3AC Dr. Eric Walsh - Overdosed (part 5/7)

[Music] all right good evening and thank you um and again appreciate your comments um host and hostess you guys are doing a phenomenal job um enjoyed the special music as well and um ready to get into our message for tonight we have only two messages after this one and um to use your phrase i'll we'll give a little sneak peek tomorrow night we will come with a very heavy topic around spiritualism in the last days um and how that impacts and affects young people um and then saturday night we are going to deal with uh end time prophecies and really deal with the go and do part of the um theme for this week and what young people can be preparing to do to really be able to get out and do god's work tonight our scripture reading is taken from first peter 5 and verse 8. i have to apologize it was uh it was a transcribed wrong and so uh corinthians was read but it was first peter 5 and verse 8 which says be sober be vigilant because your adversary the devil as a roaring lion walketh about seeking whom he may devour peter says to be sober and vigilant our message tonight is entitled overdosed overdosed let's pray father god we thank you for this opportunity to study your word once again i pray now lord that you make me once again just a nail on the wall a rusty sorry nail lord but upon that nail i ask that you hang a portrait of jesus christ this is a heavy topic tonight lord that impacts many of our young people so we're asking for an extra portion of your holy spirit this is our prayer in jesus precious and holy name amen all right so we're gonna get right into this and normally if you if you follow the patterns of my sermons i start with a bible story and i weave in the concepts into that bible story tonight i'm gonna do something a little different by starting with a testimony when i was working as a physician in california i won't even say where in california i was i had a patient come to see me he was about 31 years of age if i remember correctly it was a thursday thursday afternoon and he was having some upper respiratory um symptoms a little mild cough some runny nose this was pre-covered so no one was panicking or running for the corners um and he came in to be seen and we um we talked for a while actually knew his parents um and had kind of worked with them before and um knew that he had some struggles in the past with drugs and alcohol in fact he was a very talented football player when he was in high school and he had a serious injury in high school i think it might have been like he you know um tore a ligament significantly in one of his knees um had to have surgeries and so forth and rehab and in that process of course he was given uh pain medication well what we now know the science shows is if you simply take pain medication narcotic pain medication let me be clear as prescribed after seven days it's enough to become dependent on it or addicted to it and so this young man since high school had been struggling on and off with a pretty significant serious life-altering drug addiction problem um i don't you know i don't know how much he drank but he drank he did drugs um he never finished college he was having a very hard time with life fortunately for him his parents were pretty well off so they were able to use him find ways to keep him active and working and when i saw him he had been back working for about six months um he had actually completed before that six six months of a rehab and he may have run concurrently as rehab and so he had been clean and sober as i remember clearly six months um before i saw him and because he had these symptoms and didn't feel very well and it was a thursday i said listen it's thursday afternoon you're not gonna go back to work today anyway i'll write you off work tomorrow you'll be fine by monday morning um you don't need any special medications you don't need an antibiotic this is just a virus so we'll see you on monday and as he and i were talking and i went to prepare his note so he could be off of work um the holy spirit began to tell me that i should pray with this young man and um the urge to pray with him was actually quite strong however i ignored the urge it was busy and i said you know i don't want to offend this guy by asking him if he wants to pray um and so he left i really didn't think much of it when i came to work monday morning one of the nurses came to me and said did you hear what happened i said no what happened she mentioned the patient by name and said that something terrible had happened over the weekend the day he had off that um it seems as if he took license to take the free time and somehow stumbled back into someone or went somewhere where his drug of choice was available what i know is that that saturday he went and got those drugs and took um the same amount he always took he took that saturday night and he never woke up sunday morning and even as i think about it i'm very sad because i know the pain his parents went through that his girlfriend went through his friends from high school that he grew up in that area and the damage that it did to so many was always brought back brought back to the fact that the spirit of god seemed to be pressing me to pray with him and i failed to do that i don't know if i'd prayed with him if it would have made any difference i'll never know but i will tell you that what i've learned as a physician and part of my training at loma linda when i was um doing my preventive medicine residency part of that training was in the area of addiction medicine and young people i want to tell you that literally there is singularly no force on earth that is um a physical or chemical organic source that is more damaging than drugs and alcohol if satan has designed a win he has designed a win in the arena of drugs and alcohol countless