what Jesus did on the cross. He took your sin.
He, he took the legal demands pending against you.
He nailed them to a cross. He removed them.
He canceled them out of the way. Removed them out of your life.
And you are able to become a new creation
because of what Jesus did in your court case
and your courtroom scene.
Jesus has disarmed and dismantled
every demonic power and principality
in regards to you.
And so I walk out of this courtroom that day
just overwhelmed with the goodness of God,
overwhelmed with how much he's already doing in my life.
And that began a journey of me really pursuing Jesus
with everything that I am.
And so I want to take a moment and I want to pray for you.
If you're watching this right now and you're,
and you're struggling with your relationship with God,
I'm here to tell you God loves you
and he wants to be intimately involved with you.
If you're watching this right here
and you're saying, William, I've been a Christian for years,
but I've always been afraid to be a witness
or to speak to someone,
I'm going to pray for boldness to come upon you
because I'm going to let you in on a secret: my personality -
I'm an introvert.
I don't even like talking in front of a bunch of people,
but yet God's sending me all over the world,
God by his spirit, will give you the grace
and the boldness and the courage,
everything that you need to fulfill your destiny.
So don't allow your personality to define your destiny.
Allow what God's calling is on you to push you into that.
Even like with Peter in Acts Chapter two,
when the Spirit came upon him,
he stood up with great boldness and proclaimed the gospel.
And so right now, wherever you are,
I want you to close your eyes and bow your head.
I want you to hold your hand like you're receiving a gift.
Holy Spirit, I ask that you would come upon those people
with a fresh impartation of your spirit
with an activation of gifts,
particularly in the area of boldness and courage
to be a witness for those that are struggling
with their relationship with the Lord,
right now is a moment for you to turn your heart toward Jesus,
to surrender your heart toward Jesus and say Lord,
I'm tired of doing it my own way.
I want to surrender it all to you and just confess Christ
right now as your personal Lord and Savior.
He doesn't want to control you, he wants to free you.
Listen, family, I've enjoyed sharing my story with you.
It's one of those unusual stories,
but I hope it's been a blessing for you.