My mother was converted when she was
about twelve years old
from a Croatian family.
Her parents had come through Ellis Island.
My grandmother on my mother's side
was oftentimes persecuted for her faith
because being Croatian and Catholic
were almost synonymous.
You're almost a traitor
if you leave Catholicism.
Plus, the only evangelical church
she could go to was Serbian,
and the Catholics and the Serbians
are constantly at war,
so for my grandmother to leave Catholicism
and then fellowship with Serbians
was oftentimes very looked down upon.
She suffered.
My mother was over at her girlfriend's house
when she was twelve years old
and they happened to be Baptist.
And she was playing with dolls
up on the 2nd floor.
And the family was gathered around the piano
and started singing hymns.
And my mother said she heard the hymns,
but all of a sudden, such a great remorse
and weeping of sin came over her
that she started weeping so hysterically
that they stopped playing piano.
They ran upstairs thinking she was injured.
They shared the Gospel with her
with regard to her sin and she was converted.
My mother eventually married my father.
Both his parents - my grandparents -
were some of the first Baptist missionaries
to Brazil in Manaus back in, I think,
the '20's and '30's.
But my father was never converted
that I know of.
When I was 17,
we were out building a fence,
and he yelled and I grabbed him.
We fell to the ground and he was dead.
I had never known him to profess faith in Christ.
At that point, basketball season was beginning and such,
and I was one of the captains on the team.
I was president of the Beta Club or Honor Society.
Within just a few months,
I digressed to finally getting kicked off the team
and getting kicked out of the honor society.
And I drank a lot.
People said that the trauma of my father's death
lead to all that - in fact, that's what I said.
When in fact, what I'd soon come to understand,
after I was a Christian was that my father's death
gave my flesh a wonderful opportunity
to do everything it had ever wanted to do.
It just manifested what I really was.
I was a liar - the best.
I don't know how to describe me
except look up "jerk" in the dictionary,
and it had my picture there.
Conceited, self-absorbed, jerk.
And I went to Murray State University
for a few years and then decided
that I wanted to be an oil and gas lawyer.
Wherever that idea popped into my head I don't know.
Maybe it was because of the program "Dallas" or something.
And the only place to do that
was either Oklahoma or Texas,
and I enrolled at the University of Texas.
While I was there, I thought to myself,
I can change my life
and not be such a jerk,
not be so self-absorbed,
not be such a liar.
And nothing changed.
Within a few months, I found myself
right back into the same place I'd always been.
And I moved into a place called Plaza 25
there at the University of Texas,
and I noticed there was a group of guys there
that just seemed different.
They just seemed very different.
After a while, I came to understand they were Christians,
and they would have Bible studies and things like that.
And I didn't pay much attention to them.
And then one night in February,
after I'd spent a semester there,
and just messed up my life altogether,
I was sitting on the edge of my bed.
It was like 1 in the morning.
And I was on steroids really heavy.
I lifted weights all the time.
I wasn't any good at it, but I lifted weights all the time.
And I remember crying.
I hadn't cried, and I just kept saying to myself,
I am so miserable.
And I looked down and I had some steroids
and I thought if only these were some kind of pill
that I could just take and die.
But I knew enough from my mom -
I believe that there was something,
you know, you didn't do that.
And I just kept saying over and over,
I'm so miserable. I'm so miserable.
And it was like 1 or 1:30 in the morning
and someone knocked at my door.
And I thought, who's that?
So I opened the door
and here's this freshman.
His name was Mike Moore.
He was standing there -
not a very tall guy, maybe 5"8' or 5"9' or something.
He's standing there and he was kind of scared.
I looked at him like... what?
And he said, "You're probably going to beat me up."
I thought, "Yeah, you're probably right."
He said, "I've got to talk to you."
And although I knew him; I knew he was a nice guy,
I didn't really know him.
I said, "Well, what do you want to talk to me about?"
He said, "Look, God has been dealing with me for two weeks
and I need to come over here and talk to you.
I've been scared. I can't take it any longer.
I've got to talk to you."
And I said, "Well, what?"
He goes, "I just feel like God wants me to tell you something."
Now I'm thinking this is really strange.
This guy's coming over with a word from God.
I said, "Okay, well, what?"
He goes, "You're just miserable
and you're going to keep being miserable
until you surrender your life to Jesus Christ."
And we talked till like 4 or 5 in the morning.
And it really impacted me.
And then, I was reading -
my mom had given me a Bible
and I found it and I started reading it,
and I came to Psalm 103.
It says that man's days are like grass,
as the flower of the field, so he flourishes;
when the wind passes over him, he is no more
and the place acknowledges him no more.
And that made me angry because that's exactly what I knew.
I remember going to my dad's funeral,
and he was a very brilliant man.
He was a powerful man in his own right.
Just many things about him,
but at his funeral, people were talking
about other things like the weather,
sports, what's going on in a company.
It was like this man just died.
Shouldn't everybody just be quiet or something for awhile?
Shouldn't they think about him?
And that verse where it says the wind
passes over it and it's no more
and the place acknowledges it no more.
It's like he never even existed.
I got angry and I kind of threw the Bible
down on the bed.