countless lives are ruined families uh uh shattered dreams abated drugs and alcohol and yet we live in a society that doesn't just legalize these things they glamorize it and if you are going to be a child of the living god one of the things you're going to have to understand is twofold one the dangers that these things cause you and secondly how it is that you approach those who have these problems we'll talk about both of those things tonight um as we look at america's big problems so uh issue brief reports of increase in opioid and other drug-related overdose and other concerns during the covet pandemic this is just the american medical association just put this out earlier this month what we found is that during this pandemic there has been a whole hidden pandemic these are called the diseases of despair suicides drug overdoses uh even fatty alcoholic liver disease from um the amount of excess alcohol that has been consumed it's interesting churches were considered non-essential and closed but liquor stores were considered essential and stayed open and so many people actually and i've heard people at work i've heard people patients say this they literally um fill the void of not going out to work or church or wherever with bottles and bottles and bottles of alcohol what is interesting is that a recent report says that although this thing has been horrible and predominantly the opioid epidemic has actually affected suburban and rural white families more than even urban families however what's interesting is one report i read is that last year african americans actually did outpace in the realm of overdose deaths this is a very very serious issue one that america has not figured out and i'll say this it is a true supply and demand issue part of the reason america is always going to have a drug problem is because america does not have a drug supply problem america has a drug demand problem we're going to talk about why that is a bit tonight as well well which countries consume the most opioids it's the united states and canada um when you look at how many doses are given this i think is per million people you can see america leads the pack uh but most of these are are developed wealthy countries all the way down the list ending with spain this is a major problem um and i i we'll talk more about how this came to be but this is significant opioid overdose death this is even before the pandemic you see that it has taken off what is going on that people are literally doing drugs to the point where it takes their life and what does this mean prophetically that these types of things are happening well we talked earlier this week about the frontal lobe and this is the part of the brain that is like the most holy place this is the part of the brain that satan is putting under siege when peter says be sober be vigilant he is speaking to how sharp your mind must be because sobriety is the opposite of intoxication and you don't just get intoxicated on drugs without first or on some level becoming intoxicated with the world and i don't mean you get intoxicated in the world that you want uh a fast life and you you're looking to stay high all the time but even the pain of this world can intoxicate you to the point where people begin to self-medicate with drugs young people if you've gone through things if you've had your challenges if you've had to suffer through pain it is important that you deal with it because if you leave wounds and holes in yourself oftentimes we will try to fill them with what makes us feel better and one of the secrets about addiction is anything that changes your mood can addict you so i was working at the um the veterans hospital in loma linda while i was doing my addiction medicine training and um i say this all the story all the time because it was one of the most impactful parts of all of my medical training it wasn't i didn't get their learning from attending physicians or from phds and some uh you know a basic science specialty or something i learned so much from these veterans men who had served our country many of them if not most of them combat veterans who had actually put their lives on the line and had been greatly traumatized on the battlefields of the world and i remember as i was i was part of my training was to sit in one of the group sessions and as i sat there and and we went around the room and they talked and they let me tell you something many of them make better christians than us because they're willing to open up the scripture says confess your faults one to another that you might be healed right and many of us will never confess our faults but in the confidentiality of these group sessions they would confess their faults they would talk about their failures as fathers as husbands um all of the they would just go through and it was heart-wrenching on the one hand but you could see uh and pal and it was palpable the healing that took place because they opened themselves up at the end of one of the sessions and they would do various chants it works if you're working so work until it works they had these chants that they would do once um at one of the first sessions i went to they chanted and they said god made the human heart so big that only he can fill it god made the human heart so big that only he can fill it and when they said that all my years in church i'd never heard anyone put it that way i was raised seventh day adventist my mother's mother's mother was a seven david i've never heard it put that way god made the human heart so big that only he can fill it and afterwards i asked one of the guys who was kind of leading out i said what do you mean by that he said if you try to fill the god-sized hole in your heart with anything but god you will become addicted to it he says each one of us must find god and fill the hole make up the void your pain your disappointments your tragedies your trials every hole that life creates must be filled by god if you leave the whole the god-size hole in your heart if you leave it and don't uh actively seek to place god in that space satan will see the void and he will sell send a torrent of things after you we talked about sexual intimacy and relationships last night that's one way he can do it but drugs and alcohol are definitely another way and the bible speaks to how addiction works in multiple places one of them is here in romans chapter 7. romans chapter 7 for i know that in me that is in my flesh dwelleth no good thing for to will is present with me but how to perform that which is good i find not for the good that i would i do not but the evil which i would not that i do this is the apostle paul he's saying listen in my flesh dwells no good thing says i can't even figure out how to perform what is right he says when i go to do good the good that i would do i don't do it but the evil that i would do that's what i do verse 20 he says now if i do that i would not it is no more i that do it but sin that dwells in me he says i find that a law that when i would do good evil is present with me for i delight in the law of god after the inward man but i see another law in my members warring against the law of my mind and bringing me into captivity to the law of sin which is in my members this is why the bible says do not lean on the arm of flesh you can't trust your own body let me make it clear in fact i used i quote dr james kyle all the time when i say this but your body will conspire to kill you if you give yourself everything you want every urge every every desire if you try and fill every one of them your very body your own flesh will conspire to kill you this is why we do not walk after the flesh paul says it this way in verse 24 o wretched man that i am who shall deliver me from the body of this death it's interesting before the christian the flesh is your enemy to an extent the flesh is where sin sets up shop where desires and urges come from and we get it we can get into all of the hormonal ways we'll talk about some of the neural uh chemicals um neurotransmitters that that contribute to this in the field of addiction but satan understands we read the quote from ella white last night he has studied the human uh agency he understands how we work he knows how to push the right buttons he will create the trauma in your life and then give you the sinful uh treatment for it later on he will make you have the pain in order that he can supply earthly pleasure addiction works this is from cigarettes i'm not going to talk much about cigarettes tonight the numbers of cigarette smokers are down but vaping is up and nicotine is still nicotine it is as addicting basically as cocaine is has killed more americans than probably almost anything and it works when you smoke a cigarette the nicotine goes into your lungs it's quickly within seconds it gets to your brain and when it gets there and we talked about the reward pathway of dopamine earlier we'll talk more about that in a second it causes a massive release of dopamine so you get this feeling of pleasure this rush that happens and i'll talk more about that in a second i want you young people to understand how addiction actually happens because there to me there are two big phases of addiction there is a moral failure phase when you expose yourself to um the addicting substance and then there is a phase where you are where it's beyond your control the the point uh that you have to make the decision around is that you never allow yourself to become addicted i don't care how many alcoholics are in your family if you never drink alcohol you will never be an alcoholic addiction happens by choice but to break it it's difficult to choose as the apostle paul just said and so a good example is here right dopamine is the brains of reward pathway god created these reward pathways in my the way i see it from a medical spiritual standpoint when sin entered the world god made sure that the human mind would always prioritize certain things to make sure a man survived he said to to adam and eve be fruitful and multiply so he attached to the union of marriage and intimacy as we talked about last night the pleasure of sexual intimacy as it would drive uh humans to reproduce if it wasn't pleasurable there would be generations would be lost same with food as you can see here when you eat food there's a release of dopamine same with drinking water but you see here when someone takes drugs this is cocaine look at how many more yellow bubbles there are here than over here the amount of pleasure you feel is what makes you say that you are high there's this massive rush of pleasure in the brain a euphoria people say i'm high as a kite and so you feel so good the problem with this is it doesn't matter how high you get on drugs or alcohol when you come down your problems are still going to be there so addiction they go through kind of four stages first there's this experimental stage you discovered the agent produces pleasure and i remember growing up one of my friends um in bloomfield here in connecticut um we were like probably in fifth or sixth grade and he was telling us on our walk back home from school um how he had tried cigarettes and and i mean i didn't realize how little we were at the time but he was talking about how this cigarette gave him such a buzz man it gives you this nice buzz you get feel good i mean we're in like fifth grade oh you get this great buzz i didn't even fully understand what he was talking about but years later of all of us he was the one who wound up with the drug problem because what the way your body works you get into this experimental stage you find out that you get this buzz this pleasure from alcohol