Then I walked over and I picked it up again.
And it said, "but the love of the Lord is everlasting
on those who fear Him."
And that word "everlasting."
And then, I think maybe a couple times,
somebody visited me or something.
And one day I was at the library -
the undergraduate library at the University of Texas -
and we were competing against other oil companies supposedly,
other students,
and we were running off some oil surveys
and the girl on our team came up to me
and she said I'm going to have a party -
I think it was tomorrow night, she said.
Why don't you come to it?
And I had kind of gotten to the point
where I used to really party and things,
and I had gotten to the point
where I didn't do that anymore.
I would just sit in a bar all by myself and drink.
And so I looked at her and I said,
"no, I'm not coming to your party."
And she said "why not?"
She goes, "you never do anything.
Why don't you come? Why not?"
And really this is what happened.
I didn't think about my answer.
I didn't design it.
Just all of a sudden it came out of my mouth
and it shocked me as much as it did anybody else in the room.
I said, "I'm not going to your party
because I'm a Christian now and I'm going to follow Jesus."
And I looked at the guys.
They all kind of turned around and looked at me
because they knew what I was.
I drank, lied...
And they looked at me. And when they looked at me,
it's like all of a sudden I realized what I said.
And it's like light just (went on).
It wasn't a literal light.
No, don't criticize me for that statement.
It's a metaphor.
It was just like all of a sudden,
it was like, that's exactly what I'm going to do.
I believe in Jesus.
I do. I believe.
I'm sitting there in front of these guys
going, yeah, I believe in Jesus.
I really do believe in Jesus.
And I just walked out
and then I started walking quicker
because I was just like what has happened to me?
I mean, what has happened?
I felt like I was just new.
And I remember getting to the library doors -
the outside doors -
and I opened them up
and there was a girl coming in
who was in the same dorm.
And I didn't know this,
but a whole group of people had been praying for me
since when I first moved into the dorm
like several months prior,
had been praying for me. She was one of the girls.
When I opened up the door she goes,
"Paul! What's happened to you?"
And then I got scared.
I got real scared.
I was like, "I don't know."
And I just took off running.
I walked/ran as fast as I could
back to the apartment and I found that guy
and I said, "Mike, Mike,
I'm really scared.
Something happened to me in the library.
All I know is
I believe in Jesus and I am new."
He said, "You look new."
And so he took me down to the guy
who was like the RA
who had been leading a Bible study
named Mike Martin.
And all these guys, Mike Martin,
Stuart Depena, Mike Moore,
and all these different guys
that had been studying the Bible together
and were kind of leaders, you could say,
of like Campus Crusade and things.
I sat down and I started telling them everything that happened.
I'll never forget, one of them goes,
"You've been born again!"
I was like, "What's that?"
And then here's something.
I had the filthiest mouth and it stopped.
It just stopped.
But I'll tell you what didn't stop.
Lying.
And after the joy of that day,
I began to think about
I had lied to people.
And then, so many things in my life changed,
but then I would be talking
and something would pop out that wasn't true.
And before, it didn't bother me.
I was proud of my lying.
I could make anybody believe anything.
And I would be so struck down
by the Holy Spirit
and so ashamed,
that I would have to go back
and say, "I lied. I lied."
And it went on.
It's amazing, some things -
drinking and cussing just stopped,
but other things were like this thing
that constantly broke me;
constantly broke me.
And the Lord then gave me victory over it.
And now, it's like one exaggeration...
my wife says that I speak in superlatives.
She says everything is the greatest to you.
Everything is the biggest to you.
And that's true, but even in that sometimes,
the Lord just gets me.
So that's why when some of you guys
get real fired up for the Lord,
and you see someone else
that maybe comes into your circles,
and yeah, it seems like God's done a work,
but in one area of his life,
he's really struggling for change,
don't discount him or think he's unconverted.
Sometimes the Lord will remove so many things,
but other things, we just deal with
throughout our life.
And then, so the next day,
this study group that was there
got together and they bought me
a big old Ryrie Study Bible.
New American Standard Ryrie Study Bible.
And I carried that thing to class.
(incomplete thought)
I remember my second day as a Christian,
I'm walking back though the student mall there,
and I hear a bunch of people over here
and I go over there to look
and there's this guy talking.
And I thought is he preaching?
This guy isn't preaching.
He was sharing about why sex is good
and marriage is just an artificial institution
and promoting wickedness.
And I'll never forget, all of a sudden
I just got so... and I just went through the crowd.
"You're lying!"
"You're a liar!"
"That's not true!"
So that was the beginning
of my street preaching.
My ministry was defined.
Another thing, when I was a boy,
14 or 15,
I would have dreams all the time.
Well, not all the time, but frequently.
I would have dreams of me preaching.
And I would wake up crying
and telling God,
I'll get saved if you promise me
I don't have to preach.
And so when I became a Christian,
I also knew basically
that I was going to preach.
And I started going out
like at the student mall there
and handing out tracts and everything.
And it was a real change for me
because it went from being
a cool guy with a really nice car
to people taking your tracts - girls -
and laughing at you
and throwing them back at you.
And it was a time of killing the flesh.
But God has been faithful.
God's been faithful.