from cigarettes from cocaine from heroin whatever the drug is amphetamines crystal meth it doesn't matter you get this buzz you get this high and it makes you feel better so the second phase is you seek the mood swing produced by the agent so now you feel better so guess what the next time you get a bad grade on a test or your or your parents get into a fight or you are are disrespected by someone at school one of the things that if you find out this thing causes pleasure and changes your mood you'll go and do this thing again and now anytime you have to deal with emotional things you can use this substance whether cigarettes or alcohol you can use this substance to change the way you feel to dampen the emotional impact until finally you become preoccupied with the mood swing in the final phase you become obsessed with the agent the mood swing may no longer be present why because you develop tolerance to the thing and you can't ever get back that first high which is what most if you when you talk to people in rehab a lot of them will tell you you keep going because you're trying to get the first high back so you become obsessed with the agent and that's why you see people wearing marijuana things on them on them or they you know put wear bud light t-shirts and you literally you become obsessed with it if you listen to americans speak many americans they talk about some of these things with a fondness literally for some people a cigarette is their best friend when they get a raise at work they get a cigarette to celebrate they get fired from work they get a cigarette to console them or they get a drink to celebrate and a drink to console them and what happens is you develop a rested development you you don't ever move on and one of the things i've found in working in addiction medicine over the years is that you can see a 60 year old person if they became a drug addict at 15 and they're finally coming off of it at 60. literally you're not you're not dealing with a 60 year old you're still dealing emotionally with a 15 year old it it arrests your development this is why you're going to see more and more in our society of adults doing very childish foolish things because many have never dealt with life full bore they've only dealt with life through the veil of intoxication or getting some sort of buzz or high so let's talk about the first one alcohol alcohol is ubiquitous and i could i was going to put all the stats in how much alcohol we sell and drink but i think most people understand alcohol is everywhere and like i said even during the lockdown alcohol was still readily available this is what spirit of prophecy says in the in councils for the church page 136-137 she says satan gathered the fallen angels together to devise some way of doing the most possible evil to the human family one proposition after another was made till finally satan himself thought of a plan he would take the fruit of the vine also wheat and other things given by god as food and would convert them to poisons which would ruin man's physical mental and moral powers and so overcome them and so overcome the senses that satan would have full control isn't it interesting that when you go to a liquor store they says spirits sold here because there is when you turn your mind over through chemicals to and try and force this euphoria through the release of dopamine and adrenaline one of the things that actually happens is that uh the enemy gets sway over you he actually begins to have more power and you can see it my jamaican grandmother would say a drunk man's tongue is a sober man's mind you become unfiltered goes on to say under the influence of liquor men would be led to commit crimes of all kinds through perverted appetite the world would be made corrupt by leading men to drink alcohol satan would cause them to descend lower and lower in the scale and if you've been around you know that this this is true alcohol can rip a person straight out of normalcy ruin families not just alcohol all of the drugs that we're going to talk about here's what the bible says proverbs 23 31 says look not thou upon the wine when it is red when it gives his color in the cup when it moves itself a right at the last it bites like a serpent and stings like an adder the bible is describing fermentation here don't miss this some folks say well jesus turned the water into wine and paul said a little wine for the stomach's sake but here the bible is describing that there's a process that happens that's why solomon says don't look at it after that goes past this point when it becomes red when it gives us color in a cup when it moves itself for right when it has fermented he says don't look at it why now it has alcohol in the wine and it will bite you like a serpent it will sting like an adder he goes on solomon says thine i shall behold strange women and thy heart and thine heart shall utter perverse things your judgment of who you lay with who you associate with things you would normally never say and do you would do under the influence of alcohol solomon is giving a warning here yep someone who that's one of the reasons why girls need to understand they don't pro young women do not process alcohol they do not have as much alcohol dehydrogenase in their system to process alcohol like men do and so it does if with the same amount of alcohol consumption a woman most women will get intoxicated before the man will this is why a lot of men want to buy you drinks because they think they can hold their liquor better than you can move you to a place where you are under the influence and have poor judgment so that you are less likely to be able to make smart choices right so even if the person looks like you know i always would joke about certain celebrities but number ones i know now you would know but if they're not very attractive they'll look very attractive after a few drinks at least that's what the guy is hoping yea thou shalt be as he that lieth down in the midst of the sea or is he that lieth upon the top of a mask meaning that you you vomit you you stagger you can't walk straight verse 35 they have stricken me shalt thou say and i was not sick they have beaten me and i felt it not when i when shall i awake i will seek it yet again that's addiction you wake up beaten bloodied battered you don't remember where you've been and yet you get up and you want another drink i was preaching in um australia staying with um a family and they were um pastor joshua gonzalez actually great friend of mine down in sydney and we were staying with him he was telling me about the way that the drinking culture in in sydney and he was explaining that uh young people there they drink if you can remember the night before you didn't have a good time drinking you haven't had you haven't really had a good time drinking unless you can't remember what happened that is crazy and that's not just australia that's a pattern seen around the world now where it gets deep is that a study finds alcohol dampens brain waves associated with decision making but not motor control these are the theta waves we talked about brain waves earlier this week we talked about isaiah 1 and verse 18. come let us reason together alcohol changes your ability to reason by its impact on gaba and glutamate two chemical neural chemicals in the brain uh one an inhibitory one one an excitatory one alcohol changes your ability to make wise decisions is why the scripture says that drunk will not inherit the kingdom of god because you can't choose wisely does more than that damage is all over the body one of the big lies is that they're saying that alcohol is good for you that you should drink a glass of wine with your dinner what we now know is that there is no safe amount of alcohol to drink period that is science we i just we just interviewed a nephrologist on one of the shows i do and um he said the same thing he said every time you drink alcohol you lose nephrons in your kidney that you will not get back so if you have if you're drinking alcohol and you're diabetic and you have high blood pressure all of a sudden you're killing the neuron the nephrons in your kidneys so much faster you're also killing of course the neurons the brain cells at the same time just one drink of alcohol a day increases a woman's risk for breast cancer it is a carcinogen it's literally poison yet it is advertised and flaunted and bragged about people talk about getting that drank on and and sipping moet and alaze and all this kind of stuff they glamorize it but isn't that what satan does young people doesn't he paint you a picture like things are going to be so wonderful if you follow him well like adam and eve you follow him you will lose out on what god has for you and i wish i didn't have to preach sermons like this but in my travels i've found that there are many in the church who are just as affected by this as people outside the church but it's not just marijuana i'm not just alcohol also marijuana the wall street journal put out this article that says marijuana is more dangerous than you think this is not a christian seven-day adventist publication by any stretch of the imagination yet in all of the talk of medicinal marijuana and all the ways it helps they're not telling you the truth it's being hidden that in fact more people become dependent to marijuana than alcohol yes they say it's not addictive that's not true at all marijuana is very addicting and we'll show you i'll show you some stats on that in a second and just today march 24th 2021 a deal was reached a fast track legalizing marijuana in new york it will be worth billions billions of dollars and already the tentacles are out as people are moving as people smoke less cigarettes in america it's almost like it's being replaced with marijuana and people say well we you know the criminal the criminal justice system did not handle marijuana well but this idea that marijuana is completely safe and harmless is a lie and if there's anything affecting especially um many of our young men but even a lot of the young women in in church now it's this drug we're we think it's hip it's cool i had a patient the other day coming to one of our clinics and literally he walked in the door and we were sitting behind the desk and you could smell the marijuana from that far away marijuana use and uh um and addiction are most pronounced in america's young people of those going to rehabilitation for weed addiction 45 are under 21 years of age when those 24 and younger are included the percentage rises to 55. so there's a problem people are actually going into rehab for marijuana even though people say it's not addicting and i put this this picture here because literally people sing songs to marijuana these are the best weed songs the 420 april 20 hip-hop mix i grew up they were it was it was the reggae music that that sang about marijuana and promoted it those the rastafarians at least did but it's all over the place now marijuana has been pushed chronic marijuana use and higher dosages are found to correlate to greater incidents of psychosis and schizophrenia no one is telling you this you see the picture there marijuana induced psychosis is real i've seen this in patients myself no one's telling you that if you smoke marijuana you increase your risk of psychosis and schizophrenia later on very difficult things to deal with the point is particularly significant due to the increases in drug potency over the last two decades while the average potency has risen from three percent thc which is tetrahydrocannabinol the intoxicating ingredient in marijuana a couple of decades ago to nine percent now now they have wheat samples as high as 25 do you think there will be motivation to drastically increase the amount of thc when there's now competition between companies trying to sell it we're we're on a precipice and america does not do well with dealing with mental health crisis and illness our health care system doesn't do well with it so imagine in 10 years if only a small percentage of the millions of people who are now going to try and use marijuana wind up with mental health problems who's going to take care of them we don't have a system to take care of them i remember um we were having this discussion i think i read a case study of a young kid who came from like one a more conservative background from like the midwest and he went out to colorado when they legalized marijuana he went to the store to buy an edible and the person selling it to them told them do not eat the whole brownie cut it into fourths wait at least 12 hours between each sec section um and and eat it that way to get you high and the kid you know he got a he got in a hotel room he was so happy he could legally do marijuana do you think he ate one-fourth of that brownie he did not he ate the entire brownie in one sitting he went into an immediate psychotic episode and jumped from the hotel window to his death marijuana changes spatial and time perceptions it decreases memory suppresses the immune system it it disinhibits people don't make wise decisions and the most dangerous thing is that most people who smoke marijuana recreationally are probably also going to drink alcohol so it's not like there's a one or the other people say well it's safer than alcohol but who's studying what his impact is when you mix it with alcohol nobody is they're going to roll this thing out legalize it and by the time america wakes up to what it causes it will be too late marijuana works backwards i don't have time to get into this except to say that every other drug releases dopamine from the pre um the the um the presynaptic side of the of the neuron and the receptors on the other side on the postsynaptic side receive it marijuana doesn't do that it works on the postsynaptic side raises the amount of dopamine receptors so that's how it becomes a gateway drug if you do marijuana and then do cocaine you have more receptors to receive all of that dopamine i showed you earlier so the cocaine is even more addicting they say it's not a gateway drug but neurochemically it it it seems to exactly work the way a gateway drug would work the other one i want to just touch on quickly is the opioid epidemic 130 plus people died every day from opioid related drug overdoses and this year i think this is from 2017 or 2018. i won't get into the numbers except to tell you this this whole thing started when um the joint commission the the the accrediting uh body that goes into american hospitals and tells you whether or not you could qualify you're accredited so that you can get money from the government through medicaid and medicare they said that pain was the fifth um vital sign and all of a sudden if you weren't meeting patients pain requirements you could be dinged the provider could be dinged a physician could be dinged the hospital could be dinged and so people started writing a whole lot more narcotic pain medicines what we didn't know at the time is that somehow the pharmaceutical industry was in on this decision and has made billions of dollars as america has watched her children overdose and why does america's children overdose because america's children are trying to to manage their pain with pleasure it's self self-medication the stresses of life and i i i don't have time to go through that part of it but i want to submit to you that what the devil wants you to do is look to your pain and decide you're going to feel better by any means necessary that's why earlier this week in one of the messages i said if you if you're really ever going to find god you've got to learn to find him in your pain in your trials in your difficulties he's there in the fiery furnace waiting for shadrach meshach and abednego for god has not given us the spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind the last verse i want to read is this one first thessalonians 5 and verse 6 therefore let us not sleep as do others but let us watch and be what and be sober do you see that it's a command to be sober for they that sleep sleep in the night and they that be drunken are drunken in the night but let us who are of the day be sober putting on the breastplate of faith and love and for a helmet the hope of salvation you see that remember i said salvation is always tied to a helmet why because god wants you to protect your frontal lobe your mind it is with our minds that we love god and that's what god wants from us to be to be our choice to be uh to be our choice to choose him to love him to worship him if you're gonna be overdosed be overdosed with the holy ghost be overdosed by bathing in the love of the living god find him last story i want to tell is when i tell all the time it goes back to that veterans hospital as well i was working there um seeing patients as a resident a middle-aged man came in and sat down in a chair he was my next patient came into the exam room and said i want to die i said what do you mean you want to die we just started trying to make a joke but he was his affect was completely flat meaning no emotions he said i want to die i said why do you want to die he said two years ago my mother died a year ago my father died and he said two weeks ago my dog died he said i just want to die i said sir if you want to die why are you in the hospital he said because i felt like i had more of a chance of dying here than anywhere else i said that's not a good thing to say sir but he began to tell me the story of how he was on interstate 10 going out from the inland empire out towards palm springs and he was so high on on alcohol and crystal methamphetamines that he began to sway on the road and when the california highway patrolman saw him he pulled him over and tested him and he was high he searched the car and found in the trunk of the man's car all of the things you need to set up a crystal meth lab the gentleman told me that he was going out to set up shop in a motel where he would make crystal meth he'd sell some of it so he could live and use the other half of it to feed his addiction i said sir that that seems like a lot he says you don't understand where i've been and he began to tell me about a very difficult and troubled childhood his time at in war in combat in war and how all of that had affected him he said doc i just want to die i said sir you're not you're not here by accident today and i didn't have a glow track or something from amazing facts i reached up and grabbed the government issued um a note paper for um for for our progress notes and i began to write out for this man the plan of salvation i started in heaven and the war between christ and satan and how jesus was the lamb slain from the foundation of the world i went to the garden of eden a promise was made in genesis 3 and verse 16. that one day christ would make it right and i i went all the way to to uh bethlehem than the birth of christ and and i i went into the story of of the death of christ how he agonized and suffered after living in a sinless life and i began to write out for him how christ went to the cross and he died and when i got there i said he said it is finished and i said and he said father forgive them for they know not what they do i said sir jesus died for you he said really i said in fact if you were the only one who needed saving he still would have come and died for you he said seriously i missed the step well before i even went there i asked him i said sir do you know who jesus i had to pray about it i said sir do you know who jesus is he said yes he's the christ the son of the living god i said if you know that why do you want to die and his answer was because i've sinned too much he then began to tell me all of the sin the drugs the sex the violence all the things that he had done and when he was done he said you see christ would never accept me and that's why i gave him the plan of salvation and at the end i said to him don't you understand you have not out sinned god's ability to save you the blood of jesus christ still washes it still cleanses the man says he started to cry tears began to run down his face he said you mean jesus would accept me i said sir i've got proof proof that he'll accept you i said sir he saved a wretch like me he and i fell on the floor of the veterans hospital in loma linda california with tears streaming down his face that man gave his life to jesus christ on the spot i saw him a week later as i was doing rounds on the on that floor and he came running down the hallway brother doctor brother doctor and he threw his arms around me and he said i'm feeling so much better i said how you doing he said you don't understand ever since you prayed for me last week he said i don't even have the desire for drugs and alcohol he said doc they're gone i said how's everything else going he said listen doc he said the only problem i have is that they keep kicking me out of the alcoholics anonymous and the narcotics anonymous meetings i said why are they kicking you out he said because they tell me i'm calling on the name of jesus too much in the meetings i saw that man years later when i was moonlighting after i'd finished residency moonlighting in the emergency room of that same hospital and he was still a faithful christian i tell you all of that today young people that you don't have to be overdosed with this world or the drugs of this world you can be overdosed with the love of jesus christ that he will forgive and restore even the land that the locusts have taken he'll return it to you and i challenge each one of you tonight to value your future yourselves your families to understand the importance of your relationship with jesus christ that you avoid drugs and alcohol and if you come across someone in your life in your inner circle who has a real problem with this take that thing to prayer and explain to them the need to go into rehab they may not listen to you but you don't stop supporting and you don't stop praying because once you're addicted it's beyond you the moral decision is over and the addiction takes over and that's where the power of god is needed to break it i submit to you young people tonight god is still in the saving business let's pray father god we thank you for this opportunity to study your word and talk about drugs alcohol and addiction lord i know that there's young people there are young people who are listening tonight who are suffering from some form of addiction whether they're doing drugs or someone they love is doing drugs maybe it's a parent maybe it's a friend father god i pray that holy spirit would find them those with an addiction problem lord help them to break it help them to turn their eyes on christ set them free father and if there's someone in their circle of love that is struggling with this help those young people to claim the bible promises that say that nothing is impossible for god and help them to pray so that you can intercede and work things out for that person they love but be with all of us lord let us not get drunk with this world but let us lord all be sober and vigilant for lord we want to be ready when you come this is our prayer in jesus precious and holy name amen you

Channel: Three Angels SDA Church

Views: 1,185

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Id: fOhHDkbjM1E

Length: 49min 44sec (2984 seconds)

Published: Wed May 05 2021